George Gurley

Q: For years now, shows like Meet the Press have been broadcasting clips of an SNL sketch, a spoof of political reality, to have a conversation with their audience about the actual political reality. How are you getting to the core ingredients of what’s going on in a way that people like Tom Brokaw can’t seem to articulate?

A: I think they’d like to make sarcastic comments about candidates, but their role as news people prevents that, so I think showing our clips permits them to let us make the point.

I think it would be awkward for even some of the people on cable to be as out-and-out mocking as we can be, and I also think it sort of makes their shows more entertaining—they can do it for free.  read more »

Judith Owen, the Welsh singer-songwriter, actress and wife of comic actor Harry Shearer, was waiting for me inside the Paramount Hotel on a recent dreary Saturday afternoon.

She was on her second coffee and I was running late. My bad!

Had I been meeting, say, Natalie Merchant, I would have been there five minutes early, but I hadn’t seen Ms. Owen perform yet; I didn’t know how talented and funny she was.

I’d met her twice before. The first time was by chance outside Barneys back in 1993. I was with a female mentor, she was with Mr. Shearer, and the four of us were staring at Mr.  read more »

So everyone’s claiming to have been real tight with David Foster Wallace because they played tennis with him, had a class with him, got a book signed by him, did the naughty with him. Seems thousands of people were “pretty tight” with him and they want to make sure you know it.

I’ve hauled my copy of Infinite Jest, published in 1996, in and out of seven apartments I’ve lived in. Never made it past page 3. A few phone numbers scribbled in the back. Never wore a do-rag but had an earring in 10th grade. Took it out after someone made fun of me.  read more »

Doubles, the exclusive private club in the basement of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, reopened all spruced up on the evening of Wednesday, Sept. 17. The carpet was new, as were the wall coverings and the crocodile banquettes. Everything was in a rose salmon color. “You glow,” said Doubles chairwoman Wendy Carduner. “Everyone looks superb here. This is the most complementary color.”

As party guests began to trickle in, interior designer Tom Britt, the dapper 68-year-old who started working on the revivification last February with his associate Valentino Samsonadze, was holding court by the dance floor.  read more »

My very first thought about Sarah Palin? That would be: “I want to have sex with her.” Want to lick that face and drool on it like a dog.

I found an old clip of her on Charlie Rose. Wow, she can sure keep up with Charlie, no problem! Dodged that one nicely.  What a delightful nose!

Then during her speech at the convention: No cleavage? No fair. Slurp slurp.

O.K., I’m only going to say this once: Sarah Palin is much better-looking, smarter, wiser and savvier than 99.5 percent of the hysterical New York City liberal chicks whining about “scary” and “mean” Republicans.  read more »

The new warmhearted comedy Ghost Town, starring Ricky Gervais and Téa Leoni, has all kinds of comforting messages about life and death. Turns out if you get hit by a bus but still have unfinished business on Earth, you get to resolve all your issues with loved ones before a beam of light appears and you fade out blissfully on the way to the next world.

After a Cinema Society screening on Monday, Sept. 15, everyone at the Soho Grand’s courtyard restaurant seemed under the spell of this sweet, hilarious movie. So we decided to bum everyone out by asking if Armageddon was right around the corner.  read more »

Last May, at a benefit for the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Central Park Zoo, a dapper man came over to bum a smoke. I told him he looked just like Tennessee Williams.

“They all say that,” said Gregory Speck with a Southern accent, then proceeded to tell a story about how when he moved to New York in 1976, he bumped into the playwright in an elevator (“he was so drunk”) and they each did a double take.

The 55-year-old Mr. Speck told me he was an author, celebrity journalist and zoologist, and invited me to see his apartment in the Beresford on Central Park West, which he keeps stocked with his own personal zoo of stuffed wild animals.  read more »

On Saturday, Aug. 23, several hundred people gathered at Stone Meadow Farm, an estate in East Hampton where Mariah Carey recently got hitched, to celebrate the 125th birthday of the American Red Cross. Russell Simmons, whose eponymous jewelry line was one of the evening’s sponsors, told us that it had been the summer of Barack Obama, as well as yoga, the environment, PETA, the Humane Society and fund-raisers (his July 19 Art for Life event raised $1.7 million).

