Friday September 29

• PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS MOVIE STAR: Julian Schnabel winters in New York, and summers in the Hamptons. And in between, he makes movies. People were lining up to slam it, but his first film, a bio-pic of the short life of the artist Jean Michel Basquiat, was outrageously well received. His second, Before Night Falls, is about the exiled Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas. It has just taken second prize at the Venice Film Festival. Schnabel is on a roll. The Independent 09/28/00
• ESSAYING, POST BRAT PACK: "There was a time when Jay McInerney was the toast of Manhattan. He was compared to Fitzgerald. He posed for pictures with Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis. He regrets the photographs now. He didn’t need the Brat Pack." The Scotsman 09/29/00

Wednesday September 27

• HUGHES BACK TO COURT: Art critic Robert Hughes will have to face a retrial of his dangerous driving charges from a May 1999 accident. A Western Australian court upheld an appeal to reopen the case. Yahoo! News (AFP) 09/26/00
• DRINK UP: German Chancellor Gerhard Shroeder is about to become a pop star. "Earlier this year Mr Schroeder joked to an autograph hunter 'Get me a beer or I'll go on strike!' as he toured eastern Germany to rally support for his centre-left Social Democrats. But his remark was recorded, and comedian Stefan Raab mixed it into a drinking song called Get Me A Beer!" BBC 09/27/00

Tuesday September 26

• STERN STUFF: Carnegie Hall spends the weekend paying tribute to Isaac Stern, the violinist who became one of the most powerful movers in the music world. New York Times 09/26/00 (one-time registration required for entry)
• A MATTER OF MANNERS: New York Magazine film critic John Simon goes for director Atom Egoyan's jugular at a press conference about Egoyan's project filming all of the Beckett plays. "I have seen at least 12 productions of this play," he began, "all more touching than yours. Was this deliberate or just incompetence on your part?" Salon 09/26/00

Monday September 25

• THE BETTER MOUSETRAP: Shawn Fanning is the very model of the at-home innovator. "Fanning figured out that if he combined a music-search function with a file-sharing system and, to facilitate communication, instant messaging, he could bypass the rats' nest of legal and technical problems that kept great music from busting out all over the World Wide Web." Time Magazine 09/25/00

Sunday September 24

• URBAN INSPIRATION: Salman Rushie has moved to New York from London. "London did not spur his imagination. 'I think it speaks for itself that, for somebody who lived in England for as long as I did, relatively little of my work has dealt with it.' New York holds more promise. 'There's so much stuff just asking me to write it down here,' he says." The Observer (London) 09/24/00
• PINTER AT 70: "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 (London) 09/24/00

Wednesday September 20

• HITTING THE RIGHT NOTES: 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 (London) 09/20/00

Tuesday September 19

• ANOTHER LOOK AT BERLIOZ: 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 09/18/00

• THE GENIUS ECLIPSED: 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 09/18/00

Sunday September 17

• McCARTNEY'S PAINTINGS: 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 (London) 09/16/00 

Friday September 15

• THE MEANING OF ART: 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 09/15/00

Thursday September 14

• NOT ABOUT THE FAME: 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 (Toronto) 09/14/00

Tuesday September 12

• THE TURNAROUND KING OF OPERA: 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 (London) 09/12/00 

• BURNING AND DREAMING: 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 09/18/00

Monday September 11

• "THE BRAVEST ART CRITIC I KNOW": 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 09/11/00

• EATING TO SUCCESS: Four years ago it looked like Joshua Reynolds was about to make his big breakthrough as a playwright. It didn't quite work out though, and now, in his new role as a writer about food for the New York Times, Reynolds "finds himself in the literary tradition of Marcel Proust, finding in food the key to the recovery of lost times." The Idler 09/11/00

Friday September 8

• QUICK FADE: Karkheinz Stockhausen was one of the leading lights of the mid-20th Century avant-garde, and he influenced many composers. "Yet today it is hard to find Stockhausen even on CD, let alone in performance. He has all but disappeared from view. Some of the reasons for this lie at his own door. Stockhausen now releases CDs on his own label, but makes it frustratingly difficult to buy them." The Guardian (London) 09/08/00

Thursday September 7

• DON’T MAKE ME GO : In France to promote his latest film, director Robert Altman told the French press that he will move to France if George W. Bush is elected president in November. “It would be a catastrophe for the whole world.” Yahoo! News (Reuters) 09/06/00

Monday September 4

• DID PICASSO HAVE MIGRAINES? "A Dutch doctor will tell a world congress on headache which begins in London today that Pablo Picasso may have experienced bizarre visual migraine auras. Some people who suffer from migraine experience a disconcerting distortion of their vision. When they look at people or objects, they see them split into two parts, usually on the vertical plane. Others say they see just an illusion of a fractured face." The Guardian (London) 09/04/00

  • SO WHAT? Picasso was dismissive of critics who saw his Cubist paintings as philosophical exercises and tried to understand them through "mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis and whatnot". He was even more dismissive of the idea that he was an abstract artist. Picasso's visual distortions are always poetic. The Guardian (London) 09/04/00

Sunday September 3

• PAVLOVA GOES HOME: Nearly 70 years after she died, the remains of prima ballerina Anna Pavlova will be returned to Russia from a cemetery in London. Philadelphia Inquirer 09/03/00

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