The Observatory

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. News of the photo sale even made it onto Saturday Night Live’s weekend update.

Thanks to the Internet, the photograph—taken by Michael Comte in 1993, when Ms. Bruni was working as a model—made the rounds. Her face all wide planes, her small breasts pointing off in two directions, she stands with her hands forming a diamond over her nether regions, a sort of ironic Eve pose, but she doesn’t seem to be covering up for her own sake. Her expression—her lips are parted in a parody of innocence, her eyes are semi-frozen—says she had little need for shelter. Her skin is just the outfit she’s put on for the picture, as easy to model as a Dior suit or an Yves Saint Laurent gown. This woman has nothing to hide.

Indeed, in our own political season, when concealment, attack and counterattack are so rife, there was something Edenic about the photo of a first lady standing naked, unapologetic, challenging the viewer to choose between arousal and admiration. Because frankly, she looks great. The fact that the photo was taken 15 years ago is irrelevant, because Ms. Bruni has continued her full-frontal, forward surge of sex and power to this current day.

And while our own politicians seem to regard carnal passion as a dangerous third rail of politics—which, after all, it’s proved itself to be in the cases of men such as Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer—there is something invigorating about a first lady who told French magazine L’Express last year, “I’m monogamous occasionally, but I prefer polygamy and polyandry.” Just look at any photo of her with her husband, Nicolas Sarkozy—looking at his dumbstruck, grinning, subservient mug, you can tell he can’t believe his luck. Just last October he divorced his second wife, Cécilia, after rumors of affairs on both sides, and immediately he finds himself cheek to cheek with Carla Bruni.

It’s taken the rest of us a bit longer to catch on. The widely circulated paparazzi shots last Christmas of the happy couple cavorting on an Egyptian beach were notable for the contrast of her physical perfection against his tubby, furry tummy. Their quiet February wedding made our papers without much fanfare. But even as Europe has been electrified—the British fell so deeply in love with Ms. Bruni during a recent state visit with her husband that The Daily Mail ran some 17 pictures of her, including close-ups of her hands and feet that, for some, were more erotic than the Comte photo—we’ve remained grounded, inoculated against her charms. Carla Bruni? Wasn’t she a model, a pop singer? Did she date Mick Jagger? Do a Guess campaign?

But while we were distracted by our own former first lady’s vigorous lunge for a return to the White House, Ms. Bruni stealthily installed herself as the most compelling, glamorous and refreshingly bold first lady in many a year. She’s let us know she looks great naked and looks great in clothes. She’s stayed young without chasing youth; she’s stayed sexy without shedding her dignity or her position of power. And that’s what many women, particularly New York women, want.

 

ON HER RECENT trip to England, much was made over Ms. Bruni’s choice of attire. Dressed head to toe in Dior by John Galliano, Ms. Bruni was described in The Guardian as “two parts Jackie O, one part Lycée girl.” Commenting on the importance of the French couple’s visit to Britain, Andrew Gimson wrote in The Daily Telegraph: “Many of us decided at once that if we were going to be seduced by anyone, we would rather be seduced by her.” Hungry for a woman who could brighten up dowdy, rainy, grannyish England, male and female members of the press swooned, comparing her also to Diana, the last woman to bring glamour to the U.K.

Former French Vogue editor-in-chief Joan Juliet Buck sees Ms. Bruni as little more than an extention of high-end, French consumer products that everyone wants. “Versailles was conceived as a magnificent showroom for French goods, because around 1678, Colbert said to Louis XIV: We have to prove the French do things better than anybody,’” said Ms. Buck. “In 2008, at last, a model is married to the president, which is great PR for the further global extension of French luxury brands.”

Of course, New York women posess their own kind of glamour (and plenty of Louis Vuitton handbags!). But Ms. Bruni, at 40, has more to offer us than the promise of good taste. She’s a popular sophisticate, and an intellectual exhibitionist.

As a powerful woman operating on the international stage as one half of the first family of France, Ms. Bruni begs to be compared to that other first lady, who is hoping to become our president, Hillary Clinton. This isn’t about looks; that contest would be unfair, given Ms. Bruni’s outrageous genetic gifts. The question is which of them stands as a more useful—even more modern—model of feminism, and femininity.

In America, we like our powerful women to be not too beautiful, not too brash, not too brilliant, even. They must be mothers—make that proud mothers—who wear gold jewelry, makeup done just so, and appropriate suits. (Something in red, or cobalt, is as daring a style choice as is made.) They also must admit their vulnerability as women, even if they are tough as nails. Ms. Clinton, who is whip-smart and confident in her debates with Barack Obama, has had some of her most affecting campaign moments when teary, or sentimental. These moments “humanized” her, said the press. But what is it about tears that make a woman a woman? And for some women, those tears seemed as false as so much political posturing that’s come from all sides of this presidential race. We’re constantly being manipulated. Next Page >

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 iron-gated River House will still have five Mark Rothkos.

The city’s most epically exclusive co-ops are the last bastions of old, over-proper, clubby, nice-nosed, perfectly heeled New York. They have values and they’re sticking to them—despite, or maybe because of, the city’s creeping anxiety.

“It’s a special island in the midst of Manhattan,” Mr. Blinken, a co-founder of E. M. Warburg, Pincus & Co, said about his co-op, where he was a board member before becoming President Clinton’s emissary to Hungary.

At Upper East Side buildings like his, where the buyers have tiptop society credentials to go with their immense wealth, a board’s standards are a protective sheath. “I would think that the people at River House, they’re certainly not flash-by-night, recent zillionaires in the last two years. They’re people who have been comfortable,” Mr. Blinken said, “and I don’t think current economic problems on Wall Street will have any impact on River House, will make any difference at all.”

Impenetrability means invincibility. “You find that people at River House are rather serious and not as exposed to the vicissitudes,” he said.

The meticulous, monogram-shirted, Virginia-born broker Edward Lee Cave said the best buildings want buyers with three times the apartment price in liquid assets. “It’s never been more important than today,” he said. “I’ll tell you why! They don’t want you going belly up, they don’t want you, your fabulous company—Bear Stearns, excuse me—all of a sudden going face down, and you have to sell apartments and you can’t pay your maintenance,” Mr. Cave said. “The current crunch doesn’t affect them at all.”

Impenetrability also means whiteness. Most of the godliest co-ops, like 820 Fifth, have exactly zero people of color. “I don’t recall ever hearing of any,” said financier H. Fred Krimendahl II, an 820 board member and a past president of the Philharmonic. “But if Tiger Woods wanted to live here, we’d be happy to talk to him.”

Considering that good co-ops loathe celebrities, Mr. Woods probably wouldn’t get very far at 820 Fifth. But to be fair, there aren’t many minorities applying to these buildings in the first place, although the late Reginald Lewis bought at 834 Fifth, Mr. Krimendahl’s old building. “If a Reg Lewis came along,” he said, “we would certainly entertain that possibility.”

“I don’t have turn-downs, thank God and pray to God,” said another broker, A. Laurance Kaiser IV. “You know before you show who can get into what building. You’re very frank with your own customer.”

When asked to describe the co-op 19 East 72nd, probably the hardest building off Fifth and Park Avenue, one top broker said: “You wouldn’t bring in a rap singer into 19 East 72nd Street—just as you wouldn’t take 19 East 72nd into some rap building. They’re divergent cultures.”

A board president around the corner brought up rappers, too, but said they’d be turned away from his building because of sensitivity about publicity, not skin: Richard Nixon, after all, got chased from that East 72nd castle (afterward, he asked Mr. Cave for help).

 

EXPOSURE IS SO despised back at River House, Ambassador Blinken’s co-op, that brokers can’t use the building’s name in listings. That fear of hype made things hard on Gloria Vanderbilt, Diane Keaton and Joan Crawford, who all got turned away.

