• Is Sean Penn the unofficial liaison between Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez? Penn visited Chavez in Caracas on Wednesday and apparently the Venezuelan president told him:

"They gave [Obama] the Nobel Prize — very well, now he should earn it." [Page Six]

• Britney Spears is using Twitter, Twitpic and Twitvid to promote her new single, "3" — there's a micro snippet of the video at the link. [LA Times]
• Ashton Kutcher's best friend is a rabbi named Yehuda Berg from the Kabbalah center. [People]
• Who will host the Oscars in 2010? Hugh Jackman has turned the job down. These are random choices, but I'd love to see Amy Poehler or Wanda Sykes. Or both. [Variety]
• Nanny Stephanie Santoro says that Jon Gosselin was suicidal at the thought of Hailey Glassman breaking up with him: "He said he was going to kill himself… He said he was going to end it all … he couldn't handle it anymore." Breakdown in 3…2… [Radar Online]
• Jon Gosselin plans to publicly apologize "in a sacred space to those whom I have hurt" at the West Side Synagogue in NYC on Sunday. [Page Six]
• Meanwhile, word is that Jon Gosselin/Nadya Suleman show is "definitely on." A source says:"Both Jon and Nadya are each looking at bringing in close to $1 million for doing it." [Gatecrasher]
• Did you see Derek Jeter kiss Michelle Obama the other night? [NY Post]
• Another day, another Michael Jackson money problem. This time it's Leonard Rowe, who says he was MJ's manager of the singer. He's filed a creditors claim for $51,218. [TMZ]
• Wow, John Landis — who directed the "Thriller" video — says Michael Jackson's estate owes him for $400,000; a production company which dealt with the "Thriller" video says it's owed more than $1,000,000; and the producer of the "Thriller" video wants more than a million as well. [TMZ]
• By the by, the Michael Jackson movie will be up for Academy Award consideration. [Mirror]
• Joe Jackson says Michael Jackson is "worth more dead than when he was alive." [NY Post]
• Taylor Squared: Going strong. [Page Six]
• Wait, what? Ne-Yo sings on The Princess And The Frog soundtrack? How very Jazz Age New Orleans. [ONTD]
• Amanda Peet was burglarized by a sassy character. [Page Six]
• Heroes is winding down; low ratings has NBC thinking a "final chapter" is the next way to go. [NY Post]
• Charlize Theron will star in Mad Max: Fury Road. That's right, a new Mad Max flick! No word on whether Mel Gibson is involved, but Brit cutie Tom Hardy is in the flick. [Variety]
• Reese Witherspoon will star in and produce a screenplay called Rule #1 — about a New York woman who befriends a Puerto Rican girl with attention deficit disorder. [The Hollywood Reporter]
• What the world needs now: Men In Black 3. [Reuters]
• David Spade got $200,000 for that Tommy Boy DirecTV commercial with the late Chris Farley. [Page Six]
• Sad face: Dennis Hopper has prostate cancer. He's canceling all travel plans to focus on treatment and is in a "special program" at USC. Be well! [AP]
• Jackie Collins listens to Mariah Carey, John Mayer… and Jay-Z. [Independent]
• "Whenever I'm in the recording studio or rehearsing and I'm not convinced about the way it sounds, I know because my body doesn't react to the music. So I always ask, Hey, am I moving? Are my hips moving? My hips don't lie." — One of 10 answers to 10 questions for Shakira. [Time]
• "I know it gets sensationalized when I say, 'I was very close to death', but I was. It was a scary time. It's scarier since people like Michael Jackson and Heath Ledger have been popping their clogs. pretty much thought 'Is this worth it?' It was obviously not making me happy. The definition of insanity is repeating the same things and expecting a different result. At the time I thought, with the kicking and the rehab, maybe there's other things in life?" — Robbie Williams. [News.com.au]
• "I haven't gone back since because I'm afraid… I'd never get sober for one thing, and to have to run around in a dress. . . it's cold up there!" — Mel Gibson on why he hasn't returned to Scotland since Braveheart. [Daily Mail]
• "When I did my first album, I was marketed as the singer who would appeal to your grandma. But as each record arrived with more power and confidence, I began to sound younger and younger. Some singers start out as young punks and then make a classics album later in their career. With me, it has been the other way round. I feel as if I've finally started acting my own age. I'm the Benjamin Button of pop. It offends me when people think I only listen to Frank Sinatra. I was born in 1975 and I never wanted to be part of the Rat Pack. As a kid, my biggest idol was Michael Jackson. As a teenager, I wanted to be one of the Beastie Boys." — MIchael Bublé. [Daily Mail]
• "I always felt like the male from the time I was a child. There wasn't much feminine about me. I believe that gender is something between your ears, not between your legs. That is something I discovered in the early '90s. It was just a long process of being comfortable enough to do something about it." — Chaz Bono loves being a man. [People]
• "I was tempted to do it. But I couldn't take it. One smoke of pot and I fall asleep. I don't get much out of it. But that's beside the point. My kids were saying, 'Daddy, you have to try!' That's when I shut down. These were mushrooms ... I said, 'Listen, I didn't go through a sex change operation to direct all these women's movies so don't get me started.'" — Ang Lee wouldn't take acid to direct an LSD scene. [Independent]
• "I just drank an iced tea here with lunch. If next year they say iced tea is worse than steroids, I'll probably quit drinking that too. But at the time it was legal, just like drinking an iced tea is legal. The baseball players, the football players, the hockey players - everybody I knew in every professional sport was using it to up their game, or to heal injuries, or to stay at their peak. And everybody thought it was safe." — Hulk Hogan talks about steroid use in his new book. [Time]
• "I hate them!" — Paris Hilton on the Teen Thieves, who stole clothes and jewelry from her home. [Page Six]
• "I have lots of original ideas that maybe will get made. But everyone... Even if you bring them the most obscure movie that nobody's ever heard of — they want to remake that." — Rob Zombie, who reworked Halloween and Halloween 2 and may remake The Blob, calls Hollywood a "scared town." [CNN]
• "America's the only country where people have said that the New Zealand accent sounds posh or sexy or exotic. Anywhere else, it doesn't. That's why I've been spending a lot of time here." — Flight Of The Conchords' Jemaine Clement. [NY Post]
• "As the mother of my kids, I won't slam Dina personally. But she has expressed to me that Lindsay is in dire, dire need of an intervention. And Lindsay needs to see that her mother is either lying to me or lying to her. Dina says positive things about Samantha when she's talking to Lindsay, but then when Dina talks to me, she blames Lindsay's downfall on the Ronsons. If Dina and her cohorts want to continue lying, I could [keep exposing her] for a year - on so many different subjects. My lawyers told me to keep every single conversation - and I did." — Michael Lohan is taking voicemail tapes to Entertainment Tonight. [Perez]
• "If I go back to my black neighborhood, they'll rob the [bleep] out of me." — Tracy Morgan, promoting his memoir, I Am the New Black, at Barnes & Noble. [Page Six]
• "I always felt that I wanted to help women, period. As a child I [saw] women really, really suffer terrible, terrible situations, and I vowed as a child to want to do something — anything — that can help them have better self-esteem so that they don't have to be subjected to men that wanted to kill them. In my music, that's what I've been doing in my career, and now through FFAWN I'm doing that. I guess what got me through when I was young was something I guess a lot of people don't have and that was just the will. ... I don't know what was driving me. I guess it was something in me did want to die — you know, I guess my spirit didn't want to die, but my physical body definitely was at some point was like I gotta get out of here. ... My physical body was contemplating suicide and all this other crazy stuff, and my spirit is what saved me, I believe." — Mary J. Blige, at the official ribbon-cutting for the Mary J. Blige Center for Women, which was made possible through Blige's Foundation for the Advancement of Women Now (FFAWN), design house Gucci and Westchester Jewish Community Services. [CNN]

