• Jay Leno will return to The Tonight Show and Conan O’Brien will be allowed to leave NBC for a different network, sources say. [Washington Post]
• Horror continues unabated in Haiti, but aid donations are on track to break records. [USA Today]
• Obama gets tough on the big banks, announcing plans to tax them to the tune of $90 billion over 10 years. [CNN.com]
• Meanwhile, those banks plan to pay their employees a staggering $145 billion in compensation for 2009, up 18 percent from 2008. [WSJ via DailyFinance]
• A backroom deal with labor unions gets Democrats one step closer to passing health-care reform: union members won’t be taxed on “Cadillac” insurance plans until 2018. [Politico]
• Martin Scorsese’s new HBO show, Boardwalk Empire, will be the network’s most expensive ever, with the first episode costing $50 million to produce. [Page Six]
Earlier this week, the U.K.'s Daily Starreported that Mariah Carey elbowed Paris Hilton out of a music video for a song by Prince Azim of Brunei. Curious whether this was true, we rang up Sensible Music, who released the Prince's iTunes single "A Ballad for You Know Who," and the Prince's producer and sometime manager Jeff Allen set us straight. "I don't actually know where that came from," Allen said of the rumored Paris-Mariah cat fight. "We did ask Paris at one point, but she was tied up. Mariah came in last minute."
Furthermore, Allen tells us, the music video in question is not for a new Prince Azim single but for one by 22-year-old Brunei artist Hill. A former contestant in P2F—Brunei's answer to American Idol—Hill now counts the incredibly wealthy Prince Azim as a patron, producer, and collaborator. Hill's big break came when he performed at a lavish joint birthday party for the Prince and his siblings this past June, where guests included Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, and Sophia Loren. So impressed was Miss Mariah with Hill's performance that she agreed to fly in for a last-minute appearance in the music video for Hill's single "Stay in the Middle." Her perky good-bye wave, at 00:13 below, kind of undercuts the moody opening chords of Hill's ballad, no?
Clockwise from top left: Chef Andrew Carmellini's citrus-braised veal cheeks with polenta; tuna crudo with Meyer lemon; Nantucket Bay scallops with blood orange, celery, and fennel; and lamb meatballs with caprino. The dishes were paired with Solerno Blood Orange Liquor cocktails.
Chef Andrew Carmellini at the Bouley Test Kitchen.
Earlier this week at an intimate three-course dinner prepared by chef Andrew Carmellini, of New York City’s Locanda Verde restaurant, one young lady let her diet overtake her manners. “Does that have cheese in it?” she asked Carmellini as he was about to spoon a generous portion of his beautiful, buttery, citrus-braised veal cheeks onto a perfect creamy mound of polenta. “I don’t like cheese,” she said to the chef, who was dumbfounded at her boldness. Not only was this young lady’s behavior impolite but she also lacked respect for the space in which she was dining: the Bouley Test Kitchen.
Taking the train to Chambers Street and walking a block to 88 West Broadway may not be a holy pilgrimage, but entering chef David Bouley’s Bouley Test Kitchen, which opened in 2006, is certainly a religious experience for food lovers like me. The shiny, stainless-steel work surfaces! The multi-leveled convection ovens! The deep industrial refrigerators filled with blocks of butter and cartons of milk and heavy cream!
On Tuesday night in New York City, Henri Bendel's glittery Fifth Avenue shop was buzzing long after close. The occasion was to celebrate the publication of You Know You Want It, a coffee-table book written by Eric Daman,Gossip Girl's costume designer. Between the presence of hosts Leighton Meester and Ed Westwick (and their co-star besties) and the crew of cameras shooting the reality show The City,, it was abundantly clear that this evening was all about making appearances.
Since Gossip Girl began filming more than two years ago in New York, the series has had somewhat of a meta quality in the city. Eager fans text spottings much in the manner of the show’s titular spy, while the actors seem to be as fond of interdating as their characters are. As a result, it becomes difficult to distinguish the player from the role. But at Bendel, the cast members proved to be exceptions to the rule that life imitates art, as each made moves to clearly distinguish themselves from their on-screen counterparts.
Lawyer Dave and Holly Golightly. Photo by Alison Wonderland.
We all know that Holly Golightly loves Jack White like a little brother. Though the singer may be famous for her call-and-response with Jack and Meg White, she has a solo career of her own with her band, Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs. “Forget It,” the first single off her forthcoming record, Medicine County (March 30, Transdreamer Records), is the kind of decades-old sound that you would find on the soundtrack for a Tarantino film: milky keyboards written in a standard key, crisp snare drums, and her whisky-soaked voice that sounds like it’s being played from a dusted-off record.
Cornetist Graham Haynes leads Bitches Brew Revisited
The sixth annual New York Winter Jazz Festival took place this weekend in Greenwich Village and illustrated just why the City is aptly known as the Jazz capital of the world. The festival organizers curated a program of artists from around the planet that displayed the breadth of talent working in the jazz circuit today. The temperature on the streets may have been 20 degrees, but inside the venues were hot and blistering with phenomenal music.
