Category: people

A “source close to the government” told an Ottawa-area francophone newspaper that the star singer “is only waiting for paperwork to be finalized by next week’s deadline. The current president, René Préval, is barred by Haiti’s laws from seeking a third term.”

Sondheim is still seen as something of an art-house composer. But “it’s this ability Sondheim has, to turn the emotional crises of real life into compelling theatre, that in part explains the passionate following he evokes.”

“[His] work astutely fused aspects of Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting and Minimal Art on a grand scale; his paintings sometimes measured as much as 23 feet across. The staple of his formal vocabulary was repeating vertical bars that seemed, increasingly, to levitate before clouds of vibrant contrasting color.”

“Movie star, conceptual artist, fiction writer, grad student, cipher – he’s turned a Hollywood career into an elaborate piece of performance art. But does it mean anything? A critical investigation, with bathroom break.”

In Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge, a traumatized World War I vet finds his way to a measure of peace in a small spiritual community in India. The actual ashram which Maugham visited in 1938 is still functioning today, in a small temple town in Tamil Nadu.

“In 1903, Zhou Shuren, a 22-year-old Chinese student studying in Japan on a government scholarship, committed an act of treason: He shaved off his queue, the ponytail that Chinese men wore as a symbol of submission to the emperor. … That he did. Under the pen name of Lu Xun, the writer spent the rest of his life devoted to bringing a revolution to China – both in letters and politics.”

“Unlike his contemporaries Johnny Depp and Daniel Day-Lewis, he seems blithely unconcerned with the project of building a respectable actorly reputation. … [There’s] something about the baroque, hyper-mannered performances of late Cage that touches on the sublime, but ‘self-parody’ isn’t precisely the right phrase for it.”

“I’m writing novels! I’m one of those last Japanese soldiers on one of those islands, hiding in a cave and shooting, because nobody told him that Hirohito has surrendered. Banzai!“

“When you hop on a yacht in the middle of this and sail in an ocean where there’s no oil just to have a little party, now you’re getting into Monty Python territory,” says the master of Florida absurdism. “The truth is way worse than anything I can invent, and I can invent some very twisted stuff.”

“Mel Gibson’s recorded rants, now part of a domestic violence investigation here [in L.A.], are taking a toll where it can hurt an aging action star the most: among foreign film buyers.”