Cubic Zirconium Gives Donatella a RashIn honor of its Style Issue, the latest New Yorker has a big profile of Donatella Versace — and we couldn’t be more thrilled. We’ve been in love with D.V. ever since she was busted for cocaine and someone described the amount of coke in her fridge as resembling “blocks of Feta cheese.” That’s moxie, you know? And like everyone else, what we really love about Donatella is her heavily crafted Look. Forgive us for being blunt, but Donatella is not naturally attractive. If she had been born in, say, Ireland circa 1845, and spent her life eating potatoes on a farm, with no access to collagen or tanning beds, it’s safe to say she’d be less than fetching. But through modern technology, discipline, and piles of money, she has bronzed and blonded herself into one big piece of plasticine fabulousness. And you can too! After the jump, we present you with Donatella’s Guide to Style, as culled from the gems found in the aforementioned New Yorker profile and, just for good measure, New York’s own profile of Donatella from last year. Rest assured, Tim Gunn’s got nothing on this lady.
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Masters of the Universe Ask: To MBA or Not to MBA?Yesterday’s Times had a story about how some young bankers, like Gabriel Hammond, the 28-year-old founder of Alerian Capital Management, are forgoing the traditional b-school route in favor of gathering gold bricks at a private-equity firm or hedge fund. After all, ‘tis always better to make money than spend it on a degree that, if you’re making enough for your employer, won’t necessarily matter.
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Naomi Campbell, Serious Actress
Guess who stopped glaring at the help just long enough to look at a screenplay? Why, Naomi Campbell, that’s who! As she revealed to British Vogue, the fiesty supermodel has signed a contract to work with Spike Lee on his new WWII movie about a regiment of black soldiers based in Tuscany. “I’ll do anything for Spike,” she said. Normally we ignore the things Naomi says, seeing as she’s got some issues and all, but this makes a little sense, as we saw Spike last week in Fort Greene, surrounded by a ton of rather delicious-looking young men (in numbers and hotness great enough to suggest some sort of cast gathering). But what might Naomi’s role be in this new project? Was Spike inspired to hire her because of her fierceness with a BlackBerry, and thus create a Just One of the Guys–like role in which she dresses up as a dude to fight for her nation?
Naomi Signs With Spike Lee [British Vogue]
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The Children of New York Will Rule Us AllSomething strange is happening with The Children. Not only are they advising their parents on life decisions, developing sophisticated palates, and starting rock bands, now the Wall Street Journal is announcing they are building a niche in the international art market. As collectors. Today, intrepid Weekend Journaler Kelly Crowe introduces us to a few young New Yorkers whose weekly allowance is more than most of have in our 401Ks.
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Elijah Wood Does the Puppet Master
For absolutely no good reason, except that someone sent it to us, and it’s a beautiful August Wednesday afternoon so why not, we herewith present the “Dancey Dance” segment from last Monday’s premiere of Nick Jr.’s new live-action music series, Yo Gabba Gabba!. In it, Elijah Wood teaches us all how to do his dancey-dance, called the puppet master. Yeah. We recommend you stick around till the end, when Elijah and friends “go crazy.” It’s, uh, adorable.
Elijah Wood on Yo Gabba Gabba [YouTube via He Who Laughs]
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Hilly Kristal’s Last Interview
Hilly Kristal went to the emergency room at New York-Presbyterian last month with a cancer complication. The CBGB founder was admitted to the hospital, and the next morning he spoke to New York contributor Arianne Cohen from his hospital bed. Kristal’s long, rambling, reflective discourse may have been his last interview:
I was always in very good health. And I think anybody looks forward to living forever. Unfortunately, I found out I have cancer. So, some of the things I looked forward to, some of the adventurous things, I can’t do. I can’t climb Mt. Everest no matter how much time I have. I can’t walk the Rockies. There are a lot of things I can’t do because I’m not physically able. Unfortunately that’s how it is. I’m 75; when I was 73, I was in wonderful health. But I think I’ll be all right. I’m trying to read a lot more. It doesn’t take that much energy to read.
