Tina Brown has made good, in her way, on her promise to decode "crackling, confusing digital dots": Newsweek this week synthesizes Charlie Sheen's every manic Ustream with Bret Easton Ellis's theory, long promulgated over Twitter, of "Empire" and "post-Empire" entertainments. Mr.... MORE»
Last summer, Simon Rich was in the thrall of Brooklyn Heights, in no small part because the curveball pitch was invented there. "That alone is reason enough to live in this neighborhood," he told The Observer at the... MORE»
Plenty happens each day, but the devil's in the details. How much do you remember? --Which actor incensed a performance artist by dissing her UCLA commencement speech? --Which network is experiencing an "executive exodus"? (It's the one you... MORE»
Last night at the Hammerstein Ballroom, a mixed bag of celebrities gathered to roast Donald Trump for a Comedy Central special to air March 15. Mr. Trump, who had said on the red carpet that he did the roast in order to get paid and funnel that money to charity, sat rather gamely on a stage bedecked with ersatz gold buildings and the Trump logo-even after Seth MacFarlane, roast master, said that his "resting face is 'who farted?'" Mr. Trump exaggerated his pout immediately. The Observer wondered: had Mr. MacFarlane ever stayed at a Trump property?... MORE»
.jpg)
Peggy Siegel's tennis group was here Monday. A bevy of blondes and one or two brunettes took over a round center table in the Grill. I delivered a pink-and-plum-colored spring bouquet to their table, because I decided the ladies deserved some fresh florals. You can tell spring is in the air because half of the women had sunglasses perched on their heads throughout... MORE»
We were at the cafe at the Park Avenue Armory. The space in front of us looked like a ballet choreographed for mobile phones, with the occasional intrusion of an iPad. The scenery at the ADAA art fair last weekend was modernism, postmodernism and just-out-of-the-shell art, with a few pieces from earlier times. Call it The Secondary Market Waltz and let's go to... MORE»
The tremendous achievement of the Paul Taylor season that just ended was the revival of his 1966 masterpiece Orbs. It must be his longest work--it's in two parts, split by an intermission--and it's been revived only once before, in 1982. This is a magisterial piece--an astounding summing-up by a choreographer barely in his mid-30s, set to his most daring choice of music: the late Beethoven string quartets. Only a supremely confident young man could have embraced this formidable... MORE»
On a Tuesday evening not long ago, a group of publishing assistants in their early 20s gathered in a well-appointed apartment on the West Side of Manhattan. "Assistants: Meet the person on the other end of the telephone," the email had said. Still in their workday Moscots and belted sweater dresses, they found live human beings and an assistant's paycheck worth of cheese and wine, along with a gestural six-pack of beer that would go... MORE»
Artist Sebastian Bremer bobbed on his heels, preening, at the start of the Armory Show in New York Wednesday. The next day, his show at Edwyn Houk Gallery was set to open, with pieces priced about $30,000 to $65,000--but the gallery had told him it was already more than half-sold. "I have money in my pocket,' he bragged, over the soft buzzing of artist Ivan Navarro's electrified fence nearby (a hit for the Paul Kasmin Gallery at $11,000 per neon... MORE»
Unbearably violent and curiously pointless, Black Death is a German horror film in English with an international cast, set in everybody's favorite year, 1348 (uh, yeah), about everybody's favorite subject, the bubonic plague (talk about box office), and filmed in everybody's favorite medieval vacation destination, Sachsen-Anhalt and the surrounding forests of Lutharstadt. (Castles! Monasteries! Moats!... MORE»
"Food is always drama," Seline Dell'Orto, proprietor of Manganaro's Grosseria Italiana was explaining to The Observer on Monday... MORE»
With the great 1944 version of Jane Erye, starring Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine and a perfect supporting cast easily available to buy or rent, it would seem that nobody needs a sixth remake of Charlotte Brontë's gothic Victorian novel, published in 1847.... MORE»
"Did she see you had an entourage with you?" asked Bobby. "Yes, she definitely noticed," The Observer replied. The Observer had just had a close call on the floor of the Armory Show. Looking at two large photographs by Candida Hofer, he had been accosted by an ex-girlfriend. "Hey," The Observer had whispered. "It's good to see you, but I can't talk. These people with me don't know who I really am." The ex-girlfriend fled the scene, and The Observer returned to the company of his... MORE»
Israeli artist Maya Bloch's "hello stranger," at Thierry Goldberg Projects, is her second solo show in New York. (The first, which you can infer was a success, was at the same gallery six months ago.) Ms. Bloch paints figures formed from drifting waves of clashing, nightmarish color. They look like burning photographs, lifted out of time, but also like accidental convergences on the surface of a shimmering film of gasoline. Some of the figures have smoky halos. Some of the paintings have extra snippets of painted canvas fixed on top, as a kind of double collage.... MORE»
A young-adult novel is like porn: hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Deep in the oddly innocent pages of The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht (Random House, 352 pages, $25), I found myself wondering why it all felt so familiar. The heroine's succession of clear-cut quests, her earnest determination to seek the truth, her blandly appealing intelligence-how did I know them, why did I feel I'd read them before? And then I placed it. Oh, I thought, this is a chapter... MORE»
From our partners...
