Category: people

Debra Winger: “I think there is a new world of roles open to me now because of my age and that makes me feel juicy about acting again.” And she’s still cantankerous: “I so can’t tell you how much I hate the whole notion that we have to talk about [winning an Oscar] as if it’s some goal… Look at what it’s turned into. What a nightmare. Shame on you for bringing that up.”

“Patricia Faure — a beloved art dealer and eternally glamorous personality whose teenage dreams of movie stardom gave way to careers in modeling, fashion photography and, finally, the art business — has died at 80… She established her presence as director of the highly regarded Nicholas Wilder Gallery in 1972 and formed a partnership with the late Betty Asher in Asher/Faure Gallery before opening her space at Bergamot in 1994.”

“Interviewed on BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters yesterday, [the composer] said he was now ‘blacklisted’. ‘I can’t check in at the airport now without my ID being taken and being grilled. You know, I’m on a homeland security list, probably because of having written The Death of Klinghoffer, so I’m perfectly aware that I, like many artists and many thoughtful people in the country, am being followed.'”

“Nicolas Sarkozy is threatening legal action against a publishing company for a voodoo doll it has produced bearing the French president’s likeness. The voodoo dolls, which are typically used for witchcraft, were produced by the publishing company K&B. The dolls are sold with a voodoo manual and pins to stick in the dolls’ body.”

“There are aspects of my books that are there because they are present in real life. It’s not my mission to carry out this task or else I wouldn’t be a writer, I would be a leader of some movement or a propagandist. It would bore us all to read something where everything is wonderful, where everything goes well, without any problems.”

It may be hard to remember now, but there was a time when manners and social graces counted for something in American society, and no name was more associated with such niceties as that of Emily Post. “Like Freud and Betty Crocker, the name “Emily Post” became shorthand for authority itself.” But Post was a conflicted and complicated woman, as a new biography makes clear…

The strong-willed painter, who walked from Hungary through Italy to Paris and abandoned the art world for 15 years because he hated commercialism, tried “to overcome the aesthetic privilege of talent.” (He was also the father of the early music specialists Pierre, Marc and Jérôme Hantaï.)

“I’ve always been an outsider and I have the power of an outsider. And I bring that in. I’m always very, very different from the environment… The power that I have is from being me all the time instead of changing.”

“[He painted] a completely new kind of picture: large imaginary landscapes, set in the littoral zone that had always fascinated him, and executed with a rich painterly fluency… hard mineral forms, like teeth, seem to grow out of slimy viscera or tender mucous membranes. These pictures could be construed either as visions of genesis or of apocalypse, but the tone is less of menace than of wonder at the sublime spectacle of life.”

Clive James, one of the authors who followed Pat Kavanagh to her new firm last year, pens an elegy to the literary agent, who died Monday. “I would have gone with her even if I had known that she was soon to grow fatally ill. Every minute of knowing her was valuable.”