I love the different incarnations of breastplates, corsets and bustiers we've been seeing on the runway this year, and this one feels sort of Joan-Of-Arc-goes-clubbing. In a good way!

My friend J and I used to play "hip or homeless?" in the 90s. This would have been a mind-scrambler. I'll bet that T-shirt costs more than $150. Derelicte chic is really bizarre, and just makes me want to say that I can derelick my own balls thank you very much.

Chainmail? Or toga? Little-known fact: After the fall of Ancient Rome, everyone went to hear the Ting Tings play.

The tiny shorts and the Napoleonic jacket look like they've been dredged out of a river, for an ensemble that's dripping with cool.

A simple tank and jeans become not-so-simple with luxe fabrications.

Faux-punk! A shrunken leather jacket and tiny shredded shorts — taking a thrifting/DIY aesthetic and making it high fa$hion.

The cobbled-together leather — with grommets and lacing — is a little bit BDSM, a little medieval and very tough. It's paired with a wispy metallic skirt, for a mix of hard and soft.

Part Cyrsta from Ferngully; part Tina Turner in Beyond Thunderdome.

Spotted at Balmain: French vogue's Carine Roitfeld, in a subdued ensemble (for her).

Also spotted: Rihanna, who looked pretty Mad Max in the "Run This Town" video.

[Images via Getty.]

