Which is kind of a shame! The old "Vintage Contemporaries" cover was as much of an awesome time capsule as Jay McInerney's book is. It's perfect! The oddly colored illustration of an anonymous guy in a trench coat wandering toward The Odeon with the Twin Towers in the background, those bold colors and the justified text makes it look like an '80s video game, which is perfect for a novel that reads like a text-based RPG in which YOU are a DISSATISFIED FACT CHECKER SEEKING SOLACE IN DRUGS AND EMPTY HEDONISM.

But now it is 2009, and, weirdly, the Twin Towers are gone but The Odeon is not. And so, a new cover. This one just looks like the opening credits of Saturday Night Live.

• Michael Phelps is dating Barbara Walters' assistant "Marina," with whom he went to college. Wait, that's a fake name right?? Is someone playing a trick on poor old Cindy Adams? [Cindy Adams]
• What pairs well with xenophobia and shouting? Jay McInerney knows! At Benoit, "McInerney and his wife, Anne Hearst, had to calm down political commentator Robert Zimmerman, who'd just had a fierce on-air tangle with Lou Dobbs. Jay prescribed Zimmerman a bottle of 1991 Côte-Rôtie La Turque Domaine Guigal." Frog-loving traitors, all of them. [R&M, second-to-last item]
• Good Morning America defeated Today to score a live Britney Spears performance, leaving NBC suits "fuming," according to the NBC News-haters at the Post. Meanwhile, the singer is sane and cognizant enough to be terrified she's bungled one court case so badly she may go to jail. Her handlers take this as a positive sign!
• Alec Baldwin loved (second item) Sarah Palin's behavior off camera at Saturday Night Live, but Chevy Chase was less charitable about what she did on-camera: "She cannot improvise herself out of a paper bag."
• Elizabeth Taylor, 76, likes to be wheeled into a West Hollywood gay bar, where she drinks tequila shots and Apple martinis. They call them the golden years for a reason, people. [P6]
• Sean Penn is Venezuela, just hanging out, committing some light treason. [P6]
• Tom Cruise is a huge Tina Turner fan. In a very straight way, of course. [P6]
• Breaking: David Geffen still hates the Clintons. "They are vindictive, and people were afraid of being excluded." [R&M, third item]
• Sting's wife said she totally called the Madonna-Guy Ritchie divorce. She also allowed it to happen, by introducing the couple. So, uh, nice work, detective. Gwyneth Paltrow, meanwhile, is behaving like a real well-publicized celebrity friend.
• No one, and I mean no one, pisses in Shannon Doherty's bathroom unless her name is freaking Shannon Doherty. And don't ever forget it! [Daily Star]

So, Radar wants to know why Rielle couldn't keep her freaking jaw in place about boning John Edwards. She would be so much better off if she'd just had a little discretion! Hey, did you ever think on how a widely-used synonym for "affair" is "indiscretion"? No, it's not so much that they go together like peanut butter and jelly; more like they're the exact same thing.

What sort of patently talentless dilettante chats up a politician in a bar and manages to secure a lucrative contract with his campaign and either his or his close confidante's participation in unprotected sex? Answer: someone who shares the personality traits of a Donna Rice or Monica Lewinsky — the kind of woman who to enters beauty pageants, shares her innermost secrets with Linda Tripp or in this case blabs about married John from North Carolina to her web developer and anybody else who'll listen.

Why do you think that whenever politicians from Bill Clinton to John Edwards stray, you always hear about the extensive efforts made by their staffers and confidantes to keep them away from their accomplices to infidelity? Because people like Rielle Hunter are not generally subtle; people like Rielle Hunter would equate "subtle" with a gentle snap of one's thong!

