Thursday, November 30, 2006

Back to '06

♥ Rory ♥

You have been cordially invited to my Back to '06 party. This is VERY early notice. It doesn't take place until 2010. I got the idea from an episode of Gilmore Girls where Rory throws a "Back to '02" party in her senior year at Yale. Only 4 more years to go - better keep track of what's hot now.

Here's my starter list:

What's hot in '06

Hot Songs:
Sexy Back - London Bridge - I Write Sins Not Tragedies - Hips Don't Lie - S.O.S. - Irreplaceable

Hot Bands:
Panic! at the Disco - Fall Out Boy - My Chemical Romance

Hottest Movies:
Pirates of the Caribbean 2 - Borat

Hot TV Shows:
Grey's Anatomy - Ugly Betty - Dancing With the Stars

Hot Threads:
"Team" shirts - Return of the 80s - leggings - skulls & crossbones - ribcage shirts

Fairytale Wedding:
Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes

Hottest Comebacks:
Nick Lachey - Jay-Z

Biggest Letdown:
Jessica Simpson's A Public Affair

Most Overexposed Celebs:
TomKat - Britney Spears & Kevin Federline - Paris Hilton - Lindsay Lohan - Mario Lopez - Mel Gibson

Most Shocking Breakup:
Reese Witherspoon & Ryan Philippe

Skankiest Wedding:
Pam Anderson & Kid Rock

Most Likely to Have a DUI by the Time it's 2010:
Aaron Cater - Paris Hilton

A-Listers Getting Caught With Pants Not There

(Nov. 28) — Not so long ago, when a society woman flashed a hint of leg from beneath her petticoat, onlookers gasped.

Today, when Britney Spears displays her private parts to the paparazzi, the world points and laughs.

Spears is the latest star to give people a glimpse of what's usually covered up, a trend that asks the question: What value, if any, does culture place on modesty today?

On Nov. 22, cameras caught Spears, the recently separated pop star and mother of two, in a leopard-print minidress so short it revealed her underwear.

Two days later, Spears was photographed getting out of a car in a hiked-up miniskirt. This time, her underwear was nowhere to be found.

According to celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, Spears' up-skirt shots are no mistake -- they're a classic cry for attention.

"She wants the picture taken. She wants the publicity. She wants people talking about her," Hilton said of Spears. "That's what people love to see more than anything. Why do you think celebrity sex tapes sell so well?"

From Private Parts to Puking

The photos, which spread virally across the Internet, gained Spears entry to a club ruled by repeat flashers Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. Cameras have caught Lohan panty-less four times over the last two months.

"You'd think she'd either wear pants or panties, or be more careful about how she exits a car," blogger Hilton said. "Four times. That's no accident. That's deliberate."

The rash of celebrities flashing their nether regions worries Peter Post, director of the Emily Post Institute of etiquette and manners.

"My concern is the impressionability of young people," he said. "I think that some young people are going to say, 'Wow, if Britney Spears and Paris Hilton can do that, I wonder if I can do that.'"

Post points out that even if celebrity flashers are putting themselves in compromising situations on purpose, it's troubling that they have to bare so much to get a little media attention.

"What's scary is that we're having to go a little bit further and be a little more outrageous in order to be talked about," he said.

And from here, said Hilton, there's nowhere to go but downhill.

"I think we're going to start seeing celebrities puking or urinating or doing really crazy outlandish things to try to top each other. I would like to see that," he said, explaining that his blog's traffic would go through the roof.

Those Who Keep Their Private Parts Private Will Prevail

Despite the prospect of celebrities competing to see who can reveal the most skin -- or worse, if Hilton's prediction is correct -- modesty is by no means a lost cause in Hollywood or in the general society.

"I think some people are still modest and respectful. There's a reason we've never seen Jessica Simpson 's bits and pieces," Hilton said. "Amanda Bynes, Scarlett Johansson. There are girls who keep their private lives private and their private parts private," he said.

Post cited the 1960s and '70s bra-burning movement as an example of society pushing the envelope and ultimately deciding to push back, embracing modesty over the alternative.

"Bras went out for a while 30 years ago, but you don't see that now. There's a case of testing a line and deciding that maybe we don't want to go that far," he said.

For miniskirted starlets, Post offered tips on exiting a car with grace.

"As you get out, keep your legs together rather than apart. If you have a sweater, a scarf, a shawl or a coat, lay it across your legs as you get out," he said.

Whether Spears follows his advice or not, Post doesn't think she or her panty-less friends will be the death of modesty.

"There will always be celebrities who are pushing the envelope, but I think we'll still value a sense of modesty in the future," he said. "I doubt if we're going to be seeing women walking around without tops or bottoms on at all."

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Pretty on the Inside


DIRTY BLONDE

The Diaries of Courtney Love.

Edited by Ava Stander.

Illustrated. 292 pp.

Faber & Faber. $35.

There was a moment -- let's say 1989, since that's when I discovered her -- when Courtney Love seemed like the solution to every girl's problems. A brazenly feminist punk rocker with big hips and a sloppy grin, she was the first female celebrity in a long time who wasn't embarrassed to take up space.

Sure, they called her Kurt Cobain's Yoko. And she certainly got into a lot of fights. But Love had a messy charisma and a style -- those ripped babydoll dresses and smeared makeup -- that felt like a satire of sexiness. Her 1994 album ''Live Through This'' was the first rock I'd ever heard that really focused on women, with lyrics about breast-feeding and rape and competition, but done with humor and a nutsy aggression rare among female performers. I listened to it about 50 times.

Love, now 42, had a colorful bio, too, like a punk Pippi Longstocking. A foster kid with a trust fund, a bratty sometimes-stripper who bounced between schools and juvenile detention halls, Love traveled the world after being emancipated at 16 by her therapist mom, and then popped up in the Seattle grunge scene. Her role models were women like Frances Farmer and Anne Sexton -- crazy artists too pure to live -- but Courtney Love felt more accessible, like a friendly, shaggy golden retriever throwing her paws up on the public's chest.

Then all the terrible stuff happened. A Vanity Fair profile accused Love of using heroin while pregnant; the courts got involved. In 1994, Kurt Cobain killed himself, leaving behind their daughter, Frances Bean, who was not quite 2. In the aftermath, Cobain's widow seemed to swell to three times her own iconic size. She stood in front of a crowd of grieving Nirvana fans, furiously deconstructing his suicide note. Her emotional response seemed mythic and awesome -- and then, as time passed, more unstable, more unsettling. What kind of mother was she? There were the drugs. There was the grandiosity. There were the Hollywood friendships, the fights over Nirvana money, her remark about making an overdose ''fun'' for her daughter. There was the plastic surgery that melted her into the starlet she'd once parodied. She seemed less to be selling out than having a fire sale.

Once in a while, she would have a comeback. But with each tabloid incident she emerged less of a superhero, more cartoonish than larger than life. Now, students of Courtney have an updated textbook and a chance to come back to her lunatic fold: ''Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love,'' a scrapbook of Courtneyana and the precursor to her latest album, ''How Dirty Girls Get Clean,'' scheduled for release this spring. It's the sort of thing that generally appears only when a person is dead, a kind of companion volume to Kurt Cobain's lost-boy diaries, published in 2002. We get scribbled rants and lyrics, set lists, posters -- everything from a Mickey Mouse Fan Club rejection note to an e-mail exchange with Lindsay Lohan. Self-indulgent isn't a strong enough word. And Love herself seems to know this. A meta-scribble reads: ''No I do not want my diaries published. I want my poetry & lyrics published. I don't want my gobblegook nonsense 'Romantic' cathartic unstable keening published.''

Nontheless, here it is: all that cathartic keening, curated for your coffee table. And the truth is, a lot of it is very affecting. For anyone as interested in Courtney Love as Courtney herself is, this book presents a classic showbiz story: the smart, miserable rebel passed from school to school, writing lousy poetry and developing fantasies of world domination through rock 'n' roll. At 13, she scrawls a painful confession in red crayon about her relationship with her mother: ''When I get around her I get so nervous and awkward and timid and weak and I always find myself trying to prove to her that I can make friends and be popular even though she lives on the other side of the world.'' There's a scribbled heart and the note: ''I think I'll be a Rockstar. Get an Oscar too and be best friends with Elton John.''

Love never stops trying for these two things: rock-star magnificence and famous friends. As an adolescent autodidact, she's obsessed with punk and female glamour and enamored of Hollywood starlets like Pola Negri and Jean Harlow. She is tireless in her study of success, constantly drawing up motivational lists. There's a 1991 set of goals: ''achieve L.A. visibility,'' ''125 toned pounds,'' ''write 3-4 new songs''; a list of ''things that interest me'' (Nazis, teapots, true love); things she hates (drugs, being pregnant, Sassy magazine), and things she loves (drugs, Yoko Ono, Gus Van Sant). An egotist yes, but Courtney Love is an insightful student of herself. ''I have mojo, but I don't have confidence,'' she worries in one note. If as she achieves fame, her scribbles become more grandiose, at least her heart is in the right place, as with her fevered pledge to help ''the ugly the disavowed the disowned the terminal'' -- to ''never again scapegoat anyone'' now that she is ''one of the pretty ones.'' (Underneath, a red ink scribble adds, ''man I most want to sleep with; W. B. Yeats.'')

