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According to Fox Sports' Ken Rosenthal, the Yankees right-hander will call it quits on the heels of the first twenty-win season of his eighteen-year career, in which he compiled a record of 270–153. Let the Hall of Fame debate now officially begin. [Fox Sports]
This is really sad for hydrangeas everywhere.
In the media layoff world, no news is great news. Today’s layoff news is a bit calmer, but we still have some slashed soirees and magazine foldings after the jump.
• Time Inc. was reportedly set to lay off 250 workers today, but we haven't seen reports that it actually happened. What we did hear about was the closing of cute design title Cottage Living. [NYP, WSJ]
NYU Film School may be excellent, but it seems the curriculum doesn’t include Hollywood schmoozing. We assumed that James Franco, who is studying directing there, would be inundated with requests to appear in classmates’ films and to read screenplays, but he claims not to be so popular. “I haven’t acted in any student films yet,” he told us at the Cinema Society screening of his movie Milk. “You would think that more people would ask me to be in their movies, but they haven’t,” Franco said, laughing. He is casting fellow students, however. “I meet a lot of the Tisch actors, so I’ve asked some of them to be in the movies that I’m directing,” the Spider-Man star told us. He’s just wrapped production on the first of three short films required of first-year students in the program, and says he is now working on the second, a documentary.
Who else spilled at last night's Milk premiere? View our Party Lines slideshow to hear from Josh Brolan, Alison Pill, Rainn Wilson, and more.
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While you were watching Gossip Girl Monday night, a bunch of theater folks wrote, directed, and staged six one-act plays in the span of 24 hours to benefit the Urban Arts Partnership. The night afforded the opportunity to watch many an absurd situation: David Cross and Rosie Perez fake-fucking on a pile of stuffed animals, and Elijah Wood and Pablo Schreiber (Liev's hot younger brother) slinking around the stage wearing adult diapers. But our favorite moments came from Farragut North playwright Beau Willimon's one-act about two laid-off Lehman Brothers bankers hitting on tourist girls in Germany. Mostly because it included these lines between Julia Stiles and Alexie Gilmore:
Alexie Gilmore: "At least I don't have a tramp stamp on my lower back."
Julia Stiles: "That is a work of art!"
Alexie Gilmore: "How is a giant tattoo of the Olsen twins a work of art?"
Julia Stiles: "I respect them, all right? They worked very hard to get where they are. Plus, I'm a Gemini, so it makes sense."
And this one line about Stiles's character's first time in bed with a black man:
Julia Stiles: "He came over to borrow a highlighter. Next thing I knew, my panties were off and I was sitting on his face."
Man, art is so universal.
The Dow closed below 8,000 for the first time in five years today, dropping 427.47 points to 7,990. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was 6.1 percent lower, and the NASDAQ was down 6.5 percent. Shares of beleaguered lender Citigroup fell 23.4 percent. “It’s painful,” Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at Standard & Poor’s, tells the Times. “A lot of people have pulled a lot of cash out. They’re sitting on the side. It’s all I hear all day: ‘Where can I hide?’” According to The Wall Street Journal, the day puts “an exclamation point on an idea that … had only been whispered around trading floors and offices. Nothing is working.” [NYT, WSJ]
Photo: Courtesy the Gap
Vanita Salisbury, who organizes our 21 Questions feature, came upon this Gap ad of Seth Myers and Will Forte in sweaters and touching and recognized it for what it was: porn. Seriously, Playgirl would never have folded if they'd just filled it with pictures of dudes in sweaters. Anyway, we are running it even though the Gap isn't paying us to, because it is that good. Happy holidays, ladies and gays!
