Chace Crawford Is Awesome at Being SinglePlus, a Puerto Rican party for Carlos Beltran’s birthday and who the gayest man in the world is in our daily gossip roundup.
‘Gossip Girl’ Blinds Us With Color, EvilIn which Michelle Trachtenberg is the Marcia Cross of the Greatest Show of Our Time, returning from a mysterious absence to ruin everything and everyone.
See All the New ‘Gossip Girl’ OMFG AdsThe CW has released a whole set of steamy new advertisements for the Greatest Show of Our Time, and they want you to get bleeping excited about it.
Christiane Amanpour Is Kinkier Than We ThoughtDid Blair kick Kati off ‘Gossip Girl’? Does Gwyneth really eat? Is Diane Von Furstenberg really a dominatrix? (Christiane Amanpour says so!) The answers to these questions lie in today’s roundup of gossip.
Jay-Z and Mary J Blige Get Down to Their Own MusicHova and Mary J stop in at 1Oak, Julia Louis-Dreyfus talks trash, and J.Lo starves herself back to normal in our daily roundup of the best bits in New York’s gossip columns.
ink-stained wretches
Cindy Adams Regrets the ErrorA couple of weeks ago, back when Hookermania was in full effect, Cindy Adams wrote about how Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a.k.a. Spitzer sexer “Kristen,” was besties with a hooker called Natalia, whom New York once called the city’s No. 1 escort.
gossipmonger
Chace Crawford and Ed Westwick Are Just Roommates, Okay?!Gossip Girl star Ed Westwick says he and co-star Chace Crawford aren’t gay; they just live together. Oprah BFF Gayle King moved into a $7.1 million penthouse on East 57th Street that was purchased in name of Oprah’s dead dog, Sophie. A nude portrait of France’s current First Lady Carla Bruni taken back in 1993 will go up for sale at Christie’s next month.
‘Gossip Girl’ Gets an Actual New Yorker!Well, hello, Upper East Siders. It seems like Gossip Girl will be getting a real-live New Yorker this season. Brooklyn-born Michelle Trachtenberg has taken on the Gossip Girl role that Mischa Barton so unwisely passed over: that of Georgina Sparks, the bad girl “who rolls into Manhattan from rehab, shaking up and torturing the life of Serena van der Woodsen.” Trachtenberg has been working since practically the day she popped out of the womb: She’s been in everything from Clarissa Explains It All to Six Feet Under, but we (as well as probably the entire staff at Knopf) remember her as the girl who shook up and tortured Ann Packer’s The Dive From Clausen’s Pier when she played the main character in the Lifetime movie last year. But somehow, we’re looking forward to seeing her again, partly because a tortured Serena has got to be a more interesting Serena. Bring on the peer pressure!
Trachtenberg to Appear on Gossip [HR]
in other news
Mary-Kate Sets Her Sights on Chace?Okay, so we know everybody’s been skeptical of the much-touted love affair between Carrie Underwood and Chace Crawford (have they ever been seen together more than twice?). But now that there might be another girl in the picture, we’re a little bit worried. According to the blog Faded Youth (which must be reliable because it has pictures of Rumer Willis on it), Mary-Kate Olsen may have her eye on the sexy star of the Greatest Show of Our Time. She spent Wednesday evening chatting with him at the Waverly Inn and then met up with him later at Lit. It’s probably nothing, but it still doesn’t look good. Chace is all blue eyes and innocence and hairspray. If he starts dating M-K, suddenly he’s going to be unshaven and haggard, wandering the streets clutching grande latte in a paper cup and looking sweaty. And then he might do something awful like get stolen by Paris Hilton and move to L.A. to go to places like Hyde and start hanging out with Wilmer Valderamma. Or worse. Don’t do it, Chace! We promise we’ll start believing in your relationship with Carrie Underwood. Everyone, believe with us. Clap! For the love of God, start clapping!
