Goodbye strangers, it's been nice! (CW)

One time we tried to watch an episode of Gossip Girl. It was 2007, and Obama was gaining grass-roots support among young voters thanks to the hard work and dedication of Will.i.Am, Scarlett Johansson and two teenage newcomers, Blake Lively and Penn Badgley.

Yes, these two--dare we say--heroes had stood up together (in accordance with CW regulations) and announced in a commercial that they were voting for Barack Obama. The two co-stars, who, from the little we had seen of their program, were not especially interesting but found themselves endlessly fascinating, were given special celebrity passes because they were dating both on and off the show. And that's always fun.

But it's no longer the beginning of 2008. It's the end of 2012; the end of an era when Kristen Bell smugly narrated the lives of spoiled, jet-setting, New York prep school teens as they blossomed into spoiled, jet-setting, socialite monster nightmares. And in last night's finale, the one where the irrepressible rapscallion Chuck Bass--whose two defining character traits as we remember them were the ability to say his own name in a sexy voice and a desire to show up his dead father--finally stopped dicking around and married the dark-haired girl. Ugh, what was her name. Bonnie? Blaine?

She was the mean one, but actually they were all "the mean one": a hive of Queen Bees and their lovers, all of whom were as toxic as they were. (Except for the blond one that looked like a cardboard cutout, and had a similar acting range).

These were the kind of people of whom the nicest thing one could say was that it probably wasn't their fault they were so awful, since you only had to take a look at their manipulative, gold-digging moms and lazy, guitar-playing and/or deceased dads to see that the apple didn't fall far from the Park Avenue tree.

So last night's finale: Did we watch it? Sure. It's the end of a television era, and that needed to be celebrated. Even if that means accepting that Dan Humphrey is a woman on the Internet. He's been the one chronicling all his friends' lives with the bitchy lilt of Kristen Bell and calling himself "Lonely Boy."

The two more-awful people got married, making sure that there will be plenty of more little Basses in the sea one day. Serena and Dan may have also gotten married. Nate, who works at a newspaper, got to publish Dan's Gossip Girl memoirs, because this show took place in an age when even a spoof of The New York Observer would run a book-sized chronicle of every minutia of these kids lives.

"You'll never guess what Blaire told her maid today!" We would tease in what would have to be a 20-year column. "Tune in next week!"

That being said, what is more fun than watching a soap opera of the most self-referential kind (since Soap) about New York socialites?

Perhaps The Carrie Diaries.

Everyone from Jay McInerny to New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood to this paper's owner to—but of course—New York magazine's Approval Matrix (which, of course, made a recent Approval Matrix in the magazine).

But what is it like to be plucked, as though by the cloud-like hand of the Gossip Girl casting gods, and immortalized for fifteen seconds of television, mostly to an audience of teenagers who probably don't know who you are?

Isherwood himself once attempted an explanation of this in the pages of the Times. It began with a quote by Gore Vidal. Needless to say, it was not sufficient.

At least, not compared to essayist Sloane Crosley's entry in this month's issue of The Believer, in which no less than 4,625 words are dedicated to the experience, which—in toto—is apparently akin to living through the last thirty minutes of Adaptation, with disappointingly less drug use, and Susan Orlean having been replaced by the guy who plays Chuck Bass.

For example, this is what it's like to experience the pressure of having to dress one's self on Gossip Girl:

She pulled the last dress from my bag and called for her assistant.

"This will work," she said. "But tell you what—why don’t you borrow a pair of these?"

We were flanked by walls of overpriced designer fabrics and tailoring that glimmered at every turn. I peered over her shoulder, anticipating a tray of designer earrings or, say, some very expensive shoes.

She handed me a pair or Spanx.

And this is what it's like to share a scene with Chuck Bass:

Leighton wasn’t in my scene. Nor was Blake Lively (who plays Dan’s ex, Serena) or Jessica Szohr (Dan’s childhood friend, the bi-racial daughter of Vermont hippies, whose mom is a dead ringer for Maya Angelou) or Chace Crawford. But Ed Westwick, the stylish Brit who plays Chuck, was. During the long breaks between takes, in which the women lay on the master bed like mummies, lest they ruin their makeup, Ed chatted with concern about riots in London that had been dominating the news. Then he showed me a perversely hilarious video of a horse being hit by a truck on a country road.