And consider Chicago producer Marty Richards, who first put his $22.7 million duplex there on the market with Brown Harris Stevens’ Kathy Sloane eight years ago. Two weeks ago, the Post reported that the listing had gone to contract, naming fashion-show mogul Elyse Kroll as the buyer. The board probably didn’t appreciate the leak—or the news that Ms. Sloane was under investigation in Albany for tax evasion.

So, of course, the Kroll deal fell through, and the broker no longer has the listing. “I asked Marty to take me off because I’m going to be traveling with my husband,” the broker told The Observer, “and Marty does really need to sell.” Next Page >

“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. There she did little until Tina Brown arrived all bluster and balls in 1984—and then she did a lot.

Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s owner-operator, had become overly concerned about newsstand sales. “He wanted really clean, you know, head shots really. There was a study—they started to do studies, you know,” Ms. Leibovitz said. “And they came up with this study that the conceptual covers didn’t sell well because the person wasn’t recognizable. … For example, the Steve Martin photograph against the Franz Kline painting was the worst-selling cover that year.”

Annie Leibovitz had gotten too rock ’n’ roll for Rolling Stone.

That worst-selling cover—from February 1982—is a real mess, in today’s focus-group-in-a-Chicago-mall terms. Mr. Martin, in a suit, is painted with crude black stripes, and is in mid-campy-dance-step. The black-and-white painting looms beyond him. (Inside you might have learned that he would prefer not to discuss his relationship with Bernadette Peters.)

Then there was her Matt Dillon cover late that year. Mr. Dillon, pouty and incredibly young, is in slacks and shirt and tie, twisted and reclining, one leg up, thereby showing half his ass—and with his crotch placed nearly dead center on the magazine’s cover. What definitely seems to be Mr. Dillon’s extended middle finger rests near his square hairline. It was her last Rolling Stone cover. Now that’s how you say goodbye—to your magazine, your youth, whatever.

Ms. Leibovitz was, for much of the 80’s, an unusual bridge between the fine art world and the commercial world. This meant that in her practice she gathered commerce in one hand and journalism in the other.

Then as magazines went, so went Annie Leibovitz.

“‘Mr. President, wave!’ Annie suddenly called as they ambled toward the residence,” Tina Brown wrote in The Washington Post a few years back of the 1989 Vanity Fair shoot of Ron and Nancy Reagan.

Ms. Leibovitz had the two in Christmas-red cashmere sweaters.

Ms. Brown went on: “‘Whom are we waving at?’ Mrs. Reagan asked. ‘Congress, Nancy,’ said the president.”

It is hard to pinpoint the year and time in which Ms. Leibovitz’s balance collapsed, but it may very well have been 1989, and it may have been right there in the Rose Garden.

But there were so many other opportunities along her path between touring with the Rolling Stones in the mid-70’s to her show of portraits of women, called, handily, “Women.” I caught that one at the Corcoran in D.C., eight years ago.

The larger prints were actually split and mounted on two separate backings, with a vast seam running vertically down the middle. This wasn’t photography as museums know it. It was a collection of cheaply produced touring posters.

By 2003, she was subject to a brutal takedown by Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times. Among the kinder ideas expressed, she described Ms. Leibovitz as being “devoutly committed to portraiture while seeming remarkably uninterested in people.”

In 2006, she was untouched by an attack by Times art critic Roberta Smith, on the occasion of a Brooklyn Museum retrospective. It was a vicious amplification of Ms. Smith’s 1991 opinion of Ms. Leibovitz’s sort-of tautological problem: Her “images are only as interesting as the achievements or public persona of her subjects.”

Ms. Leibovitz was busy shooting Disney campaigns, American Express campaigns, Vogue campaigns, Gap campaigns—and who can forget all her work on behalf of those dairy pimps, the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board, which had peaked early with the publication of 1998’s The Milk Mustache Book: A Behind-The-Scenes Look at America’s Favorite Advertising Campaign?

“The truth is, I thought I was doing journalism, but I really wasn’t,” Ms. Leibovitz told Powell’s Books in 1999. “When I started working for Rolling Stone, I became very interested in journalism and thought maybe that’s what I was doing, but it wasn’t true. What became important was to have a point of view.” Next Page >

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.

He stopped in to the offices of the Washington City Paper, where he met Jack Shafer, the editor, and told him he was convinced he could penetrate the event and gain access to the big players there because he owned a tuxedo.

Mr. Samuels remembers Mr. Shafer, better known today as Slate’s media critic, as “this dude with a leather jacket.”

Mr. Shafer remembers Mr. Samuels, too. “David was a bright and bold little fuck.”

Mr. Shafer made Mr. Samuels the kindest offer an editor can make to a fledgling journalist: “We have this thing called spec …”

The tuxedo worked. Mr. Samuels got into the convention and glad-handed George H. W. Bush, his son, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and others. He filed his story—4,000 Hunter S. Thompson-inflected words—and got his spec: Ten thin cents a pop.

“I was like, ‘Huh, I can make 400 dollars at this!’” Mr. Samuels said.

Twenty years later, Mr. Samuels has had the sort of bylines today’s Harvard juniors would give anything for. He’s been nominated for two National Magazine Awards, received prestigious fellowship appointments and been invited to teach at N.Y.U.’s magazine journalism department. He’s also married to New York Times Magazine columnist Virginia Heffernan, with whom he has a 2-year-old son.

Last week, the New Press released two books he wrote: Only Love Can Break Your Heart, which collects some of Mr. Samuels’ articles from The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, among others, and The Runner, an expanded version of a New Yorker story about James Hogue, a highly accomplished runner and less accomplished grifter who scammed his way into Princeton in his late 20’s by claiming to be a self-educated, part Native American teenager named Alexi Indris-Santana.

Kirkus Reviews called The Runner “a dizzying, exhilarating tale of deception”; The New York Times praised Samuels as “an elite narrative journalist” in a Book Review essay.

But a recent visit to Mr. Samuels’ office found the writer despondent, even a little hopeless, and talking about retirement.

“Burnout is inevitable in this profession. It’s inevitable doing this sort of intense, long-form magazine writing,” Mr. Samuels was saying as he sat munching supermarket sushi at his desk in a small, wood-paneled studio he rents on the first floor of a creepy Victorian in Brooklyn Heights.

Aged 41, Mr. Samuels has the soft, rumpled appearance of someone who spends a lot of time alone in a room writing. In one of the essays in Only Love, Mr. Samuels looks at himself through his wife’s eyes and sees “her soft-bellied husband” and compares himself to the “neighborhood characters who tote tattered shopping bags filled with books and periodicals along the Promenade.”

The couple met at a party where Mr. Samuels spent the majority of the night flirting with Ms. Heffernan’s friend, who was “hot and funny and wearing a really nice dress.” But it was Ms. Heffernan who talked to him about his work, and after some insightful criticism and a couple of years of courtship, the two were married in 2003.

“I now have all the trappings of normalcy that I found completely impossible to maintain longer than a month,” Mr. Samuels said.

Between the lines of many of the pieces in Only Love is a loneliness borne of too many weeks spent in hotel rooms in Eugene, Ore., and other less glamorous locales, reporting his stories, for which he insists on face-to-face contact even for minor interviews, and in encounters with complete strangers, during which Mr. Samuels tried “to seem casual and relaxed while concentrating on them really intensely in a way that hopefully doesn’t creep them out.” Now, he says, “I’m very happy and I thank God every day that I have a wife who loves me.

“I have to earn every line I write by actually going somewhere, staying in some horrible hotel—although the hotels have gotten nicer. … I have to write and rewrite these sentences until there’s a world that’s self-contained.” Next Page >

“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.”

