Claire Zulkey interviews Jason Trachtenberg of the The Tractenberg Family Slideshow Players:
Claire: How do you like New York compared to your home town of Seattle?
Jason: I think I'm gonna get a t-shirt made with "I" and then this heart, and then "NY."
C: I think people might like that.
J: I think I might sell those for like $5 in Times Square.
Interview with Jason Trachtenberg [Zulkey.com]
· Norman Mailer and Dennis Miller are waging a public war in the pages of the Wall Street Journal about who's more irrelevant. Mailer on Miller: "Just because the two big guys who flanked you on 'Monday Night Football' took away your [bleeps] and left you with a giggle in replacement doesn't mean you have to suck up to the Wall Street Journal." Miller on Mailer: "With six marriages under his belt, one would assume Mr. Mailer has a stranglehold on warfare. One would be wrong." [Ed. noteI'll settle this. You're both irrelevant.] [Page Six]
· Mark Baker, Richie Akiva and Jeffrey Jah plan to launch "The Deck at Pier 59," a smoker-friendly, mostly outdoor restaurant and bar at Chelsea Piers. [Page Six]
· Axl Rose was spotted with a sexy Asian woman asking the deejay at Suite 16 to stop playing "Paradise City." [Page Six]
· Quentin Tarantino's mom, Connie: "He wrote sad Mother's Day stories. He'd always kill me in them, then tell me how bad he felt about it. It was enough to bring a tear to a mother's eye." [Cindy Adams]
· Liz Smith says something snarky (gasp!): "I all but fell on the floor laughing during Madonna's otherwise excellent sit-down with Matt Lauer when she insisted her friends would tell her the truth if she did a movie that sucked. Listen, if pals had been truthful with Madonna, they would have moved heaven and earth to prevent the now infamous remake of 'Swept Away.'" [Liz Smith]
· In "Black Hawk Down," script writer Stephen Gaghan wanted to use a true-life detail from Somalia that the filmmakers wouldn't let in. "The Somalis were recycling rice bags that said 'Gift of the USA' as body bags," he said. "It was a great detail, but they said, 'Don't make the U.S. look bad.' I thought, 'What is this, Mogadishu: the Musical'?" [NY Daily News]
Feminist activist Naomi Wolf reportedly called her lawyers after being the target of an Ali G ambush. (Ali G is, if you haven't heard, a British comedian named Sascha Baron Cohen who disguises himself as a gangsta rapper and does improptu interviews with famous people.) Ali G coaxed her into rapping "Yo, yo, don't be sexist, I'll let you ride in my Lexus."
Feminist writer consults lawyers over Ali G [Ananova]
Greek shipping heir and socialite-turned-social-critic Taki slams Monica Lewinsky, Lizzie Grubman and Rena Sindi in his Speccie column titled "What People Want." On Sindi: "[Former Iraqi Information Minister] Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf is God. The word on the street is that an Iraqi woman living here in the Bagel has hired him. Rena Sindi, the hostess with the mostest for brain-dead nightclub characters, wants to join the upper classes of Noo Yawk, and she s been advised that only the Baghdad ballyhoo master can pull the trick. (He should start by convincing Rena that Puff Daddy [her idol] is not on the Social Register, and his great-grandfather never defended the America's Cup.)"
What people want [Speccie]
Send sightings to tips@gawker.com
· "Barry Diller and a sober Calvin Klein outside Da Silvano waiting for a table."
· Fur-wearing meat-eaters: "former supermodel pals, Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell (in a wig no less!) ducking into Williamsburg steakhouse, Peter Lugers on Tuesday night.."
· "Jack Black and a very thin blond at Kitchenette in Tribeca having breakfast."
From the spiked Atlantic article about Gary Baum's FoE! Log and Dave Eggers: most of Gary s material comes from the kindness of sources; he also has, as he explains, "a whole series of email from weirdos." He reads me the most recent such exchange: "Hello, Dave/Gary," begins the first email, "I see Dave has taken up skywriting over Santa Monica. Cheers, Andy."
A reader offers some intel on the "It Just Hit Me" signs: "It's by this Seattle-based artist. (I am in Seattle.) He exhibited the piece first at this gallery called Roq La Rue (indie gallery here) and then he made posters of it and pasted them all over the city. Guess he's moved on to other pastures."
