You go, Paul Ryan. (TIME Magazine)

– Just in time for the vice presidential debates, here's Paul Ryan looking like Zach Morris's stand-in during a TIME Magazine photo shoot that teased him by saying it was considering naming him its man of the year. Yeah, right!

– The reason Lindsay Lohan was fighting with her mom on Tuesday? Apparently it had something to do with a $40,000 loan Ms. Lohan gave to her mother to keep her Long Island home from being foreclosed on.

– Last night was the New York premiere of Seven Psychopaths. Watch Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell and Colin Farrell reenact a scene from Here Comes Honey Boo Boo last night.
http://youtu.be/NzIsz3fU9xQ

– Here's how you know you've been hanging around brooding British vampires too much ... you start referring to yourself as a "miserable c**t." In Marie Claire of all places. Oh, K-Stew!

At least Ms. Wiig acknowledges her new fame with a pretty terrific aside (emphasis ours): "I know a lot of people probably assume, ‘Oh, she’s leaving because she is going to be doing movies now and things like that,’ which I will be." Brisk and to-the-point!

The humble amateur violinist. (via nytimes.com)

Joe Zee and his violin were featured in "Posessed," the Times Sunday Styles feature that gives free, tightly controlled publicity to bold face names with projects to promote (see Rose McGowan, Conan the Barbarian),  and Stephen Adly Guirgis, The Motherfucker With The Hat) under the pretense of writing about their favorite objets.

Joe Zee, whose Sundance reality show "All on the Line" starts up again in November, would like to tell us about his violin because it's a symbol of how he's good at... everything.

“I was good at everything,” said Mr. Zee. “I was like Tracy Flick, sitting in the front row and raising my hand for everything. English, math -- anything with a textbook. I was good at consuming knowledge. And I was great at home ec!” 

He taught himself how to be good at violin. “Because of the piano, I could read music. And I’m a really good mimic, so I could watch TV footage of great concert violinists, watch how they sat, how they held the bow, and tried to just mimic that, over and over. One day it all fell into place, and I just kept doing it until I got it perfect.”

It turned out Joe Zee was good at other instruments too: "After conquering the violin, Mr. Zee taught himself the viola, then the cello, then the bass. 'It was fascinating to be able to do every part of a quartet,' he said."

Joe Zee was not good at one thing: “I wasn’t so good at phys ed."

But according to his column in this month's Elle, it won't be long before he's good at that too.

"I am obsessed with dance. Hip-hop, ballet, ballroom--I don't discriminate. I watch it, I support it, and  in the past few years, have attended classes regularly in an attempt to master it."

His self-professed work ethic is impressive, but we suspect what matters now is how good Mr. Zee gets at promoting Elle on "All on the Line." And with former Elle fashion director Nina Garcia now representing rival magazine Marie Claire on "Project Runway," it's no bunny hop!

Joanna Coles (Getty Images)

Marie Claire editor Joanna Coles is to be the official mentor on the upcoming Project Runway: All Stars. The perhaps misleadingly titled show presents past fan favorite designers still struggling to make it in the fashion game; Ms. Coles's role will be analogous to that of Tim Gunn in the regular-flavor Project Runway.

Marie Claire, and Ms. Coles, have a long association with the reality franchise: Ms. Coles has appeared on the show for several seasons and the magazine's fashion director Nina Garcia is a judge on the program (on the new All-Stars series, her role will be played by Isaac Mizrahi and Georgina Chapman). In 2010, Ms. Coles told The Observer: “We’re developing more television," declining to give details, and noted that few believed she was actually a TV-fashion guru. An acquaintance told Ms. Coles "'Well, obviously you’d never be on a show like Project Runway’ because she only ever sees me when I have on, like, jeans and a T-shirt." Well, the British editor is a literary type.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

from @cocorocha

Chelsea Clinton arrived at the 44^th floor of Hearst Tower Tuesday night (“with amaaaaze makeup and an impeccable blowout,” one fan tweeted from the publisher’s headquarters) and soon began whispering with Randi Zuckerberg in the corner. The Observer, taking notes on the surrounding scene (high heels, designer dresses, crispy cheesesticks), lurked nearby, waiting to speak with her.

“Let’s keep private conversations private,” said Ms. Clinton’s aide. She had materialized on our right and was eyeing our pen.

