Category: people

J. M. Coetzee, this year’s Nobel laureate for literature has “successfully turned a temperament into a style. His novels cannot be pinned down to a history, be it apartheid South Africa or Bush’s increasingly authoritarian America. Yet it’s hard to believe that the Nobel committee, in coming to its judgment, wasn’t moved by the way Coetzee’s most astute writing speaks to this moment.”

Finland is justifiably proud of its musical tradition, and sometimes, it seems as if the Finns have taken over the conducting profession completely. Esa-Pekka Salonen, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is one of the country’s most successful native sons, and lately, he has been captivating America as well. Following the glittering opening night of the Phil’s new Disney Hall, Salonen’s already-considerable profile has been raised, and many are saying that the conductor appears to have graciously evolved from his early years in LA, when he favored obscure composers and difficult modernist works, into a truly well-rounded leader who skillfully balances the demands of his audience, his musicians, and his own soul.

New Yorker film critic David Denby began a talk at Yale University this week by flatly declaring that “movies suck.” Specifically, according to Denby, the Matrix trilogy sucks, most other film critics suck, and so does the exasperating tendency of the big Hollywood studios to churn out embarrassing pap masquerading as cinema. But Denby isn’t all doom and gloom, saying that just because there are fewer profound stories being filmed than in the medium’s “golden age,” that doesn’t indicate that Hollywood is dying out.

Alfred Barr was the founder of the Museum of Modern Art. “Even now, thirty-six years after he retired and more than twenty years after he died at seventy-nine (he)remains a figure of fascination and contention. No one had a more profound effect on the direction of American museums over the last three quarters of a century, and no museum director or curator, or anyone else for that matter, except perhaps the artists themselves, did more to shape the national perception and discussion of art in the twentieth century.”

What is it about 16-year-old Hayley Westrena? Her 13-song medley of ballads sold more than 290,000 copies in Britain in seven weeks, installing ‘Pure’ at the top of Britain’s classical music charts. (The album will be released in the United States on April 9.) Now, with Ms. Westenra signed up for a $4.5 million five-album contract, Decca may well be tingling with the feeling that salvation is nigh.”

“Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling was the highest female earner in Britain during the year to September – earning eight times more than Queen Elizabeth. A survey in the Sunday Times newspaper reported that Rowling earned £125 million ($A302 million), including £75 million from her latest instalment, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. However, the newspaper’s annual survey of Britain’s 500 highest earners found Rowling was only the fifth-highest earner overall.”

Published in 1967, Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ became “one of those extremely rare books that affected people’s ideas about the contemporary novel and also their sense of reality. This became true not only for his readers but also for the many more who eventually received such information, diluted and dispersed into popular culture, without being aware of its source. (A recent newspaper poll in Spain found ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ ranked just after the Bible and ‘Don Quixote’ in universal historical importance – surely the voters can’t all have read it?) Indeed, it is hard to conceive what our sense of the novel, or even of Latin America itself, would be like now had the writings of Gabriel García Márquez never existed.”

Tenor Franco Corelli, who died this week at 82, had animal magnetism as a performer, writes Tim Smith. “If you added up the considerable assets of the Three Tenors (even when Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti were in their prime), you still couldn’t match Corelli’s vocal opulence, electrically charged phrasing and movie-star looks. His one-of-a-kind packaging thrilled an opera world ever-hungry for tenors.”

Theorist Theodor Adorno is it in 2003, “especially in Frankfurt, where the critical theorist was born 100 years ago. There’s no end to the jubilee celebrations, exhibitions, symposiums, conventions and book openings. But while there is more Adorno than ever before, a lot of it comprises simply anecdotes and recollections.”

Cole Porter’s birthplace in Indiana was sold at auction this week. But the house rests on two plots of land, and two different buyers bought them. “A local resident, Brian Boyce, won one lot with an $800 (£470) bid, but a Michigan man, Keith Wegner, outbid him on the second parcel, buying it for $9,000. Mr Boyce said he might restore the historic house and convert it for a bed and breakfast business.”