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Will Hip-Hop Landmark Be Saved From the Open Market? Senator Charles Schumer because when you think hip-hop, you think Chuck Schumer was on hand today to celebrate the official designation of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue as the birthplace of the genre. Ex-tenant DJ Kool Herc, whose parties in the building’s rec room were hip-hop’s Big Bang, led the drive and delivered: The Bronx address is now eligible for the State and National Register of Historic Places and could even, despite its tender age, squeak by as a National Historic Landmark. Of course, apart from a plaque on the wall, the designation might have a practical dividend. It could help keep 1520 Sedgwick rent-stabilized, or at least make it harder to take the building’s 100 units out of Mitchell-Lama and convert them to market-rate condos. This puts the owners, who announced their intent to do just that in February, in a strange position of rooting against the very thing that makes the property interesting. As for Laurence Gluck of Stellar Management, who’s long been angling to take the complex off their hands, he doesn’t strike us as a Kool Herc fan.
Earlier: Three More Subsidized Complexes to Go Private? [NYM]
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Tina Brown Does Not Want Her Daughter to Be Like Di
Tina Brown does not want her 16-year-old daughter, Izzy, marrying at 19, the tender age of Diana Spencer when she wed Prince Charles in 1981. At the Strand Bookstore last night, before a good-size audience of slightly weird, very white, middle-aged Anglophiles, Brown, 53, chatted with former New York Times London bureau chief Warren Hoge about The Diana Chronicles, her account of the late princess’ life that’s currently No. 1 on the Times nonfiction best-seller list. Looking typically sleek in a black dress and heels before several stacks of the fat book, Brown was on from the get-go, discoursing nearly nonstop in perfect magazine prose — this ain’t the first stop on Tina’s book tour — about Diana’s role as “a prism of British social revolution” and her death as “a festival of national mourning.” In the first few minutes alone, she managed to use nearly every hot buzzword of the past year or so, calling the young Charles a “toxic bachelor” and Diana a Fleet Street dream girl who could “move product.”
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McCarter on Pogue: He Went Out There a Tech Columnist…
Yesterday we happened across — okay, we were urged by our father to happen across — Times tech columnist David Pogue’s song-and-dance ode to the wonders of the iPhone, titled “iPhone: The Musical.” We argued it was more of a karaoke number, but they’re calling it a musical, and if it’s a musical, then it must be reviewed. Here’s New York’s theater critic, Jeremy McCarter, on the latest production to open on 43rd Street Eighth Avenue:
Tech journalism hasn’t heretofore struck me as a hotbed of lyrical craftsmanship, but after watching David Pogue’s mini-musical about the iPhone, I stand extremely corrected. The video is, as Daily Intel pointed out yesterday, hilarious. If you listen closely, it’s also pretty impressively put together. (And I’d listen now if I were you — spoilers abound below.)
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‘Manny’ Video Picks Up Where M.C. Rove Left Off
The absolute highlight of last night’s book party for Holly Peterson’s The Manny was the presentation of a, um, “viral” promo clip for the book, conceived (and perhaps bankrolled?) by the socialite auteur. “My publishers would like you to know they had nothing to do with this,” said Peterson, and we understand them completely. Still, the video just got posted on Daily Reel with a fawning write-up (“as creative as it gets”). We invite you to click through, provided you’re in the mood for UES types “rapping” about their Jamaican chauffeurs and Asian maids to a mangled Hall & Oates hook in the most horrifying display of minstrelsy this side of M.C. Rove. “We were just trying to be funny,” says director Michael Jaffe. Indeed! They even got a dwarf in there, and dwarves are comic gold — doubly so when they play babies! Triply so if it’s gay babies! Disclaimer: Daily Intel is not responsible if watching the clip (after the jump) results in spontaneous class war.
