Choire Sicha

Outside, in line, BOILING. 11:22 a.m.

"Lanny, what now?" reporters ask Lanny Davis one by one. "We're going to take the White House" is his talking point today.

And here's a reporter who's been covering Hillary for the whole shebang. What's next for him? "Gonna take a week off."

Inside. There are 10 American flags in the room, six of them on the stage around the podium where she will speak. It's Mark Penn's strategy come at last to full flower, too late.

One-quarter of the floor space is unused, cordoned off.  read more »

So there at the Hillary Clinton event at Baruch College was Lanny Davis, Senator Clinton's old pal from Yale--speaking to reporters, he stressed, as just a private citizen. Barack Obama, he said, "is strong in places where she isn't strong." Also Mr. Davis had called Senator Clinton that morning to tell her he was starting a campaign on a web site, one that would launch at midnight, after the victory speech!

One the web site, womenforfairpolitics.com, women may send a form letter to Barack Obama, asking him to make Hillary Clinton his pick for vice president.  read more »

More from Sheila Jackson Lee at Baruch.

On Hillary Clinton: "She's had her fans."

More importantly, on Barack Obama and Clinton talking: "I think an invitation has been extended. Senator Clinton will accept that."

UPDATE: She also said, "This night is a celebration for a candidate that has finished the course."

Andrea Peyser couldn't get online in the press room. Andrea! Say something funny! "This is like her campaign," she said.

The line outside Baruch College for Hillary Clinton was like a cheerful catastrophe. People on cells, checking the latest; exchanging theories; the word “delegates” swept through the crowd. But it was no funeral.

The supporters waiting on a line that stretched from East 24th Street and Lexington Avenue up to East 25th Street (and around the corner), apart from the whole Cloverfield-9/11 echo, looked very much like an Obama crowd.  read more »

Governor David Paterson issued a memo in mid-May—regarding a three-month-old court decision—that was ignored for a few weeks and then, suddenly, publicized.

An appellate court upstate had said that a Canadian marriage between two women must be recognized in New York. This wasn’t much in the way of news! Mr. Paterson had already lobbied for (and seen passed last year, in the Assembly, at least) a bill saying much the same.  read more »

The hole appeared maybe in March. It was the size of—and as oddly shaped a trapezium as—a bad West Village studio.

The town’s dock becomes a short boardwalk that deposits arrivals deboarding the boat from the mainland at a cramped, poorly planned intersection; that is Cherry Grove, Fire Island’s entire tiny downtown.

So arrivals find that to their right is a restaurant, and then behind that a bar. Ahead of them is the walkway to a bar; and behind that the pizza parlor; and, a bit up, a store; and, nearer, a Prudential Douglas Elliman office. To their left is a tiny post office, another real estate office and a bar. In the middle of all this, essentially, is the hole.  read more »

“And by the way,” said San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in his City Hall on May 15, “as California goes, so goes the rest of the nation. It’s inevitable. This door’s wide open now. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not. This is the future and it’s now.”

For the first time in many years, spurred by the California Supreme Court decision last week providing the opportunity of marriage in that state to any two adult humans, there is this talk of open culture warfare. This marks a bold return to the kulturkampf of more than a decade ago—this time with the gays in charge of the argument. For now. Maybe not for long.  read more »

Daniel Manus Pinkwater, one of the two or three last great male writers alive, is putting his new novel, The Yggyssey, online, one chapter each week. He is up to chapter four! Mr. Pinkwater, like so many men after him, attended Bard College (most probably concurrently with former feminist pioneer and current outcast Phyllis Chesler, as she is a year older than he), but some decades before Bard and Bennington and that sort of school became factories for today’s malformed, self-centered boy-writers.

The male writers we find on the pay-for-placement bookstore tables today could be the unhappy real-world future of Mr. Pinkwater’s narrator, Yggdrasil Birnbaum, who attends, near the corner of Sunset and Vine, the Harmonious Reality School, founded by a doctor of fruitopathy (it is what you would think), and where “the teachers are polite, and the kids, while confused and mostly illiterate, are friendly.”  read more »

In an inevitable, perhaps even overdue collision of reality and lifestyle, this morning MTV announced it has green-lighted the 21st season of The Real World. It will be filmed in Brooklyn, the reigning home turf of post-teen drama, and broadcast in 13 one-hour episodes in early 2009. No word yet regarding in which neighborhood the attention-seeking hopefuls will reside and manufacture identity-based conflict. We are hoping for the corner of Smith and Carroll but will also settle for Bedford and North Sixth. We would also like to see The Real World: East New York, where things start getting really real, and surely City Councilman Charles Barron of that neighborhood would assist with locations. God speed, young funny-haired applicants.  read more »

“Sometimes government moves slow, but we run sure,” said Hiram Monserrate, councilman from Queens, on Monday afternoon. The Veteran’s Committee, which he chairs, was passing a Berkeley-esque resolution calling (again) for the federal government to repeal the “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue” policy and replace it with a policy of equal rights for homosexuals in the military.

