I'll always look back on Thankgsiving, 2003, and treasure my memory of the weekend that Frank Rich finally lost his mind in a really fun way in the New York Times. It's kind of exciting. His opening:
Publishing super-agent Andrew Wylie (AKA the Jackal) on the (totally creepy) keys to success:
Yow! Tina Brown took both the red pill and the blue pill, I think. She's slipped into some unholy Matrix sub-basement. Or maybe she's living in that other bad Lawrence Fishburne movie, the one where the space ship goes to another dimension and everyone ends up all bloody.
Oh, thank God. They're keeping it so real at ABC.
I Want Media is having a contest to name the media person of the 2003. (I Want Media, of course, is the website where nice people who disdain sarcasm and vicious personal attacks read about media— in other words, probably not you.)
New York/Colors's Simon Dumenco and Barney's/Observer's Simon Doonan are often confused. (Hint: Dumenco once said that "You read InStyle, you get exactly what you deserve," and an online reviewer once said of Doonan's last book that you should "get yourself a copy of InStyle instead!") Oh, there are other differences between the two illustrious taste-makers, but let's not quibble.
I don't usually say this, but: meow!
Fakes are flooding file-sharing services like KaZaa and WinMX. Usually titled "Paris Hilton Sex Tape by Rick Solomon," the files range from big beautiful women dancing naked to salsa music (seriously) to relatively generic porn to the Hilton-esque excerpt above, reportedly stolen from "Up and Cummers #98."
Paris Hilton Sex Video Rumors [Daze Reader]
Here's how the Daily News and the NY Post are playing, excuse me, reporting today's news about the Paris Hilton sex tape recording by her ex-lover Rick Solomon.
Today's Telegraph weighs in with a summary of the terrible travails of columnist and talk show hostess Tina Brown. Recent hit jobs on Tina have ranged from Jack Shafer's super-harsh piece on Slate to the Observer's anonymous Tina parody, and of course let's not forget the Washington Post ombudsman's memo which started this dirty snowball rolling. The whole world seems ready to hang Tina out to dry like a towel soaked in yesterday's eau de zeitgeist.
Once upon a time, a young Eric Gillin dreamed of being a gossip columnist. But he became disenchanted on his very first day trying out for the Daily News:
Yesterday was only day four of the Rosie O'Donnell versus G&J trial, and already I feel myself losing interest. It's all contract this, agreement that. Legal blah blah. If Rosie doesn't gun down the courtroom observers with an AK-47 soon, I won't be able to pay attention at all. What kind of media circus is this supposed to be?
College newspapers — such as our own Village Voice, New York Press, and L Magazine — can be a delightful snatch of home-grown journalism. The recently launched Kollege Daily does the useful service of keeping those of us who refuse to go near actual college campuses in touch with the hot news from the kids today.
Certain kinds of junior obsessive media freaks will want to bust out the nipple clamps before reading the following. Ready?
Rosie's magazine lawsuit circus continues on downtown. Yesterday's (possibly disingenuous) notable quotable from Ms. O'Donnell on the subject of fatphobia, gender politics, and language: "What did I do? I'm fat. I yell. Sometimes I say the F-word."
Rosie's Courtroom Day 3 [Ad Age]
War of the Ros(i)es [WWD]
Earlier this year, the New York Press ripped into author Chuck Klosterman. Today, Claire Zulkey interviews Klosterman, and he has some kind words to say on the topic: "That was just weird. I had never read the NY Press before, I had never met (or even heard of) the dude who wrote that piece, and the whole thing was just sort of befuddling. I'm sure most people who saw that piece undoubtedly had no idea who I even was! All in all, I guess I didn't think about it very much. It wasn't all that different than being criticized on some cokehead's blog. I mean, if the guy who wrote that article was smart OR talented, he obviously wouldn't be working for the NY Press."
The Chuck Klosterman Interview [Zulkey]
Yesterday, the Globe was the first legitimate press outlet... Let's start over. Yesterday, the Globe was the first press outlet to publish the name and photo of Kobe Bryant's rape accuser. Female editors ranging from Lucky's Kim France to Elle's Roberta Myers denounce the Globe's choice pretty stridently. Us Weekly's Janice Min is particularly harsh about the naming and the choice of photo (a racy prom pic): "It is misogynistic and truly exploitative to try to get big sales off of identifying an alleged rape victim," she said.