“First, hear what she has to say,” she said, offering us her e-mail address.

Ms. Clinton had joined Marie Claire editor in chief Joanna Coles for a panel on social media, along with Facebook marketing director Randi Zuckerberg (and sister of Mark), Common Sense Media executive Amy Guggenheim Shenkan and ESPN sportscaster Erin Andrews, to discuss “the perils and the possibilities of living in a digital world.”

Among the first to arrive was supermodel Coco Rocha. With 45,783 Facebook fans (personal profiles have a 5,000 friend limit, she explained to The Observer), she also maintains accounts on Tumblr, Vimeo, YouTube, Google Plus and Twitter. The last celebrated its two-year anniversary two days earlier.

“I just felt like I’d like to have a little bit of a voice,” said Ms. Rocha, whose métier is to be seen, not heard. “It’s letting people into my world and into the fashion world.”

The Canada native (she is working on her green card) kept her followers updated throughout the event, posting a photo of herself and her agent posed in front of windows overlooking Central Park.

Barbara Walters was seated in the audience, somewhat unexpectedly. Her name had been omitted from the invitation because she RSVP’d late, but she arrived as close to on time as anyone.

“I thought I’d learn something,” Ms. Walters told The Observer, admitting she was neither on Facebook or Twitter.

Asked if she thought social media was helping the field of journalism, Ms. Walters, 81, said, “Well, it’s there… so I think you need to know how to deal with it.”

“Truthfully, between e-mails and iPads and the little job I have on the side, I don’t have time for it,” Ms. Walters had explained. She didn’t have time to stay for the entire length of the panel discussion, either.

After Ms. Clinton gave short remarks, she sat in the audience, and Ms. Coles told the audience a Wall Street Journal reporter "rather depressingly" had muttered to her earlier that evening that “these kind of things" weren’t usually very engaging.

The debate surrounded bullying on the internet; Ms. Andrews described what it was like to have a video of her nude passed around online, after a stalker filmed her through the peephole of her hotel room and posted the clip to the internet.

Next on the ladies’ agenda were issues of children’s online safety, which seemed aimed at Ms. Zuckerberg. She stated that age limits exist on Facebook and argued teenagers are savvier than they are given credit.

Ms. Walters piped up with a question from the audience: If she could, what legislation would each panelist propose?

“I thought this was going to be a vacation!” exclaimed Ms. Zuckerberg, who resides in California.

But it is safe to say the night went off without any un-friending. The next morning Ms. Zuckerberg tweeted “such a wonderful girl-power evening & panel,” and posted photos of the event to her Facebook page.

“I went to a very interesting symposium that was mostly made up by young women in the audience with great shoes,” Ms. Walters reported on The View.

As for Ms. Clinton, who made one interjection during the discussion and offered a few lines to wrap up the evening, Ms. Walters said, “She was so articulate, she was so intelligent…this is a girl who has a political future.”

Publishing is a bit more nuanced.

As a result, Hearst’s takeover of Hachette Filipacchi Media is going to lead to some awkward elevator run-ins. Take, for instance, the expected reunion between Marie Claire fashion director Nina Garcia and her former colleagues at Elle. She was fired by the magazine amid rumors of an iffy endorsement deal but landed safely at the rival mag. The move allowed her to maintain her more visible gig as a judge on Project Runway, which also made the switch from Elle to Marie Claire.

Things might get equally uncomfortable for Kevin Martinez, who defected from Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar to become Elle’s publisher a little over a year ago. Mr. Martinez has been bumped down the ladder to associate publisher to make way for Kevin O’Malley, the former publisher of Esquire, now publisher and chief revenue officer of Elle. Meanwhile, Mr. Martinez’s former boss at Harper’s Bazaar, Valerie Salembier, has moved to Town & Country.

And another Elle alumnus, Carol Smith, who most recently did a half-baked stint at Condé Nast’s food group, has been brought in to replace her. There’s more: James B. Meigs, who was fired from his job as editor of Hachette’s Premiere a decade ago, eventually becoming editor of Popular Mechanics, will now oversee the popular-among-mechanics former Hachette titles Car and Driver and Road and Track, in the newly created position of editorial director, men’s enthusiast group.

