Category: people

“The news stunned the Dallas arts community, where Mr. Wyly’s philanthropy had helped solidify the dreams of the Arts District. The AT&T Performing Arts Center named the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre in honor of the couple’s $20 million gift.”

The dissident Chinese artist, who has more than 95,000 Twitter followers, posted his first updates on the service since being freed from prison in June. Ai had reportedly been forbidden to use social media after his release.

“I suppose the story of the Baby Boomers is of a generation that refused to be defined – by the constraints of class in the Fifties, of old-fashioned social attitudes in the Sixties and now, it seems, even by the length of time they have spent on planet Earth.”

“Though the comedy is frequently panic-stricken, she always knows her center of gravity. And even when she goes big, with her eyes or lips or limbs, she’s never less than natural, playing not to the studio audience but to the confidential camera, apparently average and evidently extraordinary.”

“I find it difficult to legislate the tastes of readers. I can only say people should read more of whatever appeals to them. And perhaps, be more open about surrealist fiction, fantasy and other non-realist fiction.”

“As the new general director of Glimmerglass, Zambello is certainly performing. Her role is a mix of stage director and den mother, at once warm and a little bossy, almost aggressively trying to make everyone feel at home.”

To write her new book, A.L. Kennedy had to learn palm-reading, fight through illness and create literary tricks to match the working world of her trickster characters.

The top name on the Twitalyzer Influence Index is – comedian Rafinha Bastos, “a pioneer of Brazil’s burgeoning stand-up scene [who] appears weekly on two popular television shows… and has 2.7 million followers on Twitter.”

“Nicholson Baker does not look like a dirty-book writer. … He wears round, owlish glasses­, and in early book-jacket photographs, when his beard was darker and more closely trimmed than it is now, he reminds you of one of those earnest Russian intellectuals of the 19th century. Nowadays, with the beard grown out and nearly white, he could easily get seasonal work as a shopping-mall Santa.”

“Hoyland himself disliked being labelled ‘abstract’. He was, he said, a painter full stop – one who expanded the scale and palette of English painters, who took the canvas off the easel, like Pollock, and used the floor as a base to make paintings measured in yards not feet.”