Category: people

“A mixture of aesthetic sophistication and anarchic, childlike energy, his imagination has had an extraordinary transformational effect on some of the most mainstream works in the repertoire. His controversial stagings of Mozart’s great operas in the 1980s combined high and low cultural references in the conceptual style that has become Sellars’s trademark.”

An important collection of Carl Jung’s papers is up for auction. “The collection shines a light on Jung’s personal and professional preoccupations and includes material that has never been seen by researchers before. ‘They have been seen by Jung scholars and they have been dumbstruck. Gobsmacked was one word that was used’.”

Tyler Green reports that New York Times art critic Grace Glueck is on the board of the Berkshires’ Clark Museum. “Would the Times allow its labor reporter to serve on the board of a labor union? Or could a Times science reporter sit on the board of the American Lung Association? What about its religion columnist: Would it allow him to serve on the board of a church, even if, say, he didn’t write about that church? (Glueck last wrote about the Clark in 1991.)”

Arnold Newman, the portrait photographer whose pictures of some of the world’s most eminent people set a standard for artistic interpretation and stylistic integrity in the postwar age of picture magazines, died yesterday in Manhattan.

Playwright Tom Stoppard left Czechoslovakia 68 years ago. “He has said that he is ‘English now’ but that at some level he has never stopped also being Czech. His mother’s death a few years ago may have subtly freed Stoppard to explore himself for traces of his origins. But no sudden self-discovery led to this play. It seems to have been prompted by reflecting on his friend Vaclav Havel’s moral and philosophical writings, and by reading about the background to the Czech ‘Chartist’ dissidents in the 1970s.”

At last week’s Spoleto Festival in Charleston, the Bill T. Jones company was walking off the stage when a man loudly booed from the audience. Suddenly Jones appeared and demanded the man show himself…

“He has translated what life has told him into music over the course of dozens of albums and thousands of live gigs going back to 1959, when he made his professional debut with the Art Farmer-Benny Golson Jazztet. A year after that, he joined saxophonist John Coltrane’s quartet, and basically paved the road that most post-bebop jazz pianists followed, and still do.”

“Zaha Hadid is architecture’s diva, the most precocious talent in her profession… Ms. Hadid is not interested in emulating period styles, Modernist or otherwise. Yet her buildings are obviously deeply rooted in their context… For all the apparent radicalism of her forms, Ms. Hadid’s work forms a bridge from early Modernism to the digital age. By collecting such disparate strands into one vision, she defiantly embraces a cosmopolitanism that is hard put to assert itself in our dark age.”

Philip Roth is one of America’s greatest living writers – some would say the greatest. But Julia Keller says that despite the undeniable genius of his words, there is a discomfort in reading Roth, and it stems from the fact that “his women have no souls. [They] are mere mirrors to men. Echoes and shadows. Pale parallels… the fact that Roth gives short shrift to half the human race is crushingly sad. Were Roth a lesser writer, it wouldn’t matter; his greatness, however, transforms that lack from a simple failing into a reverberating anguish.”

“Yes, people attack for me being this shocking radical who writes this incomprehensible music, but really I think I’m doing the same sort of thing as Beethoven. When the Queen asked me what sort of music I write, I said, ‘Like Beethoven’s’, which sounds like a joke, or arrogant, but actually it’s true. Now I suppose everyone will say I’m a terrible reactionary.”