More good layoffs! Shortly after Focus on the Family announced its workforce reduction, Oral Roberts announces it's laying off 100 employees. The economy: winning the culture war for us. Related: look at that creepy campus sculpture! [Wonkette](Photograph of the Praying Hands bronze scructure at the main entrance to the campus of Oral Roberts University taken in Tulsa, Oklahoma on 15 September 2004 by Dustin M. Ramsey.)
♦ Alexander Wang was the big winner at Monday night's fifth-annual CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund awards at Skylight Studios. Wang and fellow nominees like Richard Chai, Jason Wu, Lisa Mayock and Sophie Buhai, Irene Neuwirth, Alejandro Ingelmo, Juan Carlos Obando, Albertus Swanepoel, Swaim and Christina Hutson, and John Patrick were feted by John Galliano (left, with Charlize Theron), Anna Wintour, Diane von Furstenberg, Sally Singer, Andrew Rosen, Reed Krakoff, Jeffrey Kalinsky, Julie Gilhart, Julie Macklowe, Daphne Guinness, Sasha Heinz, Tory Burch and Lyor Cohen, Andre Leon Talley, Narciso Rodriguez, Maria Sharapova, Penn Badgley, Zac Posen, Vera Wang, Chanel Iman, Juliette Lewis, Harvey Weinstein and Georgina Chapman, Tommy Hilfiger and Dee Ocleppo, Lauren Santo Domingo, Peter Som, Piper Perabo, Phillip Lim, Lazaro Hernandez, Maggie Betts, Calvin Klein, Damon Dash and Rachel Roy, and James Franco. [PMc, NYO, Style.com, The Daily]
When Tina Brown's Talk magazine launched in 1999, its party was one of the biggest events of the year, an overblown, garish party that sprawled over Liberty Island. Today it's a sad memory of where magazines once stood in the New York social strata. Bob and Harvey Weinstein, then the dominating heads of Miramax Films, had lured away Brown from The New Yorker and Ron Galotti, the real-life inspiration for Sex and the City's Mr. Big, from Vogue. The Daily Beast, which launched last month and is bankrolled with a supposed $18 million of IAC's Barry Diller money, splurged for a party last night at tiny Pop Burger in the Meatpacking District. People were treated to mini hamburgers and hotdogs.For the 1999 bash, guests had to take a boat from Lower Manhattan, and the party was full of celebrities (De Niro, Madonna, Demi, Paul Newman...) and literal fireworks. It resulted in the union of Salman Rushdie and his now-ex wife Padma Lakshmi, who met there. "Weinstein Brothers Revel in Vulgarity, Glory of Manhattan," was the headline in the New York Observer. "[Publisher Ron] Galotti continued his Bullworth -esque excursion into black culture by swaggering through a rap he had written for the occasion." At Pop Burger, there was an open bar. It was hard to get a drink! The event was hardly star-studded—a round up of the usual suspects you see at every media event, add a dash of Christopher Buckley and his post-National Review fame. When fact the mini-burgers ran out after 8:15, making some people sad. Yet, free prosecco still felt decadent for our lowered standards. "I'm surprised we were even able to have this!" said one guest while quaffing champagne. And the small talk? About the layoffs and the recently laid-off, as well as "I'm not even allowed to bitch about work anymore, because at least I still have a job."
After all our trouble wrangling up moving boxes and change-of-address forms, Stephen Baldwin has officially reversed his decision to relocate to Canada. Reports this morning say that the bitter Republican convert was just joking about that pre-election pledge to head north in the instance of a Barack Obama victory, adding that the whole mess amounted to less a broken promise than yet another grave misunderstanding by humorless liberals. Whoops! Now we're told he even likes Obama:"The liberal Democrats who didn't get that I was joking need to lighten up," the born-again Christian told Page Six. "Obama is obviously talented and intelligent, and I have great respect for the man. He's got my full support, and I'm gonna be praying for him and his administration." Oh. Our bad, we guess, but let there be no mistaking his regard for the gays, whom he still loathes enough to submit to a Billy Ray Cyrus ass-tattoo if/when same-sex marriage is legalized nationwide. Not much of a concession considering his recent history, but we'll launch a Facebook club on its behalf just in case. Anything to help the cause!
