Media-Whore D'Oeuvres



"Carla Bruni-Sarkozy doesn’t like to open herself up while she’s lying down—at least not when she’s in therapy. That’s one of the things that France’s first lady reveals in the television documentary La Première Séance (The First Session). In a country where therapy retains a stigma in some circles, an array of writers, filmmakers, celebrities, and normal people share their feelings about their first visits to the therapist’s office. The film is sure to garner plenty of attention—especially for Bruni ...41-year-old Bruni, who resisted analysis until she was 28, has spent a total of eight years in therapy. What suddenly drove Bruni into therapy 13 years ago, back when she was still a huntress of men, inspired by the writings of sexual revolutionaries like Simone de Beauvoir and Françoise Sagan? She has said she started therapy to prepare her for the next stages of her life and to overcome her 'narcissism.' It turns out that she dived into therapy after she learned the family secret. While her very wealthy parents were often too busy to be very present in her life—she was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, and then she began modeling to become independent as soon as possible—their complex relationship planted a profound unease in her, even if, for most of her life, she didn’t understand why. But when Alberto Bruni Tedeschi was dying in the mid-1990s, he finally revealed the truth: He wasn’t her real father. Maurizio Remmert, the very young scion of another prominent rich Milanese family, was a classical guitarist who played with Carla’s pianist mother, it turned out, in more ways than one." (TheDailyBeast)



"The Kremlin doesn't rig elections; it engineers them. This is something everyone in Russia, no matter what their rhetoric or political persuasion, knows and accepts. So when recent local elections returned some unusual results, the only surprise was the intensity of the backlash. On Sunday, Oct. 11, 76 of Russia's 83 regions went to the polls in some 7,000 regional and municipal elections. In the weeks leading up to the event, the government pushed and pushed Russians to register to vote. But because these were local elections in a country where everything is centered on the so-called Kremlin 'power vertical,' and because Russians, long shut out of the process, don't much believe in participatory democracy anymore, only about 30 million (out of 140 million) registered. And when the day came, even fewer showed up to vote. On Election Day in Moscow, which was holding elections for the Moscow Duma, turnout was a meager 29 percent. If government employees and their families hadn't been forced to vote, the figure would have been much, much lower. All of which is to say: No one cares. Russian elections are a known and tightly choreographed quantity." (ForeignPolicy)



"Howard (Stern) got Mike Walker from The National Enquirer on the line, as he does every Thursday, to play 'The Gossip Game,' in which Mike reads four gossip items – three (allegedly) true, one false – and the crew has to pick the fake. This week's stories: 1. Woody Harrelson paid a homeless guy $100 to promote 'Zombieland' on a piece of cardboard. 2. Cameron Diaz personally scrubbed her on-set trailer's bathroom. 3. Madonna shocked SNL staffers by leaving her dressing room door wide open as she flexed in front of the mirror in her underwear, yelling: 'Aren't I f’ing awesome?!' 4. 'Hills' star Lauren Conrad wrecked her new Audi two days in a row. Robin, Artie and Fred all went the Cameron Diaz item and Howard went with the Madonna story. Mike then announced that no one was right – the Lauren Conrad story was false." (HowardStern)



"Oliver Stone didn't want starving actors trying to pass themselves off as wealthy Upper East Siders in 'Wall Street 2,' so he hired some of his uptown friends as extras. Stone's been filming all over town with Shia LaBeouf and Josh Brolin. On Wednesday, Stone shot a scene in the East 65th Street townhouse of socialite 'Baby Jane' Holzer, where the daughter of Brolin's rapacious character is playing a piano recital for charity. Guests included Julia (Mrs. David) Koch, Vogue's Hamish Bowles, Vanity Fair's Amy Fine Collins, former Paine Webber Chairman Donald Marron, and publicist Peggy Siegal, as the wife of square-jawed war hero Chuck Pfeifer, who was in the original 'Wall Street.'" (PageSix)



"At Michael’s I was meeting Sarah Simms Rosenthal, Julianne Marie, Annette Tapert and Joan Jakobson. My lunch dates, I realize, were all in the process of publishing a book ...Michael’s, just two blocks from Broadway. Then the talk was about Streisand. How that came up I don’t know. Although different people at the table either had personal experiences with her or had close friends who did. A portrait was formed, although it should be acknowledged, none of us knows her personally.The final analysis: Humorless, rude, selfish, rude, inconsiderate, egomaniacal, rude, insensitive, and an all around lotta fun ... Then, just in time to rescue Bah-Bra from the trash heap of history, Liz Smith came by the table with Jordan Roth, the new head of the Jujamcyn Theaters, which is a theatrical real estate/production organization similar to the Shuberts. Theater owners are businessmen with (they hope) a special nose for a hit show. Rather like the show business version of a perfumier. Mr. Roth, who already has some serious stage production under his belt, and is the son of producer Daryl Roth, is just this side of being too old to be called a wunderkind, but looks-wise could almost be a teen-ager (He’s 33). Last night, early evening, I went down to the PaceWildenstein at 32 East 57th Street where they were holding a private preview reception for David Hockney and his first exhibition of new paintings in New York since the late 1990s." (NYSocialDiary)