TV is simply a place where people go when they get tired of thinking. -- Kevin Devitte

The three-day weekend left me limp but bored, so I attended a Gossip Girl dinner with friends. I have an impossible work week ahead of me and wanted to get my mind out of the business and back in the gutter where it belongs. However, there was no escape for me, as the storyline of "the greatest show ever" had Chuck Bass buying a club. He spends the show trying to obtain a Patrick McMullan photo of the king of nightlife, Sean MacPherson. In the real world, Sean and partner Eric Goode are building one great place after another. The Jane Hotel, the Bowery Hotel, and the Maritime, as well as B Bar and the Park. These joints will soon be joined by a couple of new locations. A very secretive pal of mine tells me that Sean and Eric very secretively just started building something on the southeast corner of 2nd Street and 2nd Avenue. My source is a very quiet guy. It's as if every word spoken takes a day off his life. If that was me, I'd have been in the ground 25 years ago.

● Casa la Femme (West Village) - The French Kiss cocktail and Mediterranean fare seem to put you in the mood, but it's really belly-dancing beauties and equally glamorous staff that produces the allure of the place. Their simple-sweet service and svelte, mannequin-like aura makes the entire experience romantic and outlandish.
● Rose Bar (Gramercy) - Whenever I see Nur Khan, he's usually with top models like Lily Donaldson. Needless to say, with the one-two punch of Ian Schrager and Julian Schnabel top design, one of the most beautiful bars in the city is staffed by the most beautiful people as well. Bartenders are the pouty, brooding type. Cocktail waitresses are classy in a dangerously sexy way -- all seem like James Bond babes, and we always leave shaken and stirred. Wins for a likewise beautiful clientele.
● Baddies (West Village) - The Kingswood Aussies bring their Aussie-ness to the downstairs party. In case you don't speak Australian, Aussie means sexy, mate. Strapping men with accents and their friends who are just as Aussie, even if they are American. Close quarters in the murky-chic basement means a lot of flirting, trust us.

Sandra Ardito heads sales, marketing and special events for KO Hospitality Management (Cooper Square Hotel, Empire Hotel, Hotel on Rivington, and Chelsea Hotel in Atlantic City). We met the hospitality connoisseur at the Cooper Square Hotel to get the scoop on the Hamptons Memorial Day hotspot, the Reform Club Inn (suites and private cottages in Amagansett), working for Ian Schrager, and why we should stay at Cooper Square (besides the fact that it's the location of the Bjork's afterparty tonight).

Is this the first hotel KO has developed?
No, we did the Empire Hotel on 63rd Street, and we did the Chelsea Hotel in Atlantic City for Paul Sevigny and Matt Abramcyk. For those hotels, I would describe us as the hired guns.

The New Scene Stealer: More than a decade ago, actress Taraji P. Henson packed her bags for Hollywood, in search of a fresh start. It’s taken a few years and a little hustle, but the rising star of this year’s most anticipated film has finally found her flow.

“No-Shows!” screams Taraji P. Henson from the bathroom of her hotel suite in midtown Manhattan, her outstretched arms brandishing what look like two raw, embryonic chicken cutlets. “They’re my secret weapons,” she adds with the smile of a high-wattage fluoride model, before tossing the nipple concealers onto a nearby bed. Quietly but assuredly, the 38-year-old actress has become a secret weapon in her own right, most recently in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which she plays Brad Pitt’s mother, a woman whose adopted son ages in reverse while she creeps towards death. It’s an unlikely scenario, the details of which she is quick to eschew. “When it comes to portraying characters, especially the more difficult ones, it’s like I loan out my body,” she says, her eyes two orbs of unrestrained emotion. “I become an empty vessel, as if I’m possessed, and I tell my character to guide me, to talk through me. It’s like I lock Taraji in a closet and let my body be used. It can be kind of scary, actually.”

Reopened in October after an extensive reno, New York boutique hotel the Marcel at Gramercy offers five-star amenities in the realm of four-star prices, with cutting-edge modern décor and the posh Bar Milano restaurant, featuring Northern Italian cuisine upscaled for the Gramercy crowd. The hotel's facelift brings in modern minimalism in a cross between Oscar de La Renta's spring collection and the aesthetics of a lava lamp -- grandiose yet clean, with pops of olives & mustards next to futuristic metallics. Part domestic sanctuary, part club lounge, the fireplace, chandelier, and semicircular leather couch cater to cocktails and the creative set both. Co-owned by the people behind the Empire Hotel, the Marcel features five guest floors and 135 rooms, each complete with increasingly standard iPod docking stations, flatscreen TVs, and marble bathrooms.

Empire Hotel is finally finished with their renovations. The rooftop bar and lounge debuted this summer; last week Center Cut, Jeffery Chodorow's eco-steakhouse opened to great fanfare. The iconic Upper West Side hotel, with its signature giant red neon sign, was a hot property from the 1920s through the 1960s; proprietors hope that the renovations will help the hotel reclaim its place as a New York institution.

A sign (and party) for all seasons.

New York City, like no other, shines through its constant state of flux, through the destruction of historical monuments and the erection of new edifices. This modernist tendency subsides only infrequently under the pitiless pressures of development. Thus the massive neon red-light signs gleaming proudly upon the roof-deck lounge of the Empire Hotel gift the urban dweller with history from the sidewalk and recreation from the bar. (See our gallery of the altitudinous scene.) An express lobby elevator sweeps revelers up to a cascade of interlocking support frames permitting a cultured view of Lincoln Center across the way.