Category: people

“Calvin Trillin is one of America’s most productive and frequently published poets. When he’s in a pithy mood, he is also, word for word, one of our most highly remunerated. But neither he, nor anyone else, would claim that he is one of our best, and in terms of quality, his verse falls somewhere between that of Alexander Pope and the bathroom wall, generally tending to the latter. He works in what might be called a middle-world of American political journalism.”

Simmie Knox is the first African-American artist to paint a presidential portrait. Knox is 68, and “describes his professional journey as a series of fortuitous setbacks and discoveries. ‘It has happened many times for me. Things that I thought were liabilities turned out to be assets’.”

As his official portrait of Bill Clinton was unveiled last week, painter Simmie Knox was amused by the blaze of media attention. “I mean, I’ve been here all this time. I’ve just been ‘under the radar,’ so to speak, some sort of a secret — that’s what my friends say.”

Scotland’s oldest university is awarding Bob Dylan an honorary doctorate. “The University of St Andrews will make Dylan a doctor of music next Wednesday. Dylan has only ever accepted one other honorary degree – from Princeton University in 1970.”

James Levine has canceled a series of concerts in Europe because of a bad back. “Boston Symphony Orchestra management learned of the latest development in Levine’s much-discussed health problems through an article in a German newspaper.”

“Tributes continued to pour in yesterday for Jack McClelland, who died Monday after a long illness. For many of his friends, the past few years had been a sad time, watching the decline of a vibrant, engaging man who put Canadian letters on the literary map, not only at home but around the world.”

Donald and Mera Rubell have been collecting art for four decades, with their two children assisting them for much of that time, and the family has 5,000 works, 27,000 art books, and a 40,000-square-foot museum to show for their efforts. And the Rubells don’t plan to abandon the all-in-the-family approach anytime soon: according to the family patriarch, “we’re training our two grandkids, too. The 3-year-old, Samuel, can already recognize a Jeff Koons or a Maurizio Cattelan. Ella, who is a year-and-a-half, isn’t independent yet. She tends to follow and look at what he looks at. You have to train them.”

Hollywood screenwriter Robert Lees, 91, was found decapitated in the backyard of his Los Angeles home this past weekend. His neighbor, a retired doctor, was stabbed to death as well. A homeless man is in custody and will be charged in the killings. Lees wrote dozens of films in his career, and may be best known for the comedy classic Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.

This weekend marks a particularly harrowing literary anniversary: Anne Frank would have been 75 years old on June 12. Frank, of course, died at the age of 16 in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp shortly after her family was captured in a friend’s attic. To this day, Frank is the most recognizable face of the Holocaust, and the story she told in the pages of her diary continues to resonate around the world. But Frank was more than a symbol of the brutal era that Nazi oppression and violence inflicted upon a continent: she was a writer, and a very good one, which only makes her untimely death all the more tragic.

Ronald Reagan “was a man of many paradoxes whose cultural legacy is colored in shades of gray,” says John Hayes. And while the left-leaning arts world, which is still fuming over Reagan’s deliberate ignoring of the AIDS epidemic that decimated the American cultural scene, is unlikely to remember Reagan as one of its favorite presidents, the fact is that under his leadership, public arts funding hit an all-time high. In fact, at a time when many Congressional conservatives were ready to launch an all-out assault on the National Endowment for the Arts, Reagan steered a gentle course between warring parties, and may have saved the NEA in the process.