GEORGE: No, you didn’t say that—you just went and did it.
HILLY: I did—you just didn’t hear me. So I walked outside down the hall and I knocked on the neighbor’s door, and as soon as I did, I heard George back in his apartment screaming, “Get back in here RIGHT NOW!” And as soon as he said that, the door opened and this guy—this bodybuilder bald man—was staring at me thinking I was a battered victim or something. And I was just laughing. He told me there was another fuse box in the kitchen, so everything was fine after that.
GEORGE: She fixed it. I know the retelling of it sounds gruesome, but soon after we were laughing about it. We went on to have a nice dinner, right?
HILLY: Mmm-hmmm. Yeah, but that kind of stuff happens frequently. These short bursts of anger and frustration.
DR. SELMAN: How often do you think it is like that?
GEORGE [to DR. SELMAN]: Can I go get one of those Diet Sunkists?
DR. SELMAN: Sure.
[GEORGE rises, walks to a small kitchen next to the waiting room, gets a Diet Sunkist, returns.]
Tattoo Boo-Hoo! Brad bows down to Angelina as Jen weeps
Illustrated by Victor Juhasz
Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Philip Burke
OCTOBER 2, 2005 BY TOM SCOCCA
THE GAWKER KING
Nick Denton Is Either the Luce or Hefner of New Age, But He’s Building Web Empire on Gossip, Sex, Smarts; Inspiring Tale of Skinny Bloke With Oxford Honor
ON SEPT. 21, ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, THE LOS ANGELES SOCIAL catalyst, former California gubernatorial candidate and self-appointed anti-Drudge of Web hostesses, tore off her shoes, jumped up on Nick Denton’s coffee table and anointed him: Mr. Denton, said the Amazonian queen of L.A. society—a world that one of Mr. Denton’s 14 Web sites assesses and reports on—is “the Rupert Murdoch of the blogosphere.”
Mr. Denton, her 39-year-old host and the publisher of Gawker Media—the combination steroid and tonic that both inflates and slaps down societies in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, as well as the borderless society of Web-porn fans—was ostensibly welcoming Ms. Huffington to New York. Really, he was throwing his own coming-out party, and had opened the doors of his Soho apartment to some of the mob that clicks on the Gawker site five, six, seven times a day.
He pulled out a much-folded piece of paper and began to read excerpts from a hostile notice that the celebrity-heavy Huffington Post had gotten on its debut. His hands shook just a little. Nikki Finke had declared the site “horrific,” adding that Ms. Huffington—“the Madonna of the mediapolitic world”—had “undergone one reinvention too many.” The disaster that was the Huffington Post was “unsurvivable.”
“I think contrition is in order from the doubters, including Nikki Finke,” Mr. Denton said. The partygoers applauded.
But the contrition could have been self-administered. Like so many rising press lords, electronic or not, Mr. Denton had gotten in the business of celebrating what his own publication had recently stomped. Gawker.com had sneezed at the Huffington Post’s debut: “When important celebrities have a platform from which to dispense their well-informed opinions, everyone wins!”
Within two days, many of the party guests would receive e-mailed invitations to join an exclusive-but-not-too-exclusive group of readers who would be allowed to post comments on Gawker.
One of them was Nikki Finke.
JULY 10, 2005 BY ANNA SCHNEIDER-MAYERSON
Cool Hand Judy
Talk About a Failure to Communicate! Miller’s Tale Climaxes: Love Letter From Scooter, Reporter Sprung, 43rd Street Meeting; Zenger Time It’s Not—Why Did Sulzberger Allow Collapse?
ON OCT. 3, NEW YORK Times executive editor Bill Keller announced to the staff that at 3:30 that afternoon, reporter-cum-story-cum-victim-cum-witness Judith Miller would be making her return appearance in the newsroom, after spending 85 days in jail. “[S]he would like to thank you,” Mr. Keller wrote in an e-mail, “for standing by her during an ordeal that—as you know from the vultures still circling—is not entirely over.”
But who was circling? Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was done with Ms. Miller; his grand jury had collected her notes and her long-delayed testimony three days before. Whatever Mr. Fitzgerald had wished to know about Ms. Miller’s role in the White House’s leaking of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity, Mr. Fitzgerald presumably now knew.
That appeared to leave the public and the press in the role of scavengers—and Ms. Miller, Mr. Keller and publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. in the role of rotting meat.
