Facials are a beauty treat that I indulge in on a regular basis. While I understand the greater good of extractions, two other facialist moves can usually ruin the experience for me. One is insulting my skin: Sun damage I can understand. Oily pores? I did nothing more than inherit them. And the other is product pushing. However, there are the exceptions when the pushed product begets a where-have-you-been-all-my-life epiphany. This happened when Shyou of Salon de Shyou introduced me to Biologique Recherche’s P50 Loition (best skin clearer EVER), and, more recently, when Park Avenue facialist Dangene suggested I try Sanitas skin care. “Our best find,” her colleague confirmed. She wasn’t kidding. For about six weeks now, I’ve been using my Sanitas regimen of cleanser, toner, serum and moisturizer, along with a bi-weekly dose of Lemon Cream Scrub, which, with its intoxicatingly fresh scent and gentle exfoliators, has become my favorite. Now my acne-prone skin is staying quiet, my rosacea has all but disappeared, and my complexion has a suppleness and glow I hasn’t seen in a while. I’m sure much of the credit goes to Dangene, but after this recommendation, I will always take her advice.

Lemon Cream Scrub, $32, getsanitas.com

As Mel's image sinks, Leo jumps ship. Examiner

Snooki Who?: On the eve of Jersey Shore's second season premiere, Obama is clueless. New York Daily News

A Bird's-Eye view of shoppers' tastes: tracking customer spending habits provides a vault of info. Wall Street Journal

Saks Fifth Avenue is set to carry merchandise for women of all sizes: Why did it take so long? Fashionista

American Apparel's stock falls after their accounting firm dumps them. SFGate

Yoga's Gawker: A yoga blog offers both guidance and satire. New York Times

Iggy Pop debuts a fashion line, despite his personal aversion to clothing. New York Magazine

Plus-size women vs. the fashion industry New York Times Magazine

$30,400 and an exclusive invite is all you need to hang out with Barack Obama and Anna Wintour--the Vogue Editor-in-Chief will host 50 of her powerful friends at a DNC fundraising dinner tonight. The Wall Street Journal

In other Democrat news, it looks like Chelsea will be wearing Vera at her upcoming nuptials. WWD

Republican Senator Scott Brown, who once posed nude in a centerfold for Cosmopolitan, won't be modeling again anytime soon. The handsome lawmaker refused to participate in a photo shoot for The Hill's recent 50 Most Beautiful People on Capitol Hill list. The Washington Post

One hot staffer who did participate may have gotten posing advice from a Hollywood starlet--Ben Dunham, a New Jersey senator's legislative assistant, was linked to Mad Men fashionista January Jones this past Fall. Politico

First Lady of France Carla Bruni was spotted on-set with Owen Wilson and Woody Allen filming scenes for the director's new project, Midnight in Paris yesterday. This is the former supermodel's first foray into acting. Huffington Post

And finally, you've seen what a group of wealthy housewives can do to a state's reputation when the cameras are turned on them. Find out if Washington is strong enough to take on The Real Housewives of D.C., when the show premieres next week. Bravo

James Franco has a very nice face and superhuman energy. NYMag

From Blake Lively's cleavage to Milla Jovovich's legs to Scarlett Johansson's hair; Spider Man wannabes were upstaged at last weekend's Comic-Con. Huffington Post

This summer, billionaires in St. Tropez have a lot of champagne to drink. Gawker

The New York Times compares Snooki to Elizabeth Taylor and a "rare, unstable gas". NYTimes

Hidden beaches, elaborate parties, exotic adventures--these jet-set vacations are worthy of a mid-work daydream. Vogue

There's one sure sign that the end of summer has arrived, and I couldn't be more thrilled: Pre-fall is here! The transitional season has hit the stores in Soho in a big way, and I'm especially excited about Prada's newest merch. I checked out the display yesterday and it is military madness--dozens of camo-painted mannequins standing in formation, all in a uniform of hyper-colored gear.

I'm dying over these men's shorts and backpack, while, in my opinion, the printed coats are a must-have for the ladies.