Ms. Kaling’s boyfriend, the 30-year-old writer Benjamin Nugent, is the author of American Nerd: The Story of My People, which will be published by Scribner in May. He works out every morning at Crunch in Fort Greene, and the timing of his book seems impeccable; the bespectacled Urkel-esque weakling of yore has, of late, become more concerned with free weights than pocket protectors. Daniel Radcliffe, who can seamlessly switch from playing the nerdy Harry Potter to being naked onstage in Equus, vies with cheesecakey High School Musical star Zac Efron as the object of teenage girls’ affection. Steve Carell shocked audiences (and Catherine Keener) in The 40-Year-Old Virgin with his tight abs. New York actor Justin Theroux, currently starring as John Hancock in the ultra-nerdy HBO miniseries John Adams, has flashed his surprisingly ripped torso on Sex and the City and in the Charlie’s Angels sequel, Full Throttle. Clark Kent, Peter Parker and Bruce Banner are all buff nerds of our imaginations. Slightly closer to reality, there’s Conan O’Brien and, some might say, our former governor, who was famous for his 5 a.m. runs through Central Park.

But today’s nerdy beefcake poster boy would have to be Jason from this season of Beauty and the Geek, the CW sleeper hit that attempts to bring this brain-meets-brawn fantasy to fruition by making the aforementioned geeks more self-aware, if not super-pumped. “My face, hair and personality all scream to the world that I’m a geeky guy who sits behind a desk all day long,” Jason wrote in an e-mail. “However, my body screams that I’m a huge gym rat who only thinks about going to clubs and beaches. This usually leads people to believe my head has been ‘superimposed’ on my body.”

It’s not rocket science to understand that it’s paradoxical for someone to be both nerdy and buff. Perhaps no film has captured this tension better than Revenge of the Nerds, which laid bare the scary aggressiveness of the jocks as they tried to assert their dominance over the nerds—who eventually outwit them thanks to their intellectual skills, not their muscle. In his book, Mr. Nugent argues that this film, among others, highlights the ways in which nerds are seen as embodying technology, whereas jocks embody physical strength; nerds govern through reason, jocks through intuition, and so on.

“The pathos of being a nerd is to feel that because you are comfortable with rational thought, you are cut off from the experience of spontaneous feelings, of romance, of nonrational connection to other people,” Mr. Nugent writes in American Nerd. “A nerd is so often self-loathing because he accepts the thinking/feeling rift, and he knows and cares that other people accept it, too.” So in our popular culture, the male nerd has historically been not only an object of scorn and ridicule from other men, but has been unable to love. That’s why a show like Beauty and the Geek works; it’s unexpected not only for a beautiful woman to be attracted to a nerd, but also for the nerd to be attracted to the beautiful woman.

The buff nerd, however, is a kind of double agent, existing as he (and it is always he; female nerds can be “buff,” but that makes for a sexy librarian/Tina Fey kind of paradigm) does with his geeky exterior and chiseled interior, as Ms. Kaling noted, approvingly, about Mr. Nugent. Indeed, women often see these men as the best of both worlds. Jessica, a 26-year-old writer in Boerum Hill, recalled one college-era ex-boyfriend as a “skinny-jeans-wearing, seemingly emaciated art-school dude.” But he was not, in fact, emaciated. “I was shocked when his shirt came off to reveal washboard abs. I think it was sort of a response to being a total fucking geek in high school and getting picked on a lot.”

Hipster or Ripster?

Meanwhile, editorial assistants, aspiring literary agents and freelance writers crowd the streets of Williamsburg and Carroll Gardens, galley of All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen (who also happens to be a buff nerd) tucked under their arms, Black Lips on their iPods, each one a more underfed mash-up of Elvis Costello, Chuck Klosterman and Stephen Malkmus than the next and trying, ever so valiantly, to appropriate the nerd aesthetic so that they may be Taken Seriously, and not be caught sneaking into the Cobble Hill New York Sports Club or the Greenpoint Y or Absolute Power on Grand Street in Williamsburg.

These are what Gary Shteyngart, in his 2003 novel The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, disparagingly called “glamorous nerds”: “They were a savvy-looking bunch, clothed in the new Glamorous Nerd look that was fast becoming a part of the downtown lexicon. One specimen in a tight, square, wide-collared polka-dotted shirt was shouting above the rest: ‘Did you hear? Safi got a European Community grant to study leeks in Prava.’ … Vladimir looked on sadly. Not only had he spent his entire life without winning a single European Community grant, but every pathetic piece of clothing he had been trying to shed since emigrating was now prêt-à-porter bonanza!”

These aren’t the gym rats of that 1977 Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary Pumping Iron, though today, some of them are secretly taking their cues from Men’s Fitness instead of n+1. In an e-mail to The Observer, Mr. Shteyngart noted that the “glam nerds” have “appropriated everything we real nerds ever had, but they look good too. Classic imperialism.” Next Page >

“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. She is a professional photo organizer who meets with her (largely) Upper East Side clientele wearing sneakers. “Sometimes it throws them off a bit, but then I charm them and they’re fine with it!” she said.

It was just a few years ago that everyone was nattering about the metrosexual, the New York man who, though straight, loved his Kiehl’s and Thomas Pink tattersall shirts and is addicted to Grey’s Anatomy. Less discussed has been his female counterpart: gals who, while not lesbians, dress like guys (young guys), well into their 30’s; who leap into games of pickup basketball with male friends while the rest of us watch wanly from the sidelines; who affect a wry detachment from their sex’s conventional concerns of shoe-shopping, man-hunting and family. Think of the comedienne Sarah Silverman, mugging and shrugging and strumming her way through an “I’m F*cking Matt Damon” video, a birthday gift to her boyfriend, ABC talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel. Or matter-of-fact Juno actress Ellen Page. Or surly pop star Avril Lavigne.

And these gals are everywhere in New York. Urbane tomboys in $200 jeans, they wear sneakers to the office or the studio (they probably work in a creative industry). They’ve largely given up on mainstream women’s fashion, with its expensive, often unflattering vicissitudes, finding refuge in an eternal sporty girlhood that may or may not be tied to any real athletic bent. They borrow from men’s wear, which is more constant, comfortable and, lately, focused on well-made basics like jeans and T-shirts, and they profess ignorance of female grooming rituals, even if they have a secret love of eyeliner. Ever self-deprecating, this kind of woman is quick to tell you she “wears the same thing every day,” or that she dresses like her husband or boyfriend.

‘I Like to Keep It Basic’

In between glamorous appearances at awards shows, Ms. Silverman and Ms. Page—as well as more mainstream examples like Jessica Biel, Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz—seem to revel in sneakered, hoodied androgyny, thereby recasting femininity as something you can take off and put on again: an optional, mildly silly act that certainly seems to excite everyone but that one needn’t always make time for.

Ms. Silverman, particularly, whose status as a sex object is partly the product of the tension created by her potty mouth and her JAP-y good looks, dresses like she’s on her way to intramural softball. It’s a look that basically says, I’m too cool for dresses, a direct commentary on an ever-more-exhausting mainstream feminine aesthetic. The urbane tomboy cares without seeming to care. Because she’s hot enough to succeed without the embellishment, and she knows this.

Key to this type is a certain willful naïveté about the baffling stratagems of conventional female life.

“I do try to be more girly,” Ms. Tenenbaum said with a shrug. “I try to buy poufy sleeves, even just a cardigan with a poufy sleeve. And I put it on and I just can’t do it.”

They like to order Scotch at bars, rather than fruity drinks like cosmos; roll their own cigarettes; and profess to not know their way around a powder puff.

“I have my products. But I’m sure I don’t know what the hell I’m doing,” said Gillian Schwartz, 30, co-owner of a brand consulting firm, Parisi, whose high-profile fashion clients includes Vena Cava and Steven Alan. “When they start getting too specialized or tricky. … I guess I don’t like tricky. … Essentially, if you’re a pretty lady, you can just kind of let that …” She trailed off. “Well, I have no idea where I am on that, but I just like to keep it basic.”