A few times over the past few months we've observed that Rachel Maddow, in her normal, not-televised state, looks a little bit like Ira Glass. And apparently we're not the only ones who have noticed. The This American Life host himself agrees! "We do look like each other!" Glass told us at the Moth Ball last night. "Which is fine with me, though I feel like she's, like, an adorable woman in her thirties." Apparently, Maddow and Glass are friends, which could not be more progressive-radio-perfect unless one of his producers married one of her producers — which totally happened. Apparently, at the wedding, Maddow and Glass ran into one another and (this part is conjecture) did that whole Parent Trap thing where they moved their hands in unison to test whether they were looking in a mirror.
Anyway, Glass says he loves "that Rachel Maddow" and feels "an intense loyalty" to her. He watches her show almost every night, and his only regret is that saying she looks like him might not actually be a compliment. "I would never want to say anything that would cause that woman any pain," he said. "And I feel like, if I could look that adorable and beautiful and pretty, that would just make me feel great."
Related: The Dr. Maddow Show [NYM]
In a video unearthed today, Al Qaeda number-two Ayman al-Zawahiri said that Barack Obama (like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell) was a "house negro." That brings the membership of the club of people who have willingly and unrepentantly used racist slave rhetoric to describe our future president up to two. Hey Ralph Nader, let us know how the first chapter meeting goes, okay? [AP]
Once infested with wealthy hedge funders, Greenwich, Connecticut, is now infested with an entirely different species: "Visit this town and it soon becomes clear that things aren't quite what they used to be. One recent weekday morning, the only creature strolling the showroom floor of Carriage House Motor Cars was a tiny mouse." [Reuters]
Photo: Getty Images
Forty years later, it still makes you cry. Bobby Kennedy Jr. says, “We brought my father back from Los Angeles to New York and waked him at St. Patrick’s,” standing in front of 100 brothers and sisters and cousins and nieces and nephews — three busloads of Kennedys! — and even though they’re all here for a celebration, the moment is inescapably wrenching. This morning, RFK Jr. was onstage in a park in Astoria beneath one of the footings of the Triborough Bridge; above him and the roadway flapped an enormous blue banner with a photograph of his father and the new name of the span, the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. The son’s moving and hopeful speech ended with an obvious metaphor — that the bridge connects diverse peoples just as his father’s political career did. But the presence of Bill Clinton and Caroline Kennedy, sitting behind Bobby but far apart from one another, sparked a different and just as vivid image: That of a twisting, crisscrossing, never-ending Kennedy-Clinton highway.
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In case you can't tell Abrams is left, Sklar is right.Photo: Getty Images, Patrick McMullan
We, along with some others, were a little creeped out by the news today that former MSNBC executive Dan Abrams and former Huffington Post media columnist Rachel Sklar have teamed up to create a coalition of journalists who will "weigh in on how media outlets would likely respond to different PR strategies" for various businesses. "Working journalists are in a unique position to understand what will appeal to other working journalists," one of their new clients enthused to the Journal, which also dropped "an oil company" as an example of a potential client. Yipes, we thought. We know media people need work right now, and that in a way it could be cool for them, as inherently they love nothing more than offering opinions on things. In lots of ways it is kind of genius.
But still. Isn't this kind of the dark side? Doesn't working on public-relations strategies in any capacity break the ever-so-thin membrane that binds all journalists together — if we have nothing else, are we not united in our contempt of flacks?* And now some journalists — no, not some, "thousands," Abrams told the Journal, are going and telling them how we think? It will be like Cold War Russia all over again! Everyone will work both sides and no one will give out any real information! More important, it seemed ethically murky. Abrams's explanation to the Journal that they'll avoid conflicts by placing journalists with different areas of expertise with different companies was kind of vague. People change beats all the time — the reporter covering the election one week could be covering Broadway the next — and general-interest writers and editors change their focus constantly. But in the spirit of fairness, we asked Sklar and Abrams to talk us down. Their responses are after the jump.
