In a New York Observer diary that begins with a riff on the Hollywood swag season that is upon us and ends with a personal tribute to Johnny Carson, Bruce Feirstein also manages to skewer the Bush inauguration, speculate that Barbara Boxer is running for president, and inform New Yorkers that, yes, there is a political event coming up in L.A.:

In other news from the West Coast, the rains have stopped, The Aviator remains the inside favorite for Best Picture (with Sideways and Million Dollar Baby close behind), and the city is about to hold an election for mayor. The incumbent, James Hahn, currently leads in the polls—despite the fact that the vast majority of Angelenos probably couldn’t pick him out of a police line-up. To couch it in a New York colloquialism: Bloomberg, Giuliani or Koch, he ain’t.

The Observer also visits with the NYT Los Angeles bureau's Sharon Waxman at Sundance.

"It kind of gets bigger and crazier—and more stupid—as the years go by," she said. This time, however, Ms. Waxman will be adding to the hullabaloo with a little noise of her own. The release of her first book, Rebels on the Backlot, about the Gen-X directors who defined 90’s cinema—David O. Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, to name a few—was timed to hit the bookstores on Tuesday, Jan. 25, at the height of this year’s festival.

The NYO quotes a passage from the book on the lifestyle choices of her subjects: "Once Anderson went on to make Boogie Nights he tended toward the hard-partying, woman-hopping life led by Quentin Tarantino, his mentor. Cocaine became his drug of choice because it was better suited to his hard-charging, larger-than-thou ego and the maw of his artistic need. Russell was strictly a marijuana man, which was more suited to his neurotic, internal nature."