Media-Whore D'Oeuvres



(image via vidfad)

"Pint-sized Mary-Kate Olsen has cut a particularly wide swath through the town. On Wednesday night, Olsen and Kirsten Dunst got into a heated argument while sitting together at Audi's party at the Delano in South Beach. 'They just kind of stared at each other for a long time and then started exchanging nasty words,' says an onlooker. 'Then Olsen just got up and left. She's been going really late every night.' Olsen and her boyfriend, artist Nate Lowman, were also out until dawn with DJ Paul Sevigny at club Bella Rose the night before ..Earlier that night, Dunst, a staple of the downtown party circuit who did a stint in rehab for depression this year, tried flirting with newly crutch-less (and Gisele Bundchen-less) Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, to no avail. She later left the bar with Brady's manager, Will McDonald." (Page Six)

"Jennifer Rubell's annual Art Basel Breakfast ,which is known for its conceptual fabulousness, did not disappoint. Those who showed up yesterday morning at the Rubell Family Collection expecting eggs and bacon were in for a surprise and a visual feast. Upon arriving, the guests were floored by a mountain of bananas, a buffet table stocked with a grocery aisle full of cereals, another table with gallons and gallons of both regular and soy milk in coolers and another table with a long row of white kitchen counter coffee pots. It was like an edible art installation. I made myself a bowl of Pops and Special K with soy milk. It was simply brilliant!" (Papermag)

"A funny thing happened to me on my way out from a party on November 17 in London. I was temporarily confused until I ran into Naomi Campbell in the Royal Hospital Gardens. She was carrying some packages into her car and offered me a ride . 'Are you going on to Andrew’s?' she asked sweetly. 'Hop in, I’ll take you.' We chatted away, and I reminded her how she once had applied a vice-like grip around my neck when I was about to leave the dance floor and decapitate a poisoned dwarf who had thrown a missile at me. It was a private party in a private house and the poisoned one had issues about his ex-wife and myself. 'My God,' I told Naomi, 'lucky for me you don’t enter senior judo tournaments for men.' She smiled sweetly and kept her eyes on the road. Did I put the moves on her? At my age sports cars are not the best venues for great sex, so she lucked out .. The next evening was spent at Prince Pavlos’s abode for Pia Getty’s birthday, and the night after that at Chantal Hanover’s for a goodbye party that I had to break up because my flight to the (NYC) was scheduled for 8.30 a.m. Three nights of seeing old friends is all I can take nowadays. I stayed at the Bismarcks as I am between flats, and that’s always a treat, except when England beat Germany in a friendly. Once back at The Bagel, the mother of my children wanted to know why I looked so drawn and suddenly even older than I am. Liquid diet, was the answer." (TakiMag)



"'They call her the black widow. Every program she touches turns to death,' growled our source. 'She is on very thin ice.' That was how Page Six described Universal Media Studio President Katherine Pope last month in a suspiciously positioned item foisting blame for the network's disastrous string of recent offerings—shows like Bionic Woman, My Own Worst Enemy, Lipstick Librarians, and freshly squeezed lemon Knight Rider—on her fetchingly exposed shoulders. Nikki Finke accuses Silverman of having leaked the items himself ('that's one of the fringe benefits of his selling his Reveille to Elisabeth Murdoch and yachting with her this summer') in her analysis of today's shakeup that saw not just Pope's exit, but that of NBC Entertainment EVP Teri Weinberg, as well. (Weinberg was the D-girl Silverman brought over from Reveille who was later discovered in the compromising position technically referred to in the business as shtupping your showrunner. Because no one ever fucks anyone they work with in Hollywood—ever.)" (Defamer)



(Angela Bromstad via getty)

"Angela Bromstad is coming back. Bromstad, who left her post as president of NBC Universal TV Studios in May 2007 to head the company's outpost in London, is relocating back to Los Angeles to take on a major role starting in January, sources said. She is speculated to possibly oversee both the studio, now called Universal Media Studios, and NBC Entertainment under co-chairman Ben Silverman as NBC undergoes restructuring to become more of a global content company. UMS was downsized this year when the cable production division was put under NBC Uni Cable Entertainment president Bonnie Hammer. With Bromstad's arrival, Katherine Pope, who succeeded Bromstad in the studio president post, is leaving." (TheHollywoodReporter)

"As the resumes pour into Obamaland, what I want to know is: How do I apply to be on (The Rachel Maddow Show)? It's the only show that has my sensibility." (Jay Rosen/Twitter)

"Schmitt’s ideas did indeed come to be reflected in the foreign and legal policy of the Bush Administration. Leo Stauss’s dismissal of international law and his support for the strong-man leader came to the United States primarily through Hans Morgenthau. Morgenthau’s influence in U.S. foreign policy from the 1960s forward has been extraordinary. By then, the very highest U.S. officials were no longer speaking the language of international law and institutions but of projecting American power. U.S. legal thinkers, of course, took note, and, by the 1960s were also focused on the Civil Rights movement and the Women’s Movement. Those movements were primarily concerned with constitutional law, and constitutional law became the prestige topic in U.S. law schools—some top schools no longer even taught international law. The result was that by the 1990s, international law was increasingly being mischaracterized as weak, unimportant or even dangerous—nothing that should fetter the superior American state. And Bush officials were able to find in the Constitution support for a strong-man leader above the law in wartime. (Hersch) Lauterpacht and (Hans)Kelsen, by contrast, always held the law to be superior to the leader. For questions affecting affairs beyond the state that law had to be international law. And, of course, this is the view of the Constitution that the Founders held. They read Grotius and Vattel, who understood that law is superior to men." (Harper's)

