Hollywood gossip

Lushy journalists turned out in force for Jack Bryan’s documentary on the storied, now-shuttered hole of a watering hole Siberia when the flick premiered last night at Soho House. Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers, former Page Sixer Chris Wilson, The New York Observer’s George Gurley, publicist / bigtime author Sloane Crosley and a host of other party-loving media types showed up to watch themselves and their colleagues ramble nostalgically about the place that ruined so many young livers. Sadly, one member of that crowd was home with a mystery illness. “Former ‘Page Six’ reporter Ian Spiegelman opens the film: ‘I don’t even know how you could make a documentary about Siberia,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how people have any memories of what happened there.’”

“Siberia was the kind of place you went to drink to forget. ‘It’s where I went to forget that earlier that day I showed up to cover a party for Freddie Prinze Jr. and Freddie Prinze Jr.’s publicist told me that he wasn’t doing interviews,’ offered Spiegelman.

“But some memories remain: ‘One time [owner] Tracy [Westmoreland] interrupted our conversation to go throw some guy in a Dumpster and then returned to our conversation,’ says former ‘Page Six’ scribe and current Maxim editor Chris Wilson. One of his fondest recollections of the bar is the night he did shots with CNN’s Lou Dobbs.

“Another is the time when, just for fun, Westmoreland ordered his clients to hurl his entire inventory — several thousand dollars worth of alcohol — against the wall. ‘I put it up in the pantheon with Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, Mudd Club,” said Wilson. ‘I think they all occupy the same shadow of awesomeness.’

“”The first time I went down into the basement I thought, How can there not be a body down there?’ said author and book publicist Sloane Crosley. ‘It looked like Silence of the Lambs.’” [NYM]

Tired of seeing all those “cool” brand collaborations like “BAPE X FRESHJIVE X PUMA RAZOR T SHIRT WITH THREE LOGOS, $55,” etc.? Well now collaborations are coming to the common folk! Cool hipster hip cutting edge Japanese retailer Beams is teaming up with your favorite store, 7-11, for a collabo-branded pack of stationery. We quote: “The latest collaboration by Japanese select shop Beams is with 7-Eleven, producing a stationery collection that includes pens, sketchbooks and sticky notes.” Because co-branded stationery is not just a Tokyo thing any more. [Monocle via Hypebeast]

How much did President Bush drink? When did he quit? Did he quit? And what else did he do? There are absolutely no definitive answers to any of those questions, and most of the witnesses and parties involved are suspect or worse. Still, with the publication of former press secretary Scott McClellan’s book, complete with re-airing of those old cocaine rumors, it might be fun to investigate the out-going president’s drug history, as found both in the public record and the fever dreams of conspiracy artists.

Alcohol

The president has always denied being an acoholic, though he’s copped to “drinking too much” back in his callow youth (which lasted until his 40s, by the way, when he had his convenient religious reawakening). The alcohol provided a convenient excuse for his being a no-good fuckup for his entire 20s and 30s, and the religious awakening and supposed sobering up helped him gain forgiveness for youthful indiscretions like his disorderly conduct arrest and his 1976 DUI.

Anyway. Billy Graham showed up in 1985. In July of 1986, according to the lies he told in 2000, Bush quit drinking for good.

Here is a video of George W. Bush at a wedding that supposedly took place in 1992:

When the president “choked on a pretzel” in 2002, the White House took the step of having the White House physician announce to the press that “There was absolutely, positively, no suggestion on physical examination that any alcohol was involved.” He just choked on a pretzel, during a football game, and lost consciousness.

Graydon Carter sez he knows a guy who sez Bush’s blood alcohol level was quite high when he was hospitalized after the pretzel incident.

(Around the same time, a number of nuttier lefty sites began blowing up and enhancing photos of the president’s face to point out all the burst capillaries that proved his continued reliance on booze.)

Cocaine

The rumors made the rounds in 1999: George W. Bush did coke! This was before 9/11, when everyone started doing coke again, so it was a big deal. If it was true! Proving it became quite difficult when the person with the most damning-sounding “proof” of drug use turned out to be an unreliable criminal (much like how the people with the best proof that Bush went AWOL from the national guard were using questionable documents, FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS). So. Here are some of the rumors:

• Bush was arrested for drug use in the “late ’60s or early ’70s” but the arrest was expunged from his record after he performed community service. That community service may have been his stint at Houston’s Project P.U.L.L. in 1972.

• But that charge comes from the book by J.H. Hatfield. Hatfield was a convicted felon. The book was pulled from shelves. Hatfield turned up dead of an apparent suicide in 2001. He claimed all along that his sources for the cocaine story included Karl Rove, who’s known to talk off the record to journalists of all stripes.
• In 2004, Eric Boehlert floated the theory that Bush ditched the air force because they were instituting random drug tests. This seems like grasping at straws (lol) to us, but whatevs. It’s out there.
• Bush has simply never denied using cocaine.
• If you take Scott McClellan’s diagnosis at face value, Bush probably did plenty of drugs in his college days and beyond, and then more or less convinced himself that he can’t even remember if he did or not. Because he’s turned into a simple-minded fool.

