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ancient history

Tina Fey's Rocky History With The New Yorker

Opera

A Tricky Night at the Met: How Two Decades Blunted "Nixon in China"

movies

Review: In The Eagle, There's No Place Like Rome

Shields belts out a tune at Feinstein's.
cabaret

Nothing Comes Between Her and Her Comdens: Brooke Shields Debuts Cabaret Act

By Rex Reed | February 8, 2011 | 8:26 pm

It seems like yesterday when Brooke Shields lit our lashes as pedophile bait in Louis Malle's Pretty Baby. From adolescent prostitute to hip-swiveling Rizzo in Grease and killer babe with a heart of pure platinum in Broadway's Chicago, America's personality-packed sweetheart has lived more lives than a cat on roller skates. She calls her stint as the Ivory Soap baby at 11 months old "the last time I didn't need a body double." She's funny. Now she's a singer. Well, sort... MORE»

The Wee Hours

The Secret Codes of Hotel Chantelle

By Nate Freeman | February 8, 2011 | 8:23 pm

"Tim would like to invite you to go downstairs,” the bartender at Hotel Chantelle said to The Observer. The Observer wasn’t sure who Tim was, but of course we... MORE»

Lauren Bush.
Shindigger

The Toast of Vienna Trots into the Waldorf

By Nate Freeman | February 8, 2011 | 8:22 pm

Of all the dignitaries, ambassadors and titled aristocracy to fly from foreign locales to attend the 56th Viennese Opera Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria last Friday, Sharon Bush may have traveled the farthest. Just that afternoon, the ex-wife of George W. Bush’s brother Neil rushed from customs to make sure she had time to throw on a gown. Where had she been? Oh, just touring the Holy Land with a certain world-famous megachurch... MORE»

Soldier boy: Channing Tatum.
movies

Review: In The Eagle, There's No Place Like Rome

By Rex Reed | February 8, 2011 | 8:21 pm

Ambitiously set in the second century, The Eagle is a codpiece-and-crossbow saga of relentlessly exciting battle sequences sandwiched between tedious, unconvincing chatter about cantankerous centurions, fiery feudal warriors and camera-ready six-pack abs modeled by hunky pinups Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell. It isn't going to win any awards for artistic excellence, but with two 8x10 glossies flexing their glutes from here to the middle of next week and an able support group that includes Donald Sutherland and Denis O'Hare, it is not exactly a snore... MORE»

George Condo.
collector

Outwit, Outpaint, Outlast: George Condo and the Back-Burnered 1980s Art Stars

By Adam Lindemann | February 8, 2011 | 8:18 pm

I was just in Paris, visiting a painting I had loaned to the wonderful Basquiat show at the Musee d'Art Moderne and marveling at the two-hour-long line to get into the show. The French love our American mythic pop figures--Elvis, Marilyn, James Dean--and you could feel how easily Jean-Michel, prodigy, addict and star, fit right in to their vision of... MORE»

Taylor.
books

Book Review: In Justin Taylor's 'In the Gospel of Anarchy,' Stoners Seek Salvation in Christ and Sex

By Matthew Hunte | February 8, 2011 | 8:15 pm

Neurasthenia was the fashionable sickness of late 19th-century America. (Big Pharma, not yet so big, had yet to discover ADHD.) The disease--symptoms included fatigue, flatulence and headache--was thought to be a byproduct of "modern civilization": the stresses involved in urban living and getting ahead. For the upwardly mobile, neurasthenia was "a marker of class." William James, who suffered the condition, dubbed it Americanitis, the American Disease. Freud thought it was caused by excessive... MORE»

Dreck of a salesman: Ed Helms.
movies

Review: You'll Need Dramamine To Brave Cedar Rapids

By Rex Reed | February 8, 2011 | 8:13 pm

Already off to a disastrous start, 2011 sees its junk pile grow higher with an alleged "comedy" by director Miguel Arteta (The Good Girl) that is unlikely to connect with any comic-book reader sporting a 70-point I.Q., but will undoubtedly be a big hit with the kind of people who thrive on Will Ferrell movies. Cedar Rapids is a ribald collection of stale corporate-convention jokes, hateful put-downs of women and filthy one-liners you wouldn't repeat at parties attended by middle-aged men wearing Chinese lampshades.... MORE»

books

Book Review: Deb Olin Unferth's 'Revolution' Is a Bildungsroman for the 'Believer' Set

