Category: people

Following a successful period in the 1950s as a second-generation New York School Abstract Expressionist painter, Pace began spending time in rural settings, where he developed an “exuberant style [that] applied Abstract Expressionist scale and directness to figurative painting.”

“I can’t see a ballet, or a fashion show, or an art installation, or a frieze, without thinking of Diaghilev and the connections he made possible. … It might be time to say that the great avant-garde artist of the 20th century was not really an artist at all, but a producer.”

“‘Last Letter,’ which has finally been published today, is a long Hughes poem that constitutes his only known account of the events surrounding Plath’s death.” The poem, which was discovered in the British Library, has been printed in The New Statesman and was read aloud by Jonathan Pryce on the UK’s Channel Four.

“LuPone, one of the most celebrated musical theater performers of her generation, wears her anger with a difference. … As lacking in introspection as her tirades can be (can anyone always be the aggrieved party?), LuPone’s voice is most alive when crackling with hostility.”

“[The album] Reach for the Skies, released last week, features samples of two of Churchill’s most famous speeches, set to music by the Central Band of the Royal Air Force. … And this pomp-and-oratory mash-up, we are fascinated to report, is selling like hotcakes.”

“[The] creator of some of the most iconoclastic and difficult works of 20th-century fiction was surprisingly conservative in his own musical tastes. Joyce liked opera – especially Bellini – and Elizabethan lute songs.” Conservative, except that he loved things like Antheil’s wild Ballet Méchanique …

Henning Mankell, author of the popular Wallander detective stories and at one time an anti-apartheid activist inside South Africa, has been working on a television/movie project about his famous filmmaker father-in-law. But the Israeli military confiscated his screenplay.

“A man was arrested after stealing author Jonathan Franzen’s glasses from the writer and demanding a ransom of £100,000 ($158,808) at a book launch.”

“His deceptively artless comedy, usually based on his role as ‘The Gump’, a downtrodden, sad faced little man in a battered cap and a deplorably ill-fitting suit, concealed immense technical skill, superb comic timing, and a sharp business mind.”

“Everyone who has ever done me wrong. If I am in a swimming pool or on a bicycle, my thoughts turn to everyone who has Ever. Done. Me. Wrong.“