Category: people

Here’s the great irony: the budget of the Los Angeles Philharmonic is now about $120 million a year. The total amount of money we get from the National Endowment for the Arts is about $150,000. So it’s less than one percent of our budget. So we — the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic — both of these orchestras will move ahead because that’s about the level that big orchestras receive from the NEA. Who is going to be terribly hurt are the smaller organizations in this city and especially in rural America.

“Dexter, who has died aged 86, claimed that he was no writer, but could revise his ‘bad starts’ into something that worked. The formula was certainly a success for some dozen Morse novels and many original scripts for television, the medium that delivered the doings of the idiosyncratic Morse to an audience across 50 countries.”

“The New York Review, founded in 1963, was born with a mission – to raise the standards of book reviewing and literary discussion in the United States and nurture a hybrid form of politico-cultural essay. Mr. Silvers brought to its pages a self-effacing, almost priestly sense of devotion that ultimately made him indistinguishable from the publication he edited, and it from him.”

The last surviving grandson of oil baron John D. Rockefeller, he rose to the chairmanship of Chase Manhattan Bank. “His stature was greater than any corporate title might convey, however. His influence was felt in Washington and foreign capitals, in the corridors of New York City government, in art museums, in great universities and in public schools.”

“Why did Soviets focus on Hemingway? He first caught their attention in 1935 by writing for the far left American journal New Masses. His article was an angry denunciation of the U.S. establishment for leaving a large group of veterans, at work on government relief, to die in the path of a hurricane that struck the Florida Keys that year. Then, during the Spanish civil war, he came into contact with Comintern agents, Soviet spies, and communist guerrillas. They intrigued and captivated him, all the more so because they were fighting for a cause that had ignited his passion: anti-fascism. “

The problem with most writing about Kristin Stewart post-Twlight is that (especially male) critics want to call her “mysterious” or “withholding.” But “her voice does not modulate wildly because most real voices do not. Her eyebrows do not flail because most eyebrows do not. Stewart does not take something away from her performances in order to tantalize her viewers. Instead, she intentionally fails to reach the pitch of thespian overcookedness audiences are accustomed to.”

“Love or loathe him, none could deny Mr. Breslin’s enduring impact on the craft of narrative nonfiction. He often explained that he merely applied a sportswriter’s visual sensibility to news columns. Avoid the media scrum gathered around the winner, he would advise, and go directly to the loser’s locker.” (You can read some of his writing, older and more recent, at The Daily Beast.)

To put it mildly, Berry was key to rock & roll. “Starting with his first hit, 1955’s ‘Maybellene,’ Berry penned a collection of songs that, in both groove and teen-life mindset, became essential parts of the rock canon: ‘Roll Over, Beethoven,’ ‘Rock & Roll Music,’ and especially ‘Johnny B. Goode’ were witty, zesty odes to the then-new art form — songs so key to the music that they had to be mastered by every fledgling guitarist or band who followed Berry.”

Derek Walcott, whose intricately metaphorical poetry captured the physical beauty of the Caribbean, the harsh legacy of colonialism and the complexities of living and writing in two cultural worlds, bringing him a Nobel Prize in Literature, died early Friday morning at his home near Gros Islet in St. Lucia.

Writer Gabrielle Bellot introduces us to Helen Kane, “Baby” Esther Jones, and the court case over Betty Boop that revealed her origins.