The trio held forth near the national-desk area, in the spot where the editors stand to announce the Pulitzers. Ms. Miller described prison as a “soulless” place and described her love of the newsroom. A witness described the applause as “above polite but below wildly enthusiastic.”
It was a Judith Miller moment: part crisis, part special occasion. The event captured the singularity of Ms. Miller’s standing inside The Times—an insider with the publisher, she had become an outsider to her colleagues. For the past 12 months, she had been cast as a journalistic every-woman, standing in for all her fellow Timesians. But what had she stood for?
Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Philip Burke
One of those colleagues, Adam Liptak, could be seen at the afternoon fête, hovering at the front, taking notes—presumably attempting to find out. Mr. Liptak is part of a multi-reporter team working on The Times own wrap-up of the Miller case—“a thoroughly reported piece in the pages of The New York Times,” as Mr. Keller was quoted promising in The Times’ own Oct. 4 story about Ms. Miller’s return to West 43rd Street.
If The Times does come up with a thorough and satisfying account of Ms. Miller’s journey from the St. Regis Hotel, where she had her first conversation with Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby; to the Alexandria Detention Center, where she served her sentence; and finally to the witness stand, it would be the first one.
Until she tells her story in full, herself, her colleagues and readers of The Times will have to rely on the tidbits that have so far been revealed about Ms. Miller, Mr. Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, First Amendment law, imaginary uranium and the rest of Mr. Fitzgerald’s portfolio. And the more of them that emerge, the less sense the entire story seems to make.
OCTOBER 9, 2005 BY GEORGE GURLEY
GEORGE AND HILLY
IT WAS OUR FIFTH COUPLES-THERAPY SESSION…
DR. SELMAN: It would be interesting—how do you think it would be different if, let’s say, George didn’t have these moods? Didn’t have mood swings? How would that affect the relationship?
HILLY: I think it would be great!
GEORGE: Right.
DR. SELMAN: Well, in my experience, geographical cures don’t work. But there are medications that people can take to—
GEORGE: This one? [picking up a brochure] Effexor.
DR. SELMAN: The problem with antidepressants is that they usually take a few weeks before they can work. So if you take it for a week or two—
GEORGE: So a month.
HILLY: Can’t you try Prozac?
GEORGE: Ahh! I don’t want to take these things. Hmmm.
HILLY: What about homeopathics, natural remedies?
GEORGE: St. John’s wort?
DR. SELMAN: St. John’s wort does not work. Effexor is a good antidepressant. It might be a reasonable thing to do. Drugs like that tend to work better than Prozac.
GEORGE: But if I start getting in a good mood all the time, does that still count? I mean, you’re taking a drug for it.
DR. SELMAN: So? If you had high blood pressure, would you take medication to lower your blood pressure?
OCTOBER 16, 2005 BY CHOIRE SICHA
The Great Gay Outdoors
AT 5:30 A.M. ON OCT. 6, TWO MEN were shot and robbed in Prospect Park.
“The men were engaged in a sex act,” the Daily News reported. They were shot, in fact, as the 78th Precinct c
onfirmed, prior to being robbed.
On the gloomy Saturday afternoon that followed, just a muddy little twirl of yellow police tape was tangled in the bushes. Nearby, a cop sat idly in a car; two generators rigged to floodlights, now dark, marked a spooky triangle of forest.
And not far away from the crime scene, under a brutal steady rain, a few men loitered and paced, dressed in their Brooklyn casuals, looking for “sex acts.”
That these woods immediately returned to regular use as a cruising ground isn’t unusual. Areas like this are the decrepit, unchanging standbys of man-on-man match-ups. Online message boards regularly update men on conditions in similar places: Have they been raided recently? Are the men hot? Anybody, you know, been shot?
But outdoor Manhattan proper is changing, and rapidly. Rezoning—and zoning variances—in many neighborhoods are turning manufacturing districts that were desolate and therefore randy in the dark of night into Dullsville, U.S.A.
NOVEMBER 13, 2005 BY BEN SMITH
WELCOME TO BLOOM-BURG
Mayor Wins Historic Victory in Both Parties; It Only Cost About $100 a Vote, a Bargain! What Will Mike Do With Massive Mandate?