The fest’s performances ran the gamut of styles and moods. The program featured the live electronic trip-hop of Mark Giuliana Beat Music at the club Kenny’s Castaways, and the classic vocal style of Sachal Vasandani at Sullivan Hall. The controversial, hammer-fisted Eric Lewis clobbered the piano and took on his critics by ending his performance with a pronouncement that he is unafraid to express himself in any way he desires—namely by doing away with the stool and covering current pop music. Marco Benevento, who played both in his popular trio and with the gloriously chaotic Bitches Brew Revisited, proved he can successfully apply his unique brand of slick, funky, punk jazz to multiple formats. The Nicholas Payton SeXXXtet performed a set blending soulful vocals and Payton’s virtuoso trumpet. Lionel Loueke offered a combination of African singing, a la Ladysmith Black Mambazo and articulate guitar playing. When my evening ended, at three a.m., I was exhausted and felt privileged to have been there.
Some events, like Tuesday’s massive earthquake in Haiti, beggar understanding. At this dark, early hour, I’m not even going to try to comprehend, let alone write about, the magnitude of the catastrophe or its lingering effects into the future. Haiti’s leaders suggest that perhaps a hundred thousand people or more have been killed. Here is what the low side of that estimate looks like in real life. Enough said.
But there is room in the midst of tragedy to talk a bit about how we as a nation react to these events. The same familiar patterns emerge, year after year, disaster after disaster. Pat Robertson says something idiotic even as his minions activate to help survivors. Journalists, even television journalists, rise out of their workaday stupors to deliver their finest work. Americans throw off their insularity and donate to those in need. The world community collaborates; human connections count.
It seems safe to say that Harold Ford Jr.'s disastrous interview with The New York Times will kill whatever chances he ever had of taking Kirsten Gillibrand's seat in the Senate. As a relatively unknown figure here in New York prior to this interview (a recent poll found that very few voters in the state had heard of him), he will have a hell of a time recovering from making such a terrible impression in his first important media moment. Imagine if Sarah Palin's debut had been her interview with Katie Couric, and not her splashy speech at the Republican National Convention. The R.N.C. speech might not have ever happened. Here’s one low point from the interview:
Sandra Bullock is reciting the lyrics to Baby Got Back and forking a piece of a jiggly, Italian dessert off a passing waiter’s tray at the ivy-draped Beverly Hills restaurant Il Cielo. Shimmering in a red cocktail dress and stilt-like heels, the actress greets a visor-clad friend by hollering over the crowd noise, “What the heck is on your head?” This is not— for the record—how people typically act while being feted at an Oscar party. But nothing about Bullock’s path to this awards season has been typical.
The actress who broke out in a movie about a runaway bus forced to travel over 50 miles per hour has moved at her own speed professionally, and it’s paying off at age 45. In the past month, Bullock has collected two Golden Globe nominations, for her performances in The Blind Side and The Proposal. She won a People’s Choice Award and broke a box office record, as The Blind Side became the first film carried by a woman to crack $200 million at the domestic box office. And now Bullock is on the short list for an Oscar nomination, for playing The Blind Side’s Gucci-clad, .22-packing football matriarch, Leigh Anne Tuohy.
It’s a performance with no sobbing, yelling, internal torture or external malady— nothing to cue critics or audiences that This is awards-caliber, serious acting. Instead, Bullock shows us Tuohy’s matter-of-fact compassion as she makes up a bed for a boy who has never had one. The audience can cry, but Bullock plays it as a quickly swallowed lump in the throat. “I know I won’t burst into tears in front of a group of people,” says Bullock, her ponytail swishing the cluster of press and well-wishers waiting to talk to her. “And I don’t think you should do it too much in movies. It’s like you’re telling the audience they’re supposed to feel something.”
Traditionally, Olympic hockey is nowhere near as rough as the N.H.L. Fighting isn’t tolerated, and the larger ice surface favors the European-style finesse game. That said, Team Canada reliably rolls out some heavy hitters—and with this year’s tournament being played on N.H.L.-size rinks, they’ll be more of an asset than usual.
When the Canadian squad was announced on December 30, one of the biggest surprises was that Dion Phaneuf wasn’t on it. The multi-talented Calgary Flames defenseman (and, for what it’s worth, boyfriend of 24 hottie Elisha Cuthbert) can drive a guy into the boards with the best of them. Despite his absence, though, the host team has plenty of punishers. Here are the top five.
Mike Richards
The Philadelphia Flyers captain loves catching opponents with their heads down. Richards courted controversy earlier this season when he threw a somewhat reckless shoulder-to-head hit in center ice that resulted in a concussion for the other guy. Any Europeans who want to get fancy in the neutral zone against Canada might want to have a look at this first.