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Junior Vasquez Loves Cher, Will Pass on Cyndi Lauper
It’s New York’s 38th Gay Pride celebration this weekend, and even though the official dance is the one held on Pier 54 Sunday night, we thought we’d highlight a certain twelve-hour thump-a-thon occurring the night before. Why? Not only will it be one of the last big nights at that venerable gay mecca, the Roxy, before the structure is torn down next month, it’ll also be presided over by perhaps the biggest D.J. in Gotham history, Junior Vasquez, 57, who just happens to be a big old queen. Tim Murphy talked with Vasquez about the merits of Cher over Cyndi Lauper, today’s gay whippersnappers, and how you stay up all night when you’re no longer on crystal meth.
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Padma Lakshmi Introduces Dismemberment, Cannibalism to ‘Top Chef,’ Our FantasiesThe freakazoid highlight of last night’s Top Chef premiere, provided by host and Salman squeeze Padma Lakshmi in response to a contestant’s decision to fry a snake:
“Anything can stand up to frying. You can fry my toe and if you batter it right, it’s going to taste good.”
We don’t know if we’re hungry, horny, or nauseous.
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There She Is, Miss Lez
Tired of boring old beauty contests? Yawning at the notion of world peace? Last week’s seventh annual Miss Lez competition at Luna Lounge was a radical respite. There were swimsuit, interview, talent, and evening-gown portions of the competition, but contestants at straight pageants don’t often endorse the preservation of eclectic queer culture as their platform. Our cameras were there to catch the dancing, the judging, and, of course, the crowning.
Miss Lez Pageant [Video]
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‘Times’ Couplets: Nobody Mention the Elephant in the RoomWherein we arrange Times headlines in verse to bring you secret messages from the paper of record.
Tough Time Ahead for President
New War Czar Wins Praise, but White House Is Faulted —
Lack of Access to Polling Places,
For ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ Split on Party Lines,
It’s Subpoena Time!
Lies, Sighs and Politics
Victory, Defeat, Reality —
Part Coach, Part Motivator and 100 Percent Welcomed:
Waiting for Al Gore.
They Always Come Out Ahead; Bet on It?
Let’s Twist Again, Dude, as the Screws Turn.
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Bill Clinton and the ‘25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee’The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is a fun and funny Broadway musical, but it’s been running for more than two years at the Circle in the Square theater after an Off Broadway run at Second Stages. So what brought Bill Clinton — who could presumably get tickets to the newest, most in-demand shows — to Friday night’s performance? “My mother-in-law — Hillary’s mother — wanted to see something uplifting,” the former president told us after the final curtain. “My daughter had already seen it, so she suggested we all go.” It was Dorothy Rodham’s 88th birthday, and she took in the show — about awkward teens competing for the spelling title — with her son-in-law, her granddaughter, and Chelsea’s boyfriend, Mark Mezvinsky.
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Sharon Stone, Fake Candidate
“Page Six” reported this morning that Sharon Stone and Bernard-Henri Lévy star in a set of mock political ads that will debut next week at the Venice Biennale. The two “appear separately in 60-second spots as ‘Patricia Hill and Patrick Hill,’ each seeking the White House,” the “Six”-ers reported. Indeed. We’ve got stills from the spots, and Monday the magazine will feature an interview with Levy, the rakish French philosopher. Enjoy the pics — there are more after the jump — but sorry, guys, Stone’s all buttoned up.
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They Report, You Decide?Wherein we arrange Times headlines in verse to bring you secret messages from the paper of record.
Still Unsettled in Wake of New Questions
What Seller Wants a Low Price?
Who Says They’re Too Old to Stay in the Game?
Where’s the Other Half of Your Music File?
Any Wonder It Wasn’t Built in a Day?
How Weird Are Your Daydreams?
Time Wasted? Perhaps It’s Well Spent.
Who Says Warming Is a Problem?
Where Now, for the Wind?
An Answer to Help Clear His Fog .?
Break a Confidence? Never. Well, Hardly Ever.
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‘Times’ Couplets: Must We Pay to Drive to Midtown?Wherein we arrange Times headlines in verse to bring you secret messages from the paper of record.
Mayor Has New Plan to Cite Drivers Who Block the Box
Ignoring the Warnings, Again?
In This Clash, Both Sides Are Good:
No Segways Needed.
Get Moving on Traffic Relief.
Get Out and Go,
Erin. Go Faster!
