Category: people

There’s a street in the middle of Music Row called “Chet Atkins Place,” another a few blocks over called “Roy Acuff Place,” and a statue of Owen Bradley at his piano at one end of the neighborhood. Don’t be surprised if the people who decide such things look to rename another street on the Row now; “Frances Preston’s Way” sounds about right.

In the 1910s and ’20, the Brooklyn-born writer wrote dozens of colorful stories about colorful characters, very much including herself. (She also drew her own illustrations.) A century before Christopher Hitchens had himself waterboarded, Barnes had herself force-fed by tube so as to be able to describe what British suffragettes were being subjected to in prison.

The Royal Ballet heartthrob is making his feature film debut in the British-made romantic drama The Day of the Flowers, in which he plays the tour guide who leads a pair of Scottish sisters around Cuba and cleans up after their misadventures.

“There was this one piece where I almost died lying in the burning star. My hair was burning; I was burned everywhere. In the morning, my grandmother was in the kitchen making breakfast. She saw me and thought she saw the pure devil and threw everything on the floor and ran away.

Stephen Redenti, artist and bioengineer: “When you’re building a three-dimensional sculpture, you have to build the architecture to support the clay. Then you have to build devices to support the sculpture in progress — little scaffolds, levies, pulleys. I think that kind of found-object resourcefulness came in handy at the stem-cell laboratory.”

“I have been a lone voice in the world of art criticism – despised and rejected. There’s an enormous amount of resentment because I am not a member of the club. Do I enjoy my notoriety? Absolutely not. I take a deep breath and get on with it.”

“Last week, researchers unveiled new evidence suggesting that a long-disputed portrait does, in fact, depict a thirteen-year-old Jane Austen. … Of all writers, she is one that we would like to visualize accurately, in the half-belief that if we could just get a good look at her, we would be able to see something more of her world.”

Abdul Shahid, a busy, internationally traveled violinist, claims that his career and life have been ruined after the Tower Hamlets council circulated a brochure for an Indian music fair with Shahid’s first named printed as Bal (which means “pubic hair” in Bengali).

The dapper French composer-cum-prankster, best known today for his piano pieces called Gymnopédies, was even more eccentric than you think. For a start, he was a lousy pianist.

“Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones were not thinking about the most efficient way to jump-start their careers when they decided, back in 2006, to have an open relationship. Less than happy but still in love, the couple, who met as students eight years ago at the Tisch School of the Arts at N.Y.U., were merely searching for a way, in effect, to break up without fully breaking up.” Then they made Breaking Upwards, and everything changed.