The Observer has learned that Kanye West, the multi-platinum rapper and Twitter super-user recently sent representatives to the Persian Gulf region to scout locations for a short film. The project, which will take a form much like his 30-minute "Runaway"—a hybrid art film and music video starring model Selita E. Banks that premiered on MTV in October, 2010—is to be filmed in March. Read More
Day 2 of the Sundance Film Festival found The Observer snowbound in the extreme. We're talking enough snow to give Mayor Bloomberg and the New York City transit system nightmares. Astronomic surcharges became the norm as Park City's anemic livery force struggled to even make the most ludicrous time frames: "Yeah I can have a guy up there in like 3 and a half hours?" deadpanned one audacious taxi dispatcher, who seemed to take pleasure in seeing so many city slickers squeal. Read More
How can you tell 2012 has begun with a bang? Just log onto Twitter: the hot topics since Jan. 1 are a Venn diagram of American life—from pop culture to politics, to sports and even race relations. It’s beginning to feel an awful lot like looking into a microcosm not too dissimilar to those sea monkey kits we cried enough about to have Mom and Dad buy one, only to have it sitting in garage next to whatever Santa had brought us the year before. In fact, Twitter has morphed into This American Life. Well, again, for sea monkeys. At least there’s a community spirit in the barrage of 140-character thought bubblettes: it’s one of the few times that you’ll find New Yorkers venturing outside their insular world and joining in the national dialogue … even if it’s only online and it turns out that our sea monkeys are just brine shrimp with great marketing.
So here was your week on Twitter. Read More
The first thing we noticed about the den of Angels was the smell.
Hours before the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the creaky freight elevator in the Lexington Avenue Armory rattled up to the fifth floor. As the doors opened, a sharp tang of beauty-product acid smacked up against us, a collision of perfumes cut with a sweet whiff of lotions, the clouds of hairspray gushing from big bottles and wafting throughout the space. Past two aisles of models in pink gowns, beyond the couch where the most beautiful women in the world sat tonging mounds of salad with silver implements, was Karlie Kloss, a St. Louis native who, at 19 years of age, may be the most important model in the world. Read More
(Note: Some of this article appeared in an earlier article, titled Organizing the Occupation: Wall Street, Post Megamarch.)
What a difference a week makes. The weather was unseasonably mild on Friday afternoon, and as The New York Observer strolled around Zuccotti Park, the atmosphere still had the feel of a Ren Faire that had wandered into the wrong neighborhood. But there was definitely something different in the vibe over at Occupy Wall Street H.Q. Since the unions called out the troops last Wednesday, marching in solidarity with the protesters, the demo has skewed older—for instance, a pair of women standing in the front of the park looked as though they’d qualify for discount movie tickets. They held signs that read “Pissed off Grey Hairs say ‘Jail the Wall Street Bastards.’”
Read More
Last week in Paris, Kanye West unleashed his first line of womenswear. It received mixed reviews , with critics harping on the poor fittings and messily dreamed-up designs. Mr. West was unfazed, and defended his choices in an extended rant at Club Silencio, David Lynch's oddball foray into nightlife locales. “This is my first Read More
It's rare that Kanye West is not speaking out against one thing or another, but he remained strangely silent yesterday when visiting Zuccotti Park.
Read More
He's no Thom Yorke, but it'll have to do. Read More
As explained in The Observer just a few weeks ago, genius filmmaker David Lynch has stopped making movies in an attempt to become a David Lynch movie. Which is Lynchian! The recent spree of non-Hollywood projects -- Transcendental Meditation, a coffee line, an electronic music album called Crazy Clown Time -- witnessed its Pièce Read More
Kanye West is a usual fixture in the front row at New York Fashion Week, but this September he skipped the whole spectacle, leaving a void that
Vulture posits that the new Kanye West/Jay-Z collaborative album, Watch the Throne, is an extended metaphor for Game of Thrones. Okay! Two things that are well-known and -regarded simultaneously share a word in common. (It is a little-known fact that Katy Perry's album Teenage Dream is a concept album about Barack Obama's Dreams From Read More
Rapper Kanye West marked the occasion of his new album with Jay-Z to compare himself to a certain German dictator. At an English music festival, the rapper reportedly told the crowd: "I walk through the hotel, and I walk down the street, and people look at me like I'm f---ing insane, like I'm Hitler... Read More
Not in response to anything that happened recently, Wal-Mart announced they have a new web page showing how popular they are with New Yorkers.
They also announced they have 33,572 fans on Facebook, "surpassing the fan total of local landmarks such as the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center."
As ridiculous as it is Read More
... Kanye West might be there. Kanye is gonna be there. No -- Kanye is performing. What confetti machines? They’re going to blow dollar bills through confetti machines. No -- they’re gonna blow five thousand dollar bills through confetti machines. At the Mondrian. The Mondrian Soho? That place isn't even open yet. Just go to Read More
At all three parties The Observer attended Saturday night, we heard the usual refrains from the people guarding the door: "You're wasting your time;" "I can't help you tonight, sir;" "No" (our personal favorite). We got in anyway, of course.
There were two security guards outside the entrance to the Mondrian Hotel Saturday night for the Read More
