If Samuel Beckett and Charlie Chaplin teamed up to create a clown show, the result would be something like world-famous clown Vyacheslav Polunin's award-winning ""Snow Show,"" which returns to Moscow this month in the 10th year of its ongoing, decade-long tour.

Popular center-city club Kitaisky Lyotchik Dzhao Da aims to make history this weekend with a 25-hour festival of nonstop music that will feature not only popular Russian outfits like Afro-Caribbean band Markscheider Kunst and alternative outfit Tequilajazzz, but also six French acts.

The popular U.S. television series ""Sex and the City"" aired on Russian television this week for the first time, on NTV.

Mikhail Baryshnikov announced last month that he would open an arts center, called the Baryshnikov Center for Dance, in New York in 2004. It will occupy three floors in a new performing arts complex, with rehearsal studios, offices and access to a 300-seat theater.

The festival ""Masterpieces of the Russian Underground,"" presented by the Chamber Music Society of New York City's Lincoln Center, last week began exploring a Russian phenomenon that is unknown in the West: music by proscribed composers.

Punk from Myanmar and Thailand? Underground tunes from Indonesia, Macedonia and Nepal? Music by countless bands that hail from the far-off countries where Westerners tend to assume there is no rock 'n' roll -- recorded on vinyl and released by a single label?

The tiny Siberian town of Khanty-Mansiisk will be transformed this week into a Mecca for world film industry movers and shakers when it hosts its first-ever international film festival.

As a destination for a romantic holiday, the North Pole might not possess the same popular appeal as Paris or Venice, but for journalist and regular Moscow Times contributor Christopher Pala, it was a logical choice.

""Give a Party for the Party"" is no ordinary how-to manual. Published in the late 1930's by the party's New York State branch and recently rediscovered by a historian at Massachusetts' Brandeis University browsing in his campus's collection of radical pamphlets, it's a 15-page illustrated tutorial in the art of ideologically correct fraternizing: long on political indoctrination -- and penny-pinching strategies -- and notably short on scented handicrafts.

Two years before he died in 1999 at the age of 88, Leo Cherne told a friend he wanted to be ""remembered as a cold warrior."" He probably will be.

I thought of this incident recently after painstakingly preparing dozens of tiny Greek meatballs as a special treat for my children.

From a green wooden bench in the middle of Arequipa's Plaza de Armas, I took in the scene: a nearly 400-year-old cathedral spanning an entire block, a snow-capped volcano rising majestically in the distance, ivory-colored 16th-century mansions and blood-red geraniums everywhere.

Two new shows in Moscow make concerted efforts either to appeal to the youth culture or at least to plunder it for hooks, hipness and inspiration.

There's a new tearoom in town, and it's conveniently located on Tverskaya Ulitsa, near metro Mayakovskaya.

In a city that was for several years popularly referred to as ""The Wild, Wild East,"" gentlemen's clubs have long accounted for an unusually high proportion of local nightlife.