As Ned knows I did some free work for the Suede fanclub when I was 17. They sent me a lot of free stuff, including a grainy tape of tracks only available in the UK & wouldn’t even get to NY. I sort of know Suede now but have never told them I once had to write about their heights.

Andre geeking out at showing Vanya to a bunch of young people on Friday afternoon 🤠

Sullivan was so proud of this bank (1919, his alcoholism reaching the point of no return) that he fully documented its design in A System of Architectural Ornament (1924, just before his death)

Iain Sinclair on JG Ballard, from LONDON ORBITAL

Beano #1907, February 3, 1979

The movie, which has never been shown outside Sundance & was lost for 20 yrs, is fantastic. One of the best things Julianne Moore has ever done. If it doesn’t go to Criterion I’ll scream.

Alan Bennett is 92. In the introduction to his new diaries he writes he’s glad to have kept his hair & that it still has colour, but his hearing aids work too well - he hears his ankles crack as he walks.

Caryl Churchill was a lot older than 17 when she wrote FAR AWAY, the most formally influential play this century. But the first scene is textbook perfect. It could be 100 yrs old. Then she picks it apart til you question everything. Everybody wants to be radical but nobody learns to draw first.

Herbie Hancock says he played the wrong chord in the middle of Miles Davis’s solo in So What - terrified, he watched Miles not even look up, roll with it, turn it into the right chord, & seeing this changed his life

Saw The Elephant Man in cinema last night. The need to cry always does battle w astonishment at John Hurt, who was in makeup 18 hours a day - it took 8 to put on - & miserable. How do you give a performance of such subtlety, delicacy & generosity when you’r hot, starving, & can barely move?

The beginning contains one of the most thrillingly disorientating minutes in the movies, & it’s just people in a room

When you think of Trigorin & Astrov as Chekhov portraying the two sides of himself, put them together he becomes a fascinating & compelling person indeed... hardly the boring saint of myth

get yourself someone who looks at you the way Lika looked at Anton

As Laurence in ABIGAIL'S PARTY, Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, 1993. Anita Dobson, as Beverley, referred to him as 'the best I've worked with since Mike Reid'

Nina is probably a lot to do with Lika Mizinova. She was a gorgeous young teacher, 19 when she met Chekhov - she wanted to be an opera singer. They had an on-off affair for 10 years, wrote many sexy letters. But she got fed up waiting for him, hitched up with another writer, went to Paris -

- Do something, Keir - Britain elected us to be responsible - Please - No money - Do something - [racist] - What about Trump eh - Vulgar man - You were constructed in a mad middle manager's lab, weren't you - [calls the Met] - Why did you nick me - Britain elected us to be responsible

Nothing could add to the tributes, but - His recent film on London wildlife makes London as joyful & new & strange as anywhere he's been. What kind of writer & filmmaker can do this? People called him soft on climate change. He said, 'You know what? You're right.' He's now a leading authority.

I know Jesuits, not Augustinians, but there’s a close relationship & the tone here is familiar to me as, ‘It would be instructive for the rest of the class to have you flayed, but for various reasons I won’t do that’

There is a lot of sex in Chekhov. A lot. He loved women, women loved him. Everybody in his life was a little drunk, threadbare, gluttonous, laughing on the edge. Including him. Andre Gregory got this.

During the 1848 renovation a skeleton was found in the wall, dagger in his chest. Said to be an actor who didn’t come to fight call 🤪

Joanna Lumley did Are You Being Served? twice. She was recently divorced from Jeremy Lloyd but still friendly. She said she was totally intimidated by working with them, but they were all very nice to her.

Alomar met Bowie on a session Bowie produced for Lulu (!)

Marvellous shot of Laura Turner in my play I’M NOT THERE. Photo by Richard Hall

In translation Frayn & Schmidt are best bc they’re playwrights who are also fluent Russian speakers. Richard Nelson w/ Volokhonsky/Pevear excellent too. Production, Andre Gregrory is unmatched. His Vanya (which I’m seeing in cinema soon, he & Wally are speaking) is the one Chekhov would recognise.

