Though the creative output of John Hughes had slowed to a crawl in the decade preceding his death in August at age 59, the iconic director’s alter ego JL Hudson wasn’t taking to retirement quite so easily. Penning screenplays, essays, and fiction for his own amusement, some of his later writing — imbued with the same irreverent, sly but tender narrative quality as his film work — saw the light of day as a series called Very, Very Short Stories (some only four brief paragraphs in length). Excerpts after the jump.

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Today at Flavorpill, we had our rebuttal rebutted. We were surprised to hear that Duncan Sheik’s next musical adventure will be an an American Psycho adaptation — although Spring Awakening was dark in its own right. We watched a man get carted around Manhattan by strangers. We realized just how far Sandra Bullock has come since she broke onto the Hollywood scene with Speed. We thought over which friend we could hook up with Kentucky and made a mental note never to get fresh with Florida. We felt uncomfortable after reading that senior citizens are sexting. Isn’t that bad for cardiac health? We wanted to frolic in a pile of leaves after seeing this natural color wheel. We studied the facial analysis of J.D. Salinger’s mysterious portrait. We too doubted that the voice-over-chick-from-Gossip-Girl would be a qualified curator at the Guggenheim. Or single, for that matter. Lastly, we wished we had our own Duckie, but were consoled when we realized we could just wear him instead.

Marcel Proust liked to question himself, his friends, and perfect strangers about life and death and everything in between. Since 1993 Vanity Fair has asked celebrities (both literary and otherwise) to take a Proust-like questionnaire. Now they’re releasing a book entitled Vanity Fair’s Proust’s Questionnaire, compiling 101 celebrity responses from the likes of Salman Rushdie, Aretha Franklin, Martin Scorsese, and Norman Mailer.

To help promote the project they’re offering an interesting look into how YOU think and how it compares to the celebrities who they’ve interviewed. Answer questions like: “Who are your heroes in real life?” and “If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?” After twenty responses, they’ll tell you which icon you match up with the best.

We most closely resembled Giorgio Armani and Ray Charles. Take the test here, and let us know who you get.

We just stumbled across this year’s Vanity Fair Best-Dressed List thanks to an item in the LA Times about the number of art world personalities who made the cut. And it’s true: Cy Twombly, Bruce Weber, Ike Ude, and Count Manfredi Della Gherardesca are all there, mixed in with Hollywood royalty, New York socialites, political types, and the kind of random fabulous people you usually find on a list like this. Business as usual. And then we spotted the rather surprising user-generated ratings for these bold-faced names. What we discovered about style and popularity, after the jump. Read More »

Photo credit: Annie Leibovitz; Vanity Fair, September 2009

Vanity Fair’s September feature on Mad Men was supposed to be the cover story, until the powers that be decided on Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett memorial images instead. Luckily the issue still contains Annie Leibovitz’s lavish portraits of John Hamm (shirtless in two of the snaps!) and January Jones. Perfect marriage of photographer and subject: don’t shows like Mad Men exist to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz? And vice versa? We just don’t understand her financial woes.

And it’s a red-pencil bloodbath courtesy of Literary Editor Wayne Lawson. [More pages via Vanity Fair; thanks for the tip, @wesleyverhoeve]

Today at Flavorpill, we lost ourselves in The Daily Beast’s wonderful ode to Dash Snow — including never-before-seen images. We read about animal masturbation. We wondered if a lawsuit will derail The Hobbit. We did not want a slice of this pizza. We decided that we need to read the Heath Ledger cover story in Vanity Fair. We checked out what our friends at Cool Hunting are reading this summer. We looked at cool photos of the moon. We learned about the history of sex and advertising and tore down some walls. And finally, we freaked out over the impending tomato crisis. No, seriously.

In High Fidelity, Nick Hornby’s pop culture-obsessed protagonist posited that “What really matters is what you like, not what you’re like.” If we accept that our very identities are intertwined with our taste in music, movies and books, the advent of Amazon’s Kindle (now a steal at $299) does start to seem a bit worrisome. In August’s Vanity Fair, James Wolcott laments the passing of a time when every New York City subway ride presented “an opportunity to spy on the reading tastes of fellow passengers and make snap judgments that probably wouldn’t hold up in court.”

Wolcott poses an important question: “How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?” Tricky, but not impossible! We’ve got a few ideas. Read More »

Humor us for a second: Wouldn’t it have been interesting if Vanity Fair actually talked to respected, less well-known stage actors instead of honing in on every celebrity with a project on Broadway for the upcoming theatre feature in their June issue? Read More »

Last week we told you about site-specific choreographer Noemie Lafrance’s latest project Home, a new piece performed at a location just off the Bedford L stop that invites “the audience to explore the body as a place while exploring issues of public and private space.” Evidently both the location and the intimacy were way too much for a Vanity Fair Brooklyn virgin/Feist fan/”bona fide Upper East Sider”/Tory Burch-shod reporter. Read More »