Category: people

“The top court announced Thursday it will not hear an appeal to a ruling made by Ontario’s Court of Appeal made last September that upheld Drabinsky’s 2009 fraud conviction. The Supreme Court also refused to grant Drabinsky a new trial.”

“While Hathaway could be thought of as a composer’s composer, he would be more fairly described as a composer’s manicurist or a composer’s lawnboy. As evidence, let’s consider the composition that is surely Hathaway’s best-loved unheard piece of work…”

At a conference in the capital (where he replaced a speaker who withdrew because of his presence), the author declared that “a combination of religious fanaticism, political opportunism and public apathy is damaging that freedom upon which all other freedoms depend: the freedom of expression.”

“Daisey appeared, greeted with polite applause. Without notes and sounding very abashed, he apologized for roughly a minute. “I’m sorry . . . I failed you,” he said. The apology, not quite as uncomfortable as the cross-examinations that exposed Daisey on the March 16 radio episode of “This American Life,” was met with a hard-to-read silence.”

“Her intense critique of contemporary society combined with her political activism set her apart from other leading women poets of her generation, including Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. She attended rallies against the Vietnam War, organized poetry readings for peace and marched for women’s rights – and urged every writer to address social injustice in their art.”

“Her ventures in erotica, she said, were in part intended to establish the right of women to make art from the male figure – just as men had for millenniums created art from the nude female figure.” Her most famous quote: “If the erect penis is not wholesome enough to go into museums, it should not be considered wholesome enough to go into women.”

“What to do when you’ve been accused, by various publications and Web sites, of all manner of misbehavior: money laundering, blowing $5 million on your daughter’s wedding and massacring mustangs to use their skins for upholstery?” Janna Bullock, “the glamorous Russian-born real estate developer and art scene fixture,” is trying to reclaim some respect with an exhibition that take[s] on nothing less than the Russian power elite, from Vladimir V. Putin to Mikhail S. Gorbachev.”

“When I said onstage that I had personally experienced things I in fact did not, I failed to honor the contract I’d established with my audiences over many years and many shows. In doing so, I not only violated their trust, I also made worse art.”

Alexander came to the city to be an actor, and indeed got cast in On the Town. But he “made it in New York as a photographer, taking portraits of the likes of Martha Graham and Vivien Leigh; having gallery shows; working for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and the New York City Ballet; and providing droll pictures for the best-selling 1961 satire of a movie star’s memoir, Little Me, written by Patrick Dennis and later adapted for the Broadway stage by Neil Simon. And he found love.”

“Steckel’s paintings of naked men and women engaged in suggestive or explicit acts of sexual expression — and particularly her depictions of erections — set off a furor in 1973 when she included them in a one-woman show at the arts center at Rockland Community College in Suffern, N.Y.”