He's the one openly feeding you all of this unflattering information, first of all, and self deprecation tends to be charming. He's recovered and made some amends.

But just as important is the running meta-commentary. Carr repeatedly and self-consciously points out the autobiographer's primal, protective instinct toward self-flattery, and corrects this with his own reporting about himself. He calls many of his own memories "myths" based on this fact checking.

Carr also admits some of his unfair advantages:

When a woman, any woman, has issues with substances, has kids out of wedlock and ends up struggling as a single parent, she is identified by many names: slut, loser, welfare mom, burden on society. Take those same circumstances and array them over a man, and he becomes a crown prince. See him doing that dad thing and, with a flick of the wrist, the mom thing too! Why is it that the same series of overt acts committed by a male becomes somehow ennobled?

Carr also cleverly takes a preemptive shot at judgmental readers:

In the convention of the recovery narrative, readers will want to scan past the tick-tock, looking for the yucky part so that they can feel better about themselves. ( (Here’s a taste: When I got to detox for what I thought was the last time, they took one look at my arms and brought me a tub filled with lukewarm water and Dreft detergent to soak my scabrous, pus-filled track marks. They dropped pills into my mouth from several inches away as if feeding a baby bird, and even the wet-brain drunks wouldn’t come near me. See how that works?)

Carr's excerpt is worth a read, not only because it's a page turner, but also because it's a remarkable example of how, amid the spread of internet protocelebrity and the return of tabloid-style media wars, one inoculates oneself against smear campaigns: Smear yourself first, in the most charming way possible.

[Times]

Sacco: "Bungalow 8 London is more like the sophisticated European sister of New York."

Reviewer: "damn right! There are many worthwhile ways to spend your £350 in London - this isn't one of them. You've read the reviews - they are accurate. It is nothing like Bungalow 8 NYC which was so much fun a few years ago..."

Sacco: "And the downstairs opens at eleven o’clock, Tuesday through Saturday, and it’s much more of a clubby vibe than we have in New York."

Reviewer: "I'm a fair person....So I tried EVERY night in the week at Bungalow 8, and I'm talking weekend, early, midnight til late.... and it was a DISASTER....spent over £500 each night on champagne. Waste of money if you ask me."

Reviewer: "The place is very disappointing time after time. Specially compared to other clubs I have membership with. The music is cliche and dull. The members are like a bunch of estate agents, the place itself is like a corridor and the drinks are overpriced. A lot of hot air. I would rate the club lounge at Heathrow Airport higher than this place."

Etc.

[BlackBook, View London]

"No disrespect to my man Barack, but I [bleeped] with John McCain. He greeted me like a god," Jeezy, who has endorsed Barack Obama, tells Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

Now that McCain has the support of the drug trafficking industry, we may just have to vote for him!

If only Obama was better at race-baiting.

[P6]

[via Fametastic]

"With smoking the crack cocaine and the cigarettes, her lungs are all gunked up. There are nodules around the chest and dark marks. She's got 70 percent lung capacity."

He added that a spell in hospital last week and renewed treatment for her well-publicized drug addiction had offered a ray of hope for his 24-year-old daughter.

"If she doesn't go back to drugs, then she can lead this magnificent life," he said. "We are praying that that's what Amy really wants. She seems resolute."

He called on drug dealers to help her recovery by refusing to supply her with crack cocaine.

There is no medical reason why she shouldn't be able to perform at the Glastonbury Festival next weekend, he added. In the past, work has helped to keep her away from drugs. [Reuters]

Simms testified that his job was to unload BMF's cocaine from limos outfitted with secret compartments. He said he piled as many as 100 "bricks" of cocaine at a time inside the basement of one of BMF's stash houses, an ultra-modern Buckhead mansion nicknamed "Space Mountain." And he said that on one occasion, in the fall of 2004, he was ordered by high-ranking BMF members Chad "J-Bo" Brown and Martez "Tito" Byrth to set aside multi-kilo cocaine "shipments" for two customers. Simms said the customers picked up the coke from him at Space Mountain.

When asked by assistant U.S. Attorney Robert McBurney who the customers were, Simms gave two names: William "Doc" Marshall, a high-level BMF co-conspirator who testified earlier in the trial, and "Jeezy."

"Young Jeezy the rapper?" McBurney asked.

"Yes," Simms answered.

Less than surprising. But this could really put a cramp in Jeezy's brand new social networking site. On the site right now:

Quote of the Day

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.

David Brinkley

APPROPRIATE. Now enjoy this Jeezy coke rap song. He wasn't kidding, yall.

[Creative Loafing]

See how it feels to write down, "I want to direct." Or write down, "I want to act." See how that feels. Make pictures of what you want to do. Make collages to stimulate the primary process thinking that is the creative mode.

Collages are fun.

