Category: people

“[Patricia] Lockwood is all large eyes, apple cheeks and pixie haircut – like an early Disney creation, perhaps a woodland creature; one of her fans recently rendered her as a My Little Pony. The contrast between how she presents and what she writes is something Lockwood delights in. … Her steady [Twitter] stream of surreal, sexually explicit and often sexually impossible humor has won her 30,000 followers.”

“When the Field Museum was searching for a new president in 2012, one of Richard W. Lariviere’s references called the Sanskrit scholar and Chicago-born son of a welder ‘not a rogue but a gentleman with elbows’ … Mr. Lariviere got the Field Museum job, and from day one has been confronted with massive problems that again require him to use his elbows.”

“From her desperate early years, Ms. Angelou gradually moved into nightclub dancing and from there began a career in the arts that spanned more than 60 years. She sang cabaret and calypso, danced with Alvin Ailey, acted on Broadway, directed for film and television and wrote more than 30 books, including poetry, essays and, responding to the public’s appetite for her life story, six autobiographies.”

“[He was] an acclaimed graphic designer who gave shape to his spare, Modernist vision in book covers and shopping bags, furniture and corporate logos, even a church and a New York City subway map that enchanted aesthetes and baffled straphangers.”

“St. Aubyn is seen to have done something remarkable with his balance of wretchedness and wit. … He is fifty-four and the father of two, and has the air of someone who is puzzled, and rather impressed, to find that he is not dead.”

“He danced on the tables at his grade school. … As an adult, he used his credit cards to co-found a dance troupe … [and] danced and choreographed for a decade with Ohio’s Dayton Contemporary Dance Company.” He had been continuing with a promising career in choreography and teaching when he began a struggle with limbic encephalitis.

“With a towering physique and a square jaw,” not to mention musical chops honed with Duke Ellington’s band, “Mr. Jeffries was perfectly suited to capitalize on the singing-cowboy movie craze that Gene Autry and Roy Rogers popularized in the 1930s. Black performers … had appeared in silent westerns, but the Stetson-sporting, six-gun-toting Mr. Jeffries inaugurated the concept of a black singer riding in the saddle as the hero.”

“When he’s not busy, he’ll get his band together for the very loose, improvised three-hour show at an L.A. club called Rockwell. ‘So we have a kind of hootenanny, or be-in, or some kind of a jam session is what they call it,’ Goldblum says, ‘and people seem to enjoy it.'”

“People say how, when you watch a film, how do you feel about it? What do you remember? And do you like watching the film? Well, after it’s been several years, many years, it’s almost another person up on the screen.”

And it’s the big, volatile, controversial, and, er, colourful mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford. (audio)