APPOINTMENT TELEVISION: QVC HUCKSTRESS LEVINE GETS HER OWN TALK SHOW

Guess who's getting her own TV talk show? QVC huckstress extraordinaire, Kathy Levine: insanely watchable, inanely loveable, almost Buddha-like in the happiness she radiates.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the nice folks at Studios USA Domestic Television are developing a daytime talk vehicle for Levine, who's sold more cubic zirconia (Diamonique!) than anyone else on the planet. One of QVC's original hosts, on board since the shopping network launched in 1986, Levine has logged more than 12,000 hours of live airtime-- which we think that entitles her to her own country, though a talk show is nice. The show, which will be syndicated, is expected to debut in the fall of 2001.

We've never actually purchased any of the jewelry, cookware, apparel, makeup, or other items that Levine demonstrates (fondling them, as appropriate, with those perfectly manicured fingers). But for us, Levine does nothing less than define great television-- improbably, of course. She happens to be QVC's star seller, having generated more that $150 million in annual sales, but the real story is bigger than that. Levine has a warmth and authenticity that leaps off the screen-- and rural, bedridden grandmothers with credit cards aren't the only ones susceptible to it, either. We've heard plenty of street thugs praise that certain kittenish quality Levine has, which seems to combine strength and vulnerability. Everybody understands strength and vulnerability. Finally: a talk show that's gonna show what's in back of all that-- a bit more of the Kathy Levine story.

EMERGENGY MESSAGE TO SELA WARD: PLEASE STOP DANCING FOR SPRINT!

Sela, what were you thinking? Were you desperate for money? Did they offer you infinite minutes?

That Sprint commercial that has you dancing around, all loose and cha-cha, is totally wrong. It's wrong for Sprint, if they're trying to reach young consumers, because a mature woman feeling all free and kicky has nothing to do with our phone service (let alone with Sprint's advanced "code division multiple access" technology, or the company's century of progress since it was founded, as the Brown Telephone Company, in 1899, in Abilene, Kansas). And that commercial is wrong for you, too, Sela.

Think. Could any dancing on your part have summoned the majesty of globe-spanning, 21st-century telecommunications? Was this gig supposed to be a strategic stepping stone to your big role in Julie Taymor's next Shakespearean tragedy? Baby, you should have passed on this during the first phone call. We recommend that you fire your agent immediately, then call Sprint CEO Andrew Sukawaty and chief marketing officer Charles Levine and beg them to yank the spot. (You were on "Sisters"; you can get through to anybody!) Then find a new agent and ask her to get you another gig like that Jessica Savitch thing. You were completely watchable in that!

What's Up With... People Being All Up In Your Face?

On the street or in a store, do you feel that people are more in your face nowadays, than ever before? When you're trying to walk or drive somewhere, do you find yourself wanting all those folks to fucking just get out of the way? Of course you do. We all do-- for a number of reasons.

Start with a hypothetically well-adjusted, well-brought-up human being, living in a hypothetical community where people have a civilized amount of space to move around in-- whatever that means to you: no traffic jams, no mob at the open bar. Then consider all the factors that, in recent years, have diminished the navigability of public spaces, from a theoretical ideal of 100%:

- Overpopulation: There are many more of us now than when manners were invented. Nobody says "Excuse me," or even knows when to say it. Take off 5%, leaving navigability permanently diminished at 95%. Not great, but acceptable.

- Ungenerosity: Overpopulation means scarcity of resources, of which space is prime. Scarcity institutionalizes have-and have-not thinking-- which, in the case of space, has resulted in all kinds of stand-your-ground posturing. Sad, but it seems kinda normal now to ignore people standing right next to you at the door of a club. Subtract another 5%, leaving the human race at 90%.

- Narcissism: The increase here-- at least in people educated in the U.S. during the last thirty years-- is probably a result of excessive coddling by elementary and secondary school teachers, and college professors, which has allowed individuals to imagine that they are the sole standard by which proper behavior is measured. Like at the movies: "I'm sitting in this seat and I don't particularly care where you sit, as long it's not here, or in front of me, or anywhere else that might affect my enjoyment. And it's OK for me to be this way, because that's the way I am." Definitely minus 10%, for a remainder of 80%. Getting down there, but this factor is not a deal-breaker-- especially since, in a culture where human beings are so readily measured as units of consumption and production, narcissism can help put people back in touch with themselves as units of joy and pleasure.

- Motor Control Deficit: People's legs and arms and shoulders and hips and ankles no longer work with the athletic coordination to which our species was heir. You know that this is a result of hormones, plutonium, high-voltage electrical fields, fluoride, and other shit that big corporations have been pouring into the environment since WWII. Suck away 5%, to leave 75%.

- Personal Sound Systems: It's nice to hear music on headphones, but these devices have devastated peripheral awareness, making already narcissistic and ungenerous people dangerous projectiles or inertial roadblocks. Another 5% gone, leaving us with 70%.

- Cell Phones: See Personal Sound Systems, above. Cell phone users don't know what planet they're on. Lose another 5% like that. This is getting scary. 65%!

- Free-Floating Resentment Bordering on Rage: This is what happens when the world presents too many heinous political and social conditions for you to analyze and act against appropriately. Rational thought gets overtaken by a deep, primal fear of unseen or unknown forces. You get defensive, then aggressive-- at which point you not only don't wanna budge when a stranger says "Excuse me," you wanna kill him. Minus 10%. Which brings us down to 55%.

If there are other significant factors that have contributed to people's being all up in each other's faces, we can't think of them. Of course, there are factors that may be helping matters-- notably drugs, which keep many potentially inconvenient people at home, and the popularity of the words "peace" and "respect" in current usage. Add 1% for those.

56%. That's not much higher than the 50% mark-- which is where anthropologists and sociologists say all hell breaks loose...

OCEAN DRIVE PARTY: MUSTO GETS IN; HIS EDITOR EATS SHIT

Door scenes are silly, of course. We're willing to endure them for a few minutes because a) there might be free food and drink inside; and b) there might be friends inside-- or, at least, celebrities. But is there anything more embarrassing than attending a door scene for more than a few minutes? Is any party fabulous enough to repair the damage done to your ego when a door test reveals you're not cute enough, young enough, dressed enough, connected enough, female enough, animated enough-- welcome enough-- to enter right away? Can any party restore the faith in humanity
lost when a door scene proves once again that guests now would actually rather savor their own desperation than revel in true hospitality?

That's why we were so sad to read about poor Karen Durbin, the Village Voice editor who was there at the door of the Ocean
Drive anniversary party in Miami, with her gossip columnist Michael Musto and a ton of other fabulous people, trying to get past the clipboard. New York magazine reports that Musto "managed to slip in," then reappeared an hour later, to help his posse get ushered in. Musto gets points for not forgetting (though it's not absolutely the best form to ditch your peeps at the door). But Karen! An hour in line? Baby, don't you pay Michael to go to monster-fabulous events so you don't have to? Please let us know if those drinks were extra-delicious or if you managed to brush a model's sleeve on the way to the ladies' room.

And don't even get us started on the ladies' rooms at those things....

RUBIN AT CITIGROUP: NICE 'N' COMFY

Former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin will be paid more that $15 million this year by his new employer, Citigroup. And that doesn't include stock options, worth another $20 million or so. At the Treasury department, Rubin was scraping by with a salary of $152,000 per year. According to the New York Times, Rubin's approximately $35 million represents a new record for compensation at the "No. 2" executive level.

Citigroup's No. 1 is Sandy Weil, in case you're keeping track-- and we think you should, so you have someone to curse out loud the next time you're in line at Citibank, trying to cash your meager paycheck, and the tellers are sauntering around, chatting, behind the thick Plexiglas, instead of stepping lively. Weil received much of his compensation last year in the form of stock and stock options valued at nearly $45 million.

No. 2 had been consumer banking pioneer John S. Reed, whom we've kicked around before in this space. But he's "retiring" this year-- actually, we suspect he's been roughly handled by the titans of Citigroup-- so we're going to very gentle with him from now on.

P4M THEATER REVIEW: Benten Kozo, The Flea Theater (NY)

I've been so fucking busy that I didn't get to see Benten Kozo, this new adaptation of a classic Kabuki play, until last night. It opened, like, a month ago and everybody's been telling me that the production's brilliant-- especially people whom I respect for having finely-tuned bullshit detectors that can pick out the pretentious, artsy, jerk-off sputum from a mile away. So I went down to this tiny but well-run theater in Tribeca called The Flea, and you know what? The production is fucking brilliant.

Kabuki was invented as a real people's theater, right, so the artform is full of highly entertaining characters and wildly dramatic situations-- not unlike a hit TV sit-dram, except that kabuki plays also have coarse jokes, scary demons, fighting, dancing, singing, drumming, cross-dressing, fright wigs and fright make-up, quick-change hi-jinx, and other theatrical trickery that does a good job of keeping audiences from snoozing. I won't (and probably can't, in such a limited amount of space) tell you the convoluted story of Benten Kozo-- except to say that it's about this ultra-wiley bandit and his team of four wiley bandit friends. But I will tell you some of the things that can go wrong in a production like this, all of which I was afraid of when I walked in, despite what my friends had said: gratituous modernizations, condescending direction, amateurish acting, ludicrous costuming, and excruciating length.

But Benten Kozo has none of that. Instead, the play has been contemporized judiciously with some really smart writing and street-wise costuming. The director, Jim Simpson, obviously loves the material and the characters, and made sure the (almost 30!) actors do, too. The mostly American-trained actors, by the way, do a surprisingly good job of recreating, in their own terms, many of kabuki's conventions, rather than mimicking them (as they would do poorly, inevitably). And the whole thing takes about two hours. So go see Benten Kozo before the thing closes on March 31, or I'm gonna to feel even guiltier that I was't able to tell you about this gem sooner.

STUDIES SHOW: CIGARETTES CAUSE CORPORATE DIVERSITY!

Just when Philip Morris had grown more corporately responsible than we ever thought we'd see-- admitting, a few months ago, that it knew for years that tobacco was addictive-- it goes and grows more responsible. PM senior vice president Steven Parrish called nicotine "a drug" this week and said, according to the New York Times, that Philip Morris was "prepared to see cigarette sales drop and to invest elsewhere the assets now spent on tobacco."

We hope they're investing fast. The Supreme Court is scheduled to rule soon on whether or not the F.D.A. has the authority to regulate tobacco. If the Court rules that the F.D.A. does have the authority and finds (or implies) that tobacco should be officially defined as a drug, then cigarettes might be regulated as drug-delivery devices and we'd have a lot of ornery smokers on our hands. Not to mention the possibility of Philip Morris Jeans, the Philip Morris Home Furnishings Collection, and PM The Fragrance.

STUDIES SHOW: SEX CAUSED THE INTERNET!

We knew something was fishy when we read in the New York Times that a new study had found that "at least 200,000 internet users are hooked on pornography sites, X-rated chat rooms or other sexual materials online."

Fishy, because 1) most internet paranoia stories are utter bullshit; 2) the study said that women and gays "may not have the same skills built up that heterosexual men have on dealing with sexual temptation," which is utter bullshit; and 3) the article reported darkly that "researchers said cybersex compulsives spent more that 11 hours a week at x-rated sites and had more problems with relationships and jobs than occasional visitors." Whereas the truth is that the internet has had a positive effect on the sexual identities of many people, irrespective of the amount of time they spend online.

A relatively safe, new ground for experimentation and role-playing, the internet affords a healthy alternative to morbid fantasy and premature, ill-thought-out action, let alone the more profound state of erotic unconsciousness which blankets many men and women, protecting them from potentially fulfilling tastes and flavors other than the two or three they're aware of. To us, it makes sense that upon the first inkling of additional fulfilling tastes and flavors provided by a new mass medium, people would invest some time... exploring. If the results get people to rethink old relationships and jobs, well, baby, that's life.

Of course, some people mis-use this new ground. They waste hours online, lying, becoming abusive, freaking on nice people. Most of those getting fucked up with internet addictions, though. are people who were fucked up in the first place-- and that fact is kinda what has emerged from a subsequent report about the study. The Industry Standard now says that the guy who conducted the study, Dr. Alvin Cooper, happens to be the "Sexploration" columnist for MSNBC, and that he used methodology that was deeply flawed. Cooper's study was directed at self-selected cybersex veterans, as opposed to random subjects, and conducted on the web, as opposed to in person, which is how the most scientifically meaningful sex studies are conducted.

We think that people looking for shit are gonna find shit-- even scientists!. And people who aren't looking for good stuff probably ain't gonna trip over it accidentally.