Category: people

“And again a spasm went through his shoulder and he let out a low moan. Each time he sensed that his power, the current of his will, was not penetrating me and was meeting resistance, he experienced physical pain. … And in this there was no pretence, as he was evidently trying to conceal both the spasms in his shoulder and his strange, low groan.”

“As a novelist and a journalist, [Mohammed Hanif] has become perhaps the foremost observer of Pakistan’s contradictions and absurdities.”

It resembles Copeland in some ways: It’s clearly a ballerina, with nicely arched feet in pink toe shoes, hair pulled back, stage makeup, dance costume. The costume is one that’s closely identified with Copeland, copied from the flame-red unitard she wears in the ballet “Firebird.”

The winners of the 2016 Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards – given for dance, theater, and jazz – include well-established artists such as Mark Morris, Lynn Nottage, Fred Hersch as well as less-familiar names (for now) such as Aparna Ramaswamy, Jen Shyu, and Sharon Bridgforth.

Cutting Through the Clouds of Myth, a collaboration withthe Slovenian multidisciplinary artist Jaša, “is one of Ulay’s first reengagements with performance after a battle with cancer. … ‘At one point I got a sort of calling, an inner voice, to reenter performance art again,’ [he said].”

That Jeff Melanson, who studied opera as an undergraduate, is enmeshed in the soapy version of the genre is only one of the many ironies of Canada’s ongoing War of the Roses, a mutually assured destruction destined to expose the underbelly of the Canadian arts scene.

“He helped found the Library of America in 1979, the culmination of a proposal by his fellow critic Edmund Wilson in the 1950s. The company has published 9.5 million copies of 279 moderately priced novels, memoirs, narrative histories, forgotten masterpieces and other classics.” In addition, he pioneered the academic discipline of American studies.

“At an early age, Anthony Comstock felt he was destined for glory.” What he became is the leader of what suffragette Victoria Woodhull described as “the American Inquisition” – adding, “We should no more think of comparing Comstock … with Torquemada, than of contrasting a living skunk with a dead lion.”

Nearly 50 years later, at a moment when words like “doxx” and “troll” have entered the cultural vernacular, books and movies are rehabilitating Arendt’s image for a new generation, and turning her into an unlikely pop cultural icon.