“Mirella Freni and Pavarotti shared the same wet nurse,” former NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said last week at the Eighth Annual Opera News Awards at The Plaza, sharing a bit of opera trivia before giving the Metropolitan Opera Guild’s distinguished achievement award to the supreme Modenese soprano. “Just imagine the Freudian connotations,” hizzoner continued. “Mirella’s Read More
I have been through a lot since 1993. I was one of three of the closest survivors of the attack on the WTC and testified in the 1995 Criminal Trial of Ramzi Yousef. As a Special Agent of the NY Field Office of the US Secret Service I was trained to be a critical incident Read More
Hoping to ride the cash cow of Game Change, the mini-series adaptation of the Mark Halperin and John Heilemann book that proved an Emmy-sweeper, HBO decided to pay Martin Scorsese a bunch of cash to make a documentary about the world’s most charismatic politician, Bill Clinton. Read More
It was not all somber speeches at the ribbon cutting for Four Freedoms Park yesterday.
Naturally, this was an event honoring one the nation’s greatest presidents, so there was bound to be some politics in the mix, not just quaint platitudes about FDR and recastings of the Four Freedoms speech as each speaker tried to rhetorically show up the others. What The Observer was not counting on was what sounded like a full-on stump speech for President Obama at the end of Bill Clinton’s remarks from the dais in the park at the tip of Roosevelt Island. He did everything but call out the president by name: Read More
It took 40 years, some 14,600 days, between the creation of Roosevelt Island to the ribbon cutting today for Four Freedoms Park, a memorial to the 32nd president at the island’s southern tip. Today was the greatest of all those days, not simply because Louis Kahn’s dramatic, elemental vision for the park had finally been realized, but also it was a beautiful day, one full of promise, just like the memorial itself.
The bright blue sky, the beaming sun, the crisp fall air, the weather truly was suited to this place. Mayor Bloomberg joked with Governor Cuomo before the ceremony began that he had sent all the rainy weather that had been expected upstate, to which the governor responded that was fine, he would just bottle the water and sell it back to us.
But beyond the levity of friends, families and dignitaries, beyond the excitement of one of New York’s longest-suffering projects being realized, there was an twinge of trauma. The weight of history hung heavily on this place. Seasoned politicos and power brokers jammed the folding seats arrayed on Kahn’s sloping emerald lawn. They were all too well aware of the challenges facing the nation, in many ways as great as when Franklin Roosevelt invoked his Four Freedoms almost seven decades ago. Read More
You know they’re getting a little too personal. There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t have a minor heart attack reading those “grabby” subject lines from the campaign, before realizing that they’re not from a guy we met at a bar last night. Why are they always so personal? Why do Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Julian Castro and, yes, even Michelle, send us these vaguely headed emails that are both too vague and way too personal at the same time?
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So you thought that Kenneth Starr and Linda Tripp already discovered everything you never wanted to know about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky’s affair back in the 1990s? Think again.
Ms. Lewinsky, the woman who will forever be the intern with a stained blue dress, has decided to capitalize on her long-lived fame and sullied name. The Post reports that she got a $12 million book deal, although the publisher has not been disclosed. That’s a lot of money (especially in these days of austerity and low book advances) but apparently Ms. Lewinsky has the goods. Read More
The Mayans were right. We’re all going to die this year. And those of us who aren’t going to be zipped up to Kirk Cameron’s version of Heaven will be left behind to deal with the reckoning here on Earth.
Of course, the first signs of any impending apocalypse comes via celebrity news. Read More
Wednesday, October 5
Walk It Off
El Camino de Santiago is an ancient religious pilgrimage that for centuries has led Christians to a cathedral in northwestern Spain. It’s said to be the final resting place of Saint James. It’s also the subject of a new film, The Way, starring Martin Sheen Read More
Bill Clinton is writing another book! Called Back to Work, it’s going to tell everyone how to get America “back into the future business.”
In a statement from Knopf, the book is said to detail “how we can get out of the current economic crisis and lay a foundation for long-term prosperity. He offers specific Read More