Rejoice, denim-lovers (and who isn’t one, really?). Someone over at Banana Republic remembered that once upon a time—the 1990s, to be exact—premium denim was a nonentity. And as the recession flushes out other undesirables, such as doggie cashmere and pyramid schemes, scarily expensive jeans are going the same route, thanks to the seven new women’s and four new men’s spring styles that Banana Republic introduced to fashion editors this week.
Writing from her tiny Boston apartment, Jilly Gagnon is a 25-year-old struggling novelist who's starving more than she's selling. But this month, she's decided to "Goop" her way to the good life by following the advice outlined in Gwyneth Paltrow's weekly Internet newsletter. Track her progress with these daily status reports.
Day 10
Late last night, my boyfriend arrived home from band practice with a weird plastic card in hand, retrieved from some hidden section of the mailbox I'd missed.
"What's that?" I asked, trying to feign curiosity through my cleansing headache and hunger.
"Dunno." He threw it on the counter.
Now I didn't have to look—it was clearly some kind of junk mail—and he didn't have to leave it out, since he has managed to master the concept of throwing things in the garbage, but I did, and he did, and it …
One of the big talking points at this year’s Detroit Auto Show concerned all the delicious technology being integrated into the infotainment (information and entertainment) monitors embedded in the dashboards of new vehicles. Like a tangle of Eastern European porn stars on an Atlantis Cruise of the Cyclades, the manufacturers openly boasted about who could pack more in (and how cheaply). And like watching the resulting movie, I couldn’t help but wonder a few things: Is there actually such a thing as too much? Is that really safe? And at what point do we transcend the Venn-diagram overlap between what is technically possible and what actually enhances enjoyment? In order to answer these questions, I set up a series of interviews with as many humorless engineers, geeky product managers, and flamboyant interior design specialists as I could find, had them walk me through every tedious feature in their inane arsenal, and learned the adulatory power of terms like “nice interface,” in order to put together this intentionally reductive slideshow for you, which shows whose does what, whose doesn’t, and how hard each is trying to keep you from looking at all those distracting roads, signs, and vehicles out there beyond your mobile living room/computing station.
There’s a new book about the 2008 presidential campaign, Game Change, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, that’s causing a big stir because it has found out that every candidate is an incredibly dysfunctional person with a really rotten marriage. That is, except for Barack Obama, who is mostly very competent and who has a basically excellent marriage.
This might be one of the main reasons he won, because he’s the only person in the race who wasn’t a mess. Or, it could be that because he won, there is nobody to say he is a mess.
Game Change is a book that overflows with the voices of people who feel they were ill-served and mistreated. It’s a book about staff revenge.
One of the evident themes in the book, although one not explored by its authors (they may not even be aware of it), is that presidential campaigns have become so long, so arduous, so expensive, so fraught, so abusive to all who participate in them, that nobody—save perhaps the winner—emerges with his sanity intact. In other words, the people who accompany the candidate end up just as nutty, or even more nutty, than the candidate. If you lie down with flies you wake up with them—and then you give your venomous spiel of grief and recrimination to the authors of this book.
A man holds a child in a makeshift camp for earthquake survivors in the 31 Delmar neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, Thursday, January 14, 2010. By Gregory Bull/AP Images.
Supporting the rescue and recovery effort in Haiti is almost unbelievably easy, thanks to the State Department’s “Text Haiti” campaign. Just text the word “Haiti” to 90999 to have $10 donated directly from your cell phone bill to the Red Cross.
This initiative comes on the heels of Wyclef Jean text campaign on behalf of his charity, Yele Haiti. To contribute $5, text “Yele” to 501501.
Once you’ve done that, please visit one of these sites, where heartier contributions are accepted:
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Norman Jean Roy and Patrick Demarchelier photograph Lily Collins, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Isabel Lucas, Amber Heard, and Zoë Kravitz.
The Robert Pattinson Portraits
View all five sets of outtakes from Bruce Weber’s epic photo session with the New Moon heartthrob.
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Chef Andrew Carmellini at the Bouley Test Kitchen.
Lawyer Dave and Holly Golightly. Photo by Alison Wonderland.
One of the big talking points at this year’s Detroit Auto Show concerned all the delicious technology being integrated into the infotainment (information and entertainment) monitors embedded in the dashboards of new vehicles. Like a tangle of Eastern European porn stars on an Atlantis Cruise of the Cyclades, the manufacturers openly boasted about who could pack more in (and how cheaply). And like watching the resulting movie, I couldn’t help but wonder a few things: Is there actually such a thing as too much? Is that really safe? And at what point do we transcend the Venn-diagram overlap between what is technically possible and what actually enhances enjoyment? In order to answer these questions, I set up a series of interviews with as many humorless engineers, geeky product managers, and flamboyant interior design specialists as I could find, had them walk me through every tedious feature in their inane arsenal, and learned the adulatory power of terms like “nice interface,” in order to put together this intentionally reductive slideshow for you, which shows whose does what, whose doesn’t, and how hard each is trying to keep you from looking at all those distracting roads, signs, and vehicles out there beyond your mobile living room/computing station. 
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