Celebrity Muse

At the NY Comedy Festival, Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence reveals why Least Favorite Guest Star (but “nice person”) Tara Reid’s arc on the sitcom didn’t stretch a few episodes longer. (Hint: the smell of cigarettes and booze are involved.) [Rush & Molloy]

Actor/writer/onetime TV quizmaster Ben Stein laments the imminent shuttering of his favorite L.A. power eatery, where he went to observe the restaurant’s A-list patrons, become entangled in feuds with Joan Rivers, and get ignored by a new generation of celebrity trainwrecks: “At its peak, however, Morton’s was the ultimate. In 1994, it moved across the […]

Responding to a query about how he so convincingly portrayed a vomiting fit in We Own the Night, method actor and occasional frog-envisioning, red carpet hallucinator Joaquin Phoenix explains his ralfing technique: “You take a lot of cereal, you drink a lot of milk and you pound down two waters in a row and you […]

· Music round-up: Band of Horses at the Glass House in Pomoina; Softlightes at Echoplex; Casxio at the Silverlake Lounge; Ky-Mani Marley (of the world-famous reggae Marleys) at Amoeba.
· If you’re downtown, hurry over to the Music Center Plaza and watch as NBC’s Fritz Coleman helps kick off the municipal Christmas season at LA County’s […]

While we eagerly await Fox’s higher budget, more ambitious attempts at pushing the reality-TV envelope this January (we just took the fourth episode for the show’s first heart explosion in the Defamer office pool), VH1 will soon be offering the kind of low-grade, humiliation-based programming that will get us to The Moment of Truth’s premiere. […]