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‘Times’ Couplets: Watch Where You’re Going!Wherein we arrange Times’ headlines in verse to bring you secret messages from the paper of record.
The Troubles: A Walking Tour
No Sleep Is Part of the Ordeal.
Passing Mile Markers, Snapping Pictures
Woman Falls Through Sidewalk Grate.
Going Like 60 (Tick Tick Tick)
The Suns Forge Ahead Without Stopping for Pity.
Rescuers Try to Lure Lost Whales With Sound.
5-Year-Old Marathoner to Walk 300 Miles —
Not for Kids Only, Seeking Buccaneer Bliss.
A Long Road Ahead,
The Last Eden. Paradise Preserved — in a Restless Continent.
—Lizzie Skurnick
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Meatpacking Asserts Its Relevance This WeekendThough sofas and desklamps don’t have their own catwalks in Bryant Park, our city is currently awash in product-design festivals. If you can’t follow the clean lines at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair currently at Javits, you may enjoy the more accessible Meatpacking District Design Week, which begins this weekend. Clothier Jussara Lee offers an installation about climate impact, and shops like An Earnest Cut and Sew (bicycles), Auto (wedding rings) and Bodum (coffee) feature elegant takes on the everyday. The gathering emphasizes the “collision” of product design with art and fashion; New York’s Janet Ozzard will be on Saturday’s panel exploring that notion. (The magazine sponsors this and two other discussions.) Don’t get cowed: Promoter Abe Gurko promises that “the whole experience is designed for non-snobs.” So go see Karim Rashid’s Day-Glo chairs (left), tour the market building that will eventually house the Whitney, and weave in and out of cocktail parties every night. You can collide all you like. Alec Appelbaum
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Too Bad ‘Star Search’ Got Canceled
From the nymag.com video team, a double bill for the ages. Both feature hungry showbiz strivers ready to duke it out for a shot at the big time but in only one are the contenders clutching dressed-up dolls. That’s right: Up at Harlem’s Hip Hop Culture Center, a hundred M.C.’s took turns at the mike for 24 hours straight in the first-ever “rapathon” while a gaggle of mostly blonde preteen divas laid siege to the American Girl Place for a film audition. The former is decidedly PG (“No curses, no n-word, no b-word”); the latter, which features a girl saying “I don’t want to sound conceited, but people tell me I’m talented,” somewhat obscene.
American Girls Audition [NYM]
24-Hour Rapathon [NYM]
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‘Times’ Couplets: Undead Find You Tasty, Healthy, Too!Wherein we arrange Times headlines in verse to bring you secret truths from the paper of record.
The Satire Is Biting, and So Are the Zombies
Mother Nature’s Helpers
Toasting the Neighbors
Chasing an Old Flame, Taking No Prisoners.
Channeling Group Dynamics, Fueled by the Power of Funk
The Human Community
Sowing the Substance of Life
For Life, Sometimes.
Because It’s Good for You, That’s Why!
Lizzie Skurnick
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Brooklyn Design Weekend Balances Shopping With Eco-Fear
Got $12? Head to the canyons of Dumbo for BKLYN Designs, a three-day expo that kicks off Design Week today. You can browse end tables with spidery legs and kids’ chairs with Frank Gehry contours, all from local artisans. (New York is one of the event’s sponsors.) And since unregenerate consumerism is so, well, Manhattan, you can balance every splurge with an earnest discussion.
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Conan Returns to New York, and Thank God
After a week in San Francisco, Late Night With Conan O’Brien returns home today to the cozy hearth of Rockefeller Center. Like previous trips to Toronto, Chicago, and Finland, the San Francisco sojourn was marked by high spirits and top-notch japery. (Particularly enjoyable: the outing to Intel headquarters; repeated references to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s sex scandals delivered as ingenuous expressions of gratitude to the city government.) The return to boring ol’ Studio 6A is welcome, however, because it means relief from the overeager Bay Area audience.
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‘Times’ Couplets: Finally Over That Whole Tea-Party ThingWherein we arrange Times headlines in verse to bring you secret truths from the paper of record.
