Media-Whore D'Oeuvres

"Nat Rothschild, dressed in a hooded sweater, jeans and hiking boots, perches on a cowhide sofa in his relatively modest chalet-style apartment in the Swiss ski resort of Klosters. He recalls the fateful day in October 2010 when, as he scanned the globe for business opportunities, he first heard the word Bumi.Ian Hannam, a well-known JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)investment banker, had e-mailed Rothschild suggesting he look at two coal companies, including PT Bumi Resources (BUMI), linked to the Bakrie family, a powerful Indonesian business dynasty. 'He said it was the best deal he had ever seen in his life,' Rothschild says. Hannam’s approach was the first step down a path that would lead to an ugly boardroom brawl pitting Rothschild against the Bakries. As it unfolded, the clash would see the two sides trading claims of e-mail hacking, bad faith and fraud. It would leave few reputations, including Rothschild’s, unscathed.'I am the first to admit we made a terrible mistake,' Rothschild, 41, says of his decision to partner with the Bakries ... Nathaniel Rothschild, scion of a family synonymous with financial success, is the youngest of four children of Jacob, the 4th Baron Rothschild, 77, who heads RIT Capital Partners Plc (RCP), which managed 2 billion pounds ($3.1 billion) as of March 31.t the University of Oxford, Nat acquired a party-boy image that would haunt him throughout his 20s. Rothschild, who’s dating a 22-year-old model, Daisy Cummings, doesn’t drink or smoke these days and generally is in bed by 9:30 p.m. 'I lead a very boring life,' he says. Rothschild’s professional life has been anything but boring." (Bloomberg Markets)

"I went down to the Wednesday Michael’s to lunch with Jamee Gregory who contributes to the NYSD from time to time, and has published two big coffee table books on New York Apartments and New York Parties.Michael’s was its busy busy self. Dan Rather put in an appearance, lunching at a corner table with Eliot Sptitzer. Right next door to them, Da Mayah of Michael’s, Joe Armstrong was present for the first time in many weeks, back from two months in Jerusalem working on one of Paul Newman’s special school projects, lunching with Dave Zinczenko and his partner who have just re-launched Men’s Fitness. Right next door, Donny Deutsch with two ladies. At Table one, the Hollywoodlife.com gang -- Bonnie Fuller, Gerry Byrne, Carlos Lamadrid were hosting a tableful of media  and public relations honchos" (NYSD)

and public relations honchos.  
"'It’s grotesque! I hate this hotel!' says Sir John Richardson as I enter a fourth-floor suite giving on to a sweeping vista of the Thames and the London Eye. 'I’m in my 90th year but this place makes me feel 100.' High quality global journalism requires investment.  Richardson is in town to receive the London Library’s Life in Literature award, one of many honours, including a knighthood, accorded him for his multi-volume, still unfinished biography of Pablo Picasso. Volume One appeared in 1991, Volume Four is expected next year.But such has been his varied, busy life – he launched Christie’s New York; watched Georges Braque ('so good-looking!') complete his last paintings; got ejected from WH Auden’s villa on Ischia for seducing the poet’s secretary in the garden; owns a legendary art collection, ranging from Picassos to a whale’s penis, housed in his Fifth Avenue apartment; and is now consultant to über-dealer Larry Gagosian – that queues of artists, publishers, collectors, scholars supplicate for his attention on this brief visit to England. A sculptor precedes me (the first breakfast), a trip to Oxford follows – to give the inaugural lecture at Ertegun House, the new humanities centre launched by the widow of Richardson’s old friend Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records. 'Ahmet was a great character, very intelligent and well-read, you’d have loved him. He was the son of the Turkish ambassador in Washington. He noticed that the ballroom in the embassy wasn’t being used so he got these jazz musicians, working as taxi drivers, to come and play. He went into the record business and made a hell of a lot of money.'" (FT)

"The DreamWorks Animation chief talks about his first big break at Paramount and other high points of his career." (Businessweek)

"I started out as a Greta Gerwig fan, awed by her lovely, loopy performance as the titular lost post-grad in 2007's Hannah Takes the Stairs. She was as refreshingly familiar as she was Aryan and unknowable, like Grace Kelly had allowed her eggs to be fused with Gilda Radner's in a genetics experiment dreamed up by an anxious hipster. Gerwig's comfort in her own skin and her discomfort with the pained social code of the 20s male made her an instant heroine to me and a fantasy friend. Cut to September 2008. I was taking my dog for an evening walk, and we stopped into the lower Broadway office space of Red Bucket Films. There was Greta: hangin' out, fresh-faced, gesticulating wildly. I was excited by her and she was excited by my dog, and I forced the conversation to go on and on. Later we shared a cramped office space for a while in that same building, where we made an audition tape for Greta that included the line 'the pterodactyl retreats!' which she delivered with surprising subtlety. It's been a true thrill to witness what some might call 'Greta's dizzying ascent' and what I call 'Greta kicking ass.' Her self-assuredly self-effacing performance in Greenberg made Ben Stiller look like he'd just taken a ride on a tilt-a-whirl (in a good way -- he was also great, she just threw him for a loop!), and she brings a third and fourth dimension to the sassy sidekick in No Strings Attached. Every time she's on a talk show, the host's eyes seem to ask, 'There are girls like this!?' And soon everybody's going to get a double dose: Arthur (in which she takes on another dude -- comedy dynamo, Russell Brand) in April (2011), and in Whit Stillman's deeply anticipated summer film, Damsels in Distress. We met for breakfast at Odeon so I could ask her probing questions and revel in the fact that she's finally my friend." (Lena Dunham/Papermag)

"Nabokov’s conception of the artist as quasi-divine inventor means that—as is the case with one of his great heroes, James Joyce—critics tend to find themselves in the role of enchanted hunters looking for clues and connections, spotting recondite allusions, praising the novels’ elaborate artistry, or elucidating labyrinthine patterns. It would take a bold critic to read such a dazzling, seemingly omniscient, and utterly self-conscious oeuvre as depicting the bars of Nabokov’s own cage. Andrea Pitzer doesn’t, perhaps, go quite that far, but she does invite us to step back a little and ponder the oddness of the relationship Nabokov’s writings create between the fictive and the historical. She does this by contrasting him with another Russian writer much lauded in the West, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Shortly after Solzhenitsyn was deported from the Soviet Union in 1974, he arranged to meet Nabokov and his wife for lunch at the Montreux Palace Hotel. Pitzer’s opening chapter describes the Nabokovs awaiting the arrival of the Soviet Union’s most famous dissident in a private dining room of their hotel. While their personalities and experiences could hardly have been more different, the two writers’ shared hatred of communism would surely have created plenty of common ground for discussion. In the event, Solzhenitsyn never showed up, possibly fearing a put-down from the aristocratic Nabokovs, who indeed thought little of Solzhenitsyn as a writer. Pitzer, however, makes deft use of this aborted encounter, tracing the different paths each had taken to literary stardom: Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag, Nabokov in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, then at Wellesley and Cornell; the one compiling a vast and irrefutable indictment of Soviet abuses, the other studiously avoiding direct treatment of this harrowing topic in his fiction. Animating Pitzer’s retelling of Nabokov’s life, however, is her contention that Nabokov did in fact weave various explicit references to historical events into his fiction, and indeed that ;behind the art-for-art’s sake façade that Nabokov both cultivated and rejected, he was busy detailing the horrors of his era and attending to the destructive power of the Gulag and the Holocaust in one way or another across four decades of his career.' Dazzled by Nabokov’s 'linguistic pyrotechnics,' readers and critics have simply overlooked these details." (NYRB)