Michael Musto

Around 10 p.m. on a brisk Sunday evening in early November, Penny Arcade, the Manhattan performance artist and former Warhol starlet, was onstage with a four-piece pickup band at Joe’s Pub in the East Village. The petite and curvy Ms. Arcade, 58, who was wearing snakeskin platforms and a sleek back cocktail dress, explained she would be doing some improv. No big deal. Nothing too good, she joked. But before launching into the first number, a loungey “anti-careerism” piece called “No Mona Lisa,” she took a moment to quote her friend Quentin Crisp, the late British writer, actor and raconteur who is the subject of a new biopic tentatively slated for release early next year on a U.K. television network.  read more »

As we learned from the Village Voice's Michael Musto, Liam McMullan, whom The Observer's Spencer Morgan profiled in June, will be replacing Lydia Hearst as a columnist for Page Six Magazine. We gave Mr. McMullan, son of nightlife photographer Patrick McMullan, a call to find out what we could expect from the weekly dispatch, the first installment of which—a chronicle of his Halloween activities featuring a stop at the Accompanied Literary Society's masquerade—has already been filed.

"It's going to be more about what I see than what I do," he said. "Anyone who thinks I'm even the least bit entertaining, the least bit interesting, I'll give them a little more insight into how I feel about things.  read more »

"I basically started Radar because I didn't want to work at any other magazine," said Maer Roshan, the editor of the recently folded magazine. "And after six years, all of it came down to this."

Mr. Roshan was surveying his party, the night before Halloween, which had become a kind of Night of the Living Dead for journalism. "PRINT IS DEAD! LONG LIVE RADAR!" read the invitation, which was retooled after a recent development at the magazine.

Six days before his staff had been given a couple of hours to pack everything at their desks into collapsible white boxes and shove out, after the sudden declaration from his sponsors that the magazine was officially kaput, his staffers, many of whom have been fixtures in the young journalism scene in New York for years now, mingled with their media friends at the bar, Citrine, in Chelsea; not yet officially opened, the walk-up spot, which looks a bit like a Hell's Kitchen gay bar, has already held parties for Edgar Bronfman Jr.  read more »

We talked mob money with writer Gay Talese at the screening of Gomorrah.

After months of speculation, we got to the bottom of Marquee's temporary summer shutdown.

We tallied gifts, drank absinthe, and chatted with godfather Michael Musto at nightlife heir Liam McMullan's 21st birthday party.

Russell Crowe got a little testy at the Body of Lies premiere--par for the course, we suppose.

We partied with Diane von Furstenberg, Tory Burch, Fern Mallis, Martha Stewart and Rory and Elie Tahari as the CFDA welcomed its newest members.

This year’s New York Film Festival opened Friday night with a screening of French director Laurent Cantet’s The Class.

The film, which has already won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, focuses on a multicultural classroom in Paris’ rapidly gentrifying 20th Arrondissement. With the exception of the role of the teacher, who is played by the author of the memoir that inspired the movie, the cast is made up of a group of amateur teenage actors, most of whom had traveled to New York for the festival.

Maybe it was the serious, relatively low-profile film—The Darjeeling Limited was last year's selection, and The Queen opened the year before that—or the rain or the presidential debates on TV, but the red carpet was particularly quiet.  read more »

CONCERTS:

Kanye West, Rihanna, Lupe Fiasco, and N.E.R.D. Can we say power tour?! Catch their Manhattan date May 13 at Madison Square Garden. [On Sale: Saturday, Feb. 23 at noon]

Call him dad rock, but Billy Joel’s July 16 show, which was to be the last concert ever at Shea Stadium, was the fastest sell out in Shea’s history, with 50,000 tickets disappearing in just 48 minutes. In fact that was enough to prompt Mr. Joel to add a second concert two days later, which is now being billed as Shea’s official musical close out. (Sorry ‘bout that early birds!) [On Sale: Saturday, Feb. 23 at 9 a.m.]  read more »

Out of The Daily Transom mailbag yesterday came an extra special invitation. Like a pair of beacons on a foggy horizon, all pink and precious, was the announcement of Amanda Lepore’s birthday party, which will be held at Star Lounge tonight. Then we realized that the fog wasn’t fog at all—it was déjà vu! Ms. Lepore, the transgender fashion icon made famous as the face of fashion label Heatherette and MAC cosmetics, has already had at least one birthday party. Well, according to Michael Musto anyway. The Village Voice writer’s column this week dives feet-first into Ms. Lepore’s Lotus libations, where the fuzzy scribe was kicked out by a beefy security guy. Maybe Mr. Musto’s exile has turned Ms. Lepore into a Paris-Hilton-on-New-Year’s or a Patrick-McMullan-after-publishing-a-book type. Then again, perhaps the evening’s sponsors and the birthday girl just dig publicity.

Does Tinsley Mortimer have a beef with the gays?  read more »