Schnabel: He’ll Always Be a Schwinner to UsAs you probably know, Julian Schnabel did not win an Oscar for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly last night. In fact, he lost, to the bespectacled directors of a movie with “few sympathetic characters, brutal, unredeemable violence, and an ending in which the closest thing the story has to a protagonist is killed offstage.” The disappointment on Schnabel’s face when the verdict was issued was difficult for us to bear, even as it quickly turned to annoyance. Clearly, this was a political, polemical conspiracy, you could see him thinking. Javier Bardem! That hair! Gimmicky. But what did it mean? Does it mean that the world at large will never recognize Schnabel’s true magnificence? This we cannot believe. Though we are bowed by this defeat, we are not broken. The Schnabe comes from a long line of stout, hairy, strong souls, and he will emerge again, like, yes, a butterfly from a pupa. Until then, Schnabel, we Schalute thee.
Related: Julian Schnabel is My Cousin [Consent of the Governed]
party lines
Madonna Explains Why She Schnubbed the ChupiBecause Daily Intel’s pursuit of all things Schnabel is not bound by geography or actually, gravity, we asked Berlin-based reporter Lawrence Ferber to corner Madonna at the Berlin Film Festival this week, where she was promoting the film she directed, Filth and Wisdom, and ask her why she had rejected the Chupi of our dreams. Here is his report:
“What a strange question!” Madonna laughed when we asked her about the Palazzo Chupi. So we laughed too, like “Ha-ha-ha-ha, we’re not psycho.” “How did you know that?” she asked. Er, we have our ways. Madge confirmed she had looked at the Chupi and decided not to move in. But not, it turned out, for fear of seeing a Schnaked Schnabel slipping into the swimming pool. “I love the house,” she explained. “But it’s not child-friendly, which is why I didn’t end up moving there.” Also, she was able to iron out the issues she was having with her co-op board at Harperly Hall. I bought the apartment upstairs, so now everything’s A-OK,” she said. She and Schnabel will continue to be friends. “I love [Julian],” she gushed. “He’s awesome.” We think so too! Maybe we can all be friends! Madge? —Lawrence Ferber
real estate porn
Palazzo Chupi Goes on the Market; Intel Editors SchwoonThis may be hard for you to believe since we at Intel are clearly deeply fulfilled by our work, but there are days when we say to ourselves, Selves? Why did we not go into investment banking? Because a life of pounding the pavement and speaking truth to power may be noble, but it’s not gonna get us to the Palazzo Chupi. Yes, today the remaining two units of Julian Schnabel’s pink West Village Palace, having been rejected by Bono, then by Madonna, went on the market. The views (river and harbor, from various terraces), amenities (pool, parking, access to the Schnabe), and schnabulous details (cast-bronze door handles, stone fireplaces, cast-stone railings, beamed ceilings, terra-cotta tile floors) put the price at $27 million (for the duplex) and $32 million (for the triplex). Our rudimentary math skills (another reason we’re not bankers) indicate that it will take us somewhere between 400 and 700 years to save up for our chunk of Chupi. Until then, we can only dream, and moon over the pictures after the jump.
real estate porn
‘Vanity Fair’ Goes to the SchneighborhoodAs you may know, we at Intel have something of an obsession with the big, pink artist-auteur Julian Schnabel and his big, pink West Village home, the Palazzo Chupi. The Chupi is not just a real-estate development: It is a monument to Baby-Boomer Bohemian Bourgeois lifestyle, containing as it does not only the family Schnabel, but the actor Richard Gere (Maharishi, RIP) and some guy from Credit Suisse, as well as 180 casement-ed windows, earthenware-and-marble bathtubs, cast-concrete countertops, and several hundred emerald-green terra-cotta tiles. It’s also kind of a poignant monument to Schnabel’s career. In the March issue of Vanity Fair, Ingrid Sischy details the making of what she calls his Gesamtkunstwerk (“total artwork”), from when Schnabel first moved into the $2.1 million building (“He covered the walls with red velvet, brought in a few possessions, including Picasso’s Femme au Chapeau, and ran The Godfather on his VCR 24 hours a day”) to the present (“Bono, Johnny Depp, Martha Stewart, Hugh Jackman, and Madonna have all checked out the remaining residences for sale, at prices ranging for $27 million to $32 million”). There’s symbolism here that we don’t want to quite contemplate. But look at the pictures after the jump! They’re Schnabulous.
it just happened
Julian Schnabel May Get a Schnoscar! This morning, Intel obsession Julian Schnabel was nominated for Best Director for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The film, which New York’s David Edelstein called a “masterpiece,” was also nominated for achievements in editing and cinematography, but we know that Schnabel will not be entirely placated by this honor — if you’re near the in the West Village right now, you can probably hear him stalking around the Palazzo Chupi in his purple pajamas, spittle and crumbs flying into his beard as he rages about how he was supposed to get a Best Picture nod but it’s all political and polemical and the Academy is just pissed off because he’s having so much fun — but we’re proud of him, anyway.