In my years as a chronic oversharing discretion lacker I have found we often attract the same type. It's no accident Monica gave that exclusive interview to someone who just told the world how she used to screw Alan Greenspan! Which brings us to Rielle's ex Jay McInerney. He says he wrote about Rielle because he was "intrigued and appalled" by her behavior. I bet that in Rielle's case he would switch the verb to "bored" at this point. Which is what is so exceptionally unboring about Rielle Hunter! She changed her name, but unlike anti-pornography activist conservawife Donna Rice Hughes she never changed her ability to summon the energy to hit on powerful men and babble incessantly about it to all her blabbermouth friends. She would probably claim it was because she and John shared True Love. You might claim she is simply an incurable narcissist. I would say you're both right!

Michiko Kakutani didn't like it that much back in 1988. (Her review is also an awesome early example of her insane obsession with comparing every jaded young protagonist to Holden fucking Caulfield. Haven't you read like a million books, Michiko?? Find one more example of an adolescent narrator please!)

No doubt the reader is supposed to see Alison's flippancy as a defense mechanism, as a desperate attempt to cover over her own unhappiness and fears. Unfortunately, we never believe in her vulnerability, never even like her. She has none of Holly Golightly's waifish, desperate charm, none of the self-deprecating good humor of Mr. McInerney's earlier heroes. She just seems like another bitter and self-deluding hedonist, adrift in a glitzy world - a spoiled princess, who's as careless with her own life as she is with the feelings of others.

But our own in-house McInerney expert, Sheila, says the book is pretty great. She's read it like three times! She raves: "it's much better than some of his other books, like Model Behavior."

We've long since past the age when every single book by McInerney and his bro Bret Easton Ellis was optioned for a crappy film, but this is really a golden opportunity for some inspired director, right? Allison Poole (the Hunter-inspired main character) would be a great role for some actress looking to expand into edgier parts. Anna Paquin? Vanessa Hudgens???

Or hell, get Rielle out of retirement to play herself! She tried acting, once. As we speak our own Video Department is ordering the classic Denzel Washinton vehicle Ricochet, which features a young Lisa Hunter, a.k.a. Lisa Druck, a.k.a. Rielle Hunter.

"She's a nice girl... She used to be a real party girl.

"When she wasn't out at nightclubs, she was taking acting classes. We dated for only a few months, but in that period, I spent a lot of time with her and her friends, whose behavior intrigued and appalled me to such an extent that I ended up basing a novel on the experience," McInerney recalled.

And, to think, now Rielle Hunter's behavior is intriguing and appalling the entire country. It doesn't get much more appalling than sleeping with a guy whose wife is dying of cancer!

Assuming, you know, Hunter doesn't suddenly decide to deny the whole love child thing.

We should have known something big was going to become of this woman when McInerney depicted her saying, "Most of the guys I know have really high-powered jobs and make up for lost time when they're not in the office."

[Post]

"Men. I've never met any. They're all boys. I wish I didn't want them so much.... I hate being alone, but when I wake up in some guy's bed with dry come on the sheets and he's snoring like a garbage truck, I go—let me out of here."

Wikipedia does now mention that the Alison Poole character—the Rielle Hunter stand-in—ended up a character in Bret EastonEllis' American Psycho. She gets around!

Think of how easy it might have been to understand Arianna Huffington's bloggy animus toward Tim Russert if there were a book out chronicling all the sordid details of their decade-and-a-half-long secret feud. (There is.) Every gossip-mongering gadabout should know the full backstory on every spat, falling out, and long-running mutual antagonism in media. Below are the volumes no shelf should be without.

