Category: people

He studied with László Moholy-Nagy, did prodigious amounts of drugs and designed the cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed” and died young. When an architect asked him, “What is graphic design?” Robert Brownjohn replied, “I am.”

Logue is best-known for his 40-year project of transforming the Iliad into a contemporary piece, but his life “was a fittingly picaresque epic that also included being imprisoned in a Crusader castle, writing a pornographic novel, acting in films by the director Ken Russell and committing a modest armed robbery at the age of 8.”

Where did yarn-bombing come from? Magda Sayeg knows. And her work has gone from guerrilla to corporate – complete with wrapping a Prius, not quite Christo and Jeanne-Claude style, in yarn.

James Fox: “Some of my students apparently wrote to the BBC, asking it to employ me as a new arts presenter. I knew nothing of this note, but a year later I received an email out of the blue from the BBC arts commissioner inviting me to go in for a meeting. I went, clueless, of course. A few months later I was out filming my first programme.”

“Eight times a week he clefts himself in twain for the delectation of largely female audiences who love him just for his selves. Let’s face it. Mr. Jackman is, unapologetically and triumphantly, the bi-est guy in town: bicultural, bimorphic, binational, biprofessional and, for entertainment purposes, bisexual.” (Emphasis added.)

“A few months after his May inauguration, Emanuel said, he decided that he would work out of the mayor’s so-called ceremonial office… and he would make it a showcase for Chicago art and furniture.”

Remember last spring when the City University of New York blocked (until getting shamed into backing down) the honoring of Kushner, after a board member claimed the playwright was “anti-Israel”? Well, Kushner is letting bygones be bygones, donating the prize money from his Creative Citizenship award to CUNY.

“I’m happy to reassure you that Kurt did not die a bitter man who kept thinking he was a failure,” said Mark Vonnegut to science fiction fans in response to a new biography that depicts the author as angry, cynical, and depressive.

Charles McNulty: “How many other movie star pinups are also giddy song-and-dance men? His new concert show is a glitzy advertorial for his career that combines action hero with ripped abs and what I’d affectionately call (draining the term of any homophobic taint) a show queen, a category that can no longer be limited to gay men.”

“The amount of vitriol in Helen Vendler’s review betrays an agenda beyond aesthetics. As a result, she not only loses her grasp on the facts, but her language, admired in the past for its theoretical elegance, snarls and grouses, sidles and roars as it lurches from example to counterexample, misreading intent again and again. Whether propelled by academic outrage or the wild sorrow of someone who feels betrayed by the world she thought she knew–how sad to witness a formidable intelligence ravished in such a clumsy performance.”