ExclusiveRumors.com

How many ways can you analyze 30 seconds of silent footage? An infinite number of ways! Over the last 24 hours, cable pundits, our modern Vienna Circle, have explored all the possible meanings of a bunch of guys drinking beers.

Not long ago, a Cambridge police officer named James Crowley arrested Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates for the crime of being rude to a police officer who wouldn’t get off his porch. Then, Barack Obama, who is friends with Gates, said the Cambridge Police Department acted stupidly. This touched off a national conversation on race, which means a bunch of dudes on TV shouting at each other.

So Barack Obama invited Crowley and Gates over to the White House to have beers and talk about shit. And the press was invited to watch, briefly, but not to listen in. And so the world will never know how Racism Got Solved.

But we can certainly guess a lot of things! Crowley probably said “tastes great” and Gates said “less filling” and then Gates got arrested, again, maybe.

“I feel like we’re watching Britain’s Got Talent,” Chris Matthews says. “Biden’s probably the only one who drank the beer,” Bill O’Reilly says, perhaps unaware that Biden was the only one drinking near beer.

Oh, look, the Post called a body-language expert! That is always the sign of a really good news story, when a body-language expert has been called. Obama was comfortable, and Crowley was not, and Biden is ridiculous. Thanks, body-language expert.

Even Gates’ daughter (guess what online media outlet she writes for) got in on the action, with a column about how she watched them talk from some windows inside the White House and What It Means About Race. (Also she has already been accused of “taking the low road” by The New Republic for mentioning that Crowley’s 14-year-old daughter applied her eyeliner inexpertly, which Gates found “charming,” which is apparently evidence of condescension from someone uppity enough to have graduated from The New School. No, seriously, we’re not seeing it, TNR, and this just looks like Corner-style shit-stirring for the hell of it.)

Oh, and White House photographer Pete Souza had his official photo of the toast uploaded to Flickr before the beers even got warm. We can’t wait for Peggy Noonan to write a column on the ghosts of Ferdinand de Sassure and Roland Barthes discussing the studium and punctum of the image on Fox & Friends.

Here is the original post

This blurry photo was purportedly taken in the dark heart of Wall Street this morning. As you can see, it clearly shows… uh…

—A banker who drank too much last night?
—A frat boy hazing victim?
—A banker hazing victim of a secret Wall Street banker frat?
—A publicity stunt?
—A never-before-seen half-man half-bull underwear monster?

Or what? Your explanations in the comments, please.
[Thanks to The Big Lead, who sent this to us. Dealbreaker has some guesses too.]

Originally posted here

So here’s Anderson Cooper on his show tonight talking to Erica Hill about an innocent little interview he did with ABC’s Bachelorette, Jillian Harris. But then a clip from the interview is played and Cooper immediately inquires about the sexing.

The interview in question took place yesterday on Live With Regis and Kelly while Cooper was filling in for Regis Philbin. You have to kind of admire him for cutting to the chase and asking the question that so many wonder but dare never to ask, and then turning around and defending himself with such animated vigor. Then again, he is the son of an octogenarian smut-peddler, so it kind of figures that he’d dive right in and ask about the boning that went on behind the scenes on the show.

But the highlight of the clip may actually be when Harris replies that she kissed ten guys on the show, provoking Cooper to say, “You know what…I just threw up in my mouth a little.” Oh come on Andy—really?!

Go here to see the original

Annie Leibovitz, perhaps the highest-paid celebrity photographer in the world, is profoundly broke. She hocked every photograph she’s ever produced and now the high-end pawnshop that gave her $24 million has filed suit to force her to sell it all.

Art Capital Group is a financial firm that specializes in lending money for people who own valuable art. They’re happy either getting back in cash or taking the art. Leibovitz, whose financial difficulties have been well-documented, mortgaged her homes and all her photographs to Art Capital and yesterday they filed suit for breach of contract, claiming she won’t cooperate in their attempts to sell her pictures.