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG IS not a man who confuses the trappings of power for power. But on the eve of his re-election, as he stood on the observation deck on the Empire State Building, at the top of the city, the symbolism of his mastery was irresistible. The new Bloomberg L.P. tower stood out behind him; his city was sprawled around him. But after a single glance, the mayor turned away from the view.
Early returns showed Mr. Bloomberg well on his way to the sizable victory foreseen in the pre-election polls. At press time, the incumbent had more than 60 percent of the vote.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
The landslide ratifies what may be the most powerful mayoralty in New York City history and anoints Mr. Bloomberg as the city’s first true Imperial Mayor. Not since Ed Koch’s victory on both Democratic and Republican lines in 1981 has a mayor emerged from an election with no coherent opposition.
But unlike Mr. Koch, Mr. Bloomberg steps into a Mayoralty re-engineered for power by a 1989 reform of the City Charter that removed the “upper house” of New York’s legislature and with it most of the checks on the mayor’s power to set budgets and make policy.
“The mayor is unrivaled. It’s total primacy. There are no competing centers of power,” said Fred Siegel, a historian at the Cooper Union. “If you have someone who seizes the power inherent in the office, they can be a hegemon.”
NOVEMBER 13, 2005 BY DAISY CARRINGTON
Red Diapers, Platinum Umbilical
THIS WEEK, FAIRCHILD PUBLICATIONS is introducing a horrifying new magazine called Cookie, featuring $900 strollers and hair gel for 3-year-old boys.
But could this be the very magazine that New York City parents deserve? Have you noticed how parents are increasingly using the bellies of innocent babes as their own personal billboards?
Take David Moore, 37, a creative director at Publicis Advertising, who likes to dress his 2-year-old son, Conrad, in a T-shirt stenciled with the classic image of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. “It seems like pretty much all parents in Brooklyn have something similar,” Mr. Moore said.
“I don’t think many of our customers are communists,” said Harald Husum, founder of Appaman.com, which distributes the T-shirts. According to Mr. Husum, he’s sold nearly 6,000 Che products since his company was launched in 2002, despite a smattering of protests from Cuban-Americans.
Mr. Moore’s wife, Francesca Castagnoli, a writer, wearily estimates that one in 10 kids in her hood own the Che shirt. “Some people probably think it’s an icon of what’s cool,” she said, adding (without apparent irony): “Also, you sort of want that independent spirit for your child.”
DECEMBER 4, 2005 BY MARK LOTTO
WELCOME TO SCHNOOKLYN
ON A RECENT SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, every street corner along Smith Street was set and lit like a Norman Rockwell. But. The signs in the windows all read: “Wanted for Sexual Assault. Reward of $12,000. Name: Peter Braunstein.”
It’s not Whitechapel during Jack the Ripper, but ever since the former Women’s Wear Daily reporter allegedly assaulted a woman in her Chelsea home on Halloween night, Peter Braunstein has been spotted sipping lattes and annoying dry cleaners all over Cobble Hill. Every day the police dragnet continues, and every day drags nothing up.
But Alberto Braunstein, the suspect’s dad, knows that Peter wasn’t the suspicious coffee drinker or the irate dry-cleaner customer. His son wouldn’t be caught dead outside Manhattan. “I have never known my son to even go to Brooklyn,” said Mr. Braunstein. “So I was stunned.”
Forget the massive manhunt. Is Peter Braunstein the last freelancer in New York who thinks he’s too good for Brooklyn?
It would have seemed that, by now, few New Yorkers still cling to the old anti-Brooklyn bigotries. Who persists in seeing the borough as little more than Manhattan’s waiting room, its discard pile, its backwater wilderness? Even prejudiced Manhattanites are migrating en masse to Brooklyn.
This hegira has been going on for years, but can no longer be understood simply as the search for cheap, mythically large apartments; rents in Brooklyn are nearly as high as those in Manhattan. It’s different now. People aspire to Brooklyn. The vector of the city has reversed itself.
OCTOBER 2, 2005 BY ALEXANDRA JACOBS
Yes, I Flew JetBlue Flight 292: Gleeful Survivor Tale; ’Tis Pity I’m a Media Whore; Some F.A.Q.’s on My Landing
AS WE PASSENGERS JOYOUSLY DISEMBARKED FROM JetBlue Flight 292 on the evening of Sept. 21, 2005, one of Los Angeles’ gorgeous toxic sunsets was illuminating the kindly, ruddy, handsome faces of the suddenly superfluous but very welcome emergency personnel gathered on the tarmac. They all looked like 1940s movie heroes reduced to skycap duty.
