It isn't easy being gr......ee...:}---:}

While I continue trying to pluck my cyber-pheasant for a half-way decent quill, here's more than enough to keep a brain alive:
though Thursday's Regent Street Christmas lights bling with a blinging celeb is best left for very social beings.
On the first Thursday of every month, First Thursdays, 100 galleries and museums of East London open their doors late.

Or try some opera outings in the cinema with relays from New York's Metropolitan Opera House:
John Adams' Dr.Atomic (originally directed by my old pal and mentor Peter Sellars and re-envisioned by Brit director Penny Woolcock) is first up on Saturday either at BFI's IMAX or at Cineworld Fulham Road, West India Quay or Wood Green as well as cinemas through out the country. Theatre guru Robert Lepage's production of La Damation de Faust is next on 22 Nov (same cinemas including IMAX) and Thais (20 Dec).
And Tim Albery directs a new production of Musorgsky's opera Boris Godunov conducted by dynamic ENO Music Director Edward Gardner. With Albery you know you certainly won't be sitting through 'a dry rot' production. A much anticipated event.

Josiah McElheny's Island Universe is still at White Cube's Hoxton Square space, and his Super 16mm film upstairs is a fascinating ballet for the Lobmeyr-designed chandeliers in New York's Metropolitan Opera (before curtain up at every performance they rise heavenwards). McElheny, who collaborated with cosmologist David Weinberg, links the experience with the Big Bang. The film is more enthralling, though.
Sculptor Sir Anthony Caro talks (17 min) about his latest work transforming a ruined church into his "Chapel of Light".

BBC Radio 3's Discovering Music (2 Nov - 5 days online or podcast)
explores composer Peter Maxwell Davies' music theatre work Eight Songs for a Mad King written originally for South African actor Roy Hart and one of the most thrilling pieces of contemporary music in the repertoire. Even if you don't dig the music, you'll be fascinated by the programme.

BBC Radio 4's Front Row (03 November)interviews Ken Russell making his debut as a theatre director in New York. Mindgame is a thriller written by the British writer Anthony Horowitz which stars Keith Carradine. Russell used a Maxwell Davies' score for his film The Devils, though everything was heftily cut by the Hollywood studio.

UK Jewish Film Festival opens this week.

One of the forerunners of Brit dance-theatre DV8 are at the Royal National Theatre with To Be Straight With You
And Royal Ballet of Flanders bring William Forsythe's Impressing the Czar to Sadler's Wells Theatre (it played Edinburgh last year). Another of the world's great choreographers.
[Addition: oops, forgot to mention also Mark Morris Dance Group's Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev's score performed by the London Symphony Orchestra).
And: Jan Sverak, film director, and his father Zdenek, actor and scriptwriter get a retrospective at the Riverside Studios. The very funny as yet unreleased Empties from last year's London Film Festival is showing.
Also, a retrospective of films by rarely showcased Italian director Valerio Zurlini who worked on de Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Vittoria de Sica's last film made the year before he died The Voyage (Il Viaggio, 1974) is out on Optimum DVD. Antonio (Ian Bannen), Cesare (Richard Burton) and their love interest Adriana De Mauro (Sophia Loren). Though the film print often looks as if lensed through Vaseline it's very pleasurable watching these great screen actors in a Visconti-esque melodrama based on a Pirandello short story. Sophia Loren is starring in the film version currently in production of the musical Nine. Haunting music and lyrics by Maury Yeston.]

BBC Radio 4's In Our Time has loads of great listening: Aristotle's politics this week, Simón Bolívar, Dante's Inferno, The Vitalists who aimed at unlocking the secret of life itself - one may feed the brain and never need never leave the sofa listening to all this.
And in this week's Start the Week (3 Nov), Andrew Marr is joined by Niall Ferguson (The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World), also a Channel 4 series starting Nov 17, Susan Jacoby (The Age of American Unreason: Dumbing Down and the Future of Democracy), Lawrence Goldman (The Federalist Papers) and Linda Colley, curator of an exhibition at the British Library Taking Liberties: the struggle for Britain's freedoms and rights.


BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves has a scary debate from the Free Thinking Festival in Liverpool asking Is Privacy Dead? And the ever coruscating and illuminating Will Self gives the opening lecture for Free Thinking 2008, arguing that the way the mind is portrayed in novels is preposterous.
BBC Radio 4's The Archive Hour (1 Nov): Saigon Songs - The Lansdale Tapes tells the story of American general in Vietnam Ed Lansdale who taped sessions of GIs singing their war songs alongside Vietnamese colleagues at his villa in Saigon.

And Picture Book on BBC Four is rivet ting and beautiful programming on the art of children's literature.