Art Capital has loaned Leibovitz a total of $24 million since September of last year. They took as collateral the negatives and copyright to all of Leibovitz’s photographs, as well as her homes in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and Greenwich Village. But they also extracted from her, according to a lawsuit filed today by Art Capital, both an agreement to sell her archives to repay the loan and the exclusive rights to arrange the sale. And they claim that she is refusing to honor that agreement, frustrating their attempts to sell the photos and refusing to allow real estate agents into her homes.

The suit isn’t over the debt, per se. The original loan, according to the suit, was premised on the likelihood that Leibovitz was eventually going to have to sell her archives in order to repay the debt by this September, when it comes due. And according to a sales agreement signed by Leibovitz and included in the suit, Leibovitz agreed to let Art Capital “identify buyers,” “solicit offers,” and “consummate such sales.”

But so far, Leibovitz has refused to cooperate. Art Capital took physical custody of Leibovitz’s negatives when it made the loan, so it wouldn’t have any trouble selling those to recover some of the money if it wished. But the real money is in the intellectual property rights to Leibovitz’s portfolio, and for that, it needs her cooperation to get the most value.

“The agreement with her was that they’d go out and sell it for more than $24 million,” says a source close to Art Capital. “And now, she’s not making herself available. Any likely buyer would say, ‘Gee, can I meet with Annie?’ I don’t think anyone would buy it if they don’t feel they have a cooperative seller.”

Leibovitz’s refusal to cooperate raises the question of whether she ever intended to pay Art Capital back, or whether she has already surreptitiously sold the archive using another agent. Her relationship with Art Capital began to go south in March, when Getty Images announced that it was taking on Leibovitz under a “a special multi-assignment collaboration.” It’s unclear what that means, but Getty’s release implies that Leibovitz’s “name and talent” had been added to the company’s “roster of elite photographers available for commission photography.”

That was a surprise to Art Capital, who, according to the suit, thought Leibovitz had pledged them the “right of first refusal to act as agent in connection with…the engagement by third parties of photographic services” provided by her—a way of hedging against the loan by at least getting commission on any of Leibovitz’s photos. According to a source close to the deal, Leibovitz didn’t inform Art Capital of the Getty arrangement.

Art Capital’s suit seeks to compel Leibovitz to honor the contract and help the company sell her photos and homes. It also claims she owes “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in bills associated with the deal.

Leibovitz’s attorney declined to comment. The suit is silent on how much, if any, of the $24 million she owes Art Capital has been paid back, though it’s highly unlikely that the company would move forward to force the sale if Leibovitz had made much of a dent in what she owes. So no matter what happens with the suit, she’s almost certainly deep in a hole with no clear way out aside from the sale.

In May, one of Leibovitz’s other creditors, a lighting company that claimed she owes them $189,000 prepared a petition for involuntary bankruptcy against her, which would turn the decision over a sale of her assets over to a bankruptcy judge. The petition hasn’t been filed yet, and a lawyer for the company didn’t immediately return phone calls, but today’s suit may well increase the likelihood that Leibovitz is forced into bankruptcy.

Read the whole complaint here.

Here is the original post

OK! magazine wanted to drum up sales with this cover about Jessica Simpson’s weight loss. When Us Weekly ran the same basic cover, it was their best-selling cover of 2007 — the same year, incidentally, OK! found Jessica’s “new” body.

The cover is a before/after spread, tied to a story about how Simpson has “already peeled off 10 pounds in 10 days” (last time around, Us had her losing “20 pounds in two months”). Their “Before!” picture is from a couple weeks after Simpson’s infamous chili cookoff pics surfaced and ex-boyfriend Tony Romo took her to the Waverly Inn for Valentine’s Day:

Click for larger images

Now, OK! hasn’t laid eyes on the allegedly svelte Jessica Simpson, that’s just what “sources” told them. So to illustrate Simpon’s purported weight loss, it went to the photo archives and found a picture of her jogging on the set of Major Movie Star in September 2007, more than a year before, we’d point out, the picture labeled with the big “BEFORE!” caption:

It would appear the cash-bleeding celebrity weekly really is done paying for fresh art.

