It's been a year since Radar folded, what the hey is Maer Roshan doing with himself these days? He is "working on some TV projects" out in LA, and going to the beach and working out, John Koblin reports. Wonderful!


Jonathan Lethem's new novel Chronic City is using the same cover photo that Portfolio used for its inaugural issue, the NYO points out. Meaning that the book will fade away, but not before Jonathan Lethem spends his entire $100 million budget.


I have come to the (late) conclusion that the New York Times Magazine, which gave us the immortal, meaningless phrase "The Way We Live Now," is America's Most Pretentious Magazine. Not bad, just pretentious. What do you say about that, NYT Mag editor Gerald Marzorati? "Does the Magazine have an ideology? At the risk of giving some of my colleagues hives, I think it does. Call it Urban Modern." Thanks, we might!


The new editor of the resurrected version of Vibe magazine will be Jermaine Hall, formerly editor in chief of the (now-dead) King magazine. Is there still room in the magazine industry for scantily clad women? Only time will tell.

• After appearing on The Late Show, a nationally televised program, Anna Wintour requested a "more private table" at the bistro Chat Noir. [Page Six]
  
  
• Fall Out Boy lead singer Patrick Stump landed in jail over the night for a traffic warrant. His bail has been set at $15,000 [TMZ]
  
  
• Lily Allen's friends have no problem telling the tabloids about the singer's drunken, slutty ways. Remarked one pal, "She'll hook up with anyone when she's drunk." [3am]
  
  
• Jackie O's half brother, James Auchincloss, has been arrested on kiddie porn charges. [NYDN]
  
  
• A child grows within Mel Gibson's girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva. And now it's showing! [Daily Mail]
  
  
• Chelsea Handler has broken up with her live-in boyfriend, who's also her boss. It is, says a source, "such drama." [Gatecrasher]
  
  
• Former Hugh Hefner plaything Bridget Marquardt and her boyfriend Nick Carpenter moved in together last week and are already fighting. Sadly, there has been one casualty thus far: Marquardt's collection of Hello Kitty memorabilia. [E!]
  
  
• Danielle Staub from Real Housewives of New Jersey wants a photographer to shoot the cover of her forthcoming memoir — for free! [Gatecrasher]
  
  
• Quest magazine removed Walter Noel, whose hedge fund lost loads of dough in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, from their list of high societies best and brightest. [Page Six]

We're trying to keep this series alive. So if you have or spot any old photos of media type friends, send them over. Hopefully we'll be able to compile something of a yearbook at some point.

For a while people were just uploading new snaps onto the social networking site, but now some graying folks (including oldie and goodie Spy magazine!)—perhaps suddenly feeling burdened with the desperate, tingly sensation of time swiftly passing—are sifting through shoeboxes at the backs of closets and flipping through dogeared copies of The Bean Trees to see what old glory days photos they can find and slap up on the web. We've found a few so far—of Radar brave knight Maer Roshan, of peacenik Bill Dobbs, of Wigstock mainstay Lady Bunny (above), all of them fresh-faced and young—on Jon Nalley's 1992 Democratic National Convention album. Journey with us below, and then send us your old(ish) New York (and beyond!) photos. It'll be like signing a yearbook!

Dobbs, right, with Sandor Katz


Maer, on left.


Maer, on right.

"You'll be seeing us again in some way!" he told us without blinking or laughing once. Performance art.

"You're killing me," sighed the flack at the door when we were finally plucked from the line and had the audacity to bring in a guest. No, we're killing print! It did seem a bit ironic that the final Radar party was wildly oversubscribed.

So Maer, how are you feeling? "We put out sixteen good issues," he said, adding that he'll be an editor-at-large at Tina Brown's Daily Beast, "helping out." Will he have to go into the office? "Only when I feel like it."

Meanwhile, we heard the rumor of a party guest who was laid off at Radar on Friday, hired at Culture + Travel on Monday, and laid off again on Wednesday when that magazine folded. And this was all before covergirl Shannen Doherty arrived, who showed up dressed in black shiny leggings, looking like a sexy cat. (We were promised absolutely "no access" to her.)