1. The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood, by Tom King

The Gist: A gay Polish-Ukrainian Jew from Borough Park moves to Hollywood and enters the mail room at the William Morris Agency. After forging a letter suggesting he had a college degree when in fact he did not, Geffen rises through the ranks to become an agent, then leaves WMA and founds Asylum Records and produces albums by Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Asylum is sold to Warner Communications, and Geffen becomes Vice Chairman of Warner film studios. He then retires and un-retires after a minor but erroneous health scare, founds Geffen Records, courts John Lennon and Yoko Ono (see below), produces Cats, Risky Business (see below), co-founds Dreamworks SKG, produces Saving Private Ryan, backs Bill Clinton, gives lots of money to AIDS research, falls out with Bill Clinton over one of the sleazeballs he didn't pardon, and now backs Barack Obama. Along the way Geffen throws many temper tantrums and raises his voice to the point where even Steven Spielberg asks him politely to lower it. He also shows a remarkable ability for betraying the confidences of good friends and business associates in order to charm potential clients he’s just met. The night Lennon was shot, Geffen was in bed with a male prostitute and loves to boast about it.

The Pull-Quote: “’What about my music?’ [Yoko Ono] asked. ‘Well, I’ve never heard any of your records.’ ‘Really,’ Ono said. ‘That doesn’t sound like a very good reason for me to make a deal with you.’ ‘I’m a big fan of John’s, and I have a great deal of respect for the two of you, and we do a very good job. We’re a good record company.’ ‘What do you mean you’re a good record company?’ Ono fired back. ‘You haven’t put out a record yet!’”

The Takeaway: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Be enlightened and progressive on your own time, but cunning and ruthless on corporate time. Respect for others’ privacy won't make you rich and powerful. Endear yourself to those you want to impress by gossiping about people you know behind their backs. It'll smack of such poor judgment that would-be clients will assume you're either crazy or brilliant, and guess what? You are.

2. Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power, by Judy Bachrach

The Gist: Gifted writer Tina Brown makes her fellow students feel small at Oxford, dates a host of famous men (including Auberon Waugh, who washes frantically after sex, Martin Amis, whom she adores, and Dudley Moore, whom she does not), deflects charges of arrivisme, and becomes editor of UK tabloid Tatler at age 25. She meets Harold Evans, then married and famously editing the The Times of London and The Sunday Times, which names her Most Promising Female Journalist. Brown and Evans marry in 1981, then move to New York three years later, whereupon Brown revives the moribund Vanity Fair by turning it into the must-read glossy on celebrity doings and the leisure class. She hires true crime reporter Dominick Dunne, photographer Helmut Newton and inaugurates a new wave of magazine journalism, operating under the assumption that "intellectuals should be read and not seen." Meanwhile, Tina and Harry are now East Coast socialites whose fiercely guarded life together aspires to shape headlines, not become them. (Their best friend is British libel law.) Brown takes over The New Yorker in 1992 and remakes that antiquated smart sheet, too, acquiring Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane and David Remnick, who later replaces her as editor-in-chief. On a manuscript submitted by Yiddish Nobel laureate, Brown writes, "Beef it up, Singer," which more or less encapsulates her style of feared-but-respected-or-hated tenure. She founds Talk magazine in 1999, which folds after just two years, an over-sensationalized failure from which this unauthorized biography derives all of its rise-and-fall schadenfraude. (Bachrach is a contributing editor at the new VF, edited by Brown’s archnemesis Graydon Carter.)

The Pull-Quote: "We live in a time when infamy sells.... There is no honor, no reticence, no loyalty." Spoken by Maureen Dowd on Brown's New Yorker reign, and quoted by author to make a clichéd point.

The Takeaway: Develop a nose for future A-listers. Sleep with as many as you can all the while adopting an “amused” air about them. Overpaying the talent means you can bully them into submission, so don't be cowed by easily tossed around phrases like "national institution" or "greatest living writer." Fuck 'em if they can't take a kill-fee. Oh, and marry old men.