Now government is moving slower than ever.

This resolution was introduced by Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who was, except for maybe U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner, the city’s only solid candidate for mayor next year.  read more »

“It’s not the best time in the world to be a White House correspondent,” said Bill Plante on the sultry afternoon of Saturday, April 26. This was at Tammy Haddad’s annual pre-White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner lawn party. The blooming wisteria was strangling the woods that surround her house.

These nearly-over final four years of George W. Bush are Mr. Plante’s third second-term presidency in his years as CBS White House correspondent. “I guess he could still drop a bomb somewhere—there are people who think he means to do it,” Mr. Plante said.  read more »

Sometimes statistics can give rise to a piece of journalism. New York Times magazine contributing writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis, a resident of Boston, found that 700 gay men age 29 or younger were wed in the state of Massachusetts between May 2004 and June 2007.

What resulted is a 7000-word New York Times magazine cover story, published this weekend.

This number sounds like a statistical anomaly! It certainly is.  read more »

This morning, the New York Times announced the recipients of their 2007 Punch Awards. The awards, named after the nickname of former Times honcho Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, have two categories: "journalistic or editorial excellence" in community service and "business accomplishments."  read more »

“In fact, the press that covers me on a regular basis I think is kind of bored because I just talk about solutions,” a raspy-voiced Hillary Clinton told Larry King on Monday night.

They really are. So bored! Bored with all those SOLUTIONS! But she also had good news, everybody! Hillary Clinton is staying in the race for FOREVER—“until we get Florida and Michigan resolved”—which will be slightly after the time that Democratic National Party Chair Howard Dean drops dead and just before Satan returns to rule on earth.

Fortunately, our country has, for now, a rich resource of small-town papers, which still publish edited collections of stump speech transcripts that the national and the traveling press will never transcribe again, as they sit in their reserved seats at events and practice stabbing themselves to stay awake.  read more »

The wingnut parade at the 112th annual New York Times stockholder's meeting, held late this morning at the Times' conference room on the other side of a birch-and-moss filled atrium from the Times' newsroom tower, was out of control. And when chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was not being harassed by pesky shareholders, he was being attacked by bugs. (He spent about a minute flailing at an insect that seemed to have emerged from his hair.) Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media was there.  read more »

Tishman Speyer, the newly-chosen developers of the West Side rail yards, would like to eliminate the northernmost spur of the High Line.

Friends of the High Line president and co-founder Robert Hammond doesn't believe it's going to happen—after all, he's already overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the conversion of the elevated railway into a new city park.

When he first went to Mayor Bloomberg, he said, "The Mayor said 'Don't show us pretty pictures. We've got enough parks, we can't pay for them all.'"

So Hammond showed the city it could make money off the High Line—or at least, property owners in West Chelsea could and some other money would trickle down.

"I've seen this movie before," Hammond said today of Tishman Speyer's plans, speaking at the 2nd Annual Trends in New York City Land Use and Real Estate Development conference down at New York Law School this afternoon. "I think we'll get the whole Line," he said.  read more »

On Monday, April 14, Mariah Carey—“incredibly well-funded, corporately polished,” according to the bitter pop music critic of the Chicago Sun-Times—was on Oprah, stumping for votes.

“Now Mariah didn’t get her new body just by eating artichokes,” said Oprah.

Cut to the video, Mariah at the pool in a black bodysuit.

“I’m a female and I like the arms to be slender and toned!” said Mariah.

Mariah got the whole first 42 minutes of the show, and also, her new CD came out the next day!

Midway through her appearance, a mass e-mail was sent from David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager: “You’ve probably heard about the latest dust-up in the Democratic race,” it opened.  read more »

On June 10, 1974, a large group of passengers were evacuated from city buses in midtown. They were crawling with roaches, according to an account in The New York Times.  read more »

The New York Times under executive editor Bill Keller still has fewer Pulitzer victories to its credit than during the short-lived reign of his predecessor, Howell Raines.

Under Raines, who served approximately 21 months before resigning in 2003 in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, the paper's news pages published seven Pulitzer-winning entries.

In more than twice that span of time—53 Pulitzer-eligible months as executive editor—Keller has published six Pulitzer winners.  read more »

“I look back at it now,” Annie Leibovitz said at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1991, “I realize that one of the things I loved toward the end at Rolling Stone were the conceptual covers.” She had left for Vanity Fair in 1983, in part to follow an art director she admired.  read more »

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter showed up almost three hours in to this morning's Landmarks Preservation Committee meeting on the proposed St. Vincent's Hospital rebuilding in the West Village.