Sounds a little claustrophobic! Fortunately, Off the Record hears, some Hearst-Hachette staff will spill over from the $500 million tower to the building next door, the Sheffield condominiums. Hearst had the foresight to purchase at least six floors of the Sheffield back in 2007, before Hachette was even a glimmer in David Carey’s eye.

The Sheffield condominiums, formerly known as Sheffield57, long suffered from management problems under developer Kent Swig, but there’s at least one tenant who must feel right at home: socialite and publishing heiress Lydia Hearst bought a place there in 2008.

kstoeffel@observer.com :: @kstoeffel

Ms. Amos strode in a half an hour late but made up for the lost time by speaking for almost an hour about the challenges specific to bringing humanitarian relief to Haiti, Libya, and Sudan, barely pausing to nibble at her Good Housekeeping-recipe popover. 

Hearst editorial director Ellen Levine asked about the challenges of negotiating with male leaders whose customs dictate they shouldn't shake her hand. 

"They don't expect you to be tough," said Ms. Amos. 

Longtime magazine fixture Christy Turlington was there to be, as Marie Claire's slogan goes, "more than just a pretty face." Ms. Turlington is taking a break from getting her master's in public health degree at Columbia in order to promote her first documentary, No Woman No Cry, about maternal health. It debuted on Oprah Winfrey's OWN network last month. 

That Marie Claire aims to incorporate more international news and longform journalism than their lady mag competitors speaks to Ms. Coles's background.  She was a career reporter before becoming the New York bureau chief of the Guardian and the Times of London. Plus, she's married to foreign correspondent Peter Godwin. Copies of his latest book, The Fear, were available for guests. 

After Ms. Amos cited a particularly grim figure about the frequency of lethal natural disasters increasing with global climate change, Ms. Coles cleared the air. 

"I don't know how you don't drink more alcohol," she joked.

Both she and Ms. Amos abstained from the white wine served. 

kstoeffel@observer.com :: @kstoeffel 

Mr. Carey dropped the magazine on the floor. Thwack.

"It didn't sound like that in January!" Mr. Carey said, grinning.

"We call that the thud factor!" said the magazine's publisher Nancy Berger Cardone.

It was back to school night last night for the boys and girls of the Hearst empire, and if you closed your eyes long enough you'd think it was the '90s — or maybe just a party full of slightly stressed magazine folks putting on a brave face. Though the event was technically a Fashion Week party, it was by all means a coming-out night for the new principal at the Hearst Tower on Eighth Avenue. Mr. Carey stunned the media world earlier this summer when he abruptly left Four Times Square to become the head of the magazine division at Hearst.

Glasses of Prosecco flew around the patch of Lincoln Center behind Jonathan Benno's new Italian restaurant. A low wall made from rectangular blocks of ice stacked two-high separated guests from foot traffic coming from 65^th Street. The DJ blasted "Freedom" by George Michael. Say, when was the last time Hearst had a party like this?

"This is the first year," said Cathie Black, now chairman of Hearst after giving up her job to make room for Mr. Carey. "You know, a lot of these people were operating at a loss several years ago. It's like a coming-out party."

Mr. Carey was holding court by the entrance to the party, speaking with Esquire editor David Granger, when the Observer asked him to explain the difference between Hearst and Condé Nast.

"The cafeteria!" Mr. Carey said. "The sushi is really terrific at Hearst. I enjoy the sushi."

Not that his summer hasn't been without a little getting up to speed.

"I feel a lot of pressure," he said. "Email me at 3 o'clock in the morning and see how quickly I get back to you."

He was quick to add: "I love my job."

Yes, but how does everyone else feel about their new corporate boss?

"So far so good," said Town & Country editor Stephen Drucker. "It's great. He's doing his job. So."

Where's that Prosecco!

"You may notice my husband has a black eye," Marie Clarie editor Joanna Coles said. "Various people have suggested that I might have hit him."

Here we go. Never mind about Mr. Carey and Hearst. Please do go on.

"The real story is that we got a dog at the weekend. And in his excitement to let the dog out of the car, the car door hit him in the face," she said.

Anyway! What's Hearst like these days, Ms. Coles?

"It's very hard to get jaded when you work in a Norman Foster building," she said. She was standing in front of the reflecting pool with Henry Moore's sculpture of gigantic vertebrae at her back

"Everyday you feel like you're an extra in a movie," Ms. Coles said. "That's what it feels like working at Hearst." She suggested that if Oliver Stone were making a movie about the magazine world, he would film it in the Hearst offices.