Meditate for five minutes and notice how quickly the time goes. Narrow down. Narrow down and make a plan. Think about a year. Think about how so many corny things are true. Think about how you are not 22. Ready yourself for sacrifice.

I know I'm not 22. But Cary, do you know whereof you speak?

I am a child of Florida's warm, wet indolence, the intoxicating rot and the rough, beefy unculturedness. I am a child of that. I know how it is to hate Florida and feel better than Florida and want to live in places like California.

Final words of wisdom?

So be with the ones who know you well. Be with the ones who see your bullshit. Work it out where you're from. Work it out, whatever it is; work it out where you're from.

You have this thing you have to do. It has something to do with film. You don't know precisely what, yet. But figure it out and then if you have to go to L.A. to do it go to L.A. But figure it out first.

Thanks!

[Salon]

[Steppin' Out]

Before television viewers could get a closer look at what was real and what was not, the camera moved to a wide angle and stayed that way until Mr. Rogen and Mr. Franco left the stage, The Associated Press reported. It was an awkward moment that made some in the audience laugh. Backstage, Mr. Franco told The Associated Press that MTV had put them up to the joke — supplying the script as well as the fake pot and joint — and then had a last-second change of heart.

So it seems that there are three possibilities:

1. Franco is telling the truth here; MTV put them up to it, then had a change of heart, but Rogen did it anyhow.

2. MTV told Rogen and Franco to say that the network had a change of heart, as a way to make the stunt seem more edgy, but not too edgy.

3. It was truly an off-the-cuff display of weed smoking, and Franco was kidding when he told the AP it was the network's idea.

Watch the video here again and again, and decide for yourself. At least we know that they weren't smoking salvia

[NYT].

1. Suck up to Peyser! Andrea Peyser is here to cast judgment on humanity. And generally, she does not like what she sees. As a hateful, finger-wagging moralist, her usual weapon is outraged hyperbole, especially against celebrities, and especially especially against lady celebrities. But, you know, if you give her an exclusive, and play desperately, shamefully apologetic, you might get a little sympathy! Especially if you compliment Peyser's columns viciously attacking a different terrible woman:

She called me to explain herself. Also, because she liked my columns slamming another discarded wife, Dina Matos McGreevey.

"If I were an acting coach, I'd tell her not to make faces!" she said of Dina. "Don't look mad or petulant. She looks like a 12-year-old."

2. Suck up to the NYPD! The cops? Heroes. Always. They do no wrong! Also, they are fantastic sources, if you're a tabloid. O'Neal is not only not mad at the cops for arresting her, she is grateful at the favor they did her!

"Just when I was about to change that and wreck my life, the cops came and saved me!" Tatum crowed.

"I was saved by the bell, by the guys in the Seventh Precinct."

3. Avoid the Sob Story Everyone's got one, and they rarely get you very far. So be careful when employing this one. Best to put on a cheerful, "there but for the grace of God" tone, say you're getting your life back on track, admit you've made mistakes, and leave it to Peyser to spin your tale of woe in her inimitable style. O'Neal focuses on the positive—her career is picking back up! Her boyfriend is a saint!—while Peyser reminds us of her lifetime of abuse and addiction. (Though O'Neal does point out that she lost her beloved dog, which is the sort of relatable sob story that does work. Poor puppy.)

(And if all else fails, hire Post flack Howard Rubenstein.)

Tatum to Cops: Thanks! [NYP]

Bell County's new line beats the original, A Life On the Rocks.

1. Buying crack on the street: Tatum O'Neal—as we mentioned earlier, celebrities should all certainly have private, high-class connections to make discreet deliveries to their door. Buying rocks off the street is for the poors.

2. Calling the police while you do coke: Boy George—the singer made a frantic 911 call saying his home was being burglarized, only to be arrested on a drug charge after the cops found an eight-ball in his apartment when they showed up to investigate. Needless to say: do not call the police while you do coke. Christ.

3. Allowing yourself to be videotaped smoking crack: Amy Winehouse—the crazy British beehive badass got arrested after a tape of her smoking the rock was "passed to Scotland Yard." Shouldn't they be investigating mysterious murders in locked rooms, or something? In any case, if you're going to smoke crack, and you are a very famous person, be sure to do it with no recording devices present. (This goes for regular cameras too, Kate Moss).

4. Annoying your relatives so much they sell you out: Whitney Houston—The singer went so crazy on crack that her sister-in-law Tina Brown, herself a former crackhead, staged an intervention. By selling embarassing photos of Whitney's coke-strewn house to the National Enquirer! Lesson: your relatives are greedy bastards quick to stab you in the back to make a buck, so be sure to take care of them financially before they call the tabloids.

