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gossip roundup
Sheen Slur May Offend Veteran Best Man
- Charlie Sheen is sorry to black people for calling his ex-wife Denise Richards a "f—king n—--r." He's especially sorry to "Tony Todd, an African-American, who was my best man at my first two weddings." Ha! Richards, with whom Sheen has been bitterly feuding, doesn't get an apology, and can presumably just "f—king" deal. [Us]
- Yesterday, everyone was worried fashiongay Andre Leon Talley would ruin Michelle Obama by putting her in a bolero jacket or some other atrocious thing. He hasn't done that yet. Instead, the Vogue editor-at-large introduced the would-be first lady at a fashion-industry fundraiser while he was wearing "a kind of turban that recalled the much-discussed costume [Barack Obama] once wore in Somalia." No one should have a problem with Obama hanging out with what looks like a gay muslim, even an elitist gay fashion muslim in New York, so obviously no one, anywhere, will. [R&M]
- Not only did Anne Hathaway break up with her scuzzy Italian boyfriend, she also moved out. Yay! But what's this business about dinner at Cipriani? [P6]
- Relentlessly cranky novelist Tom Wolfe demanded to know why a developer insinuated he was anti-Semitic. OK, this time he might have a legitimate reason to be cranky. [P6]
- Broadway and former TV star Mario Lopez is being named People's "Hottest Bachelor," but he's still totally getting evicted from his Broadway theater to make way for Katie Holmes. The guy's biceps can't catch a break.
- Supposedly Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt just bought a $10,000 stash of guns, including "two Benelli semiautomatic M4 tactical shotguns, two Wilson close quarter combat .45-caliber pistols and one Scout semiautomatic rifle." Suddenly, I'm kind of interested in seeing them in front of some reality television cameras again. Near other reality television stars. While drunk and angry. [The Superficial]
- So sad: Freeloading music critics get free drinks, but no free food, at a listening party. They stormed out in a huff, logically. [P6]
- The mother of 50 Cent's 11-year-old son claims the rapper burned down her Long Island mansion. He claims she totally monitors his cell-phone conversations with the son. Call it a draw? [R&M]
architecture
Ugly New Buildings: Not in Tom Wolfe's Backyard!
Tom Wolfe has been fighting the plan for a new building at 980 Madison, near his home on the Upper East Side, for a while now. Yesterday, he made it quite clear that he didn't want an ugly new building: "980 Madison is in the heart of the Upper East Side historic district and it does not need this additional structure. The district has been treated as a specifically landmarked area... I think it is incumbent... to roam through the great archives of architectural history, or architectural future, and come up with something that has more meaning with the Upper East Side." It's true that everybody is putting inappropriate buildings everywhere these days. (Wolfe previously vented his opinions on the original plans for 980 Madison, a skyscraper, to the New York Times.) After the jump: a Wolfe paen to skyscrapers! [Sun] More »
Tom Wolfe's "Idiots"
"I would just point out, all news today comes from newspapers... Television has never initiated a successful story in its life." [Post]
"I would just point out, all news today comes from newspapers... Television has never initiated a successful story in its life." [Post]
bear stearns
Just Like Tom Wolfe's Blues
In Tom Wolfe's 1998 novel A Man In Full, big-time real estate developer Charlie Croker becomes a religious evangelical as his once-vast wealth dissolves. The same thing seems to be happening to Bear Stearns chairman and former CEO James Cayne, who played golf and bridge and maybe smoked pot as his firm crumbled, and whose horde of Stearns shares is now worth maybe one-twentieth its value a year ago. Cayne is selling all those shares. Like Croker, he considers such worldly possessions baggage and, to hear the Times tell it, is on the verge of some kind of spiritual awakening: More »
critical stalker
Tom Wolfe Eats Alone, On Display
"At EAT on Upper East Side. Tom Wolff is sitting by himself eating breakfast in the window. Wearing full white suit." Sometimes, even when you do get a $7 million advance on your next book about "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition in Miami," you still end up seated near the damn window, for the whole world to see.
books
If anybody still believes the book publishing industry remains a cultural haven in this numbers-obsessed era, this should shatter their illusions. In Motoko Rich's article on Tom Wolfe's new book deal, there's a hugely compromising nugget of data. I am Charlotte Simmons, the dapper author's most recent blockbuster, had a print run of 1,500,000. Or so the publisher's publicists claimed, in an effort to build excitement for the 2004 novel. A self-fulfiling prophecy? Nope. The publishers actually shipped more like 800,000 copies, and the book eventually sold only 293,000, a respectable number in these illiterate times, but only about a fifth of the notional print run. (The disappearing book sales are represented graphically to the left.) Book publishers are no different from their counterparts in the magazine and newspaper industries: as print declines, so the claims, whether of print runs or circulation figures, become ever more inflated and ever more desperate. (Thanks, John, for the idea.)
The publishing industry's disappearing act
If anybody still believes the book publishing industry remains a cultural haven in this numbers-obsessed era, this should shatter their illusions. In Motoko Rich's article on Tom Wolfe's new book deal, there's a hugely compromising nugget of data. I am Charlotte Simmons, the dapper author's most recent blockbuster, had a print run of 1,500,000. Or so the publisher's publicists claimed, in an effort to build excitement for the 2004 novel. A self-fulfiling prophecy? Nope. The publishers actually shipped more like 800,000 copies, and the book eventually sold only 293,000, a respectable number in these illiterate times, but only about a fifth of the notional print run. (The disappearing book sales are represented graphically to the left.) Book publishers are no different from their counterparts in the magazine and newspaper industries: as print declines, so the claims, whether of print runs or circulation figures, become ever more inflated and ever more desperate. (Thanks, John, for the idea.)
books
Tom Wolfe abandons New York
Tom Wolfe's next book, "Back to Blood," will be published by Little, Brown in 2009. (Not Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the firm he's been with for 40 years!) The book covers Wolfe's usual bases: "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition in Miami, the city where America's future has arrived first," says the press release. (Dear Tom: you wanted to set the stage for the future in a super-stratified city of dizzying wealth, grinding poverty, and a vast illegal underclass, and you picked MIAMI?)
