Sofia Coppola is making up for her flop Somewhere with an interview with Lee Radziwill for T Magazine. It is a fascinating look at the ex-mother-in-law of Real Housewife Caroline Radziwill. (Just kidding! Jesus Christ, relax. But actually, the metaphor sort of works if you imagine Andy Cohen as the latter-day incarnation of Andy Warh ... actually, no it doesn't. Forget we said anything.) Socialites used to be so witty and clever. Maybe we'd still have interest in them if any of the new crop was anything like Jackie O's sister.

Not to be left in his sister's shadows, Roman Coppola is currently working on his own coup: a film called A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charlie Swan III, starring cousin Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray and, wait for it ... Charlie Sheen. According to Variety, it's a role of his lifetime. Literally:

In a plot line that seems to intersect with some of Sheen's real-life persona, "Glimpse" follows a successful graphic designer whose fame, money and charm have made him [irresistible to women. But when his] girlfriend breaks up with him, his life heads into a downward spiral.

In an interview with Moviefone, Mr. Coppola claimed he was "baffled" by the fact that insurance companies wouldn't cover Mr. Sheen on-set:

Well, to me, it was such an obvious thing. I had sensed that Charlie would really be good in this movie and when the insurance company was not into it, it just kind of baffled me. I’ve known Charlie since we were boys together so when he looks at me and says, "Hey, let’s do this thing. I want to do it." It’s a done deal. He’s going to be there for me; he’s not going to be a flake or not follow through so I think the insurance company failed to get some good business and I saved some bucks because I couldn’t get an insurance policy and I couldn’t get a completion bond. Thank god, because I saved two percent of my budget for not giving it to that worthless function.

We're glad Mr. Coppola has so much faith in his old family friend, but actors that are "uninsurable" (Val Kilmer in the ’90s, Robert Downey Jr. in the ’90s, Lindsay Lohan now), are that way for a reason. Though we're sure Mr. Coppola knows what he's doing.

After all, he's made a bunch of music videos and co-wrote Moonrise Kingdom and The Darjeeling Limited, so how different could directing a full-length feature be? And to be fair, Sheen's back on the up-and-up, remember?

Dickdickdick. (Lifetime)

– Chris Brown wants to poop and fart on lady comedian; deletes Twitter account.

– Charlie Sheen once gave Lindsay Lohan a check for $100,000 to help out with her IRS "debt," which is one case of the blinded-by-syphilis leading the blinded-by-syphilis.

– Liz & Dick premiered last night on the Lifetime channel, and Twitter was very excited about it, but apparently it was awful, no d'oy.

– If you ever wanted to know how to destroy Goop, here's Gawker's handy guide.
– Justin Bieber no longer beloved by Canadians, even while being given a White Trash award by the nation's Prime Minster.

Charlie Sheen refuses to sip from Ashton's Appletini

"I was kind of impressed... I thought, 'Hey, man, make it colorful!'" Mr. Sheen said about Mr. Kutcher's exploits. He'd previously given Mr. Kutcher his blessing on taking over for him on the show as well.

But Charlie Sheen, truth-sayer that he is, couldn't contain his contempt for Kutcher and CBS during a TMZ phone interview yesterday.


Said the thespian whose veins are filled with tiger blood: "I'm tired of lying. I'm tired of pretending the show doesn't suck. I'm tired of pretending Ashton doesn't suck."

He then added, "It's nothing personal." Which is probably why he's offering Mr. Kutcher's ex-wife a role in his next project, a TV version of the Adam Sandler/Jack Nicholson classic, Anger Management. As Mr. Sheen would probably say, "It's just good business, bro! This has nothing to do with the fact your very first episode beat any of mine in the ratings for our (mind-bogglingly) popular show!"

At least now, Mr. Kutcher can finally say he's in good company.

Bieber and Sheen: new best friends? (Getty Images)

Really, there's only one thing to say about the fact that while in Las Vegas, Tiger Blood recipient and 2011's Person of the Year (according to the numerous end of the year listicles, on the Internet) Charlie Sheen decided to a) try to invite 17-year-old Justin Bieber to hang out, and b) do so over Twitter, where he accidentally sent a public message to the Biebs which included his phone number.

Being forced to change your phone number after being bombbared with calls and texts regarding your message to an underage teenage boy? (Which read -- ahem--: “310-954-7277 Call me bro. C”)

Winning.

"It was a very special night at Ground Zero and I will always remember being a part of it," Mr. Birnbaum wrote The Observer in an e-mail. For him, the celebration was more about New York solidarity than terrorist bloodlust.

