Category: people

“Thee popular Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and the South African playwright Athol Fugard are among the recipients of the [$147,500] 2014 Praemium Imperiale awards, Japan’s highest honors in the arts. This year’s roster of winners also includes architect Steven Holl, painter Martial Raysse and sculptor Giuseppe Penone.”

“Mr. Stout, an associate in Frank Gehry’s office before establishing his own firm in 1996 in Los Angeles, explored the relationship between architecture and energy in holistic designs that were no less sculptural and humane for being ecologically responsible. Sustainability helped shape form.”

“Now, with the publication this week of The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee, [former neighbor] Marja Mills’s memoir of what she describes in the book as a warm friendship with Ms. Lee and her older sister, Alice Lee, Harper Lee is back to remind us that she did not authorize the book or cooperate with Ms. Mills.”

“Most references to director, writer and actress Desiree Akhavan place a neat three-word descriptor by her name: bisexual Iranian American, often followed by the words ‘the next Lena Dunham’.” But being young, female, and a writer/director/actress is where the similarities end.

“He had an incomparable stick technique (something he pooh-poohed as a technique). A brilliantly accomplished musician (he was a virtuoso violinist and a composer), he boasted what must have been a genius-level IQ. He appeared capable of playing four-dimensional mental chess while carrying on a dinner conversation with lesser mortal beings.”

“[The] superstar Marxist philosopher … [has] been accused of the worst professorial misdeed of them all: plagiarism. And not just any plagiarism – plagiarism of a 1999 article in American Renaissance, a white supremacist magazine published by an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a ‘hate group’.”

“We’ve only got a few left,” he comments, adding that a “high percentage” of those who have invested will have done purely because of the proximity to the trumpeter.

“Regarded by many as South Africa’s leading writer, Gordimer was renowned as a rigid moralist whose novels and short stories reflected the drama of human life and emotion in a society warped by decades of white-minority rule.”

“‘Don’t understand why life takes beautiful people away,’ Haden said, his voice shaking and struggling against a question that ultimately hangs over all of us. ‘Beautiful people give of themselves.'”

“Making feature documentaries is incredibly hard. You either have to have a massive trust fund or take this existential risk. You can’t have a family. You can’t have a mortgage. The idea that you could turn a 10-minute film on a Swedish arts programme into an Oscar-winning documentary, it’s either folly or extraordinary bravery.”