See more here

Anna Wintour has come up with a genius way to save the dying fashion business: Why doesn’t everyone just collude on prices? So what if it’s illegal? She has “friends in the White House.”

At a “town hall” meeting hosted Tuesday by the Council of Fashion Designers of America intended to address how to get recession-addled shoppers to buy obscenely expensive things they don’t need, Wintour, who chaperoned White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers at February’s Fashion Week, was thinking outside the box:

“Could someone lead a committee that would make ground rules for retailers of when the discounting starts, and then all the retailers can agree to it?” Ms. Wintour suggested.

It’s so simple, and so illegal. When CFDA president Diane von Furstenberg pointed out that such an arrangement would violate anti-trust laws, Wintour was nonplussed: “Is that something we can change? We have friends in the White House now!”

Surely a Vogue cover for the president’s wife gets you something, no? Nevermind that the Department of Justice is aggressively ramping up antitrust prosecutions under Obama.

After Wintour was called out on her casual approach to the law yesterday, her flacks began spinning to the New York Post:

According to a Vogue spokesman, Wintour was merely alluding to designated days for retail discounts that are already in place in certain countries including France and the United Kingdom.

“That may be OK over there,” says Vano Haroutunian, a New York lawyer focused on the apparel industry. “But here, it sounds like collusion.”

One anonymous “fashion insider” gave the Post a choice quote that sums up much of what goes on in Wintour’s entitled little head:

“Either the idea was crazy or it was brilliant, but it wasn’t 100 percent crazy,” our source said.

Photo of Wintour and Rogers snapped by blogger Alex Geana.

More

Summer is in full swing, so you know what that means: Monsters! It was exactly one year ago today that we first reported on the Montauk Monster and now something that looks like Monty’s cousin has emerged in Toronto. Alive!

The creature was photographed by a Toronto resident named Jeffrey Freeman as it was rummaging around in his backyard. What could this hellish thing possibly be? Freeman thinks it’s an opossum, but his boyfriend thinks it’s a “freakish alopecia marsupial.” Torontoist suggests that it may be a bald raccoon, something they say is increasingly common in their area. Whatever it is, it looks like a damn monster!

Here’s another shot of it:

See the resemblance?

They’re both monsters!

Local Creature Learns to Shave [Torontoist]

Here is the original post

Julie Powell blogged her way through cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking; a book deal and movie followed. Are food bloggers thrilled for her? Hardly; Powell is a foodie infidel who must be stopped.

Powell’s movie is part blogger story and part Julia Child biopic; Meryl Streep plays Child, the famous home-cooking guru.

Now in preview screenings, Julie and Julia is already being savaged in food blogger circles. Chef, cookbook author and food blogger Virginia Willis’ slam set the tone. While professing “no malice,” it took Powell to task for daring to question Child’s recipe, once:

One day she made a comment implying a recipe being wrong for roast chicken. I honestly don’t remember what it was, but it struck me as being so disrespectful, completely without deference to Julia Child, that I stopped. What the hell did she know about food? Had she even heard of poulet au Bresse? Didn’t go back.

Actually, the term Willis was looking for was poulet de Bresse, but we shouldn’t interrupt a master bravely defending Child against a disrespectful (gasp!) acolyte:

People who happen to eat and are able to type are now our new food experts… Good grief, people who don’t know how to begin to roast a ding dang chicken without following a recipe can be our new, ahem, food experts.

The bitter anger of a lone chef-writer? Hardly; other food bloggers quickly agreed. “Thank you, Virginia for… bravely expressing your frustrations,” wrote one. Another: “Great post.” Another: “A very well written article about something which, despite being an amateur food blogger myself, does frustrate me to no end.” One blogger, after watching only a trailer, said Child “deserves more than being the other half to a Nora Ephron-penned romcom about a ‘lowly cubicle worker’ who blogs and struggles and cries and gets a book deal.” Oh, plus also, Child thought Powell was a mere stunt artist! A clown, really! What a gleeful thing, to be able to report.