As Nick Denton wrote in 2005,

"Gawker has covered Radar to the point of absurdity, as if it was a reality TV show, in which every actor and every action, however minor, was worthy of mention. Maer said that, at Radar, everyone was a celebrity. The blogs have taken him at his word. One day he'll appreciate the attention; but not just yet."

While the party was just (yet another) Radar wake, it felt like much more: Maer Roshan has always been one of the biggest believers in magazines and in the now-outdated idea that they can be culturally relevant—a fine industry to dedicate your life to. After a brutal week of magazine foldings and months of layoffs, it felt like we were mourning much more than the third death of Radar.

[Photos: Nick McGlynnn for Random Night Out]

Previously: Radar 2.0 Launch Party
Radar 2.0 Wake
Radar 3.0 Launch

Burkle made his money with supermarkets. It is quite profitable, of course, to own all the supermarkets, because people need to eat. But, you know, it's not very glamorous! And Burkle enjoys flying around on his private jet with famous people, and globe trotting with politicians, and partying, and models. He likes models. One can enjoy this lifestyle with supermarket billions, but isn't it more fun to enjoy it with media holdings?

So at some point he and Jackson decided to invest in Maer Roshan's crazy magazine about "pop and politics and pop culture and scandal and pop" or whatever the hell the tagline of Radar 3.0 was. And they gave him 15 issues to do with as he pleased, and he did eventually turn out a pretty good product. But the money wasn't there, because it was a new magazine, and there's not even money for old magazines anymore.

And honestly it was probably not as exciting and fun to own a magazine as Burkle thought it would be! It's tough, because he also wanted to secretly own the magazine, and no one who secretly owns things gets the same pleasure Rupert Murdoch does from personally tearing up the Wall Street Journal and remaking it in his image. And Murdoch loves newspapers. There's really never been any evidence that Burkle loves magazines. Murdoch will take a loss for years on something like the New York Post. Burkle didn't give Roshan the five years he said it'd take to break even on Radar before he pulled the plug. Because if it's not subsidizing his lifestyle, it's not worth the cash. He's a capitalist, obviously, and Radar was not a charitable endeavor, but if we had his fortune we wouldn't mind wasting it on the talent Roshan brought together.

Back to controlling distribution and sales of food! Unlike media, mac and cheese is recession-proof!

• It was too late to have a new tone: Radar's tone is wry, arch, post-modern, skeptical, and, you know "snarky" (*retch*). Had the magazine launched five or ten years before it did, it would have been a lone, intelligent voice amongst the wilderness of celebrity coverage. As it was, it was just one more magazine with the same tone that hundreds and hundreds of blogs had made into the default voice of the entire young American audience. Radar was never bad—it just wasn't fresh.
• It was too late to start a standalone magazine: There are plenty of people who dream of starting their own magazines. Few make it happen. Roshan did,somehow, but he missed the era when it would have been a viable enterprise. What was the last great standalone magazine to launch, and be successful? Wired, in 1993? And Wired is still around because it now has the money of Conde Nast to back it up. The day of launching new, large-scale, general-interest print magazines (rather than super-niche ones) that turn a profit are gone. Technology will determine the future of publishing, but that's not it.
• It was too late to own its category: Celebrity coverage with a twist. Smart celebrity coverage. For people who are actually intelligent, but have a pop culture habit. This is a niche with no space left in it. It is a niche that was filled before Radar got a chance to get to it. Radar didn't lack talent—it lacked a compelling reason to exist. That Maer Roshan got three cracks at it is a testament to his otherworldly skills as a salesman.

• Cleese, 68, is in the midst of a divorce from his third wife.
• They met at a "power breakfast" in New York.
• Smiley: "We had this natural connection and became firm friends."
• Cleese: "I never thought I would be interested in somebody in marketing but she is so acute."
• Cleese took her on a European "divorcey-moon" tour arranged by his friend. Sounds sort of rebound-ey.
• Read between the lines: Smiley: "we are still getting to know each other... it is a very close, very warm friendship."
• Read between the lines: Cleese's friend on a dinner in Zurich: "I don’t think they’d had a major consummation before that, if I may put it that way."
• Cleese: "I am not sure when we’ll be seeing each other again."

