Category: people

“In a world where there are scores of amazingly trained, virtually interchangeable violin virtuosos, Pekka Kuusisto stands out as that rarest of things: the genuinely individual talent.” Kuusisto plays the classics as if he had just made them up, with a sound and style that most violinists would never even consider attempting. No surprise that he’s also “in [his] comfort zone improvising with an electronic jazz group or taking the stage with a Norwegian noise duo.”

The world’s most famous living condemned heretic says, “The world was not created in six days and God rested on the seventh. It was not created in the churning of a giant pot… And regarding ‘how shall we live,’ I don’t want answers that come from some priest. [But] as a writer I find I need [religion] to explain the world I’m writing about. As a person I don’t need it and as person I do. I would agree, that tension is irreconcilable. [But] it’s just there. It’s just so.”

“Eat your heart out, Eddie Haskell. Tony Dow, best known as the actor who portrayed The Beav’s big brother, Wally, in the ’50s TV series ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ will have one of his abstract sculptures on display at the Louvre.”

“Mr. Crichton was fundamentally a novelist of ideas — a public intellectual who wrote potboilers. He took on big subjects, such as bioengineering and climate change. He wasn’t afraid of slowing down the action to teach a scientific concept. When he wanted his readers to understand something, he would devote a couple of paragraphs to explaining it.”

“The late George Carlin, whose sense of irony was world class, would have appreciated last night’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor ceremony at the Kennedy Center, though it’s not clear which rich irony he would have liked most. Surely, he would have gotten a kick about being too dead to pick up the prize himself, as more than one presenter noted.”

Martin Ramírez’s artistic reputation has undergone an extraordinary re-evaluation in the last few years, with his paintings now fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. Now a multi-million dollar legal battle has begun over the ownership of his paintings, hundreds of which he simply gave away in the hospital ward. An auction of 17 paintings at Sotheby’s was recently halted when lawyers for the Ramírez family claimed them. At the heart of the legal dispute is a conundrum. Was Ramírez, who was diagnosed a “catatonic schizophrenic” really insane?

Widely known as “Mama Africa,” she had been a prominent exiled opponent of apartheid since the South African authorities revoked her passport in 1960 and refused to allow her to return after she traveled abroad. She was prevented from attending her mother’s funeral after touring in the United States.

Sculptor Anish Kapoor “is very interested in negative space, in spaces filled with a nothingness that is, paradoxically, deeply present… ‘On one level you might say it’s not art, it’s a silly game. But I think there’s something in that little edge which is interesting and problematic. There is something going between the meaningful and the banal.'”

“People feel they know Roald Dahl. Most of us have read his books and had our childhoods shaped by his fantastical mind and macabre sense of humour. Dahl’s vision was one of boundless possibility and unfettered imagination; a world where witches had no toes, where giant peaches could float like zeppelins and where friendly giants subsisted on a revolting diet of snozzcumbers.” This week, a new kidlit prize bearing Dahl’s name will be awarded in the UK.

“A single John Leonard sentence is, more often than not, an unmatchable catalog of learning, wit, enthusiasm and combativeness, and by the time Mr. Leonard died on Wednesday, those sentences surely numbered in the millions. No other critic could range so giddily over so much material… without ever losing his ethical bearings, his sense of humor or the thread of his argument.”