A streak of overcompensating insecurity runs through the book, as Love obsesses about her own mythical potential: Is she pretty? Original? Is she better than skinnier, more popular girls? Do famous people like her? Love reproduces a note from Marc Jacobs, who thanks her for an unnamed thoughtful gift and promises to keep it private. And then there's that exchange with Lindsay Lohan, who commiserates about leeches she calls ''sickofans'' -- a brilliant pun or a bizarre typo? Hard to say.

Kurt appears only halfway through the book, in touching snapshots with baby Frances Bean. But perhaps the saddest, funniest artifact is an early page labeled ''Things to teach my children (I will have four children).'' Scrawling and amending as she goes, Love sets down her wisdom: ''be caustic (dry),'' ''be humble'' and ''Don't fight. If you do, win. If you lose I'll fight for you.'' But most of her advice seems to be addressed to her own inner child. ''Never let anyone see you be self promoting.'' ''Be glamarous, get your highlights done every 16 days,'' ''Be honest. Pay Even the littlest things Back. Never borrow any money.'' ''Earn your own fame.'' ''Alchohol and cigarettes are weaknesses. Disgusting ones.'' ''You will be very spoilt,'' she concludes. ''Don't abuse it.''

I recently saw a young woman reading ''Dirty Blonde'' on the subway. She loved Love, she said; she was even in a Hole cover band. The slot Courtney Love filled nearly 20 years ago -- the big-mouth punk lunatic feminist rocker, the bad girl as role model -- is still open. But it's nice to know the original candidate hasn't stopped auditioning.

Laughs

>>Man comes home , finds his wife with his friend in bed . He
>>shoots his friend and kills him.
>>Wife says "If you behave like this, you will lose ALL your friends"
>>*******************************************
>>
>>A small Boy wrote to Santa Claus," send me a brother"
>>Santa wrote back," SEND ME YOUR MOTHER"
>>****************************************
>>
>>Husband asks , "Do u know the meaning of WIFE??
>>Without Information Fighting Everytime
>>Wife replies," No, It means , With Idiot For Ever !!!"
>>*****************************************
>>
>>What's the difference between stress, tension and panic?
>>Stress is when wife is pregnant,
>>Tension is when girlfriend is pregnant,
>>and Panic is when both are pregnant.
>>****************************************
>>
>>Teacher: Do you know the importance of a period?
>>Kid: Yeah, once my sister said she has missed one, my mom
>>fainted, dad got a heart attack & our driver ran away.
>>****************************************************************
>>
>>A women asks man who is traveling with six children, "Are all
>>these kids yours??"
>>The man replies, " No, I work in a condom factory and these are
>>customer complaints".
>>****************************************************************
>>
>>A young boy asks his Dad, "What is the difference between
>>confident and confidential.
>>Dad says, "You are my son, I'm confident about that. Your friend
>>over there, is also my son, that's confidential!"

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A Poisoned Spy

Despite the utter lack of evidence about who poisoned Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy who died last week in a London hospital, it was hardly surprising that suspicion fell immediately on the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin. Mr. Litvinenko was a defector with many enemies in Russia, official and otherwise, and Mr. Putin’s record on justice and human rights has left many people prepared to believe the worst.

It did not help that the Kremlin quickly went on the defensive. Government spokesmen declared that any suggestion of Kremlin complicity was “sheer nonsense” and that the Soviet and Russian intelligence services hadn’t assassinated anyone since 1959. Talk about sheer nonsense.

How much better it would have been had Mr. Putin’s people said something like, “Let us help find out who did this outrageous thing!” That’s also what Mr. Putin might have said when Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative reporter, was murdered or when all the other reformers were killed.

Words like that might not end the violence. The struggle for wealth and power in Russia is out of control. Mr. Litvinenko also certainly had a long list of highly motivated enemies. He was a defector who claimed he had been ordered to kill the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He wrote a book alleging that his fellow Russian agents had organized a lethal bombing and accused Chechen terrorists. At the time he was poisoned, he was said to be looking into the death of Ms. Politkovskaya.

But the real problem is that Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. agent himself, has given no indication that he is dismayed by the political killings, or that he is doing much to stop them. He seems mainly concerned with deflecting blame.

Jay-Z in Brooklyn, Unblemished by False Modesty


♠ Jay-Z ‡

“Jay-Z Has Sold Out.” That was the message taped to box office windows at the Howard Gilman Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Saturday night. As a statement of fact, this was plain and clear. But it didn’t take much interpretive effort to catch an unintended double meaning in the phrase.

Figuring out what a Jay-Z sellout would entail is a trickier business. He’s the high-rolling president of Def Jam Recordings, but also, he insists, still a hustler at his core. He treated his concert as a Brooklyn homecoming, and a no-nonsense crowd reinforced the feeling. So did the setup, which had him backed only by a D.J., Green Lantern, and a lyrical partner, Memphis Bleek, along with basic stage lighting and a video screen.

But before the first of many roof-raising shout-outs to the borough of his origin, Jay-Z opened with the title track from his new album, “Kingdom Come” (Roc-a-Fella/Island Def Jam). The song is a marvel of messianic conviction — “Not only N.Y.C., I’m hip-hop’s savior,” Jay-Z boasts in the chorus — that lays claim not just to hip-hop’s throne but its soul. More literally it heralds a successful return to the game, after a less-than-successful departure from it.

“Just when they thought it was all over, I put the whole world on my back and broad shoulders,” Jay-Z barked at one point in the tune, overstating both the impact of his so-called retirement and the weight of his burden. Because most of the people in the crowd knew “Kingdom Come” by heart, they pitched in, making the sentiment feel more jubilant. During one of several superhero metaphors, Jay-Z pointedly dropped out and they managed to finish his line, “Superman is alive.”

They managed a lot more over the course of the show, including the entirety of the Notorious B.I.G.’s verse in “Mo Money Mo Problems.” (That moment came during a medley of throwback anthems by fallen hip-hop heroes, a roll call that also included Jam Master Jay, Tupac and Aaliyah.) Jay-Z’s sturdy vintage material inspired a similar response, with even his more slippery lines being echoed verbatim in the hall.

The finer nuances of Jay-Z’s flow — his sleek syncopations and deceptively casual cadences — were only partly discernible in a show plagued by muddy acoustics. Perhaps for this reason he delivered some of his lyrics a cappella. It was in those moments that the full measure of his charisma came across, since the unaccompanied setting gave him a chance to lower his volume, expand and contract his tempo, and play with some subtleties of tone.

Still, the concert’s highlights were delirious with bombast. One of the most exuberant was “Show Me What You Got,” a track from the new album that has already, deservedly, spent some time in the Top 10; scenes from the music video, involving fast boats, faster cars and the opulence of Monaco, underscored some suave-like-James-Bond braggadocio. (Somehow Bond suits him better than Superman.)

Later, near the show’s end, Green Lantern started up the horn intro to “Crazy in Love,” the gargantuan Beyoncé hit from 2003. Any speculation about whether Beyoncé would show up to sing the tune with her longtime boyfriend was quickly dispelled, as Jay-Z dove straight into his guest verse. It was a weird moment — perhaps loaded with implication, perhaps not — but in any case the verse sounded great.

So did “Encore,” which followed, and served as a finale. Interestingly, the tune, from Jay-Z’s brilliant but premature farewell, “The Black Album,” prompted more than a few people to leave the hall. But this was only fair. They knew for a fact he wasn’t going anywhere this time.

Lure of Great Wealth Affects Career Choices

A decade into the practice of medicine, still striving to become “a well regarded physician-scientist,” Robert H. Glassman concluded that he was not making enough money. So he answered an ad in the New England Journal of Medicine from a business consulting firm hiring doctors.

And today, after moving on to Wall Street as an adviser on medical investments, he is a multimillionaire.

Such routes to great wealth were just opening up to physicians when Dr. Glassman was in school, graduating from Harvard College in 1983 and Harvard Medical School four years later. Hoping to achieve breakthroughs in curing cancer, his specialty, he plunged into research, even dreaming of a Nobel Prize, until Wall Street reordered his life.

Just how far he had come from a doctor’s traditional upper-middle-class expectations struck home at the 20th reunion of his college class. By then he was working for Merrill Lynch and soon would become a managing director of health care investment banking.

“There were doctors at the reunion — very, very smart people,” Dr. Glassman recalled in a recent interview. “They went to the top programs, they remained true to their ethics and really had very pure goals. And then they went to the 20th-year reunion and saw that somebody else who was 10 times less smart was making much more money.”

The opportunity to become abundantly rich is a recent phenomenon not only in medicine, but in a growing number of other professions and occupations. In each case, the great majority still earn fairly uniform six-figure incomes, usually less than $400,000 a year, government data show. But starting in the 1990s, a significant number began to earn much more, creating a two-tier income stratum within such occupations.

The divide has emerged as people like Dr. Glassman, who is 45, latched onto opportunities within their fields that offered significantly higher incomes. Some lawyers and bankers, for example, collect much larger fees than others in their fields for their work on business deals and cases.

Others have moved to different, higher-paying fields — from academia to Wall Street, for example — and a growing number of entrepreneurs have seen windfalls tied largely to expanding financial markets, which draw on capital from around the world. The latter phenomenon has allowed, say, the owner of a small mail-order business to sell his enterprise for tens of millions instead of the hundreds of thousands that such a sale might have brought 15 years ago.

Three decades ago, compensation among occupations differed far less than it does today. That growing difference is diverting people from some critical fields, experts say. The American Bar Foundation, a research group, has found in its surveys, for instance, that fewer law school graduates are going into public-interest law or government jobs and filling all the openings is becoming harder.