In case anyone missed her point about the nature of her relationship with Cleese, Smiley updated her Facebook thusly:

The Sunday Times coverage never called Smiley a "friend," so one presumes the clarification is hers.

Oh, Veronica. At least rent Holy Grail before you put John on permanent "just friends" status.

[Mail]

(Photo via Daily Mail)

Radar's website has studiously ignored the day's hottest story—just as it sidestepped the juicy revelations about conman Raffaello Follieri's relationship with supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle, and the Hollywood rumors of an affair between actress Gina Gershon and former president Bill Clinton.

Burkle's involvement in the pop culture magazine has never been acknowledged, but he joined Yusef in a bid for the Chicago Sun-Times in 2004—and Radar's unusual discretion in covering stories about the California tycoon and his buddy Bill pretty much confirm the creepy Burkle is in Yusef's consortium. "It's fair to say the restrictions that come with Radar's funding are getting more inconvenient," says a veteran of the magazine. Radar's Maer Roshan did not respond to a request for comment.

One shouldn't give too hard a time to Radar, however. It's not as if New York magazine made any mention of financier Bruce Wasserstein's marriage breakup earlier this week. Every publication has investors it can't afford to offend; it's just that Radar has had a lot of them, and it really can't afford to offend them.

Update: Maer Roshan did indeed respond, with a zinger!

Q. Hey, Maer — where's your Jesse Jackson "nuts" piece? (In the same place as all the Burkle coverage?) ;)

A. Actually, it's in the same place as our item on you going down on a go-go boy at Urge on Thursday night.. But while we're on the subject, have I missed Gawker's coverage of the Jezebel fiasco?

Late in the evening a frisson rippled through the upper lobby as Rupert Murdoch and his wife Wendi came up the stairs. No matter that the Australian media mogul gave former Nixon aide Roger Ailes a cable news network to play with, nor that he publishes the neo-con rantings of the Wall Street Journal's opinion pages, and the nauseating moralizing of Andrea Peysner in the New York Post. Murdoch was immediately surrounded by friends and sycophants.

Best moment: Maer Roshan dragged photographer Nikola Tamindzic over to capture a moment of pretend intimacy with the 77-year-old tycoon. The move had all the subtlety of a high-school girl who was still trying to make her ex-boyfriend jealous: the intended audience was Mort Zuckerman of the Daily News, who let Roshan's magazine run out of money before he found a new benefactor.

But by the time Roshan managed to tap Murdoch's shoulder and extract him from his group, Nikola was distracted by some pretty girl; by the time the Radar editor refocused the Serbian photographer on the task at hand, a friend of Murdoch, Tom Freston, came over to have a tycoony chat; and by the time a slightly embarrassed Roshan finally got his photo opportunity, Zuckerman was distracted by a gold-digging Julia Allison. "He's single, right?" she asked.

Hey girls! Mort Zuckerman — owner of the New York Daily News — is single.

Larry David — creator and star of Curb Your Enthusiasm — is single.

Star talking head Julia Allison — seen here talking with Business Week's Sarah Lacy — is dressing for her new target demographic.

Matt Nye, Jann Wenner's boyfriend, with spiritualist Kathy Freston. It's a hard life being the spouse of tycoon; nobody else understands that.

Julia Allison looks a little different. Ah yes, no hand on hip. Or maybe something else.

Charlie Rose and Mort Zuckerman can at least turn on the charm when they need to. Liberal pundit Eric Alterman has no mode but obnoxious.

The power picture: Charlie Rose, Mort Zuckerman, Arianna Huffington, Jann Wenner and Rupert Murdoch.

Jacob Bernstein, son of the Watergate investigator, is thinking about his flat-screen television at home.

Yes, Wendi Deng is indeed hot — and tall. Seen here with Lloyd Grove, the former gossip columnist.