• Agyness Deyn might try hypnotism to quit smoking. She "obviously" wants to stop so she can "settle down and have babies," says a friend of her boyfriend's. Obviously that's any woman's only consideration. [Daily Mail]

• Zac Posen will see your economic negativity and raise you an ounce of creativity. "I started my business in another trying time, right after 9/11. Everyone was saying ‘don't go into business, there's no place, there's no retail world out there.' Nobody wanted to hear about a new brand. But you create your own excitement, and you create the industry, and you create the customer, and that's what is going to get this country out of this difficult time." Yes we can wear beautiful dresses! [The Cut]
• Meanwhile a rag-tag group of former i-bankers has a crazy dream to make ugly shoes from recycled trash. Which is a kind of creativity that, environment aside, I'm not sure we need. [The Street]
• Lynn Yaeger goes to fashion week on the subway. Just. Like. I. Do. [The Cut]
• "Vivica Fox came out in this full sequined gown and she had the longest hair weave of her life. It was a shock, it was inspiring to women." If you've ever wanted to enter the mind of Christian Siriano, one good way of doing so would be to read an entire column by him. Fashion week is literally amazing, guys! [Time]
• Coco Rocha, in between attending fashion shows and walking in them, is also hosting an hour-long documentary about the lives of models during the week of weeks for E! Busy girl. [Elle]
• Kelly Cutrone had a hand in getting Ashley Alexandra Dupré to Yigal Azrouël on Friday. Yigal fired her. [NYDN]
• But Cutrone still wins for sheer audacity of media tricksterhood: she introduced Dupré to an editor at an avant-garde fashion magazine who wants to shoot the ex-callgirl, like, yesterday already. So this is how you get into Dazed and Confused. [The Cut]
• Are runways this season more diverse than last? It's looking like yes. The New York Times talks to some models from Harlem and the Bronx who are glad to see the "No ethnic models" signs retired. (The story also reminded me of how I know three models who all went to the same high school somewhere in deepest Queens. Once I told one of them I was thinking of moving to Queens and she gave me this withering look and said, "By 'Queens', you probably mean, like, Astoria, or Long Island City, don't you?" I did. But at least I know where Queens is, unlike a nameless designer in Eric Wilson's piece.) [NY Times]
• Model Sessilee Lopez eats egg McMuffins and asks to take home clothes from fashion shows. [NYDN]
• Peter Som has a fall collection, even if he didn't have a show. [Fashionista]
• An angel investor in Patrick Cox's struggling handmade shoe house was caught trying to license the Patrick Cox name and trademark for profit. [Telegraph]
• Somewhere, someone built an algorithm to analyze all the acres of type churned out in fashion week coverage, and that someone is here to tell us that this season's buzz words are "chiconomics" and "Michelle Obama." And "recessionista." [UPI]
• Anna Wintour is still talking about that sequined mini-dress The Recession made her not put in Vogue. Only now, in her mind it only cost $25,000, not $50,000. Times are hard. Anybody got any idea whose dress this might be? [WSJ]
• The May cover of Wintour's magazine might actually feature some models on it, in honor of the costume institute gala at the Met, which is model-themed this year. Online speculation points to Raquel Zimmerman, Natasha Poly, Liya Kebede, Isabeli Fontana, and Natalia Vodianova as among the final choices. [Fashionologie]
• British retailers are going to change their sizing for children's clothes because of the obesity epidemic. [Telegraph]
• Which will play right into noted obesity educator Karl "No Fat Chicks" Lagerfeld's talking points. The Kaiser also has reservations about online shopping, although this one time his assistant showed him how to order books and music on Amazon.com and it wasn't so bad, he supposes. [Portfolio]
• Nastia Liukin's line of denim isn't faring well. But her leotards, sold to other gymnasts, should keep her from the poor house. [The Cut]
• Wal-Mart isn't concerned about the souring fortunes of celeb-backed labels; it's launching a new Russell Simmons line. [WWD]
• Zooey Deschanel is also getting in on the action, with a limited-edition pair of $415 Oliver Peoples sunglasses she personally designed. My snark for this project is lessened in direct proportion to the share of the profits that will go towards victims of domestic violence. [LA Times]
• Posh's dress line has slightly lowered its prices from last season. But she's not sure if it's inspired by Mad Max or Mad Men. Either way there's a gray one with a butt ruffle. [Daily Mail]
• H&M's same-store sales beat analysts' expectations by only declining 1% on last January. This is good news. [WSJ]
• Whoa. A man in Osaka threatened 11 Uniqlo employees with a knife, tied them up with packing tape, and stole 2.5 million Yen. He was arrested as he tried to escape. [Breitbart]

[New York, December 1. Image via Splash.]