"Britney's comeback is official! My 18 year old daughter+ her friends at Emerson College, all want to buy concert tickets for her new tour!" (Bonnie Fuller/Twitter)

"At the end of a week of intense laying-off in television, the Media Mob has learned from several sources at the network that ABC executives are considering cuts to the news division. The focus would be on a slimming down of political units the network bulked up during the presidential campaign. Rumors about the cuts have been circulating for weeks now around the ABC News offices, but the rumors have numbers: The cuts could affect as many as 35 staffers and would take effect in the new year." (Observer)

"There was no racial outcry as O.J. Simpson was put behind bars. Simpson was revealed as a rather mundane criminal, both arrogant and stupid. When Judge Jackie Glass lowered the boom of serious time on O.J. Simpson in Las Vegas on December 5, 2008, we saw many things come to an end. Barack Obama had been elected president a month earlier but the robbery led by Simpson and for which he was convicted and sentenced drew none of the racial profiling of reason like his murder trial 13 years before. Judge Glass said something before she sentenced O.J. Simpson to what could amount to 33 years in the gray bar hotel. Mention was made of a bail bond hearing at which she could not fail to wonder aloud if the defrocked hero was arrogant or stupid or both. Glass reached the conclusion that he was both by the end of the trial." (Stanley Crouch/TheDailyBeast)

"There was a buzz in Silicon Valley on Nov. 4, long before President-elect Barack Obama ’s victory was certain. The high-tech sector had a major prize in hand by lunchtime on the West Coast: A unanimous Federal Communications Commission decision to open prime wireless spectrum long dedicated to protecting over-the-air television signals — the 'white spaces' between broadcast signals — for unlicensed use by mobile technology devices. Google, Microsoft and other Internet heavyweights had been pushing hard for the white-space ruling, since it promises to loosen telecommunications companies’ grip on the commercial airwaves while also clearing the way for sophisticated new applications of wireless technology. It hadn’t been a smooth ride, however — white-spaces advocates had been challenged by nearly every player in the technology lobby in Washington, all fighting to protect the status quo. The election proper was the big payoff for Internet advocates, however." (CQPolitics)

"Snooty Scarlett Johannson put noses out of joint at the London premiere of film The Spirit. The whingeing star swanned past fans who had been waiting for hours, refusing to pose for pics. Inside she chucked a brown mac over her dress and sulked in the VIP area for 15 minutes before legging it out the back to George Clooney's party across town. Cheeky mare!" (3AMGirls)

"Spoke to a small town banker on the Downeast Coast of Maine to learn a strange fact about how Treasury is handling the $700 billion TARP. His bank has a clean balance sheet, several branches, private stock issue, with a local, sophisticated board spanning families and generations, and it does a deal of business in commercial, real estate and autos. When TARP was announced in late September, the Maine bank board's opinion was that it was not for us, we don't need a hand-out, we don't want government interference, we don't like the whole idea of taking tax-payer money. But then they listened to advisers who said that the government was urging everyone to apply, that there was no stigma, that the government would have a light hand, especially since they owned a healthy bank. The application was accepted quickly and soon $26 million showed up in a ribbon. The bank had been unable to make as many loans as it wanted before TARP, because businesses had grown so cautious, reluctant, fearful that expansion will leave them short if the recession depens and lengthens. Now with the $26 million on hand, they can't do more than bank it. My banker source shrugs. 'Maybe they're lying to us and the economy is much worse than even the TV says. We can't be sure, so we'll keep it. It's very cheap money. We sold them preferred stock at 5%. We'll buy it back after three years. Cheap money.'" (JohnBatcheloeShow)



"Last night, the Brooks Brothers store was filled with the sound of little feet at the Saint Jude’s Hospital Holiday Party. Gossip Girl cast members Matthew Settle, Chace Crawford, and Taylor Momsen were in attendence, as well as the Harlem Alumni Choir, the legendary Wynton Marsalis, and Santa Claus." (Guestofaguest)



"This is the first time in three years that I've decided to embrace Art Basel Miami. A lot of people I spoke with wondered how different this year's would be because of the economy, but staying at the newly minted Fontainebleau, you'd hardly notice that a recession has been in full swing for over a year. Funny, this is where I also stayed three years ago, but now it's barely recognizable .. Last night in the lobby, before heading to PUMAVision and the Rubell Family dinner for the exhibition and book 30 Americans, I spotted A-Ron the Downtown Don chatting with Paul Sevigny .. A lot of New York journalists were there as well as a bevy of international editors from all over the world including China and India. I ran into Ryan McGinley who rode up there on a moped. Kehinde Wiley, who's among the 30 artists, was present in a coral- colored suit alongside many other artists who are in the show." (Papermag)