Category: people

At 80, with a new book out, Norman Mailer is still stuffed with big opinions. “People are always complaining in sports about how much money these athletes get. At least those athletes can answer, `I’m getting that money because I’m the best in my field.’ In literature it’s exactly the opposite. It’s the mediocrities who make the mega-sums. That was always true to a degree, but it’s intensified considerably.”

His signature drawings of performers from the theatre were instantly recognizeable. “Mr. Hirschfeld was the best-known artist in the world of theater and had won a special Tony — an Antoinette Perry award — as a sign that the theater world welcomed him not only as an observer but also as one of its own.”

Wynton Marsalis is at the top of the jazz world. And his various projects animate the field. “The jazz world should love him, as audiences seem to. In fact, Marsalis seems to provoke equal amounts of admiration and loathing. Those who dislike him say he is a reactionary, holding back the progress of jazz and stifling innovation in his attempts to make jazz respectable and establish a canon of the ‘greats’.”

“Whenever an opening appears for the music directorship of a leading American symphony orchestra, 44-year-old David Robertson is invariably mentioned. It’s a good time to be an American conductor. The cellist Yo-Yo Ma observes that American classical music is at a moment when ‘really interesting leadership’ can make an enormous impact on the way classical is played here. Robertson is a passionate, articulate advocate of both old and new music who doesn’t, as Ma puts it, see ‘culture as a static block’.”

“There should be a kind of discovery of the unexpected here [New York]. After all, this city is the most cosmopolitan of American cities and should be able to attract and display emerging talent. Otherwise, we lose creative artists to countries that are able to fund the arts more generously, and with each loss the inner life of our city is poorer. Just like a person, a city without an artistic life is a pretty dismal thing.”

“John Killacky has resigned as director of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts after six years. Since becoming the Yerba Buena center’s executive director in 1997, Killacky has consolidated the institution’s local and national reputation as a showcase for adventurous visual and performing arts and for community involvement.”

South African playwright Athol Fugard has been involved in all aspects of theater – as director, as actor, and most important as prlaywright. He used to insist on directing the first production of his new plays. But “starting in June this year, when I turned 70, I made a resolution to stop directing. And a few years ago I decided to stop acting. There’s so much I still want to write, so many stories to tell if I’m going to climb into my box at the end – or into my urn, I guess, since I’ll be ashes.”

Ever since Salvatore Licitra stepped in to fill the shoes of an ailing Luciano Pavarotti at the Metropolitan Opera last year and brought the house down with his powerful tenor, he has been tagged as the Next Tenor. These days, preparing for his Carnegie Hall debut next week, Licitra is starting to adjust to being a star, but thankfully, he’s not speaking in cliches yet. He complains that Pavarotti never even called to wish him luck on the night of his unexpected Met debut, and jokes that being a tenor has its downside – all the operatic tenor characters, he insists, are “stupido” or “son of a beetch.”

“Sharon F. Patton, a scholar and the director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, yesterday was named director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art… The museum was founded by Warren Robbins in 1964 as a small private enterprise on Capitol Hill. Under the Smithsonian mantle, it became part of the largely underground complex of halls near the Smithsonian Castle Building. It has 7,000 objects of traditional and contemporary art, the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives and the Warren M. Robbins Library.”

Quincy Troupe, who had to resign as California’s first Poet Laureate and from his teaching job at the University of California, San Diego last fall after it was discovered he had lied on his resume, has settled into a new life. “I think I did the admirable thing by resigning, but that wasn’t enough for some people. They wanted me to bleed. You wouldn’t believe the hate mail that I received. The (racial slurs) I was called. I didn’t do anything that cost anyone a dime. It wasn’t fraud. I didn’t do what the people at Enron did. But some people wanted my head.”