Ms. Schwartz, a tall, bare-faced brunette, was drinking cappuccino in Nolita near her office the other day in a monochrome shirt and cardigan combo and slim brown corduroys. “I almost feel clownish when I get dressed up,” she said, echoing Ms. Tenenbaum. “There’s a real apprehension, especially in the creative industries, to not be overdressed. Overdressed is pretty bad. Underdressed is cool.”

To be an urbane tomboy is to have a certain condescension toward feminine adornment (even, or especially, when it’s the source of one’s livelihood). Or at least, a sense that in serious times, we should be thinking about other things. “Maybe people don’t feel as comfortable being all blinged out anymore,” suggested Ms. Schwartz. “There’s some bad stuff going on that we’re responsible for.” Next Page >

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. But when he got to the ’Wichcraft on 20th Street, he pulled those insect-size earbuds out of his ears.

“This is one of the places where I actually like the music they’re playing, it’s not the same stuff you hear everywhere, like R&B, top 40’s, T-Pain or whatever,” he explained between hefty bites of a chicken salad sandwich. The Velvet Underground played in the background. “Sometimes it’s like I never took my [iPod headphones] off.”

What’s the difference? IPod or no, we are perpetually surrounded by music these days, and often by the thumping beat of the Arcade Fire song “Laika” or the insane carnivalesque psychedelia of 60’s Brazilian bizarros Os Mutantes. Our restaurants, retailers, doctors’ waiting rooms and business offices silenced the languid keyboard covers of top 40 tracks or the smooth jazz that misted from their ceiling speakers long ago. Classic rock from Led Zeppelin? Harmless R&B from Mary J. Blige? Electronic blips from Brian Eno? Even pop jazz (blech) from Kenny G? Those are moldy elevator music choices. Now it’s all about obscure electroclash and bass-heavy baile funk. Underground hip-hop and grimy punk. The Kinks. The Clash. Black Sabbath. Even … Minor Threat? This is the new background music, and you can’t get away from it.

In the era of the earbud, businesses are making their own playlists using iTunes or getting custom-made “audio personalities” from music companies and trend-savvy DJ’s. No more gentle piano notes, smooth synthesizers and a string instrument or 20 to help the shopper buy, the client relax, the worker work. Then, background music was meant to literally fade into the background, whispering sweet nothings just out of earshot while the din of consumerism and socializing (couples chatting, plates clinking, cash registers clanging) took the main stage. But now companies are pummeling us frontally, with a half-ironic rock ’n’ roll sneer, slinging music from bands like Sri Lankan beat-mistress M.I.A. and emo-punk pioneers Jawbreaker into our ears.

The original, instrumental elevator music developed by the Muzak Corporation, the 74-year-old company that made so many languid synthesizer covers of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” was, actually, controversial: Angry listeners accused it of deploying mind-controlling, Orwellian tricks. It was, they claimed, formed as an emotional sedative, coaxing consumers into mindlessly and happily conforming to the capitalist society by buying useless things.

But this new background music, these punk, hip-hop and rock bands, made revolutionary sounds that were meant to wake us up. We wonder whether iPods constantly being in everyone’s ears lays a mental fog over the brain. Do we even listen to music anymore? Or is it all just sinking into the background, surrounding us like air-conditioning?

“I can’t help wondering if the incidence of earworms and musical hallucinations is higher now, with background music in every public place,” said Oliver Sacks in a recent interview with Wired about his new book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. “The brain is very sensitive to music; you don’t have to attend to it to record it internally and be affected by it. I think we may be exposed to too much loud and repetitive music. One patient of mine has epileptic seizures induced by music and has to wear earplugs in New York City. It’s a dangerous place for him.”

For all of us!

Grilled Peasant Bread With Side of Siouxsie and the Banshees

’Wichcraft partner Sisha Ortuzar, 35, orchestrates the sandwich shop’s playlists. He downloads songs off a site called eMusic.com that sells mp3’s for mostly independent artists. Using iTunes, he organizes the songs into playlists, one for each day of the week. Devendra Banhart in the mornings, Spoon and Enon during their busy lunch hours. He freshens the playlists about once a month, taking suggestions from workers and utilizing his own taste in music.

“You make an effort to find stuff because it’s fun, but also to find stuff that is not played out, not played at every restaurant or every other business.”

Frank Bruni, restaurant critic for The New York Times, has jammed to the background music in Little Giant, the Lower East Side fresh market eatery, which includes tracks from English New Wavers Squeeze and alt-country/rock band Wilco. In his 2005 review, he wrote: “During a typical dinner, I grabbed a slice of grilled peasant bread, slathered it with the restaurant’s evanescently sweet chicken-liver mousse, took a bite and smiled not just at what was happening in my mouth but at what was happening in my ears. Siouxsie and the Banshees? Circa the early 1980’s? Didn’t I own that album?” In The New York Times blog Diner’s Journal, Mr. Bruni is chronicling the music that has titillated his eardrums on his dining adventures across the country, like Alanis Morisette’s “You Oughta Know” in Dallas, Texas, at a fancy boite “with a clientele that doesn’t really dovetail with an angry pop tirade against infidelity.” Next Page >

“Patients often ask me, ‘What do you do?’” said Dr. Francesca Fusco the other day from behind a large antique desk in her cream-colored office in the Wexler Dermatology practice on East 32nd Street. “And then I tell them, ‘I do chemical peels; I use, for example, Retin-A, I use Vitamin C, I have had Botox …’”

“I’m due,” she whispered, casually gesturing towards her smooth forehead with a French-manicured hand.

A petite brunette with large brown eyes who will admit only to being “in her 40’s” (she’s been practicing for 18 years), Dr. Fusco is, in a word, gorgeous—just one in the city’s growing brigade of attractive female dermatologists, who, even more than their famous clients, serve as “faces” of the treatments they peddle.

“Appearance does matter,” said Dr. Grace Pak, a private practitioner on lower Fifth Avenue who wears her hair short and sleek and, at 43, lacks any trace of a wrinkle. “I go to great lengths to present a consistent image,” she said.

Long gone are the days when women went to see skin specialists just to get a zit popped or a mole checked. With injectable face fillers, glycolic acid treatments and new lasers zapping onto the market every minute, patients shopping for a dermatologist these days are really “shopping for a new face,” said Dr. Gervaise Gerstner, 34, a former colleague of Dr. Fusco’s who now practices at Park Avenue Skincare further uptown—and practices what she preaches! “People say, ‘Give me exactly what you do,’” said Dr. Gerstner, a lithe blonde pictured in windswept black and white on her practice’s Web site. “It’s really sweet.”

Vamping In Vogue

Of course, one expects one’s dermatologist of either gender to have a smooth complexion. But no one ever compared, say, Dr. Zizmor to George Clooney.

“I think there is a kind of a high bar as a female dermatologist,” said Dr. Anne Chapas, a fetching young specialist who practices at the Laser and Skin Surgery Center of New York. “Men are just as into keeping up their appearance as the women in the field, but there’s probably a little more pressure on the women. “Patients say, ‘Oh, I want to have skin like yours. Your skin is gorgeous.’ And I always wonder, ‘Do they ask my male colleagues that?’”

In the past, dermatology was hardly a glamour field. “Historically, they were geeks,” said Dr. Ellen Marmur, chief of dermatologic and cosmetic surgery at the Mt. Sinai Medical Center. But over the past decade, the specialty has changed radically, thanks to developments like the mass marketing of Botox and the blockbuster idea that the fat on one’s ass would actually look better puffing up one’s cheeks. Baby-boomer demand for safe, noninvasive anti-aging procedures has taken dermatology from the unpleasant realm of acne and rashes and elevated it to “a lifestyle specialty,” to use Dr. Pak’s lofty term.