No matter how much he begs, not a penny into that Radar magazine. Mogul to mogul, let me tell you: worst decision I ever made.

Something about George Bush's crimes against humanity, probably.

PBS's Charlie Rose.

What on earth is Mediabistro's Laurel Touby doing here? I didn't recognize her without the boa.

This man looks important, but I have no idea who he is.

Rich gay men make such good fathers. (Arianna Huffington, whose husband Michael turned out to be a political loser and "bisexual" — with Jann Wenner. The Rolling Stone author and his boyfriend had a baby with a surrogate mother.)

You know who this is, don't you? The hotel bellboy — must have been living on some blissful service industry planet without continuous cable talk shows — didn't. "Can I help you, miss?" he asked. "Where is the Huffington car?" she replied.

Photos by Nikola Tamindzic

Roshan, in his announcement, jokes: "Chris has been involved with this project from its inception in the early 50s." Tennant was a diehard, sticking with Roshan through his magazine's first and second hiatus; but he's always been drawn to New York's plutocratic society. His forthcoming book, The Official Filthy Rich Handbook, provides some hope of joining them, more than a gig, even a well-paying one, at a financially vulnerable magazine.

Unfortunately, the book project did also alienate Tennant's Radar colleagues: it wasn't so much that Tennant was distracted; more that he recruited the magazine's Sarah Horne to do much of the writing. I think that shows admirable talent as a rentier, of course.

Extra tidbit: when the former Talk editor was trying to rustle up funding for the first incarnation of his Radar project in 2002, he tried to find young Tennant some temp work as editor of one of those new-fangled blogs, a site which was to be called Gawker.

On our way in, we brushed past Julia Allison. Her breasts, "outsized badges of femininity," were like two convicts struggling to escape the confines of her dress. "If you see any single men, give them my number!" she called after us. We did, and they were gay.

The best gay by far wasn't Maer Roshan, who is not gay so much kind of nicely paternal, but Greg Garry, Radar's photo director. When asked about Whoopi's reaction to his cover he squealed, "That fucking bitch! What a cunt! That bitch! I mean, she dated a white dude who went around in blackface!" A girl in gold lamé stretch pants and a butterfly sequined top said, "Yeah, Tony Danza." No dear, Ted Danson. "Yeah, Ted Danson!"

Both Emily Gould (who was there) and I noticed that their newest employee, Alex Balk, had lusciously eyelashed pyrite eyes—and that they lacked the feral hunted quality that they had when he worked with us. He looks like one million dollars in change and his skin shone with an inner light.

I talked to some guy in a suit that turned out to be Maer's lawyer, a man named Douglas A. Hand, Jr. On his business card, j.d. and m.b.a. are in minuscule letters, as if majuscule (or serifs) are too ostentatious. He was the only one reading Radar. (At least, at the party!) Maer had given him a copy. "You know, Maer's always trying to assert his rights with Yusef. It is the battle between editorial and publishing." That's Yusef D. Jackson, head of Integrity Multimedia LLC.

Yusef's boy reporter Neel Shah was wearing a cardigan. New York Observer gossip reporter Spencer Morgan was wearing a $1,500 Paul Smith blazer. His grandfather had bought it for him.

As the night wore on, Pol Pot jokes cropped up more often due to the presence of skulls at the bar. "What's Pol Pot's favorite pick up line?" I ventured. "Khmer, I've got something to show you!" It worked neither as a joke nor a pick up line.

Soon enough though we were all headed to the Lolita Bar for the afterparty. Maer ducked out to buy some Marlboro Lights. By this point Page Six magazine's Rachel Syme had joined us. Later in the night so did New York mag's Jada Yuan. All of us talked about Page Six honcho Richard Johnson a lot—you know, the guy who promises to rape non-ugly lady reporters in his column.

I said I thought a theological case could be made that he is the devil. Maer Roshan's boyfriend Matt, who sometime appears on "30 Rock," said, "Did I just hear the world theology?" I said he had. And then weirdly Nick Denton, our own personal Yusef, appeared, along with Aaron Hicklin, editor of Out. I thought Maer and Nick hated each other but Nick explained to me that nothing is ever personal.