Is MK Chasing Chace? [Faded Youth]
Earlier: The Fug Girls: Introducing the Good Boy
gossipmonger
For Cecilia Sarkozy, Revenge Is a Dish Best Served During the Venetian HourCecilia Sarkozy, the ex-wife of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, is set to get married to PR exec Richard Attias in New York on March 22. (Friends say it’s a “revenge” wedding.) Shelley Ross was so hated in her capacity as executive producer of CBS’ The Early Show that CBS News president Sean McManus didn’t even wait to find a replacement before firing her. Colin Farrell tried hitting on model Meghan Lowther at the Rose Bar, but found out the hard way that she has a boyfriend. The April issue of Elle features an interview given by Michelle Williams right after she broke up with Heath Ledger. New York real-estate giant Steven Fisher, best known for turning the aircraft carrier Intrepid into a museum, is trying to get his own TV show. Gossip Girl’s Conor Paolo wants, uh, Daniel Day-Lewis to join the cast.
party lines
Amy Sedaris Kills Goldfish With Only Her Breath. Allegedly.David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels is a movie all about the relationship between a teenager, his older babysitter, and her family. So, naturally, at the event celebrating the movie last night at MoMA, we asked the cast if they ever had the hots for nanny. “Like, all of them,” Green admitted immediately. “I tried [to hit on them, but] they wouldn’t have me! I was a dirty little kid.” As for his techniques? “Lookin’ up skirts and all that. I tried to [use a makeup mirror to look at her] when she was in the bathroom, and it didn’t work,” Green said. “She got pissed [and] sent me to bed with no supper. And beat me.” Connor Paolo, Gossip Girl’s Eric, is just 17 but remembered having an eye on his Iranian nanny’s young daughter. Amy Sedaris, however, had a view from the opposite side. She was always the babysitter. She remembered with a shudder that awkward ride home with the dads, who inevitably had “booze on their breath,” driving you a distance you could walk. And then! “This one kid once accused me of killing his goldfish. I was leaning over it breathing, and he told his parents I killed it, so they never had me back,” Sedaris griped. “I will never let it go!” Man, we wish Amy Sedaris had been our babysitter. Imagine the insanity. And the cupcakes! —Jocelyn Guest
Related: Amy Sedaris Kills Roaches With Her Bare Hands
gossipmonger
‘Page Six’ Manages to Not Revel in Sarah Jessica Parker’s Failure Sarah Jessica Parker is not confident that her unreleased movie, Spinning Into Butter, will ever see the light of day. Barack Obama and his wife are slated to attend the opening of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Oprah on Thursday. Cosmetics heir Olivia Chantecaille got engaged to banker boyfriend Ren Grady. Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively took a bunch of friends shopping to Armani Exchange on Fifth Avenue. Shake Shack is opening a location on the Upper West Side! Sting, Diddy, and Josh Hartnett all hung out at Half Nelson producer Charlie Corwin’s birthday at Socialista, which is now back open after the hepatitis scare. Michael Musto will appear on the cover of The Village Voice spoofing this magazine’s Lindsay Lohan shoot.
in other news
Gossip Girl: ‘New Yorker’–ApprovedIn what could be the biggest literary catfight since Lillian Hellman versus Mary McCarthy, The New Yorker’s Janet Malcolm has taken on New Yorker television critic Nancy Franklin, right there in the very pages of the magazine. The subject of their contretemps is a text we can all agree is one of extreme literary consequence: The Gossip Girl series.
You may remember that back in November, when Franklin reviewed the Greatest Show of Our Time in The New Yorker, she callously dismissed the original text, as crafted by Nightingale graduate author Cecily von Ziegesar. “I’ve been told that some kids in Manhattan’s private-school population resent the way they’ve been depicted in the show,” she wrote at the time, adding parenthetically, and cattily, ‘Or maybe they just want to distance themselves from a Nightingale graduate who can write a paragraph like this: “There was a box of orange Tic Tacs in her pocket with only one Tic Tac left. Serena fished the Tic Tac out and put it on her tongue, but she was so worried about her future, she could barely taste it.’”
Now, Janet Malcolm has revisited the series, and her review carries none of Franklin’s snideness. In fact, quite the opposite. The prose, she declares, is Nabokovian. The character of Nate “is a kind of Vronsky manqué.” Von Ziegesar’s “designated reader is an adolescent girl, but the reader she seems to have firmly in mind as she writes is a literate, even literary, adult.”
“Only someone very hard-hearted wouldn’t laugh” at the situations the characters find themselves in, she writes. “The way von Ziegesar implicates us in her empathic examination of youth’s callousness is the Waughish achievement of these strange, complicated books.”