And such a specialty requires the right kind of ambassador, at least in competitive Manhattan. Like socialites, designers, magazine editors and fashion publicists, female dermatologists now tend to be a youthful, well-coiffed bunch, blending seamlessly with their patients at high-profile society gatherings, even popping up occasionally in Vogue’s party pages.

The most recognizable face of the bunch is Dr. Lisa Airan, a photogenic Northwestern University-educated (and frequently designer-clad) dermatologist who trained at UCLA before setting up shop on Fifth Avenue, marrying a plastic surgeon, appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show and achieving ubiquity on the benefit circuit (she refused to be interviewed for this article).

Then there is Dr. Gerstner, a Princeton-educated former chief resident at Mt. Sinai with two young children who currently works six days a week, while still finding time to pose beside socialite patients Marjorie Gubelmann and Cristina Greeven Cuomo and friend Tory Burch, herself a client of grande-dame glamour derm Pat Wexler.

“It’s true with anything,” said Katherine Pearle, an Upper East Side mother of three who sees Dr. Gerstner every one to three months and also brings her husband and kids in when they need it, explaining her choice of a dermatologist that dazzles. “You want to go to a dentist with nice teeth.” Next Page >

Michael Bloomberg is OK with people using Euros to buy goods in New York.

Michael Calderone wonders what Bloomberg meant when he said he wants the New York Times to be more careful when writing about a presidential candidate “next time.”

Anthony Weiner gave a pro-Clinton speech in Las Vegas recently.

Charles Barron and Vinny Ignizio chat about race.

The view from inside Bloomberg L.P. is that a Bloomberg presidential bid is not likely at all.

The Assembly will forecast less revenue for the state than Spitzer has predicted.

A Clinton supporter goes slightly off-message when talking about that photo of Obama.

And above is a four-minute clip about a Bloomberg-Obama presidential conspiracy that's like an Oliver Stone movie but weirder. Next Page >

This Sunday night, the 80th Academy Awards will take place at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles, bringing the usual glitzy glut of red carpet fashion, faux-improvised speeches and what is perhaps the most important industry honor of the year: The Best Picture Oscar. Two thousand seven was heavy, judging from the nominees: No Country for Old Men, Atonement, There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton and Juno. Teenage pregnancy, murder, conspiracy, war, paranoia, unrelenting regret—and that doesn’t even begin to test the strange and murky waters of There Will Be Blood.

“I don’t know if the movies this year indicate that we’ve arrived at some new phase in American moviemaking or if it’s just that we’ve arrived at a place of uncertainty,” said Mark Harris, author of the new book Pictures of a Revolution: Five Films and the Birth of the New Hollywood. “This was the anti-closure year. You’re not sent out of the theater comfortable; nobody is getting patted on their bottoms and tucked into bed happily. But, for those of us who don’t like that, and want to come out of a movie theater disoriented and unsettled, these are happy times.”

>> L.A. Rousing Pencils Up! Strike Is Done, the Oscars Are On, and the Writers Are Doing Whatever They Did By Spencer Morgan

If you think this year has been weird, consider the Oscars that took place 40 years ago. The ceremony had been postponed for two days following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; the country was getting more deeply entrenched in (and becoming more suspicious of) Vietnam; and the five movies up for best picture reflected a seismic shift in Hollywood and moviegoer tastes: Bonnie & Clyde, In the Heat of the Night, Dr. Doolittle, The Graduate and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? In his book, Mr. Harris follows the stories behind the making of each movie, from early inception to that April evening in Santa Monica. Along the way, he manages to tell a larger story—not just about the end of the era of bloated Production Code-approved studio movies, which paved the way for the age of 1970’s auteurism—but of the cultural revolution of the 1960’s.

Late last Friday afternoon, the 44-year-old Mr. Harris, who worked as a writer and an editor at Entertainment Weekly from its inception until 2006, and is now a regular columnist there, was sitting in the bookshelf-lined living room of the Upper West Side apartment he grew up in and now shares with his husband, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner. He is dark-haired and thin, with a winning, boyish smile. Mr. Harris spent four years on the book—which was published this week to early critical raves—researching, tracking down interviews (“through luck and persistence I got just about anyone who was still alive”) and watching 600 movies in the order they were released between 1956 and 1967.

“I thought very early on that I could use those five movies to drag along a lot of what was going on in 1967 in terms of loosening morality, race relations, the appearance of a generation gap, the arrival of a new level of violence in movies just as we were getting deeper into Vietnam,” Mr. Harris said. “Once I knew that I was writing about the mid-60’s, I certainly did not have any interest in writing only about the Oscars or only about movies, as if what was going on in movies did not connect at all with what was going on in the real world,” he said. “The whole thing that I felt was so interesting was that this whole movie revolution coincided with the revolution of everything else: a music revolution, a political revolution. I wanted to teach myself how The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde anticipated that was going to happen, or whether that emerged organically because of the people who made those movies.”

 

IT’S AN INTOXICATING notion: What if we could always study history via the Academy Award for Best Picture nominees? What would it tell us about ourselves? Let’s pick a year. Say, 1990. Dances with Wolves took top honors, criminally beating out Goodfellas, while also trouncing Ghost, The Godfather III and Awakenings. It was the end of the 80’s, that era of yuppie self-obsession and anxiety. As the world changed all around us—cracks in the Iron Curtain, the beginning of the end of apartheid—we looked at ourselves from various angles and came up with appealing myths to sell, from the American war hero-cum-friend of the Indians to the otherworldly (literally) powers of love. A commercial, capitalist time honored a host of commercial, capitalist films.

And how about this year? Sure, Juno, starring the sassy Ellen Page looking to give up her baby for adoption, stands out as the lone comedy, with its black humor and lacy overlay of sarcasm, but even that film raises troubling and complicated issues about the endurance of love, the difficulties in marriage and what, exactly, constitutes a happy ending. Atonement, based on the acclaimed Ian McEwan novel, has all the grand sweep and epic period details of past Oscar favorites. But at its core, apart from the gorgeous glint of Keira Knightley’s green gown, is the troublesome question (and irresolution) of the tricky business of forgiveness. Michael Clayton is about one soul-weary man’s obsessive attempt to right a wrong, while No Country for Old Men is fueled by irrational acts of violence and There Will Be Blood is a 158-minute journey into perhaps the darkest American soul ever illuminated on film. Next Page >

Last Thursday, on a cold and blustery January afternoon, the cast and crew of Lipstick Jungle, the new NBC series premiering Feb. 7, scuttled about the Ukrainian Institute of America on 79th Street and Fifth Avenue.

Bright lights illuminated the high ceilings, ornate moldings and chandeliers within the 1898 mansion, which was standing in as a billionaire bachelor’s New York City apartment. Banks of additional lights outside the building created artificial sunlight streaming through the windows. The grand staircase was covered in plastic wrap. At the top, Brooke Shields—tall, sleek and TV makeup-ready—waited in a puffy winter coat (heat, apparently, not high on the list of priorities) to be called in front of the cameras, and tried to placate her daughter, the 4-and-a-half-year-old Rowan, who wondered, insistently, how much longer. The blond little girl attempted to stare down her famous mother. The two heads came together for some whispered negotiations, before Ms. Shields pulled Rowan cozily onto her lap. “Sorry,” she said with the universal what-can-you-do mommy smile. “We had a little bit of a change of schedule today.”

There was something awfully appropriate about witnessing this scene, as Lipstick Jungle, based on the best-selling novel by Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell, tackles the subject of three high-powered Manhattan women juggling their big-time jobs, their relationships, friendships and—in Ms. Shields’ character’s case—kids.

