Perhaps this vintage movie poster for XXX film "Male Service" (1966), will remind you of the scene in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle takes Betsy, played by Cybill Sheperd, to a Times Square grindhouse for their first date. Betsy: "Taking me to a place like this is about as exciting as saying to me 'Let's fuck.'" Travis: "I can take you to other movies." [via X Rated Collection]
Katie Couric is reportedly close to being pushed off the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News after less than two years. Resented by coworkers and aging viewers, regretted by the executives paying her exorbitant salary and ignored by the younger people she was hired to attract, Couric must sometimes miss the days when she was a perky, fearless anchor key to making Today the most profitable program in television history. Back then, the New Yorker called the anchor America's "imaginary friend" while others admired her interviews as surprisingly tough (she once asked Pat Buchanan, "Are you trying to drive the President crazy, or are you just on a big ego trip?") How did America come to hate "America's Sweetheart?"
Style.com wants to tell you who the cool kids are. They've compiled a field guide to "2008's Coolest Cliques" using the following six dubious categories: The New (New) Bohemian, The European Union, The Swans 2.0, The Catwalk Queens and The New Kids on the Blog. Julia Allison is mentioned three times! The whole thing is rather irritatingly in ad-maximizing slideshow form and the commentary is anodyne, so here's a condensed and snarkier version. Buckle in, kids. We'll get through this together.
Yesterday we told you about the Ivy League imposter who transferred from Columbia to Yale, faking his resume and references. Akash Maharaj, a 26-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago, was arrested last fall; he now faces fraud and larceny charges. It was a story of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps gone wrong... until his lurid, baroque tale unfolded further, starring a vengeful Latin ex-lover! It looks like fellow Yalie Victor Cazares, a maybe-probably member of the secret Skull and Bones society that also counts George W. Bush and John Kerry as members, was the one who turned him in.
Models falling are always funny. They splay out on the runway in their fancy clothes and ridiculous shoes and suddenly, for a brief moment, look as human as the rest of us. After the jump is a particularly wonderful model tumble from a recent Charleston, SC Fashion Week runway show. Correction: This is actually a boutique owner, not a model (hence the bow). But, it's still funny. So there.
Though Gwyneth Paltrow hasn't done much acting lately (aside from announcing over and over that she's taking a break from it), she's still managing to make headlines for her time-tested preference for bizarre fashion. Most recently she's taken a page from her infamous Oscar goth screwup and picked a pair of tarantula-like black sandals to wear to a charity event in New York last night. A closer look at the half-boot half-sandal contraptions after the jump.
Artist of our age Damien Hirst must have a busy schedule, what with all the shark embalming and gluing little diamonds onto skulls and bidding on white truffles. But he's determined to make sure that his art remains within reach of the common people, who wear jeans and patronize over-the-top art world events. So he teamed up with all-American brand Levis—and the Andy Warhol licensing machine—to design some jeans that anyone can buy, assuming they have $80,000 (really) to spend on psychedelic pants. After the jump, photos of Hirst's new clothing items from last weekend's opening in LA. The smart consumer will wait until these go on sale at Filene's.
Do you have something hanging around your apartment, taking up psychic space? Maybe it's under the bed or in a shoebox. Maybe it's a cream-colored Fender jazz bass... but it doesn't have to be that. Heartbroken Eastern Europeans have been contributing to the Museum of Broken Relationships in Croatia. You send them your romantic emblems and tchotchkes, and suddenly a dead cell phone with the caption, "It was 300 days too long. He gave me his mobile phone so I couldn't call him any more" becomes art. Our favorite entry?
Lifetime (television for "Women") announced today that it has poached hit reality competition show (and Peabody award winner) Project Runway away from Bravo, where it has been the flagship series. The Weinstein Company, which co-produces the design show, said that it has entered a five-year deal with Lifetime. NBC Universal, which owns Bravo, has apparently started legal proceedings trying to block the move. "We believe that this lawsuit is without merit. While good for the market for lawyers, it is always unfortunate when parties try to win in court what they have lost in the marketplace," said legal counsel for the Weinstein Co. Meow! Should the move stick, look for many gay men, too lazy to change the channel, to develop strange relationships with Tracey Gold movies of the week. [EW]
Looking for a quick snack that won't spoil your dinner? Might we suggest tearing into a Dirt Sandwich? Make sure to grab yourself a placemat and a handful of napkins, for this week's double decker supreme is stacked to the ceiling with this week's messiest infotainment offerings. Compiled with care by Defamer's resident culinary expert, Molly McAleer, we think you'll find this to be the tastiest sammy you've noshed on all week. Join us as we find out how Amy Winehouse's face looks these days (answer: better than Harvey Levin thinks), what a teary Hayden Panettiere did immediately after receiving an award for Saving The Whales (or some such nonsense) and what Harrison Ford thinks of being slimed. Pay close attention, lest you miss the revelation of whether or not Dancing With The Stars' Priscilla Presley spray tans or not ... a special CoJo investigate report! Enjoy, kids, enjoy!
