DMX Can’t Believe Anybody Would Have a Name As Ridiculous As ‘Barack’Rapper DMX has seen his share of gangs, hard drugs, and prison bars, but please, reporters, don’t try telling him crap like there’s some black guy out there named Barack Obama running for president. The Dark Man X seemed unfazed by a female candidate, but a Barack? “What the fuck is a Barack?!” he demanded during a recent Q&A with hip-hop mag XXL. “Where he from, Africa?” DMX admitted he’s not following the race and suggested that “no one person is directly affected by [whoever is] president” anyway. But seriously: “Your momma ain’t name you no damn Barack!” The Yonkers-born DMX knows something about baby names, after all; his kids are named Xavier, Tocoma, Shawn, Javon Micai Wayne, and Praise Mary Ella. The XXL interviewer futilely tried to pursue the topic, even trying to convince the politically apathetic rapper that the possibility of a black president is a big deal, but eventually gave up with a halfhearted, “Well, Barack has a good chance of winning so that might be something.” Thoughts, DMX? “Good for him, good for him.” —Jennifer Chen
intel
Kristian Laliberte & Co. Developing a ‘Hills’-in-Manhattan Reality Show
Sometimes, the world around you creates situations that you never thought could be so perfectly distilled into brilliance that it’s just stunning, like the invention of meat on a stick and that Website about men who look like old lesbians. This is one of those times. Kristian Laliberte on camera, all day long? What could be better? (Well, a competition show where monkeys throw poop at Oscar-winning actresses would be better, but we like to keep our expectations within reach.) According to Emily Brill, authoress of EssentiallyEmily.com, an ABC-affiliated reality show is being developed about Kristian and his two friends Devorah Rose and Annabel Vartanian. It’s apparently supposed to be “a Manhattan version of The Hills,” which we would have thought would be impossible because nobody here in New York is that bad at acting. Still, the prospect sounds delicious. Kristian is the lovably quotable socialite/stylist/something-or-other you might remember from that party you went to when you were drunk but not as drunk as everybody else. Devorah is the editor of Social Life magazine, and Annabel is that girl who passed out at the La Perla party in December. It’s going to be about their raucous lives running around the city and desperately striving to be relevant, or at least, you know, present and photographed. Apparently they asked Brill to be on the show. “Emily, tell me the truth. Look at me,” someone involved asked her. “Do you want to be FAMOUS?” Brill considered, and then replied: “No. I want to be respected.” Man, this show is already gold.
SO, ABOUT THAT TELEVISION SHOW [Essentially Emily]
Update: Kristian just called to tell us that Brill “was never involved in any stage of what we were doing.” Apparently the filming that’s been done was not for a reality show, it’s “more like a documentary.” Hey, we’ll take it any way we can get it!
intel
The Long Hand of the Trumps Slaps Madame Tussauds Right in Her Wax FaceIn the most hilarious press release we’ve received all week, today we learned that Ivanka Trump actually doesn’t send nail polish to Madame Tussauds weekly to spruce up the wax mannequin in her likeness. We can only imagine the nasty personal phone calls that the Donald made to some poor executive at Tussauds in order to cause them to squeak out this apology. They probably involved a lot of scathing sarcasm and scowling head bobs that you could just hear through the phone. Below, the statement:
Madame Tussauds New York would like to set the record straight. On Friday, the Daily News called and was inadvertently given incorrect information by a Tussauds employee. Unfortunately, the employee thought the Daily News was asking about a different figure. Madame Tussauds New York does not in fact have a figure of Ivanka Trump… yet. We apologize for the confusion. Madame Tussauds loves the Trumps and is very proud of its figures of Donald and Ivana Trump, as well as its more than 200 lifelike figures.
OH MY GOD — are they saying Ivana Trump is sending nail polish for her wax likeness at the museum? That’s even better!
in other news
J.Lo Jennifer Lopez Wants Only the Best for Her Baby PhotosJennifer Lopez, mother to the heaven-sent twins Max and Emme, got $6 million from People magazine in exchange for their first baby pictures, according to reports. But did you also know she demanded her husband, Marc Anthony, be the one to shoot them? That’s what TMZ.com says. (We would have really preferred Anne Geddes, but you can’t have everything.) They also hear that she insisted upon being called “Jennifer,” as opposed to the commonly accepted “J.Lo,” throughout the entire article. Oh, and also for the rest of time. A rep for People told the Website that their story was “absurd,” but we do know that Lopez’s reps prefer for her to be called “Jennifer,” so this doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch. Also, “Jennifer” is no fool. If Marc is behind the cameras, he can’t be in the photos!
