Category: people

The legendary Latin-jazz-rocker tells Rolling Stone, “I’m going to stop playing when I’m 67 and work on what I really want to do, which is to be a minister, like Little Richard.” Meanwhile, he tells his band, “the theme of this tour is ‘live your light.’ I want the audience to be reminded that before they had all this stuff, this DNA and flesh and bones, they were made out of light.”

Says the Master of the Queen’s Music: “We can all learn from a recent auction of art as an instantly recognisable iconic commodity, where it has become part of the entertainment industry, crossed with investment banking.”

She’s hardly a traditional historian, but author Sarah Vowell has connected with a wide variety of readers with her snarky, sweet books on American history. She “has never seen any reason why an interest in history should preclude an interest in popular culture… In a way, she makes you wonder about the rest of them, the historians who would never dream of making a pop-culture analogy.”

John Adams’s new memoir, Hallelujah Junction, reads like a gentle repudiation of the idea, popular at mid-century, that audience approval is irrelevant to classical music. “He knew at once, he says, that atonality, far from being the promised land that Schoenberg and Babbitt had predicted, was a dead end.”

“His earliest memories go back to Tashkent and the railway truck he and his family lived in after evacuation to the Urals in 1941, when he was four. When they went back to Moscow, it was to a single room. Their old Bechstein occupied the only space not taken up by beds.”

When Americans think of President Andrew Jackson, we usually think of him first as a war hero, and second… well, we probably don’t think twice. But a new book offers an extended assessment of the Jackson presidency’s impact on American art and culture.

“Constance Rooke, a champion of Canadian writing, an editor, a writer, a scholar and a beloved teacher has died after a long bout with ovarian cancer.” She and her husband “founded the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival in 1989 when they were living in a former stagecoach hotel in the centre of the village. The festival, held on the first weekend after Labour Day each year, continues to celebrate the finest writing in Canada.”

Next year Serra will be 70. Like all great iconoclasts, he has lived long enough to see his supposed artistic provocations gradually accepted as groundbreaking statements. His towering curves and sheets of oxidised steel are now an artistic signature, as instantly recognisable as Giacometti’s elongated figures or Rothko’s swathes of deep, dark colour.

Composer John Adams is just out with a new autobiography, which in addition to telling his life story, gets into the subject of how he came to develop such a distinctive, recognizable sound. “I felt that I could take [an existing musical] language — somewhat in the same way, let’s say, that Picasso took cubism and used it as a jumping-off point for an expression that was much more varied and much more dramatic.”

“A German fee collection agency has sent mail addressed to poet Friedrich Schiller, who died in 1805, reminding him to pay his TV and radio license fee.” The address the bill was sent to is home to a school named for Schiller.