art, I guess. (Deirdre Molloy)

ANTHONY HOPKINS has impressed us all before with his convincing transformations into real-life roles. In the past few years. he’s been US President Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone’s biopic and CS. Lewis in Shadowlands. In Surviving Picasso, he shaves his head, boasts a tan. turns his eyes a penetrating brown and somehow inhabits the skin of artist Pablo Picasso in a film by the Merchant Ivory team that’s more about the artist's controversial love life than his canvasses. ‘I can‘t sit in judgement on the man.‘ says the actor. ‘He was obviously complex. a selfish man and probably a generous one too a complete paradox. It’s their tunnel vision, obsession. that makes great artists. Such artists don’t have much time for people outside that, and it makes them abominany selfish. But then you say, well. that’s the way they are.’ (Alan Morrison)

Surviving Picasso opens in Scotland on Fri [0 Jan. See review, page 33.

ETHAN HAWKE manages a binary career he‘s a mid- ranking movie-brat and a mid-ranking avant- garde thesp. One minute he‘s slacking his way into Winona Ryder’s knickers in Reality Bites. the next he’s co-founding Manhattan’s Malaparte Theatre Company. Now Hawke's toying with literary fame and what a bumpy ride that has been. The publication of his first novel The Hottest State was first delayed by its author’s suspicion that it wasn’t good enough. Despite this, some cringeworthy passages were leaked to the press. and the US critics applied their

drollery. Now the book is with us. after an eighteen-month rewrite. More perplexing this time around is the blind-spot of the US critics. They seem to have overlooked the shared themes between the novel wherein a love- struck couple spend a torrid week in a Paris hotel and Hawke‘s last film Beyond Sunrise. in which he fell in love with kooky French babe Julie Delpy and spent a night with her in another European city. Art imitating

The Hottest State is published by Flamingo at £9.99. See review, page 88.

NULA SHAKER is not a name that automatically springs to mind when planning what to call your band. but then eleven months ago even the most ardent chart fortune teller wouldn’t have guessed that ‘Govinda’. a mantra sung in Sanscrit would have been scraping the upper reaches of the music charts. Whether you believe for a moment that Crispian Mills and the rest of his gang have even the slightest genuine interest in the mystic babble that they spout is immaterial. What is certain is that, whether they reach Nirvana or spend eternity in Hell having their arses jabbed with toasting forks for blasphemy. their time on Earth is likely to be blessed with much material comfort thanks to the humungo number of records that they're flogging. They're not big ones for groupies either, apparently. You've been warned. (Jonathan Trew)

K ula Shaker play Barrow/and. Glasgow, Mon 20/Tue 2/ Jan.

DAY BED is a painting in oil and acrylic of Sigmund Freud's clinical couch. The picture is part of a new solo show by Julie Roberts. whose photo-realistic paintings of isolated, unsettling objects will be remembered by those who saw her Dentist Chair and Restraining Coat in last year’s British Art Show. Welsh-bom Roberts - who recently returned from Rome as the first recipient of a new Scottish Arts Council scholarship - presents some of the resulting works in the show. which opens in Edinburgh this fortnight.

The Rome Paintings by Julie Roberts are at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, Sat ll Jan—Sat 8 Feb. She can be seen in conversation with assistant curator Pat Fisher at the gallery on Sat [8 Jan at 2.30pm. See Preview, page 67.

2 The List lO-23 Jan I997