Then, like any sharp-tongued lady of letters, she smoothes things over with her colleague, only to plunge the knife straight into her back.
in other news
The Internet Is Messing With Us Over ‘Gossip Girl,’ and We Do. Not. Like.
Oh, hateful, rumormongering Internet. We go out for like an hour, and when we get back, the world has been turned upside-down. Okay. In case you were out having a boozy Friday-afternoon lunch, here is what happened: First Gawker reported that Mischa Barton was offered a part on Gossip Girl, the Greatest Show of Our Time. Then TV Guide, your trusted source for television news, was like, it’s absolutely 100 percent true, and Mischa will be the role of “Georgina Sparks, a scheme queen who brings Serena’s checkered past screaming into her present,” which is pretty much awesome as well as, let’s face it, the perfect and possibly only role for Mischa Barton, who was recently arrested for DUI and marijuana possession. But then! Us Weekly got all up in it and decreed Mischa won’t be playing Georgina Sparks. Her agent turned down the role, they said, because apparently Keds ads are way more important to Mischa than the Greatest Show of Our Time, and who would date the gross boys if she was busy working?
TV Guide is checking its sources against this new information, but we trust Us implicitly, since they know everything. The only question in our minds is this: Who will be Gossip Girl’s Valerie Malone? Our suggestions, after the jump.
in other news
Leighton Meester Records Album; We DieForget Heidi Montag. Ignore Scarlett Johansson. Don’t even think even think about Lindsay Lohan. Our new favorite starlet who is absurdly recording a pop album is Leighton Meester, a.k.a. Blair from the Greatest Show of Our Time. That’s right. The Gossip Girl star told some Canadian press outlet that she will be “be finishing it within the next couple months, hopefully.” Yessssss. Her music, they say, is “an electronic-rock hybrid that sounds like Gwen Stefani and MIA.” We have no idea what that means, but we’re guessing it doesn’t involve hair bows and white tights, which makes this a huge departure from her previous oeuvre. Above, we dug up a clip from YouTube of Blair singing and weakly pretending to play the guitar, from an old movie called Drive Thru. Click above to view. It seems like she can actually sort of sing, in that wailing-talking Tia Carrerra–from–Wayne’s World kind of way. What great news. This is exactly how she’s going to win back her social supremacy at Constance Billard. Jenny’s going to have to release her sex tape extra early to fight back.
‘Gossip Girl’ star Leighton Meester talks new album [CTV.ca]
Update: Just after we posted our item, usweekly.com put up a video of Blair talking about the show and her album. Click after the jump to watch!
in other news
Chace Crawford: Founder of the Forelock Movement?Remember when we wondered aloud whether the Times was trying to imply that there is something less than masculine about Gossip Girl star Chace Crawford Nate Archibald? Well, apparently he heard us, because when he went out on the town to do a similar article with Canada’s National Post, he was careful to choose a bottle of Steam Whistle, a local brew. “This is a great beer,” he told reporter Shinan Govani, who dutifully OMG-ed. “I love Canada.” Naaaaate, don’t change who you are because of the pressures of the media! We love you just the way you are, you shrimp-and-avocado-salad eater, you. In fact, one of the things we love about you is your wispy haircut. Unlike Zac Efron’s well-conditioned, floppy version, Nate’s bangs have a dried-out, Aquanetted look that surely doesn’t require obnoxious, ponylike head flicks to handle. Govani agrees with us, declaring in the National Post story that Crawford is the icon of the latest male-bangs movement. He says that he’s given masculine dudes everywhere the confidence to get new, more fashion-forward dos. Now that’s more like it. Let’s all get behind Nate’s heterosexuality, huh? Govani even has a new nickname for Nate: Mr. Man-Bangs! Hey, wait
Meet Mr. Man-Bangs [National Post]
Earlier: Chace Crawford Sips Merlot, Is Reluctant to Meet Kate Hudson
in other news
UES Forever! Real Life Gossip Girls Are Moving Back UptownLike our friend Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl, many true-blue-blooded Upper East Siders feel like while it’s okay to come downtown on a Saturday night and barf in the streets, it is no place to live. Just in case you thought that was an unfair stereotype, the Observer rounded up a few Upper East Side girls and got them to fulfill it. “At a certain point, being downtown just loses its appeal,” Abigail Cusick, who moved straight back to the UES after graduating from Skidmore, tells the pink paper. Cusick says lots of her friends have moved back uptown after getting Soho, the Lower East Side, or Chelsea “out of their system.” Downtown is just too icky. “You wake up and it’s like waking up in the apartment you partied in the night before.” Uptown, her existence is idyllic, mostly because she can raid her parents’ liquor cabinet and play with their dog, then have someone else clean up its shit. “The housekeeper comes over to clean for me, I can stop by and pick up a bottle of wine; I get to play with the dog, then return it,” she says. “It’s nice.” We bet! You know what’s not nice though? 86th Street. Cusick can’t believe they’re building condos up there. “I think it’s laughable,” she says. “I mean, it’s still 86th Street. It’s where classes collide.” Ew! Everyone knows you never want to rub up against classes.
