Category: people

“From the nineteen-sixties on, Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh Realpolitik, one based on her experience: looks mattered. If you got cut off from access to men and money — and from men as the route to money — you were dead in the water. Women were one another’s competition, always. For half a century, this dark comedy of scarce resources had been her forte: many hands grasping, but only one golden ring. Rivers herself had fought hard for the token slot allotted to a female comic, yet she seemed thrown by a world in which that might no longer be necessary.”

“Alongside Ian McKellen, Howard was the leading heroic actor of his generation, someone whose voice … thrillingly encompassed, said the critic Irving Wardle, a sardonic croak, a lyrical caress, a one-man brass section and a whinnying cry of horror.”

“People come to hear music, not to hear shouting. And to go on stage and scare Netrebko, how can the Met let this happen? If someone were to shout an anti-American slogan on the stage of the Mariinsky, it would be my fault.” The conductor then goes on to talk about Ukraine and Crimea.

“I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at NewsHour every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming. … I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future.”

“It’s one of the reasons I didn’t like acting. I don’t like not being able to interject. I don’t like waiting to talk. You have to wait for the other person to finish with his lines.”

“In 2006, the Iranian artist Mana Neyestani sat down to draw a children’s cartoon for a weekly magazine called Iran Jome. The image showed a 10-year-old boy named Soheil trying to have a conversation with a cockroach in a nonsensical cockroach language. The insect didn’t understand the boy and responded, ‘Namana?’ – which means, ‘What?'”

“It’s called ‘I Can’t Breathe,’ and as the title indicates, the song is something of a tribute to Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who died last summer after New York Police Department officer placed him in an apparent chokehold. ‘I can’t breathe’ were Garner’s last words, repeated and captured on video.”

“The world they live in is so beyond our understanding. You’ve never queued for anything. Ever, for anything. Every time you go in the street, the traffic is stopped for you. It’s a world you can’t imagine. They are, in a way, aliens. But inside that, they are the same flawed, insecure, vulnerable, complicated human beings we are. It’s my job to get into the person who’s inside that world.”

Hilton Als: “One of the architects of black political correctness, he saw as threatening any attempt to expose black difference or weakness in front of a white audience. … Hughes’s reluctance to reveal the cracks in the black world – which is to say, his own world – curtailed not only what he was able to achieve as an artist but what he was able to express as a man.”

“Kenneth G. Pigott was that rarity among leaders of cultural institutions: a visionary board president who could speak knowledgeably about the art form he served and who took an active, influential role in moving the institution forward.”