"I'm against it!" he said. The proposed towers would very nearly cast a shadow over his nearby restaurant, the Waverly Inn, after all.  read more »

Lawyers for Daniel Magnus, the former publisher of free-sheet newspaper Metro New York, have filed an amended complaint in New York's Southern District Court charging the media company with racketeering.

Magnus first filed suit against his former employers in February, claiming that he was owed severance and bonus pay; now he's amended the complaint to add RICO violations.

In the filing, he claims that the company asked him to backdate and alter corporate documents—and that this qualifies as racketeering because the U.S. mail and "wire communication systems" were used.  read more »

Voters were “stunned” and also “dumbstruck,” said the AP. It was just a “bombshell,” this admission from the governor.

This was August 12, 2004. “You’re right,” said David Lee Miller on Fox News. “This is nothing less than a stunning announcement broadcast live.”

But who was stunned?  read more »

What tactics might new governor David Paterson take in dealing with the media when they ask questions about his personal life, I asked Ken Sunshine, the public relations man who is friendly with both Paterson and former governor Eliot Spitzer, late last week.

"I think he should tell the press to go fuck themselves when they ask things that are inappropriate," he said. "Of course, I don't think he should follow that advice. You should delve into the lives of politicians at the same level you delve into the lives of press people."

But already, resulting in what was either a full disclosure or a limited hangout or a modified limited hangout, Paterson and his wife were conducting interviews with Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News. Meeting since Saturday, the couple carefully disclosed news of years-old mutual extramarital affairs.  read more »

The governor is on the move.

Co. were a day late and at least $2,721.41 short. At least his people recognized—and, probably more difficultly, convinced Spitzer—that someone needed to clean up his senseless public mess.

Unfortunately for Mr. Spitzer, at least one major firm turned him down on Tuesday as a client, according to an industry specialist. There was nothing that they thought they could do for him.

His sex-ring circus displays his greatest failure of articulation yet.

Back in the attorney general’s office, he had people who could decently interpret him for the public and the press.  read more »

Everyone's got something to peddle on the back of Eliot Spitzer's (are we still saying alleged?) prostitute problems. Low-grade PR firms and magazines have gone crazy.

Dr. Carol Cassell is available for comment, says PR By The Book! "As seen on The Today Show and Good Morning America, this author of Put Passion First: Why Sexual Chemistry is Key to Finding and Keeping Lasting Love, is known for her 'thought-provoking' and 'entertaining' interviews."

Why, that is "thought-provoking"! But it wasn't just publicists out to flack.  read more »

There's a rumor going around that the press conference is being delayed because David Paterson is being sworn in as governor.

Needless to say, this would mean that Spitzer is resigning.

Azi asked one of the governor's advance people here about it and got a digusted head-shake in response.

The reporters waiting here at the Spitzer press conference, at least the ones I've talked to, don't think he will resign.  read more »

38th floor, 633 3rd, waiting.

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which each year rewards what they view as positive depictions of gay people in various media from reality shows to newspapers to comic books, has made a happy woman of Us Weekly editor Janice Min.  read more »

On Friday night at the Ritz, that trumped-up gay bar up in Hells Kitchen, something entirely too ordinary happened once too often: Madonna’s “Get Together” came on.

That’s the one that goes: “Can we get together? / I really, I really want to be with you.” (OMG, LOL, she’s so like deep.)

The gays pretty much always freak when something from her 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor gets played. It has hit its expiration date hard. They like it—but at this point, it’s as inflected with nostalgia as “Borderline” or “La Isla Bonita.” And on Friday night, according to two attendees, a distinct expression of “meh” accompanied the ritual playing of the Madge.  read more »

“I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country,” Al Gore said on December 13, 2000.

Well, George W. Bush didn’t listen to Al Gore’s advice, and neither so much did God. But Ralph Nader evidently took it as holy writ.  read more »

“I was around when there was a lot of hoo-ha about this back in the Giuliani administration,” said Barbara Warren, a longtime staffer at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Services Center on West 12th Street in Greenwich Village.

The “hoo-ha” in question was the idea of gays as the great superconductors in whatever public health panic is gripping the city at any given moment. And pretty much everyone else in attendance at a thoroughly retro meeting at the center on Feb. 21 was there during the Rudolph Giuliani administration, too, and the Dinkins administration, and the Koch administration.  read more »

For all the clumsiness of the McCain press folks over the past 30 hours since The New York Times published their story about their candidate's ties to a lobbyist, they scored at least one direct hit—a talking point that has appealed to and happily been dispersed by the self-involved press.