Assorted cookies came by.

"I'm just going to pinch one of these. Don't tell anyone, but I'm having a carb," she said. She picked up a cookie.

"I like being busy. I love being busy. I get up early. I'm like Margaret Thatcher," she said. "'Never underestimate what you can do in 10 minutes!' which is Margaret Thatcher's motto. And actually it's very useful for Fashion Week. You can do a lot in the 10 minutes between different shows. You can do a lot in the back of a cab."

Well the party is running late, so the Observer better get going.

"We're very excited to have David," said Harper's Bazaar editor Glenda Bailey. "He's come with lots of enthusiasm and great ideas. I think that's what it's all about."

We asked Ms. Bailey if editing her magazine had become less fun in the last few years.

"Harper's Bazaar is up by 11 percent on the newsstand." Ms. Bailey paused for five seconds and stared into the Observer's eyes. She blinked emphatically.

Then Ms. Bailey stared for a few more seconds. "We're up in advertising," she added.

zturner@observer.com / @zekeft

Late last week, in a moment that feels particular to the neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a girl in her early 20s with long, seemingly unwashed brown hair, stained denim cutoffs, scuffed boots and a loose white tank top that exposed lacy bra straps rode by on a bicycle and caught the attention of a 31-year-old man.

She belonged to the species of Dirty Girl that have been shuffling around this city for years: youthful, thrifty, indifferent to grooming-and in possession of an undeniable and confounding sex appeal.

"There are different kinds of hotness," explained her admirer, who preferred not to be named. "Sometimes you see a woman and you think, 'My God. I would do anything to take that woman out to a nice meal and see if she's crazy enough to think I'm nice and marry me someday.' And then there are times you're walking home and you step into a bar and there is this chick in the corner and I can go home and have sex with her for a weekend. And those girls radiate that."

The levels of trying and looking like you're not, so that everyone knows you actually really, really are, have an appeal, he added. "You know how in middle school you would rip your jeans, and your parents would mock you? That's kind of how I feel about them. It's like you know that that was such a curated attempt that it inherently exposes a softness in the middle, a kind of vulnerability. Like, 'You don't know who you are very well yet, but you're trying to create a facade that supports a certain thesis.'"

PHOTOS> Meet the Dirty Girls

The Dirty Girls of New York have some well-known ambassadors, commonly found in the front rows of certain fashion shows and the pages of Nylon magazine and (with their nipples showing) on Purple magazine founder Olivier Zahm's blog. They are well educated in the art of heavy eyeliner, like that smudged and smeared around Becka Diamond's eyes; of concealing your actual, sizable wealth with vintage T-shirts, like Peaches and Pixie Geldof; and of uncombed hair, like that framing the disinterested, remote look of Cory Kennedy's eyes. (All of the above are often identified as model or socialite or "It girl" or "party girl," though their actual professional pursuits are unclear.)

Ms. Kennedy appeared in ad campaigns and on the cover of Women's Wear Daily after the photographer (and her onetime boyfriend) Mark "The Cobra Snake" Hunter began posting photos of her on his Web site back in 2005. And though the look has all but disappeared from editorial pages, the photographer's Web site is still a place where the number of skinny, adolescent thighs in ripped stockings, navels exposed by dingy crop tops and various states of intoxication demonstrated by suggestive poses on the ground would make any man, young or old, feel instant guilt-if not for having looked, then for the place their imagination took them. 

"I know a lot of those girls and for some of them it's real, you know?" said Mr. Hunter by phone. "They sleep in their clothes and then go to a party and they won't shower, for real. I'm not a girl, but it must be a relief that that kind of look is acceptable because it's a lot easier to pull off than throwing pounds of makeup on and trying to make your clothes steamed and unwrinkled and stuff. I've traveled with some of them, and they just throw their shit in their suitcase and they put it on wrinkled and then they just put dry shampoo in their hair. It's a lifestyle."

Asked about the appeal of the look to the opposite sex, Mr. Hunter said, "It just gets a dirty idea in your head. Like, 'This girl is wild,' or it's just very sexual, like, 'Let's degrade this person.'"

Meanwhile, the fashion editors-who almost always take a position contrary to that of a straight man when it comes to what's sexy-see the look a different way.

