It's hard out there for a young writer, especially if you're blogging all up on the HuffPo! Jessica Wakeman wasn't sure how to make her writerly dreams come true, so with adorable naivete, she asked Vanessa Grigoriadis, the successful but occasionally-mocked writer of Rolling Stone articles, Britney meltdown-profiles, and creative-underclass blogger chronicling. Vanessa's response? "You need a strategy."
Momofuko Ko is, as NYT food critic Frank Bruni tells us, "a new restaurant from David Chang, and David Chang is at this point the New York restaurant world's equivalent of Tiger Woods or Roger Federer." It has 12 seats. Their democratic Web 2.0 booking system requires everyone—yes, everyone—to go online at 10 a.m. and make reservations for the limited number of seats available that week. We love the idea. No calling Graydon Carter's office for a chance at the Waverly: here's the one place in New York where your precious connections and friends can't get you preferential treatment over the slobbering masses lining up for their share of the fancy chow-time.
Sloane Crosley: the 29-year-old publishing publicist is everywhere these days, pending the release of her first book of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake. (It's been this way ever since young Leon Neyfakh at the Observer profile-swooned over her "shiny hair.") Does she use her much-lauded publicist superpowers on herself? However, we have a feeling that Sloane knows there might be haters out in that catty little media world of hers... and thusly attempts to takes herself down a peg in her author bio for her essay in Esquire, which is a long, possibly over-cute rumination on why she ended her book the way she did.
Self-referential LA Times humor person Joel Stein finally says "fuck everything" today, and writes a column about Julia Allison [LAT]. Yes. He calls her "a genius," but perhaps this was just a bit of flattery to draw some good quotes out of her. Here she is explaining the thinking behind her fake role as "editor at large" for Star, in an interview she gives via cell phone while shopping for clothes: "The people who do corporate strategy are understanding the power of three or four minutes on a cable network or a morning show. It's the best publicity you can get. Oh, that is the cutest dress I've ever seen. Oh my! Oh my God! I can't handle it. Anyway, with the advent of 24-hour news networks, you have an incredible amount of air time to fill." Shopping and building her brand at the same time! In case you're still stuck in the old, outdated journalism world, Julia breaks down how she is really just as smart as—or smarter than—any other REPORTER or whatever:
Who has a stalker? The "recovering editorial assistant" behind Editorial Ass has a stalker! "An unsolicited author came into our offices looking for me. I have no idea how he got my name—I'd never met him before. But he came in asking for me by name and carrying his unsolicited manuscript. Now he has somehow learned my direct [phone] line..." Some of the following rules may be obvious to you; for instance, "never show up in person at a publishing company." Also, you're gonna want to put down that phone.
A YouTuber (no, it's not the same one who gets a million views whenever she stares at the camera, yes I'm sure they all look alike but bear with me) explains how to max out "cute Japanese girl" playability. Turns out it's even simpler than bashing your head against a wall screaming "why doesn't anyone watch my carefully made skits?" Just play Japanese music, flash a peace sign, wave, and stare. The most popular girls don't talk, just like in the good old days!
Would you read a tell-all book from two former concierges at Chicago's upscale Four Seasons Hotel? Well, you can't: Random House/Three Rivers Press has canceled Great Reservations: Two Concierges Dish About Outrageous Requests, Celebrity Encounters, and Guests Behaving Badly at a Luxury Hotel. For making it all up? No, it's because they were "legally banned" from writing about said experiences by signing a confidentiality agreement with their former employer. Gotta read the fine print, gals! (The book had "anecdotes on such celebrities as Madonna (who had a 'phobialike aversion' to air conditioning) and Sir Anthony Hopkins," reports the AP.)
Memoirists are so screwed: it's gotten to the point where you can't even sleep with tons of prostitutes without having to present a receipt for verification anymore. We already told you how British debauched dandy Sebastian Horsley, author of Dandy in the Underworld, was barred from entering the States for his very own book party, due to his checkered past. Now the NYT is forced, in the wake of a rash of fake memoirists, to contort itself into a variety of amusing positions in order to verify his story! Details on the memoir: "a debauched life of cocaine, heroin, opium and amphetamine use, writing that he spent more than £100,000 (nearly $200,000) on crack cocaine and £100,000 to consort with more than 1,000 prostitutes."
How to get bloggers to blog about you or your project? Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing tells us how, in seventeen easy steps. He's been tracking what makes a website "blogger-unfriendly," ranging from "have a link," to "PDFs suck" to more stuff we already know! For blog-beginners in the nascent phases of internet domination, it may be helpful. [Information Week]
The bad news for Eliot Spitzer is that he's been linked to a prostitution ring. But the good news is that it's a high-class prostitution ring. He's not the first public person to get caught having inappropriate sex, and he won't be the last. Spitzer's reputation as the moral Governor may be over — and our idealization of Spitzer ended before this scandal — but that doesn't mean his career is. In the case of sex scandal, there are three models Spitzer can follow.
Whoops! Spitzer ain't the only john to be caught up in a prostitution ring... but a classy one. We provide a very brief, very incomplete history of so-called high-class organizations offering the services of paid girls.
The celebrity-media complex is so bizarre and strange. People get famous for no reason, or for the reason of being attractive and on TV, and the unattractive and un-famous become obsessed with them. Perhaps no one is more qualified to point out the nuances of the Faustian bargain celebrities engage in than Ashton Kutcher. Why is this guy a star? Sure, he's married to someone famous, but as an actor, the range he showed from Kelso to Dude 1 in Dude, Where's My Car? wasn't exactly Meryl Streep-esque. So his new show, Pop Fiction, tricks tabloids and blogs into writing fake stories. Zach Taylor, one of the hoodwinked bloggers, is frankly flattered to have been fooled into writing about the fake pregnancy of Avril Lavigne. And now I'm writing about Ashton Kutchner, and promoting his new show with a clip of Paris Hilton pretending to be spiritual (which we sorta covered, at the time) after the jump. The guy might not be a good actor, but he is good at what he does. Whatever that may be.
We realize that former mag queen Tina Brown is still a "name" and Hillary Clinton's last week was a compelling story (resembling though it did so many of her previous weeks) but isn't there a wee bit of favoritism involved in a newsweekly running a front page story on a presidential candidate written by a woman who needs that candidate to become president in order for her forthcoming book to actually sell? [Newsweek]
Hillary Clinton's making a comeback! But not! Because trend lines are never wrong, this graph proves why Barack Obama does better every time Clinton wins a state primary.
"My brother did 3 tours in Iraq so someone could drive around in this!?!?!!?" That's what Rebecca from Minneapolis wants to know about this stupid Hummer. So she flipped the bastard off! Luckily for her, there's a website called FUH2.com, devoted exclusively to pictures of people flipping off Hummers (H2 version only). We judge this to be a good thing. After the jump, five pictures illustrating the different styles that patriotic Americans have used to give the gas-guzzling monsters the one-finger salute. May this be the first step towards justice in the world!
Sheila didn't come into work yesterday... as it turns out, she had a good excuse. As I was led through the subway station in handcuffs Tuesday night, a young girl called after me, "Oooh, undercover got you, didn't they? What you did, ma?" Good question! All I did was drink a beer from a paper bag while waiting for the F train. Trashy habit, and technically illegal, but who cares, right? In fact, the NYPD cares very much. What followed was twenty-four hours in two jails, hours in handcuffs, and eventual dismissal in that three-ring circus known as Night Court. Everything I need to know about life, I learned in the female prisoner holding pen in the Tombs.