Something similar is happening in academia, where newly minted Ph.D.’s migrate from teaching or research to more lucrative fields. Similarly, many business school graduates shun careers as experts in, say, manufacturing or consumer products for much higher pay on Wall Street.

And in medicine, where some specialties now pay far more than others, young doctors often bypass the lower-paying fields. The Medical Group Management Association, for example, says the nation lacks enough doctors in family practice, where the median income last year was $161,000.

“The bigger the prize, the greater the effort that people are making to get it,” said Edward N. Wolff, a New York University economist who studies income and wealth. “That effort is draining people away from more useful work.”

What kind of work is most useful is a matter of opinion, of course, but there is no doubt that a new group of the very rich have risen today far above their merely affluent colleagues.

Turning to Philanthropy

One in every 825 households earned at least $2 million last year, nearly double the percentage in 1989, adjusted for inflation, Mr. Wolff found in an analysis of government data. When it comes to wealth, one in every 325 households had a net worth of $10 million or more in 2004, the latest year for which data is available, more than four times as many as in 1989.

As some have grown enormously rich, they are turning to philanthropy in a competition that is well beyond the means of their less wealthy peers. “The ones with $100 million are setting the standard for their own circles, but no longer for me,” said Robert Frank, a Cornell University economist who described the early stages of the phenomenon in a 1995 book, “The Winner-Take-All Society,” which he co-authored.

Fighting AIDS and poverty in Africa are favorite causes, and so is financing education, particularly at one’s alma mater.

“It is astonishing how many gifts of $100 million have been made in the last year,” said Inge Reichenbach, vice president for development at Yale University, which like other schools tracks the net worth of its alumni and assiduously pursues the richest among them.

Dr. Glassman hopes to enter this circle someday. At 35, he was making $150,000 in 1996 (about $190,000 in today’s dollars) as a hematology-oncology specialist. That’s when, recently married and with virtually no savings, he made the switch that brought him to management consulting.

He won’t say just how much he earns now on Wall Street or his current net worth. But compensation experts, among them Johnson Associates, say the annual income of those in his position is easily in the seven figures and net worth often rises to more than $20 million.

“He is on his way,” said Alan Johnson, managing director of the firm, speaking of people on career tracks similar to Dr. Glassman’s. “He is destined to riches.”

Indeed, doctors have become so interested in the business side of medicine that more than 40 medical schools have added, over the last 20 years, an optional fifth year of schooling for those who want to earn an M.B.A. degree as well as an M.D. Some go directly to Wall Street or into health care management without ever practicing medicine.

“It was not our goal to create masters of the universe,” said James Aisner, a spokesman for Harvard Business School, whose joint program with the medical school started last year. “It was to train people to do useful work.”

Dr. Glassman still makes hospital rounds two or three days a month, usually on free weekends. Treating patients, he said, is “a wonderful feeling.” But he sees his present work as also a valuable aspect of medicine.

One of his tasks is to evaluate the numerous drugs that start-up companies, particularly in biotechnology, are developing. These companies often turn to firms like Merrill Lynch for an investment or to sponsor an initial public stock offering. Dr. Glassman is a critical gatekeeper in this process, evaluating, among other things, whether promising drugs live up to their claims.

What Dr. Glassman represents, along with other very rich people interviewed for this article, is the growing number of Americans who acknowledge that they have accumulated, or soon will, more than enough money to live comfortably, even luxuriously, and also enough so that their children, as adults, will then be free to pursue careers “they have a hunger for,” as Dr. Glassman put it, “and not feel a need to do something just to pay the bills.”

In an earlier Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie argued that talented managers who accumulate great wealth were morally obligated to redistribute their wealth through philanthropy. The estate tax and the progressive income tax later took over most of that function — imposing tax rates of more than 70 percent as recently as 1980 on incomes above a certain level.

Now, with this marginal rate at half that much and the estate tax fading in importance, many of the new rich engage in the conspicuous consumption that their wealth allows. Others, while certainly not stinting on comfort, are embracing philanthropy as an alternative to a life of professional accomplishment.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are held up as models, certainly by Dr. Glassman. “They are going to make much greater contributions by having made money and then giving it away than most, almost all, scientists,” he said, adding that he is drawn to philanthropy as a means of achieving a meaningful legacy.

“It has to be easier than the chance of becoming a Nobel Prize winner,” he said, explaining his decision to give up research, “and I think that goes through the minds of highly educated, high performing individuals.”

As Bush administration officials see it — and conservative economists often agree — philanthropy is a better means of redistributing the nation’s wealth than higher taxes on the rich. They argue that higher marginal tax rates would discourage entrepreneurship and risk-taking. But some among the newly rich have misgivings.

Mark M. Zandi is one. He was a founder of Economy.com, a forecasting and data gathering service in West Chester, Pa. His net worth vaulted into eight figures with the company’s sale last year to Moody’s Investor Service.

“Our tax policies should be redesigned through the prism that wealth is being increasingly skewed,” Mr. Zandi said, arguing that higher taxes on the rich could help restore a sense of fairness to the system and blunt a backlash from a middle class that feels increasingly squeezed by the costs of health care, higher education, and a secure retirement. The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, a principal government source of income and wealth data, does not single out the occupations and professions generating so much wealth today. But Forbes magazine offers a rough idea in its annual surveys of the richest Americans, those approaching and crossing the billion dollar mark.

Some routes are of long standing. Inheritance plays a role. So do the earnings of Wall Street investment bankers and the super incomes of sports stars and celebrities. All of these routes swell the ranks of the very rich, as they did in 1989.

But among new occupations, the winners include numerous partners in recently formed hedge funds and private equity firms that invest or acquire companies. Real estate developers and lawyers are more in evidence today among the very rich. So are dot-com entrepreneurs as well as scientists who start a company to market an invention or discovery, soon selling it for many millions. And from corporate America come many more chief executives than in the past.

Seventy-five percent of the chief executives in a sample of 100 publicly traded companies had a net worth in 2004 of more than $25 million mainly from stock and options in the companies they ran, according to a study by Carola Frydman, a finance professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. That was up from 31 percent for the same sample in 1989, adjusted for inflation.

Chief executives were not alone among corporate executives in rising to great wealth. There were similar or even greater increases in the percentage of lower-ranking executives — presidents, executive vice presidents, chief financial officers — also advancing into the $25 million-plus category.

The growing use of options as a form of pay helps to explain the sharp rise in the number of very wealthy households. But so does the gradual dismantling of the progressive income tax, Ms. Frydman concluded in a recent study.

“Our simulation results suggest that, had taxes been at their low 2000 level throughout the past 60 years, chief executive compensation would have been 35 percent higher during the 1950s and 1960s,” she wrote.

Trying Not to Live Ostentatiously

Finally, the owners of a variety of ordinary businesses — a small chain of coffee shops or temporary help agencies, for example — manage to expand these family operations with the help of venture capital and private equity firms, eventually selling them or taking them public in a marketplace that rewards them with huge sums.

John J. Moon, a managing director of Metalmark Capital, a private equity firm, explains how this process works.

“Let’s say we buy a small pizza parlor chain from an entrepreneur for $10 million,” said Mr. Moon, who at 39, is already among the very rich. “We make it more efficient, we build it from 10 stores to 100 and we sell it to Domino’s for $50 million.”

As a result, not only the entrepreneur gets rich; so do Mr. Moon and his colleagues, who make money from putting together such deals and from managing the money they raise from wealthy investors who provide much of the capital.

By his own account, Mr. Moon, like Dr. Glassman, came reluctantly to the accumulation of wealth. Having earned a Ph.D. in business economics from Harvard in 1994, he set out to be a professor of finance, landing a job at Dartmouth’s Tuck Graduate School of Business, with a starting salary in the low six figures.

To this day, teaching tugs at Mr. Moon, whose parents immigrated to the United States from South Korea. He steals enough time from Metalmark Capital to teach one course in finance each semester at Columbia University’s business school. “If Wall Street was not there as an alternative,” Mr. Moon said, “I would have gone into academia.”

Academia, of course, turned out to be no match for the job offers that came Mr. Moon’s way from several Wall Street firms. He joined Goldman Sachs, moved on to Morgan Stanley’s private equity operation in 1998 and stayed on when the unit separated from Morgan Stanley in 2004 and became Metalmark Capital.

As his income and net worth grew, the Harvard alumni association made contact and he started to give money, not just to Harvard, but to various causes. His growing charitable activities have brought him a leadership role in Harvard alumni activities, including a seat on the graduate school alumni council.

Still, Mr. Moon tries to live unostentatiously. “The trick is not to want more as your income and wealth grow,” he said. “You fly coach and then you fly first class and then it is fractional ownership of a jet and then owning a jet. I still struggle with first class. My partners make fun of me.”

His reluctance to show his wealth has a basis in his religion. “My wife and I are committed Presbyterians,” he said. “I would like to think that my faith informs my career decisions even more than financial considerations. That is not always easy because money is not unimportant.”

It has a momentum of its own. Mr. Moon and his wife, Hee-Jung, who gave up law to raise their two sons, are renovating a newly purchased Park Avenue co-op. “On an absolute scale it is lavish,” he said, “but on a relative scale, relative to my peers, it is small.”

Behavior is gradually changing in the Glassman household, too. Not that the doctor and his wife, Denise, 41, seem to crave change. Nothing in his off-the-rack suits, or the cafes and nondescript restaurants that he prefers for interviews, or the family’s comparatively modest four-bedroom home in suburban Short Hills, N.J., or their two cars (an Acura S.U.V. and a Honda Accord) suggests that wealth has altered the way the family lives.

