The letter, which belongs to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, shows how reporters went to great lengths to discover details of the ceremony Joyce had tried to keep a secret. The author told his son that anyone who thinks he married as “a publicity stunt he must be a congenital imbecile”.
Tag: 08.01.14
So This Is PBS’s Idea Of Arts In America?
“Is PBS unaware that there’s more to art in America than Kristin Chenoweth, Melissa Etheridge and Michael Feinstein? Or does it simply not care? I hate to have to ask that question yet again, but not knowing the answer troubles me even more—and I suspect it’s also troubling at least some of the people who write the checks that keep PBS afloat. If it isn’t, it should.”
The Latest Classical-Pop Crossover Is The Worst Yet
It’s a “breathtakingly crass, spectacularly point-missing wave of pop-classical crossover. It makes one fantasise about re-education camps for the compulsory internment of whoever’s listening to this brazenly misguided bilge.”
Met Opera Debacle – It’s About Leadership
Peter Gelb is “right that opera in its current form is not sustainable — something of a given in a field that has literally no independent commercial viability, relies entirely on donations, can’t hope for significant European-style government funding in this country, and is paying hundreds of people very large salaries. The unions are also right that the problem is partly artistic.”
How Sotheby’s And Christie’s Locate New People To Spend Massive Sums Of Money On Art
“If you’re even remotely curious about starting a blue-chip art collection, there’s a good chance the world’s biggest auction houses already know who you are, and exactly how much you might spend to own a masterpiece. … They’ve dispatched armies of experts to identify potential bigwigs, and satisfy their ever-expanding art whims.”
Dick Smith, Hollywood’s Master Of Makeup, Dead At 92
“As the grandmaster of special-effects makeup, Dick Smith broke ground in the movies in the early 1970s when he transformed Dustin Hoffman into a 120-year-old for Little Big Man and an adolescent Linda Blair into a diabolical demon [sic] in The Exorcist. When he received an Academy Award in 1985 for aging F. Murray Abraham into an elderly composer in the film Amadeus, many industry observers wondered: What took so long?”
Robert Drew, 90, Pioneer Of Cinéma Vérité
“[He] altered both journalism and filmmaking when he helped develop the hand-held camera and a synchronized sound recorder and put the new equipment to use making documentaries in the put-the-audience-in-the-room style.”
When The Fourth Wall Is The Naked City: Tales Of Outdoor Theater In New York
“Alfresco settings have their advantages – the fireflies, the moon, the breeze – and their complications, too: the bicyclists, the boomboxes, the gaze of raccoons that live just below the Delacorte’s stage and often scamper on. The Times asked performers, producers and directors to talk about the perils and pleasures of acting under the sky.”
Actually, Some Material Goods CAN Make You Happy
“It’s been the refrain of behavioral economists … for years: Spend your money on experiences, not things. A vacation or a meal with friends will enrich your life; new shoes will quickly lose their charm. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story, argue psychologists Darwin A. Guevarra and Ryan T. Howell in a new paper … Not all goods, they say, should be lumped together.”