The Local: More Kids Dating SoHo, Marrying Upper East Side [NYO]
Related: ‘Gossip Girl’: Too Beautiful for This World
in other news
Does Blair Waldorf Have a Wee(d) Problem?On any day, we love a good descent into debauchery on the part of a rising starlet. But today’s news is better than most, because this time, the lovely young lady losing her marbles is none other than Daily Intel favorite Blair Waldorf! (Some people know her as Leighton Meester, but, like Brooke Shields on that episode of Friends where she thinks Joey is really Dr. Drake Ramoray, we sometimes have trouble breaking the fourth wall.) And just in time for the show’s return to the air. Turns out that Bad News Blair was wandering around a party at Avalon on Sunday night “surrounded by a cloud of funny-smelling smoke.” That’s tabloid code for “she was smoking a fat doobie,” people. According to “Page Six,” at one point, a fellow partygoer lifted her (and her dress) up, and people could see her panties! We’d assume someone made a mistake (after all, who gets stoned before they go to a big party where celebrities are going to be? Hello, talk about paranoia central), but we remember all too well when Radar caught the actress smoking weed at GoldBar in November. Even then, she was hogging the drugs passed around by her friends. Man, bulimia and a marijuana problem? The rest of the Gossip Girl season is going to be really confusing, junk-food wise.
Gossip-Maker [NYP]
Earlier: Blair Bogarts the Weed, ‘Gossip Girl’ Will Return Before the Summer
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‘Gossip Girl’ Will Return Before the Summer!If you’re wondering what’s going to happen now that the strike is over, head over to Vulture’s Poststrike Encyclopedia. They have a complete roster of what shows are coming back and when and how. And as far as we’re concerned, the best news is that Gossip Girl will be back to complete its season before the summer! They still have 9 of their 22 planned episodes to go. It will be back in April and might complete all the rest of the hour-long shows going into the summer. Guess what that means? Months more coverage of the Greatest Show of Our Time! And up to nine more exhaustive episode recaps! That’s okay, take a minute to revel in your own joy. We’d write more, but we think we just blacked out.
Vulture’s Poststrike Encyclopedia: When Will My Show Be Back? [Vulture]
in other news
Chace Crawford Sips Merlot, Is Reluctant to Meet Kate HudsonAs you can imagine, we were delighted this weekend to see that the Times had done an “A Night Out With” column with Nate Archibald! And he was so Nate-y in it! He bumbled around, he was adorable, and he was a little insecure. Just like he is on TV in the Greatest Show of Our Time. But as we read the article a fifth time, we thought we noticed an undertone that we didn’t much like in Katie Thomas’s choice of descriptions. See if you note what we’re talking about (we’ve bolded the key bits):
• “After a 15-minute drive, during which he fiddled with the car’s controls and got a little lost, Mr. Crawford pulled up to a nine-acre estate.”
