Category: people

While artists are rather more circumspect about each other’s work when speaking on the record in today’s ultra-professional market, the gloves often come off as soon as the Dictaphone stops recording. I’ve lost count of the confidential insults I’ve heard contemporary artists sling at their peers

Matt Taibbi: “[Daniel] Richards is pitch-perfect. He enters wrestling halls in small towns in states like Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky to boos and jeers, dressed in a horrific shirt emblazoned all over with Hillary Clinton’s face. The 6-foot-5, 37-year-old then harangues crowds with choice barbs culled from the fairly tepid liberalism that courses through his veins as an ordinary sane person. In Trump country, particularly in coal regions, even kindly telling people you hope they get jobs in clean energy comes across like hardcore aggression.”

During the 1960s and ’70s, he was one of the busiest jazz drummers in America, playing with a range of stars from Quincy Jones to Stan Getz to Ella Fitzgerald to Peggy Lee to Roberta Flack to Doc Severinsen on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show to Simon and Garfunkel’s 1981 concert in Central Park to Angelo Badalamenti’s band for the original Twin Peaks. As a singer, he scored his first hit with “Windmills of My Mind”, but his voice is in the heads of an entire generation because of his work on Schoolhouse Rock.

“I am retiring. Now. Right now. I am just tired,” said the 84-year-old billionaire, who has done more than any other single person to shape L.A.’s current cultural scene. Even so, report Adam Nagourney and Adam Popescu, “the practical ramifications of Mr. Broad’s decision may be limited; the announcement in many ways marks the end of what has been a slow-motion fade.”

“[He] exuberantly weathered thunderstorms, flimsy sets, crackling audio, frayed costumes and sometimes inexpert performers so that his spare but enormously popular company, the New York Grand Opera, might live up to its lofty name.”

“So what does Marina Abramović taste like? The sweets are a variation on Prussian Blue, a warrior color that is tied to memories of her parents and of the ocean, and they leave a guilty blue stain on your tongue. … One of the treats [which are three to a box] is wrapped in gold leaf. The flavors involved are strong and, much like the artist herself, aren’t for everybody.”

“Three cities in Colorado — a state whose fortunes have been tied to the boom and bust of oil, gas and other commodities — are among the top 10 leading destinations for the nation’s best and brightest as old cow and mining towns morph into technology hubs, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Another Colorado city is plotting a 21st century revival.”

“It was so surreal. They read back to me why I was selected — and I don’t even have the words to describe what it felt like to hear,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wow, I guess that’s what I’m doing,’ but you get in the thicket of doing it, and with no warning, you get this bird’s-eye view of the past 15 years.”

Mr. Friedman’s death from complications of H.I.V./AIDS has rattled the theater world, both because he was seen as among the brightest lights of his generation and because it shocked those who had come to see H.I.V. infection as a chronic but manageable condition, at least for those with health care.

Alongside playwright Baker (The Flick, Circle Mirror Transformation), theater artist Mac (A 24-Decade History of Popular Music), opera director Sharon (of the L.A. experimental company The Industry), critic and novelist Nguyen (The Sympathizer), and photographer Bey, winners in the arts include painter Njideka Akunyili Crosby, author Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones), composer Tyshawn Sorey, singer-songwriter Rhiannon Giddens, landscape architect Kate Orff, and geographer-artist Trevor Paglen. (For a complete list of 2017 MacArthur Fellows, click here.)