Category: people

“[He] was one of the leading alto saxophonists in the generation that followed Charlie Parker … For much of that career, he was a sought-after section player in big bands because of his ability, unusual at the time, to read sheet music with as much breezy authority as he brought to his solos.”

“With the help of a sophisticated radar, [Nicholas] Reeves aims to prove Nefertiti is buried there in a hidden chamber of the young pharaoh’s underground tomb that long hid the most fabulous treasure ever discovered in Egypt.”

Dudamel’s editorial, headlined “Why I Don’t Talk Venezuelan Politics,” is a 650-word essay in which he describes himself as “neither a politician nor an activist.” He says, “I will not publicly take a political position or align myself with one point of view or one party in Venezuela or in the United States.”

“When puppeteer Basil Twist got the call in the middle of rehearsal for his new show, he bristled. ‘I was like, ‘Who is this, a bill collector?””

“For generations of Montrealers, the pure tone and clear expression he cultivated with the Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal, an ensemble he co-founded in 1974, defined the way Palestrina, Victoria, Lasso, Tallis and other Renaissance masters should sound.”

“A cartoonist and quasi-historian who launched her comic strip Hark! A Vagrant in 2007 while still working at the museum, Beaton has harnessed the power of Tumblr and Facebook and Twitter to become a ubiquitous presence online, where her sketchy, clever, perfectly imperfect strips are often copied, spoofed, remixed and memed by others.”

“Poitras and the documentary-world veterans Charlotte Cook and A.J. Schnack have created Field of Vision, a company that will commission short-form documentaries and make them available for free streaming on its website.”

“Something quintessentially Benjaminian happens in that uncanny encounter of radio and child: the hint of an unsettling remainder in the everyday, in the dislocation of sent message and received meaning, in the figure of the child who knows something his parents do not.”

“Surely, goes the reasonable argument, an architect’s job is to provide a building that works, meets its brief, and is on time and on budget. It’s hard to argue otherwise, except that this reasoning would have strangled at birth many of the world’s greatest and most popular buildings: the Palace of Westminster, St Pancras station, the Sydney Opera House, the Pompidou Centre, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, most of the work of Antoni Gaudi.”

There are many things one might do while inside a room whose walls are lined with a historic Thomas Hart Benton mural: admire the artwork, contemplate it, take selfies with it. One should not use it as a surface to lean on while writing. Especially if you’re a state lawmaker.