Ah, Radar magazine. The freelancer's favorite! An infamous nonpayer in iterations one and two, the magazine, now in its stabler third incarnation, has done little to incur our wrath.

But it might!

Radar pays "upon publication," which is fine. But then that fine day comes when it hits the stands. Invoices, those annoying things, must be processed. (We hate it too!)

And so, seeing the magazine out and about, a freelancer we know emailed an editor about payment. The request was passed on to the managing editor. A week passed with no response. An email was sent again. Another week passed, in which no response was forthcoming.

Now, this isn't crazy in the world of magazines. Not by any stretch. But it just so happens that this freelancer, like others, is still unpaid from a previous iteration of Radar. You'd be nervous too! Perhaps you are!

We actually expect the best from Radar—magazine staffers there have expressed great sincere regret over past troubles with paying freelancers. So we and our freelancing friend would love to get a status report. Have you yet been paid by Radar 3.0?

Update: Good news! We haven't heard from any other contributors to the new Radar who've had trouble! Isn't that lovely?

In addition to the free drinks, the party boasted a few other attractions. Like: Radar editor Maer Roshan and Gawker publisher Nick Denton, standing in the exact same brightly-lit room! (Mmm, friendly.) Art, at least some of it by Terence Koh! A teenaged singer strumming his guitar in the corner while absolutely no one paid attention to his underamplified set! Observer media reporter Michael Calderone! "I sit right next to Doree. If I wanted to, I could just reach over and touch her," he told us.

You see?

But the evening's real highlight was the outfits the cocktail waitresses were forced to wear. In keeping with Campari's "it's sort of the 30s, but breast implants have been invented" advertising, they were dressed all sexy-retro, and they were wearing these adorable little hats with veils by Victor Osborne. We were hoping that was what was going to be in the goodie bag, or rather goodie box. Instead: a miniature bottle of Campari.

—all of us

Kittah [Wikipedia]
How to Create LOLCats aka MemeCat aka Kittah aka Cat Macros [engtech]

The mixture of financial types, publishing people, drink-cadging bloggers, and assorted hangers-on made for the kind of spectacle that, could they ever have conceived of it, would have made the Pilgrims decide that any kind of torture and oppression was better to endure than sailing to an unknown continent to lay the groundwork for a country that would, on some chilly evening in the early spring of one of the nation's most prosperous decades, put forth a party like this one. You hated loving hating to love being there, and you struggled to conceal yourself, and before you knew it you were being introduced to Jay McInerney and telling him that, yes, you were the one who called him "Douchebag, Jay Douchebag" on your silly little website, an admission he took with the calm demeanor of someone used to having complete strangers let him know that they had referred to him as a douchebag each time he made a new acquaintance. Which is to say he smiled, nodded, and then told a story about himself that, while amusing, did nothing to disprove the earlier judgment. Still, he was perfectly friendly, and was soon posing for pictures with young Vachon, who was outfitted in the standard blazer and underbuttoned shirt that seem to mark so many young men who have come into a great fortune via inheritance, the financial markets, or gigantic book deals. This was his room, this was his time, and everyone around him moved about with the constant awareness that they were in the presence of the season's Next Big Thing. He outshone the combined wattage of the thousand Next Little Things who scurried about the packed event trying to grab the oversized appetizers that were being passed around by harried buspeople.

Looking around you were overwhelmed by the stunning mediocrity of most of it. Did you see Nick Denton in the back, standing close—but not too close—to his former employee (and Mergers dedicatee) Elizabeth Spiers? Was that Radar resurrectionist Maer Roshan leaning back and carrying low in a conversation with a reporter from WWD? Who would win the battle of drunken WASP stereotypes with the surname Morgan, Hudson or Spencer? Could the News' Ben Widdicombe get in enough free wines before Cocktail's Jo Piazza finished the last bottle? Why weren't we informed that no one wears ties anymore? It's a sad day when publishing types are dressed better than the finance types, but it's even sadder when the bloggers are sporting neckwear.