But it is opening up “choices,” as Mrs. Glassman put it. They enjoy annual ski vacations in Utah now. The Glassmans are shopping for a larger house — not as large as the family could afford, Mrs. Glassman said, but large enough to accommodate a wood-paneled study where her husband could put all his books and his diplomas and “feel that it is his own.” Right now, a glassed-in porch, without book shelves, serves as a workplace for both of them.

Starting out, Dr. Glassman’s $150,000 a year was a bit less than that of his wife, then a marketing executive with an M.B.A. from Northwestern. Their plan was for her to stop working once they had children. To build up their income, she encouraged him to set up or join a medical practice to treat patients. Dr. Glassman initially balked, but he was coming to realize that his devotion to research would not necessarily deliver a big scientific payoff.

“I wasn’t sure that I was willing to take the risk of spending many years applying for grants and working long hours for the very slim chance of winning at the roulette table and making a significant contribution to the scientific literature,” he said.

In this mood, he was drawn to the ad that McKinsey & Company, the giant consulting firm, had placed in the New England Journal of Medicine. McKinsey was increasingly working among biomedical and pharmaceutical companies and it needed more physicians on staff as consultants. Dr. Glassman, absorbed in the world of medicine, did not know what McKinsey was. His wife enlightened him. “The way she explained it, McKinsey was like a Massachusetts General Hospital for M.B.A.’s,” he said. “It was really prestigious, which I liked, and I heard that it was very intellectually charged.”

He soon joined as a consultant, earning a starting salary that was roughly the same as he was earning as a researcher — and soon $100,000 more. He stayed four years, traveling constantly and during that time the family made the move to Short Hills from rented quarters in Manhattan.

Dr. Glassman migrated to Merrill Lynch in 2001, first in private equity, which he found to be more at the forefront of innovation than consulting at McKinsey, and then gradually to investment banking, going full time there in 2004.

Linking Security to Income

Casey McCullar hopes to follow a similar circuit. Now 29, he joined the Marconi Corporation, a big telecommunications company, in 1999 right out of the University of Texas in Dallas, his hometown. Over the next six years he worked up to project manager at $42,000 a year, becoming quite skilled in electronic mapmaking.

A trip to India for his company introduced him to the wonders of outsourcing and the money he might make as an entrepreneur facilitating the process. As a first step, he applied to the Tuck business school at Dartmouth, got in and quit his Texas job, despite his mother’s concern that he was giving up future promotions and very good health insurance, particularly Marconi’s dental plan.

His life at Tuck soon sent him in still another direction. When he graduates next June he will probably go to work for Mercer Management Consulting, he says. Mercer recruited him at a starting salary of $150,000, including bonus. “If you had told me a couple of years ago that I would be making three times my Marconi salary, I would not have believed you,” Mr. McCullar said.

Nearly 70 percent of Tuck’s graduates go directly to consulting firms or Wall Street investment houses. He may pursue finance later, Mr. McCullar says, always keeping in mind an entrepreneurial venture that could really leverage his talent.

“When my mom talks of Marconi’s dental plan and a safe retirement,” he said, “she really means lifestyle security based on job security.”

But “for my generation,” Mr. McCullar said, “lifestyle security comes from financial independence. I’m doing what I want to do and it just so happens that is where the money is.”

Furtado Lines Up Special Guests: Timbaland, Chris Martin, Justin?

♥ Nelly ♥

Nelly Furtado has so many guests on her latest album, she's trying to see if they can all make it to her world party. The singer's in the midst of organizing her upcoming Get Loose Tour, and if it all works out, she's going to have surprise guests tailored to each continent the tour visits.

In Europe, for instance, Coldplay's Chris Martin "should get an invitation" to join her for their duet "All Good Things (Come to an End)" (see "Nelly Furtado Double-Dips With Two Soaking-Wet Videos"). In Latin America, she'd like to sing with Juanes on their collaboration, "Te Busque." And if their paths cross on their respective world tours, she'd like to hook up with Justin Timberlake, with whom she's recorded several unreleased tracks.

"We were thinking of touring together," Furtado said, "but it didn't make sense for both of us, so we went our separate ways. But I'll probably come up to some of the Justin shows, so hopefully he'll return the favor and come to some of mine."

Also on the guest list: frequent Furtado and Timberlake collaborator Timabaland. "He toured a little bit with me on my Whoa, Nelly! tour," she said, "so I'm sure he'll come back and do his thing. We love performing together, so that should be a lot of fun."

As for an opening act, she wants it to be a revolving door, with each artist doing 10 to 15 dates each. "One of the things that's cool is, in the States I'm going to bring some Latin artists out on the road with me and do a bilingual sort of thing," she said. "They'll do their regular Spanish material, and then I do my thing, you know, whether I sing in English or Spanish or Portuguese, or play guitar."

Furtado's thinking about inviting the Puerto Rican reggaetón group and recent Latin Grammy winners Calle 13, since they did a remix of her "No Hay Igual," to fill one of those slots. "They're getting big now," she said.

So far, only the Canadian dates have been announced, but the tour will also hit the U.S., Japan and Australia along with Europe and Latin America.

The singer is playing a brace of radio holiday shows next month, and after the holidays she's got "lots" of rehearsals scheduled, so that the show can become a "full sensory experience." "Like, it really has a beginning, middle and end, and takes you on a journey," she said. "It's important to have a fun show that's interactive, where the crowd's involved. I always leave room for spontaneity and rawness, because those are my roots, you know? I started by doing club shows, and that's the energy I love, the raw club energy of just feeling like you're rocking out."

While she'll have a choreographer and four back-up dancers with her on the road, Furtado insists that there won't be any real choreography in the way you might expect with a large stage show. "The way I am with movement, it has to be all natural," she said. "It's a pretty music-based show. It's not about any one thing. There's visuals and movement, but music plays the hugest role. Everything else is just to keep it sophisticated and sensual and fun."

Furtado said she got a taste of what's to come during a recent gig in Mexico City, where the audience knew the words to all of her songs and were even able to guess what the next song would be. "I was overwhelmed with emotion," she said. "I was actually tearing up on stage. I had to get a grip! It got me really excited for next year.

"I love what I do for a living more than ever," she added. "I'm really happy in this place, and I hope to make music my whole life. I can't wait to bring the show to the fans and thank them for sticking with me this whole time."

Nelly Furtado's tour dates, according to her record label:
December 2 - Indianapolis, IN @ Pepsi Coliseum
December 7 - Anaheim, CA @ Honda Center
December 9 - Sacramento, CA @ ARCO Arena
December 10 - Tacoma, WA @ Tacoma Dome
December 13 - Camden, NJ @ Tweeter Center at the Waterfront
December 15 - New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
December 16 - Sunrise, FL @ BankAtlantic Center


March 21 - Victoria, BC @ Save on Foods Memorial Centre
March 22 - Vancouver, BC @ General Motors Place
March 23 - Kelowna, BC @ Prospera Place
March 25 - Grande Prairie, AB @ Crystal Centre
March 26 - Edmonton, AB @ Shaw Conference Centre
March 27 - Calgary, AB @ Pengrowth Saddledome
April 4 - Toronto, ON@ Air Canada Centre
April 5 - Montreal, QC @ Bell Centre
April 6 - Ottawa, ON @ Scotiabank Place

You Won't Believe Who Cameron Diaz Would Like To Trade Places With ...

Cameron Diaz

For more than a dozen years, audiences have been eating up that Cameron Diaz grin. You know it: That megawatt sweet smile that dares you to go ahead and try not to fall for her. She played it to the hilt in romantic comedies from "There's Something About Mary" to "My Best Friend's Wedding," and it's no surprise to see it in Diaz's return to the genre, "The Holiday."

This time Diaz plays Amanda, a woman who needs a break — from men and her Los Angeles life — so she swaps homes with the similarly burned-out Iris (Kate Winslet), a move that takes her all the way to the English countryside. It's just her luck that Graham (Jude Law) comes knocking. So much for a quiet holiday. (Stop making that face, it's a movie.)

We caught up with Diaz and chatted about the film, her favorite holiday, working with Jude Law, and best of all, the person she'd most like to trade places with.

MTV: Hi Cameron. What are you up to?

Cameron Diaz: Actually a girlfriend of mine just had a baby so I'm on my way to see them.

MTV: Talking about a movie suddenly seems mundane.

Diaz: It's OK. I'm excited to talk about ["The Holiday"].

MTV: When you go into a romantic comedy, do you feel like, "I know how to do this"?

Diaz: I don't, because I feel like each one of them has been so different from the next. I kind of pick the films I do by how I'm feeling at the moment. It's more about my life and my choices rather than necessarily about my career.

MTV: So where were you at when you decided to do "The Holiday"?

Diaz: One thing is, I want to work with somebody who knows what they're doing. And I love [director] Nancy Meyers. Her writing is so much fun and full of life and relatable. I read [the script] and I was like, oh I know exactly who these women are. I've been both of those women.

MTV: Which leads nicely to the question: Is there someone you could imagine trading lives with?

Diaz: The image that comes to mind is Jack Black in a blue leotard with a big mustache. I just want to know what it's like to be Jack Black and be in Tenacious D. That would be really fun.

MTV: Do you like to try on other people's lives?

Diaz: Oh yeah, I love it. It's one of the perks of the job — getting to explore somebody else's experience and tell their story and indulge yourself in their lifestyle and learn about how they live and put yourself in a predicament that you would not normally ever get to be in. It's a really cool job.

