Category: people

America is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together.” Timothy McVeigh “was a true patriot, a Constitution man.” And this: “I would have liked to have been president, but I never had the money.”

“[His] career stretched from the Great Depression to the brink of the 21st century, … [and he] was one of the last links to the days when Broadway was a center of culture in America and was covered meticulously by more than a dozen newspapers.”

On his first day of rehearsal as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel dealt with “a phalanx of cameras that followed [him] up the stairs, trained lenses on his breakfast hug-athon with orchestra members and shadowed him into the orchestra hall.” Even the NBC Nightly News was there.

“As the 28-year-old joins the Los Angeles Philharmonic this week as its music director, the Spanish-language newspaper Hoy is showcasing photos of the young Gustavo and a conversation with family and friends about his formative years in Venezuela.”

“The artist has told the BBC there will be no more large-scale installation pieces, including his signature pickled animals and medicine cabinets. In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, Hirst says he is now solely painting by hand.”

“How can Hollywood (where it’s almost impossible to find anyone publicly condemning Polanski) and almost everyone else see the same story in an opposite light? Is it proof that the movie business is amoral, or just that it believes that Polanski has suffered in his personal and professional life and paid his debt to society?”

In an absolute monarchy, “Confucius was a self-made man and he taught that governors should be chosen for their virtue and ability, not their birth. He argued that the end of government was the welfare of the people. And he insisted that a ruler who was not righteous and humane would forfeit the Mandate of Heaven, and so lose his crown.”

“Hopkins achieved national prominence as director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1974 to 1986, but he got his professional start at UCLA and returned there in later years. … He chaired the [UCLA] art department from 1991 to 1994 and ran the Wight Art Gallery, and later became the first director of the Hammer Museum.”

“Philip Blum played cello with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 54 years, the last 12 of them while battling cancer. … ‘He used to say if he wasn’t in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra he’d be pumping gas,’ his wife said.”

“Dubbed the ‘Poetic Social Mission,’ [Guy] Laliberte’s time in space will include a two-hour act on Oct. 9 centering on a story written by 2002 Booker Prize winner Yann Martel,” to be broadcast around the globe.