Category: people

“An algorithm-based vetting process has real issues. So few immigrants have committed acts of terrorism, that a computer program couldn’t even generate an accurate predictive model, the coalition of tech experts from some of the U.S.’s top universities and research groups says.”

The Australian took over the Printed Matter book fair in New York in 2013. Printed Matter is “the granddaddy of such gatherings, and [Cane] transformed it into a radically inclusive affair, attended by venerable rare-book dealers alongside obscure zine makers so scrappy they could barely afford the plane fare to participate.”

We would know so little of dance without him: “Bhargava edited films that captured the work of Balanchine, Peter Martins, Bob Fosse, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham and many other prominent choreographers, in the process creating an archival record of a genre that had historically been difficult to preserve. And through Dance in America and other television work, he spread the art form to people who might not have been able to get to a theater.”

“I expect art to be troubling because I expect people to be troubling. I am prepared to like and dislike something in every work. I can also appreciate the aesthetic genius of a moral monster without feeling that I am becoming inured to monstrosity. Just as I can read Heidegger without becoming a Nazi, I can look at one of Adolf Hitler’s juvenile watercolour paintings and appreciate a bit of pink in the sky there, and understand it as a painting of its era and one by a tyrant at the same time. And if I do this and am judged immoral for it, is it because it is bad for just me or bad for society at large?”

Those affected said they “felt unable to raise concerns”, and he “operated without sufficient accountability”. The London theatre said it “truly apologises” for not creating a culture where people felt able to speak freely.

He was one of the two attorneys whose groundbreaking defense prevailed in the 1960 obscenity trial of Penguin Books for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover; eleven years later, he won a more difficult case against Paul Ableman’s The Mouth and Oral Sex, establishing the “literary merit” argument. “He added a service to the arts by ending the cultural vandalism of Mary Whitehouse, whose attempt in 1982 to prosecute the National Theatre for staging Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain collapsed after his (and the Old Bailey’s) most remarkable cross-examination.”

“I was five when my neighbor in Santo Domingo bought the first set on our street, the first I’d ever laid eyes on. … Maybe I would have been O.K. if I’d seen anything else: the news, a variety show, a political debate. But my earliest exposure to television was a Spider-Man cartoon … My father’s absence made perfect sense. He couldn’t come back right away because he was busy fighting crime in N.Y.C. . . . as Spider-Man. The diasporic imagination really is its own superpower.”

He held some of the most prestigious positions his profession had to offer – at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Saint-Séverin in Paris, and the Chapelle Royale at Versailles – and he was a pioneer, as performer and scholar alike, in reviving the organ repertoire of the 17th and 18th centuries, notably on historical organs. His large discography includes one of the most admired sets of J.S. Bach’s complete works for organ. (in French; Google Translate version here)

Sontag the personality has grown so large in death that it threatens to eclipse her work: She is remembered as a narcissist, a pugilist, the enemy of Camille Paglia, and a genius.