He threatens to quit acting while Jack Nicholson and a host of other Hollywood hotshots toast genius Penn who

He threatens to quit acting, while Jack Nicholson and a host of other Hollywood hotshots toast “genius” Penn, who is suffering for the sins of Tinseltown’s money-mad performers.The $4m ensemble piece, along with Pleasantville and The Truman Show, makes the mistake of confusing show- business unhappiness in particular with human unhappiness in general It’s part of 1998’s larger filmic trend – Deep Hollywood. With DH films like Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, stars can’t say enough how the particular director or actor had so much taciturn “aura”.This year, American entertainment magazines ran stories of film ad campaigns, box office, and studio firings and hirings, instead of the mags’ breathless fans notes of yore. While HurlyBurly’s makers claim that it is not a movie about Hollywood per se, Ordesky says: “HurlyBurly is about what Hollywood can do to the human mind, the soul, and the personality”.If you were part of New York’s Elect you wouldn’t have to go to the movies to watch the return of 1980s-style decadent parties. You would be at writer Bret Easton Ellis’s party, waiting for him to leave his own do, watching his teenage guests cavort and women in short Santa skirts serve drinks. And then, like Sean Penn, after trying to be invited to the party, you would rant against it.. IT’S SURPRISING to realise that it has only been during the past 15 years or so that the likes of Christy Moore, Paul Brady and Mary Black have established a world market for a brand of easy-listening pop music firmly rooted in the Irish tradition but almost exclusively fuelled with songwriting, home-grown or bought in, in a pre-hat act American country vein.

Hard to define more concisely but almost a genre in its own right. Braving the storm-force winds and risking (successfully) an intermittent electricity supply, Dolores Keane, one of the longest-established stars of the scene, and her younger brother Sean, one of the fastest rising, were rewarded with a more than healthy turnout and a rapturous reception – from an audience demographic that major labels in Britain would simply never dream of. If the showband era of the Sixties has bequeathed to the world the blue-rinse pap of Daniel O’Donnell and his cronies, it has perhaps redeemed itself in fostering a communality of social experience with live music and a healthy belief that singers and songwriters don’t necessarily have to be the same people. In the case of Dolores and Sean, they may never find themselves in the running for a Mercury Music prize but they are quite simply great singers with great songs – and that is a quality that should never be taken for granted or undervalued.
Touring for the first time together, the show took the form of two separate sets from each artist and their regular bands, with a smattering of duets and swapping of personnel – indeed the mercurial and rock-solid Ted Ponsonby deserves a mention in despatches for saving the cost of two rhythm guitarists and seemingly memorising two acts’ entire repertoire with consummate cool For this was no scripted show. Sean, at least, never sings the same set two night’s running and that, together with an unusually dynamic band – Ponsonby on rhythm, Michael McGinty on string bass and Robbie Overson powerhousing away on Townshend-ish lead guitar – adds edge to what will always be a naturally gifted vocal performance.Some of the duets were more compelling than others, but when the match succeeded, as on Kieran Halpin’s strident, dramatic “Like Sister, Like Brother” – allowing Dolores’s windswept, husky and declamatory style and Sean’s higher, more lonesome tones to make something greater than the sum of the parts – it was a triumph.Promoting her Greatest Hits Collection, Dolores delivered essentially that with typical good humour.

But the reception for Sean’s set was extraordinary, and with the appearance of effortless control – an eye of serenity in the midst of his band’s storm – he moved the whole show up a gear. Emigration, peace and love gone wrong are themes that dominate Dolores’ material but while Sean explores similar paths, he casts a much wider net. Three albums in, he’s one of the great Irish discoveries of the Nineties.. In the western suburbs of Paris, by the Bois de Bolougne, the Seine contains a thin strip of expensive real estate, the Ile de la Jatte.

Famously painted by Seurat last century, the island today harbours big white blocks of flats, the offices of Yves Saint Laurent, and a riverside supper club: the Maxwell Cafe, formerly known as the Quai du Blues. Through the open stage door comes the sound of a mellifluous but irritated Ohio baritone “That ain’t mah shit That’s Vacher’s shit. Where’s mah shit?” And an answering voice, Parisian and perplexed: “Er, je ne sais pas, mais voici le papier a cul musique.”

Inside, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, in bronze silk suit and snakeskin boots, is rooting around in a crated toilet bowl, watched by a workman who holds out placatingly a roll of toilet paper printed with staves of music.
We go up to the bar to sit down. Jay lights a Pall Mall (“a bad habit I picked up during the Korean war”) and explains The toilet is his prop for the song “Constipation Blues”. “After a long, agonisin’, almost 15 minutes of that song I reach in and show the audience I did manage to produce somethin” – but the Cafe’s proprietor, Gerard Vacher, has replaced the usual correct plastic piece of excrement with a French joke one, which will not do.A lapse of standards is something Jay is not about to tolerate, as his French musicians have learnt.