• “In the driveway, he fielded questions from a television reporter, who asked about his relationship with Carrie Underwood, an American Idol winner. ‘You’re under the assumption that we’re dating now,’ Mr. Crawford said with a laugh.” [Eds.: OMG! CALL JESSICA! OR CHRIS!]
in other news
OMG! The Boys of ‘Gossip Girl’ All Have Chest Hair!It turns out that we aren’t the only people in the world who uncomfortably fetishize the cast of Gossip Girl. The gays do it, too! (Okay, to be fair, Daily Intel editor Chris is one, and Jessica is a big ol’ ‘mo ho herself.) Out Magazine has a delicious photo shoot of the boys “roughhousing” around in its March fashion issue, and we couldn’t be more delighted with the results. Also, they provide telling insight into why their home demographic is so into the show:
The thought of returning to high school is a harrowing one for most gay men, but being able to look at adolescence through a lens that idealizes everyone as insanely wealthy, impossibly gorgeous, and improbably well-spoken is like porn.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Okay, we have, but it took us thousands and thousands of words to do it. Dan Penn Badgley talks a bit to the mag about whether or not he would be comfortable going gay for the show. “It would be an interesting thing to do,” he says. “It could bring in a whole different demographic.” If you’re talking about the kind of demographic who lusts after teenage boys discovering their sexuality, Penn, we’re pretty sure you’ve already got that one sewed up.
in other news
Potential ‘Gossip Girl’ Fashion Show Thwarted by Super BowlNow, we’re not too familiar with menswear designer Antonio Azzuolo. According to the Times’ Moment blog, he’s worked at Hermès and Ralph Lauren. And this Fashion Week, he showed a line of extremely preppy suits, coats, and accessories under his a.a. label. So why do we here at Daily Intel care? Because according to the Moment, Azzuolo had a very unique source of inspiration. Not something pretentious and normal like, say, “German Expressionism” or “The films of the 1930s.” No, no, no. His inspiration was Gossip Girl! Bouncy Times blogger Jonathan S. Paul had the following conversation with the designer:
Paul: Do you watch Gossip Girl?
Azzuolo: Oh yes — we went for that kind of character. Very Upper East Side. We were going to get the guys from the show to model but two of them were at the Super Bowl today so it fell though.
OMG, Nate and Chuck and Dan in a fashion show?? We would die a thousand deaths of joy. What an unfair world it is in which something as glorious as last night’s game cannot coexist with something as stupendous as an all–Gossip Girl fashion show. We’re sure we’re not alone in caring about both. Okay, maybe we are.
Chuck Bass in a.a. [The Moment/NYT]
party lines
Serena Thinks Gossip Girl Is Chuck!Since the writers’ strike has been keeping us from passing judgment on what’s real and fake on Gossip Girl, we took the debate to the street at last night’s celebration for the New Old Navy. The minute we saw Chace Crawford and Blake Lively, we of course asked them whether they read our awkwardly obsessive coverage. Both seemed politely interested (though previously unaware) of our weekly recaps. “Oh my goodness! I’m flattered!” laughed Lively, while Crawford asked us to show it to him on the red carpet, and told us that even though he “isn’t a big Internet blogger,” he’ll check it out. OMG! Did you hear that guys? They’re such liars. Even we Google ourselves and check to at least page three, and we’re not famous. But anyway, we know it’s standard stalkee procedure to pretend your stalker has no effect on your life. While talking blogs, we also dug into the carefully guarded identity of Gossip Girl herself. Lively laughed off the rumors of it being Eric, saying “I personally think it’s Chuck,” and real-life Gossip Girl narrator Kristen Bell took the more cerebral route: “She’s just that eminent being in the back of your head, the little devil on your shoulder all the time.” It felt like a good high-school gab session when Lively bragged to us about how she’s the best Guitar Hero player in the cast (hello! Just like on episode eight!) and her Crumbs cupcake routine (“I cut them into fours and love the peanut-butter and red-velvet ones”.) But as it turns out, we aren’t the only ones feeling that Serena and Nate are Just Like Us: “While we were on set, these very Upper East Side–ish kids came up to me and said, ‘We are, like, you guys, in real life.’ But I was like ‘I am so sorry to hear that, I would not wish that upon anybody, our lives of debauchery and scandal.’” Wish it upon us, Chace. Wish it upon us every Wednesday night, please! —Amy Preiser
Hear more from the New Old Navy Party, with quotes and pictures of Heatherette, Kirsten Bell, and Sophia Bush!
