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I once ordered a cheap copy of The Lady in the Van from one of those book warehouses. It came to me signed by Alan Bennett. Today I pulled a cheap copy of The Habit of Art (which I own) off a shelf. It was.. signed by Alan Bennett. 🤔

Near the end of Uecker's life - Levering forced Uecker to tell this story - he got a call in the booth after the game. It was Joe Torre. How nice. He gets on the line, says hello. Torre says, 'Someone wants to talk to you.' It was Mays. Willie Mays just sitting with Torre, decides he misses Ueck.

Francis inviting Scorsese in blew my mind, this is sort of another level. (Come now, she's from Philadelphia & South Jersey. She came when she was four. Still has the accent.)

Feed kittens. Mother comes. ‘Ah yes. Good.’ Mother relaxes, watches kittens eat. Last kitten stumbles away. Mother yawns, stretches, goes to finish the food. Black kitten (greedy) returns. Mother glares at him. He does not cross his mother.

Stage acting is total awareness of your mind & body. You know what to do with your hands & feet, your posture. It looks natural in a theatre but it’s totally unnatural. On film your whole body usually isn’t in the frame, but these things still matter, they affect everything else.

I’ve kept quiet about Oskar Eustis leaving the Public but opening a restaurant with a ‘refined cocktail program’ (over & above the other changes) is really tempting Joe’s ghost www.theastornyc.com

The Astor | Downtown Tavern & Bar in New York, NYVaried American cuisine & craft cocktails served in a 2nd-floor venue with a refined hideaway feel.www.theastornyc.com

Buddy Guy’s 90th. You all know the story, but it’s worth re-telling. He came to Chicago on 21 Sept 1957, his ‘second birthday.’ Chess Records wasn’t interested in his tapes, & he couldn’t find work. Six months later he was broke, miserable & on the verge of going back to Louisiana.

To write anything worth reading or watching you need a lot of humanity or at least decency, & you have to be mean. Maybe nobody ever sees the meanness. Maybe you're known for improving every room you're in. But it's there, & it's usually about other writers. Self-evident, you'd think, & yet..

Not a fair question because Hoskins was a unicorn, a savant - a dyslexic, van driving camel-herder who looked like Finsbury, literally an accidental actor with the rigour, skill & imagination of a master, plus star power. Gold dust.

When George Devine was directing Beckett's PLAY in 1964, Kenneth Tynan (Lit Mgr of the NT) tried to strongarm him into ignoring Beckett's stage directions. 'We are not putting on PLAY to satisfy Beckett alone.' He wanted Devine to slow down, make it intelligible.

This is about SPINAL TAP, but it’s why I love yet can’t re-watch THE PLAYER

Learned today that Mark Knopfler agreed to do the Princess Bride music for cheap if Reiner included his Spinal Tap cap in the film - it’s hung in Fred Savage’s room

The funny thing about Coming Up is it goes against things I like in a record. It walks full-on into sounding like Bowie & T-Rex. Esp. T-Rex. I hated other bands of the era for this. Suede hadn’t done it before, hasn’t since. But it was such a relief given the scene I just don’t care.

What fun this was. Britpop had fully clogged arteries. Suede coming back from the dead with an unabashed pop record about degenerates getting wasted & fucking was a relief. The LP sequencing is iffy (they say this) & the drugs were starting to intrude, but not yet. 📸 @rachelastica.bsky.social

You want a savage review? Tom Crewe makes a noose of Ocean Vuong's own words. At best he implies Vuong is dimwitted, at worst a cult-leading fraud. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Tom Crewe · My Hands in My Face: Ocean Vuong’s FailureI groaned​ my way through The Emperor of Gladness. I writhed. I felt real despair every time I forced myself to open...www.lrb.co.uk

I am totally bored by this discussion because I work in the theatre, where friends (so-called or otherwise) are 1000x times more savage than this every smoke break

Marianne Jean-Baptiste is a really good musician. She says working with Mike Leigh is the difference between classical & jazz, & Mike is a world-class jazz man. You do the improv, he whispers a change to you, another to your partner. You do it again, more. He inserts bits from the last version..