Advertisement

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT REPORTS FROM THE TIMES, NEWS SERVICES AND THE NATION’S PRESS.

Share

POP/ROCK

Still a Chart Junkie: Alanis Morissette’s “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie” remains atop the pop album chart for the second straight week, selling an estimated 268,000 copies last week, according to SoundScan. That gives the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter’s album a two-week total of nearly 740,000. R&B; star R. Kelly’s two-disc set “R.” sold approximately 216,000 copies to debut at No. 2. Bruce Springsteen’s “Tracks,” a four-disc collection of mostly previously unreleased recordings, sold about 46,000 copies to enter the charts at No. 27.

*

Early Stones Tickets: Cable’s VH1 will air a special Ticketmaster 800 number at 6:30 tonight that will allow viewers to purchase advance tickets for the Rolling Stones’ upcoming tour dates, including Feb. 9 at the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim. Regular tickets go on sale Sunday at 10 a.m. Meanwhile, Mick Jagger does a live chat today at 4 p.m. on America Online (keyword: MTV), followed by a live Keith Richards chat on Tuesday (keyword: VH1).

*

A Blaze of Violence?: The editor of the hip-hop music magazine Blaze was apparently beaten in his New York office and identified one of the attackers as rap producer Derek “D-Dot” Angellettie, an associate of Sean “Puffy” Combs, police said Wednesday. The victim, Jesse Washington, was treated at a hospital Monday for fractures to his face. A lawyer for Angellettie, who had not been charged as of Wednesday, has denied he was involved in the attack. A police source said Angellettie allegedly was upset that Washington and Blaze were going to publish a photograph of the anonymous musician known as the Mad Rapper, whose debut album is scheduled to be released by Combs’ label, Bad Boy. Washington made headlines in August when he wrote an essay in his magazine accusing Fugees member Wyclef Jean of pointing a gun at him because of an unfavorable album review. Jean publicly denied the accusation, and police were not involved.

Advertisement

ART

Auction Highlights: California had a strong presence in a $42.2-million auction of modern and contemporary art Tuesday night at Sotheby’s New York. After fierce competition, the late Richard Diebenkorn’s 1959 landscape, “Horizon--Ocean View,” from the Reader’s Digest collection, went to an anonymous collector for $3.9 million, soaring past the high pre-sale estimate of $2 million and more than doubling the artist’s previous auction record of $1.8 million. “Rotating Circle,” a wall-mounted, motorized 9-inch disc by Los Angeles-based sculptor Charles Ray, whose retrospective exhibition is at the Museum of Contemporary Art, also set a record, fetching $189,500 and quadrupling its pre-sale estimate. Los Angeles collector Eli Broad purchased two pieces in the sale: Jeff Koons’ sculpture “String of Puppies,” for $288,500, a record price for Koons; and Robert Rauschenberg’s painting “Dry Run,” for $992,500. A Cubist painting by Picasso, “Nude Woman,” commanded the sale’s top price of $11 million.

QUICK TAKES

An international panel of top film directors, including Australian Gillian Armstrong, Masato Harada of Japan, Giuseppe Tornatore of Italy and American Sidney Lumet, will convene in New York today during the United Nations World Television Forum. The event will be Webcast live at 9 a.m. (at https:www.un.org/av/tvforum98). . . . Fox’s first-year single-dad series “Holding the Baby,” which aired briefly on Sundays in August and September, will return to the network’s schedule on Dec. 1, in the Tuesday night 8:30 time slot.

Advertisement