And we know you need more Gossip Girl, so just get it over with and click here.
intel
The Night We Shared a Moment With ‘The Captain’
We had just arrived at Morandi last night when a pair of older, Sopranos-looking gentlemen sitting at the end of the bar got into a spat with some other patrons and stomped out. “You wanna start something with me?” the one with a pompadour snarled. “C’mon, Paulie, let’s get outta here,” his friend said, and they slammed their glasses down and stomped out. “Weird,” our friend said, as we settled into their seats. “Do you think Keith McNally paid those guys to be here, like Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding?” But we were too distracted to ponder this possibility, because right then, at the other end of the bar, directly in our line of vision, was a face that over the past five months and five days we had come to know, and indeed, to love. “Look,” we whispered to our friend. “It’s The Captain.”
in other news
Gossip Girl Revealed?Today’s Daily News gossip columnist has a very, very upsetting Gossip Girl item. First, he reports that there are tensions on the set between Blair and Serena (Leighton Meister and Blake Lively, to those of you who insist upon dealing with this show in a world of reality). “Chace Crawford tends to stick close to Leighton, while Penn Badgley hangs on- and off-screen with Blake,” a source tells the saucy Aussie. “The crew will snag Blake for a scene just moments before it is shot so they can avoid any awkwardness with Leighton.” Not that a catfight between the show’s two female stars surprises us, but, come on, isn’t it a little clichéd? That’s not all Widdicombe has for us, though. He claims he knows the identity of Gossip Girl herself, the snarky Upper East Sider who narrates the show (using the voice of Kristin Bell). We’d tell you to stop reading right now in order to avoid spoiling your fun, but we find the candidate too unbelievable to be true. According to an on-set source, Gossip Girl is none other than Eric van der Woodsen!
intel
‘Gossip Girl’: Too Beautiful for This World
Last night — the night we will forever remember as the first Wednesday night after the first season of Gossip Girl, the best show of our time, came to its untimely, tragic end — we stepped out of the office and immediately felt something missing. We felt tingly and strange, like an amputee missing a limb. Well, maybe not quite like an amputee missing a limb. We looked at our hands — they were shaking. Our foreheads — boiling. We felt faint, empty, and there was only one way to fill the void inside of us. We hastened to our DVR. “We’ll just watch one,” we said to ourselves. “Just one.” Hours later we came to, as if from a dream. We were sticky and wearing four to six striped scarves. It was then we realized: We had gone on a full-on Gossip Girl binge. But! We managed to record some of our favorite moments, which we present to you in the above montage. It’s not all of our favorite moments — our bastard DVR took it upon itself to delete the first half of the season — but that’s probably a good thing. If we had watched the full season in our fugue state, it might have been dangerous. Click the image to watch.
Earlier: The Progression of Intel’s Obsession With Gossip Girl
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More ‘Gossip Girl’ Locations Explained!Apparently we are not the only people feeling withdrawal from the Greatest Show of Our Time. Today Gridskipper.com unveils its “Gossip Girl Guide to New York.” In it, they run through several things we know (the club “Victrola” was actually the Box; Chuck tried ply Serena for sex with a grilled cheese from Gilt), but it also explains a few things we didn’t know. For example:
• Rufus Humphrey’s art showroom is really the Front Room Gallery on Roebling Street in Williamsburg.
• Vanessa works at Communitea in Long Island City (come on, we might believe that Blair & Co. could find Brooklyn, but this is a bit of a stretch).
• The Eleanor Waldorf Boutique is in fact Rubin Chappelle in the meatpacking district.
• In the pilot, Blair and Nate have dinner at Geisha.
• The “Kiss on the Lips” Party is actually at the Foundry in Long Island City.
Back in December, the producers of Gossip Girl told us much of the filming goes on in Long Island City, so the locations there should come as no surprise. But as time goes by, we can only hope the rest of the great riddles of Gossip Girl are explained. You know, so we can be prepared for next fall when the show comes back from boarding school unexpected, and we fall in love all over again.
The ‘Gossip Girl’ Guide to New York [Gridskipper]
Need more Gossip Girl in your day? Click here for all of our previous dish and episode recaps.
intel
So, Wait, Was ‘Gossip Girl’ Realistic or Not?Can you believe it’s really over? Like, you won’t be getting any more Gossip Girl until fall 2008? Why can’t we get this for the next ten months instead of the goddamned election? It would prove the same amount of highs and lows, except without all of the unflattering self-judgment. Lucky for you, we’re still reeling with withdrawal. So to satisfy your (and our) cravings, we’ve gone back through all of our obsessed recaps and broken things down character-by-character. Below, witness our Electoral College–inspired evaluation of the reality and fake-ality of Gossip Girl via its most important characters.