Happy 20th birthday, 'Bonfire of the Vanities'! Today, the Times celebrates Tom Wolfe's novel with a look at the ways New York has changed since 1987—it's full of rich white people now, did you know?—and interviews with some of the people who characters in the book were based on, or who knew those people. The choicest quote comes from Ronald L. Kuby, the former partner of the radical lawyer William 'Al Vogel' Kunstler. "'Bonfire of the Vanities' ... managed to create a fantasy criminal justice system where rich, white Sherman McCoy is being railroaded by a combination of craven black leaders and corrupt journalists and spineless political leaders. That was white people's fantasy, that was not black people's reality. It was a fundamentally racist novel appealing to the very worst in white people, at their most privileged and snivelly. And no, I don't think it could possibly have the same cachet today."
the earl grey
Tom Wolfe Dresses Way Down In The Hamptons
Since time immemorial, or since maybe 2004, we have received missives from a person called The Earl Grey. As frequently as possible, we print these letters as a service to society.
Thursday, July 26, 2007. 7:45 pm. I'm on the Hampton Jitney, Montauk Highway, Route 27, we pull into the forlorn Southampton Jitney HQ/Health Spa parking lot. I'm drowsy from a full afternoon on Main Beach, when I notice famed New Journalism author & bon vivant TOM WOLFE walking slowly to his car in the parking lot just beneath my bus window.
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new york observer
The significance of holding last night's party to celebrate the New York Observer and its new website at the Four Seasons restaurant was intentional, obvious, and not at all lost on anyone. Despite its recent Frank Bruni demotion to two New York Times stars, the restaurant remains the symbolic and probably actual center of New York old-guard media power. After so many years of playing gadfly to the media, politics, and real estate elite of this city, the Observer and its boy-owner and his advisers chose to make a very specific sort of statement.
More »
The 'New York Observer' At The Four Seasons
The significance of holding last night's party to celebrate the New York Observer and its new website at the Four Seasons restaurant was intentional, obvious, and not at all lost on anyone. Despite its recent Frank Bruni demotion to two New York Times stars, the restaurant remains the symbolic and probably actual center of New York old-guard media power. After so many years of playing gadfly to the media, politics, and real estate elite of this city, the Observer and its boy-owner and his advisers chose to make a very specific sort of statement.
More »
portfolio
The Other 'Portfolio'
We can understand how, in the manic rush to deliver your premier issue to a waiting public and get your website up to snuff, certain details can be overlooked. Still, shouldn't someone at Conde Nast thought to have spent $7.95 from their $125 million endowment to snap up portfoliomag.com? Because this does not exactly scream "business lifestyle." On the other hand, the Tom Wolfe essay on toe-sucking is well worth reading. More »
portfolio
We Read 'Portfolio' So You Don't Have To
Let us begin with the cover of Portfolio. It's a gilded city image, a metropolis of lit-up office windows in earth tones, oddly, as it is supposed to be an homage to Berenice Abbott. (A funny reference, as she was told that New York City was too toxic for her to live in and so she left.) Publisher David Carey and Editor in Chief Joanne Lipman are shown in the Times this morning comparing their cover favorably to a recent Fortune cover, with Carey saying, "We're not giving you peas and carrots. We want to capture that glamour." By that measure things are certainly already a success; the magazine certainly weighs as much as Glamour. More »
media
Media Bubble: Hassan Elmasry's Campaign
tom wolfe
Help Us Be Like Tom Wolfe
When he's not defending the architectural sanctity of the Upper East Side, Tom Wolfe wears white suits. It's his gimmick, his thing, like Paris Hilton's vagina or Mel Gibson's anti-Semitism. Whether or not you subscribe to the "enduring appeal" of the white suit, we nevertheless require your assistance. We hate to bend you over and use you like our personal Craigslist bitch, but these are desperate times. One of us males in the vast newsroom requires a white suit. This is for a — no really — upcoming wedding in the tropics. It need not be a white suit of Wolfean dappertude, nor do we desire to blow much cash on what is essentially a novelty. One would think that, this being New York, you can get anything at any time, right? No, for even our crappiest retailers must adhere to the laws of season, which mean that the few harebrained consumers who might buy white suits do so in the springtime, not now, on the eve of December. Forget all the chains and discounters (Daffy's, Men's Wearhouse, etc.); we've had better luck with small crap suiteries, though so far nothing in our size. Help us resolve this fashion emergency. If you know where one can acquire a cheap white suit (remember: for the tropics!) in the next week, in Manhattan, let us know in the comments or via the memory hole. In return, we'll bring back beautiful photos and maybe some of that military-grade Caribbean blow. More »
michael kinsley
JoeJournalist.com: Could One Of These Men Be JoeJournalist? Yeah, Maybe.
This morning we asked you to help us identify the mystery journalist who had the effrontery to start his own website in the early days of the Internet. While the general consensus remains fixated on Andrew Sullivan, there are a few other ideas out there. We present them after the jump. More »
tom wolfe
Why You Cannot Afford to Skip Any Parts of the Sunday 'Times'
If you hadn't read the Automobiles section — which, in fact, we usually don't, and we have no idea what possessed us to do so this week — you'd have missed this delightfully jarring bit: More »
media
