She grabbed my arms with a surprising ferocity. “Thanks!” she squealed before scuttling back into her dressing room. The door slammed behind her.  read more »

1. Century 21

Cortlandt Street near Broadway

Doorless dressing rooms make you feel like you’re changing in the high-school locker room.

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God willing, at this very moment someone is scrambling eggs on a stove in an apartment overlooking the East River while at the same time gazing up at someone’s buttocks, pressed against a see-through Plexiglas bathtub, sunken, by design, into the floor above.

In the early 1980s, the late Paul Rudolph, noted architect and onetime dean of the Yale School of Architecture, incorporated such a tub into his dream apartment on the top three floors of 23 Beekman Place. The tub was still in working condition a few years ago, when hotelier and noted bathing enthusiast André Balazs had his birthday party there. “Of all the incredible bathtubs I’ve heard of in this city, that one takes it,” Mr. Balazs said.  read more »

Until last Thursday, when a nude photograph of Carla Bruni, the 40-year-old model-turned-pop-star-turned-first lady of France, sold at Christie’s for $91,000, more than 20 times its expected price, Ms. Bruni hadn’t been the subject of much conversation among New Yorkers. But over the last week, her name popped out of pursed lips at cocktail lounges and long lunches across the city, as men and women started to catch on that a new icon of fashion, sex and sensibility—a 21st-century amalgam of Jackie O, Lady Di and J-Lo—was emerging across the Atlantic.  read more »

When the economy disintegrates and Manhattan bursts into flames, the board of the block-long co-op 765/775 Park Avenue will still be begging the day help and dog walkers to take the service elevator; the co-op board members at 820 Fifth will still be turning away unsatisfactory multibillionaires like Ron Perelman and Steve Wynn; and Ambassador Donald Blinken’s living room at the  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 »

The summer of 1988, David Samuels was between his junior and senior years at Harvard and decided he wanted to cover the Republican convention in New Orleans.

His journalism experience had been limited to writing parodies of news items for the Harvard Lampoon, and he had little in the way of access set up for the convention.  read more »

“Ben looks like Beaker from the Muppets on the outside, but then inexplicably like a guy from Prison Break under his clothes,” said Mindy Kaling, the 28-year-old actress who plays Kelly Kapoor on The Office. “I think if I’m going to have a boyfriend who works out, he better be sort of embarrassed about it, like Ben is. Sheepish fitness is the only tolerable kind.”  read more »

“I dress like a boy because I feel like boys are generally more comfortable than women,” said Ali Tenenbaum the other day, sitting at a West Village coffee shop and wearing a “typical” outfit of black Hudson jeans, blue J. Crew cardigan, yellow T-shirt and designer sneakers. Ms. Tenenbaum, 38 (whose family was the inspiration for the Wes Anderson film The Royal Tenenbaums, though she said the actual resemblance is slight), has unfussy brown hair that falls to several inches above her shoulders, and clear, radiant skin. She doesn’t wear makeup.  read more »]]> http://www.observer.com/2008/urbane-tomboys#comments Arts & Culture Tue, 18 Mar 2008 12:37:53 -0400 Meredith Bryan 66611 at http://www.observer.com http://www.observer.com/2008/clash-goin Like many music-obsessed New Yorkers, Oliver Truman navigates the honeycomb of city streets with headphones plugged into his ears. Mr. Truman, a 26-year-old marketing assistant with a beanstalk frame and curly-q’d chestnut hair, has a playlist called “walking” on his iPod, loaded with songs ranging from The Buzzcocks to The Four Tops.

On a recent weekend afternoon, he listened to The Jam while flipping through a magazine and Screwdriver while depositing a check at the bank.  read more »]]> http://www.observer.com/2008/clash-goin#comments Arts & Culture Feist M.I.A. Muzak The Clash Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:13:53 -0400 Gillian Reagan 66254 at http://www.observer.com