Category: people

“Artist Marina Abramovic and theater director Diane Paulus are among Time magazine’s 100 most influential people for 2014. The annual list, which covers fields as diverse as arts, politics, science and sports, was released on Thursday and also included artist-filmmaker Steve McQueen and songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez.”

“Glawogger, whose oeuvre includes his documentary trilogy exploring the world of work – Workingman’s Death, Megacities and Whores’ Glory – as well as dramas such as Slumming and Kill Daddy Good Night apparently died in Liberia after contracting Malaria.”

“George Psalmanazar claimed to be a kidnapping victim who was snatched from Formosa (now known as Taiwan) by a Jesuit named Father de Rode of Avignon.” And that’s just the start of it …

“The atheist Shakespeare theories” – which have been around for about a century now – “may be gaining currency, but … he has been called everything from a closet Catholic to an apologist for the Protestant state religion; the truth, one suspects, is murkier.”

“It is only Shakespeare whose language and characters have taken on a life of their own, enabling his work constantly to accommodate itself to the new. There is a quotation for every occasion, a character parallel for every figure in public life.”

“I knew García Márquez’s colonels and generals, or at least their Indian and Pakistani counterparts; his bishops were my mullahs; his market streets were my bazaars. His world was mine, translated into Spanish. It’s little wonder I fell in love with it – not for its magic (although, as a writer reared on the fabulous ‘wonder tales’ of the East, that was appealing too) but for its realism.”

Says the man who went from co-scripting Andrei Rublev to making the Oscar-nominated Runaway Train to getting fired from Tango & Cash: “Freedom is not a guarantee of good art. The best art comes in the war or the plague.” “[Art] can help politics when politics are ready to be changed. Not before.” “Opera is much closer to circus than to cinema.” “Tango & Cash, like every real Hollywood film, is a film for people who cannot read.”

“She’s been described as gracious, thoughtful and reserved, someone who only speaks up when necessary. And 17 days ago, she reluctantly stepped into the spotlight in a last-ditch bid to save San Diego Opera from extinction.”

“A rarity in classical music for his simultaneous careers as a professional pianist and a music critic … [and] known for his humor, wit and encyclopedic memory of recordings and performances, Mr. Goldsmith was a frequent contributor Musical America and High Fidelity magazine … as well as a prolific writer of liner and program notes.”

She adores “the unnerving exhilaration of writing scenes in the middle of the night and handing them to actors at ten o’clock the following morning. The buzz of that is like nothing else. It’s the pressure, and the fact that you are thinking on your feet.”