J.Lo to ‘People’: Don’t Call Me Dat!! [TMZ.com]
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You Can Say This About the Girls of the Emperor’s Club: They’re No MoronsYesterday the Feds busted the Emperor’s Club, a New York–based escort service that provided, according to their Website, “refined and successful international clients” looking for “risk-free dating … without long-term-commitment intricacies” with “exclusive, beautiful, educated companions of fine family and career backgrounds.” You know, hookers. Of the four people charged with running the service, three of them were women. Still, from the phone records in the FBI affidavit, parts of which are up on the Smoking Gun, it didn’t seem like it was a woman-friendly workplace, from the male founder who said that a would-be call girl “looks like a butcher in my opinion” to the conversation about the “baggage” a worker with kids has to the outraged indignation of an applicant who was “shock and confuse” that the company expected its employees to have sex with men who don’t even take them out to dinner. But then comes a tender moment between one self-aware prostie and her pimpette.
party lines
Ally Hilfiger: Heiress, Artist, HealerPart of being in the “new generation of creative people,” Ally Hilfiger told us back in January, is being “multitalented” and mastering a variety of methods of artistic expression. But as much as she loves fashion, acting, art, and combining the three in hard-to-explain multimedia exhibitions, she may have a higher calling. “If I couldn’t do the acting, the painting, and the fashion design,” she told us at the spring 2008 Men’s Fashion Party at Blue and Cream last night, “I would really like to become a healer.” Really? Like, what, a doctor? No. “An energy healer and a holistic healer,” Ally clarified, explaining that despite her interest in fashion, she’s just as interested in what’s on the inside as what’s on the outside. In fact, she follows Peter D’Adamo’s Eat Right 4 Your Type diet, which tells her which foods are okay for her to eat and which are “toxic for my specific makeup.” She added, knowledgeably, “It helps your immune system, and it just keeps you really healthy for your geno-type.” As for the healing, right now it’s just a hobby, something to do in between art projects. “I already do healings on people sometimes,” she said. “But I’d really like to get a degree and really have a profession of healing people.” —Stephen Haskell
Related: Ally Hilfiger on the ‘New Generation of Creative People’
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Miss Brooklyn Pageant Roiled by ScandalThe Miss Brooklyn Pageant, recently revived after a sixteen-year hiatus, is already enmeshed in scandal, though not of the topless-Facebook-photos variety. At least, not yet. Anyway, as it turns out, this year’s winner, 22-year-old Leigh-Taylor Smith, who was crowned after she charmed the audience at Long Island University’s Kumble Theater last week with her off-key rendition of “Nobody Does It Like Me,” lives in Manhattan. And that’s not all! The Brooklyn Paper did some digging, and now they have revealed that the judges were not only aware of this fact, they chose to turn a blind eye. “We only had a few committed girls from Brooklyn,” Kim Thomas, the executive director of the Miss Brooklyn Scholarship Program, explained to the paper. “We couldn’t have a contest with only three girls.”