But first, the idiocy!  read more »

Vanessa Grigoriadis did the TV shows. The Feb. 21 Rolling Stone, with her Britney Spears story on the cover, was hitting stands.

“Why do people sop up this issue of Rolling Stone?” Larry King asked on Feb 7.

On Feb 10, she went on CNN’s Reliable Sources.

“By writing this piece on everything from her family to her breast implants, haven’t you now joined the mob?” asked host Howard Kurtz.

(For just one thing, Rolling Stone covering Ms. Spears is like Running Times covering Martin Lel, like Yachting covering Paul Allen, like Cat Fancy covering pussycats.)  read more »

Remember when Al Gore's alien wolf-baby and Laura Bush's secret lovenest were on the cover of the low-end supermarket tabloids back in the summer of 2000? No? Well, this year's election is at last being given the vote of confidence by the masterminds at the Globe and the National Examiner, both publications of American Media Inc.—corporate home to Star, Sun and... Fit Pregnancy.  read more »

The perpetual bachelor party that was Park Avenue South has finally ended. Now that sexist bacchanalia is just compulsory night out with the boys; limp and early, out for a few beers and home and dry.

Men these days are delighted to be engaged. They just can’t wait to get in out of the cold. You can’t live a shelter-magazine spread without a spouse. Metrosexuality was the gateway drug to heterosexuality.

And so their marriages have the masculine sheen of an aggressive and antisocial act—more about leaving than arriving.  read more »

According to internal traffic measures, the Web site of the New York Times broke single-day traffic records this week—then broke them again the very next day.  read more »

BOSTON—Barack Obama spent his last days before Super Tuesday running for God of America. His cult is growing; his calling as America’s spiritual leader is cemented. Seriously, who would have ever thought that the next Christ would have gone to Harvard Law?

On Monday night in this sad seaside town where the 7-Eleven cash registers still displayed the laughable phrase “GO PATTS CHAMPS 08,” what looked like the cast of The Departed laid out the case for Obama as our salvation. The young crowd had stretched endlessly around the Boston seaport, all the way up and over a bridge to downtown.  read more »

It turns out that at the Obama overflow party B there is a party C, sort of--in the basement! These kids party! We were alerted to this latest Obama party by insane screaming and hollering, set off by...
Kansas? Delegates? California exits? Obamatinis?(Did I mention there were Obamatinis?) I don't know why everyone is screaming! This must be how Andy Rooney feels. "We win California, we win the presidential election," a guy says. "Forget it," a girl says. No, wait--yes we...
can?  read more »

Hillary Clinton is all on the TVs here--they can't turn her off as they did on New Hampshire primary night. The booing here at Obama party A is heartfelt and loud. (She's speaking incredibly well, by the way.)

Unfortunately a table of guys were hooting and hollering for a WDR cameraman (from somewhere foreign) while Clinton was talking about people who'd died from today's tornadoes.  read more »

I met a black Republican for Obama!  read more »

The crowd at the Obama party in Murray Hill seem to be taking this OK, cheering for delegate wins and the exciting win of Delaware. (Delaware: Still a state!)

They even cheered the exit poll numbers that found that male voters favored Obama. Uh, the men did. The women did not so much! So this is not a grim scene, even as Clinton handily takes New York.

But you know that people working on their first campaign had grander fantasies than a delegate squabble.

P.S. It smells less like barf in the back of the bar.

It's a bit chaotic here at the New York Obama H.Q. party at Tonic East, on Third Avenue at 29th Street.

Apparently the Giants enthusiasts have been here drinking all day and now they are being displaced a bit by the hopeful young crowd who are arriving in a steady stream. Honestly? It seriously smells like vomit up in the front. I really think some recently hurled!  read more »

BOSTON—Photographers are petting the bomb-sniffing dogs! Nuts! Next up, cats and dogs having sex. Seriously, usually they just take you to jail if you go near the dog.

Earlier, down on the seaport at the World Financial Center, the line to go see Barack Obama speak stretched, four and eight wide, for at least half a mile, curving along the shore and up and over a bridge to downtown. Fortunately there wasn't much of a breeze off the water, but the youngsters in line (and they are young!) were shouting and hopping to keep warm. Seriously.

Madness!

Barack Obama's speech at the Meadowlands early this afternoon was not terribly thrilling or very new. Reporters wondered why it wasn't happening downtown Newark. This was more an event for the cameras than the people—though one reporter suggested the campaign had become overly fearful of a repeat of the D.C. debacle, where fans and reporters alike had been turned away in droves from seeing Obama speak.  read more »