Remember when Pedro Martinez was to be the savior of the Mets? Now the Mets don’t even want him back. Pedro’s contract, signed in 2004, is off the books, and while he claims he wants to come back, the Mets don’t seem to have room for him in the rotation. Partly this is because he has been injured and pitched poorly last year. (Also, former Red Sox teammate Derek Lowe is a better fit.) It's also partly because he no longer has any symbolic value. But the question now is, did he ever, really?
At a book signing, Magic Johnson, a big health-care advocate, was caught on tape getting confronted by a worker on the One Hanson Place (a.k.a. Williamsburg Bank tower) condo in Fort Greene that Johnson is invested in. The project's using non-union workers who say they can't afford health care. "My workers all have health care," Johnson protests weakly, before the guy is dragged away by security. [Gowanus Lounge]
Photo: Getty Images
Yesterday Michelle Obama took daughters Malia and Sasha to see their future home in the White House; they also visited a couple of private schools. The trip highlighted some profound, troubling, and potentially explosive decisions that the Obamas are going to have to make very soon. That's right, we're talking about private family decisions. It's been a long time since we've had young kids running around in the White House, and it's been way longer since we've had a black family moving in. So the Obama's choices about church, pets, school, food, and sports will be scrutinized almost as much as his pick for secretary of State. Here are a few that are already contentious.
1. You are a purse snatcher.
2. You and two of your friends punched a woman in the face on the 3 train on Sunday and stole her purse.
3. The woman, whose green card was in the bag, chased you out of the subway and caught up with you, grabbing onto your arm.
4. You had to beg the woman to let your accomplices go. "Leave him alone!" you cried. "He's my friend!"
5. The woman hung onto your friends long enough for the cops to come and arrest them.
6. You continued running away and left them behind.
7. You are a purse snatcher.
We don't know how the Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin survived the party hedge-funder John Paulson held at the Metropolitan Club last night. We could barely make it through the following sentence without going into spasms: "Mr. Greenspan spoke while guests dined on a three-course meal — preceded, of course, by a cocktail reception featuring Krug Grand Cuvee champagne and 2006 Chassagne-Montrachet from Domaine Marc Morey. For dinner? Jumbo crabmeat & avocado, paired with 1999 Haut-Brion; and Colorado rack of lamb with tarragon jus and parmesan polenta cake, paired with 1999 Chateau Margaux and 1999 Lafite-Rothschild (which can fetch more than $500 a bottle)." [DealBook/NYT]
Tom Daschle, the former Senate minority leader, was offered the post of secretary of Health and Human Services by Obama. According to sources, he's accepted the job. South Dakota represent! [Roll Call]
"Right around when the AIG bailout started, and people's consciousnesses were really being raised about what was going to happen, our sales went up 26 percent," Claire Cavanauh, the owner and co-founder of Toys and Babeland, boasted to us at the store's benefit for the New Space for Women's Health last night. The last time sales were up that much, Cavanauh said, was after 9/11. "You can stay home, it's free!" explained actress Michelle Hurd (Eleanor Waldorf's assistant, Laurel, from Gossip Girl!). "And it's warm, especially since here in New York it's getting so cold." Speaking of the season, would a vibrator, we wondered, make a good holiday gift? "I actually got my mother the Rabbit last year," she said. "She was quite shocked and turned red instantly, but probably a month later she very quietly thanked me." Wow, okay. We excused ourselves and wandered over to Ricki Lake, who was standing near a tower of lube, and asked whether she was having more sex in the down economy. She wasn't. "I'm single," she said, but "I can tell you firsthand what my favorite vibrators are. My favorite is the Jimmy Jam. It's solid gold and it's waterproof." Wait, how is a solid-gold vibrator cost-effective? "It's not," she laughed. "I did a talk show for eleven years. I busted my ass in a different economy."