Liam McMullan, the 20-year-old son of photographer Patrick McMullan, and Stephanie Wei were sitting nearby. One night earlier this summer, the two were hanging out at 2 a.  read more »

Dear Mayor Bloomberg,

You’ve had a good run, been a real successful, under-the-radar-type mayor, and everyone likes you. Well, 70 percent of New Yorkers. Anyway, I’ve never heard anyone say, “Bloomberg, that fascist!”

Unless I missed something, your administration has been pretty squeaky clean. No big scandals, right? I know you’ve given hundreds of millions of your own money away, but you couldn’t have paid off everyone. I like how you still ride the subway, are listed in the phone book and get paid a $1 a year. I can relate.

There’s one thing you could do for me.  read more »

At the Southampton after-party on Sunday, Aug. 3, for Bottle Shock, a film about the early days of California wine, there was almost nothing to drink—zero wine, no Champagne, no friendly bartenders offering a free whiskey. Novelist and wine columnist Jay McInerney was shmoozing; he and his wife, Anne Hearst, had hosted a dinner for the cast the night before. A few months ago, I asked Mr. McInerney if it was a good idea to sip red wine all day and he said no, Hemingway ran into some trouble doing that.

Finally I got a glass of rosé, and then spotted Eliza Dushku, who plays a sexy barmaid in Bottle Shock.  read more »

“I’m happy to say I’ve danced in fountains, I’ve had strawberries and wine and Champagne, I’ve visited places like Brideshead,” said nightlife duchess Amy Sacco. She was on the roof of the Gramercy Park Hotel after a Cinema Society screening of Brideshead Revisited on Tuesday, July 22. “And I’ve had the unrequited love issues, too.”

Former gossip columnist Lloyd Grove recalled watching the Brideshead miniseries in the early 1980s with friends from Yale and being served plovers’ eggs, just like the ones Lady Marchmain sent Sebastian. Literary agent David Kuhn, who was “gay but not out,” watched it at Harvard’s Spee Club, which was “not gay but gay-ish.  read more »

Truth is I don’t cheat, don’t get laid extracurricularly, ever. Against the rules.

Fine with it! It’s been many years since I said good riddance to the occasional late-night hookup and the once-in-a-blue-moon, drug-fueled marathon bang sessions. Three hours nonstop one late night circa 2000. No nonsense. Non. Stop. Sting kind of stamina. Not bragging, just sayin’. Provided her with 9 to 14 orgasms. Me: zero. Downside of Viagra.

Those days are gone, R.I.P., don’t miss it, don’t look back.

Of course, I can draw on those experiences and say, “That happened, I did all that, sowed my wild oats and now I can be dignified, altruistic, focus on lofty ideals, convert to Catholicism.  read more »

A toxic mixture of dread, fear, panic, paranoia and self-doubt was brewing in my head on my way out to the Hamptons the last weekend in June.

On the train, I sat on a fold-up chair next to the bathroom and listened to the contents of the bowl swish and swirl around, like the economy and the Bush administration. From time to time, I looked up from my novel (about a sleazy opportunistic journalist in late-19th-century Paris), saw baseball caps, tall boys, tattoos, flip-flops, and shuddered.  read more »

I had been invited to stay at the large, elegant estate of the interior designer Tom Britt.

GEORGE: This a new couch?

DR. SELMAN: So what brings you back?

GEORGE: Well, it’s been six months.

HILLY: Well—

GEORGE: I’m a little groggy, I have to admit, because I had to work last night. Went to this benefit at the Central Park Zoo. What animal did you like best?

HILLY: This huge porcupine and the little fox and an owl that was just gorgeous.

GEORGE: And Al Gore was there.

HILLY: Whatever.

DR. SELMAN: Personally, I’ll leave the petting of wild animals to other people, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

GEORGE: And then as usual, I started getting a little rambunctious, didn’t want to go home, so I put Hilly in a cab round midnight, and ended up in some apartment sitting around with kids half my age playing this game I invented.  read more »

At the Wildlife Conservation Society on June 3 at the Central Park Zoo, we found a creature with a steely gaze and a hefty, 235-pound-ish build: Al Gore.

The Transom imagined that the former vice president was thinking the following: What am I doing here again?  read more »