There are things the Transom considers red flags. One is the word “exercise” in any context not involving our First Amendment rights. Another, we recently discovered after a SoulCycle date with Real Housewives of New York City star Aviva Drescher, is the phrase “lock-in shoes.”
As in, once you’re on, you are not getting off. Read More
The Austrian director Michael Haneke is in a very exclusive club, having won the Palme d’Or for best picture at the Cannes Film Festival for both of his last two films, the Nazi allegory The White Ribbon (2009) and the end-of-life drama Amour, which will be released in the U.S. this month. Late in his career—Mr. Haneke is 70—the onetime provocateur (whose earlier films contained graphic violence and a strong sense of dread) has come to be embraced by the critical establishment. Amour, and its 85-year-old lead actress, Emmanuelle Riva, are considered front-runners in the coming Oscar race. Read More
“We’ve met before,” purred Kim Stolz, an impish grin on her face. The Transom was standing in a dark corner with the most famous lesbian to come out, as it were, of America’s Next Top Model. We were at the launch party for The Dalloway, a bar/restaurant Ms. Stolz co-owns with fellow reality heroine Amanda Leigh Dunn, of The Real L-Word fame..
The Transom couldn’t recall previously meeting Ms. Stolz , though we remembered her infamous kiss with a curious competitor during Cycle 5 of ANTM, as well as her time as a VJ and correspondent on MTV News. Even in her new role as Citigroup vice president and part owner of the hottest lesbian spot to hit New York in decades, she was unmistakable.
“I feel like the New York lesbian scene was kind of different, more diverse when I was growing up,” said the Manhattan native. “But recently it’s been confined to dive bars and clubby atmospheres.” Read More
The popular Christian author William Paul Young, who renders his first name “Wm.” and goes by “Paul,” gave the Transom a hug. He was on a short break from a series of interviews on Tuesday with the likes of Good Day Alabama and the Fargo evening news; he was sitting in a director’s chair with Read More
Lena Dunham was having a bad Friday night. The Girls star and director was filming an exterior scene in Williamsburg (observers described it as—spoiler ahoy!—a fight between her character and her love interest played by Adam Driver). But a nearby house party—a birthday celebration attended by the sort of early-20s liberal-arts graduate Brooklynites whose lives Read More
“The bar’s set really high–everyone on the street should feel like they’re part of our ‘hood,” said Carol-Lynn Parente, executive producer of Sesame Street, outside the Roseland Ballroom on Monday. Ms. Parente was attending the venerable series’s first open casting call in 43 years of production, as the Sesame Workshop sought to add a Spanish-speaking Read More
Screenwriter, director, and essayist Nora Ephron died last night; she was 71. Wonderful tributes and memories of Ephron’s legacy keep pouring out (just one example: it turns out the You’ve Got Mail website is very much intact, and itself a wonderful, odd little remnant of one of her more profound tributes to the Upper West Side).
If you haven’t read the New York Times‘ exceptional obituary of Ms. Ephron do so. Meanwhile, we have been relishing our own small piece of Ephron’s legacy: The You’ve Got Mail character Frank Navasky, played by Greg Kinnear. Read More
“I had the idea six years ago,” said Ian Reisner, co-owner of the West Side’s Out Hotel, which opened in March. “I thought it was a shame. I was out here 25 years ago, and we lost fun clubs like the Roxy, Limelight, Private Eye, the Bank…” He then described a European trip, during which he’d Read More
The contestants represented New York’s spelling elite. Many of them had whole careers’ worth of spelling behind them, elevated reputations and steady salaries underpinned by the public’s faith in their agility with words.
Now, sitting in two rows before an audience on the third floor of the Standard Hotel, wearing comically large name tags and sparkly bumblebee antennae that bobbled gently as they fidgeted, they awaited the bloodletting. Read More
Before Bill Clinton walked onto the stage in the Hilton Hotel’s third-floor ballroom, he stood in the wings as the president of the International Association of Fire Fighters praised him for nearly six minutes.
“Simply put,” said I.A.F.F. general president Harold Schaitberger, Mr. Clinton is “the kind of leader American workers need more of holding office today at every level of government.” Read More