MTV: What's it like working with Jude Law?

Diaz: He's such a great actor. The great thing about this role for Jude is that it's so much like him. He's so much like Graham. He's grounded and open and charismatic and understanding and sensitive. It's very close to who he is.

MTV: OK, time for some silly questions: What's your favorite holiday film?

Diaz: I love "A Christmas Story." How can you not love that?

MTV: I'm partial to "Elf."

Diaz: Oh, you are hilarious. That's my girlfriend's favorite. I said to her, what was your favorite movie of the year? "Elf." [She laughs.]

MTV: What's your favorite holiday?

Diaz: I kinda like the Fourth of July. It's summertime and you get to light the fireworks and everyone's outside and it's beautiful. And it's also one of those holidays where if you can't make it home for that holiday you're not going to get in trouble.

MTV: So Justin [Timberlake] is in "Shrek the Third" with you. Did you guys record your lines together?

Diaz: You know, even with that first "Shrek," I never met Mike Myers or Eddie Murphy until the day of our press junket. None of the actors work together [in animated films]. You'll have to wait to see the film to see what our roles are.

MTV: You're a Martin Scorsese vet after "Gangs of New York." Do you think he's going to get his Oscar this year for "The Departed"?

Diaz: I saw "The Departed" twice in 24 hours, so I was really into the movie. I went and saw it and then I loved it so much that another friend was going to see it, and I was like, "I will go with you." I love that movie! He's amazing. Marty's the best ever.

MTV: It's hard to believe you've been doing this for over a dozen years, going back to "The Mask" in 1994. Do you ever look back and think, "If only I could give that Cameron some advice?"

Diaz: Oh sure. But the thing is, you can't worry about what happened in the past, what you did or didn't do. All you can do is apply it to the next experience. I mean, there's so many things even from the last movie like, "Why didn't I do that?"

MTV: Any TV shows you're obsessed with?

Diaz: I love "Grey's Anatomy." It's the only one that I actually TiVo. And I love "The Soup" — do you watch it? It's hilarious.

MTV: Oh sure. "Talk Soup" lives on.

Diaz: Yeah. I started watching it when I was in high school. It's almost like a guilty pleasure.

MTV: I haven't heard about anything you're doing after "Shrek 3." What's next?

Diaz: I don't have anything set up. I'm at the moment unemployed.

MTV: Oh no!

Diaz: Yeah, I'm hopefully going to rectify that at some point, but nothing at the moment.

Drug charge for Gotti teen

Frank Gotti

Frank Agnello - better known as Frank Gotti, a star on the popular television show "Growing Up Gotti" - was pulled over by Suffolk police in Dix Hills earlier this month and arrested on drug charges.

The 16-year-old was driving two friends in his 2006 Chrysler Pacifica on South Hollow Road, when he was pulled over for a traffic stop at about 8 p.m. on Nov. 10, according to police and court records.

Authorities discovered several OxyContin pills, a prescriptive pain killer that also is used as a recreational drug, inside the car that none of the teens would claim. As a result, all three were charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance, Det. Sgt. Bruce Markgraf said.

Agnello, of Old Westbury, and Juliana Buckley, 17, of Dix Hills, also were charged with criminal possession of marijuana, court records state. The third friend is a juvenile. His name was withheld by police.

Once in police custody, Agnello's mother, Victoria Gotti, went to the Second Precinct in Huntington - not far from where he runs Gotti Tans on West Jericho Turnpike - to bail out her son.

"It was like something out of their little TV show," said a witness who did not want to be identified.

The witness said John Gotti Jr., Agnello's uncle, also showed up the precinct. Agnello was given a desk appearance ticket and is scheduled to be arraigned in Suffolk County Criminal Court in January.

Agnello's attorney said he will enter a not guilty plea.

"There were no drugs found on his person," said W. Adam Mandelbaum, of Oyster Bay, who is representing the youngest of the three Gotti brothers. Mandelbaum said the pills were found in one friend's handbag. He had few other details to release about the alleged crime.

"Right now, the case is under investigation," Mandelbaum said.

Buckley and her family could not be reached for comment.

On one of his Web sites, Agnello, the grandson of mobster John Gotti, says he is a student at St. Dominic High School in Oyster Bay. He authored a book called "The Gotti Diet," in which he describes losing 80 pounds in a year before starting the reality television show.

"Ironically, he is also an excellent cook and hopes to one day own his own restaurant," the official "Growing Up Gotti" Web site proclaims. "In the meantime, this over-achieving honor student and MVP all-around athlete plans to go to college for business management."

The show followed Agnello, his two brothers and single mother in their daily lives. It began in 2004 and was cancelled in December 2005.

5 Traits That Make You a Hall of Fame Girlfriend (according to askmen.com)



Why should men settle for women that only offer appearances? Some women still believe that their beauty is enough to keep men happy. Those days are long gone. Men no longer settle for such raw deals. So what makes a woman a great catch?

Today, professional and successful men are in hot pursuit of smart, funny, independent, spontaneous, and very sexy women. Why shouldn't we? After all, don't we deserve better than women whose only talent is tossing their hair from one shoulder to the other?

If you are in a relationship right now, stop for a moment and analyze your current situation. Is your girlfriend a keeper, or should you just sweep her away? It's time to look for the five crucial qualities of a Gold Medal Girlfriend.

1. Independence makes her strong

Women who have balanced lives and interests of their own and who don't depend on men are the ones who can attract men without effort. Desperation to find men and get married are qualities that will drive most men away from potentially adequate relationships.

2. A great girlfriend gives you space and freedom

Another requirement for most men is that girlfriends or wives give them space to pursue outside interests. Relationships should not be like a 7-Eleven, open 24/7. Clinginess is the quickest route to relationship disasters. Too much space could be a sign of rockiness in relationships, from a lack of love, interest or attraction, but freedom allows men to grow as individuals and gives them breathing room, which is much appreciated.

3. She stays calm

There is no reason for men to be afraid that their girlfriends will freak out on a daily basis. The two scenarios men hate the most: women crying for no reason and women acting suspicious. If these scenarios seem familiar, then get out and don't look back. Men want women they can trust. No one wants to be questioned and interrogated by the people that supposedly love them.

4. She's one of the guys

Men look for women who not only complement them but share their interests as well. If she's going to be your best friend, then why not do things that you enjoy together? Monday Night Football can be a great activity for two, if you're both interested in it.

5. Sex is always an adventure with a great girlfriend

Some women think that as long as they have sex from time to time, their men will be happy. But sexual relations should not be one-sided; women cannot lie back and expect men to do all the work. If that's the case, boredom will set in very quickly. Nothing keeps men more interested than women with vast sexual ranges. Women should make their men feel wanted and desired; they should make sweet love one night and be wild the next. If women keep men guessing, they'll come back for more — always. Of course, men have to keep their women guessing too. Remember, it takes two to tango.

These are just some of the qualities men look for in ideal girlfriends. Keep in mind though, I'm not suggesting men dump their girlfriends if they don't have the qualities mentioned above. What I am saying is that maybe men should think about what they need and want in relationships and strive to be with someone who fulfills those needs.

---

Ladies take note

Monday, November 27, 2006

Still Rocking His Own Look

♠ Mick ♠


IN an era of music careers created in the democratic nowhere of MySpace, where the members of hot bands dress as if they were office temps, the days of the rock show as spectacle and the rock star as circus star are unquestionably numbered.

Yet arena rock, at least, still has a certifiable god in Mick Jagger. And, as the Rolling Stones blew through this honky-tonk beachfront city last week on the last leg of its Bigger Bang tour, Mr. Jagger gave a performance that was a master class in the genre.

As lithe as a boy, Mr. Jagger seems to defy age. At least he does below the waist. Grooved and sunken, his weather-beaten face betrays every second of his 63 years and this makes it all the more startling when he prances and postures like some curious and gorgeous superannuated Pan.

It is Mr. Jagger’s persona that a Stones show is clearly built upon, and Mr. Jagger who inspires fans to travel great distances, blow the rent money on tickets and follow the Stones to the ends of the earth.

The music draws them, too, of course, but there are few sights in entertainment as compelling as Mr. Jagger’s almost vaudevillian brio, his eccentric presentation and his achingly singular style.

“Mick Jagger has been living on the style edge since 1966,” said Joe Levy, the executive editor of Rolling Stone. “The edge keeps moving and so does he.”

Even a cursory trip through the archives of fashion makes clear that whenever designers as unalike as Roberto Cavalli and Tommy Hilfiger invoked some emblematic rock star, or rocker “icon,” or rocker “rebel,” Mr. Jagger was the point of reference.

Bowie was stylish. Bryan Ferry looked good in a suit. But it was Mr. Jagger who preened himself in a Mephistopheles cloak at Altamont; wore Ossie Clark jumpsuits split to the navel; and who appeared in a flounced neoclassical Grecian-style jacket to read Shelley at a concert after Brian Jones’s death.

It was Mr. Jagger who flaunted billowing trousers designed by Giorgio Sant’Angelo, “mad things, beautiful things,” as Tony King, Mr. Jagger’s media coordinator for four decades, said last week. “From the start the Stones had kind of their own look,” Mr. King explained before heading from Manhattan to New Jersey for the Bigger Bang show. “They were very much not the Beatles, four guys wearing the same suits.”

In truth the Stones dressed identically in their very earliest incarnation, wearing the matching suits that were the boy-band uniform of the British Invasion. That they ditched these in favor of dressing as rowdies or dandies or rough trade or women probably owes more to Mr. Jagger, a lifelong clotheshorse, than to any other member of the band.

