Category: people

Blake Bailey: “Vidal’s life was a tragedy whose great themes put one in mind of Citizen Kane: the story of an insatiable egoist who had everything and lost it. Standing on his balcony in Ravello, overlooking the gorgeous coast, a friend asked him what more he could possibly want out of life: ‘I want to make 200 million people change their minds,’ Vidal replied.”

“He saved even his old passports and used bullfight tickets, leaving behind one of the longest paper trails of any author. So how is it possible that ‘Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars,’ which opens on Friday at the Morgan Library & Museum, is the first major museum exhibition devoted to Hemingway and his work? It could be simply that no one thought of it before.”

We can blame sportswriters who weren’t above making up quotes for some of it, and we can blame Berra’s boyhood friend and former colleague, sportscaster Joe Garagiola, for spreading the image nationwide. But Berra – who was, among other things, a real shark at negotiating a contract – really did utter some of those famous lines, and he wasn’t above using them to his own advantage.
09.23.15

“In 1915, with the newly innovated film camera, a young Russian-born, French actor named Sacha Guitry captured some of France’s greatest artists and authors. His footage of Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet, Edgar Dégas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and other luminaries in their twilight years appeared in his first cinematic work, a 22-minute silent film called Ceux de Chez Nous (Those of Our Land).”

“[Adrian] Frutiger created some of the most widely used fonts of the 20th century, seen daily in airports, on street signs and in subway stations around the world. … Perhaps [his] most ubiquitous typeface is also the least obtrusive: OCR-B, the optical-character font he designed in 1968, adopted five years later as the world standard” – and now seen at the bottom of everyone’s bank checks.

“She caused a revolution by simply, sweetly, turning to spaces that other dance-makers don’t. But she also caused a revolution in the space of the human body. She rejected the pulled up stance of ballet and the inner torque of Martha Graham. She loved Merce Cunningham’s work but she had no wish for dancing bodies to be so upright. She was going for something else, something more yielding, more off-balance, a way for the energy to flow on unusual paths through the body.”

“Chaplin’s art overflowed the bounds of cinema and raised the tides of history; but Chaplin’s life also overflowed the bounds of law and norms and submerged those who stood in the path of his desires.” As the man himself wrote, “I have no morals in the sense that I abide with them in awe. I respect no book of rules for they have been written by someone else.”

“Sargent, said one of his biographers, was ‘at home everywhere, and belonged nowhere.’ Born in Florence to American parents in 1856, he grew up in Europe yet always considered himself American.” And by the time he settled in London in his thirties, he “seems to have known everyone.”

“His verse could be, by turns, intensely personal, or public-spirited, taking on the Vietnam War and a long list of social injustices, expressed in hot language. ‘This is fresh meat right mr nixon?’ begins one of his best-known poems, ‘In the Heart of the Beast,’ a response to the fatal shootings of student demonstrators at Kent State University in 1970.”

“His sharp wit could be cruel, but he was a television natural, a hugely readable television columnist, and an insightful – if sometimes harsh – critic.”