Continuing the idiot trend of ludicrous footwear for every imbecile occasion, a pair of sneakers celebrating popular downtown gastropub The Spotted Pig are now available to the general public. This set, in Batali Orange, should be in stores soon. Fair warning: If we see you on the street wearing these, we will punch you in the colon, hard.
Dear Brooklyn: Like a sugared-up 11-year-old, you're always claiming things. Sometimes it's "That dirty Pole touched me in a bad place." Sometimes it's "We invented electroclash and it's good!" A lot of the time your outrageous claims have to do with babies and how great life is and the joys of microbrewing beer. You know: Lies. Over the years we've started to ignore you—which meant when you came to us yodeling about a tornado yesterday, we smiled, nodded and backed away. I guess it's just hard for all of us to tell your "personal" truth, the James Frey kind of truth, from the actual truth sometimes. Maybe you should go back to your "great apartment" and think about that?
TMZ.com, the celebrity website dedicated to the destruction of the west's 5000-year tradition of literacy and culture, ups the ante today: They're launching Star vs. Star, an online game "combining the fantasy sports craze with the world's obsession for all things celebrity."
"My today's Paris Hilton item. Supposedly she was seen at the Beverly Hills Hotel newsstand checking the latest publications. Seeing if she's in them. If she was, she bought it. If not, not. I can't believe she didn't buy everything. She's in everything. So I almost doubt my own item. So I almost think I should punish myself. But who can have a column without something about Paris Hilton, right? I mean, even if it's only semi partially right, right?" Is... everything okay over there, Cindy? [Cindy Adams]
Today Gatecrasher reported on yet another party for socialite Holly Peterson's "book" The Manny, the racist-'viral'-marketing marred debut whose lack of even trashy-fun value we noted a while back. It's, like, the tenth party we've heard of for this book, which came out in June, so far, and we were all ready to make a joke along the lines of "10 parties, that's one for every book that someone actually went into a store and purchased!" So we looked up Nielsen Bookscan numbers in an attempt to confirm our hunch. Bookscan tracks about 70% of retail sales, but doesn't track bulk buys ("special sales.") We rubbed our hands together gleefully, waiting for the dismal digits to appear on our screen.
A woman with a boa and a dream and a bad laugh has emerged from the hubbub of the internet triumphant. "The kids at Gawker are going to go crazy tomorrow," predicted LA Observed last night. Well, yes. We are. Like, we might have to be put in protective custody. For Mediabistro, everyone's favorite amalgamation of freelancer message boards and half-hearted blogs, which gets 50,000 unique visitors a month, has been acquired for $23 million by Jupitermedia. (That's $38 for each person who came to their website last year!) We don't know what to say except: Wow. Holy hell, wow. There's something really wrong with the economy. I guess we have to say congratulations to Laurel. It seems like if we had any brains at all we would have done that ourselves.
In Sunday's Arts & Leisure section, Virginia Heffernan deconstructs websites that make a living making fun of bad photographs of celebrities. And where does she turn for an authoritative analysis? Why, our fave crack art historian, Perez Hilton!
As gossip site TMZ's syndicated television show approaches its initial air date of September 10—and in advance of what will no doubt be a busy day tomorrow with Paris Hilton's release from jail—the New York Times takes a look at the Associated Press of breaking vagflash news and finds that not only is it profitable ("one of the few remnants of the AOL-Time Warner merger that has resulted in some cross-platform success"), it's not much different from every other gossip-gathering organization. It pays for stories (er, "collateral materials") and thrives on the fear of celebrity flacks, who know they need to fill the TMZ tip jars with publishable material if they want to stay in the game.
Have you ever loved a magazine so much that you wanted to reach out and touch it in its special internet-place? Yeah, us neither. Apparently, though, some Facebook-inclined people need to have this kind of relationship with New York magazine. They want to tell it their thoughts, like "I wish 2 be the editor of NY MAG ONE DAY!" Good luck with that, Sarah Sarway (Yeshiva of Flatbush). Also, if you ask a question on the Wall, there's a chance that ice-princess publicist Serena Torrey will deign to lower herself to personally answering you. Her avatar is a photograph of three pigs. The pigs represent Adam Moss, Bruce Wasserstein, and the younger Wasserstein who secretly owns the magazine. Or: ignorance, stealth, and narcissism. Or: the three vanities. Or: Appolonia 6. Go on, poke her!
We [Heart] New York magazine! [Facebook]
We complain a lot about Park Slope parents and their double-wide Bugaboos and such, but to our knowledge, no parents have yet been spotted with a $4,000 nine-karat gold accented Maclaren stroller, or a $17,000 diamond-encrusted pacifier, or a $3,000 made-to-order Goyard diaper bag, or even an $850 Gucci baby carrier. Not yet! There's lots more in this Forbes slide show about the "Hippest Baby Bling" (the Louis Vuitton diaper bag is a relative bargain at $1,870) that rational people might find completely insane, but fortunately, Forbes manages to find a way to justify these expenditures.
"Put a professional football player, three actors, a reality star and a pop star in a room together, and what do you get?" asks the Post. Answer: something so intensely sad and degrading that it makes us want to move to an isolated cabin far away from this deranged city of has-beens right now. Apparently someone named Jay Galvin, who is paid by clubs to drag in D-listers and is "famous for his vodka and cranberries," has assembled a wannabe 'Entourage'-style posse that is so pathetic that its Vince is purported popstar Ryan Cabrera! Everyone else, including American Idol castoff turned soap star Constantine Maroulis, football player Michael Strahan, Stiffler from American Pie, and the Vote for Pedro guy from Napoleon Dynamite, is sort of Turtle. Once they partied so hard that Ryan threw up inside of his mouth!
No wonder Scarlett Johansson always has that creepy feeling that someone's stealing her fingernails. I wonder if they smell as delicious as she does—like strawberries and lotion and rain and delicate clay pots drying in the sun!
Rocketboom present (Andrew Baron) and past (Amanda Congdon) were there, as were Kent Nichols and Doug Sarine, creators of Ask A Ninja. I also got fleeting glimpses of Cali Lewis from GeekBrief.TV and Alex Lindsay of Pixel Corps and This Week in Tech fame.
I say again. Where were the audio people?
Someone did a Joy Division sneaker for New Balance, on sale in the U.K. now. Yeah, that's how we always pictured Ian Curtis. Jogging like a prat. Maybe with some ankle weights, and a track suit! Right up until the moment he hanged himself.
Not everyone is pleased by the news that the Hampton Jitney will be making stop(s?) in Brooklyn this spring. Upper West Siders, usually a restrained, voiceless group, are complaining that they lack similar service, even though they live in Manhattan. The downtrodden residents of the better borough sing of their suffering.
Arise, ye lowly denizens of Brooklyn, and avail yourselves of the comfort of the Hampton Jitney. Yes, even though thee are of lowly, outer-borough stock, the ceaseless efforts of Marty Markowitz, your portly champion, have borne fruit: Come the first note of green in the meadow, the fancy carriage formerly reserved for the lords and ladies of Manhattan will deign to enter your foul-smelling territory (possibly even at multiple stops) and transport you to your jobs as scullery maids to the gentry of the East End and South Fork. Be sure to wear shoes; this ain't no LIRR.