Emphasis ours. Needless to say, not that we've watched in a few years, but this has ruined Gossip Girl forever for us, in that it will in no way be as hysterically funny or as remotely interesting as Ms. Crosley's on-scene exploits (especially of note: the piece of dialogue given to her, a surprise not at all worth spoiling).

Do enjoy:

A DOG NAMED HUMPHREY [The Believer]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Ed Westwick

Gossip Girl character Chuck Bass may prefer old money penthouses on the Gold Coast, but actor Ed Westwick has shown a penchant for a different (though arguably equally pretentious) kind of real estate. Reports are out that Mr. Westwick has taken a place at The Edge, a Williamsburg highrise.

But it seems that Mr. Westwick, like his character, is having commitment issues. Although supposedly he was looking to buy a condo in the building, he ended up renting a place instead, The Post has reported.

The Edge, home to both bankers and hipster artists (the successful rich kind, not the starving kind) is one of Williamsburg's flashy new developments, as loved by young Manhattanites as it is reviled by locals. One of the best selling buildings in the City, the highrise boasts extravagances including a spa, a "movement studio," and a virtual golf system. Oh Williamsburg, what happened to you?

According to listings on StreetEasy, one-bedroom rentals are going for $3,750 per month, while two bedrooms are going for north of $5,000.

Ed Westwick hates shirt buttons. (Photo via Patrick McMullen)

Gossip Girl's Ed Westick always manages to look so dapper when photographed out and about: whether he's taking his brother to the US Open or attending Simon Spurr's Fashion Week show, Westwick retains the effortlessly cool style of Chuck Bass even while the show is off air. Or so we thought.

Outside of Williamsburg dive bar Zablozki last night we were grabbed by what first appeared to be a homeless hipster trying to bum a cigarette. On closer inspection, the sweaty guy with the gold necklace resting on a bounty of chest hair (visible because his shirt was unbuttoned to his navel) turned out to be a very disheveled Mr. Westwick. Momentarily confused by his west London accent, we demanded repayment for our Parliament by having the teen star perform in different British dialects in the middle of the crowded street.

Variations included: "Oi, I'm cockney, mate!" (that's verbatim), and some incomprehensible Manchester impression that sounded remarkably like Drive Shaft's rendition of "You All Everybody" from Lost.

While Mr. Westwick was a remarkably good sport when it came to the impromptu performance, the three young blondes that comprised the rest of his posse appeared mortified: though whether they were embarrassed for their friend or merely shocked at the level of bonhomie a CW heartthrob would exhibit toward plebeian strangers remains undetermined.

Means of transportation.

"DO YOU KNOW HOW TO DO an evil laugh?” asked the 10-year-old son of artist Lee Quinones, standing last Friday in the packed and tiny Eric Firestone gallery, an art space slotted in a nook between East Hampton fashion stores.

The sun had not yet gone down and the attendees had dragged their kids, pets and other accessories to the opening. There was plenty of rosé and men in suspenders. Women stood in harried circles outside, smoking and talking.

Many of the little ones were the artists’ children. Even among that voluble crowd, the miniature Mr. Quinones was quite the talker. He was standing below the nose of an old military plane—junk in a junkyard, once, but now salvaged and made into art by his father. Mission Accomplished, it was called, and like the other works, it embraced, or maligned, American iconography. The exhibition, which opened last Friday and runs until Aug. 21, was called “Nose Job,” named for both Warhol’s before-and-after schnoz pics and the front parts of fighter jets. Each piece was rendered from parts from the galloping mess of steaming iron known as the Bone Yards, scrap heaps in the Arizona desert housing dead metal once tossed into combat by the Air Force.

“An evil laugh?” The Observer asked.

The show also brought out the locals, or whatever a “local” is in East Hampton. A woman in her 80s, pastel sweater flung and tied across her nape and back, applied red lipstick and leaned into another conic art work, this one by of-the-moment artist Dan Colen, that was blank save for the rouge remnants of kisses. “Like Oscar Wilde’s grave,” an onlooker said loudly.

“Yes, a deep laugh, like this,” Mr. Quinones demonstrated.

He leaned into a nose cone fashioned as a sergeant’s megaphone by Shepherd Fairey, about to laugh into the echo chamber. Mr. Fairey was one of the many contributors to the exhibition—along with Richard Prince, Mr. Colen and RETNA—who made pieces but did not make the trip out east.

