Category: people

“Even as his reputation grew, he became increasingly frustrated with racism in America. When European universities began offering him teaching positions in the late ’60s, he accepted. By the early ’80s, after the death of his only child in Los Angeles, he had vowed never to return to the United States. He never did.”

“I’m still really curious and I still love to perform and get my hands dirty, but I get such a huge thrill, maybe even a greater thrill, from seeing other, younger people doing things. So the sense of joy or satisfaction has expanded.”

“For more than half a century [he] orchestrated the play of luminescence and shadow on television shows, in commercials and at live performances, illuminating – or not – everything from jowls to Jell-O to ginger ale. … [He] was largely unknown outside the technical circles in which he was an acknowledged master. But there is scarcely anyone alive in America today who has not experienced his work.”

“Trends weren’t his job to acclaim. His assignment was to assess individual works of art, and he performed this task with magisterial balance, his forensic intelligence leavened with a lancing wit and an indestructible love for what the stage at its best could be.”

Floyd Norman: “The idea of my color, I never even gave it a second thought. And I don’t think anybody there did either, because what they were concerned about was, How well can you draw? How well can you paint? What talents do you have? … Walt Disney was the same way.”

“I have a massive chip on my shoulder. When you fall into something at age 11 and get paid incredible amounts of money for your entire teenage years for doing a job anyone would want, there is a part of you that thinks everybody is just saying, ‘He got there because he fell into it; he’s not really an actor.'”

“The French director of opera, theater and films such as Queen Margot and Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, died Monday in Paris of lung cancer. He was 68. A screenwriter and actor as well, Chéreau was director of the Th&eacuteâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, France. His unusual production of Wagner’s Ring cycle] in Bayreuth in 1976 was described as changing the face of modern opera.”

“In these cautious, anxious times for classical music, fraught with labor unrest and declining subscriber rolls, the Chicago Symphony is thriving. Mr. Muti, an elder statesman with a heavy Italian accent, has been an unexpectedly galvanizing hit.”

Mary Oliver on her latest subject, dogs: “They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.”