“It was in 1969, when the Stones made ‘Gimme Shelter,’ when all of a sudden there became a need to have a look for a tour,” Mr. King said.

It was also about that time when Mr. Jagger and his bandmates began affecting eyeliner and the dangling earrings that would eventually provide Johnny Depp with the visual cues for the character Jack Sparrow, his “Pirates of the Caribbean” homage to Keith Richards-as-dandy, a characterization that helped make a multimillion-dollar franchise out of a dull cinematic cartoon.

Even as far back as 1975, when Karen Durbin wrote a Village Voice cover article about the Rolling Stones, she was not alone in pointing out the gender games Mr. Jagger was already playing through clothes. “He was very, very androgynous,” said Ms. Durbin, now a film critic for Elle magazine, and so avid a fan she claims to have seen the Stones 22 times. “But he was also simultaneously a little scary, a little hard and indisputably masculine.”

Mr. Jagger’s onstage dualities were not accidental, said Ms. Durbin. “It was all deliberate.”

Nowadays, of course, gender blur is a karaoke setting in the music business. At some point everyone in a band has put on eyeliner, except perhaps the girls.

And while groups as unalike as the Libertines, say, or the Scissor Sisters, or the Strokes or the Killers or the Hives, or My Chemical Romance continue to pay homage, not always ironic, to the rock star as dandified satyr, the much greater shift in the music business is away from Rolling Stones-style theatricality and toward something more neutral, amateurish and anonymous.

“We would never get all costumed up,” Mitch DeRosier, a musician with the indie band Born Ruffians, said by phone last week from Portland, Ore., where the group was on tour with Hot Chip. “I don’t go out of my way that much.”

Talk to a member of almost any band created in the emo era and one would hear more or less the same thing. “I like the Rolling Stones and I’m a huge fan of their music,” said Seth Olinsky, a musician in the exuberantly frumpy Brooklyn-based indie band Akron/Family. “But the sexy-strut dude is not the image I choose to be important to me.”

As an expression of style, grunge has been quoted so liberally by now that it rates a mile marker on the timeline of fashion. Yet compared with the look lately favored by young bands, grunge has come to seem almost baroque.

And as that has happened, so has Mr. Jagger’s form of personal display been refined to the extent that he is like an essence of rock star: skinny jeans and cropped jackets by the Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquiere; tight glittering T-shirts by the Dior designer Hedi Slimane.

“In mainstream rock you no longer see guys willing to take these fashion risks,” said Dan Peres, the editor of Details, a magazine whose editorial mission basically descends from Mr. Jagger’s robust sartorial and social experiments. “In this day and age, where if you have a great MySpace page you can go further than acts with labels promoting them and sell tons of albums without even having a label,” said Mr. Peres, “no one wants to make a style statement that would alienate anyone.”

No one wants to go onstage, as Mr. Jagger did each time the band played “Sympathy for the Devil” on the Bigger Bang tour — which ends this weekend in Vancouver — in a coat and matching fedora designed by Miuccia Prada and made entirely of feathers, perhaps because no one without his history could wear a coat of cock feathers and not seem like a joke.

“Very early on we did the same thing” young bands are now doing, Mr. Jagger explained in an interview this week. “We wore clothes very similar to what we wore offstage because we didn’t have any money and that was the look.”

It wasn’t until the end of the ’60s, when the Rolling Stones were playing 50,000-seat arenas, that the band began, he said, to wear more “eye-catching” stuff.

“If I was starting out now, I would dress down, but still hope to have some distinctive way of dressing down,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re starting out or you’re doing it for years,” Mr. Jagger said. “There’s no point in having a huge dress-up if you’re playing a 500-seat club. And if you’re playing for 50,000 people, there’s no point in wearing rags.”

In a Party Mood







SARI GUERON has the sort of fashion antennas some other designers would kill for. Mostly they vibrate in response “to what my friends want to wear,” Ms. Gueron said. As those friends primp for the rounds of cocktails and dinner parties that herald the holiday season, they “will want to feel sexy,” she predicted, “though not in a way that hits you over the head.”

“Sexy” is a notion she equates with a modestly scooped neckline, a gently accented waist and fabrics like satin or taffeta, rich with a hint of luster. “When it comes to party dressing, people are making more of an effort,” she said. “The look is definitely more dressy than it used to be.”

Fashion, it appears, is in the throes of one of its inevitable mood swings, the years of casual, sketchily improvised party dressing giving way to a perceptibly more formal look. “The days of jeans and a dressy top are long gone,” said Lela Rose, a young Texan whose tent dresses and pinafores seem conceived for steel magnolias. “This is a much more feminine time.”

Those observations chime with a consensus among merchants, designers and young style-setters. They interpret “feminine” to encompass gem-tone velvet blazers, streamlined tuxedo suits and even shorts — and that uncontested hit of the season, the dress.

The resurgence of the full-on party dress signifies “a return to refinement,” said Jeffrey Kalinsky, the founder of the Jeffrey shops in New York and Atlanta. Variations, which began arriving in stores earlier this month in a profusion of fabrics and colors, include a buttercup yellow silk faille Empire style by Prada, a taffeta mini with petal sleeves by Thakoon and a crisp silk faille trapeze by Oscar de la Renta, with a fanciful bow at the nape.

Women are responding to the candidly flirtatious, festive mood of such dresses. Celerie Kemble, a decorator and New York society fixture, has jettisoned the wispy tops and slim trousers that were her party uniform a year ago for dresses with moderately full skirts and rounded necklines, mostly in deep colors, sometimes threaded with metallic embroidery. She tends to wear them with patent leather shoes. The combination makes for “a sweeter look,” she said, “with the glossy feeling of a Christmas ornament.”

Which is not to say gaudy or cloying. Ms. Kemble subscribes to a brand of subtle luxury that has adherents on both coasts. “There is a trend here to dress in a way that is clean and simple,” said John Eshaya, the fashion director of Ron Herman, an outpost of hip in Los Angeles. “We don’t need the flashbulbs. The only things that should sparkle are your earrings.”

In keeping with that dictum, plenty of women are toning down the luster of a satin or taffeta dress with a light cashmere cardigan, balancing its airiness with flat shoes or chunky jeweled sandals. The look is buoyant, not uptight. “We are not talking about the simple sheath dress that we equate with an Audrey Hepburn,” said Gregg Andrews, the fashion director for Nordstrom.

At Lord & Taylor, the most sought-after styles are emphatically youthful and sensuous, said LaVelle Olexa, the store’s fashion director. Women are buying silk jersey wrap dresses and knee-length or thigh-grazing cocktail dresses, elongated variations on summer’s popular Mod-inspired swing dress. Customers of all ages find those shapes flattering and unexpectedly liberating, Ms. Olexa said.

Indeed, styles like Rebecca Taylor’s brocade cocktail dress, draped and gathered beneath the bust, or Marc Jacobs’s ballooning mini combine an ingénue freshness with a forgiving fit that reflects younger women’s growing insistence on ease. Ms. Gueron said her clients, many of whom are in their 20s or early 30s, feel that “if something is too fitted, it suggests that you’re trying too hard.

“People that age think you look cooler when you’re comfortable.”

Is It Dance? Does It Matter?




All kinds of people, trivially and profoundly, have tried to pin down dance, to define what it is and is not, and some of them get quite feisty if you challenge their definitions. So let us relax a little and pay heed to what artists are actually doing. Manhattan (and the rest of the city and the country and the world) is awash in artistic performances that may derive from dance, may be billed as dance, but are just as easily described as a hybrid of dance and something else — or as something else entirely.
Looking back over the season since September, in my perambulations through the world of dance, I’ve encountered all kinds of hybrids. One of them, the Polish Teatr Dada von Bzudlow at La MaMa, continues through this weekend.

There was Mark Morris’s delightfully loony, joyful version of Purcell’s “King Arthur,” which came from London and was seen in Berkeley, Calif. It was billed as opera but, stripped of its “book” by John Dryden, was really more theatricalized dance. There was Constanza Macras and her Dorky Park dance troupe from Berlin at Dance Theater Workshop, whose piece embraced all manner of theater, film and live music. Shen Wei Dance Arts at the Joyce was dance, but, given Mr. Shen’s training in art, as much a visual experience as a choreographic one. Caitlin Cook’s “Skint” at the Kitchen was rambling, quasi-improvised dance mixed with rambling, quasi-improvised rock music.

Sarah Michelson’s “Dogs” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music became increasingly theatrical as it progressed. Meredith Monk, also at the academy’s Harvey Theater, is a one-woman hybrid, since she started as a dancer but prefers now to be thought of as a musician, and incorporates photography and video into her work as well. Witness Relocation’s “Dancing vs. the Rat Experiment” at La MaMa was a lively, conceptually overflowing if often incoherent collage of theater and dance, reviewed by critics from both fields. Most recently, last weekend, there were Teatr Dada von Bzudlow’s “Several Witty Observations (à la Gombrowicz)” and Claude Wampler’s “Performance (Career Ender)” at the Kitchen.

The Polish von Bzudlow troupe bills itself as a theater and played at La MaMa, which is primarily devoted to experimental theater (as in its sobriquet E.T.C., meaning Experimental Theater Club) but has long been refreshingly loose about what it presents. “Several Witty Observations” is billed in a news release as dance-theater, and compared with most of the performances mentioned above, this was more unambiguously dance than any of them.
Maybe it was different back in Poland. I am not familiar with the writings of Witold Gombrowicz, the dissident playwright and novelist during the Communist years on whose diaries this piece is based. At the outset of the performance a man whispers in Polish, untranslated. Perhaps in Poland there are more such verbal interpolations, pushing the work toward a true blend of dance and theater. But even the Polish reviews refer to it as primarily dance.

