Category: people

“It is tempting to think of Harold Pinter’s career as a series of rooms which together make up a remarkable, if draughty (his rooms tend to be draughty) house. Pinter brought poetry back into the theatre; he said things by the unsaid. People make jokes about his pauses, but the pauses are as eloquent as the lines. – The Observer (UK)

A rare interview with Simon Keenlyside, one of the world’s leading baritones, and the most internationally successful British classical singer of his generation. – The Telegraph (UK

The revolution that was Michel Fokine – and then eclipsed. “Before Fokine, choreographer, set designer, costumer and composer each worked in isolation on a dance; Fokine set about bringing these arts together.” The onset of Nijinsky helped prematurely end Fokine’s career at age 34. – New Statesman

Larry Harvey’s Burning Man Festival attracted 30,000 to the Nevada desert earlier this month. “‘This will be Rome to the colonies. The problem with utopias is that they are based on some theory of human nature,’ he says, as he is joined on his couch by a topless woman, a punk called Chicken John and a transvestite glam rock star named Adrian Roberts.” – Time Magazine

Berlioz’s excellent memoir is a model of the genre, as entertaining and eventful as any novel. Now a new biography attempts to fill in some of the holes. – The New Republic

Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney has been painting for 20 years. Magritte and de Kooning are his big influences (Magritte inspired the Beatles’ apple logo). McCartney’s first public show is about to open in London. – The Telegraph (UK)

What is it about Tracey Emin, anyway? What makes what she does “art”? “If she decides that a tent with the names of 102 people she’s slept with is art, that’s her prerogative. That unmade bed, for instance, ‘illustrates the themes of loss, sickness, fertility, copulation, conception and death’.” – The Scotsman

Canadian poet Anne Carson is a recluse, not given to public contact with the outside world. So you have to piece together her life from other sources: “it’s known that she teaches classics at McGill University; that she won the 1996 Lannan Award, the 1997 Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998, among others, and that earlier this year, she received the McArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Award worth $500,000 (U.S.). Michael Ondaatje says she is ‘the most exciting poet writing in English today’. Susan Sontag puts her in a ‘less-than-fingers-on-one-hand group of writers’.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)

Michael Kaiser was touted as the man to turn around the tumultuous problems of London’s Royal Opera House. And he got the house reopened last winter after its renovation. But instead of sticking around, he was soon out the door and on his way to Washington’s Kennedy Center. – The Telegraph (UK)

Time Magazine art critic Robert Hughes survived a traumatic accident in Australia, then watched as Aussies took him to task. It’s part of the country’s love/hate attitudes about high culture, Hughes believes. “The whole Aussie experience has left him seriously considering throwing in his citizenship – renouncing the country he has so often defended. ‘What’s the point of going back? It’s like a dog returning to smell its vomit,’ he told me in our most recent telephone call.” – New Statesman