Category: people

Dave Eggers has been a polarizing figure from the moment his first book hit the bestseller lists, using his fame as a vehicle to disseminate periodic manifestos on myriad controversial topics, some literary, some not. Now, Eggers is taking up the cause of the shamefully underpaid American schoolteacher. His new ‘oral history book’ on the subject “makes a compelling case for investment in education to be put in the pockets of the teachers. Pay them, it argues, and their wealth shall trickle down into the community, the economy and the future. It is hard to disagree.”

Harold Pinter is 75 this week, and Alastair McCauley says that the playwright’s long career has been a gift not only to audiences, but to actors and critics as well. “The pauses in Pinter are like the spaces between people in the paintings of Cezanne, Seurat, or Picasso: expressive, charged, firm. They dramatise the tension between characters… When staging his own plays, he doesn’t let his actors into secrets: the mystery is there for them, too. But actors have said he gives them confidence, not least because he knows how vulnerable they can feel.”

For more than two decades, violinist Stewart Kitts held a prestigious leadership position in the Florida Orchestra, and was one of the Tampa Bay area’s brightest cultural lights. He had come from a musical family, and was in the process of raising three children of his own. But somewhere along the line, Kitts got divorced, began dating a drug addict, and became addicted to crack cocaine himself. Less than two years later, his arrest record reads like that of an inner-city gang member, and he has been officially dismissed from the orchestra following a failed intervention last season.

‘Painting for me is like putting rocks in your shoes before you go out on a journey. It’s about making things a little more difficult for yourself so that you know where you are going, but you never really know how you’re going to get there. They used to say that Pollock didn’t know what his next painting was going to look like, but he did know what he was going to do in the studio that day. Me, I know what my next painting is going to look like, but I don’t know what I’m going to do in the studio to get there. I’m just trying to inch nearer all the time.”

“Last February, Turkey’s most celebrated writer, Orhan Pamuk, told a Swiss newspaper that ‘thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and almost no one dares talk about it. Therefore, I do.’ This caused a furor within Turkey, with liberals defending Pamuk’s right to free speech and/or the critical importance of speaking out about this particular matter, and reactionaries branding Pamuk a traitor, burning his books, and issuing the anonymous death threats that have forced the writer to flee his country.”

Harold Pinter is 75. In Dublin they’re throwing big parties. In London, nothing, really. “One way and another, Pinter’s 75th birthday will not go unremarked. It just seems suprising that an English dramatist, for whom London is a living presence, should be more honoured by the Liffey than the Thames. But perhaps, in the end, it’s the ultimate tribute.”

She talks about the stresses after her controversial appointment to lead the Baltimore Symphony. ” ‘It was a very trying and stressful experience in many ways. To be perfectly honest, my initial reaction, when it all started, was to run: ‘Gosh, who needs this?’ She described a candid private meeting with the whole orchestra at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, the orchestra’s home, before she appeared at a news conference on July 20. She wanted to look the musicians in the eye, she said, before signing the contract. She told the players she needed to get over her own hard feelings. By her account, she made it clear to them that she had already been hesitating about taking the job, given the orchestra’s large debt and poor attendance. At the same time, she praised the players as part of a gifted and deeply musical orchestra.”

Child stars are supposed to burn out, right? It’s wired into their genetic code. So how do you explain Charlotte Church? “Since leaving her Voice Of An Angel days behind, and turning into the party girl and pop star of her late teens, Charlotte has endeared herself to the British public by dint of being more Viz than Vogue.”

“No one divides the musical world quite like Michael Nyman. There are critics who shudder at the mere mention of his name. The public loves him; his score for Jane Campion’s film The Piano has become a fixture on [UK radio network] Classic FM… He has a whole team of agents and managers, he has his own recording company, and he lives in the heart of the Islington elite, a stone’s throw from Simon Rattle.” Now, Nyman is hitting the road, performing his own piano works for adoring throngs across Europe. “What’s surprising for anyone who remembers the blistering, relentlessly repetitive early Nyman is how soft and mellifluous the recent music has become… So can it be true that Nyman is really mellowing? Have all the old distancing devices been banished?”

Harold Pinter is 75, and not in good health, his esophagus ravaged by cancer and his famous voice “notably weakened.” But somehow, the playwright has willed himself to create a short but profound new radio play, which will receive its premiere next week on BBC Radio. “For Voices, Pinter has reworked five of his later plays – One for the Road, Mountain Language, The New World Order, Party Time and Ashes to Ashes – into a fragmented narrative on cruelty, torture and oppression, which is interrupted, accompanied and complemented by [composer James] Clarke’s mercurial score, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the soprano Eileen Aargaard and an Azeri singer, Fatma Mehralieva, among others.”