Madonna

Last week I wore a pair of six-inch Lanvin sling-back stilettos while hosting a fashion show in Dallas. They looked great with my new Band of Outsiders jacket. I told the assembled crowd of socialites that it was the only way I could see over the lectern, which was true-ish. It was all fairly transparent. Anyone could see that I invented this excuse in order to walk the runway wearing those insane shoes and have my Linda Evangelista moment.

I’m a big believer in excuses. The more baroque, the better. I see them as a form of politeness.  read more »

An O.G. in the Usual Gang of Idiots: The Times' Neil Genzlinger profiles MAD magazine's fold-in creator Al Jaffee and finds the 87-year-old writer/illustrator still up on youth culture. (Of course he is: The guy did a mind-blowing cover for Vice magazine's Comics Issue, after all.)

Fox Season: Time's James Poniewozik wonders about FOX News Channel's future since "I get a sense that the haven for conservative hosts, and viewers alienated by liberal news, needs to figure out its next act."

How Many Doors?: Vanity Fair's Rich Cohen talks to VF.com's Claire Howorth about interviewing Madonna in the May 2008 issue of the magazine."It was the longest day in history... I had to go through countless doors to get to Madonna. I did the interview at the same time they were shooting the satellite down, and it felt just like that. I had one shot, one chance." Was Cohen intentionally echoing VF editor Graydon Carter's infamous "seven rooms" theory of access?

First Defense: Slate's Jack Shafer warns you how not to look the fool--The April Fool tomorrow.(Flashback, here's the origins of April Fools Day according to The Simpsons.)

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 »

Madonna turns 50 this year and whether one loves or hates her, one has to wonder how many listenable albums she has left. This is as much because every album represents another persona, another clone of the same DNA, as the fact that the woman is turning 50. Eventually, she's going to transform from a M.I.L.F. to a M.I.L.A.L.M. (Mom I'd Like to Act Like a Mom). When a quality version of the single "Four Minutes to Save the World," off her new album Hard Candy (due April 29th), was leaked onto the Internet last week, fans could be forgiven for cringing a bit at Madge's cool-as-a-cucumber delivery being drowned out by the "urban," brassy hip-hop beats. Was it Mommy telling us to turn the music down?  read more »

Sure, Madonna is mega famous, filthy rich, and looking pretty damn good for a woman who is about to turn 50. But as she told reporters yesterday following the debut of her inaugural filmmaking endeavor, Filth and Wisdom, at the Berlin Film Festival, life wasn’t always all faux British accents and Kabbalah bracelets. She explained how the movie evoked her own long-hard road breaking into show business (the good old Danceteria days!) through its storyline of three young flat mates in London who “try to finance their dreams while working unfullfilling jobs,” the Associated Press reports. And she recalled “the cold harsh reality” of arriving in New York “only to find that there were thousands of girls that wanted to do the same thing, and I wasn't so special after all — that I was never going to be able to pay the rent ... and that I was going to have to do other things to feed myself.” Sniff! The characters in Filth and Wisdom face similar woes. One of them, played by a member of the Gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello, is an aspiring actor; another a would-be humanitarian who wants to help the children in Africa; and the third, a failed ballerina turned pole dancer.

An East Side Kabbalah school has flipped a building for $9.3 million just three years after buying it for $5 million, property records show.

With the sale from the Research Centre of Kabbalah to a firm listed as Carvi Properties Inc., a new chapter is added to the history of the futuristic-looking building at 152 East 55th Street.  read more »