Back in U.S., Queen Celebrates Ex-Colony
Hopper’s America, in Shadow and Light:
Sometimes You Can Go Home Again.
Confusion and Deception as a Royal Family Affair
In a New Space and Time, a Classic Story of Tragic Love,
Family Values, Betrayed.
As the Climate Changes, Bits of England’s Coast Crumble
Away From Her– Time’s Wounds. And the Heart’s?
Yankees Find Just Enough to Get By.
—Lizzie Skurnick
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‘Times’ Couplets: The Children Are the FutureWherein we arrange Times headlines in verse to bring you secret truths from the paper of record.
Mankind’s Appetite for Destruction in the 20th Century
One Bad Swing Can Often Lead to Another:
The Drama of Daytime: Friendships, Feuds and Fury;
Murky Emotions Floating to the Surface,
The Pressure of Great Expectations —
Struggles to Regain Equilibrium.
Digging for Clams and Difficult Answers
(Not Any Time Soon)
Seek Balance of Unity and Differences.
Glimpsing the Future (and a Babe)
Change the World (and That Diaper).
—Lizzie Skurnick
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Why, Yes, We Can Show You an Underground Burlesque Show
Been looking for an underground burlesque show that operates weekly at undisclosed locations around the city? We can’t tell you where the Blushing Diamond Revue is though it’s definitely not in the garment district right now but we can show you what you’re missing. Emcee Norman assures us that this is a traditional burlesque: “all the girls are girls.” Are they! Miss Harvest Moon strips while hula-hooping, one dancer’s pasties go flying, and the crowd cheers all the old-timey fun. Want to find the show for yourself? First, watch the video.
The Blushing Diamond Revue [Video]
Sex and Love [NYM]
Rob Thomas Goes to Nashville, Takes on Record Label
Matchbox Twenty lead singer Rob Thomas debuted My Secret Record — a documentary account of his battles with Atlantic Records bosses while recording his 2005 smash solo release, Something to Be — at the Nashville Film Festival last night, and we learned a few things from it. Another solo effort should come out within a few years, Matchbox Twenty will start work Monday on a retrospective album — and Thomas thinks today’s record industry as crass, celebrity-obsessed, and focused solely on the bottom line. The film, which, it’s worth noting, first screened far from Atlantic’s midtown HQ, is one part behind-the-scenes look at the making of Thomas’s album and two parts muckraking exposé of the music industry’s star-making machinery. “I didn’t set out to produce a documentary about myself because I don’t have enough of me,” Thomas said after the screening. “I wanted to see this through because this was an important part of my life. I’m happiest when I’m writing songs, and I’m just trying to find a space between Ashlee Simpson and Beyoncé for a career.” Distribution deals are pending, but, for now, an army of middle-aged female fanatics were begging last night for autographs, pictures, hugs, or whatever piece of Thomas they could grab as their own. We suspect Atlantic Records honchos may soon want a piece of his hide, too, but for less loving reasons. —Steve Ramos
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‘Times’ Couplets: There’s No Place Like HomeWherein we arrange Times headlines in verse to bring you secret truths from the paper of record.
An Anglophilic Yankee Aristocrat and His Finds Across the Pond
From Asia to the Caribbean to New York, Appetite Intact,
Putting Up His Dukes, for His Country, His Race and Money,
Going Against the Flow.
Ferry Required? No Bridge, No Problem.
Solitude and the Sea…
A Brutal Passage From India to Misery at Sea, and Back.
Innocence or Experience? An American Tale.
On Friendly Turf, Suggests History Will Be Kind to Him.
—Lizzie Skurnick
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Infidelity Expert Finds New Yorkers Just as Puritanical as Other AmericansIt turns out there’s one thing all Americans — Republicans, Democrats, East Williamsburg hipsters — agree on: We’re nearly all anti-adultery. In her new, sure-to-be-big-deal book, Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee, Pamela Druckerman, a former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, explores what she calls the Marriage Industrial Complex, a pervasive network of people working to help you conquer adultery — mental-health professionals, religious organizations, and laymen who have put their personal experience with cheating to public use. “In no other place in the world do people assume that talking about their adultery was an act of public service,” Druckerman, who’s traveled the world, visiting marriage fairs in Dallas and probing strangers in all-you-can-eat Uzbek cafés, for details on their cheating habits and attitudes, told us from her Paris apartment this week. And New York, she found, is a city of faithful urbanites, toeing the same guilt-laced line toward adultery as the rest of America.