Miss Brooklyn is from Manhattan [Brooklyn Paper]
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Mark Ronson, Best British Male at Brit AwardsLifelong New Yorker Mark Ronson was given an award for Best British Male last night at the Brit Awards in London. “I’ve never felt so British or male before in my life,” Ronson said in his fake British “Mid-Atlantic” accent after being presented the award by fellow American person Beth Ditto. “I didn’t think my chances were great.” We didn’t either, because Mark Ronson is not actually British. But what’s really weird is not the D.J.-producer’s apparent identity crisis but the fact that the normally skeptical Brits are accepting him as one of their own. Why?, we wonder. We don’t suspect for a minute that they are fooled by his ridiculous accent. What’s next? Is Gwyneth going to get a BAFTA? Will Madonna get knighted? Is this all part of some new attempt to take back the colonies? Don’t even try it, limeys. Daily Intel will never be swayed. Unless of course you are offering pounds
Mark Ronson Wins Best British Male at the Brit Awards [NME]
Earlier: Mark Ronson Is British by the Way
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‘Cookie’ Mag’s Answer to ‘Real Housewives of New York’ Makes Stunning DebutCookie’s new columnist, Tatiana Boncompagni Hoover, has a problem. That problem is that she is just too fucking fabulous for her own good. Each week, the daughter of an Italian princess, wife of an appliance scion (yeah, she’s married to that Hoover), and mother of Enrico and Valentina finds herself “deluged” with invitations to black-tie galas and cocktail parties, plus “intimate dinners, a weekend jaunt to a swanky new hotel in Miami, even a spa week at a tony Anguilla resort,” and it’s getting to be a little much! Only just last month, she was forced to choose between a trunk show, the Guggenheim Young Collectors Council’s annual Artist’s Ball, and a dinner party at a hedge-fund manager’s lavish home! Horreurs. Happily, she made the right decision and went to the trunk show. “At the event I saw rising It girl Chessy Wilson,” she relates in her inaugural column, “who regaled me with a story about her handbag catching fire earlier that day when she accidentally dropped a lit match into it.” Hahahahaha — barf. But it’s not all clinking and chortling for this real housewife. There is a dark side. “The problem with the New York City social scene is that it sucks you in,” she writes. What, like Michael Alig? Will Tatiana’s addiction to nightlife end in blood and guts and jail?
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Bill O’Reilly Doesn’t Want to Lynch Michelle Obama Until He Is 100 Percent Positive She Hates AmericaThe folks over at Media Matters, who spend all day sifting through transcripts of conservative pundits’ radio broadcasts looking for faux pas, have struck pay dirt yet again. Where? The O’Reilly Factor, of course. Apparently, yesterday some old biddy called up ol’ Bill’s radio show, all bent out of shape about Michelle Obama’s saying on C-Span that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” For the first time? The caller was aghast, like, How dare Michelle not be grateful for the good things America has done for her people! What about Brown v. Board of Education? The right to vote? Hell-o. “I have a friend who had knowledge of her and said to me months ago, ‘This is a very angry,’ her word was ‘militant woman,’” the caller, whose name was Maryanne, told O’Reilly. His interest was piqued. “What I want you to do then, Maryanne… I want you to stay on the line,” he said. “If indeed Michelle Obama is angry about something, if she has a history, we would like to know that.” Then, tamping down his excitement, O’Reilly muttered that of course they’d have to check the facts first. After all, “I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels.
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A Brief Appreciation of the Genius of Sharon BushHot off the heels of her most recent scandal — in which the 55-year-old ex-wife of Neil Bush refused to give back the engagement ring given to her by former beau Gerald Tsai — Sharon Bush is on “Page Six” again, talking about John F. Kennedy’s supposedly illegitimate son, Jack Worthington. Apparently, they dated. “We dated just after my divorce for about a year,” Sharon told the Post, calling him “a very caring individual who is active in philanthropies.” This reminded us: Sharon Bush is freaking amazing. Let’s take a look back at some of her best moments, shall we?
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UES Forever! Real Life Gossip Girls Are Moving Back UptownLike our friend Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl, many true-blue-blooded Upper East Siders feel like while it’s okay to come downtown on a Saturday night and barf in the streets, it is no place to live. Just in case you thought that was an unfair stereotype, the Observer rounded up a few Upper East Side girls and got them to fulfill it. “At a certain point, being downtown just loses its appeal,” Abigail Cusick, who moved straight back to the UES after graduating from Skidmore, tells the pink paper. Cusick says lots of her friends have moved back uptown after getting Soho, the Lower East Side, or Chelsea “out of their system.” Downtown is just too icky. “You wake up and it’s like waking up in the apartment you partied in the night before.” Uptown, her existence is idyllic, mostly because she can raid her parents’ liquor cabinet and play with their dog, then have someone else clean up its shit. “The housekeeper comes over to clean for me, I can stop by and pick up a bottle of wine; I get to play with the dog, then return it,” she says. “It’s nice.” We bet! You know what’s not nice though? 86th Street. Cusick can’t believe they’re building condos up there. “I think it’s laughable,” she says. “I mean, it’s still 86th Street. It’s where classes collide.” Ew! Everyone knows you never want to rub up against classes.