Let's do the math here: Ashley Alexandra Dupre, America's most famous hooker, hits the news in March when her fortuitous association with Eliot Spitzer becomes public. Except for some vague second-hand insinuations that she wants a record contract, she doesn't make any real career moves until now, when she decides to do her first interviews with the press. We're pretty sure that she's been getting advice—but are her advisers looking out for her interests as much as we, the gossip bloggers, are? Doubtful. We've put together a complete guide to career options for Ashley—or any woman who finds herself famous after a sex scandal—after the jump. Simply select one and go, Ashley:
Why, God, why? PC Magazine was such a nice, safe publication. It never hurt anyone. It sort of kept to itself around the neighborhood, but it seemed perfectly normal. Not at all like those rowdies at Infoworld. Ziff-Davis, the publisher, has already gone through bankruptcy. Wasn't that enough ? In a word: No. Seventy percent of PC Mag's revenue now comes from the Internet, according to Ziff's CEO. Valleywag alum Nicholas Carlson has a tidy little reblog of the whole situation.
So, former MSNBC guy Dan Abrams is starting a "consulting" firm full of random media people to give advice to rich corporate clients about how to handle media-related issues. Do you know what that's called? It's called a PR firm. But this PR firm would never call itself that, because that would make the media people it employs sound corrupt. The thing is, this firm's business plan is so annoying that the rest of the media (us) is going to cover its clients even harder to make up for it. For example! Abrams' first client is billionaire Ron Perelman. Now why would Ron Perelman need to worry about his reputation?
The good news about the Recession just keeps on coming! First it was layoffs at institutional hate monger Focus On the Family, and now it's a failure of reality television! The Los Angeles Times tells us that some once-very popular shows like Deal Or No Deal (aka Guess!), Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, and Dancing With the Stars are down precipitously in the numbers this season. They deduce that this might indeed be because of the recession and the fears of stark reality it stirs up (as depicted by Lance Bass dancing). And if that's the case, then maybe this recession is a good thing! Let's just think of it like spring cleaning or an enema. Sure it's unpleasant in its way, but you'll also feel relieved and unburdened when it's over. Frankly, though it will pain me at first, I think I'll learn to live a better life without my beloved Cottage Living magazine, so you should learn to live without Survivor 43: The One Where They Finally Eat Poop. There's been talk of this phenomenon going down on Broadway—that a good purge will revitalize the medium—and maybe the same will be true of television. Look, good scripted TV shows like 30 Rock and Gossip Girl (OK, "good" is sort a of relative term there) are up! in the ratings. So, I know it must seem catastrophic now, but it'll all work out in the end. Sometimes, things just have to burn. It's nature's way.
I'm skeptical, but Boy Genius Report has what's supposed to be an internal document from Walmart. It details the launch timeline to begin selling iPhones at Walmart on December 28. Here's what nags at me: Why not start the day after Thanksgiving, instead of three days after Christmas? It's not because unprepared staff and long lines would be a problem. Please explain to me how this is all part of His Steveness's master plan.
Everyone in the world is thrilled that America elected Barack Obama! There was dancing and American flag-waving on streets that more recently have been burning American flags (both abroad and in San Francisco). It looks like America will have a President who'll, you know, be diplomatic and respect international law and maybe not be so much of a terrible American stereotype! This is all bad news for terror network al-Qaeda, who rely on American aggression and foreign affairs incompetence to keep that anti-Western fervor up. So they quietly talked up a John McCain presidency on their message boards while publicly endorsing Barack Obama in order to pull the old reverse psychology trick they tried against Kerry. It didn't work! So now they're just calling Obama names. They released a stupid video, of course, in which Ayman al-Zawahiri calls Obama a "house negro" and quotes Malcolm X! They have some legitimate policy grievances with Obama, of course, because while the Bush strategy was to use the 9/11 attacks as a pretense to go ahead with a pre-planned invasion of non-al-Qaeda secular dictatorship Iraq, the Obama plan is to go back into Afghanistan—and Pakistan!—and kill all of them. (Bush thought this plan so clever he secretly instituted it himself at the very, very end of his presidency.) Still, even with the threat of ramping up that particular war, Obama is simply not a very good recruiting tool for Islamic Extremists! So they are kinda reduced to just needling the President-elect, with this Malcolm X talk. Obama, of course, has written at length of reading Malcolm X: "Only Malcolm X's autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me." Who knew al-Qaeda seconds-in-command were reading Dreams From My Father? But, of course, their invocation of Obama as a "house Negro" is a total misreading. As Malcolm said:
One of most poignant—and adorable!—symbols of the recession yet: In Greenwich one recent morning, "the only creature strolling the showroom floor of Carriage House Motor Cars was a tiny mouse." The Connecticut town that has traditionally been home to the Wall Streeters and gazillionaire hedge funds is swathed in gloom, reports Reuters. Car salesmen, jewelers, florists, real estate agents, and interior decorators, all accustomed to lavishly catering to well-heeled local residents, are suddenly finding themselves high and dry.