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Sing Along With Of Montreal
Actor and comedian Michael Showalter hosted the inaugural New York by New York event, Indie Rock Karaoke, Saturday night at Studio B. A sold-out crowd turned out to see Of Montreal, who played an original set before turning the mikes over to the amateurs. Surprise guests Paul Rudd and David Wain turned out a lively performance of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” and Showalter tried his hand at the brutally repetitive INXS hit “Need You Tonight.” Selections from the crowd included Cheap Trick’s “Surrender,” the Guns N’ Roses classic “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” and “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey. Between numbers, Showalter’s Alan Shemper character emceed and told Soterios Johnson jokes. And everyone in attendance got a subscription to the magazine. More New York by New York events are coming. Until then, watch the video.
Karaoke With Of Montreal [NYM]
Events [New York by New York]
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Behind the Music Protests
Hey, CBGB fans: This is how you protest a club’s closing. When the venerable music venue Tonic abruptly shut its doors on April 13, owners John Scott and Melissa Caruso-Scott had to vacate the building by the next day. Instead, a motley crew of musicians, including the legendary guitarist Marc Ribot, showed up for an improvised concert that didn’t stop even as hard hats began dismantling the stage. Ribot and fellow downtown eminence Rebecca Moore were cuffed and briefly jailed. Hours later, Ribot was the mouthpiece of a new group called Take It to the Bridge, a pissed-off but realistic and articulate advocate for displaced jazz and avant-garde musicians. They’ve got the ear of City Councilman Alan Gerson, and they’re gaining traction. We talked to Ribot about the coalition, its goals, and the future of music in New York.
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A Dumbo Developer by Any Other Name …
Is Dumbo megadeveloper David Walentas the inspiration for the adaptation of an Elizabethan play that opens tomorrow night in the arty turned pricey hood? Spring Theaterworks is staging Arden: The Lamentable Tragedie of a Dumbo Real Estate Mogul. It’s the 1592 play Arden of Feveresham, which chronicles the gory end of a shady landowner (and some say was written by Shakespeare), relocated to modern-day Dumbo, where Arden lives in a sleek loft space. As for Walentas, he nearly single-handedly converted the area’s old industrial hulks into luxury condos, and he both supported and displaced local artists as he did it. He’s not named in the new script, but everyone’s buzzing that the lushly maned macher is the model for the new Arden, whose onstage death is plotted by his wife and her lover. (Walentas’ real-life wife, Jane, has plotted only to restore an old carousel — at least as far as anyone knows.)
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Look Out! Here Comes the Edge and Bono! Three years ago, Playbill posted a news item that seemed so ludicrous as to be a prank: An upcoming Spider-Man musical, it announced, would be directed by Julie Taymor, with music written by Bono and the Edge. Well, SuperHeroHype.com claims to have unearthed the casting notice for a July staged reading, and it looks either legit or extremely well faked: “The burden of being a superhero, his guilt for his role in his uncle’s death, as well as his debilitating crush on Mary Jane all weigh heavily upon him. Great pop/rock voice.”
We assume Bono and the Edge are writing original music for this, but why should they? We bet they could just repurpose their catalog and turn it into Spider-Man: The U2 Experience. Lyrics to “I Still Haven’t Found Uncle Ben’s Killer” are after the jump.
Matthew Barney, the Bull, and the Chrysler It seemed appropriate that on that quasi-apocalyptic Sunday afternoon when the nor’easter sky released eight inches of rain on New York City that Matthew Barney had a rare live performance. In an enormous empty one-story warehouse not twenty feet from the East River in Long Island City, a standing crowd of around 200 populated by numerous art-student types, famous artists like Cindy Sherman and Vito Acconci, sundry museum curators, and icons like David Byrne and Björk witnessed what seemed like a cosmic cross between an Egyptian funeral, the end of the world, the Rape of Europa, a demolition derby, a porn film, and voodoo ritual. Whatever it was, it freaked a lot of people out.