Powell, you see, has made enemies of her obsessive online peers. What infuriated them most was a 2005 New York Times op-ed decrying the “insidious… snobbery of the organic movement” — an all-out assault on the Church of Alice Waters. The reaction was furious: “today’s stupidest piece of information;” “gratuitous… a coarse reductionist version of the… organic movement;” “[a] shockingly incoherent thing;” “ill-informed… erroneous.” Or this, after Powell panned raw foodism in the Times: “Julie Powell… needs to stop huffing dust from the crypt of Erma Bombeck.”

The prevailing “Slow Food” ideology of the culinary world is that the process of nourishment should be devolved — from massive centralized farms and feedlots and factories to local growers and aritsans and ultimately home gardens; from nutritionists and other food scientists to cultural and family traditions. And ultimately, we’re supposed to replace slapdash restaurants with careful preparation in small, individual kitchens.

The irony is that here we have in Julie Powell the ultimate manifestation of these principles, an amateur who dived fearlessly into home preparations, devolving not only food but, via her blog, media as well, taking both cooking and communication into her own hands. And yet the foodie priesthood seems on the verge of ex-communicating her over these very traits. Sorry, guys, but Julie Powell is literally the embodiment of an organic movement. Buy some Milk Duds (TM), splash some fake butter on your Popcorn, pop open a Diet Coke (TM) and enjoy the film.

Read the original post

John Travolta’s rep is knocking down reports that he is contemplating leaving Scientology. Of course, Scientology can be a tough habit to kick if you are, say, a closeted gay man who was forced to privately confess in auditing sessions.

On Saturday, the Daily Mail speculated at length that Travolta was on the verge of bolting the cult, citing his despodency over the death of his son Jett, whose autism reportedly went untreated on account of how Scientology doesn’t believe in autism. The first glimpse of daylight between Travolta, who has reportedly funded the church to the tune of millions, and Scientology came last month when details of a Bahamian police report emerged in which Travolta acknowledged that Jett “suffered from a seizure disorder and was autistic.”

But yesterday Travolta’s rep told E!Online that the Daily Mail report was “totally false”:

“There’s no change in the relationship between the Church of Scientology and John,” Paul Bloch told E! News. “He is a member and it’s as it was, now and forever.”

And in Scientology, forever means, like, forever.

But, as another E!Online story notes, Scientology has a way of holding sway over some celebrity adherents even after they’ve decided they don’t want to play anymore: The cult’s “auditing” process involves extracting confessions of all manner of “deviant” behavior, from financial misdeeds to sexual histories, and storing the data in the church’s archives. If a wavering member, say, didn’t want anybody to know that he’s had sex with men, the church would have a fairly good chance of convincing him not to, in Scientology parlance, “blow.”

Read the original here

On the Late Show With David Letterman last night, Katie Couric told the story of how Michael Jackson asked her out on a date in 2000 (two years after her husband died), using Rabbi Shmuley Boteach as a go-between.

Praise be to the lord and all that is holy, Couric turned Jackson down, probably because he was a pedophile and also because he had “weird tape on his nose.”

If the thought of Couric and Michael Jackson enjoying a romantic evening together isn’t nauseating enough for you, you need turn only to this clip of Larry King on Jimmy Kimmel’s show from two weeks ago, wherein King recounts his 1981 date with a young Couric in Washington, D.C., and actually utters the following words: “Once, I did Katie Couric.”

Again with all appropriate praise to the TV gods, King misspoke: He did not “do” Couric, who is 24 years younger than King, because “I thought we were going to go up to the apartment, Katie and I, but she said she had a roommate.” Naturally, Kimmel asked why King didn’t go for the threesome. Sweet dreams tonight, kids!

More here