Category: people

“There have been several calls for his ouster from the University of Toronto — where he’s tenured — including a recent open letter to the dean of the faculty of arts and science signed by hundreds, including many of his fellow professors. Friends refuse to comment on him lest they be associated with his image. Critics hesitate, too, for fear that his supporters will unleash their online wrath. A graduate student at another Canadian university was reprimanded for showing a short video clip of Peterson to a group of undergraduates. One of the professors taking her to task likened Peterson to Hitler.”

“As with many painters whose style matured during the late 1960s and early ’70s, Whitten’s career wasn’t widely recognized until the past few years. But today, when Whitten’s visually seductive paintings appear in major museum shows, it has become difficult to imagine a history of abstract painting without his work.”

“[He] came to the forefront of his country’s music scene in the 1950s, when he became a pioneer of South African jazz as a member of the Jazz Epistles, a bebop sextet that included the pianist Abdullah Ibrahim and other future stars. After a move to the United States in 1960, he won international acclaim and carried the mantle of his country’s freedom struggle.”

The 77-year-old singer “made the announcement while in the midst of his ’50-Year Anniversary World Tour.’ In March, Diamond was set to visit New Zealand and Australia on the third leg of the tour. … He is one of the world’s most popular recording artists, having sold more than 130 million records.”

“Over the years, a welter of American women have been identified as the model for Rosie, the war worker of 1940s popular culture who became a feminist touchstone in the late 20th century. Mrs. Fraley … staked the most legitimate claim of all. But because her claim was eclipsed by another woman’s, she went unrecognized for more than 70 years.”

I had “a strong suspicion that I’d done my best work and anything more would be inferior. I was by this time no longer in possession of the mental vitality or the verbal energy or the physical fitness needed to mount and sustain a large creative attack of any duration on a complex structure as demanding as a novel…. Every talent has its terms — its nature, its scope, its force; also its term, a tenure, a life span…. Not everyone can be fruitful forever.”

Moses will be remembered as an L.A. art world fixture, one of the city’s most productive and experimental artists of the last half-century. He had a restless romance with abstract painting that sparked a perpetually evolving body of work, leading him to dub himself “The Mutator.” Moses formed the “Cool School” of artists — who included Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, Edward Kienholz, John Altoon, Ken Price and Billy Al Bengston — at L.A.’s influential Ferus Gallery in the 1950s and ’60s. Their raucous partying and creative camaraderie not only fused a nascent local scene but made the art world beyond take notice.

The book also opened Provence up to the world – but first to Britain. “Mayle’s relaxed amusement with the French villagers appealed to traditional British frustrations at dealing with their neighbours, and more important, it linked into what the writer George Mikes once described as the English love of enduring hardship: the lavender-scented pleasures of Provence came only at the cost of adapting to life among the locals.”

“After initially publishing the instruction book The Folksinger’s Guide to the 12-String Guitar as Played by Leadbelly with musician Pete Seeger in 1965, Professor Lester went on to write essays, fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books. Among the latter was 1968’s To Be a Slave, which was named a Newbery Honor Book – a finalist for the prestigious Newbery Medal. He also collaborated with African-American illustrator Jerry Pinkney on children’s books, including a reworking of the Uncle Remus tales and 1996’s Sam and the Tigers: A Retelling of Little Black Sambo.”