Category: people

“Here’s Teen Vogue on another photo of Jaden Smith in a skirt suit: ‘The midi skirt set sends up a poignant rejection of heteronormativity.’ What sage could have predicted that heteronormativity would eventually make its way into the vocabulary of teen magazines and shareable web content? Only, perhaps, the queer theorist Judith Butler.”

“Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead once called him ‘the most perfect singer alive.’ It was a plaintive, nimble and haunting voice that blended elements of Primitive Baptist church choirs and the Grand Ole Opry, music on which Mr. Stanley was weaned in far southwestern Virginia.”

“Actor Al Pacino, musician James Taylor, gospel and blues singer Mavis Staples, Argentine pianist Martha Argerich and rockers the Eagles will receive the 2016 Kennedy Center Honors, the arts center announced Thursday.”

“One of Pakistan’s most famous and respected musicians, celebrated for devotional songs from [the] centuries-old mystic tradition [of qawwali], has been shot dead by Taliban gunmen in Karachi.”

Harvard professor Karen L. King, following an exposé by The Atlantic on the provenance of the papyrus fragment and the man who presented it to King, said, “It appears now that all the material Fritz gave to me concerning the provenance of the papyrus … were fabrications.”

“Peeling away the myths that Fuller and his acolytes applied to his life like so many layers of fertilizer is no easy task. It’s not for a lack of historical sources. Fuller consciously, even obsessively, documented his own existence, referring to himself as an experiment.”

In addition to his 27 years with the pink paper, “Murray worked as a lecturer in philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, into his 60s. In philosophy, as in music, he would easily become immersed in his subject. One student later recalled how they had met at his house and continued to talk even when the fire brigade arrived to put out a blaze in the apartment downstairs.”

“At 84, the man considered by many to be the world’s greatest living painter—and its priciest, too, at least at auction, where his record stands at $46.4 million for 1986’s Abstraktes Bild, just behind Jeff Koons’s $58.4 million sculpture Balloon Dog (Orange)—is still vigorously creating work. But before he created these paintings, he had barely put brush to canvas in four years.”

“Two thousand sixteen marks the 100-year anniversary of my father, Leroy Mosley’s, birth. He was and is my inspiration, the man who taught me to bob and weave in life and art. I came into being shaped by the stories about his childhood in Louisiana and the grinding poverty he endured there, the bloodletting and laughter in the Fifth Ward in Houston and the harsh enlightenment he received in the Army.”

Asked to sum up her life, she said: “I haven’t any imagination – but I was lucky to spend my life among fascinating people.” She couldn’t be more wrong. At 100, as those of us lucky enough to celebrate with her today are thrilled to attest, Olivier remains as original, stylish and clever as ever.