As such it is interesting without being sharply distinctive. Leszek Bzdyl, dark-haired and handsome, is the choreographer and troupe leader. He is first seen in the lobby, lying on the floor and placing his head into a trash bin. Onstage he is joined by Rafal Dziemidok, big and bald, and Katarzyna Chmielewska, who provides the female erotic element.

They interact with two large inflatable sculptures, one a large mattress, the other a large footstool or round sofa. There is atmospheric music by Mikolaj Trzaska and a foray into the audience to pass out enigmatic slips of paper. The dancing is purposeful, energetic, sometimes sexy and funny, but never quite convinces as dance or dance-theater. But maybe it means more for connoisseurs of Mr. Gombrowicz.

Ms. Wampler’s piece is entirely different, and far more thought-provoking. But even though it was organized by the ubiquitous Ms. Michelson, who did “Dogs” and was also curator of “Skint” at the Kitchen, and even though it was billed as performance and dance by the Kitchen (which had no idea what the mysterious Ms. Wampler would do when it printed its publicity), this was only dance in the most oblique sense.

But it was fascinating, whatever it was. Ms. Wampler comes from Pennsylvania and has been active in New York as a dancer, performer and visual artist. Her program gave only the odd title; no other information was provided, not even her name.

Instead there were two texts, one about polar bears drowning as the arctic ice melted beneath them, the other about a 7-year-old boy who swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco. In a subsequent telephone conversation Ms. Wampler suggested that the performance might shed light on the texts. No such luck for me, unless the idea was to encourage polar bears to become better swimmers.


What the audience saw was a setup for a rock trio: a cartoon-illustrated amplifier, real keyboards and a drum kit. The musicians, led by a singer who played electric bass and who led the “rehearsal” and gradually stripped down to silver briefs, spent 55 minutes tinkering with their music. They sounded full-bodied and pretty good, somewhat reminiscent of the Doors, though the singer had a higher voice than Jim Morrison. But they weren’t “real”; they were projected: the singer clearly, against his backdrop, the others more ectoplasmic against the omnipresent smoke.

Finally a black-clad woman (Ms. Wampler, it turned out) brusquely flattened the singer’s set and on came the same musicians, live, to blast through their song at considerably higher volume. Followed by a long blackout during which nobody in the audience knew quite what to do. End of show. With no dance evident at all.

Yet maybe there was. Upon questioning, Ms. Wampler identified the musicians as the John Carpenter Band (not the film director). Joey Albanese was the drummer and Debbie Chou the keyboard player. Ms. Wampler added that she had kept her program devoid of information to prevent the audience from using it as a “crutch.”

With that in mind, one had to suspect that a goodly portion of the audience was part of the performance too, from those who stalked out angrily, to those who stood up and boogied to the live music, to the man who insisted on bringing a weird, patched-together backpack into the theater.

The boogying was dance, I suppose, and to the extent the audience was drawn in, their boogying was too. Maybe some of Mr. Carpenter’s contortions on video were choreographed. But what Ms. Wampler was really doing, as she has done before, was challenging the conventional relationships among creators, performers and observers. Her piece was always engaging, technically superb, sonically appealing.

Was it dance? Not really. But the excitement for critics and audiences alike in so many performances these days, from downtown to Brooklyn and beyond, is to ignore the old categories, or at least not fret if their expectations are thwarted. Artists are eager to mix things up, and audiences better be ready to go along for the ride.

For Graphic Novels, a New Frontier: Teenage Girls


“It’s time we got teenage girls reading comics,” said Karen Berger, a senior vice president at DC Comics. And DC, the comics powerhouse best known as home to Superman and Batman, has a program to make that happen.
In May, DC plans to introduce Minx, a line of graphic novels aimed at young adult female readers, starting with six titles in 2007, each retailing for less than $10. The stories will be far removed from the superheroes who more typically appeal to young males. They include “Clubbing,” about a London party girl who solves a mystery; “Re-Gifters,” about a Korean-American teenager in California who enjoys martial arts; and “Good as Lily,” about a young woman who meets three versions of herself at different ages.

Teenage girls, Ms. Berger said, are smart and sophisticated and “about more than going out with the cute guy. This line of books gives them something to read that honors that intelligence and assertiveness and that individuality.”

As a whole, the line is positioned as an alternative for teenage girls who have, especially in bookstores, become increasing smitten with the Japanese comics known as manga. In 2004, DC started CMX, a manga imprint, to capture part of that audience. The marketing then was similar to that used for DC’s other titles.

With Minx, though, DC has taken what, for it, is the unusual step of seeking outside help. It has joined with Alloy Marketing + Media to promote Minx. All told, DC, a unit of Time Warner, will spend $125,000 next year to push the line.

“In terms of consumer marketing, it’s got to be the largest thing we’ve done in at least three decades,” said Paul Levitz, the president and publisher of DC Comics. “It’s not large by the scale of consumer marketing and advertising as it’s done in America, but it’s a large-scale commitment, I think, for a publishing company in general.”

Alloy Entertainment, a division of the marketing company, has helped to make hits of books like “Gossip Girls” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” Alloy was also the so-called book packager behind “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life,” a first novel by a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore named Kaavya Viswanathan that was pulled from stores earlier this year when it was learned that numerous passages had been copied from novels by other writers.

Still, Alloy is offering DC access to a large audience of teenage girls, through Web sites and the Delia’s shopping catalog, which has a mailing list of nearly five million, according to Samantha Skey, Alloy’s senior vice president for strategic marketing. Ms. Skey said Minx would be the first graphic novel publisher to be included in the catalog.

Along with other initiatives, Alloy plans to create online networks about the novels that will let subscribers write reviews, see previews and sketches or discuss the stories.
DC cast a wide net in seeking those stories. “To us it doesn’t matter if the person has written comics before or is known to the comic book market,” Ms. Berger said. “We want writers who can really write to the demographic and to really bring something new to the table.”
The right creative team is important. “When you had mostly boys and men making comics, you had comics made mainly for boys and men,” said Johanna Draper Carlson, the editor of comicsworthreading.com, a Web site for comic book news and reviews. “Then you end up with teen-girl superheroes who are drawn like Victoria’s Secret models.”

“I don’t think only women can write for women,” Ms. Carlson added, “but I think it helps provide an alternative perspective and a more true-to-life experience.” Ms. Carlson, who often champions female-friendly comics on her site, is taking a wait-and-see attitude to the Minx line.
The first Minx graphic novel will be “The P.L.A.I.N. Janes,” written by Cecil Castellucci and illustrated by Jim Rugg. It tells the story of Jane, a transfer student in a suburban high school who starts a campaign, “People Loving Art in Neighborhoods.” It’s a call to appreciate the everyday world that comes to involve everything from protesting the construction of a new mall to encouraging pet adoptions from animal shelters.

Jane’s classmates and fellow believers are Jane, who is interested in theater; Jayne, an academic whiz; and Polly Jane, a jock. Each is decidedly not part of the in-crowd. The reason for Jane’s transfer is serious: her family fled to suburbia after Jane survived a terrorist attack that blew up a cafe in fictional Metro City.

The experience of survival is a personal one for Ms. Castellucci, 37, whose young-adult novels include “Boy Proof” and “The Queen of Cool.” In 1979, when she was 9, Ms. Castellucci witnessed a bombing by the Irish Republican Army in Brussels. In 1986, she was in Paris during a rash of bombings. Those incidents, and the events of Sept. 11, played a role in shaping the story.

“It seemed like this was a good opportunity to explore those fearful feelings that I had growing up,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Los Angeles. “They’ve always been a part of my makeup and fears.” Feeling scared, she said: is an emotion everyone understands. “You can’t help it if you’re a part of this world.”

Ms. Castellucci was recruited by Shelly Bond, a Minx editor. It was an easy sell. “I love comic books,” Ms. Castellucci said, listing several series she enjoys, including “Fables” and “American Virgin,” on the DC imprint Vertigo, and a particular creator (“Brian K. Vaughan. I love everything he does”).

But reading comics is different from creating one, particularly a 146-page graphic novel. “I had to learn how to write a story all over again,” she said. “I did have a week or two when I thought I don’t know what I’m doing.” She said that the graphic novel was “kind of like a movie or a storyboard, but it’s not. There’s so much you can do with the images and the pacing.” She credited Mr. Rugg, the artist of “The P.L.A.I.N. Janes,” as a prime source for advice.
Mr. Rugg, who is based outside Pittsburgh, said he appreciated the goal of Minx. “I liked their target demographic,” he said. “I like the idea of doing comics for an atypical reader.” In addition to creating the drawings, Mr. Rugg also gray-scaled them, giving the black-and-white comic book a sense of color. He finished his work last month.

One of Mr. Rugg’s previous comics was “Street Angel,” about a homeless teenage girl who fights crime, which he created with the writer Brian Maruca. Mr. Rugg, 29, called that comic, published by Slave Labor Graphics, his response to the typical depiction of women in mainstream comics, most particularly their impossibly proportioned bodies.
“It’s the same for men,” he acknowledged. “But I don’t find that as offensive.”