3. How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, by Toby Young

The Gist: Son of highbrow sociologist Michael Young, who coined the term "meritocracy," Toby Young devotes his life to testing how much strain that already weakened concept can take. He writes for the British Times, gets fired from the British Times. He founds celebrated Modern Review, which traffics in "low culture for highbrows," then shuts it down, much to the dismay of everyone else involved. Young moves to New York in the early 90's, gets hired by Graydon Carter as a contributing editor (read: sinecurist) at Vanity Fair, then proceeds overlong tenure as a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of Graydon Carter’s shoe (this is G.C.’s description of him, not ours). Young cracks dud jokes to celebrities, refers to doormen who won't let him into parties he'd end up hating anyway as "clipboard Nazis," does blow while on assignment, asks Nathan Lane if he's gay, gets fired from Vanity Fair. Now back in London (this isn't in the book), Young edits The Spectator, a conservative weekly, and boasts of his "negative charisma," probably as a way to boost paperback sales. HTLFAAP, much like Young himself, has been up and down the wicket of sadomasochistic success. A film adaptation is said to be in post-production, starring Simon Pegg and Kirsten Dunst.

The Pull-Quote: “Cool Britannia was a cry of independence, a howl of protest against the all-enveloping cultural hegemony of the United States, yet, paradoxically, it didn’t really mean anything—it hadn’t really happened—until it was noticed by the American media. That explained the schizophrenic attitude of people like Damien Hirst, Keith Allen and Alex James: they wanted to assert their indifference to the attentions of glossy, New York magazines, and yet they wanted to be photographed striking this insouciant pose in Vanity Fair. Like rebellious schoolchildren, their protest wouldn’t have counted unless it was registered by the authorities. Unfortunately, in this scenario I was cast as the toothless substitute teacher.”

The Takeaway: The memoir is a good object lesson in what not to do if you want to hang onto a job or a masthead listing, or cast the impression that deep down you really had high expectations for the world of glamour-besotted New York media. Also, it pays to be obnoxious in a way that only you find ironic.

4. Spy: The Funny Years, by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, George Kalogerakis

The Gist: In 1986, Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen found the future of piss-taking journalism in the form of Spy magazine. Épater le bourgeoisie never had it so good, or so the editors – now all dressed up and fixtures of the very culture they once lampooned – are the first ones to remind you. Spy pioneers satire as a clever agglomeration of facts, and specializes in the infographic, the listicle (just like this one!) and the blurb cloud. It attempts to decipher just who, exactly, is on the New Yorker’s indecipherable masthead. It follows Anthony Haden-Guest into the dank reaches of his own nightlife. It refines hatred of Donald Trump into an art form. Features include the Liz Smith Tote Board, Separated at Birth, and Logrolling in Our Time, without which everything from The Onion to Conan O’Brien’s pre-interview fooling would be unimaginable. The self-conscious prose style is a cocktail of H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling and Wolcott Gibbs, and its been swigged by every glossy editor in search of a readership ever since. Once G.C. leaves, it all goes to shit. Like Studio 54, the new owners can’t make it work, ergo the justified hubris of the book’s title.

The Pull-Quote: “How easy is it to steal the sour cream?” – in a chart surveying the various Manhattan cafeteria chains.

The Gist: You need only ask yourself if you read Radar to determine whether there’s any pedagogic value to be mined from Spy.

5. Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

The Gist: Nameless 24 year-old fact-checker for elite New York glossy (a thinly veiled New Yorker) moonlights as an aspiring novelist, or wants us to believe he moonlights as that while he’s busy Hoovering coke by the suitcaseful and partying through the vertiginous 80’s club scene with a yuppie twat called Tad Allagash. Tad calls the narrator, who writes annoyingly in the second person, “Coach.” His mother has recently passed away, so we’re shin-kicked into wondering if a life of artifice and glitz is simply an emollient for real pain. Behind the hatred there lies a plundering desire for love. Or something.

The Pull-Quote: “Just now you want to stay at the surface of things, and Tad is a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice. You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you clean up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.”

The Takeaway: Once Tina Brown takes over Coach’s magazine, he’s fired. Sort your soul out before you move to the metropolis of infinite distractions, otherwise you, too, will wind up a shiftless anonymity with withdrawal symptoms. (Your apartment can still be a mess, however.)