Mr. Fairey may have had a reason. As the day went on, several of his fellow artists referred to him, with disdain, as “the man who got Obama elected.” The plane tip—once the wind-beaten beacon of this country’s bullet-speed airborne propulsion, but now art—had been branded on its side with the phrase “Amplify Your Voice.” What, again, did Warhol have to do with this?

“Muuuuu-mha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” the kid bellowed into the Fairey sculpture. The echo was eaten up by the metal. We couldn’t hear much of it. The Observer, taken with the idea, ducked into the antimegaphone, the cone that squelched voices instead of amplifying them—as Mr. Fairey had falsely advertised—and emitted an evil laugh that only we could hear.

We had been in the Hamptons, itself an echo chamber of sorts, for not quite an hour.

"SWIFT AND STRONG, as vengeance and arrows, come the Americans,” read the subtitles to the 1920s war film screened at the “Nose Job” after-party. A projector had been set up, as well as a puddle jumper pulled from the Bone Yard, with its cockpit open for kids to climb in. It had been decorated by the graffito Futura.

Carlos Rodriguez, a graffiti artist who goes by the name Mare139, stood toward the back holding a bottle of Casa Dragones, an ultra-luxe brand of tequila, as the deejay, designer Timo Weiland, spun “Ask” by the Smiths.

“There was a section of photographs by Henry Chalfant of the old trains, and that contextualized a lot of the artists in the show, because a lot of us come from that generation,” said the artist. “It’s expanding the idea of what graffiti or urban art is.”

But street art needs real streets, and when we zoomed out of East Hampton, having been stuffed into a car driven by a Russian man named Dmitri toward the end of the road—the ocean—there was not a single appearance of anything resembling graffiti.

"OH, GIVE IT SOME GAS," Nathaniel Christian said. It was now Saturday afternoon, and blistering. The Observer was driving a $200,000 Ferrari California around wooded curves, hugging each one and swerving delicately across the tight-waisted Water Mill streets. We had not been behind the wheel in years.

“Just rev it, pump the gas, push it,” Mr. Christian said. The prolific collector of Italian cars was sitting shotgun in the black convertible, charging his iPhone and tightly gripping the car’s door. He wore aviators, kept a patch of stubble and owned more Ferraris than any other man or god needs to. And that Saturday he held his annual Ferrari Rally, a celebration of spun-out tires and breakneck, rowdy speeds that wrangles 120 different versions of the Italian super car to construction don Michael Borrico’s estate. The cars—total worth, $100 million—were dashing and elegant. Outlandish, they were made decent by diversity—beautiful cars in red, yellow, white and black, angular, boxy, buxom, hourglassed, upticked, hardtop, no-top, half-top, sleek, small, enormous.

And of course they were all loud.

With a gear click and a whirl of the steering we shoved our right foot onto the gas pedal and out came a guttural growl—“VA-roooorha-reeeouuuu-thududumhhvvv!”—that shook the sunken leather seat as the California sashayed, as if on ice skates, through the winding Hamptons lanes.

“When I first got this, I thought it was a chick car,” explained Mr. Christian, who, when he’s not vrooming past dogwalkers in red machines, is a successful commercial real estate broker in the city. The automatic transmission—no way we were driving stick—burst into a new gear and summoned another set of horses in the already galloping engine.

“But it’s not,” said Mr. Christian, removing his sunglasses. “It’s not a chick car.”

The exhaust pipe sounded a glissando that swung upward in pitch, the tone peaking with each thrust on the pedal—and that rush! A few more turns and we came back to Mr. Borrico’s estate—we had gone in a circle, a small version of the circuit the Ferrari owners would take later as they rallied through the Hamptons.

As The Observer pulled the Ferrari California into its spot, we overheard another Ferrari owner. “Can you move my car, so it’s not near the front?” he asked. (Were all the drivers male, and white?) “I don’t want the polo balls to come flying at my car.”

There was a polo match later, and when it began we sat at a table with Chelsea Leyland, the deejay, who was having a smoke and wearing sunglasses the size of lily pads. We watched the ponies trot out of the stables kept beyond the pool, where floating, gold letters spelled out MOET MOET MOET. The match began, and the horses, the literal kind, barreled forth with thunderous muscle.

We drank a bottle of Moet Ice, and went to talk to Ed Westwick, Chuck Bass on Gossip Girl. The party had comped him a house and a Ferrari for the weekend, and we had seen him pull its marvelous grill up to our Sag Harbor brunch. He sat a few tables down with a girl who never took her sunglasses off.