Amusingly (to us, perhaps, and probably no one else), we now have a major candidate who’s admitted to cocaine use… but that admission itself is suspect. Barack Obama famously admitted to experimenting with coke in his first memoir, Dreams From My Father. “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though,” Obama wrote in the more-than-decade-old book. The New York Times spent god knows how long trying to find anyone from Obama’s adolescence who remembered him doing drugs but they came up short. Everyone remembered him as basically a square. He smoked a little weed.

We’re forced to ask if Obama didn’t exaggerate his drug use for the sake of a compelling narrative!

(We’ve come so far.)

And I Am Not Lying reports on a public Fight Club-type affair in Union Square last Friday, drawing a large crowd: “All kinds of people: old people, moms with strollers, skateboarding teens, foreign tourists throwing Euros around… A number of shirtless, scraped-up men paced the perimeter of the circle, alternately refereeing and answering questions. The rules were simple: find a partner, get in the ring. No face shots, tapping out ends the fight. No settling scores, just fighting for the fun of fighting.” Our favorite fight? Two skinny hipsters! The accompanying video is sort of like watching a cockfight, if the cocks were scrawny, bobbing chickens. Which one will defend my honor at Hugs? [And I Am Not Lying]

At a new condo in the East Village in NYC, a volatile mix of summer weather, a rooftop pool, gays, hipsters, and wealthy young hedge fund yuppies conspired to form a party that resulted, predictably, in drinking, drugs, debauchery, and defecation. Disasters of this type never happened when all members of various disparate cultural groups stayed neatly separated from each other, in neighborhoods segmented by class, wealth, race, and sexual preference. A Curbed tipster gives a brief glimpse into this dangerous world in which ubiquitous money obliterates traditional social boundaries and brings together GayHipYups in search of intoxication:

“our building had its first pool party this weekend and i thought you would enjoy. the disastrous combo of hedge fund guys, gay guys, and hipsters caused massive combustion resulting in the cops coming, fdny as well, the roof trashed, drugs, booze everywhere and some random people shitting in our gym. i stopped by for a couple hours and saw the disaster in the making! i’m sure you’ll read about it in curbed soon. it was one of those ‘only in ny’ moments.”

This would never happen in Topeka.

[Pic via Curbed]

In case you weren’t really up to fighting the hordes of screaming ladies and gays who camped out last night to watch the glitterati arrive for the HUGE Sex and the City movie premiere at Radio City Music Hall, we’ve put together a handy little photo gallery of some of the notable red carpet arrivals. Most everyone looks a little tired and a lot older than when the show left the air four years ago, but all managed to teeter down the runway and pose for pretty pretty pictures. Like the one of Sarah Jessica Parker, above! Or the twelve waiting for you after the jump.

GALLERY

Anna Wintour

Ashley Olsen

Chris Noth

Steven “Cojo” Cojocaru

David Eigenberg

Patricia Field and Candace Bushnell

Jason “Coke Eyes” Lewis

Jennifer Hudson

Kim Cattrall

Lydia Hearst

Sarah Jessica Parker

Christian Siriano
END

It’s come to our attention that the Times‘ story today about the “miracle fruit” that makes everything taste sweet is—to use a technical journalism term—a big ripoff of a Wall Street Journal story from a year ago. A Page One WSJ story, at that. And it’s not just that the Times wrote a piece on the same topic, which is common enough; they used a bunch of the same sources, and made the many of the same points in the same way. With not even a nod to the original! This is a semi-gotcha—it could have been solved by simply giving a little credit. It’s not plagiarism, but it is enough to mightily piss off a fellow reporter. Check out the similarities:

“To Make Lemons Into Lemonade, Try ‘Miracle Fruit,’” WSJ, 3/30/07:

“The Miracle Fruit, a Tease for the Taste Buds,” NYT, 5/28/08:

WSJ:

NYT:

(PS: The Times linked to three different websites in its online story, so they can’t argue that they couldn’t even give a link to the WSJ.)

Ruh roh! There’s an quandary on Brooklyn Heights Blog about a dog-walker captured walking dogs… while simultaneously riding a Vespa. OK behavior? Egregious? What if they’re also heading towards oncoming traffic? Click to judge. [Brooklyn Heights Blog]

Headline to an email plea from Democrats.com: “69 More To End The War.” Okay!

IAC’s Barry Diller has just explained—to the audience at the Wall Street Journal’s D Conference—the breakdown of his relationship with the internet conglomerate’s biggest shareholder, evil John Malone’s Liberty Media. Paid Content was taking notes. Diller’s metaphor? “Partnerships are marriages without the stuff.” Oops, Freudian slip!

Those words could so easily be used to describe the former studio head’s marriage blanc to fashion designer and longtime friend Diane von Furstenberg. Diller’s widely known to be gay; a former boy-toy even wrote a lightly-veiled account of his two-year relationship with a tycoon nicknamed ‘Bear’ who sounds much like Diller; and his for-show relationship with Diane von Furstenberg has long been the subject of amusement among Hollywood insiders.

Here’s just one tale that makes the rounds. At Ed Limato’s pre-Oscar party, Barry and Diane (who had just recently tied the knot with a lot of eyerolling from those attending) were hanging out. People were sitting with comedians Steve Martin and Martin Short. Short noticed Barry was there with his bride, and said, “Isn’t it a shame that Barry and Diane feel they have to be here swanning and glad-handing for political reasons when they could be at home doing it?”