Category: people

To say that Wolfe’s writing was the poetic refinement of the art of sixties advertising is to say only a good thing about it—Wolfe took the taste for the potent phrase, the loaded short sentence, the startling intervention, even the wild punctuation, of sixties advertising copy, and turned it into a kind of art.

“Richard Gray Gallery opened in 1963 in Chicago, becoming one of the first spaces in the city to show work by some of the day’s most prominent artists, among them Jules Olitski, Morris Louis, Hans Hofmann, Louise Nevelson, and Jim Dine, as well as works by modernists like Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Josef Albers, Milton Avery, and many others. … But Gray’s gallery didn’t only show contemporary art — he also had a passion for work by aboriginal and African artists, antiquities, and prints and drawings.”

“A renowned Russian playwright who wrote a play about the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky has been found dead, according to a number of reports from Russia. Elena Gremina, 62, reportedly died just six weeks after the death of her her husband, Mikhail Ugarov, who directed the play, which was called One Hour and Eighteen Minutes. The play revolved around the death of Magnitsky in a Moscow prison cell in 2009 after he exposed a coverup by state officials to embezzle an estimated $230m from the Russian treasury.”

Fintan O’Toole: “[He] didn’t do kitchen-sink drama and he was always a little bit on the outside. But he produced play after play marked by soaring imagination, ferocious honesty, great artistic ambition and unshakable integrity. … What made Murphy such a distinctive, original and restless presence in the theatre of the last six decades was his ability to evade easy categorization, to bring together the intense exploration of private anguish and the epic treatment of history, politics and myth.”

As a performer, Mr. Marks was known best as a French horn player for Alarm Will Sound, of which he was an integral member. The ensemble has been critically praised and is known for its unusual stylistic breadth and commitment to innovation.

“Lee is suing POW! Entertainment for fraud and conversion, claiming the company and two of its officers conspired to steal his identity, name and likeness in a ‘nefarious scheme’ involving a ‘sham’ sale to a Chinese company. POW! was acquired in 2017 by Hong Kong-based Camsing International, and Lee says POW! CEO Shane Duffy and co-founder Gill Champion didn’t disclose the terms of the deal to him before it closed.”

“It turned out that, among the middle-aged people (those aged 35 to 64), the higher-status participants both had more gray matter and more of this beneficial “segregation” in their brain networks. Both measures are correlated with better memory and are considered protective against dementia and other signs of brain aging. This relationship held even after the authors controlled for things like mental and physical health, cognitive ability, and even their socioeconomic status in childhood, rather than adulthood.”

“As the dean enumerated this extraordinary set of failings, he warmed to his task — leaning ever further forward, as if sharing gossip with a group of intimates or inmates. Encouraged, no doubt, by a sense of rightness and righteousness, the faithful apparatchik’s eyes lit up like a chap embarked on a quest with like-minded souls.”

In his use of novelistic techniques in his nonfiction, Mr. Wolfe, beginning in the 1960s, helped create the enormously influential hybrid known as the New Journalism. But as an unabashed contrarian, he was almost as well known for his attire as his satire.

“Even among the many underground artists, musicians and misfits who populated downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and 80s, he stood out as one of the weirdest. His music – with its stark sheets of minimalism and overwhelming guitar-oriented symphonies – filtered into rock and noise, and it’s hard to imagine bands such as Sonic Youth and Swans without him. Originally trained in theatre, with no formal musical education, he brought intense drama to experimental music.”