Category: people

In response to the accusation from an unnamed former co-worker, Minnesota Public Radio will cease distributing reruns of old Prairie Home Companion shows and merchandise as well as Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac; the current PHC with Chris Thile will be renamed. Keillor himself has given responses to The Star Tribune and on Facebook.

“I haven’t figured it out. But it’s settled on me, and it’s just there. … All my life, I’ve mouthed off about how I should stop acting, and I don’t know why it was different this time, but the impulse to quit took root in me, and that became a compulsion. It was something I had to do.”

Should a writer be socially engaged? Is it a part of our duty? I always return to the poet and teacher Marie Ponsot: “The duty of the writer is to the welfare of the work.” Not to some political party or cause or ideal—which through making our art more useful might somehow rob it of its integrity, its wonderful, vital uselessness—but simply to the work itself.

“[He] used specially treated pieces of glass that he mounted on walls and in metal braces to refract and reflect dazzling beams of color.” As he once told an interviewer, “Instead of using paint to capture light, I’m actually painting with light, taking it a giant step forward.”

Dubbed “the world’s sexiest soprano” by People magazine in 1975, “Ms. Neblett was a supremely confident and, to many critics, supremely talented singer and actress, known for her charming, often sensual portrayals of comic characters and dramatic heroines.” She made operatic history in 1973 as the first opera singer to appear in full-frontally nude onstage.

“Once dubbed the ‘poet laureate of jazz,’ Mr. Hendricks expanded the vocabulary of jazz singing as the leading exponent of a style known as vocalese. He wrote witty lyrics for dozens of jazz tunes that otherwise had no words. Moreover, as a vocalist, he performed at breakneck speed, winning the admiration of such jazz giants as pianist Art Tatum and saxophonist Charlie Parker.”

We tend not to associate aging with creative bursts. Historically, critics saw advancements by elderly artists as peculiar… Many older artists, however, sense the significance in their new creations, even if the public reacts with hostility.

Calloway founded the museum in 1976 as part of the outgrowth both of her activism and of a historical society in Omaha, Nebraska. Her son called her one of the last of the “true icons” of north Omaha. Her museum had been through both good and hard times, but it just reopened in a new facility earlier in the fall.

Parul Sehgal has rather a lot to do, and she’s fine with that. “I only care about doing the work. I have zero other ambitions. I’m the laziest, least socially ambitious person, ever. And I don’t get off on the punitive power of the critic; you know that brand of critic, the scold, who has appointed himself to keep the ecosystem clean. That’s the kind of thing that I find very uninteresting. Taxonomizing has very little to do with how and why people read.”

Here’s how it went down in the beginning, according to Carol Burnett herself: “I had this terrific and unheard-of contract that read if I wanted to push that button, the network would have to give me 30 one-hour comedy-variety shows. … I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ And they said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. Carol … all comedy-variety shows are hosted by men — Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, Dean Martin … It’s not really for you gals.’” Yeah, wrong.