Category: people

“Singers found him particularly exacting; he had no time for hissy prima donnas or big-baby tenors, and he expected even the most timid newcomers to meet his generally brisk tempi and take criticism on the nose. To work with Sir Charles was a privilege, but it wasn’t an easy ride.”

“But rather than it being a piece of furniture, historians believe it would have been a vast wood and stone structure which would have allowed more than 1,000 of his followers to gather.”

“A journalist once wrote of Goldblum that trying to pin him down is ‘like trying to nail jelly to a greased piglet’. He doesn’t so much swerve a straight question – that would imply intent – as talk frustratingly around it. … Goldblum’s enthusiasm is, if not quite infectious, not something you want to stamp on either.”

“Bob Dylan turned 69 in May. To make it sound more portentous: He has now entered his 70th year. Bob was always chronologically a little ahead of the generation that embraced him, and now, as Baby Boomers are rounding into their ’60s and taking, some of them, their first look at the end of the road, Dylan is out there on the frontier, spying what’s to come, what’s already here. The news is not good.”

“Hemingway was very fond of loafers,” said Patrick Hemingway, the writer’s 82-year-old son. “A lot of celebrity endorsements are phony, but not in this case. Hemingway had a great sense of style. He especially loved leather boots from Madrid.”

“Pekar, by all accounts, was a tough guy to be around: angry, confrontational, beset by grudges and troubles over money, an obsessive worrier. He never hid any of this, but wrote about it instead. That made him as brave as almost any artist I can think of — unadorned, unfiltered, less concerned with how the world thought of him than with how he thought of himself.”

“Stretched to the limit by budget cuts and a rising caseload — traffic filings alone rose nearly 10 percent to 1.83 million last year — the Los Angeles County justice system has been struggling to contend with what appears to be a growing number of celebrities gone bad, done wrong, or otherwise in need of adjudication.”

“The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him.”

“[The] famed Russian pianist and conductor who is accused of raping a teenage boy in a Thai resort has been allowed to leave the country and prepare for a forthcoming concert appearance … as long he returns within the next 12 days.” Pletnev insists that he is innocent and intends to defend himself in the Thai courts.

Joe Queenan: “Consider the case of Ben Franklin, printer, engraver, scientist, wordsmith, diplomat, philosopher and, because he was a fellow denizen of the City of Brotherly Love, my personal favorite among the founding fathers.” Until, that is, Queenan had a good look at Poor Richard’s Almanac.