5. Fighting the police: Christian Slater—It's bad enough to be arrested by the police. Getting your ass kicked by them is even more embarrassing. Particularly when you act like a lunatic while doing so. Cue Christian Slater, 1997: the floppy-haired actor, bingeing on coke, beat his girlfriend at a party, bit a man, and then, "When the police arrived, Slater did not go quietly, but hid in a stairwell and fought with officers, reportedly shouting, 'the Germans are coming and they will kill us!'" Don't do that.

Helluva drug.

O'Neal got busted by narcotics cops on Clinton Street between Grand and East Broadway—hardly a bad neighborhood. The cops just happened to be doing a drug sweep, and she got swept. Terrible timing.

This is why people have connections, call their dealers, and have their drugs delivered to them safely. And for celebrities who are veteran coke champs, one would expect a ton of numbers on speed dial precisely to avoid the need to trot around the streets at 7:30 p.m. in search of crack.

Our theory: she really was committed to getting sober, and had thrown out all of her drug dealers' numbers. In fact, this could all be a blessing in disguise for her; she told cops, "Today was the first time I was relapsing, but you guys saved me!" Sweet!

Then she tried to say she was researching a part, and begged to be let off. That one didn't go over as well.

Even assuming that she was going to buy drugs no matter what, the actress made two serious mistakes that you can learn from. The first was buying crack in the first place. In New York, the Rockefeller drug laws set harsh mandatory minimum sentences for possession of just five grams of crack—a standard that used to be 100 times lower than that of powder cocaine, though the disparity has been closed somewhat. Still: legally speaking, you are always safer buying powder in New York.

Second, she should never have engaged the police in the lying conversation that she did. She was caught up in a sweep; they weren't going to let her go no matter what. Saying "Do you know who I am?" and "I'm researching a part" is simply foolish, because together they're an acknowledgment that she did, in fact, buy drugs. Better to say nothing and let your lawyer sort it out later. Scientific studies show that cops can't even identify intoxicated people accurately, never mind spying contraband from across the street; deny, deny, deny. Legally speaking.

In any case, those of you who are happy and well-adjusted drug users would presumably not be so stupid as to put yourself in a position to be arrested on Clinton St. in broad daylight. Those of you with serious problems would, which is all for the better. And Tatum O'Neal was prevented from returning to crack smoking, which is certainly worth a night in jail. It's a happy story, really!

Of course, the NYPD was supposed to have nipped this whole problem in the bud a century ago, according to this NYT story from 1908:

In a lengthy post this month dedicated to chewing out the Times for its criticism of him, Honan writes:

Why, this may shock you, but here's the thing: Cocaine is exceptionally fun. LSD? It genuinely alters your perception. I'm not suggesting that you do either of these. Both conspired, unsuccessfully, to kill me and I would no more try either today than I would attempt to put a rattlesnake in my anus. I am older and wiser and recognize that the benefits are not worth the risks. Despite my swinging-dick persona on Twitter, I'm more this guy than that guy. Drugs, especially highly addictive ones like speed or cocaine or heroin or ones with powerful psychological components like LSD, tend to not be worth the price you pay for their use.

We agree! But since the Wired article was all about stimulating brain drugs, the writer's own history might have been worth a mention—particularly after it turned into a controversy, because it serves to strengthen his case against the Times' criticisms, not weaken it. We're on your side, Mat!

And what exactly does a "swinging-dick persona on Twitter" talk about?

Alcohol

The president has always denied being an acoholic, though he's copped to "drinking too much" back in his callow youth (which lasted until his 40s, by the way, when he had his convenient religious reawakening). The alcohol provided a convenient excuse for his being a no-good fuckup for his entire 20s and 30s, and the religious awakening and supposed sobering up helped him gain forgiveness for youthful indiscretions like his disorderly conduct arrest and his 1976 DUI.

Anyway. Billy Graham showed up in 1985. In July of 1986, according to the lies he told in 2000, Bush quit drinking for good.

Here is a video of George W. Bush at a wedding that supposedly took place in 1992:

When the president "choked on a pretzel" in 2002, the White House took the step of having the White House physician announce to the press that "There was absolutely, positively, no suggestion on physical examination that any alcohol was involved." He just choked on a pretzel, during a football game, and lost consciousness.

Graydon Carter sez he knows a guy who sez Bush's blood alcohol level was quite high when he was hospitalized after the pretzel incident.

(Around the same time, a number of nuttier lefty sites began blowing up and enhancing photos of the president's face to point out all the burst capillaries that proved his continued reliance on booze.)

