By Drew Grant 8/15/12 8:40am

Menace to Society

Can you recognize these faces?

Menace to Society: Haven’t We Met Before?

I have a problem. Well, no, we have a problem. The children of Prozac Nation, medicalized since we entered grammar school: we are a generation of self-diagnosers. Con-artist hypochondriacs, we refuse to take responsibility for any personal shortcomings, attributing them all to in-vogue disorders instead.

It’s not rude to type on your iPhone while talking to someone if you tell them, “I’m just so ADD.”

Feel awkward at parties? Kind of a loner? Don’t sweat it, you just have Asperger’s. This has lately become a handy catchall term for anyone who is even a little bit weird or likes to spend time on the Internet. That’s the great thing about the autism “spectrum”—it’s a spectrum! If you look closely enough, we’re probably all on it somewhere. Read More

By Drew Grant 7/24/12 6:53pm

Menace to Society

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Menace to Society: Full Gallop

Not long ago, I attended a party thrown by gym magnate Bob Roberts and his wife, Lauren Day Roberts. Walking around their opulent Southampton villa, I found myself talking to a small cluster of people hanging out by the infinity pool—the outdoor one, not to be confused with its heated indoor companion—asking what they do for fun. Besides cluster near infinity pools, that is.

“Well, polo season is about to start,” former rock journalist and current PR maven Liz Derringer told me.

“I love polo,” I said. “I used to play it all the time.”

I received some incredulous stares, since I guess no one suspected a sleek urbanite such as myself actually spent her formative years in Newark, Delaware, where everyone who was anyone played water polo.

“Well, then you have to meet Nacho Figueras next weekend at the Bridgehampton Polo Club kickoff,” my dear friend (and publicist) R. Couri Hay suggested. “Maybe we can even set you up with a lesson. When was the last time you rode a horse?”

That’s when it dawned on me that they were talking about polo polo: the kind played by very attractive men who appear in Ralph Lauren campaigns. The kind that’s like croquet on horseback, where you gallop at full tilt while bending over to hit a very small plastic ball with a 10-20 pound mallet. Read More

By Rex Reed 1/24/12 8:00pm

movies

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Albert Nobbs is Ms. Butler

Albert Nobbs, a lumbering saga about the pitfalls of a woman posing as a man to hold down employment as a butler in 19th-century Dublin, opened for one week in December to qualify for Oscar nominations. It is now expanding to commercial marquees for public scrutiny. Thanks to a quirky performance by Glenn Close featuring enough prosthetics, wrinkles, painfully binding corsets and pinched diction to generate critical acclaim and give Meryl Streep a run for her money, attention must be paid. But not too much. As a period piece, Albert Nobbs is slower than Proust, and nothing of any consequence ever happens to write home about. In her bowler hat and high starched collars, Glenn Close looks like Conan O’Brien playing Oscar Wilde.

Awkwardly directed by Rodrigo Garcia (son of acclaimed novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez) from a novella by George Moore that was turned into a play Ms. Close performed off-Broadway 30 years ago, it’s a dull little fugue in a minor key Read More