· "Mayor Bloomberg was 'distressed' to see that so many other guys had found out the annual Central Park Conservancy fund-raising lunch is a great place to meet babes. 'I liked the odds better in the old days,' Hizzoner quipped yesterday. 'Maybe next year I'll give an executive order that the only man allowed at the lunch will be the mayor.'" [NY Daily News]
· The owners of the Cheetah nightclub are forcing patrons to check their cigarettes at the door for $1, (which is probably distressing to the New Jersey and Long Island people who drove all the way into Manhattan to go there.) [Page Six]
· Paris Hilton was in talks with Playboy to bare all for $200,000 until mom, Kathy Hilton, ended the negotiations. [Page Six]
· Liz Smith on the movie version of The Devil Wears Prada: "This fictionalized [Anna Wintour-esque] character is one of the grand villains in pop literature and my ideas for her run from Rene Russo to Helen Mirren to Judy Davis to Susan Sarandon. Anybody in the Cameron Diaz vein will do to assay the beleagured young slave employee..." [Liz Smith]
Choire says that these signs have been popping up all over Manhattan. "The weird thing about New York," an out-of-town visitor said to me several months ago, "is that no one here has 'normal' ambitions. You never meet people who want to work in mid-level management and have a house in the suburbs with the white picket fence. Everyone here is plotting to be a Fortune 500 CEO, or a famous novelist, or a movie star." I'd say that's definitely true for people of a certain age. "You're not going to be famous" is probably the single most depressing thing you could say to most people under the age of 35 in Manhattan.
We're sick of fighting the accusation that Gawker is a blog for yuppies, so we're bringing you a bit of lowbrow culture. There's a lovely little working class game called "golf" that apparently involves little white balls and large swaths of green fields and, uh, something and...something. We don't play it, so we don't know. Tom from Karlo.org notes that there are several "courses" (whatever those are) accessible by subway, and helpfully points them out.
Golf via the subway [Karlo.org]
From Craig's List, titled "An Open Letter to Myself": "I know you really wanted to move here. For ten years all your friends and family heard is how much you wanted to move here. Back "home." Back to where you were born. But various reasons kept you where you were. You were a big fish in a small pond. You enjoyed a comfortable level of class-D celebrity. You hobnobbed with interesting people and famous musicians. You had creative control. You set your own hours. You had fun parties in your sweet house that had so much space you had a room just for a pool table. And you had a pool. And Koi. You had a private back yard with a hammock. But no, you wanted to move to New York. You were missing out, you said."
From a reader: "Re: Heidi Julavits and her claim that 'everybody knows everybody in one way or another', here's an old Web site that used to track—in insanely obsessive detail—every Eggers connection and association. The site was run by Gary Baum, a high school student who ran an interview with Eggers' sister Beth (later reprinted in Harper's) in which she complained that her brother took all the credit for raising their little brother, Toph. Keith Gessen, a freelancer, wrote a 10,000-word piece about Baum, his site, Eggers, and Beth for The Atlantic, but the piece got killed when Beth committed suicide and Eggers appealed to the Atlantic to respect his family's privacy. All of this happened like two or three years ago, but the site is good for teasing-out those lit-world connections."
My manifesto
· Overly enthusiastic celeb spotting: "I just saw everyone at the opening festivities of the Tribeca Film Festival! Renee Zellweger is BEAUTIFUL in person! Like a living barbie doll. Ewan McGregor- Too much makeup. And BONO is unbelievable!"
· "I just came from the Ace Bar tonight (E5th St. between Ave A and B) - 12:30am Friday morning - 3 of the 5 Strokes were there - Julian, Nick and Albert. They are writing songs for their new album. Going into the studio to record their second album at the end of May. Also walking home from Ace Bar - spotted MTV's Gideon Yago with a lady pal at East 4th St. and 2nd Ave."
· "I saw Josh Hamilton at the 10:00 Saturday night performance of Wigfield (starring Strangers With Candy's Amy Sedaris, Steven Colbert and Paul Dinello) in Chicago. He was very cute, despite having two very dark front teeth. "
Tigerbunny writes, "One of the more interesting aspects of living in NYC is the neighbors. Most of the time, these are the kind of neighbors that are heard but not seen. For example, the neighbors that enjoy belting out Enrique Iglesias tunes at their weekly karaoke gathering. More often, it's our neighbor that has the habit of randomly and inexplicably yelling, "HELP!" at least once a day. Finally today after the second "HELP" within the span of the hour, another heard but not seen neighbor responded, "WHAT KIND OF HELP DO YOU NEED, ASSHOLE?!?!?!"
Neighbors [Tigerbunny via Anil]
· Bronx assemblywoman Gloria Davis pleads guilty to bribery charges but only has to pay back $20,000 of the $24,000 she took. [Page Six]
· Joe Pantoliano blames gate crashers for problems at his family reunion in Hoboken. (Not that this excuses recent behavior. A Gawker reader notes that Joey Pants bailed on a book signing in Hoboken around the same time, leaving fans in the lurch.) [Page Six]
· Fashion photog Terry Richardson now dating Sisley model Susan Eldridge. [Page Six]
· Lizzie Grubman's dinner at Otabe interrupted by mice. [Page Six]