Put down whatever you're reading right now: this week Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Absurdistan, releases his third (and, in our opinion, best) novel, Super Sad True Love Story. A tale of inconvenient love set in a slightly futuristic and very dystopic America, the novel follows Lenny Abramov, a soulful and affable 40-ish New Yorker who's lost among a rapidly self-destructing society perpetually glued to their information spewing "apparati" (tiny and infinitely more capable iPhones). We spoke to Shteyngart about religion, slutty clothes and the perils of doing readings in red states.

The book documents a sort of American apocalypse, with the country collapsing financially, morally, intellectually. The scariest part is that, in light of the last few years, your imaginings don't seem all that unrealistic.
It's so weird. When I started writing this it was 2006 and I had things like the collapse of banking and the collapse of the auto industry in the book. And of course as I was writing, these things started really happening. So I had to keep making things worse and worse.

You paint a bleak portrait of literacy in America—books are considered artifacts and college students major in subjects like Assertiveness and Credit. You teach at Columbia University; do you actually fear such a trajectory?
Well the humanities are finished. Except at the very, very elite universities where you have the luxury of knowing that once you graduate a job awaits you, or at institutions like Oberlin, where I went—you're not going there to make money; you're going to, like, raise turtles on the Oregon coast. But at other institutions it's finished. And it hits me in the gullet—this is my livelihood. I did a reading in a state—I won't mention which state, but it's redder than a tomato—and a student from the honors college of this particular state university raised her hand and said, "Mr. Shitgart, how do I know when a book's been fiction-ated?" I was like, What?? She said, "You know, when it's not true, because I only like to read true things." I told her if it says "novel" on the cover, it's probably been fiction-ated. You can't make this stuff up.

One thing that endures in your dystopian America is religion.
It will always survive. I'm not a religious person at all—I don't really see the purpose of it. But now we're beginning to do research into religion being connected to genetic coding. There are apparently some people who are predisposed to think there's a higher power. It's like alcoholism; you're marked to believe. And some of us just have a much lower propensity. I live on the Lower East Side and there are a lot of Hasidic Jews there and some of them are just not marked for religion at all. One of them told me he'd take my last book, Absurdistan, and put it inside his prayer book. It's the most profane novel, and he'd read it instead of praying. I thought that was great.

You come up with many hilarious, futuristic innovations in the book—for instance, onionskin jeans, which are basically transparent pants that have become all the rage among young women.
I just love how every year summer comes around and people just get nakeder and nakeder. And when I started writing the ass crack had begun to make, like, a hugely aggressive appearance. I noticed it even among people I know who are fairly conservative. So I was following the ass cracks around for some time and I was like, well, what if we just turn this around a little bit?

You also concoct some amusing new acronyms that—in the vein of LOL—are a regular part of digital communication in the book.
Like JBF—Just Butt-Fucking. I love that one! "Oh, I'm just butt-fucking with you, JBF!" One I used already exists—ROFLAARP: Rolling On the Floor Looking At Assorted Rodent Pornography. Another one that I made up was TIMATOV—Think I'm About To Openly Vomit. That one sounds like a Hebrew saying. I hope that one gets traction. JBF, too.

You did a satirical video advertising the book in which you costar with the writers Edmund White, Mary Gaitskill, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jay McInerney and your student at Columbia, James Franco. How did this come to be?
I wrote it and my friend Doug Choi directed it. It helps to know all those people, so I just picked up the phone. Actually I've met Jay only once but he's said really nice things about my work and it was very sweet—he came with a nice bottle of wine and I gave him a nice bottle of vodka. So it worked out well. And the video went really viral. Look, I've given up completely on the idea that the writer can be the person at home in that cozy study just writing away. Nowadays, you're a persona as much as you're a writer. You have to be out there, hustling this thing. I have this Facebook thing now, this Gary Shteyngart page you can go on and, like, "like me" or something. My publisher made me start doing it.