And we thought New Yorkers were the only ones with insane, entitled interns. KSTP-TV in Minnesota had to file a criminal complaint against one of theirs, Jennifer Nicole Anato-Mensah, 21, after she freaked out about getting fired and screamed at her boss, "You don't know where I'm from. I'll mess you up, bitch!" [Twin Cities via Romenesko]
It's well known that Moby enjoys the sex and vice — he even has a stripper friend he likes to hang out with, he tells BlackBook magazine. But even he cannot abide the goings-on at the Box, despite the fact that he is friends with Simon Hammerstein, and also a partial owner.
"When they were first renting the space they were looking for investors, so they went to old friends, and I thought to myself, it was right around the corner from where I live, it’s a place to go. And after I invested in it, I don’t actually go there that often.
"I like degeneracy, but for the Box you really need to be in the right frame of mind. I’m pretty comfortable with debauchery and degeneracy, but the things that go on there don’t make sense to me … The last time I was there, there were live sex acts on stage, and I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, but just suffice to say lots of crazy things. I’ve traveled around the world, and I’ve been to a lot of degenerate places, and rarely have I seen the level of degeneracy like I’ve seen at the Box."
As we wrote yesterday, Obama has apparently picked Eric Holder, one of his veep vetters and a former deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton, for attorney general. Holder is black, which would be a first for the Cabinet position, and rocks a mustache, which isn't a historical first, but certainly can't hurt his prospects. But what could harm him are the concerns coming from both the right and the left — most notably, Holder's role in facilitating the infamous Marc Rich pardon. Of course, anyone who's spent more than twenty minutes in the halls of Washington has done something they regret, and Holder brings what many consider to be the type of experience and judgment that the Justice Department desperately needs.
Either way, the confirmation hearings should be a good time. 
Hillary Clinton's camp is sending out messages that she is not 100 percent sold on the idea of accepting a secretary of State offer. Reports in the Times and Politico quote one source that says she is "agonizing" over the decision. “If you are secretary of state you work for the president,” the Clinton ally told the Times. “If you are a senator, you work for yourself and the people that elected you.” The source (we're assuming it's the same one) told Politico that she is tempted to stay in the Senate and “help pass health care and work on a broad range of domestic issues.”
But the Politico story also observes that the Clintons have been boasting that they have eliminated the leaks in their campaign. “We’ve gotten rid of all the other idiots,” joked one Clinton confidant, forcing us to wonder aloud: Is this one big, unilateral leak about Clinton's ambivalence just a cover in case the secretary of State gig doesn't pan out? Or a bid to make her seem in control of the situation?
Because by other indications, she and her husband are gung-ho for the gig.
Blaine and Robert Trump are going to divorce court next month, with Blaine hiring Christie Brinkley's divorce lawyer, Robert Cohen, to help get some of Robert's estimated $200 million. Anne Hathaway is dating an actor named Adam Shulman, who someone calls an opportunist just like Raffaello Follieri. Dustin Hoffman saved two rows of seats for his family for Slumdog Millionaire at the Angelika. Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl couldn't get into her own magazine's party for the new restaurant Shang until a publicist recognized her. Fergie (the singer, we guess) lingered in Jeremy Piven's dressing room after seeing him in Speed-the-Plow. Cindy Adams says it's a toss-up between Barbra Streisand and Beyoncé over who will perform at the Inauguration, and also that Bill Clinton will do whatever it takes so Hillary can be secretary of State. Also, Chris Matthews dislikes Hillary Clinton because he fears strong women, and because women "don't excite him or send tingles up his leg," though men like Obama do, even though he's not technically gay, says a New York shrink.
Legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin makes some kind of Dadaesque, free-associative statements about the economy in AM New York today: "Who ever heard of a bank bouncing? Checks did, but the banks never did … Money! When you're broke, you're a joke … Franklin Roosevelt said you can’t have guns and butter. That’s 60 years ago. And we’re trying to have super technology and splendor at home. What happens is the splendor drains out of life." [Urbanite/amNY]
Skelos, Paterson, and Silver: "We're number one!"Photo: AP
"Yaaaay! Ha-ha! Hooray! Wee! Woo! Why are we laughing and congratulating ourselves? Because we, Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, Governor David Paterson, and Assembly Majority Leader Sheldon Silver had an emergency meeting all day, and it's finally over. We were supposed to come to some sort of agreement about $2 billion in desperately needed budget cuts, to save New York State's balance sheet before it starts to spiral into a more than $16 billion deficit. But we didn't! We didn’t do anything. Skelos didn't want to have the cuts on the hands of his Republican majority, so he maneuvered Paterson politically into delaying the vote until January, when the Democrats will take over. Isn't he clever? And you know the best part? The only loser in this expensive waste of time is the taxpayer! Schools, hospitals, public-safety and mass-transit programs are now going to have to face deeper cuts later, and everyone's probably going to get way higher taxes. Yaaay! Whoopee! Skittles! Smile for the cameras!"
Albany Fails to Reach Deal on Budget Deficit [NYT]
A Victory for Senate Republicans, but Tough Decisions and a Reckoning Await [NYT]
You paid for tax session but got circus tix instead [NYDN]
WHY ARE THESE MEN SMILING [NYP]
Bringing the Democratic majority in the Senate up to 58, Mark Begich was declared the winner of the Alaska Senate race over 40-year incumbent (and recently convicted felon for corruption) Ted Stevens. The final vote difference was 3,724. Still outstanding are the Senate races in Minnesota, where they are awaiting a recount, and Georgia, where there will be a runoff in December. [Politico]
Poor Andrew Cuomo. He turns 51 on December 6, and he's planned a massive bash to celebrate the passing of the half-century mark at Bridgewaters in the South Street Seaport. He even sent out little invitations with the scales of justice on them (because that is like his "signature" — last year he had them rendered in marzipan on a cake). It should be a blast! But will anyone go? The only people who can afford the price of a ticket — they start at $1,000 and go up to $50,000, because Cuomo's also raising money for his next AG race, or a possibly a gubernatorial campaign — are Wall Street people, and even they can't afford it these days. Especially because dude has been hammering them about bonuses. In fact, in some cases the invitations asking for money arrived in tandem with the letters he's been sending out demanding executives to forgo them. Awkward.
WALL STREET BIGS WON'T HELP CUOMO BLOW OUT CANDLE$ [NYP]
ANDREW CUOMO WANTS $50,000 FOR HIS BIRTHDAY [NY Real Estate]
Dupré with Diane Sawyer, who will interview her on Friday on 20/20.Photo: Courtesy of ABC News
Ever since former governor Eliot Spitzer was forced to resign in disgrace after a prostitution scandal, we've been wondering about the girl with the magical vagina who brought him down. In some ways, we knew a lot about Ashley Dupré (we saw her naked on Girls Gone Wild!), but in other ways we knew nothing. What was her motivation? What does she think about? What did she think of Eliot Spitzer in bed?? Finally, Dupré has accepted interviews with Diane Sawyer and People magazine, and this week we're scheduled to learn everything we wanted to know! "Everyone knows me as 'that girl,' but I'm not just 'that girl,'" the 23-year-old told People. "I have a lot of depth, a lot of layers." Let's page through some of them! From excerpts in the Post:
• She is capable of guilt: "I try not to revisit that place too often, but when I think about [Spitzer's first apologetic press conference] I think of [Silda's] face, her eyes, the hurt … I'm sorry for your pain."
barack obama, ballsy crimes, elections, ink-stained wretches, sarah palin, white men with money, health carnage, campaigns, crime, fox news, mayor bloomberg, neighborhood news, party lines, balloon boy, david paterson, lindsay lohan, video, gossip girl, the greatest depression, bill thompson, courts, made-off, the most important people in the world, america's sweetheart, falcon heene, levi johnston, bernie madoff, congress, fort hood, gays, health care, new york times, the greatest show of our time, jared kushner, state senate, gay marriage, madonna, balloon dad, equal rites, galleon
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