Media-Whore D'Oeuvres



"After weeks of speculation, The New York Times published its supposed career-ending story about New York Governor David Paterson. Longtime aide David Johnson, his outsized salary, and his many run-ins with the law are the main focus of the piece, and Paterson escapes for the most part unscathed." (Lloyd Grove/TheDailyBeast)



(image via michaelsblog)

"I went to lunch at Michael’s. Michael’s was even on the quiet side although it seemed every table was taken. Next to me, Richard Rubenstein, the pr exec was lunching with a client; Director Irwin Winkler was with director Joel Schumacher. Patricia Duff was next door with a table of political people. On the other side of the directors Stan Shuman was lunching with Chancellor of the Schools, Joel Klein. And next to them advertising magnate Carl Spielvogel was with Eliot Spitzer. Across the way from them, Jamee Gregory was with Anne Eisenhower Flottl, and Tina Brown was with someone whose face I didn’t see." (NYSocialDiary)



"On the morning of Wednesday, Feb. 10, George Stephanopoulos was sitting in the Good Morning America studio, overlooking Times Square, crossing his legs. Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper sat a few feet away. Outside a blizzard was swirling. Viewers were snowed in ... It was Mr. Stephanopoulos’ 49th birthday. What a crazy year it had been! Just last night, on the eve of the snowstorm, he had gone on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. Predictably, that joker had asked him a variation of the same thing he’d been getting repeatedly since December, when ABC News announced that he was leaving the Sunday-morning politics circuit to replace Diane Sawyer as the lead anchor on GMA. Why get yourself mixed up with morning television? If past was precedent, GMA was a stepping stone to becoming the anchor of ABC World News, as Charles Gibson and now Ms. Sawyer had already proved." (Observer)



"Between Spurr and Calvin Klein's showings, I had the unexpected opportunity to get a glimpse of John Malkovich's brand new men's line, Technobohemian. The presentation, held in Soho House's private White Room, was a nice departure from the hectic scene at Bryant Park. After an hour long tête-à-tête with the multi-talented actor I learned that he's had a life-long obsession with uncovering distinct and rare fabrics. Malkovich has been an avid collector of premium hard-to-get textiles for over 20 years; his fabric compulsion comes in at a close second behind his love of film and stage." (Luigi Tadini/Papermag)



"'Real Housewives of New York City' stars Alex McCord and Simon van Kempen being denied entry to the Lela Rose runway show at Bryant Park." (PageSix)



"Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith, two of the most powerful art critics in New York, spent Valentine’s Day together seeing a few art shows—nothing out of the ordinary for the couple, married 18 years, who visit dozens of museums and galleries every week in service of their respective columns—hers in The New York Times, his in New York magazine. Among their stops on Sunday afternoon was the Guggenheim, where they spent three hours wandering about before going to the museum’s new cafe. Mr. Saltz got some cinnamon-ginger cookies and sat down across from his wife. Then he made a confession. In a moment of passion and uncontrollable excitement, he said nervously, he had posted a link to her latest article for the Sunday Times on his Facebook wall. 'My wife doesn’t know I’m posting this,' Mr. Saltz had warned his Facebook friends. 'Read this & see if it doesn’t do something to your inner-pheromones.' Ms. Smith’s piece, a spirited and uncommonly provocative call for more adventurous museum programming in New York, was already the talk of the art world by then. But when Mr. Saltz told his wife that he’d posted the link, the acutely private, Internet-averse Times critic was taken aback. That changed when Mr. Saltz told her about the hundreds of comments and questions that people had posted on his Facebook wall in response." (Observer)



"'I could see every one of these looks on the cast of Gossip Girl,' gushed Lucy Sykes Rellie at the Timo presentation, which designers Timo Weiland and Alan Eckstein explained was a 'collision of eras' or rather the Scorsese epics "The Age of Innocence meets Gangs of New York.'" (Papermag)



"I am told so many things about what is going to happen in the Internet business—happen imminently, happen in a way to transform human behavior and aspirations, happen in a way to disrupt the powers that be, or to restore the powers that used to be—that I should be in a position, if I could just focus my attention, to get rich, finally. Everybody I know who follows the next big thing believes that this year—emerging from recession, with the death of so many aspects of conventional media—will be a year of, in Internet-speak, radical inflection, precipitating a wave of acquisitions and I.P.O.’s and a river of new investment. If you can only focus on what so many geniuses are saying, you can win big. But deciphering the chatter is no small talent, because the technology business is at least as much talk as it is science. The next big thing can sometimes feel like the coming of Christ, but it can also feel like the internecine debates about socialist doctrine that famously took place in the cafeterias of City College, in New York, in the 1930s. So what I am going to do here—rather in an effort to create a Next Big Thing for Dummies—is to try to align the factions, parse the theories, distinguish the geek Lenins from the geek Trotskys, and offer the possibility for you to profitably know what this year is going to bring (or, anyway, hold your own at a cocktail party)." (Michael Wolff/Vanity Fair)



"Celebrated New York artist Kehinde Wiley was commissioned by Puma to create artwork for the brand’s apparel and footwear leading up to the 2010 African Cup of Nations, including crazy t-shirts, shoes that probably are probably too valuable to kick a ball with and an All Africa jersey, all of which you can see in the video after the jump. Or at Wiley’s upcoming three-day show at Deitch Projects, the gallery home of Jeffrey Deitch, who recently accepted the big cheese job at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art—guess he felt like being bored. Anyway, the exhibit will be on display starting this Thursday, February 18th, and goes through the weekend, so check that out." (TheFADER)



"Niall Ferguson is not given to understatement. So I was not surprised by the claim last week that the US will face a Greek crisis. I promptly dismissed this as hysteria. Like many other high-income countries, the US is indeed walking a fiscal tightrope. But the dangers are excessive looseness in the long run and excessive tightness in the short run. It is a dilemma of which Prof Ferguson seems unaware." (Martin Wolf/FT)