Thanks to something Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes created, the October issue of Vanity Fair has gotten a little bit of attention. The issue also contains something I created: a fake cover flap you can cut out and attach to a newsstand copy of The Weekly Standard. It’s on page 272, in the Vanities section. More details are here.

This is hilarious: The fake Parents magazine cover I created for this website a couple of months ago has propagated itself all over the web, and now it’s earned its own page on Snopes.com, the excellent website that debunks or confirms urban legends. The cover’s distribution gained significant momentum last week when one of the friendly guys at Boing Boing posted it without realizing it was a joke (and without knowing where it came from). He quickly posted a clarification, but the ball was already rolling: The cover has been pulled out of context and posted in all sorts of places (32,615 hits on i-am-bored.com!), almost always by people who had no idea where it came from. Lots of people have thought the cover is real, so Snopes stepped in to debunk it.

In the post where I originally published the cover, I didn’t pretend it was real. I just meant for it to be an amusing (if juvenile) riff on a growing trend in magazine-cover design. So it’s bizarre to see the cover get taken out of context, and to watch credulous people actually wonder if it’s real.

A totally inadvertent hoax! Huzzah!

The latest issue of Stay Free! contains an excellent and lengthy interview with Bill, the man primarily responsible for the flash-mob phenomenon of 2003. Bill is a very smart man, and he has lots of smart things to say about the phenomenon he inspired. Here’s an excerpt:

I had conceived [flash mobs] specifically as a New York thing. People in New York are always looking for the next big thing. They come here because they want to take part in the arts community, they want to be with other people who are doing creative stuff, and they will come out to see a reading or a concert on the basis of word-of-mouth. Partly they want to find out what everybody else is so excited about, but partly they just want to be a part of the scene. You have this in other places too, but I feel like there’s something in New York that makes it kind of a city-wide pastime. Part of what I liked about this idea was that it would be very frank about the pure scenesterism of it. What is it that would make people come to the flash mob? Well, it would be the fact that if it went off as planned, lots of other people would be coming. The desire to not be left out was part of what would grow it. I didn’t have all of these grandiose notions about it at the time; I mostly just thought it was funny. But I thought of it as a stunt that would satirize scenester-y gatherings.

The interview was conducted by Francis Heaney, whose blog you should be reading.

The Summer 2005 issue—no, wait, the “June/July/Aug/Sept 2005” issue—of Bookforum is coming out in a week or so, and it contains a special section on Thomas Pynchon. Check out the section’s stellar list of contributors:

The man on the cover is Irwin Corey, a loopy comic actor whom Pynchon sent to represent him at the 1974 National Book Awards. When the time came for Pynchon to accept the fiction citation for Gravity’s Rainbow, it was Corey who went onstage and accepted the award from a baffled Ralph Ellison. Corey then delivered a bizarre humdinger of an acceptance speech. You can listen to a short excerpt of it here (Windows Media format). And you can read a transcript of the whole thing here.

The 1974 National Book Awards took place on April 18, a mere two and a half weeks after what is perhaps the most famous streaking incident of all time: On April 2, a streaker named Robert Opel bounded across the stage as David Niven was presenting an award at the 1974 Oscars. Toward the end of his Pynchon acceptance speech, Corey expressed his thanks to “Mr. Knopf, who just ran through the auditorium.” (The transcript indicates that a streaker actually ran across the stage during the ceremony, but I don’t think this is true—I couldn’t find confirmation of it anywhere online. For a couple of minutes, though, I was thinking, “Yes! A streaker! At the National Book Awards! Awesome!” How fucking hilarious would that have been?)

[Side note: According to a website I stumbled onto a few minutes ago, the German term for streaking is Nackerblitz, which translates roughly as “nude lightning.” However, there are only about five Google hits for Nackerblitz, so the word is apparently not widely used.]

Update, May 26: Some content from Bookforum’s summer issue is now online, including part of the Pynchon section.

Improv Everywhere is a New York-based performance art group that stages elaborate public pranks. This weekend the group completed its latest mission: deploying a tuxedoed bathroom attendant to the men’s room in the Times Square McDonald’s.

Here is a full report, complete with some video. It was a solid mission. But I doubt Improv Everywhere will ever top its most inspired mission to date: Best Gig Ever, whereby the group and dozens of its associates showed up at a Mercury Lounge gig by a little-known Vermont band and pretended to be fanatical fans—not to mock the musicians, but to warp the space-time continuum. Genius.

From today’s Washington Post:

A Feb. 5 Names & Faces item on an Evite to Michael Saylor’s birthday party was based on a copy of the invitation that had been partially forged before it was sent to The Post. The original Evite from MicroStrategy’s CEO said the party will be “exotic, mysterious and ebullient,” but it did not say “erotic.” It said “Think ‘Alias’ (the TV show), but sexier,” but did not include “much sexier,” as was reported. The original also specified “cocktail dresses,” but did not say “the shorter the better.” And, the original did not end with — or even contain — the words “no one leaves alone.” Nor was there anything in the original invitation unfit for a family newspaper. The birthday celebration involved dinner and dancing at the Ortanique restaurant for about 200 guests.

[Via Romenesko.]