Category: people

“A French court on Thursday fined Dieudonné 22,500 euros ($24,000) for anti-Semitic comments … It caps a bad week for the comic, who was on Wednesday handed a two-month suspended sentence for condoning terrorism after a comment suggesting he sympathised with one of the jihadists who attacked Paris.”

“The inevitable first question, though, can always be answered with: ‘No, they’re not Native American.’ This is a purely African-American tradition. … Some suggest it was a way of honoring Native Americans who sheltered runaway slaves, and also a means of paying respect to a culture that fiercely resisted European domination. Others say it arose after Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show passed through New Orleans in 1884.”

“In 1994, I didn’t have information about arts funding. I didn’t belong to any group of artists, any art movement. I was not part of the NEA Four. I considered my performance work more elaborate than actionism, but not quite theater. It was a visual testimonial, an invitation to go beyond minor (or, to some, major) limitations and experience the sublime, or at least an attempt to reach the sublime. Usually it was an interesting exercise in symbolist bloat. I’m not glamorizing my status as an outsider, but to be attacked, to smell the attack coming, was unbelievable because I wasn’t participating in this system.”

“When [his] first book, The Country Blues, was published at the tail end of the 1950s, the rural Southern blues of the pre-World War II period was a largely ignored genre. His book immediately caused a sensation among college students and aspiring folk performers … [and] created a tradition of blues scholarship.”

“In the hallowed halls of art criticism long dominated by self-serious arbiters of taste, Saltz will sometimes say he prefers to play the role of the hapless naïf. Saltz can look the part when he wants: he’s a petite man, with a receding hairline, bookish plastic frames, and a face that resembles a hybrid of J.K. Simmons and Larry David’s. But his boundary-pushing antics are serious business, a persona built over 25 years of hard work and self-questioning, and they’ve put him in a uniquely influential position in the New York art scene.”

“If the Catholic Church makes G. K. Chesterton a saint – as an influential group of Catholics is proposing it should – the story of his enormous coffin may become rather significant. Symbolic, even parabolic. … In his vastness and mobility, Chesterton continues to elude definition: He was a Catholic convert and an oracular man of letters, a pneumatic cultural presence, an aphorist with the production rate of a pulp novelist.”

“The first,” writes Catherine Shoard, “is that he’s the best actor of his generation. … [The second] is that he’s a bit of a fruitloop. A hippy – a pagan, even … Yet my bullshit detector never blips, even when he explains how the mind has two genders and is quite like a womb. Rather, Rylance just seems like one of the gentlest men I’ve met.”

“Cervantes, often lauded as having written the first modern novel, died in 1616 after requesting burial in a convent in Madrid where, for almost a year, investigators have been searching the subsoil for bones that they now believe to include some of the author’s.”

“His life in Egypt became ‘an unpredictable roller coaster,’ he says. ‘And I’m getting old for amusement parks.'” And yet: “I refuse to put myself in a position where I’m some sort of fugitive. If you’re dissing the country from outside, the brand will lose credibility.”

Mies van der Rohe’s “famous dictum ‘less is more’ is one Otto believed in to the core of his being. The duty of the architect was to make as little impact as possible on nature and to learn from natural design – in Otto’s case, from the structures of crab shells, birds’ skulls, spiders’ webs and bubbles on the surface of water.”