Oscar Nominations Announced [CNN]
Related: Can Julian Get a Schnomination? [Vulture]
cultural capital
‘Schneighbors’ Goes to the Dark SideYou remember our favorite reality program, Schneighbors? It stars Julian Schnabel and a rotating cast of members of New York’s aging bohemian bourgeoisie and is set mainly at the Palazzo Chupi, the pink palace in the West Village where Schnabel lives with Richard Gere. Right, the show that exists only in our heads. Anyway, we normally think of Schneighbors as a heartfelt comedy, Cocoon–meets-Friends–meets–Three’s Company. But the other night, it took a dive into Six Feet Under territory. “When I die,” Ross Bleckner said to Webster Hall’s Baird Jones at Schnabel’s opening for his series “Navigation Drawings,” at the Sperone Westwater Gallery, “I want my ashes to be mixed into paint and have my friends use that paint in their work. I will be given to my friends like Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, Brice Marden, Cy Twombly, Lucian Freud, and Tom Sachs.” That’s funny! Us, too!
Now That’s Art to Die For [NYDN]
bons mots
Three Interviews With Julian SchnabelIntel crush Julian Schnabel has been making the promotional rounds for the Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and after reading through a few of his interviews, we can report that whether he’s “picking at a crab cake” in Philadelphia, “stretched on the floor in his blue silk pajamas,” or “propped up by cushions like some flannel-shirted artist’s model” in a Toronto hotel, he’s just as Schnabulous as ever. A few of our favorite bits:
• On his preferred interviewing style: “Lie down, like I said. Please, just try it, just try it. OK. I will do the same. Put your head down. Now you can just relax and ask me anything you want, and we will be on the same plane.”
• On artists David Salle and Robert Longo, who made films that didn’t do as well as Diving Bell and the Butterfly: “Well, they’re not very good painters (either).”
in other news
Rule No. 1: Never Acknowledge What the Schnabel Is WearingSome cowboy from the Houston Chronicle interviewed His Schnabulousness last week. Perhaps his mind was addled after an hour of watching Schnabel’s leg hairs trailing through the azure depths of the hotel pool by which the interview was conducted, or perhaps as a straight-arrow Texan from a town where men don’t wear skirts, no sirree, he just couldn’t help himself, but something caused him to open his mouth and ask a question that no man has ever dared to ask. “I had to ask, politeness be damned,” he wrote. “What are you wearing?”
He looked surprised by the question.
“What? This?” he asked, as if he really thought I might’ve been asking about his sandals.
“This is a shirt I picked up last night at Target,” he said, looking bemused, “and this is a pareo, from Indonesia.”
“Ahh. A pareo. From Indonesia.”
What now? Was I obliged to compliment him on it? What would Miss Manners advise?
It seemed a good time to say goodbye.
Yes, Eric Harrison of the Houston Chronicle. Yes it does.
Earlier: All Things Schnabel
Julian Schnabel on the Diving Bell and the Butterfly [Houston Chronicle]
cultural capital
Julian Schnabel Is Numero Uno!So this weekend we finally read Andrew Corsello’s profile of Julian Schnabel in the current issue of GQ, in which the two gigantic personalities ride around the Hamptons in La Schnabe’s newly purchased 1975 Eldorado, eating and farting and picking at themselves. Other than not being online, much is wonderful about the piece, but our favorite part is the description of Schnabel’s tubby magnificence, which we’ve faithfully, and perhaps illegally, transcribed for your pleasure:
I only now register the absurdity of what he’s wearing: Slippers, a blue-and-gray checked wraparound skirt that may or may not be a old tablecloth, and a grubby white vest, unbuttoned, that may or may not be Naugahyde and may or may not have been part of a three-piece suit worn by Don Johnson in a Miami Vice episode. His belly, ample, ruddy with sun, parts and displaces the flaps of the vest so that they hang to the sides, putting on glorious display the salt-and-pepper Afghans that are his chest and back hair. Look at him, the bear on the outside and the satyr on the inside. Is this a man capable of making a movie with the word butterfly in the title? The look of a man capable of making a movie as powerful as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly — powerful not only in the sense of exalted emotions, but in the way it takes your assumptions about what movies are for, assumptions so fundamental you aren’t even aware you have them, and turns them inside out? No. This is the look of a man living off the dregs of a modest fortune made in the 1970s publishing a magazine called Heavy Shaggin’
in other news
When Bono Met BloombergYesterday Bono and Mayor Bloomberg met to talk about what philanthropic and civic projects they could team up on. The meeting went well, according to Bono, who told the AP that he thought he and Bloomberg could make beautiful music together. “I think [Bloomberg] could do an awful lot of good,” he said. But it’s not just Bloomberg’s money, or his power, or his soft, soft skin that draws Bono to him. He likes him for him.
“What I’m interested in is not just his cash, but his intellect, and how his business acumen could be used to work for the world’s poor.”
We think this sounds like the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Maybe Bloomberg will, like Bono, move into Julian Schnabel’s big pink castle and join the cast of Schneighbors!
Bono and Bloomberg Could Harmonize On Helping the Poor [NYS]
Earlier: Look Who’s Schneighbors!