Category: people

It is said that an addict must hit “rock bottom” in order to be willing to recover. But when the addict is a celebrity, her “lowest, loneliest moments are populated by exactly what a performer craves most: an audience. It stops looking like rock bottom, which leads the victim to believe there are still depths to plumb. Unfortunately, the next level down is usually a notice in Obit magazine.”

“The project to seek Cervantes’ bones, which lie buried somewhere in the walls or floors of a convent in central Madrid, would allow forensic archaeologists to reconstruct the face of a man only known from a picture painted by artist Juan de Jauregui some 20 years after his death.”

“William Faulkner arrived at the University of Virginia’s Charlottesville campus in 1957 and served two terms as UVa’s first writer-in-residence. Many of his classes, readings, addresses, and Q&A sessions were recorded, and a treasure trove – 28 hours of tape – survived. Every invaluable minute is now available online.”

“It was impossible not to draw easy parallels between Winehouse’s art and her apparently tumultuous life. And while her fans ostensibly blanched at her mistakes, there’s little question that we also let it validate her work: Hey, she means it. She really means it.”

“[He] was the first Greek film-maker to achieve international renown,” and he brought international exposure to great Greek actors such as Irene Papas and Melina Mercouri.

Lucien Freud wasn’t even the most famous of the Freuds. Sigmund, of, course, was first, but there are others…

“The record sleeves and album artwork we know and love, and have come to take for granted, owe their existence to the iconic designer, who in 1940 created the first illustrated 78 rpm album package as a young art director at Columbia Records. The company took a chance on his idea – to replace the standard plain brown wrapper with an eye-catching poster-like illustration – and increased its record sales eightfold in mere months.”

“Mr. Welles’s longstanding difficulties with Hollywood are the stuff of legend. At bottom, though, they amount to this: He was a fanatical, impractical perfectionist who was willing to spend any amount of time and money on his films. But it was always other people’s money.”