Category: people

Christopher Frayling is the new head of Arts Council England, and he seems well suited for it. “To those who regard themselves as on the inside, Frayling is known not as a popular historian but someone who has sat on every cultural committee going and has connections stretching from, where? – South Kensington to, presumably, 10 Downing Street. He is a trustee of the V&A, chairman of the Design Council, and has previously been a member of the Arts Council, as well as, less respectably, helping to choose the contents of the Millennium Dome’s faith zone. Frayling is even better connected than his predecessor in the job…”

“When legendary wordsmith Gwendolyn Brooks died in December 2000 after more than three decades as Illinois’ poet laureate, she left behind some mighty big shoes to fill. On Wednesday, following a three-year search, poet and teacher Kevin Stein replaced her. A longtime English professor at Bradley University in Peoria and the married father of two, he edged out co-finalist Rodney G. Jones of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.”

For nearly half a century, Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko has been “a piercing voice of conscience, sometimes bitterly angry, other times overflowing with enthusiasm and hope. Many Americans see him as part Walt Whitman and part Bob Dylan; Russians know him as a wildly popular poet who embodies their country’s spirit and has often screamed truths that others feared to whisper. His fame has spread far beyond his homeland, and today he is among the world’s most widely admired living writers.” And now he’s in Tulsa…

Filmmaker David Lynch has “lent his famous name and idiosyncratic hairstyle to a project to raise $1 billion on behalf of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru of transcendental meditation who once entranced the Beatles, and who has for the past few decades been striving to build an earthly paradise. The $1 billion is for a meditation centre big enough to hold 8,000 skilled practitioners. Lynch explains that such a critical mass of positive thinking ‘broadcast’ from one spot will be enough to pacify the world.”

“The Cuban pianist Ruben Gonzalez, one of the leading members of the musicians that formed the Buena Vista Social Club, has died aged 84.”

Comedienne Carol Burnett, country music star Loretta Lynn, soul legend James Brown, film and stage director Mike Nichols and violinist Itzhak Perlman get their Kennedy Center Honors. “In time-honored style, each was enveloped in adulation, encomiums supplied by a parade of fellow celebs.”

“The question of when an artist must engage in politics remains a painful, personal dilemma. It is an issue that preoccupies Daniel Barenboim, Israel’s most celebrated musician and its most vociferous critic. Barenboim has taken his opposition to Israeli policy to the front line, forming a youth orchestra from both sides of the conflict and teaching twice a year at a conservatory in Ramallah whose 800 students, he admits, are imbued with a hatred of Israel. He has been abused by Israeli politicians and pelted with vegetables in a Jerusalem restaurant. But the more he criticises Israel, the deeper his commitment grows.”

James MacMillan is Scotland’s most famous composer. But “over the past five years or so, the steady deterioration in the relationship between the country’s most famous composer and Scottish society at large has progressed gradually and relentlessly, until now, when there is no relationship at all. Systematically, MacMillan has cut himself off from communications with the outside world.
Many of the circumstances of the decline are well-known – notorious, even – though one day there is a large footnote to be written in the history of Scottish contemporary cultural life, in order to document the whole sad, shambolic affair.”

Actor Tim Robbins has a new play opening in Los Angeles. He says that “being lambasted as un-American” for his outspoken views on the Iraq war has been “tough to swallow. Despite his radical rep, he actually sees his penchant for democratically sanctioned dissent as every bit as all-American as his love of baseball. He says his moral compass has always guided him toward saying and doing what he thinks is right, to speaking the truth when he sees hypocrisy in the world, and he has trouble understanding why so many people take issue with the simple logic of his frankness.”

The 100th anniversary of Salvatore Dali’s birth is coming. Vincente Navarro writes that: “The Spanish establishment, with the assistance of the Catalan establishment, wants to mobilize international support for their painter, Dali, portraying him as a “rebel,” an “anti-establishment figure” who stood up to the dominant forces of art. They compare Dali with Picasso. A minor literary figure in Catalonia, Baltasar Porcel (chairman of the Dali year commission), has even said that if Picasso, “who was a Stalinist” (Porcel’s term), can receive international acclaim, then Dali, who admittedly supported fascism in Spain, should receive his own homage.”