"Some people equate dirtiness with soulfulness. That it makes you interesting," said Elle's fashion news director, Anne Slowey. "I don't think it's necessarily one of fashion's biggest trends, but kids of a certain age are always discovering it. But, it's like, can't someone rediscover Stephen Sprouse or Geoffrey Beene? Alex White is doing styling with Oscar de la Renta and re-creating that whole 'Upper East Side kid mimicking parents' thing, which is more interesting to me than always doing Marc's Perry Ellis collection.

"I think it works for Cory Kennedy, but there is a fine line between expression and clamoring for attention," she continued. "The minute it becomes ... who was it that used to roll around on the floor at clubs? Or like Paz de la Huerta. I've seen her pick her nose and fling it across the restaurant, and at a certain point you're just out of control."

Ms. Slowey later added on The Observer's answering machine, "Erin Wasson is like the epitome of the dirty underpants look, but even her line got cleaned up for fall." (Last month, in fact, Ms. Wasson's line for RVCA consisting of denim cutoffs and baby tees-the debut of which was marked by the model claiming, 'Homeless people have the best style'-was discontinued altogether.)

What's frustrating at this point-for someone who first glimpsed the Dirty Girl look eight years ago at N.Y.U., tried it on and ultimately abandoned it by graduation-is that it still dominates young women's idea of style. Even as the clothes on the runways have become beautiful and elegant and clean. Even as Alexander Wang has traded in his burnout tees in favor of deconstructed suits in sophisticated fabrics and pinstripes. And even as 17-year-old actress Taylor Momsen has amplified the look to an ungodly extreme, looking dirtier, cheaper and self-consciously more desperate than all the Dirty Girls before her.

But there is hope: Examine the spreads in the just-out September issues of the major fashion magazines, and you will find a refreshing precision to both the tailoring and hair-styling. "I think there's always going to be a place for that rebellious dirty look with the torn sweaters and leggings," said Katie Connor, Marie Claire's fashion features editor. "But in terms of what we're looking at on the runways, right now, it's much more a return to the classics, and what we're seeing is very ladylike-it's longer hemlines and square top-handle bags. That goes directly in the face of these young starlets in the tattered clothes."

Even Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, who arrived in the hallways of N.Y.U. practicing what became known as homeless chic, seem to be cleaning up. (The latter is Marie Claire's cover girl this month, with pink lips and a tailored jacket slung over her shoulders.)

"I look at the Olsen twins, and they've come so far in terms of when they first came to New York and started that whole wide-gaping-holes-in-your-leggings look," Ms. Connor said. "Now they're talking about how they would love to see the first lady wear The Row or Elizabeth and James"-their fashion lines-"and you see even in them this shift towards sophistication."

Perhaps that will soon trickle down, and all these wanly bicycling, pallid Williamsburg Winonas will morph into the Betties of Brooklyn Heights?

But for now the Dirty Girls are still with us: staring out blankly from American Apparel ads and most conc
entrated in the photographs of Mr. Hunter.

"There are always people who will live this lifestyle," Mr. Hunter said, "And people who will follow it, get bored and change. But I don't think it's going anywhere."

Perhaps that's exactly what the Dirty Girl look is, then: a phase, no different from mean boyfriends or naval piercings, that will always define a time in young womanhood and that, inevitably, passes with time. "They are clearly investing a lot of time into how they get dressed-and in lieu of what can be a whole conversation," Ms. Slowey said. "And then they grow up or they actually have the talent to back it up, like Chloë Sevigny, and eventually they probably want to start marketing themselves somehow, whether they are actresses or performers, and they're going to have to start taking themselves seriously. At some point how you look becomes business. It's fun to slum it, but there is a shelf life to that."

ialeksander@observer.com

WWD is cautiously optimistic:

After a bruising 2009, advertisers clearly have remained cautious when it comes to spending during the first quarter of the new year -- although the numbers are at least heading in the right direction.

But as Fashionista points out, raw page numbers don't necessarily translate to financial gains:

There's a huge chance that Marie Claire, despite the fact it's doing better than last year in terms of ad pages, didn't make much bank. (We won't know until the Publisher's Information Bureau releases 1st quarter sales figures in a couple of months.) Vogue's ad pages may be flat, but they claim not to negotiate rates, so are their results actually better?