Category: people

Political scientist Amanda Friesen: “[He] is always flying around in his private jet. That must seem like a dream come true for some folks! By jetting off to Vegas, he’s doing things people are familiar with  –  things they might do if they had the money. In some respects, Donald Trump is Jay Gatsby, throwing the party and drawing people in with his excess and opulence. He’s Gatsby without the earnestness.”

“Jane was a living, writing, talking paradox. She was an elitist who championed the undergo, a lover of ceremony and ritual who wanted to destroy the status quo, a republican who relished her peerage, a rebel at home in the realm, the barricades and the drawing-room were her natural habitats. … Oscar revered his mother and father, but his resemblance to his mother goes to the core of what made both of them remarkable, and prone to calamity.”

“He was one of the people who was a key input into this thing we call the Vancouver model or ‘Vancouverism’… He was one of these people who challenged the idea that only Vancouver would be an urban place… and he was quite right about that.”

“The two men didn’t exactly collaborate. Yet both were instrumental in creating an ethos in the early era of the Music Center that’s worth revisiting as the institution, having recently entered into its second half-century, tries to become newly relevant.”

Because he today relies on a hearing aid to bring his left ear to 70 percent capability and all sound “arrives from the left,” the inner voice and texture of his music has become simpler and more stationary. “It’s like mono-hearing and spatial effects don’t happen anymore.”

“I think it’s all one big ball of wax by now. I think that there is very little difference anymore between how I write online and how I write in the pages of magazines or when I speak. … When somebody is hearing, reading, seeing me they have a sense that they’re getting at what I might really be. Even though the pervert that is often out on Instagram might not seem like me, it’s me. And my wife approves of about eighty percent of those pictures.”

“The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has been named the winner of the first Berggruen Prize, which is to be awarded annually for ‘a thinker whose ideas are of broad significance for shaping human self-understanding and the advancement of humanity.'”

“[He was] a folk troubadour, raconteur, broadcaster and writer whose radio show Folksong Festival aired for 70 years and helped introduce then-unknown entertainers such as Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie and Joan Baez.”

Davidson’s influence on Los Angeles is twinned in my mind with the architectural landmark just down the street from his old Music Center headquarters — Walt Disney Concert Hall. The reason is that I believe Davidson, who died Sunday at age 83, has done as much to transform the city’s conception of itself as a cultural capital as Frank Gehry’s magnificent building.