Cocaine

The rumors made the rounds in 1999: George W. Bush did coke! This was before 9/11, when everyone started doing coke again, so it was a big deal. If it was true! Proving it became quite difficult when the person with the most damning-sounding "proof" of drug use turned out to be an unreliable criminal (much like how the people with the best proof that Bush went AWOL from the national guard were using questionable documents, FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS). So. Here are some of the rumors:

• Bush was arrested for drug use in the "late '60s or early '70s" but the arrest was expunged from his record after he performed community service. That community service may have been his stint at Houston's Project P.U.L.L. in 1972.
• But that charge comes from the book by J.H. Hatfield. Hatfield was a convicted felon. The book was pulled from shelves. Hatfield turned up dead of an apparent suicide in 2001. He claimed all along that his sources for the cocaine story included Karl Rove, who's known to talk off the record to journalists of all stripes.
• In 2004, Eric Boehlert floated the theory that Bush ditched the air force because they were instituting random drug tests. This seems like grasping at straws (lol) to us, but whatevs. It's out there.
• Bush has simply never denied using cocaine.
• If you take Scott McClellan's diagnosis at face value, Bush probably did plenty of drugs in his college days and beyond, and then more or less convinced himself that he can't even remember if he did or not. Because he's turned into a simple-minded fool.

Amusingly (to us, perhaps, and probably no one else), we now have a major candidate who's admitted to cocaine use... but that admission itself is suspect. Barack Obama famously admitted to experimenting with coke in his first memoir, Dreams From My Father. "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though," Obama wrote in the more-than-decade-old book. The New York Times spent god knows how long trying to find anyone from Obama's adolescence who remembered him doing drugs but they came up short. Everyone remembered him as basically a square. He smoked a little weed.

We're forced to ask if Obama didn't exaggerate his drug use for the sake of a compelling narrative!

(We've come so far.)

Bear Stearns executives believed another public statement was needed. Arrangements were made for Mr. Schwartz to appear from Florida on business network CNBC.

Minutes after 9 a.m. on Wednesday, Mr. Schwartz told the cable-TV audience, "Some people could speculate that Bear Stearns might have some problems...since we're a significant player in the mortgage business. None of those speculations are true."

But before he could get through his talking points — which included mentioning the firm's strong cash reserves and indicating to investors that Bear Stearns would have a profitable first quarter — Mr. Schwartz was interrupted by breaking news from New York: Gov. Eliot Spitzer, having been linked to patronizing prostitutes, was resigning. Mr. Schwartz was dismayed, but got a chance to make his points after the news break.

Later, as the crisis is reaching a breaking point, Bear convenes an emergency board meeting. But hey, former weed-smoking CEO James "Jimmy" Cayne had better things to do:

Mr. Schwartz arranged an emergency board meeting to brief directors that Thursday night. It was late, so most phoned in. James Cayne, who'd remained as chairman after stepping down as CEO Jan. 8, missed part of the discussion because he was playing in a bridge tournament at a Detroit hotel.

[WSJ; pic via Lolfed.com]

The miracle berries go for $2-3 each. But a single one makes everything in the world taste sweet. And the tasting parties have barely concealed orgiastic overtones:

He believes that the best way to encounter the fruit is in a group. "You need other people to benchmark the experience," he said. At his first party, a small gathering at his apartment in January, guests murmured with delight as they tasted citrus wedges and goat cheese. Then things got trippy.

"You kept hearing 'oh, oh, oh,' " he said, and then the guests became "literally like wild animals, tearing apart everything on the table."

"It was like no holds barred in terms of what people would try to eat, so they opened my fridge and started downing Tabasco and maple syrup," he said.

[NYT. You can buy em wholesale here.]

Bush misled U.S. on Iraq, former aide says in new book [AJC]

"City health officials said the victim, whose identity was not released, was admitted to the hospital complaining of chest and abdominal pain. He died two days later. Health officials said the hardened resin, made with venom from toads of the Bufo genus, contains chemicals that can disrupt heart rhythms.

"The aphrodisiac was supposed to have been applied to the skin, not eaten, but authorities said even that use can be harmful." [AP]

One, the Times thinks the magazine has enough brand cachet to get people to take drugs. Laughable, but flattering for Wired. Two, notoriously wrong Wired ("Push" internet will kill the Web browser! Tech's "Long Boom" will continue forever!) has stopped even pretending people take its advice seriously. As the Times noted elsewhere today, the magazine has successfully transitioned from the sterile, fact-based technology reporting it was once at least marginally associated with (day-glo typesetting aside) to the unverifiable buzzmaking at the heart of lifestyle publishing. The result: advertising and circulation are both on the march. See, drugs really do give you a boost!

[Times, Wired]

And at one point while the cops were still there, two girls tried going into the bathroom together (as per usual), and the bouncer wouldn't let them, they got into an argument, admitted they didn't actually have to "use the bathroom", so he just told them to move on.

The fallout from the law enforcement operation?

After they left, the bouncer announced, "Ok everyone, party's back on!"

[pic via NY Mag]