An actor in my play went to the gym with the director. They decided to run the play. A woman was on the adjoining treadmill. She left about halfway through. 'She's had enough,' they thought. But she returned 5 mins later - she could've had any treadmill but chose that one, & stayed til the end..

Someone missed a bet, not casting Dick Van Dyke as God and Tim Curry as the Devil in something, preferably with singing and dancing. Though perhaps it would've been more interesting with the roles reversed.

As I recall Curry said he did intense physical therapy & regained a lot of function- had he kept going he might have gotten some ability to walk, but it would have been limiting & he chose a better quality of life. His short term memory is affected but the voice is intact. He’s made of strong stuff.

The story was that Hitchcock was fond of entering a crowded elevator, with a companion, in a tall office building on the ground floor, and start telling the companion a story, reach the seeming climax as they stopped, and then exit while the other riders craned to hear what came next.

An actor in my play went to the gym with the director. They decided to run the play. A woman was on the adjoining treadmill. She left about halfway through. 'She's had enough,' they thought. But she returned 5 mins later - she could've had any treadmill but chose that one, & stayed til the end..

People get addicted because, knowingly or not, they like to think of them as patriots in British-occupied Philadelphia. You are not that. You have a shit job & no money like everyone else. This is hard. We’re all frayed but some of us have sustaining alternatives. Those people play spies.

If you’re ‘reimagining’ Chekhov in ways that would make him want to kill you - in this case, explicit ties to Trump & MAGA - you actually totally lack imagination, & should be ashamed of yourself

When Gumby’s friend Errol Flynn invited him to explore the ‘service corridor’ of the house, the result was beyond his expectation.

Tim Curry always gets to the right place, but by a route that never occurred to you. No greater compliment for an actor than that.

Not knocking Skarsgard at all. It’s largely the makeup/CGI for sure. But think about Curry, who has an unnatural amount of charm combined with darkness, & he can modulate between them at will. There isn’t an actor like him, really.

When Tim Curry says he’s eternal, he’s everything you’ve ever been afraid of, and he’ll kill us all, you believe it - and he also feels way bigger than the clown suit

Ringo's earliest heroes were Cozy Cole (showman, swung, interesting tom set-up, soloed, but great feel) & Chico Hamilton (precision feel, the 'painter' Ringo became)

As Tom says later, Jagger certainly knows The Cure, Ronnie might, whether or not Keef does, he doesn't care

There’s an objective pleasure in Cary Grant in an Anderson & Sheppard suit, for example, or a dress that shows off Ava Gardner’s legs up to her neck - then there’s this, or a pop star in stupid old man makeup, yet people act like it’s the same 🙄

Did I have a decent career in the music hall? Yes. But my digs in Wych Street had lice, I had cirrhosis, & the mercury killed me before the syphilis did. (Buried quietly at East London Cemetery, collection taken by fellow artistes. Shaw mentioned me sneeringly in 1948.)

The IT filmmakers dithered on prosthetics. Curry had found the prosthetics in LEGEND torture, but it was more than that - he knew he didn’t need them for Pennywise. He finally said if they wanted prosthetics they’d need another actor. They ended up making his head bulbous, that’s all.

Not for nothing the term was first coined for Ed Rendell, who really did help turn Philadelphia from a backwater people left to an arts/culture/food/education/business magnet. He was born in NY but is a legit Philly sports psychopath, too.

Jimmy Breslin said Rudy Giuliani was “a small man in search of a balcony.” It doesn’t get any better than that.

ICHIRO: learned Spanish specifically to better tell his clubhouse they were going to go out & do unspeakable things to opponents’ wives, & tell opponents the same

NYPD hated Kerik. He was real police for four years, where he was Giuliani's driver during the '93 campaign. He moved to Corrections the second Giuliani won, took the fast track with Giuliani's backing, then back to NYPD. To the street cop he was a toadying crook, a bagman, a wimp.

Whether or not it was, he met with her in the 'secure rooms' there after getting rumbled at the St Regis