Which might be seen as particularly depressing, considering your characters in Love Story are slaves to technology and social media.
That's the thing: the web goads us all into becoming stand-up comedians, food critics... We're doing everything for this thing and it wants everything we've got. How will we resist? It's almost like a religious entity; we worship this thing, it knows everything and sees everything and is everywhere and nowhere at once. And the idea is that it's neutral, but we know better. We're all microserfs now, we're all uploading information into this thing [Shteyngart picks up his own iPhone], so it becomes bigger than anything we do. And it's ultimate purpose is what? To help some corporations better sell some products? It's very disturbing. The bar is the only refuge, because at some point one is too drunk to effectively wield this machine.

In light of all this, how do you avoid constant depression?
It's possible to be much happier when you're divorced from the truth. When you run into the truth head on—that the planet is killing itself, that culturally and intellectually we're destroying ourselves, that our attention span is getting smaller and smaller—it's horrifying. But if you can find a way to ignore all that stuff, then life is pretty good!

Naomi Campbell is going back to court, this time to testify in a blood diamond case. HuffPo

PETA reaches Her Majesty in the form of new bearskin hats for the Guards... faux bearskin that is. The Telegraph

Shopping online is women's new favorite pastime, but now etailers are trying to seduce the gents. WSJ

Just when you thought modern-day dating was confusing enough, here's online courtship version 2.0. New York Times

The case of the disappearing outcast: Why there are no more Darias. The Paris Review

Photo: Steven Klein

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child premiered yesterday at New York’s Film Forum, and director Tamra Davis stuck around after the 8 pm screening for a short chat with the audience, discussing her documentary film’s inspiration, and how the whole story unfolded. From the years 1983 to 1986, as Basquiat’s star was swiftly rising, Davis, then a film student and gallery assistant, interviewed her close friend and filmed him painting in his studio, amassing about four hours of footage. When Basquiat died in 1988 at the age of 27, Davis put the project away in safe keeping, only recently deciding to revisit it. After much persistence, Basquiat’s father Gerard gave Davis his blessing to access his son’s art archive (for 1996’s Basquiat, director Julian Schnabel did not gain the estate’s permission; in fact, Davis says Schnabel himself painted all the artwork shown in the movie), and she then began interviewing key figures in the artist’s life, including his long-time girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk and art dealer Jeffrey Deitch.

The result is a beautiful, heartbreaking portrait. Davis’ own dialogues—which capture Basquiat’s boyish charm and easy smile in closely cropped frames—are interspersed with other interviews, films, and photographs of the artist and his work (including a great clip of him walking in a Comme Des Garcons runway show). Thanks to Davis’ fascinating documentary, the record of Basquiat’s life is a bit more complete, but as far as the filmmaker is concerned, she says the piece is really “a love letter from me to Jean.”



Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child is showing at Film Forum through Aug. 3. Davis’ entire transcript is part of a traveling exhibition, called Basquiat, currently in Basel, Switzerland.

—Julianne De La Torre

Photo: Basquiat, courtesy of Lee Jaffe

Anyone who’s been sucked into Bravo’s The Millionaire Matchmaker is familiar with the particular charms of its Los Angeles-based star, Patti Stanger. The founder of the Millionaire’s Club, a dating service and charm school for the uber-wealthy, manages to be both nasty and genuinely sweet to her unlucky-in-love charges and their prospective sweethearts. So when my boss got an email inviting her to a casting call for the upcoming season, to be shot in New York City, I, her reality TV-obsessed intern, was given the task of attending. And what’s more, I agreed to enter my single self into the pool of hopefuls for the event, despite never having been set up on a blind date, let alone one that might take place on film.

A casting session filmed for The Millionaire Matchmaker

Upon entering the Marcel Hotel, I was escorted to the Polar Lounge, which resembled the gender-divided dance floor at a middle school social. Miniskirt-clad twenty- and thirty something women eagerly filled out forms, while the guys (mostly actor types) clung tight to the bar. I started by filling out the 26-page application. How did I find dating in New York? Fast paced and non-committal. What was my last boyfriend’s biggest fault? His Napoleonic complex. Who would my dream millionaire be? A New York Yankee. What was I hoping for out of this? Who knows?

