Category: people

“Literary biography—an enterprise Updike regarded with some skepticism—is largely a hunt for such deeply buried evidence. As an aid to future biographers and anyone else interested in pursuing the mystery of Updike’s prodigious talent, I’d suggest paying attention to his lifelong love affair with cartooning, a passion that burned hottest when he was young but remained warm until his dying days, when he ceased to draw but still repeatedly referred to the comics he had loved in childhood.”

I was realizing more and more that my artistic journey was creating dramatic and lasting effects, not only on the generations to come, but on all living beings and I refused to continue down that path. I thought: “This is going exactly against the very nature of dance, which is to be ephemeral.”

“Most art lovers won’t recognize the name Milton Hebald. But it’s safe to assume that tens of millions of people have seen his work: sculptures, installed in prominent public places in Los Angeles and New York City, that include a monumental display of the 12 signs of the Zodiac that stood for decades at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport.”

“Throughout her work, Ms. Summers was fascinated by the interplay of form and movement, something, she realized, that dance and film could exploit both singly and in combination. Through film, she was able not only to capture the motion of a dance itself, but also to add contrapuntal movement through camera work and cutting.”

“According to Curbed, Bradbury’s house was purchased by “starchitect” Thom Mayne, of the firm Morphosis, and his wife, Blythe Alison-Mayne. Mayne, who is on the faculty at UCLA, is a winner of the Pritzker Prize. Bradbury, who typed “Fahrenheit 451″ on a pay-as-you-go typewriter at the UCLA library, was presented with the National Medal of Arts in 2004.”

“We have people we admire, like Einstein, saying mystery is the most beautiful thing a human being can experience. Yet everywhere in our culture everything that is truly mysterious is immediately dismissed. In a way I think science is the modern religion and at times I despise it as much as I despise other religions, because it really will only accept stuff that fits its masculine ability to define the world.”

“In many ways, Mr. Berthot spent his career exploring how to supplement and expand on the modernist monochrome without straying too far from it.” After a 1996 move to rural upstate New York, “the natural world became an increasing influence. He turned to depicting trees and hills so close in tone to their backgrounds that they almost seemed carved from them.”

The author of Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise “was widely regarded as one of the most significant novelists of his generation,” often compared to Conrad and Hemingway. “[He] took readers into the underworlds of drugs, violence and strife, both cultural and personal. His characters were sometimes strung out, often morally ambiguous and, above all, real.”

“[He] started doing local stand-up gigs when he was still in high school. As his reputation grew, so did the variety of his roles: Negron played comic and serious characters on TV shows including Hill Street Blues, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. He was a familiar face in film comedies such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Easy Money.”

“The French critic Michel Ciment once counted Mr. Rosi among ‘the three last giants of Italian cinema,’ the others being Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonio. His films won top prizes at the Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals. Yet he never acquired the kind of international fame many of his peers knew.”