Category: people

Both books—Xavier de Jarcy’s Le Corbusier, un fascisme francais (Albin Michel, 2015), and Francois Chaslin Un Corbusier (Seuil, 2015)—claim the architect was active in several fascist groups in France beginning in the 1920s, but did a good job of keeping his involvement under wraps.

The Library “looked West to bring back a longtime New Yorker as its new director, choosing Colin B. Bailey, who has served since 2013 as director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco but was for many years before that the chief curator at the Frick Collection.”

“[The playwright] tasked James Grissom with seeking out each of the women (and few men) who had inspired his work – Maureen Stapleton, Lillian Gish, Marlon Brando and others – so that he could ask them a question: had Tennessee Williams, or his work, ever mattered?” Here Grissom recounts his first meetings with Williams.

The ABT star, the first American to become a prncipal at the Bolshoi Ballet, star may still be recovering, but he’s not resting. He tells WNYC’s Leonard Lopate what he’s up to. (audio)

“We have on the one side Ukraine, whose situation is not improving; in Israel and Palestine things are getting worse; the disaster the Americans left in Iraq, the atrocities of Islamic state and the problem of Syria. There is war everywhere; we run the risk of committing the same mistakes as before; so without realising it we can get into a world war as if we were sleepwalking.”

“Sitting on his upholstered couch in his rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, we talk about being an openly gay actor in the ’80s, the healing that comes with watching parents age and why he says [his late ex-boyfriend] Jack was the best man he ever knew.” (podcast)

Zuzana Ruzickova “was a survivor of Terezin and Auschwitz and Nazi slave labor in Hamburg. [She] was a prisoner in Bergen-Belsen and at the time of its liberation, she was 18 and weighed 60 pounds.”

“He deeply loved the theater, his teacher from the rugged prairie to raging, war-torn Washington. … Lincoln’s meteoric rise from the frontier was fueled by his skills as a performer. Drama, jokes, stories, courtroom arguments, outdoor debates – he could go on for hours and exhaust rivals such as Senator Stephen Douglas.”

“His best known book, ‘The Open Veins of Latin America,; published in 1971, described the historical legacy of the Spanish colonial era and capitalist plunder that followed it. He spurned conventional narrative in favor of anecdotes highlighting, among others, enslaved indigenous Bolivian miners, devastated Brazilian rain forests and polluted Venezuelan oil fields.”

Doig, who died in Seattle on April 9 at age 75: “I don’t think of myself as a ‘Western’ writer. … To me, language — the substance on the page, that poetry under the prose — is the ultimate ‘region,’ the true home, for a writer.”