6. The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger

The Gist: Recent Brown graduate Andrea Sacks wants to write for the New Yorker (sigh) and blankets the media world with her resume hoping to get a dues-paying job somewhere that will eventually allow her to become Larissa MacFarquhar. Whoops. She gets hired by fashion bible Runway’s bitch supreme Miranda Priestly (Anna Wintour, not even thinly veiled) as her junior personal assistant. Next thing Andrea knows, she’s chasing down lattes at Starbucks and sirloins at Smith and Wollensky instead of learning about ledes and nut grafs. Not what she had in mind but she loves the clothes and even develops a knack for being a second-string slave to a subhuman narcissist. Unlike in the film, Andrea doesn’t quit – she gets fired for saying “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.” Ballsy, sure, but she does get to keep some of the Dolce and even snags an interview for a real writing position at another magazine in the same building. (N.B. Author Weisberger was Wintour’s personal assistant, so this novel is a bildungsroman, which is a word Andrea learned at Brown but seldom got to use after graduation.)

The Pull-Quote: “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.”

The Takeaway: How many bright young girls have come to New York hoping to fill these Cinderella slippers, only to discover that not only is Wintour not hiring, but she’s honed her filter for confessional opportunists more interested in publishing advances than making sure her Apple Fritter is extra flaky. If you want to be a bona fide reporter, save yourself the aggro and dashed hopes and apply for an internship at the New York Sun your junior year. Also, while it’s true that some ball-breaking editors respond well to self-assertiveness, telling your boss “Fuck you” isn’t the wisest career decision.

7. Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, by John Gregory Dunne

The Gist: The story of Dunne and wife Joan Didion's attempt to transform the life of anchorwoman Jessica Savitch, who died in a car wreck after more or less proving on air in 1983, during a broadcast of NBC News Digest, that she was a drug addict. Instead of a sadder version of Network, the screenplay transforms into the Disneyfied Up Close and Personal, which makes absolutely no mention of Savitch and which even Robert Redford doesn't remember filming.

The Pull-Quote: “The purpose of such a meet-and-greet is to allow the executive to size up the supplicant. [Disney studio chairman Jeffrey] Katzenberg had not read Golden Girl, but he was aware of the less savory details of Jessica Savitch’s life. He liked the ugly-duckling idea; it was the kind of narrative he wanted, and he was also responsive to the television background against which it would be played. He did have reservations, and here I quote Joan’s notes of that first meeting: ‘Wants to know what is going to happen in this picture that will make the audience walk out feeling uplifted, good about something and good about themselves.’”

The Takeaway: Dunne is witty and disarming, especially when he quotes Jack Warner's definition of screenwriters: "schmucks with Underwoods." Interestingly, the "monster" in question is not the industry or any particular studio executive, but rather the money that governs all, including Dunne.

8. You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, by Julia Phillips

The Gist: Scandal-sponge Jewish producer reveals the vast corruption, drugs and sexual indiscretions that motor the movie industry. Phillips gets fired by Steven Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, accuses Goldie Hawn of body odor, and, on the night she becomes the first woman to win a "Best Picture" Oscar for The Sting, downs three valiums, one upper, one and a half drinks, two joints and a dash of cocaine. The book is a sprayfire indictment of practically everyone Phillips ever met in Hollywood, and it got her banned from Morton's.

The Pull-Quote: "They were really a rogues' gallery of nerds. Marty [Scorsese] was tiny and asthmatic, Steven [Spielberg] had the soft, flabby look of a typical Twinkies kid, and Brian [De Palma] never took his safari jacket off."

The Takeaway: Sour grapes ferment the best, although it's not as if anyone still believes in some West Coast Arcadia where dazzling moving pictures are made. Still, you'll hardly do better for the brutally honest story of a show biz prodigy that had to burn everything before she flamed out.

9. Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures With the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media, by Michael Wolff

The Gist: Following up on Burn-Rate (1998), which was about Wolff’s bust foray into the world of online startups, this is the nasty-minded sequel by the former New York media writer who wants badly to be the next Murdoch but can’t and decides to just insult everybody he ever envied instead—especially Fox News President Roger Ailes. Most of the stuff in here consists of Wolff's recycled columns, but it's all in one place and no true mogul ever wasted his time searching through web archives. Harvey Weinstein is obese and grotesque. The media business is "collapsing” like communism. Some of Wolff's axioms should be true even if they aren’t: “The larger and higher-profile the company, the bigger the nutcase who runs it.”

The Pull-Quote: “This was the meta thing. Meta gave both irony and gravitas to what we did. The delicious incongruity between our superficiality and our importance. The joie de vivre of self-referentialism. The stupendous, intoxicating power of being able to create the world we lived in."

Bonus Pull-Quote: “So, as I arrived for my speech, I was thinking of my relationship to the absent but always present [Fox News head Roger] Ailes. He was the greatest, but the Antichrist too.”

The Takeaway: Still fun. Like Young’s book, AOTM is a serviceable monument to failure dressed up as critical thinking. Though most of the wisdom you could just as easily cull by lunching at Michael's. Wolff went on to try and match-make the sale of his old haunt New York (he's now at Vanity Fair) to Mort Zuckerman, who in the event lost out to hedge fund wizard Bruce Wasserstein. That means more meanness is forthcoming in what promises to be the Dance to the Music of Time of inferiority complexes.

Also,

While standing in line to get in... talking on cell phone giving friend directions. bouncer accosts me and tells me i need to go across the street or to the corner. apparently there is a no cell phone talking rule on their property. ha! that's a first for me.

Like another contributor in the current issue, Jay McInerney, Johnson is a novelist: he won the National Book Award for his novel Tree of Smoke. Like McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City (who covers Art Basel in Miami as if the art show were merely an extension of his sodden New York nights), Johnson is out of place in a business magazine, or in fact-based journalism, for that matter.

The Tree of Smoke author's mission was to "touch" the oil pipeline and, presumably, convey the majesty as only a novelist can. He barely made it out of the Sheraton hotel's breakfast room in Erbil, staying within the safe confines of American-friendly Kurdistan. Our informant tells Gawker that Portfolio's Bill Tonelli, a favorite of editor Joanne Lipman and the commissioning editor on the piece, kept the draft to himself for two weeks while he himself phoned Iraq to work some facts into the story.

Johnson was impressed by the economic vitality of Kurdistan. Why hasn't it been recognized by journalists from the New York Times and CNN, he wonders. "Here's a guess, just one possibility: because journalists are pimps for war, my friends, in burgundy velvet suits. And that's the news from here." Here's another guess, just one possibility: because real reporters do, occasionally, leave the five-star hotels that so impressed Portfolio's coddled author.

So, has Joanne Lipman's vain effort, to turn novelists into business journalists, finally run its course? Don't bank on it. Portfolio's brittle editor, famously ignorant of journalistic precedent, has the ambition to nurture writers in the way that GQ and Talk once managed, and a long wish list to work through. Top of her list: best-selling creator of Alex Cross, the African-American forensic psychologist, James Patterson.

Addendum: Where is Howell Raines, Portfolio's media critic? When the former New York Times editor was appointed, the magazine did say that his first column would be in March, on coverage of the election. So we're not ringing the alarm just yet. But he did, say our spies, submit an earlier column on Katie Couric, which would have been for the current issue. Pretty dated, and thin, we hear. "No one bothered checking to see if he could actually write a column and no one asked him for ideas before announcing his signing. He apparently didn't take too well to being edited."

