It Happens This—and Next—Week
• Martha heads back to work, as Dan Rather leaves his post.
• Art collectors swarm the piers for the Armory Show; Basquiat lovers swarm new show at the Brooklyn Museum.
• Lots of shooting at the Garden and Film Forum: Big East tournament brings top college hoopsters to town while Shane–High Noon double bills bring classic Westerns to the screen.
• Whole Foods opens in Union Square.
• And Spamalot premieres on St. Patrick’s Day.
Reality-FashionVictim!
Project Runway winner wants to run away.
Project Runway winner Jay McCarroll may have come a long way from kicking potential rapists out of chat rooms on the porn site he once ran in Pennsylvania, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard being the foul-mouthed future of fashion. McCarroll claims that fans have ordered at least a thousand of his tote bags off the show’s Website, and “all those come from my hands.” “I’m just a fucking one-man band. I have, like, three or four family members back home helping me. Don’t even mention the bags, because then more people will want them.” Meanwhile, he hasn’t yet been paid, so he’s still staying with a friend in Park Slope. And his contract says he no longer owns the rights to his TV designs. “I feel a bit owned,” he says. Plus he’s being stalked, but “they’re not even, like, hot indie-boy stalkers.” Then there’s the doppelgänger, Jake, who pretends to be him to get into parties. “I met him at the Marc Jacobs after-party. It was awful. I was looking at this person who thinks they look like me and I’m horrified because I do, apparently, look like that.”
—Jada Yuan
Jam Master Jay’s Dueling Next of Kin
As Missy Elliott, Chuck D, Lil’ Kim, Russell Simmons, Naomi Campbell, and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels toasted the Jam Master Jay Foundation for Music at a $10,000-a-table gala February 25, a behind-the-scenes battle for the legacy of the foundation’s namesake, the late Jason Mizell, raged. The Foundation for Music is headed up by Mizell’s widow, Terri Corley-Mizell, and supports inner-city schools music programs. Then there’s the Jam Master Jay Foundation for Youth, which grew out of efforts by Mizell’s mother, Connie, soon after the D.J. was murdered in his Queens studio in 2002. It offers college tuition for high-schoolers. Sources close to the family say that Corley-Mizell and Connie have barely spoken since Jay’s death. Finally, there’s the Mizell Children’s Fund, which was set up in late 2002 by hip-hop heavies like Simmons to raise cash for college for Mizell’s three kids. Sources close to the Mizell family say that several big donors withdrew contributions because of concerns over the fund’s ill-defined mission. Corley-Mizell would not confirm or deny this, but she did say that “there were some pledges made that didn’t go through.”
—Ethan Brown
There’s Goldin Them There Sidewalks!
HBO’s nugget marketing.
HBO’s been prospecting for viewers for the new season of Deadwood, so it hit upon the idea of sprinkling the ground, phone booths, and ATM locations along Broadway from 10th Street to Columbus Circle with little golden nuggets. A ten-member team did the drop (200 per block) from 3 to 5 A.M. on February 28. The 10,000 gold-painted die-cast Canadian lead pebbles were imprinted with a URL. Nugget holders could enter a contest to strike gold in the form of cash or Deadwood DVDs. Within a day, more than 2,500 people had logged on. However, unlike in Deadwood, South Dakota, there are fines for littering here. “We had consulted the city’s sanitation laws,” says HBO spokesperson Courteney Monroe, and HBO sent out pickup teams at 10 A.M., but the nuggets were gone by then.
——Kate Pickert
On Sontag at Carnegie Hall
On March 30, Susan Sontag’s friends and family will pay tribute to her with a private concert at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel auditorium. A ten-by-ten-inch limited-edition book containing photographs of Sontag, by Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jill Krementz, Andy Warhol, and Sontag’s longtime partner, Annie Leibovitz, will be produced for the event. Sontag’s funeral was held in January at Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. Along with a flutist who played Debussy’s La Flute de Pan, passages were read from Samuel Beckett and Charles Baudelaire, who are also buried there. Sontag’s longtime agent, Andrew Wylie, welcomed the guests, who included her son, David Rieff, as well as Leibovitz, Isabelle Huppert, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. Patti Smith took a Polaroid in Paris that is going to be the last page of the Carnegie Hall book.
57 y.o. WomanGives Birth, Tune-ups
The Goddess Repair Shop.
Aleta St. James, the 57-year-old who delivered twins in November, didn’t come by her energy by heredity alone. Nor does she have a guardian angel for her youthful aura (though she is Curtis Sliwa’s sister). She’s quietly been operating an anti-aging spa in her apartment for two years. Now she’s taken it to the street and opened the Goddess Repair Shop, on East 50th Street. It features electronic muscle-stimulation treatments to reduce wrinkles, firm muscles in the face and neck, cleanse organs, and “increase the turn-on mechanisms that control DNA, protein synthesis, collagen, and elastin production, thus increasing the rate of cellular repair and replication.” In vitro is not available, however.
—Beth Landman
The $45 MillionTract House!
New Hamptons McMegamansions.
Attention billionaires! How would you like to be neighbors with Ira Rennert, the reclusive conglomerateur who got Sagaponack in a snit when he built a 66,395-square-foot Italianate-style oceanfront super-villa, Fair Field. Developer Jeffrey Colle, who built Billy Joel’s and Donna Karan’s houses, is said to be building three $45 million megalo-mansions on sixteen acres next door. Not exactly an unheard-of number out there, but Sagaponack Association president Ana Daniel points out that your investment could be better protected. “Where those houses are located, there are no dunes left.” Colle refused to comment.
—S. Jhoanna Robledo
EDITED BY CARL SWANSON