The Local: More Kids Dating SoHo, Marrying Upper East Side [NYO]
Related: ‘Gossip Girl’: Too Beautiful for This World
intel
Uno’s Final Moments Before His Huge Westminster WinJust before Uno the beagle chomped down on his historic Westminster victory on Tuesday, New York had a reporter backstage at Madison Square Garden watching his tense last few minutes.
While stylists primp a nearby Sealyham terrier and its owner before Westminster’s Best in Show contest, Uno sleeps. It’s barely an hour until he makes history as the first beagle to take top honors, but you wouldn’t know it by the way he’s splayed out in his crate. Nor are his owners worried. Whether they spend 45 minutes brushing and combing his hair or not, Uno’s coat will look the same. “It’s a low-maintenance breed,” says co-owner Jon Woodring. Still, Uno stands at attention as handler Aaron Wilkerson snips and cuts the dog’s hindquarters and runs clippers over the beagle’s sensitive bits.
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Mark Ronson Is British, by the WaySo, People just told us that Grammy-winning Amy Winehouse producer Mark Ronson will be getting his U.S. citizenship in time for the upcoming election. Naturally our first thought on this was, Thank God. Because Mark Ronson’s vote is really important. But then we were like, Wait, what? Mark Ronson isn’t American? Has not the son of New York socialite Ann Dexter-Jones and stepson of Foreigner’s Mick Jones, the brother of Charlotte and Samantha, lived in New York for basically the entire time we’ve been alive? Didn’t he go Vassar? Wasn’t he just at the Beatrice Inn? We checked: Yes, yes, and yes.
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Did Uma Thurman’s Boyfriend Just Call Her Fat? Is Uma Thurman pregnant or merely fattish? “Page Six” thought the actress looked a little “puffy” in recent photos, so the other night at the Gucci benefit they asked her new boyfriend, Swiss banker and Elle Macpherson baby-daddy Arky Busson, if Uma was up the spout. “No,” he said, and then he made a grave, grave error in judgment: “She quit smoking,” he said. Oh, Arky. We understand that you are foreign, but don’t you know that the number one rule of American boyfriendry is to never, ever acknowledge, even obliquely, that your girlfriend has gained weight? You’re going to have a lot of groveling to do this Valentine’s Day, dude.
No Puffing Makes Uma Puffy [NYP]
photo op
Is Zani Gugelmann Being Ironic?Our internal dialogue regarding the above picture of Zani Gugelmann from yesterday’s Charlotte Ronson show:
Wait a second. Is Zani Gugelmann really wearing an anti-fur button on a shearling coat? No. She can’t be. But it looks kind of like she is. Maybe the fur is fake? But it is so lustrous. It looks like real fur. But can it really be possible that she picked up the anti-fur button, chirped ‘I support animals,’ and pinned it to her (fur-lined) bosom without noticing that as she did this her fingers brushed actual fur? NO. Yes? No. YES.
Also, are those leather boots?
Etc.
Rock and Ronson [Park Avenue Peerage]
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Rocket Scientists Stymied by Hearst ElevatorsThe elevators in Hearst Tower are, like the rest of the building, designed to look cool and be efficient. They’re so cool and efficient, in fact, that they don’t even have buttons on the inside. Instead, Hearsties punch in the floor number on a panel outside, which then tells them which car to hop into. Though the system is simple enough if you go there every day, it’s confusing for visitors. Especially, you know, models. But you wouldn’t think that they’d stymie some of the country’s most brilliant engineers. But last night at Popular Mechanics’ Breakthrough Awards, which honored the top innovators and inventors of the year, the tower’s lobby was a scrum of confusion. Honorees stood gazing at the elevator doors, stumped. “Excuse me, but how do you get this to go down?” one, the inventor of a nonturbine wind alternative, was heard asking. Meanwhile, the maker of a nerve-powered robo-arm trotted off to ask for help from a security guard. Eventually, Hearst dispatched staffers to the lobby to escort honorees upstairs. Hm. Guess there’s something to that “selective intelligence” thing.