You knew the engagement of hip-hop artist M.I.A. and musician Benjamin Brewer — son of mogul Edgar Bronfman Jr. — would yield plenty of hilarity, but this? Since her 2007 album Kala launched her from rising star into actual pop songstress (we blame Pineapple Express for introducing her to Judd Apatow fans), M.I.A. has been trying to emphasize that she doesn't just sip wine at fancy parties, as when she dissed New York for its lack of gun violence compared to her war-torn childhood in Sri Lanka. Maya, we urge you, just let the music speak for itself. Quotes from a recent Spin interview in this morning's New York Post suggest she should have quit while she was ahead.When it comes to her inner turmoil between her anti-establishment roots and the decadent wealth of her her new in-laws-to-be, M.I.A. explains how exactly she reconciles the two: "I've always had that [bleep]-the-system mentality, and his dad is so 'the system.' But then, they're the most liberal family - they bootlegged alcohol, for God's sake. They're rich because they threw big, illegal parties, so I don't mind." She's referring, of course, to the Bronfman's old old family business, liquor company Seagram. So basically the system is awesome when it's netting her $100,000 to play MTV after parties, but otherwise, she's still an iconoclast. Oy. We love the music, but does she know she's making herself harder to like?
Alberto Vilar, the wealthy financier, co-founder of Amerindo Investment Advisors, and mega-donor to the Metropolitan Opera, was convicted of all 12 counts in his securities fraud trial this morning. "Mr. Vilar, 67, blinked when the first guilty verdict was pronounced by the foreman in a United States District courtroom but remain stone-faced." [NYT]
Everybody wants a piece of Internet fame these days, even prisoners who don't have access to the Internet. Wade Kirkwood is a serial arsonist—it's basically an addiction for him and all the wildfire coverage on cable news is his porn. CNN interviewed him recently to get insight on whoever it is setting fires in California, and now he's written them from prison asking if they could maybe "put his name out on the Internet" because he's "very interested in helping people that suffer from the same problems I deal with". Oh, no, he wants to be a fameball! Trust us, it's not all that it's cracked up to be. That said: here ya go, Wade Kirkwood: you're on the Internet. Congratulations! Click through for an excerpt of his prison letter to CNN.
Further evidence that hip hop is dead: Snoop Dogg's appearance on Martha Stewart's show yesterday during which the rapper showed off that timeless Thanksgiving favorite, cognac-laced mashed potatoes. Click on the video to watch as the self-described "homegirl from New Jersey" picks up a few new vocab words from the former resident of Compton.
Philip Seymour Hoffman walking with a friend in Chelsea ... Carla Bruni blowing a kiss to photgraphers outside the Letterman show ... Rihanna arriving at JFK ... Naomi Watts walking in SoHo ... Keanu Reeves carrying a Barneys bag in Central Park ... James Franco leaving the New York Times building and later arriving at Letterman's studios ... actor Emile Hirsch walking with friends ... Katie Holmes leaving the Schoenfeld Theatre after a performance ... and a spandex-clad Robin Williams riding his bike at night.
That whole Project Runway lawsuit, between the Weinstein Company and the television conglomerate they dissed, NBC/Universal, is never going to end. Well, not if Harvey Weinstein and NBC head brass Jeff Zucker can't play nice. The New York Times did a little status update for the lawsuit this morning (basically everything is the same: jilted ex-lover doesn't want to let the fashion design show go to its new middle-aged girlfriend Lifetime, because of first refusal contracts, allegedly) that brings up some bitchy new details about their relationship. Basically, Zucker thought the two honchos were besties that he'd never screw NBC over, but Weinstein says nuh-uh:
