WONDERFUL TOWN, WONDERFUL SCREED

Gotta love the New York Press alternative weekly for its list of 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers. Among those on the receiving end of its full-bore contempt are movie director Sofia Coppola (50), ad man Donny Deutsch (40), liberal pundit Eric Alterman (39), author James Frey (30), anchor woman Diane Sawyer (23), Dean of the Actors Studio James Lipton (17) and a host of bankers, politicians, media moguls, corporate chiefs, lawyers, professors, pro-smoking activists, bloggers, gossip columnists, actors, comedians, publicists and reporters.

Topping the list is former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, now a businessman. Rest assured, the luminaries who made the list are not likely to gaze upon its wonderful screed. They would gag if they did. Here, for example, is what it says about James Lipton:

It's not just that his sycophantic interviewing technique has transcended butt-kissing to become all-out analingus, or that he's sullied the stage where Pacino performed Mamet with paeans to Ben Affleck. It's not the fey cadence and maddening British affect. It's that Lipton has become so obsessed with full-penetration starfucking that he's allowed the Actors Studio to deteriorate into a fifth-rate factory whose graduates aren't prepared for a two-liner on "Law & Order." In the days of Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg, the Actors Studio was considered more important than the Yale School of Drama; today it competes with continuing education classes at the Learning Annex. Memo to Lipton: Taking it from Jay Leno and Ethan Hawke isn't doing much for your students. And you look ridiculous.

About James Frey:

It still boggles the brain that so many fell for this brawny brat's 2003 rehab memoir, "A Million Little Pieces." Clearly there's a huge audience starved for dimestore, parodic Hemingway machismo. And Frey, the self-proclaimed "greatest writer of his generation," is the man to give it to them. He boasts about getting in real old-time fistfights with his fellow junkie patients and about beating a priest almost to death for daring to touch Frey's very masculine thigh—classic 1930s retro-prose, homoerotic and homophobic at once. His characters are as anachronistic as his writing; there's a steelworker "as hard as the material he works with" and endless tearful farewell scenes with a fisherman, who actually says, "I ain't much for words, kid." Frey's fellow patients all talk like outtakes from a Spencer Tracy movie, pasted into Frey's poorly written, 400-page ode to his family-funded self.

About Diane Sawyer:

The queen of broadcast journalism infotainment, Diane is ABC News' incessant ingenue that we hope one day interviews a hungry Siberian tiger. As Good Morning America's 50-something going on 30-something blond and blue-eyed eternal debutante, she coyly sucks pudding from Wolfgang Puck's spoon, creams over celebrities and moguls of any stripe, cries like an insipid crocodile for the victims of fêted daily tragedies and bats her eyelashes while touting her Nixon-White-House-past. For her current multi-million-dollar-per-year contract, Diane guarantees an overdose of saccharine sufficiently strong to send viewers into a coma, but not strong enough to flush the fourth-place network's morning ratings out of the toilet.

About Donny Deutsch:

Deutsch represents the latest trend in that most loathsome of New York traditions: the selling of adolescent greed, egomania and narcissism as charisma and depth of character. The chief of David Deutsch Associates says he only hires "Jews, chicks and fags," and is known for tearing off his shirt during office hours and saying—without irony—things like, "I can kick the ass of any CEO in advertising!" Think Steven Seagal meets Charlotte Beers. The "Elvis of Advertising" has been dabbling with a CNBC talk show and even told New York magazine that he'd consider running for mayor. Qualifications: good at selling shit, does lots of pushups. Look out, Bloomie.

For running around the streets of Lower Manhattan without visibly crapping himself, Giuliani was elevated from the world's most hypocritical goon to He-Man, Master of the Universe. Forget his violating federal handicap laws, his wars on rent control and community gardens, his refusal to test DNA rape kits until the five-year statute of limitations was up, or his corporate real estate giveaways—Rudy is now considered a Great and Heroic American Mayor. After office, Rudy wasted no time cashing in on his immaculately conceived new stature, riding into a post-mayoral sunset of private sector millions, five-figure lectures and flattering rumors about his political future in the GOP. It was toward this last end that Rudy came out in defense of Bush's Ground Zero campaign ads last month. And why not? He's co-chair of the Republican National Convention host committee, and the tragedy saved his sinking ass too.

Congratulations, Rudy. Though we prayed you'd fade away, your insistent grandstanding, lingering influence and threats of future public office leave us no choice. For actions past and present, you are hereby crowned 2004's Most Loathsome New Yorker. If we didn't have a rule against it, you'd probably be here for life.

Alistair Cooke did not make the list, I am happy to report.