With Lipstick Jungle, the powers-that-be at NBC are hoping to capture the millions of viewers whose longing for Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte has not been slaked by the reruns, DVD’s and sanitized TBS versions they have had to make do with since the hit HBO show went off the air in 2004. “It’s a jungle out there. Dress accordingly” is the show’s tag line; the trailers and adverts not-so-subtly suggest the show’s Sex and The City lineage, with glamour shots of high heels striding on sidewalks and the three female leads showing plenty of leg and cleavage. And the Jan. 31 premiere party would thrill Carrie Bradshaw: It’s being held in the shoe department of Saks Fifth Avenue.

But the creators of the show stress its move into new territory.

“In Sex and The City, the shocking thing was women talking about sex,” said Candace Bushnell, who created Sex and The City in the pages of The New York Observer in the 1990’s and is one of the show’s executive producers. “But today, women still have a hard time talking about ambition.” The blond and blue-eyed Ms. Bushnell, who is a dedicated presence on set, was perfectly coiffed and surprisingly delicate in dark jeans (and, yes, fashionably pointy high heels). “I mean, we have a woman running for president,” she said. “Sex isn’t forbidden—there are women having Tupperware parties with sex toys—but saying you want to be CEO or president of the United States? You’re not supposed to say that unless you’re 12 and then no one takes you seriously.”

“I like that it’s not only about the happily ever after,” said Brooke Shields. “What I love about these women is that the goal is not finding the man and having that be the only type of happiness. We spend so much of our younger years thinking that’s what you have to get: you have to get the relationship, you have to get the family. … Now when you’re actually in it, when you get what you wished for, how do you spend your days in it?”

The three main characters of Lipstick Jungle are Wendy Healy (Ms. Shields), a married movie mogul; Nico Reilly(Kim Raver), a Vanity Fair-like editor in chief, also married; and Victory Ford (Lindsay Price) a fashion designer who dates a billionaire named Joe Bennett, played by 80’s heartthrob Andrew McCarthy. (All three women are described in Ms. Bushnell’s book as being in their early 40’s; NBC describes them as “30- and 40-somethings.”)

The pilot opens with the information that all three women have made it onto a list of “New York City’s 50 Most Powerful Women,” as they convene for Victory Ford’s fashion show—which is slammed in the press the following day. The trio assemble to console Victory with alternating advice. (“You can use the house in Montauk,” says Wendy. “The freezer in the garage is stocked with Dove bars and weed.” Nico counsels her not to show defeat: “I find it offensive that women always feel that we have to apologize for our success. There is no luck, there’s just talent and hard work, and the ability to bounce back when you’re knocked down.” Quips Wendy, “And I always thought she just screwed her way to the top.”) Next Page >

The Sundance Film Festival is its own little world, set in the otherworldy state of Utah. Smack in the what-surely-must-be-quaint-when-not-overrun-by-wankers town of Park City, nestled between spectacular, somewhat sci-fi-looking snow-covered mountains, it’s a universe where the inhabitants wear puffed-up coats (think duvets with sleeves), big clompy boots, silly hats and shiny laminates hanging around their necks designating their station (press, talent, producer, lawyer, etc). There are celebrities—ranging from (the still hot) Robert Redford to 50 Cent (and, weirdly, Armand Assante seemed to be everywhere). There are San Diego housewives, snowboardy dudes trying to avoid everyone else, elderly Salt Lake City volunteers and what seems to be a direct shuttle from the worst of the Hamptons (the stripey-shirt bankers and the blown-out, mini-miniskirt-and-furry-up-to-the-knee-monstrosities-wearing ladies who love them) straight to the velvet-roped queues outside the N.Y.C./L.A. venues that crop up for the duration (think Butter, Tao, Hyde, Marquee). And that’s not even getting into the high altitude that makes you constantly thirsty, gets you drunker and miraculously caused at least one smoker to lose her appetite for cigarettes.

But what does it all mean for the movies? And boy, oh, boy, are there a lot of movies. While a large chunk of the Sundance population is desperately trying to figure out which is the party to be at, the parallel world of journalists and studio acquisition­ types are wondering if they commit to one 8:30 a.m. screening at one end of town, could they be missing the next great thing on the other side?

There’s just no way to see ’em all, so here is the very best of what the The Observer checked out over three days in Utah (which, of course, doesn’t include the countless films—Pretty Bird! Choke! Good Dick! Mysteries of Pittsburgh!—we didn’t get to see but wish we did).

Our hands-down favorite was the fascinating documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which worked up a bidding fever over the opening weekend (the Weinstein Company got foreign distribution, while HBO nabbed U.S.). The film concentrates largely on the completely batsh*t-insane trial and surrounding press mess that swirled around Mr. Polanski’s controversial conviction for unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, and his subsequent exile to Europe. Director Marina Zenovich got many of the key players to speak frankly, including Mr. Polanksi’s lawyer, the prosecutor, the young woman in question (now grown up and married with children), Mia Farrow and other close friends, and there’s tons of fantastic footage of the enigmatic Mr. Polanski himself. Even if you’re not interested in the director’s work, his tragic childhood, the Manson Family murder of Sharon Tate or how corrupt our judicial system can become when dealing with a celebrity, this one is worth it for the awesome time capsule of 1970’s whacked-out fashion alone. Seriously.

>> And There's More! (From Sundance) By Spencer Morgan

It seems almost impossible that as people root through Sundance looking for the next Little Miss Sunshine (a.k.a. the little indie that was critically acclaimed, award-nominated and a big hit at the box office), the best contender is a film called Sunshine Cleaning and also stars Alan Arkin. But there you have it. This one seems to have it all: fun and quirky plot (two sisters who go into business cleaning up after crime scenes), terrific performances from Emily Blunt and Amy Adams, with an undercurrent of sad family drama that had more than few members of the audience sniffling. We’re betting on this to be the big one to come out of this year’s festival.

The Wackness, a coming-of-age story written and directed by Jonathan Levine (yet another graduate from the Brown semiotics program) actually got a round of applause from an already weary press/industry audience. The film is set in a sweltering New York summer in 1994 and is chock full of Biggie songs, Giuliani jokes, 90210 references and—amazingly—even has a cameo from Ms. Mary-Kate Olsen as a drug-taking free spirit with dreads in her hair who likes to twirl around Washington Square Park. Sir Ben Kingsley is moving in a Dustin Hoffman-like direction as he plays a lovably wacky and totally messed-up Upper East Side shrink who strikes up an odd friendship with the 18-year-old Luke (Josh Peck), who trades him weed for therapy sessions. Here’s something that also bodes well: a Juno connection! Olivia Thirlby, who played Ellen Page’s best friend in that film, co-stars as the object of desire in this one. Remember the song that was featured so prominently in all those Juno trailers, David Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes”? Well, it plays during The Wackness’ end credits. Coincidence?

It’s kinda hard to imagine What Just Happened? not being bought and coming to a theater near you. Barry Levinson directs a star-studded cast of Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis, Sean Penn, Catherine Keener, Stanley Tucci and Jon Turturro. It’s one of those behind-the-Hollywood-scenes type deals that went over huge with the mostly L.A./N.Y.C. crowd. (Couldn’t be an accident that it was before this one that a volunteer pleaded for people to please put away their BlackBerries, as the green glow is particularly annoying. The Los Angeles lawyer sitting next to me informed me, “It’s always the acquisition guys. They’re bored.”) But the question might be how it would play elsewhere in the world, where most people (gasp!) don’t care so much. Next Page >

On Friday, Jan. 18, Paris Hilton hosted a private dinner party for her film The Hottie and the Nottie at the Turning Leaf Lounge, one of many venues along Main Street that had been rented and revamped by Hollywood party planners. Across the street, a quaint sports bar called Doolan’s bore a temporary new maroon awning emblazoned with the word Stereo, after the New York nightclub.

Inside the party, where a giant wine bottle hung from the wall, Ms. Hilton was meeting a few select members of the press. Two girlfriends waited patiently on couches nearby, occasionally whispering in each other’s ears. Ms. Hilton wore a sparkly blue dress and a giant diamond ring on her ring finger that she waved around with impunity. She is not engaged.

