Category: people

Mikhail Baryshnikov is a prodigious talent. But “in all the agony and ecstasy that has surrounded Baryshnikov’s every move – the matchless dancing, the seething love-life, the mediocre film career, the downmarket commercial activities – it has taken time to see that his greatest claim to world gratitude is the almost unbelievable generosity with which he has marketed his talent.”

Margaret Atwood on how she became a writer: “I just started writing, and started writing poetry. I was too ignorant to know you couldn’t just walk into it and make a living that way. I got a magazine called Writer’s Market and thought maybe I will write true romances in the daytime, because you can make quite a lot of money doing that, and in the evenings I will write my works of genius.”

With three weeks having passed since his disappearance, those close to monologuist Spalding Gray are despairing of finding him alive. It seems likely that Gray, who left behind a wife and three children, jumped into New York Harbor from the Staten Island Ferry. “Death has been Gray’s obsession, his fascination. It petrified him, yet he grew accustomed from an early age — from his own mother’s threats to kill herself — to death’s constant presence.” Gray had often predicted that his own death would come by suicide, once he could no longer bear to battle his myriad demons, and it appears that he may have been correct.

Did Leonardo invent the first plastics back in the 15th Century? “Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci, where the artist was born the illegitimate child of a Florentine notary and a peasant girl in 1452, found Leonardo’s recipe for artificial materials in several pages of drawings and notes.”

In Tokyo, plans to exhibit a painting by Adolf Hilter have been scrapped. “A spokesman for Toshiba Entertainment, the film’s Japanese distributor, reportedly said that too much interest in the painting had led to the exhibition’s cancellation.”

Ann Miller was one of the movie greats, writes Rex Reed. “She couldn’t sing like Judy or swim like Esther, but they couldn’t machine-gun tap, either. She loved the spotlight, she loved the attention, she loved the camera, and she loved to dance.”

“The question of when an artist must engage in politics remains a painful, personal dilemma. It is an issue that preoccupies conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim, Israel’s most-celebrated musician, and one of its most vociferous critics.”

A painting by Adolf Hitler is to be exhibited at a theatre in Tokyo in conjunction with a film about the dictator’s life. “The showing of the watercolour is meant to back up the message of the film – to show that Hitler had a human side to him and that is all the more reason why he is terrifying because a despot could be born again.”

Thomas Ades is the latest British composer to burst on the scene carrying the hopes of British music. “He’s been acclaimed as a pianist, and as a conductor of his own music with (among others) the BBC Symphony Orchestra. For several years he was musical director of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and is currently artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. Then there’s the string of prizes he’s been awarded; the biggest is the Grawemeyer Award, normally given to composers with decades of achievement behind them.” The question is – can he live up to the hype and deliver?

Playwright Vaclav Havel plans to move to the United States for several months this year, giving lectures and maybe resuming his writing career. “Havel, who was invited by the Library of Congress, plans to stay from April to July, mostly in Washington.”