Category: people

“In addition to having the hand and eye of a gifted artist, Will Eisner… had an amazing insight into the human condition and the heart of a true club boxer. He was tough, game and always moving, packed a powerful punch and never quit… He carried two concealed weapons — a wry, deadpan sense of humor and a lightning wit — both of which held no respect for pomposity or rank.”

When one thinks of NASA, one probably doesn’t think of art, but performance artist Laurie Anderson would beg to differ. Anderson recently became the agency’s first-ever artist-in-residence after being offered “$20,000, plus unlimited access to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and more, to create a new work.” The result is “a 90-minute flow of electronic music, personal musings and melodic stories that meander from the nesting habits of gay penguins and her favourite haiku… to the latest advances in robotics and photos from the Hubble Space Telescope.”

Renzo Piano is the architect of the moment in New York, with several high-profile projects on the books. “For an architect who had never designed a building in New York before these projects emerged, Mr. Piano is suddenly spending a lot of time here. So why is an architect celebrated for three decades, starting with his collaboration with Richard Rogers on the Pompidou Center in Paris, finally having his New York moment?”

A decade ago, Andrea Gruber was being touted for a major career in opera. But it derailed in a haze of drug addiction, and she admits to being stoned while singing at the Met. Now she’s back at the Met and telling her addiction story…

For what, will Susan Sontag be best remembered? “It’s not clear what, in the future, will be made of Sontag’s many-sided career. It may be that the fiction will be treated as a secondary matter. “The Volcano Lover” was a high peak of modern psychological realism, but Sontag never matched it in her other novels. If there is one achievement that people should remember her for, it is the critical essays, mostly on writers and filmmakers, that she collected in “Against Interpretation” (1966), the volume that made her famous; “Styles of Radical Will” (1969); and “Under the Sign of Saturn” (1980).”

Where are the ashes of Luis Buñuel? The mystery is as surreal as the surrealist film maker’s life…

Big band leader Artie Shaw quit the music business 50 years ago. But before he did: “A clarinetist and bandleader, Mr. Shaw’s music sold more than 100 million records with a stunning series of hit-making songs, including Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.” His music so defined its period that Time magazine wrote that on the verge of World War II, the United States meant to the Germans ‘skyscrapers, Clark Gable and Artie Shaw’.”

“In the first half of his long, spectacularly eventful life, he played jazz with Bix Beiderbecke and Mozart with Leonard Bernstein; married Lana Turner and Ava Gardner; made a movie with Fred Astaire; and was interrogated about his left-wing ties by Joe McCarthy. Then, at the age of 44, he stopped playing music and started writing fiction, eventually producing a monstrously long autobiographical novel called ‘The Education of Albie Snow’.”

Susan Sontag was that rarest of modern intellectuals, a deep thinker who had no qualms about embracing the 20th century’s often superficial definition of fame. Sontag “had the gift of fame, which is to say she possessed charisma, which may be why she ended up being called overrated, the fate of charismatic people. I had read more about her than by her.”