After her work in the comfortable, sparsely populated lounge was done, she exited to the street, where two SUVs and a giant mass of screaming fans were waiting. “Oh, my God, oh, my God, she looks so beautiful,” said one of the latter, his voice quavering with emotion as he looked at the image he had captured on his digital camera.

Next stop: the 50 Cent concert at Harry O’s, a big performance space along the strip, where the rapper Akon had performed the night before, as would Maroon 5 and Velvet Revolver in the coming days.

A group of bodyguards forcefully whisked Ms. Hilton’s entourage to a table at the front of the stage. Ms. Hilton’s manager asked that her friends create a sort of human shield against encroaching fans, the most persistent of which was a middle-aged woman who claimed to be a former Playboy model. “I’m a really cool chick,” she pleaded.

At the adjacent table sat pregnant actress Jessica Alba and her fiancé, Cash Warren. “How crazy is this?” exclaimed Mr. Warren, who is in town promoting his documentary Made in America, about the Crips and Bloods. Later, he said that he had not been expecting such a huge crush of people. “When 50 went on, all of a sudden a mosh pit broke out. We were like, ‘O.K., Jessica’s pregnant, we gotta get out of here.’”

Mr. Warren said that even though he and his fiancée have gotten really good at “keeping things moving” through fawning crowds, Sundance presented special hazards. “It is a little overwhelming at times,” he said. “It’s pretty amazing the lengths to which people will go to gift you.”

Among the booty the couple had accepted thus far: snowboards, boots, the video game Guitar Hero and “lots of clothes and soft stuff for the little one.”

Over at Stereo the night before, Sir Ben Kingsley—promoting two films, The Wackness and Transsiberian—argued a similar line, echoing his self-spoofing appearance on The Sopranos. “I think that the marriage between that talent and corporate wealth and know-how need not be contaminating—it can be a very, very good thing,” he said. “I mean the Renaissance [was] built on patronage from royal princes of great wealth. We need our royal patrons, and now it’s the corporations.”

And the corporations have gotten very savvy at making their presence as soothing as possible. At the Village at the Yard suite, Diesel offered not free gifts but the opportunity to style an underprivileged child. The folks from Lexis Hybrid Living at the Project Greenhouse suite offered organic robes and scarves and trail mix and the opportunity to feel really good about one’s car.

R&B singer John Legend was there. “It’s quite a lot going for a small town,” he said. “It’s like Hollywood has descended on a very small town, and all the L.A. people get to wear their ski jackets, which I’m sure they’re very excited about. A nice little fashion change-up for them.”

Mr. Legend performed up the street at the Star Bar Saturday night. But the night belonged to Bono, who hosted a dinner at the Bon Appetit Supper Club after the premiere of the Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington documentary U2 3D. Al Gore came to dinner, as did the actors Woody Harrelson, Colin Farrell, Mary-Kate Olsen and Dennis Quaid. Afterward they headed up to the Greenhouse nightclub—another New York outpost, no relation to the suite—where they listened to the musical efforts of Entourage star Adrian Grenier.

On Sunday night, the group Velvet Revolver was slated to perform at Harry O’s. Sadly, lead singer Scott Weiland had missed his plane, so the band was forced to make do with Cisco Adler, who was conveniently dining downstairs at the film festival’s corollary “Chefdance” event. “Dude, I rocked that shit, bro,” he said of the capacity crowd. “I learned the lyrics five minutes before going on.”

Across town that night, a different kind of cast party was under way.

“After our premiere, we all went up to Daxter’s,” said Mark Maccora, unit production manager on North Starr, which is about a rap star who leaves inner-city Houston for rural Texas. “They just wanted to have a real classy group experience to celebrate. Get away from the hustle and bustle of Sundance.”

Mr. Maccora said he had been moved to tears during a scene in the film where the protagonist is offered the opportunity to finally go horseback riding “for real.” “We’ve been working so hard all our lives for this,” he said. “And now we’re getting to ride for real.” Next Page >

DR. SELMAN: What’s happening?

GEORGE: I sat around in my pajamas all day, e-mailing high-school friends. I have this illusion that I’m actually working, because I am typing and concentrating, but we were just talking nonsense. Whether or not Star Wars is in fact a masterpiece, you know, Beatles versus Stones. The summer of ’87 comes up a lot. Girls. This girl a friend of mine slept with recently—he admitted that this girl’s “kid had a kid.” We refer to him as the Granny Humper. What else? Bongo drums. So I got into a fight with one of them.

DR. SELMAN: This is one of those guys who molested you during boarding school?

GEORGE: No, he was one of the “molestees.” We were talking about drums and analyzing this Motörhead video on YouTube and Bruce noted that the drumming was spectacular, and I said, “Come on, is there any real difference between drummers?” And Bruce, who’s really into the drumming, said some drummers are better than others and how he can keep a basic backbeat going forever, ooom chi boom, ooom chi boom—but he can’t play in a mambo band. So I said I was playing air guitar and air drums the night before—this is when things started to get ugly. Bruce responded with, “Were you clown dancing in your undies? Was Hilly there, the two of you pounding wine?”

[Exit HILLY]

GEORGE: So then my other friend Ian wrote “oooch,” which means that I just got dissed. I didn’t take it that way. So I wrote back, “Hey, not everything is a diss.” Then Bruce responded, and Ian again wrote “oooch,” you know, I got dissed again. Then it escalated. I said, “I know you’re giving me the ‘oooch’ and the ‘plink’ to get a rise out of me”—

DR. SELMAN: Can I ask why we’re talking about this?

GEORGE: This happened a couple hours ago. Affected my mood.

DR. SELMAN [to HILLY]: I presume that you had to go to the bathroom, but the timing, was that anything to do with what George was talking about?

HILLY: It was so boring to me.

DR. SELMAN: I was thinking the same thing.

HILLY: I am just so sick of no one being able to just get anything done. I’m so sick of hearing about these e-mail exchanges. If it’s so important, why don’t you cc me?

DR. SELMAN: Does this have any relevance to your relationship?

HILLY: I’m so sick of having to be the person who always takes action, everywhere, all the time. I don’t think I ask for too many things. One thing in the world that I wanted so badly was tickets to the Van Halen concert. I didn’t get them. O.K., guess what, it’s a sign from God, they’re extending the tour—so I said, “George, here’s a great chance. Come on, with your connections you can get tickets. You don’t have to get me anything for Christmas.” He doesn’t do it. I have to do it myself! Okay, you go away on trips, and it’s sweet, because you get me a present after I badger you to get me one. The last two times, you’ve gotten me presents I already have! The first time it was a T-shirt, the second time it was a stuffed animal I already have. Guess what? I’m 33, I have enough stuffed animals. I want grown-up stuff.

DR. SELMAN: This sounds like déjà vu all over again.

HILLY: Christmas is this month—

DR. SELMAN: Ah-ha!

HILLY: —and I want you to know, I don’t care how much money you have or don’t have, but I want a goddamn engagement ring. If you have to give me a Cracker Jack ring, I don’t care, but you have to give it to me. I was just thinking on the way over here—you’re friendly with Kenneth Jay Lane. Well, your mom’s friendly with him. Jesus Christ, he’s one of the most famous costume jewelry designers in the whole world. Get him to make me something fake and say, “Maybe in 10 years, 20 years I can afford to get you something better”—

DR. SELMAN: Get the setting and then get the stone.

HILLY: Exactly. I’ve given him ideas. Like the Van Halen thing, his name is “Diamond Dave.” You can’t give me a ring—but bring me to see Diamond Dave, that’s the next closest thing. Cheesy, but the sentiment counts.

GEORGE: May I try to say something?

