My parents were... always on the road. They were actors, so I was raised predominantly by grandparents in Minnesota. I spent holidays with my mother and stepfather but lived in my grandparents' house.

One of this year's most interesting, elitist and curiously anti-theatrical events on the fringe is served up by a pair of Aussies in their mid-twenties who arrive in your lounge and spin a few bizarre yarns. That's right: you don't go to them, they come to you, as long as you've convened a quorum of 10 or more. We feasted on a DIY buffet in an apartment near the Meadows before the knock on the door.

Hollywood director's move to reinvigorate Napa Valley estate a 'dream come true'

Chase Insteadman, the narrator of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, is a former child actor who lives on residuals from a long ago sitcom. His life as an Upper East side dilettante, however, is set to change when he meets Perkus Tooth, a paranoid counter-cultural critic who takes to lecturing him on Marlon Brando, Chet Baker and unseen forces from a booth at a coffee shop.

R.E.M., by bookending the album with the ringing guitar drone of "Discoverer", are suggesting Collapse Into Now has a conceptual unity absent from their recent albums; and certainly, the recurrent themes of conclusion, starting over and rebuilding do lend it a muscular sense of purpose. That muscularity finds its musical equivalent in the rock heft of tracks like "Alligator_Aviator_ Autopilot_Antimatter" and "All the Best", although it's the more tender songs, such as "Überlin" and "Oh My Heart", which are the standouts, recalling Automatic for the People. The latter track, with its waltzing accordion, has a distinctly European flavour, while elsewhere the presence of mandolin/bouzouki folk-rockers like "It Happened Today" and "Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I" marks a welcome return to a more varied textural palette.

The Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci has expressed his regret for never apologising to Maria Schneider for making her do the taboo-busting sex scenes with Marlon Brando in his 1972 arthouse film, Last Tango in Paris.

The French actress Maria Schneider became famous over-night when she starred opposite Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci's controversial film Last Tango in Paris (1972), which featured perhaps the most famous sex scene in cinemahistory, in which Brando, with the aid of a slab of butter, appears to have anal intercourse with his co-star.The sequence caused a world-wide furore, and the film was banned in several countries (including parts of the UK). Schneider and Brando, along with Bertolucci, were idicted by an Italian court on charges of obscenity for participating in the making of an erotic movie, and it was banned in Italy until 1987.

Maria Schneider, the French actress best-known for her controversial steamy sex scenes in the 1972 film Last Tango in Paris, has died at the age of 58.

Matt Damon thinks that psychics are "charlatans".

Even Wilko Johnson's skull is stripped to brutal basics. Bushy grey eyebrows hood the dent in his bald eagle forehead; manic eyes stare down the crowd. In the 1970s, Johnson's band, Dr Feelgood, helped scorch a path for punk. Last year, a documentary by Julien Temple, Oil City Confidential, showed that the largely forgotten guitarist is still magnetically charismatic, though haunted by the death in 2004 of his childhood sweetheart and wife, Irene. Tonight, the success of the film seems to have resurrected not only Johnson's career, but also his spirit.

The stately home where The Godfather wedding scene was filmed is on the market, priced at a minimum of $2.9m (£1.8m).

When it comes to extreme feats of physical endurance, it's debatable whether they should be shown on TV.

There comes a time in life, normally when hair starts thinning and waistbands begin to stretch, when a man's thoughts turn towards a motorbike. Specifically, they turn towards a Harley Davidson, those roaring kings of the open road upon which we can deludedly dream of being transported back to free-spirited days of our youth.