StyleDiary's Patricia Handschiegel just posted a picture that was taken of her the day she sold her online-fashion startup to StyleHive in November 2007. In it, she's at her least glamorous — and most gleeful. "I love that picture because I was so fucking happy," she tells us. We wanted to know how she got that way. At first, Handschiegel wouldn't talk. "I know some things," she said, "But if anything, this shit makes you humble. You see how small you are and how big business and everything is." Fortunately, persistence and well-placed guilt trips paid off. And so below, her bullet points for the wantrepreneurs out there — girls' girls or not — looking to actually accomplish something.
We are shocked (shocked!) to hear this, but word on the street is that the lovely and ever-growing multicultural soccer team united by Brad and Angelina isn't exactly getting along of late. According to Star, animosity and friction is growing among the four little Jolie-Pitts, with personalities growing bolder and fights getting messier. And, unsurprisingly, The Chosen One is allegedly on the brunt of most blows. Most disturbing of all? As a source claims, those cushy lips of hers are only getting bigger as a result of actual physical blows from her siblings:
Sex writing is, at this point in the zeitgeist, the ghetto of journalistic topics. "Who am I?" begins the anonymous lady behind "Sex and the Street," the new Princeton sex column. "I'm just an ordinary girl with an extraordinary preoccupation with sex." Not so extraordinary to be preoccupied with sex: our biological drive to mate and procreate is very strong. To build your notoriety as a dude writer, it's important to have big ideas, or at least think you have them. For postmodern girls, however, it seems the fastest shortcut to getting attention is writing about sex or relationships, faux-frankly.
So, uh, you know John Mayer, right? The totally dreamy, maybe a bit annoying, pop singer and adept professional celebrity who dated Jessica Simpson? Right. Well, he's gone and done what some might call "the unthinkable." He, um, made out with Perez Hilton. Shriek! The newly svelte-ish celebrity blogger, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, is dishing on his site about the night he sucked mug with John freaking Mayer and I just can't stand it. So what exactly happened here? Yes it was obviously tectonic plates shifting and odd cosmic bits of whimsy like sun spots or something, but there has to be a more terrestrial reason for all of this.
Yesterday the staff at TMZ, Harvey Levin's AOL Time Warner-owned gossip site, tossed themselves over a line that I don't think even Perez Hilton would dare approach. They made fun of someone's dead mother. In a piece posted yesterday afternoon they wrote: "The mother of 'American Idol' contestant Elliott Yamin died last night in Richmond, Va. She was 65. Claudette Yamin had been hospitalized over the weekend... Yamin finished in 3rd place in 2006 on 'Idol,' behind Katharine McPhee and Taylor Hicks — who, like Mrs. Yamin, will never be heard from again." Commenters were upset in their usual thoughtful, Socratic way and TMZ eventually acknowledged the thoughtless remarks toward the end of the day. Mind you I say "acknowledged," not "apologized for."
That ABC show "American Inventor" has, stunningly, produced a real, breakthrough product: the backless bra. No longer will women be forced to suffer the tyranny of an encircling bra strap! Maidenform is now selling the product, which originated as a finalist entry on the show, for $25. And soon, the company will be launching a big ad campaign for the bra, which includes a promise from the (male) ad executives to model it upon request [Adrants]. Something for kinks of every stripe! After countless generations of embarrassing fumbling by men and chafing upon women's backs, this campaign would have to be terrible for the product not to be a wild success. Below, a clip of the heroic inventor, Elaine Cato, demonstrating her humanitarian idea on the show last year.
Today's Observer contains a smart, if depressing, package of stories on the fading glories of the magazine industry, but the weekly saved its cruelest cut for the front page, where appeared the parody at left of Vogue's infamous LeBron James cover (click for larger version). The message: if anyone deserves to be compared to a crazed monster it is the notoriously demanding Wintour, with her ostensible boss Si Newhouse along for the ride. The illustration, by Victor Juhasz, capped a rough few months for Wintour, who was publicly dissed by fashion's priesthood during a recent trip to Europe, then faced uproar over her recent weight-loss outreach to two female designers and is now grappling with fallout from the James cover. After the jump, a large version of the parody cover, and the object of said parody.
It's a bittersweet moment. Jezebel has been Gawker's most successful ever launch, and Conde Nast's acquisition of the women's site is the ultimate validation. But it's heartbreaking to let Jezebel go, and part with Anna Holmes, Dodai Stewart, Moe Tkacik, Tracie Egan, Jennifer Gerson and Jessica Grose, the writers who brought a new tone and intelligence to coverage on the web of fashion, media and relationships. It wasn't an easy decision.
After much delay, the future has arrived. Everybody's buying lasers! And, everybody's hairless! If you guessed that these two things are related, you are probably an astute female consumer of laser hair removal services. But now that the world of science fiction is here, you don't have to sit around cold, impersonal cut-rate salons to have some young whippet blast the hair off your body with concentrated pulses of scalding light; you can do it in the comfort of your own home, with no training or safety at all! We can already anticipate the hilarious domestic violence battles that will end with a laser being drawn. Two consumer-targeted lasers, the Tria ($995) and the Silk'n ($800), are about to be launched [WSJ ($)]. Just one slight drawback: these lasers are sexist and racist!
Lauren Goldstein Crowe, the Portfolio fashion blogger, posted her last post today. She continued the grand tradition of bloggers on their way out: the big fuck-you last post. Noted was Moe from Jezebel and other alleged meanies of the internet, who she had been advised to ignore. But she couldn't help herself!
