BlackBook Magazine

As promised: Ugly Betty's America Ferrera gets glammed up for the August 2008 issue of BlackBook, on newsstands July 22.

Chic, sleek, slick, elegant, and stylish are all words I’m guilty of overusing. Especially "chic." I have to admit that my posts are sounding a bit like the press releases that come attached to the invitations. It’s easy to name-drop the morning after when you’re able to copy and paste from a tip sheet, and I don’t know if there are any more ways I can characterize a chic event. (I've actually used the last alternative in the thesaurus.) Can you blame me? The amount of brain cells I’ve killed from the copious amounts of chic cocktails I've downed have made staring at the blank page in the morning a challenging experience. So here I am at the W Hotel in Union Square typing away (thank goodness for modern BlackBerry technology and boring friends!) on a review of my booze-drenched, celebrity-infested week. From Brooke Shields to Socialista, with Lauren Conrad’s bratty behavior in between.

Maybe you think most of Long Island along the L.I.E. is just a wasteland of Bennigans, Applebees, TGIFridays, Wendys and McDonalds. But how wrong you’d be. Sort of. Every desert has its oases -- also its scantily clad chicken-wing hawkers. So you can pull over for a bite, or floor it until you hit the Starbucks in Manorville the way you usually do. Here are a few places worth a stopover on the drive out east up 495.

What, you’re stopping already? On the ass-(aka LIC-)end of the Queensborough Bridge, Sage American serves up organic eats and sandwiches, and it's just a three-block detour on the way to 495. Try it. When else would you find yourself in Queens?

For all you Project Runway fans, top three contestant Rami Kashou was in a bar fight last night! Rami made it to the end of the contest by consistently wowing the judges last season with his Grecian-inspired frocks. A partygoer at West Hollywood gay establishment the Abbey reports that he saw a scuffle between Rami and another clubgoer, then witnessed Rami get hit in the head with a martini glass, leaving him bleeding from head to toe. Ouch. While the clubgoer had no idea what started the bar fight, he did see Kashou being taken away in an ambulance, and the martini-glass-thrower being hauled away by security.

Whereas New York galleries have an unflappable fealty to art classed by influence, taste, and theory, the galleries of the West Coast operate less intellectually and more intuitively as windows, providing insight into the land's breezy consciousness. The group art show at GR2 -- the gallery associated with Giant Robot magazine -- is no exception. With works by 30 artists (such as Yumi Sukugawa), "Suggestion Box" sidesteps highly conceptualized work for boldly narrative pieces, without linking their work to highfalutin' themes or statements. And as much as we all (especially yours truly) love the guesswork involved with complex concept-based art (and the intrinsic photo-op to pose thoughtfully, arms akimbo, and scrutinize the painting at hand), sometimes, it's just more pleasant if the artists opt to fill in the blanks. The GR2 show, opening tomorrow, seems fit to do just that.

To paraphrase (okay misappropriate) food critic and author Raymond Sokolov, the Hamptons' East End is a narrow island off the coast of Manhattan devoted to the pursuit of brunch. In New York, the ladies, they lunch; when in the Hamptons, they brunch. Nosh with the best of them at the following BlackBook-approved locales. And check out our full Hamptons listings in restaurants, nightlife, and hotels.

Having inherited the morning-nosh mantle from the diner that occupied this Sag space before it, perennial brunch pick New Paradise Café (despite Durkin and Co.’s protestations that it is no longer a breakfast joint) serves a mean Bloody Mary to wash down the house specialty L.E.O.

Every good fashion lover knows the September issue of every fashion magazine is the biggest and the best; we wait with breath that is baited. However, there seems to be only one magazine this September featuring actual models on its cover. Neither Vogue nor Elle; the former's cover girl is Kiera Knightly, and the latter chose to go with "musician" and sometime "actress" Jessica Simpson. The September model mag honor goes to Vanity Fair of all places, which will feature all the marquee-name 1990s models. Confirmed for the VF cover are Stephanie Seymour, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, and Cindy Crawford. Are models such an endangered species that only an ensemble cover had any chance of getting play for fall?

The long-abandoned Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea, is being given a second chance by the seemingly and suddenly reformed rogue nation. The 105-story building -- once dubbed "the worst building in the history of mankind" by Esquire -- has not been worked on in 15 years, and a deranged Egyptian group is bringing it back to life.

Vans have come a long way since the days of Jeff Spicoli pulling bong hits and slapping his noggin with the classic checked slip-on. They've branched out to all sorts of designs, fabrics, and styles, and they've bridged the overlooked culture gap between skate rats and head-bangers. All this generates annual fall lines that get Vans aficionados frothing at the mouth. Now get ready for fall 2008 kicks, which include two-tone corduroy lace-ups in muted colors, as well as sweet-ass Iron Maiden high-top-style classic Sk8-Hi, featuring the group's album cover artwork from its 1983 album Piece of Mind. My fave? The Johnny Ramone slip-ons.

While shock artist Andres Serrano may be trying to pass shit off as art, "Garbage Picker! The Contemporary Artist as Chiffonnier(e)" (opening tonight at New York's Affirmation Arts) explores the role of the chiffonniere, or ragpicker. "Ragpicker" might be what thrifty fashionistas call themselves when fishing through their neighbor's trash for "vintage" finds. But instead of trying to recontextualize trash as garments, this Chelsea show utilizes trash as a means of exploring capitalism -- both in its 19th-century incarnation, when the American economy was starting to pick up a little steam, and in its current incarnation, when it resembles a possible outtake of Serrano's latest work.