April 27, 1999 | There are 150 stories in the Naked City, make that 152 as of Sunday. Photographer Spencer Tunick, who has earned considerable fame traveling around the world taking arty pictures of hordes of naked people lying down in front of landmarks, proved no match for Mayor Rudy Giuliani's vice-averse police force.

When Tunick and 150 volunteers tried to do their artistically nude photo thing in Times Square in Sunday's wee hours, the reception from New York cops was chillier than early-morning asphalt on bare buttocks. The men charged with keeping the once porn-friendly strip safe for the likes of the Disney set arrested Tunick and his trusty assistant, Justin Jay, just as the volunteer models stripped and got supine.

Tunick, who has tussled with the law for art's sake before, insists his work is not pornographic. "They're bodies lying like pieces of clay ... like a sea of pink. None of the bodies are touching. No one's grabbing themselves in any way," he says. Meanwhile, Tunick's attorney, Ronald L. Kuby (the former law partner of the late William Kunstler who was last seen defending Long Island Railroad murderer Colin Ferguson), damned Giuliani, saying that the bust was part of the mayor's "crackdown on the quality of life and on naked people."

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Or it could just be gas ...

"I see Frank Gifford with the same confused look on his face that I used to get. To me it clearly says, 'What hit me? How do I get out of here?'" -- Kathie Lee Gifford's first husband, Paul Johnson, dissing the morning talk-show host in the National Enquirer.

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What is it with cops and art anyway?

Just because the metal spider outside an Arizona sheriff's front door looked like a funky sculpture didn't mean it wasn't a ... cue "Psycho" shower-scene music ... time bomb!

When Ava Arpaio looked out her window Saturday and saw the 2-foot-long sculpted spider a prankster had stolen from machinist/sculptor Thomas Hall's yard, she thought it might blow, reports the Arizona Republic. And her husband, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was feeling skittish after his name was mentioned on a Trench Coat Mafia-sympathizing Web site, agreed that the creature -- with its black metal body, brown metal legs and grille eyes -- "looked very menacing." So he called in the big guns. After all, he snapped, "Spiders live in webs, don't they?"

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After evacuating the Arpaios and their neighbors, a SWAT team unleashed a bomb robot to zip up and shoot the strange sculpture, tip it onto its back and blast off its hind end with a water cannon. Only then did a bomb squad officer, clad top-to-bottom in a protective suit, gingerly make his way over with a flashlight to peek into the pummeled piece of art's inner parts. "We treat it like it's going to get us," the deputy told the local paper.

Hall, for his part, thought his annihilated arachnid looked "cool" with its legs "all up in the air" and says he wants its remains returned to him. In lieu of flowers, donations in the metal spider's memory can be sent to the Fund for the Preservation of Unusual Lawn Art.

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This is your pilot. We're about to crash into the sea -- NOT!

"To be told you're about to die is not a pleasant experience. Everyone looked up for a stewardess, but they looked shocked. Then everyone turned to their neighbor as the full horror of the announcement sank in ... About 15 minutes later, the captain said, 'I understand that a false alarm sounded to the effect that we are about to ditch. I assure you that this flight is fine.'" -- British Airways passenger Lloyd Pople on what happened when a pre-recorded emergency announcement was mistakenly played during his flight.

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A brand-new bouncing candidate for psychoanalysis

So begins another chapter in the wild man blues of Woody Allen's wacky life: fatherhood at the age of 63.

The notoriously neurotic filmmaker and his 28-year-old adoptive stepdaughter/bride, Soon-Yi Previn, set tongues wagging again last weekend as they strolled the streets of Manhattan with their new baby girl. But no one seems clear on the origins of little Bechet Dumaine Allen, who the swinging duo named after legendary clarinetist Sidney Bechet.

The New York Daily News guesses that the curious couple has adopted the toddler, apparently Asian, as Soon-Yi has not appeared pregnant in recent months, and puts the kid's age at about 5 months. The New York Post, however, reported last August that Soon-Yi might be pregnant and estimates that baby Bechet is only 2 or 3 months old. And Allen, for his part, is offering only a coy, "We're just very pleased."

Less pleased, one might imagine, is Woody's former longtime lover and Soon-Yi's adoptive mom, Mia Farrow, whose children with Allen could call Bechet both sister and niece. Hey, whatever, just so long as they don't one day call her "mom" ...

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Di and I

Once a cad, always a cad. And James Hewitt, the former British cavalry officer who rode into the spotlight when Princess Diana confessed to an affair with him, is about to be a much richer cad. Having once contributed intimate details to a scandalous book about the imperfect princess, Hewitt, London's Sunday Telegraph reports, is fixing to sell the newspaper rights to his princess-boffing memoirs for more than 500,000 pounds ($807,500) and is currently in negotiations with the Mail Sunday and the News of the World.

But royal-juice-seeking readers will be disappointed to learn that Hewitt must tell his tawdry tale without the benefit of the love letters Diana wrote to him, and which she had begged him to burn. The blue notes, written in 1990-91 and subsequently stolen by Hewitt's former fiancée, were recently returned on the condition that they not be published. So if Diana ever jotted the equivalent of her princely hubby's charming wish-I-were-your-tampon exchange with horsy Camilla Parker Bowles, you won't hear it here. Now there's something to be royally grateful for.
salon.com | April 27, 1999

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