Supreme Commander

HALFWAY through the film “Dreamgirls,” in a performance of the title song, three women in floor-length gowns are shown from behind. As they float toward the front of a stage and begin to sing, they carve the air with their arms, in synchronized gestures that follow their exaggerated hourglass silhouettes. Every aspect of their movement conveys the same singular image — shimmering glamour and modern, urbane energy — that made their music such a hit.
Based loosely on the Supremes and adapted from Michael Bennett’s 1981 Broadway musical, “Dreamgirls” is the story of three women — played by Beyoncé Knowles, Jennifer Hudson and Anika Noni Rose — who start out as backup singers and end up as stars. But though the movie’s primary subject is music, it’s the Motown era’s underappreciated movement style that keeps the whole thing shaking.

Fatima Robinson, the choreographer responsible for the on-screen moves, has extensive experience with girl groups: while growing up in Los Angeles, she created dances for herself and her two younger sisters. “Choreographing ‘Dreamgirls’ was such a trip,” she said recently, “because I felt like I was placed back in my mother’s shoes.” Literally, that is. “I was 10 years old, with my two little sisters beside me, and performing for my mom and her guests,” she said.
Beyond that, however, her qualifications are indirect: she is too young to have experienced the Motown moves when they were new, and she has had no formal dance training. She hadn’t even seen the original “Dreamgirls” onstage. But that doesn’t mean she’s a novice. She honed her technique during her teenage years in Los Angeles club competitions and as a backup dancer in music videos.

At 21 she choreographed her first video, for Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time.” From there she went on to choreograph for people like Lenny Kravitz, Busta Rhymes, Prince, Mary J. Blige, André 3000 of OutKast, and most recently Fergie and Nelly Furtado. Now 35, she is one of the most sought-after hip-hop and popular-music choreographers in the world.
Bill Condon, the film’s director, and Laurence Mark, its producer, invited her to audition for the job, along with three other choreographers. Each had a week to come up with a version of “Steppin’ to the Bad Side,” a show-stopping number about the theft of one of their songs by a white group.

Ms. Robinson decided to take some chances. Whereas the original stage version uses dancing horn players, she recalled, “I went out and got a bunch of tambourines and chairs, and gave it a whole church feeling instead.” She also made the movements less jazzy and more street. “The point was to prove these guys are tough, so it doesn’t feel too dancy. It’s just smooth and cool.”
The choreographers selected dancers, rehearsed and at the end of the week presented a taped video of the dance. Mr. Condon and Mr. Mark liked what they saw on Ms. Robinson’s tape. “Fatima brought an entirely different perspective to the piece.” Mr. Mark said. “She brought in gospel and jazz and blues and soul and rock. It was this amazing amalgam of styles.”
She kept that street influence palpable throughout the film, for a dance style that is less explicitly theatrical than the original stage choreography by Mr. Bennett and Michael Peters.
“It’s a little harder,” said Hinton Battle, who played James Early in the original cast and who appears as Wayne in the screen version. “Those guys are slick and smooth. You never think they sweat at all. Fatima’s brought that edge.”

As Ms. Robinson explained, “I wanted this to be my own.”

Wearing knee-high boots and her always-present poppy red lipstick, she could be a figure in one of her stylish music videos. Certainly no one would mistake her for one of the Lycra- and jazz shoe-clad dancers of the original “Dreamgirls” cast. But she said she believes that she has a lot in common with Mr. Peters, who died in 1994.

“We both use feeling in an essential way,” she said. “We go off intuition. He would tell his dancers to stop standing up so straight, dig in it, get on the ground. There was even an element then of street dance in his choreography. Even though it was jazz, it still had this quality of toughness and authenticity.”

For all her innovation, she said she learned a great deal by studying vintage tapes of “American Bandstand,” “Shindig!” and “Soul Train.” “Right now we’re moving our waist and our hips a lot,” she explained, standing in the studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood that she helped design. “Back then, they were restricted in their wardrobe; when you put those dresses on, there isn’t a lot of movement.”

Keeping her torso stiff, she swayed her hips gently. Then with a coy dip of her shoulders, she unfolded one arm low and to the side, as if offering a tray of cocktails, while the other stretched high above her head: just one of the signature moves she created for the group, who become the Dreams.

Much of the movement style now associated with Motown was invented by a man named Cholly Atkins, the record label’s staff choreographer. An inimitable tap dancer who had worked with black vaudeville acts and chorus lines, he created moves to fit a group’s individual sounds, what came to be known as vocal choreography.

“He would really listen to the rhythm deep in the music,” said his biographer, Jacqui Malone, “and he would make the steps go with those rhythmical hooks. With the Supremes, a lot of their movements had to do with over-the-shoulder glances, swaying of the hands and that kind of thing.”

Ms. Robinson did something similar for the Dreams, whose dance skills evolve over the course of the story. At first they’re backup singers to a James Brown-like character played by Eddie Murphy. While he performs the big, highly physical maneuvers that take up the stage, they just move their hands and shoulders and demurely shift their weight.

“The first few times you see them, they’re trying to get their steps together,” she said. “They don’t know anything. They were just thrown into this. They barely know the songs. But by the time you see the girls performing as Dreamgirls, their hair is done, their movement is very cool, simple and beautiful.”

Some of the film’s most interesting choreography takes place outside the performance scenes. Effie (Jennifer Hudson), the lead singer, who is replaced by the more traditionally pretty Deena (Beyoncé Knowles), sings several songs backstage; these involve less obvious show moves, but they are every bit as carefully thought out as the concert numbers. And as the relationships among the characters change, their movement reflects their changing dynamics.

“You have to show all that,” Ms. Robinson said, “so there’s little things we added within the performance.” For example, when the singer played by Mr. Murphy develops a relationship with Anika Noni Rose’s character, Lorrell, “whenever he does anything with the girls, he’s always paying attention to Lorrell,” she said. “He’s always giving her that little eye. We played with that within the choreography.”

Similarly, in Deena’s early performances, she and the other Dreams stand side by side. By the time she sings “One Night Only,” a raucous disco number, she has become a star; she takes command of the stage, wearing a sparkling cat suit and swinging her arms up and around. The two other singers are in the background.

For almost all of these numbers, during the three months of filming in Los Angeles, Ms. Robinson’s choreographic process was the same. “We would start in the studio, sit down and read the script, then listen to the song,” she said. “Bill Condon was around the whole time we were filming. I would go in and start, and then he would come in toward the end of day, and he would look at the dances and then we would talk and see what we needed to add, what’s too much.”

She worked out the dances first with a skeleton crew, then watched the results on video with Mr. Condon to determine how to shoot it on film. “Her spectacular work walks a fine line between staying true to the period and making the movement pop for today,” Mr. Condon said in an e-mail message.

Because the stars’ time on set was so limited, there was very little room for adjustment. Often she sent them the tapes to study, to make sure they could get right to it when they arrived.
That kind of exacting preparation is a hallmark of Ms. Robinson’s work, on the set and far off it. At technical rehearsals for the VH1 hip-hop honors in early October, long after “Dreamgirls” wrapped, she arrived at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan to block out the show, which she also choreographed. Unlike many choreographers who work in oversized black sweat clothes, Ms. Robinson was dressed in four-inch jeweled heels, impossibly skinny jeans, a white wrap-around sweater and a red bandanna that perfectly matched her shade of lipstick.
She coached her dancers, who were doing a variation on African-themed movement for an Afrika Bambaataa tribute, and her manner reflected her style of dress. She was fastidious and demanding, but she never raised her voice, even in the chaos of lighting crews and microphones that swirled around her. Place holders for artists like Russell Simmons, Method Man and other hip-hop performers who were to be present that night rested in the seats as Ms. Robinson went over the routine with her dancers for the last time.

“I am a hip-hop choreographer,” she said after the rehearsal. “Whatever I do, whether it’s ‘Dreamgirls’ or an awards show like tonight, is influenced by that. For ‘Dreamgirls,’ I had to make the movement authentic to the time and still make it feel fresh. But it wasn’t that hard because Motown naturally informs all of what I do. It represents African-American music, and R&B and hip-hop are children of that whole era. And once those children started scratching their parents’ records, they became the next level of African-American music, and what I do is a part of that.”

Report: Princes Plan Concert for Diana

LONDON - Britain's Princes William and Harry plan to stage a concert with performers including Elton John next year to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of their mother Princess Diana, a newspaper reported Sunday.
The Sunday Mirror reported that the brothers would arrange the event, scheduled to be held July 1, 2007 at London's renovated Wembley Stadium, which can hold around 90,000 spectators.
Proceeds would be donated to British homeless charity Centrepoint and other causes supported by Diana, the newspaper reported. It was expected to be screened live on television.
Paddy Harverson, spokesman for Prince Charles, who divorced Diana in 1996, could not immediately confirm the report.
"We're considering a number of options on how best to commemorate next year. William and Harry will make a decision in due course," Harverson said.
Britain's Mail on Sunday newspaper reported that the princes planned to approach Madonna, Beyonce and Kylie Minogue to perform at the event.
Diana, 36, her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, 42, and their driver Henri Paul, 41, all died when their car crashed at high speed in the Pont d'Alma tunnel in Paris, France, on Aug. 31, 1997.
Retired senior judge Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss is holding an inquest into the deaths and is awaiting a report on the crash by Lord John Stevens, former head of London's Metropolitan Police.
Rumors and conspiracy theories continue to swirl around Diana's death, despite a French judge's 1999 ruling that the crash was an accident. An investigation later concluded that Paul had been drinking and was driving at high speed.
Stevens said in January that his investigation was "far more complex than any of us thought," but did not specify what he meant.