There was a stunned moment of shocked ecstasy when, by the wall where Roshan deputy Chris Tennant was disgruntledly flirting, a full set of breasts came into view, their sparkly flesh somehow offering to extend and make good the promise of sex. Then, just as quickly you realized it was Julia Allison, and tried to think of puppies and babies, anything good and pure. It shouldn't have been a surprise to see her—she's everywhere, like ejaculate on a porn booth floor—but it seemed like as good a time as any to surf the crowd and find someone willing to offer a quote. I passed by Radar whatever Neel Shah, but I didn't need any advice on dating or taxicab etiquette or blogging for Glamour, so I moved on. Spotting literary agent David Kuhn, I introduced myself and told him I worked for Gawker, which was probably not a good idea.

"So David," I asked, "how do you feel about being Out magazine's fiftieth most powerful gay?"

"Is this for print?"

"Fuck yeah."

"Then just say I'm happy I wasn't the fifty-first." He then went on to say something extremely funny and extremely off the record about Out's Aaron Hicklin and, perhaps realizing that the last thing you want to do around an inebriated gossip blogger is start being candid, asked "Hey, do you want to meet the real Roger Thorne?"

Thorne is the "id" character of Mergers, an entitled, foul-mouthed, nip-slip-obsessed caricature of every Ivy League WASP who has done well in life due to family connections rather than any semblance of intelligence. How could I not want to meet the model? Kuhn, desperate to get rid of me lest he say something catty about Tina Brown, was happy to make the introductions and disappear.

"Dude, I love Gawker!" said the Thorne inspiration.

"Dude, I loved your character! How does it feel to be the model for Roger Thorne?"

"Dude, it's awesome! I mean, some of that stuff was exaggerated, but you know—" He suddenly grew wistful and displayed the kind of reticence with which the banker in the book was entirely unfamiliar. "I'd prefer that this isn't on Gawker. You know, I just want to have a good time."

I was started to feel that second stage of inebriation, the one where you know you have a good hour, if that, of comprehensibility left, so I nodded and shook his firm American hand and went out into the cool air to clear my head and fill my lungs with smoke. My head hurt from overindulgence in the drinks department and underindulgence on the solid side—we expect too much of alcohol and too little of hors d' uvre—but as I worked my way toward the door I swore I saw the only two women who work for Radar.

Outside was no better than in, except you could smoke and you were less likely to run into Nick Denton, who will pick random moments at parties to discuss the unnecessary technical changes he's forcing on your website and mutter ominously about post counts and generally just scare the shit out of you that you're going to be fired within the week. Managing Editor Choire Sicha was smoking—Managing Editor Choire Sicha is always smoking—and discussing the merits of Remnick v. Brown with Roshan, a longtime Brown partisan. Somewhere in the background I could hear the Canadian-accented tones of the Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar and her posse of Eat the Pressers. Balthazar habitu Lockhart Steele was chatting with New York Sun contributor Meghan Keane. Dealbreaker's John Carney hobbled about on one crutch. It occurred to me that these were the same fucking people I saw at work or in bars every day. I checked in with the people from Riverhead, who lamented the absence of Emily Gould since it left them unable to thank her for keeping the book so prominent in the cultural conversation.

Vachon approached once more. He was in excellent spirits, effusive with praise, modest in his own success, proud to point out the fine family members who had come to town for the celebration. Vachon told me how much my support for the novel meant to him, how my assessment of its flaws mirrored his own. He told me all this and my hand grew tighter around my drink. I stared at Dana blankly as I realized that having to write this report as an inconsistent dispatch in the style of his novel was going to be painful and time-consuming for me and anyone who had to read it. Then I felt warm liquid on my hand and looked at my tie and first noticed the thin trail of dark red that trickled down my jacket. I was spilling wine on myself and it became clear to everyone how drunk I was. It wasn't until I put the glass down and saw how the wine had pooled on my jeans and dripped down to my shoes, and how it came now more quickly, through my fingers, that, in the space of a final epiphany, I finally understood it all. I really need to switch to white; it stains less. —balk