By Robert P. Baird | February 8, 2011 | 8:11 pm

In 1987, Deb Olin Unferth followed her boyfriend to war. She was 18, and she was in love with an eccentric college senior she was sure was a genius. "The women in my family fell in love with geniuses, was how I understood it," Ms. Unferth writes in her memoir, Revolution, and George--"spectacular, misunderstood, brilliant" George--was her... MORE»

Nixon in China.
Opera

A Tricky Night at the Met: How Two Decades Blunted "Nixon in China"

By Zachary Woolfe | February 8, 2011 | 8:08 pm

"The American people may not like my face, but they're going to listen to what I have to say," Richard Nixon said during the 1968 presidential campaign. Nixon's embarrassments up to that point, after all, had been primarily visual ones: the disastrously five-o'clock-shadowed 1960 debate, the shine of sweat at his "final" press conference in... MORE»

Jacobs' Lenses
Galleries

Art Review: Patrick Jacobs Takes a Look at the Vision Thing

By Will Heinrich | February 8, 2011 | 8:05 pm

Patrick Jacobs set seven round lenses into the white walls of Pierogi Gallery in Williamsburg. Behind them you'll think you see close-up, ground-level photographs of pretty, green meadows. (The largest view is monochrome, but the rest are in color.) Far off beyond the fields are winding roads, rivers, bridges, power lines, hills and, in two cases, little towns. It is an otherworldly, overcast day. One town has its lights on and the other doesn't. But all these evidences of human industry and geologic upheaval are safely in the... MORE»

Hayden Christiansen at a screening for Vanishing on 7th Street

Even Darth Vader doesn’t love the Dark

By Daisy Prince | February 8, 2011 | 7:55 pm

Hayden Christensen, Eve and Russell Simmons were in the house for a Cinema Society party. Although Cinema Society's Vanishing on 7th Street's screening afterparty at Beauty & Essex was not the official start to Fashion Week, it had the blessing of the God of Going Out himself, Russell Simmons. No Fashion Week could possibly begin without a sighting of the nocturnal Mr. Simmons.  The Observer caught up with him while he was sitting with his friend... MORE»

Pyramid Power
Antiquities

Curse of the Mummy: Met Says Boy King Can Head Back to Egypt, Despite Unrest

By Katherine Clarke | February 8, 2011 | 7:54 pm

Egypt's political woes and resulting chaos won't change the Metropolitan Museum of Art's plans to return 19 objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun to the nation permanently, for display in Giza. Zahi Hawass, Egypt's minister of antiquities, had alleged that the Met's objects had been stolen from the excavation early in the 20th century. The items in dispute, all tiny, include a lapis lazuli sphinx, a bronze dog and a reconstructed blue bead... MORE»

Grimm Portents

'Hansel and Gretel' Go Hollywood: All Movies in 2011 Will Be About Fairy Tales

By Daniel D'Addario | February 8, 2011 | 4:55 pm

Only a few years into the Avengers super-cycle, and studios seem to be wearying of superhero tales as tent-poles. 2011 brings us a Red Riding Hood adaptation from director Catherine Hardwicke, dueling Snow Whites starring Charlize Theron and Julia Roberts, and now a Hansel and Gretel movie from Paramount.... MORE»

Weddings

Sorry, Rupert! Royals Insist That Will-Kate Wedding Stay 2-D

By Daniel D'Addario | February 8, 2011 | 4:13 pm

The royal family has refused to grant Rupert Murdoch the right to broadcast the upcoming royal wedding in 3-D, citing the distraction the new and imperfect technology would impose on the ceremony. The wedding is to take place in Westminster Abbey, a small space that could restrict the ability of 3-D broadcasting. The delightfully British demurral from Prince Charles's press secretary reads: "I'm afraid I have to say that we have decided not to progress with 3D coverage of the service on this... MORE»

Buzzword Kate Middleton, walking out of a door.
The Royals

Science Proves Kate Middleton is Fashion Week's Biggest Buzzword

By Nate Freeman | February 8, 2011 | 3:31 pm

What we already knew has been confirmed -- the phrase "Kate Middleton" is more important than any other phrase this Fashion Week. In a press release sent out today, the Texas-based analysis firm Global Language Monitor has confirmed that the princess-to-be toppled Lady Gaga from the top spot in the list of reigning fashion phrases. The surge was due to the overwhelming anticipation for her April 29 wedding. The first line of the release is a... MORE»