Patti (center) and her team

Eventually I was led into a private room to chat with casting director Vinnie Potestivo, who insisted that viewers will be introduced to a different type of dater in New York, someone more career driven, sophisticated and fashion-focused. “And the men won’t be slobs,” he added, taking a dig at the Los Angeles lot. Quickly, talk turned to my own dating preferences. I got the feeling that Potestivo had already picked out my dream millionaire and was just waiting for me to say yes. Would I date someone who was not Catholic? Would 5’10’’ be a suitable height for a date? Would I be attracted to someone who worked in fashion? Yes, yes and yes. As I posed for a photo and gave Potestivo my contact information, the spirit of the event took over and I couldn’t help but feel a little hopeful, excited even. Now all I have to do is get ready for my close-up.

—Lauren Mayer

Photos courtesy Bravotv.com

Jason Stackhouse on "True Blood" has changed a lot over the past few seasons—he’s gone from playboy to radical Christian to killer. But it’s Ryan Kwanten, the Australian-bred stud who plays the Southern deviant on HBO’s guilty pleasure, who has made each of Jason’s phases compassionate, sexy and real. We caught up with Kwanten, on the morning after the show earned an Emmy nod for Outstanding Dramatic Series, to find out what’s in store for his character this season and what the talented actor is doing when he’s not conversing with vampires.

Your character, Jason, always seems to have some new problem surfacing.
Yeah, he is just like one of those little stress-balls. He is always getting squeezed and poked and prodded, pulled in all different directions, but for someone with his—how should I say this—cerebral failings, he does pretty well for himself. It’s an interesting time in his life because he’s got to learn to think for himself.

We have heard that one of the ways he starts to move on is through a mysterious new love interest. Tell us a little bit about her.
The character’s name is Crystal and she’s sort of the first character that we’ve met in the life of “True Blood” who has the potential to really sweep Jason off of his feet, show him what it’s like to be in love. She’s played by Lindsay Pulsipher, who is a very intelligent, very good-looking young actress. She’s really turned what could have been a caricature into something with a lot of subtext and a lot of weight.

Jason is basically the definition of a redneck—always in a sweaty muscle tee, drives a truck, says “ain’t” a lot. You’re an eloquent Australian—has it been difficult to find common ground with your character?
Yeah, well I’ve had to deal with the wardrobe. I personally wear like a size 30 or 31 jean, but Jason somehow squeezes into a size 28—so that was, something to get used to. The accent actually came surprisingly naturally. I’ve always kind of prided myself in doing that stuff. I’ve never had an accent coach or anything and everyone has sort of embraced the accent that I’ve found. Amazing numbers of people have come up to me thinking not only that I’m from America, but also that I’m from the deep South.

Kwanten on set

You definitely offer a comic relief on the show, and now you’re on set with Steve Zahn filming the adventure-comedy-fantasy film, “Knights of Badassdom”. Do you prefer comedy?
I definitely enjoy comedy; it makes for a very fun shoot. But at the end of the day, if the script is good, it doesn’t really matter what I’m doing. I like to be constantly challenged. I go to New Jersey next to film a movie called “Truck Stop”. It’s a very heavy sort of drama, where I play a pimp, of all things. Then from there, I have a film back in LA, which is an action film.

When you do actually have a day off, what are you doing?
I live a very normal life. Pretty much all of the drama in my life, I try to leave it on set. Most of my friends are out of the business so it keeps me pretty sane and centered. I just sort of do, you know, what anyone else would be doing—going to the beach, exercising.

We’ve heard you’re working on a self-help book called “The G-Strategy”. Is this your first foray into writing?
It’s not exactly a self-help book. It’s a satire of a self-help book. I’m kind of poking fun at the whole self-help craze, which has kind of exploded in the past five years. But I have done a lot of writing. I’ve sold a lot of scripts back in Australia, and written poetry that’s been published, though this is my first attempt at long-form fiction.

Are we going to be seeing your scripts in Hollywood at any point?
Not necessarily, but perhaps at some point I’ll get into producing. I’d love to give other young actors the same sort of chances and opportunities that I had. To have the ability to discover someone—there would be nothing greater.

Photos: top, WWD. All others, courtesy HBO.