New York: Don’t tease. Only five years after Sarah Jessica Parker said that Manhattan was the fifth lady on Sex and the City, Gossip Girl creator Josh Schwartz explained that New York was the, um, twelfth character on his new show. As far as roles on Gossip Girl go, New York’s was by far the most violated. Brooklyn geography was mauled like a blonde’s left boob on prom night. The Upper East Side’s dimensions were exaggerated like a jock’s staying power the morning after prom night. And the meatpacking district was pushed around like the returns manager who spotted those mysterious stains at a Mr. Tux the day after the morning after prom night. But through it all, the city was honored with luxurious locations shots, glamorous interiors, and ambitious editing that brought Dumbo, Yorkville, and Williamsburg within arm’s reach. Sure, there was that whole Brooklyn real-estate problem. But the producers clearly did their best with Manhattan (arranging shoots at The Box and Marquee? Touché!) , and it was all done with love. Reality Index: 60%.
Guess We Know What Serena Was Doing in ‘Europe’ This SummerAs you may imagine, we are eagerly looking forward to the Gossip Girl season finale tomorrow night. You might even say that we are pregnant with anticipation. Even though we know “Episode 17: A Thin Line Between Chuck and Nate” is not the finale as God and Josh Schwartz intended, that the show is only actually ending now because some stupid writers decided they needed to have health insurance or whatever, we’ve got our white tights and headbands all laid out for the blessed event because we’re sure the Best Show of Our Time will go out with a bang. And now, our friends over at Radar have got us whipped into even more of a frenzy with an excellent item about one of the Gossip Girl players. As you may know, we prefer not to acknowledge anything that suggests the people on the show are actors and actresses, because the characters are real to us and we think everyone should fucking respect that. So we’ll put it this way: Which prominent Upper East Side princess once had a much more prominent honker? Oh, wait, duh, you can tell from the photos above. This sheds new light on what Serena was doing in “Europe” over the summer. Will Blair have to go “away” to have Chuck-Nate Jr.?
Gossip Girl Moves Out of Idol’s Way [TV Guide]
Gossip Girl Serena’s Van der Newnosen [Radar]
We’re Back!Welcome back to us, that is. Like many of you, we spent most of the last ten days or so in the isolation tank that is our homes, eating butter and sugar by the fistful, drinking, and willfully ignoring the outside world; the only newspaper headline that passed in front of our bleary eyes was one that said, “War Hero Harry Bailey Returns to Bedford Falls.” We were happy, and all was right with the world. That is, until this morning, when we were cruelly deposited back into the cold, cookie-less world we lived in before, blinking, five pounds fatter, and approximately ten times stupider. We thought some of you might be in the same position, so we’ve quickly pulled together a list of what we think might have happened last week while we were napping.
•Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup all got foreign money in their Christmas stockings.
•Serena and Dan started dating in real life, sending our Gossip Girl Reality Index numbers flying off the charts.
•Benazir Bhutto was killed.
intel
A Very ‘Gossip Girl’ ChristmasOur mind-shatteringly detailed guide to what in this week’s episode of Gossip Girl could pass for real-life New York experience, what seemed kinda fake, and what really put the “Jesus Christ” back in our Christmas.
intel
Chace Crawford’s Stetson Cologne Auditions?We are under strict orders from our boss to keep our Gossip Girl posts down to just one a day, but sometimes life doesn’t go your way. Like today, for example. A tipster sent us the link to a cache of sixteen (possibly fake, definitely titillating) glamour-shot portraits of a young Chace Crawford. Are they early head shots? Are they cut-and-paste jobs like the ones of Daniel Radcliffe’s giant manballs that were racing around the Internet earlier this year? Or are they actually just test photos from Ian Somerhalder’s brief “Dirty Blond” experiment? We’re not sure. But something about the football-and-board-shorts photo smacks of full-on, Abercrombie-aspiring, local-mall-cattle-call-attending reality. After the jump, a couple more images that are sure to tickle your funny Nate Archibald bone. In the comments, let us know what you think. Are they real? Or are they just Chase’s head airbrushed onto Ian Thorpe’s (pre-carb-bloated) body?