The Social Commando "disarms with charm." Her decor features an "oil painting of her mother as a debutante, oil painting of herself as a debutante, framed photos of her and her mother with last summer's boyfriend on the Dalmatian coast." This is a girl whose sole purpose on Wall Street is "to have So Much Fun while avoiding anything that might be Ugh, So Not Fun," and "her 20s expire in a blur of So Much Fun, a swishing memory of body glitter and hiccups, the seasons marked only by a steady recursion of weddings—the last of which is often, and to everyone's surprise, her own." This is the girl so lionized by Jay McInerney, the one so hated by the women on Sex and the City (remember the episode where the girls go to the party in Connecticut thrown by their formerly fun friend who now has two kids? She's this girl). She is old money. Here, we detect a certain longing in Dana's voice, a recognition that while he may mock this character, he knows that, on the eve of his 32nd birthday, he too will settle down with her.

"The Ivy Beleaguered" has a "tunnel-like focus"; she "has no life at all"; "fluent in Mandarin and Spanish, she had a 4.0 in economics and two summers' worth of internships at the best venture-capital shops in Palo Alto." And, most tellingly, "she shops at Club Monaco and Express" and rarely goes out except on sultry summer nights to "hunt for that Indian businessman." Uh, okay! Here's some casual racism and classicism at work. Dana is at once jealous and contemptuous of the Ivy Beleaguered. She is new money, and probably of Asian descent. She has to work hard for what she gets, and Dana hates that she's smarter than he is. He consoles himself by telling himself that she has no life. She would never join the other analysts at the strip club!

"The Nuptialista" has "awesome cocktail party banter"; her signature cocktail is a "vodka Southside at Round Hill Club." Now, let us pause for just one moment. How many of Marie Claire's readers are aware of the existence of the Round Hill Club, the exclusive country club in Greenwich, CT? We're going to go with... maybe 7? Is Dana just fucking with the magazine and its readers, letting them know that even though he deigned to write for them and take their money, that he's still more privileged than they will ever be? Well, unless they marry up, of course. The Nuptialista is of the right social breed for Dana, but when it comes down to it, she's just a little too Charlotte for him—"what she seeks is someone who can promise her a future filled with her past: large houses, green lawns, social prominence." Also, she wants to get married too early. But Dana will definitely be at her wedding.

Finally, there's the "Big Swinging Chick," the only woman in Marie Claire's spread who's wearing a pantsuit. The subtext? She's a big lez, or at least, she's totally emasculated her husband. Dana is friends with this woman, certainly, but is also secretly scared shitless of her, even as he assumes a kind of loveable scamp place in her worldview. She's way too successful, though, for him to ever be really good friends with. Then again, she doesn't seem to have any friends.

A Field Guide to Wall Street Women [Marie Claire, not online]

"Hmm," he pondered, his face scrunching up like a sponge. "Burgundy is such a crap shoot. Two out of three bottles are total crap. Better to go with a Bordeaux. Otherwise you'll commit suicide." Oh well, he would know! Also, was this really happening?

We decided to test the waters. "Here's a question from Mediahoho who asks, 'When are you going to write the sequel to Less Than Zero?'" A pause. Were we going to get punched, slapped, noogied? "Heh. heh," said McInerney. "I'm writing the sequel to Lunar Park." Heh. heh.

Q: Can I have my Smiths CDs back, please?
A: No

Q: how does he stay so thin while writing a column for Gourmet?
A: It's House and Garden and I don't. I just have a good tailor. (Unspoken subtext: cocaine!)

Q: What's the best antidote when the Bolivians won't stop marching in your head?
A: Xanax or Valium.

Q: What was Michael J. Fox really like?
A: Short. Also, he's a wildman. He's as wild as I was. In fact, he was well suited for the role.

Q: How many roads must a man walk down?
A: For me, 4 or 5 if you're talking about marriage. Whenever I start thinking about how horrible a person I am I just think that all my ex-wives and girlfriends don't hate me. That makes me feel better. Heh. Heh. Heheheheh.

If only the guy sitting next to me hadn't stolen my cell phone when I left it on the bar. I inevitably leave my cell phone on the bar at Otto and the bartenders inevitably save it for me. This creep answered my phone a couple of times when I called but quickly hung up.