HILLY: I don’t want a production in front of people, I just want a goddamn ring to put on my left finger because I’m old and I’m sick and tired of having to answer the questions. And you know, if I don’t get one, I’m moving on.

DR. SELMAN: Boy, that is a threat.

GEORGE: Anyway! She bought Van Halen tickets off eBay for a lot of money, and we hadn’t paid rent, so I said, “You can’t do that.”

DR. SELMAN: So you do have tickets?

HILLY: I’m on a waiting list.

DR. SELMAN: How does this address the ring? Next Page >

Silicon Alley meets marketing meets journalism meets Hollywood: New York is the new capital of content, from Hudson Square to West Chelsea, SoHo to Midtown. Click on the photo for a tour ... Next Page >

About a year ago, while climbing the crimson steps leading up to a fancy gala, I was confronted by a spectacle that is all too common in this ambulatory city: a young woman’s ass. Under normal circumstances, I would have averted the eyes after an obligatory once-overing that is every gentleman’s duty. But something about this round and bobbing specimen—framed in an expensive-looking, glittery gold fabric—held my attention. It was too perfectly round … too fixed. Something was amiss, and not in a good way.

Subsequent experience enlightened me that the lady’s posterior was actually just stuffed into a pair of thick, spandex sausage-skins, also known as Spanx.

These “rubber suits,” as the city’s social gals like to call them, represent a new and dangerous affront to all things sensual. And yet they seem to have stretched their way into the wardrobes of many an attractive woman in this town.

Like it or not, “Spanx or no Spanx?” is now one of the many questions that cross their minds when conceiving an outift.

So what, you ask?

The problem is encapsulated partly by the name itself. Spanx! It cynically celebrates the very sex and sexuality that I believe these thigh-stomach-and-bottom condoms exist to destroy.

In the months following that fateful confrontation with that motionless mannequin-rump on the staircase, I encountered Spanx in another, more intimate setting. I can fairly report that a pair of Spanx is to the throes of passion as a wrench is to the gears of a well-oiled machine.

Removing the things—think wetsuit—presents a direct threat to the delicate status of the lovemaking at hand. By the time you get those babies off, you might well be ready for bed!

Sickos and fetishists aside, it is my radical contention that heterosexual men still love a woman’s body—the way it feels, smells and, yes, jiggles. But the monsters over at Spanx have managed to convince girls of every size and shape that they’re better off in a rubber suit.

My sweet darling says Spanx afford her protection from the errant hand or gust of wind. To which I say, “Whatever!” Still, in a gesture of sympathy (and also a nod to the hallowed tradition that began with the French nerdballs who donned “stomachers” in the early days of the Renaissance and was later dignified by the brilliant Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot), I stuffed myself into a pair of her size B’s one Saturday afternoon.

In a nutshell—no pun intended—Spanx on a dude are no good.

My derriere, never a selling point for me, was now roughly the same color as my khakis rather than the usual pasty white.

Movement of the area, particularly any sort of plié-type motion, was severely impaired. And pudge around my stomach area was now made to grotesquely overflow about the edges of the wretched plastic.

One hour into the experiment, while numbing the mind with a glass of whisky, I noticed that I no longer had any sense of my manhood. That is, my boys were also numb, completely.

I couldn’t help but think a similar effect must be wrought on a woman’s privates. Is this why every formal party in town is devoid of sexuality?

The best thing I could say about wearing Spanx is that under a pair of corduroys they are virtually undetectable, though surely if someone had goosed me they would have noticed a certain resilient plasticity.

An hour later, what can only be perceived as a negative presented itself as I was en route to meet my girlfriend and her friend for dinner: A fart in a pair of Spanx has no where to go. The gaseous beast is forced to put up a great trashing fight to escape, so much so that one can’t help but take note of its struggles.

To be fair, while out on the tiles of a West Chelsea nightclub, I did detect a slight upside to my new accouterment: When I would bend to the beat, my posterior seemed to spring back in much closer proximity to the next beat than usual—to my mind improving my sense of rhythm.

Certainly there are those for whom Spanx add spice to the sexual mix—a quick Googling will lead you to the many proponents of the elastic enhancer of their deviant desires. And to them I say, “Carry on! Spanx it up.”

But to the nondeviant, to the occasional spanker, to those who enjoy seeing their fellow human climbing stairs or dancing to their own (missed) beat—I ask you, What good are Spanx?

The only useful insight I gained from donning the “rubber suit” is one I instinctively already knew: It is a stupid, unnecessary garment that further detaches us from our essential selves. In my case, my balls. Next Page >

Kate S., 27, a slim, attractive event planner who lives in Chinatown, was recently getting dressed for a high-profile party. “I always wear a black pinstriped suit,” she said. “I give away my womanly rights to wear stilettos and a low-cut shirt, so I have do something, you know? I knew there would be men around. You don’t want to look like a corporate person; you want your hiney to look cute.”

And so she did what an increasing number of New York women are doing every night of the week: She wiggled into a pair of Spanx, the nylon and spandex undergarments that cinch a gal’s waist and thighs, eliminating underwear lines and shaving off anywhere from 2 to 10 pounds, depending on whom you ask. “They look like The Crying Game, but I do feel better when I’m wearing them,” Kate said. And she knows she is not alone. “If anyone ever catches a glimpse in the bathroom, they’re like ‘Omigod, I have those in black and I love them!’”

“They’re like hosiery crack!” said Suze Yalof Schwartz, an editor at Glamour who puts Spanx on all the women she styles for the magazine’s TV makeover segments. “They’re addictive. I would say hold off as long as you can.” She estimated that she herself owns 10 pairs of the tights. “Who knows, I’m scared to even go into that drawer!”

>> Spencer Morgan: I Put My Chestnuts In Spandex Storage—It Felt … Creepy!

Scores in Manhattan society now swear by Spanx, the moderately priced innovation of one Sara Blakely, 36, an entrepreneur based in Atlanta who has been widely credited with reintroducing girdling to the masses, thanks to comfortable fabrics; cheeky packaging; 100 different styles that reach as far up as the bust and as low as the ankle, eliminating the flabby overflow known as “muffin top”; and plenty of celebrity endorsements. Oprah was an early convert (“Spanx really changed the way I wore clothes. … I’ve given up panties,” she once told her audience) and Gwyneth Paltrow owned up to wearing two pairs at a time after giving birth. The company, which launched in 2000, recorded over $150 million in sales in 2006.

Oddly for a city that long scorned nylons, Spanx are particularly coveted in New York, where they have become ubiquitous at benefits and photo shoots. “It’s such a fashionable, stylist-oriented city,” said Ms. Blakely, adding that she does the most business here. “And the stylists have become Spanx’s No. 1 fan.”

Daniel Lawson, costume designer for NBC’s forthcoming series Lipstick Jungle, has dressed the show’s entire cast—some of who request it specifically—in the special undergarment, as well as Kate Winslet in a forthcoming movie. “We just Spanx everybody right up!” he said. “Without a lot of effort, they take off five, eight pounds immediately.” Not to mention “everything slips on smoothly. It’s become the Kleenex of the girdle world.”

“I’m in my 40’s, and I’d say definitely probably 80 to 90 percent of my friends wear them,” said the designer Pamella Roland. “Especially with evening gowns.”

‘Not Your Grandmother's Girdle’

Ms. Blakely is not surprised that New Yorkers, surely among the skinniest women in America, are her biggest fans. She was a size two when she invented Spanx, she said, and she was primarily trying to eliminate the dread Visible Panty Line.

“I didn’t like the way my own butt looked in white pants,” she told The Observer in a phone interview. “I went shopping for body-shapers at the age of 27, and I was completely horrified by what was out there.”

She started her company with $5,000 she’d saved selling fax machines door-to-door. The response was immediate. “There was a whole new interest from the consumer in wearing shapewear that wasn’t your grandmother’s girdle,” said