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Sim ArtVideo games, you tend to think, are set in fantasy worlds, so it’s a strange fact that the best-selling PC game of all time is The Sims, a real-life simulation rife with mundane, detailed exactness; characters sleep, go to work, and bicker. There’s no end – the characters just live their lives – but the game has become a cultural phenomenon since its 2000 launch. It has now even inspired “The Sims: In the Hands of Artists,” an exhibit opening Thursday at Chelsea Art Museum. For the show, gamemaker Electronic Arts collaborated with Parsons, challenging students to create Sims-inspired art using everything from basic pencil and paper to machinima, a moviemaking technology powered by the game’s engine. We got a sneak peek at four student projects.
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‘Times’ Couplets: Not Everyone’s Built to Be a Man-eaterWherein we arrange Times headlines in verse to bring you secret messages from the paper of record.
Manhunt Begins
Hooking a Big One?
Revolution Begins at the Beauty Salon.
Sallie Mae Said to Talk to Suitors —
No Matter the Message, It’s Delivered With Dazzle.
Mixing Poise and Panache
Parise Wastes Little Time in Firing Up the Devils.
Sharon’s “Condition” Is Said to Improve:
Statistics Show Ups, Downs and Betweens.
When the Haunted One Turns Into the Hunter
Paris Believes in Tears (and Love and Real Estate).
From Call Girl to Kant Girl in a Flash of White Panties
Giving All for Her Country but Also Feeling the Pain.
—Lizzie Skurnick
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Sean Lennon’s Irving Plaza Show Is BYO HummusConsidering he’s been a famous New Yorker since birth, you’d figure Sean Lennon would get gigs at New York’s top concert venues. But, in fact, tonight marks the first time John and Yoko’s son will headline medium-size Irving Plaza (or should we say Fillmore New York?). He’s pretty psyched, even if it means playing for a crowd of old friends who’ve been witness to Lennon’s personal soap opera, so he’s focused on putting on a good show. We spoke to him about it — and his mom and the state of the record business — last week.
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WNYC Unveils Its New Home, Tastefully
Public-radio pooh-bahs including Ira Glass, Jonathan Schwartz, and Brian Lehrer were among the 150 or so who gathered this morning for breakfast in the Varick Street building that will soon house WNYC’s airy new studios. (The station was heretofore crammed into a tight warren of offices near the top of the Municipal Building.) The new digs will feature a these-days de rigueur street-level studio with seating for 120 and picture windows onto the sidewalk. Kristen Chenoweth hosted, her typically perky self despite getting off a plane, she said, from “the vapid wasteland” of Los Angeles only six hours before. She serenaded Dawn Greene — the name of her late husband, Jerome L. Greene, will grace the street-side space, for which his foundation donated $6 million — and the audience applauded not only the emcee but also themselves for not stooping to the ratings-grabbing level of people like, say, Don Imus. Leonard Lopate, for one, recalled one of the raciest moments on his long-running interview show, when Kurt Vonnegut asked in the middle of a conversation whether Lopate was having an affair with his wife. “I said, ‘I don’t think so,’” recalled the host, who insists he wasn’t. Vonnegut later apologized.
—Tim Murphy
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The ‘24’ Absurd-o-Meter: Five Kinds of Absurdity!This week, Jack goes for a ride under a truck, Fayed goes for a ride with a chain around his neck, and basic dramatic logic takes a ride out the window.
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‘Sopranos’ Premieres, City Life Pauses
Alan Alda tells the story — or at least we’re pretty sure we’ve read someplace that Alan Alda tells the story — that he first realized the tremendous cultural significance of M*A*S*H when he went driving in Los Angeles during the broadcast of its famous farewell episode in 1983: The freeways, in that pre-VHS era, were empty. We can report that at about 8:30 last night, a half-hour before the final Sopranos premiere and usually a prime burgers-and-beer hour, you could walk into the Corner Bistro and immediately be seated.