"While that picture shows my exuberance at the killing of bin Laden--and that was certainly how the crowd felt--perhaps the most moving part of the evening was when a spontaneous moment of silence quieted us, hands were raised silently in the air flashing the victory sign, and for 60 seconds we honored the 9/11 families. The silence ended with chants of "USA! USA!" Who could forget a night like that?" he wrote.

kstoeffel@observer.com :: @kstoeffel

Their hero had weeks ago stepped into the center ring by refusing one of the grander frauds of the Late American circus--the redemption racket that TV quietly borrowed from religion sometime in the waning decades of the 20th century. But the cunning Mr. Sheen floundered the moment the morning-show interviewers left his mansion, depriving him of their precious and practiced outrage.

He seemed to mistake himself for a tiger-blooded cultural revolutionary, and his devourers for followers. His U-Stream talk show was scattered and bizarre; his Funny or Die cooking show wasn't funny at all. His Violent Torpedo of Truth tour was an opening-night disaster in Detroit, an ill-christened tabloid basket-case.

By the time Mr. Sheen washed up in Manhattan, he was all out of charm and flair, quite entirely down to freak appeal, the dark matter of Octomoms, Humanzees and casual Austrian cannibalism. But this stuff is no match for casual American cannibalism: The throng came to poke at his living corpse, to see if vodka would run from its side, if Mr. Sheen possessed any death-defying magic or was, more ideally, just an historically entertaining end-stage addict destined to self-destruct in some uniquely amusing way, ideally right before their eyes, within the next hour or so.

"Fuck Carnegie Hall!" one man yelled as Mr. Sheen walked onstage.

The modern Rome is self-sacking. The barbarian drew massive cheers and was soon on to greater hate-targets.

"Fuck Detroit!" bellowed the little Alaric next, and he was hailed mightily.

"Cocaine!" he boomed, a simian belch that evoked the whole Sheenian ideal of vice and impunity to bind all as one. Well, all except one.

"I quit cocaine," said Mr. Sheen, and so things were rocky from the start between the man and his mob.

From the upper decks, the holders of $25 tickets booed sobriety. It diminished, after all, the chances of their hero dying unnaturally and hilariously right before their eyes.

In dark sunglasses, he sat at center stage, sating the dark appetite with Wallenda tales of empty sex with a pregnant Juarez hooker whose torso was marked with Caesarian scars, of flooding hotel rooms while cracked-out in Hong Kong, of hiding their beloved cocaine in his crotch on a humid day, then finding that his ball sweat had turned it to paste.

The nameless Everymook serving as interviewer mistook the mob for an audience and himself for James Lipton. An attempt to discuss the making of Wall Street triggered the first wave of heckling: "Boring! Boring! Boring!"

"Early showbiz memories, I imagine you have some pretty interesting stories over ..."

"Boring!"

"Anything in particular that stands out over the course of your showbiz ..."

"Boring!"

Mr. Sheen appealed to the mass mind's palsied centers of identity: They'd boo his failure to contract gonorrhea before them, and he'd win them back with shared hatred of all bosses. Back and forth it went, boring and predictable and sad.

Mr. Sheen appeared to believe that his father had once actually killed a man named Kurtz in the Philippines, that he himself had suffered for the national honor and interest in distant lands under Oliver Stone: "I survived the fucking jungles of Platoon."

"People wonder where all this shit came from," he said. "I watched hot chicks for years swoon over my pop. He always had cash in his pockets, and he was always surrounded by hot chicks: 'Let's see: Hot chicks, cash in his pockets. Fuck exploring the arts. Fuck finding my craft.'"

But here he confused what people pay to see with what they are paid to listen to: Radio City wanted real sickness, not forced-catharsis. Soon the aisles moved with early-exiters.

Finally came the Trotting Out of the Goddesses, the live-in concubines so essential to the Sheen legend.

"Whattup, New York!" said the Goddess whose air of deathliness suggested shoplifting and landfills.

"New York's my favorite city, love y'all!" said the Goddess whose air of doomedness suggested casual incest and fetal alcohol syndrome.

The y'all was the thing: This was no siren, they realized, no carnal wonder at all, only a hick who'd ridden a Greyhound to Hollywood. She was lower than even the holders of the cheapest tickets, and as such, according to the night's primate code, must be devoured.

The boos grew deafening, and talk turned to death proper.

The non-Lipton asked if the crowd would like to hear Mr. Sheen's Bucket List, and to the extent that 5,000 people can impatiently say, "Fine," they did.

Mr. Sheen said he wanted to drive a cab dressed like Travis Bickle, to take people far from where they wanted to go and not care, to crash into the stock exchange, evoking antisocial darkness insofar as a multimillionaire can.