“Nah, I’m not doing anything, nah,” Mr. Westwick said to The Observer. “But I love ya!”

His chest spilled out, indecorous tufts of hair unfurling around five undone buttons, as he leaned on the back of his wingman and fellow bloke, Jacob.

The wingman pointed out a girl, all legs, who had just walked away.

“I was gonna say, ‘Yeah, see you later!’ and then this chick, well—you done scared ’em away!” he said to The Observer.

He began taking off his shirt.

“Boom!” he said. “Observe that! Heeeey—bada bing, bada boom.”

Then with a “ta-ta!” they headed toward their Ferrari and sped off.

The sky darkened and in an instant the white house stopped glistening in the hot sun, while the men on its balcony—and their copious stock of wine in ice-stuffed buckets—were quickly draped in a cool, purple night. We hadn’t yet been up to that balcony: it was for the car owners only. So, a girl in a black dress, full of Champagne confidence, snagged our hand, and we ran by a guard through a door and into the redwood interior, past decorative canoes and out to that Ferrari-only deck. The women up here wore riding boots and frilled patterns of another era. We lit the cigarette of the girl in the black dress, and then lit our own.

Another woman, in a white dress, approached The Observer and offered to buy a one of the last cigarettes in our pack. She was offering $10 for a single one.

Despite all these worthy contenders, though, The Observer's award for best seat pairing at the Tommy Hilfiger show goes to Anna Wintour and Amare Stoudemire, who chatted like old pals. Even though he hunched over, The Observer estimates that Mr. Stoudemire is roughly three times Ms. Wintour's size.

Geography was an important concern at Saturday's all-day show, which was a dreamy, idealized account of New York rap. On Governor's Island, in between Manhattan and Brooklyn, Queens' A Tribe Called Quest, Staten Island's Wu-Tang Clan and Bronx's KRS-One performed classic albums that are some of the best music the city has ever produced. "We represent the real fucking hip-hop," said the man who introduced the man who then introduced KRS-One.

KRS-One turned 45 this month, the same age as Slick Rick, whose "Children's Story" and "La Di Da Di" are two of rap's most giddy and buoyant songs. In the $409-a-person VIP tent, the first person waiting on the astoundingly long line to meet Slick Rick after his set was a 52-year-old redhead named Lauren. "I used to listen to him way back when," she said. "I raised my kids on MTV." He emerged in a black shirt, jeans, his famous eye patch, and a wad of plate-sized necklaces that would make a chiropractor uneasy. He sat at a table behind a railing, which Lauren stuck her chin out over to tell him her name. Slick Rick asked her something. She stuck her chin out farther. They talked and he smiled a big smile, with the right side of his mouth and mustache tilting upward toward his patch.

"He asked if I like his music," she said afterwards, as the rapper's medallions were crunching into the lawyerly-looking man next in line, who gave the rapper a one-armed hug.

Meanwhile, on the main stage, the rapper Rakim was performing, but without Eric B., his former DJ--and the first name credited on Erik B. and Rakim's Paid in Full from 1987. That gem is writerly, relaxed and minimal, but, in person, Rakim was unconvincing. The crowd idled inattentively. A man who looked like Gossip Girl's heartthrob Ed Westwick ordered a beer. He wore a straw hat with an enormous hole, big enough to stick a large hand through. For some reason, the hole was facing front, and the hat was tilted down and to the side. He wore a tattoo of an oversized feather on the back of his left arm: It was Ed Westwick.

Stuff White People Like's 116th entry, Black Music that Black People Don't Listen to Anymore, lists KRS-One and Wu-Tang. The blog also has a separate post featuring the cover of Midnight Marauders, the album A Tribe Called Quest performed on Saturday.

JOKES ASIDE, they played with bop, bite, and brightness. Limbs shook and waved.

But there was a horribly long wait for Lauryn Hill, who sometimes doesn't show at all. The sun was hot. First, her stage was set up: There were five keyboards, two electric guitarists, two bassists, and, for some reason, two drummers playing similar-looking drum sets, like in the Grateful Dead. A DJ ate up minutes by playing music and calling out locales. When a lot of New Jersey guys cheered for their state, this reporter booed half-jokingly, and a tall man in a Homer Simpson shirt said, "Actually, Lauryn Hill's from New Jersey. She went to Zach Braff's Bar Mitzvah."