Related: The Loneliest Soprano [NYM]
Earlier: Daily Intel’s coverage of The Sopranos.
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‘Times’ Couplets: Monogamy?Wherein we arrange Times headlines in verse to bring you secret messages from the paper of record.
On Gilded Sharks and Loverboys
Gotta Minute? So, There’s This Guy Tony …
Going With the Flow.
Enter an Old Rival, Again
Material Muse for Some Strange Bedfellows
(Latin Lovers)
Creatures More Slothful Than You and Me.
Three-Way Connection of Minds and Bodies;
Episodes of Vanity;
Whimsy Collides With Tragedy.
See You in Court, Sweetie!
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Conan O’Brien Owes His Career to a Crank
Four things about Conan O’Brien and his show that we’re pretty sure haven’t been published before, which we learned last night at his rare public appearance — with four of his writers — at the Museum of Television and Radio:
• The character “
cultural capital
Hail Helvetica!The crisp Swiss typeface Helvetica turns 50 this year, and to mark that occasion it’s becoming the first typeface to enter MoMA’s permanent collection, in the shape of an original set of 36-point lead letterforms. (The museum, however maintains its own official type, “MoMA Gothic,” a variation on Franklin Gothic.) Today, MoMA opens “50 Years of Helvetica,” a design show including vintage New York City subway signs, an excerpt from Gary Hustwit’s 2007 documentary Helvetica, and, yes, an American Apparel ad. What makes this neutral font (not to be confused with Microsoft’s pale imitation, Arial) so universally beloved, showcased on everything from the Crate & Barrel catalogue to nineties house-music album covers?
cultural capital
The ‘24’ Absurd-O-Meter: Bonus Michelle Dessler EditionWe ran into Reiko Aylesworth, who used to play CTU agent Michelle Dessler on 24, at a party for the new Philip Seymour Hoffman play, Jack Goes Boating, recently. And so we realized we had a perfect opportunity to get some expert insight on our 24 Absurd-o-Meter, which she confessed she hadn’t seen.
Did you ever read a script and just blurt out, “What the hell?!”
Oh, we would do that, probably every other day. There’s a lot of stuff that gets to us, and we say, “Oh, come on.” And it actually doesn’t even air. There were things that they wanted to do with my character …
Like what?
Oh, like, suicide. Within the course of 24 hours, I become suicidal.
Steal This AlbumIf the current Google-versus- Viacom clash of the titans didn’t already convince you that the very notion of copyright is sinking, here’s another leak it sprung. Egged on by Apple chief Steve Jobs, EMI has become the first major label to chuck copy protection in its digital dealings. The music company — which controls music by Pink Floyd and Coldplay (and the Beatles, still conspicuously absent from iTunes) — will sell its wares on Jobs’s virtual record store as straight-up MP3s, without the annoying add-ons that make the files playable on a limited number of devices. In the short run, this will create an unholy mess of mixed-format libraries. In the long run, it’s a victory for the progressive Googlethink encapsulated by Clive Thompson in this week’s magazine: “If everything is promiscuously available digitally, and easily findable, this will be a cosmic win-win for everyone.”
cultural capital
Tribeca Film Festival: Pricey
Our little Tribeca Film Festival is all grown up — and about to start charging some very grown-up prices to prove it. The fest’s 2007 edition will see a 50 percent ticket-price hike, to $18 per screening, from last year’s $12. This brings it more or less in league with the heavyweights like Sundance ($15) and way past uptown’s picky New York Film Festival ($10 for regular screenings) — which, compared to the Tribeca glitz blitz, is slowly beginning to look like a night out at the Anthology Film Archives. The difference, of course, is that Tribeca overbooks wildly — this year’s roster is some 200 movies — and most of its picks end up in regular release within minutes of the red-carpet premiere. So, while the price hike makes the fest feel like more of a big-ticket event, it also makes it just a teeny bit of a nuisance.
Tribeca Ticket Prices Jump 50% for Upcoming Fest [Indiewire]