“‘I was hoping you’d come later in the week.’ It’s a curious thing to hear from someone who has five Academy Award nominations, and who took an Oscar home for playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator. But this is theatre, and Blanchett, like any stage actor before press night, doesn’t quite know how it will go.”
Category: people
The Backlash To Frank Gehry – And His Response
“According to the art critic Hal Foster, Gehry’s Walt Disney concert hall in Los Angeles is a ‘media logo’ and his style of architecture is a ‘winning formula’ for ‘any corporate entity that desires to be perceived, through an instant icon, as a global player’. Someone started selling T-shirts saying ‘Fuck Frank Gehry’ (and he bought some).”
Who Is Cindy Sherman? Don’t Look At Her Self-Portraits To Find Out
“Over the course of her remarkable 35-year career she has transformed herself into hundreds of different personas: the movie star, the valley girl, the angry housewife, the frustrated socialite, the Renaissance courtesan, the menacing clown, even the Roman god Bacchus. … ‘None of the characters are me,’ she explained … They’re everything but me.”
Met Opera’s Longest-Serving Singer, Charles Anthony, Dead At 82
“The number seems almost impossible, but Mr. Anthony” – a comprimario tenor – “sang with the Met in 2,928 performances. He played 111 roles in 69 operas” over 57 seasons; his final performance, as the old Emperor in Turandot, was in January of 2010.
Remembering Lucian Freud In His Studio
David Dawson, for 20 years Freud’s assistant, friend and occasional model: “He was sort of nimble and jumping around at the entrance to his flat. Very, very piercing blue eyes and wonderful manners that immediately sort of put you at ease, or put me at ease, anyway, and [he] was very intimate and caring about how I felt.”
Dancer-Choreographer Zina Bethune Killed In Road Accident
“Bethune, 66, a former New York City Ballet soloist and the founder of a Los Angeles multimedia dance and theatrical company, was struck by two vehicles and killed shortly after midnight Sunday after she apparently stopped to help an injured animal along Forest Lawn Drive in L.A.”
Ricardo Legorreta, 1931-2011, Mexico’s Essential Architect
“No discussion of contemporary architecture in Mexico could pretend to completeness without a discussion of the work of the Legorretas and their firm. Part of Legorreta’s legacy has been to show that there are many Modernisms, not solely a smooth narrative from LeCorbusier to Mies to Johnson.”
How Charles Dickens And America Fell In And Out Of Love
“On his first visit to America in 1842, English novelist Charles Dickens was greeted like a modern rock star. … But a visit which had started so well quickly turned into a bitter dispute, known as the ‘Quarrel with America’.” (It seems author and country loved each other not wisely, but too well.)
New Director Works On Funding – And Inspiration – At The California Arts Council
Craig Watson: “In all of my early discussions around the state, it is clear the role the Arts Council played historically as a convener has been missed. We are getting back in that business where it makes sense.”
Who Is Elizabeth McGovern? (Aside From Lady Grantham On ‘Downton Abbey’)
“The English approach to show business and their work is more — and this is a big generalization, I hasten to say — but it’s more, they work on it as a craft job. There’s not the expectation that any minute they’re going to take over the world, the way show business is set up in L.A., for instance. I feel comfortable with that.”