"Lovely," she said when she came out. "Good to see you. Long time, long time." She has not released an album since her solo debut late last century, when she broke a record for Grammy nominations. Her performance was tremendous and odd: Her band's loud rock music back-up was closer to nu-metal than Funkadelic, and, as if to express its dissatisfaction, the sound system hissed and shrieked throughout the set.

But she was a spectacle, wobbling across the stage, stubborn and intense, stretching out "Fu-Gee-La" with nods to her friends and followers listening from the side of the stage-Mary J. Blige,  Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz. During "To Zion," she brought out the song's namesake, her son. "13 years old! Just had a birthday," she said. Two little girls and four more boys came out. "That's just to let you know I wasn't vacationing all this time," she said. "It was worth it, really worth it."

The Wu-Tang Clan hasn't made a great album in ten years, either. But, instead, members like Ghostface Killah have done solo work that's as good as anything in the world, except for Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the debut they performed Saturday. What's scary about their music isn't its near-academic obsession with kung-fu and violence, but waiting to hear if they can straddle the line between dexterity and chaos. But the words clicked perfectly: It was moving to hear such a large group rapping so fiercely together over strange and ingenious beats for such a loving crowd.

They played solo-album songs, like GZA's "Liquid Swords," which began with everyone rapping along. But Method Man, wearing a strange hat — a kind of long detached sweatshirt hood — ran hushing around the stage, so GZA could do his beautiful first verse alone.

Boy Jones stood in for his father Ol' Dirty Bastard, who died of a drug overdose in 2004 at 35. "Just like his father," Raekwon said, shaking his head after "Shimmy Shimmy Ya." "Just like his father."

Afterwards, oddly, Snoop Dogg finished the night with his heavy-eyelid California rap. As the stage was being set up for him, someone came on to thank Metro PCS, the wireless service and sponsor. He was booed, which he complained about, but mostly people were turning away and heading to the ferries.

For most teen shows, the transition between high school and college is the beginning of the end—the death rattle before inevitable cancelation. For Gossip Girl, however, it appears nothing will change at all. Think about it: has a show about high schoolers-turned-undergrads ever cared less about featuring its characters in class? We can count on one hand the amount of school-based subplots on Gossip Girl over the past two seasons, and most of them have to do with scandal; must we remind you about Dan having sex with his teacher backstage at the school play? So it’s with great pleasure that we can report season three of Gossip Girl—which premiered last night—picks up right where you would expect it to: with our favorite Upper East Side teens looking pretty, having sex and acting way too grown-up. Here are three observations from the season premiere.

Dan and Rufus share a barber and a bankroll!

Remember when Rufus wouldn’t take Lily’s money to help pay for Dan to go to Yale? Well he doesn’t! The former Brooklynite is now firmly ensconced in the upper crust, bragging about how he didn’t have to break into the family emergency fund while enjoying a breakfast that would, as Dan put it, “make the Four Seasons look like One Season.” That the Humphrey part of the Humphrey-Van Der Woodsen clan is now flush with cash is sure to be one of the main sources of conflict on Gossip Girl this season—Dan and Vanessa are already fighting—but don’t get too comfortable seeing triple-digit haircuts and Dior suits. Since Rufus never got rid of his apartment, we’re sure something will cause a rift between the families before long. Otherwise, why save the set?

Blair and Chuck are so boring!

The will-they-or-won’t-they Blair and Chuck tete-a-tete that dominated so much of season two finally came to triumphant head in the season finale—and we rejoiced because we just want those two crazy kids to make it! But now, it just seems like a bad idea if the only thing Gossip Girl plans on having Blair and Chuck do is play not-so-elaborate roleplay sexual fantasies and talk about how they just want to make the other person happy. Snooze! Where is the passion? Where is the spark? Where are the headbands!? Hopefully that gay kiss between Chuck and some handsome beau will set things in better motion.

Serena is still an idiot!

We like to think we’re pretty intelligent and even we had a hard time trying to parse what Serena was actually doing. It turns out all her antics for the paparazzi had to do with her trying to get her father’s attention—here’s still hoping that James Spader winds up being her estranged dad. Right. Because seeing the daughter you abandoned blow a line of coke off some soccer player’s abs in OK! is just the type of thing that will make you want to contact her again. Oh, Serena! You poor misguided girl. Kudos, however, to the show for placing her at the middle of the most ridiculous moment in three seasons: an escape from suffocating paparazzi on horseback (!) while at a polo match (!!). Will wonders never cease?