A timeout from tulle! It’s Super Tuesday! New Yorkers flock to the polls to pull the lever to help the country decide: Will Bill and Hillary Clinton be the Democratic nominee in November, or will Barack Obama ride a horse named Camelot into the White House? Will New Yorkers swoon before John McCain’s straight talk and wicked wit? And who else misses Bob Dole? If politics is too complicated for you, break off a piece of your trust fund and buy an overpriced beer in a dingy bar full of bespectacled hipsters with midlevel publishing jobs, as McSweeney’s Dan Kennedy reads at KGB Bar from his memoir Rock On: An Office Power Ballad, which, he told us, is “a cross between The Office and Spinal Tap. It’s widely described as funny. … It’s an awkward thing to say about myself. Oh, who am I kidding, it’s described as funny and brilliant!” The memoir is about Mr. Kennedy’s stint as a record-company executive, which “was an incredibly exciting chapter, but I at a certain point realized I have to be true to myself as an artist and writer, and it’s not all about making money and having the office and the assistant and all that stuff. I had to walk away…No, I’m kidding. I was fired.” (Literary and unemployed! The deadly duo! Mr. Kennedy, are you tattooed?) Of his walk on the corporate wild side, Mr. Kennedy reflected: “I was the saddest Homer Simpson sellout I’ve ever seen. I thought, ‘I’m gonna keep it real, I’m not gonna change.’ Meanwhile like a year and a half later, I’m like 30 pounds heavier, fat, happy. …” The fault lies with corporate America today, he said. “I thought it was going to be a gonzo world of rock ’n’ roll excess, but I didn’t realize the record industry had become a 51-year-old white guy with a law degree and a masters in marketing and a tan in the middle of winter.” Yes, it’s true: Rock ’n’ roll is dead, but luckily, tans in the middle of winter are not! Back at the tents, today’s breathtaking sartorial revelations include the collections by Badgley Mischka, wedding-dress maker Monique Lhullier, Diesel, and Marc by Marc Jacobs. We’ll still be tracking down that Stam bag on eBay … oh, hell, Canal Street.
[Dan Kennedy at KGB Bar, 85 East Fourth Street, 7 p.m., 212-505-3360; Fashion Week schedule, http://mbfashionweek.com/newyork/]