We were shepherded into shuttle buses with big glass doors, where we sat making call after happy call on our cell phones or just staring stupidly into space as we were driven to the terminal. There, as if at a particularly festive wedding, we were greeted by a receiving line consisting of JetBlue executives wearing shiny blue ties, L.A. Chief of Police Bill Bratton (remember him?) with chest puffed out in a natty suit, and a curly-haired, diminutive gentleman in rolled-up shirtsleeves who kindly offered to help me find my husband. As he walked away, a couple of remote synapses clicked in my addled brain. “I think that was the mayor,” I told a bearded fellow who had been sitting across the aisle from me on the plane. “No,” he said. “Really?” Yes, in spacy, decentralized Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, elected last May, commands approximately the same amount of recognition as the actress Taryn Manning—also on the flight, with her publicist, who must’ve been thrown into severe shock by what happened; how else to explain the over-24-hour delay in shoving Ms. Manning before the television cameras?
Alas, I was not quite so restrained. Indeed, after eschewing another adrenaline-fueled flight to J.F.K. in favor of a tearful reunion with my spouse, I made a quick decision: I was not going to allow myself to be spirited away back to normalcy, dinner and the indifferent mews of our two cats, but would rather plunge shamelessly headlong into the mosh pit of waiting news media, starting with John Broder, L.A. bureau chief of The New York Times, and quickly following up with an Aaron Brown–Anderson Cooper sandwich on CNN. Surrounded by these and other enthralled suitors, I felt like Scarlett O’Hara flouncing her petticoats at the Twelve Oaks barbecue. Fiddle-dee-dee—I was alive! The hot flash of the cameras felt like a mother’s kiss. That landing was scary, sure—but even scarier was how quickly I transmogrified into a total media whore. Yet it seemed a fitting coda to an ordeal that was amplified to the nth power because so many of us had, now famously, watched it on television. For those who have never flown JetBlue: One of the company’s major selling points is the small televisions on the back of each passenger’s seat, which offer a selection of free channels via DirecTV satellite. I have complained a
bout these TV’s before, mostly because of the ambient noise that emanates from the cheap plastic headphones they distribute; there is nothing like trying to sleep to the tinny sounds of your seatmate enjoying VH1’s Metal Mania. But this time, believe it or not, I was grateful to have them. Because guess what? After the initial alarm of seeing the very plane we were occupying filmed circling around LAX on MSNBC and Fox and ABC—a garish spotlight trained on the faulty nose-gear, the news of our possible plight crawling along, incredibly, in the same text zipper as Hurricane Rita—the testimony of the aviation experts summoned by the news programs proved largely reassuring.
To answer some frequently asked questions: What was the mood in the cabin? Um, it was tense. Very tense. Though not as bad as you might think: I tallied no screams nor frenzied clicking of rosary beads. As we glided along at 5,000 feet, there were scattered tears, subdued prayers and even jokes from a few wizened, seen-it-all-before road warriors—you know the type. I was far from being able to joke, but I did remark to one of my row mates, a handsome, clean-cut man with a wife and two young daughters waiting for him at home, that at least if I perished in a fiery inferno, there would be the satisfaction of knowing that I had conclusively won an ongoing argument with my husband about whether a fear of flying is justified. “Small consolation,” he said. But he knew exactly what I meant.
Pity I’m a Media Whore; Some F.A.Q.’s on My Landing
What did the flight crew tell you? The announcements from the cockpit were warm, yet crisp and businesslike. At first, slowly rising over the dusty hills of Palmdale, we thought the problem was merely landing gear that wouldn’t retract (much less of an issue, surely, than landing gear that wouldn’t extrude), or possibly even a mere signal glitch. Then a low fly-by at Long Beach Airport, during which our plane’s underbelly was inspected from the ground with binoculars, revealed the cockeyed nose gear. Is this the moment to admit that I had never really realized before that planes have nose gear? Somehow I had always thought that they alighted on their back feet—like birds. We were informed about the plans for an emergency landing at LAX, which is not a JetBlue hub, but whose facilities could better accommodate our wayward aircraft. “We’re going to do our best to make this a positive situation,” said pilot Scott Burke, inciting hollow laughter in the cabin, along with a few groans.
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 57