But talk of death is no substitute for death itself. And Mr. Sheen's job was not to explore his own darkest appetites but to sate the mob's.

More boredom, more booing.

Then Mr. Sheen said that before dying, he'd like to perform on a Friday night at Radio City Music Hall, which, over the past 54 minutes, in the most marginal and half-hearted sense imaginable, he'd done.

With that, the sick man took the dark people's money, and was gone.

 editorial@observer.com

Charlie Sheen's tour has less in common with past successful speaking tours, like Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain schtick, than with quick-burning train-wrecks--Britney Spears disappears for two-year chunks, just long enough to stoke sufficient interest in her next staggering dance across America. (Will there be a single unironic fan in any given stadium?) Snooki gets paid more than Toni Morrison to speak at Rutgers--unsurprising, given the rich legacy of MTV burnouts who'll speak about "issues" at your university. As mass media has made the speaking tour effectively irrelevant (could a Hal Holbrook act, without a healthy local-theater circuit, thrive today?), one wonders what a Charlie Sheen hopes to get out of a speaking tour. Ms. Spears and Snooki seem to need the money (and may as well milk their notoriety while they can)--but Mr. Sheen's case is more opaque (he has earned millions on Two and a Half Men, but clearly is not a conservative spender).

One is reminded of a second film, 2007's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, in which, after the titular assassination, Mr. Ford re-enacts his one notable act onstage. There's money for him in it, but also the frisson of having done something that people will praise, something that he knows was wrong. Mr. Sheen's self-knowledge is in doubt, but in that film depicting a pre-mass media era, interest in Robert Ford's glamorous misdeeds and "bad boy" image dwindled quickly. The tour grinds on.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

--Which public figure is, for some scary reason, the subject of political polling--and is more electable than Sarah Palin?

--Which network, under new management and ownership, just renewed its beloved and low-rated sitcoms?

--How will 'Teenage Meme' Rebecca Black lose our interest after tomorrow?

--Who's the best-dressed New York doll?

--What potentially financially disastrous decision did Courtney Love (maybe) make today?

--What's the next great The Daily-style paid-content jailbreak?

--How is Broadway copying the opera's big idea?

--Where does Frank Bruni go for after-theater drinks? (Sometimes he's feeling upscale, and, well, sometimes...)

--Is leaving your executive job to judge a reality show a good idea?

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Then again, understatement has been the preferred coping mechanism this week. Just ask accused serial killer Maksim Gelman, who embarked last month on a 28-hour spree of violence. "I've had better days," he said in a confession released this week, claiming that he was suffering from cancer and helpfully advising cops that it was generally better to "stay away from PCP." Asked one New York Post commenter whose romantic life may have, well, had better days: "Am I the only one who thinks this guy is kinda hot?"

To be fair, under dire circumstances, a lot of things seem more attractive than you'd think. Abandoning strong reform policies in capital cities that rhyme with Schmalbany. (Not that we're thinking of anyone specific.) Pleading guilty in the face of a Staten Island landfill's worth of federal wiretapping evidence. (No one there, either.) Finally acknowledging that your company's nuclear reactors may need a touch of technical assistance. (O.K., we're thinking of Jeffrey Immelt.)  But we won't admit it, if only for the sake of keeping up appearances.

Which is almost as important as making them. In D.C. on Tuesday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg made one as co-chair of something called Mayors Against Illegal Guns--a sort of understatement of posturing, particularly when you consider the likelihood of opposition given the "illegal" qualification. (Forgive us if we've failed to register the existence of Mayors for Illegal Guns. And we already gave, thanks.)

But that's what we like in our billionaires: unambiguousness. Illegal guns, bad! Icy beer, good!  Just don't ask them to be unambiguous about what they do. Eleven of the 16 New York City billionaires mentioned in this week's Forbes "Billionaires" issue (is there any other kind?) are hedge fund managers--an attractive business even in dire circumstances that offers an opaque façade of minute transactions that are conveniently difficult to explain to, say, a jury of one's peers. No giant infrastructure, dirty factories and the like. Just good old-fashioned money-making via structured finance.

And that's better than good old-fashioned money-making via bribery, the favored choice for disgraced State Senator Carl Kruger--large denomination bills, please. Something a little more liquid than inside information on Proctor & Gamble.

And historically, this week of March doesn't bode well for ambitious scheming politicians, at least one of whom found himself on the receiving and fatal end of a sharp object somewhere around 44 B.C. But we're not quite to the third act just yet, and it's difficult to identify the bigger schemers. (Et tu, Lipsky?)

We'll make it there, but we're not gonna lie: We've had better days.