crazy quilt

• How do moderne womens acquire that timbre to their voices? Wholesale, I mean? That nouveau Valley Girl up in the top of the palette nasal ohmigod...thing? It's kind of an inch back toward the throat from a babytalk sort of position. I dunno. All I know is if you have the TV turned to WE and can't find your remote...it's ringing in your ears.

• I have now eaten these!

• First thing I do when I get richnfamous? Acquire a car and driver. Why...why... Wait. Let me say this again...WHY do famous youngsters insist on driving on their own cars? E! Daily News has basically become Celebrity Car Accident Round-up. I know sometimes you just gotta feel the wheel under your hands, but if I were one of thse folks in the Military/Proactiv® Solution industrial complex, with my first paycheck from a first 2-line speaking role on Two and a Half Men I'd buy a bullet-proof sedan and a fierce terrorism counter-trained Israeli driver and let them handle it.

(BTW, I hate to be lugubrious or even weigh in on this shite, but the celebrity machine is really not gonna be happy til Ms. Spears is dead. That's what we see through those lenses, fame eating her. Why do we think this has no implications for regular folk? Why do we think this isn't gonna happen?)

• Congrats to Skip! She's engineered a super-cool and expected life development with a grace and power that is nonetheless incredibly inspiring. Go darlin freundin, go!

• I'm starting to be overwhelmed by architectural ghosts in Chicago. I was in a cab going up Ashland Ave. this weekend and it was downright haunted. In the most classical ghost-like way. I saw spectral outlines of buildings everywhere--also signs, and businesses, types of architecture and types of city resources, everywhere, all torn down, turned into either empty lots, condos or new-old Irish pubs. Sometimes I think it is this, more than anything, that will make me leave this city. I didn't know where to look, it was very unrestful.

• Over the last year my taste in pasta has become ruthlessly al dente; less-than, really. I like it almost under-done. Throw out the over-done stuff. Weird.

• People who abuse ellipses on the internet...what, she says, employing them herself, can we do to stop this travesty of modern life? The way some people create prose with ellipses as their sole conjunctive device is fairly homicide-inducing. Drifting from topic to topic...limply...like an annoying overcome attention-getting woman lying on a chaise...expecting you to follow from idea to idea or even from listening mode to doing mode...listen to me...do this for me...laugh with me about this...ah here I comment on myself...freshen my drink, would you... They ought to be sent to boot camp.

• A seal on a fairly cavernous chasm has been breached: I saw my first Law & Order! Ever! (Did I mention I was unemployed?) It was Law & Order: Spinoff Twelve or something. L & O: Bad Bad Things. L & O: It's All Over in an Hour. L & O: I Want an Emmy. Whatever. But you know...I kinda liked it. Worried I have a way now to do nothing else.

• Really fabulous exclusive shots of Abby the orphaned otter at cuteotters.com, back through the end of September. Oh that otter... She is just the most!! Kills me. Those on the left are some of the news photos that came out when she was first rescued.

• It is an odd experience, the reading of Martha Stewart Living sometimes. Sometimes it feels like she's working her way through all the domestic phenomena of your past. Like, right now? She's reinvigorating crewel work. It doesn't always make me feel good as one after the other she tackles these things. Raspberry fool. French ivory. Chintz-covered sofas. Whatever. For one thing, she makes everything more expensive. And...she didn't invent this stuff, but somehow she gets credit for it. Oh, I'm being cranky. I like looking at the pretty photos. But somehow I hear my grandmother when I read these articles, debunking all the gushing descriptive language and reinventing-the-wheel smugitude. What MStew has in the market she's cornered is an inexhaustible supply of Topics, working her way back through the history of antiques, decorative arts, crafts, housekeeping. Nobody else puts their proprietary stamp on them quite as she does.

One thing in particular has twanged my strings so hard I can't even look at the article! It's about the Mercer Museum/Henry Mercer House in Doylestown, a place that I credit with sparking about 85% of the major interests in my life, including decorative arts, lettering, and a desire to own/decorate an architectural folly made of stone. I just don't wanna hear what Martha has to say about it. Yet. Even looking at the website for Fonthill makes me so hyper I can't breathe.

I think this is a fairly lame part of my personality, this "caring too much I can't even look" thing. For instance, for somebody who cares terribly about calligraphy or cooking or whatever, I avoid writings about these things in enormous clumps. Sometimes it's a strength, to avoid the blah-blah--and after seven years at a newspaper I am dying to swim out of the information stream and just let things go by--care about what I care about and not have to know a little about everything--but at the same time. Shite. Could read a paper every once in a while. Oh well, enormously complicated, whatever.

• Will I ever escape the long arm of Grease? Ever? I had no idea when I saw it for my 12th birthday party that it was planting the seeds it was. It didn't feel like it. It felt inevitable and huge and big, but it didn't feel life-changing. But now it's just constantly around! Still! I've seen it more than a few times recently and I am startin to think I can't avoid a think-piece about the ending. Again. Maybe it's payback for loving all the time-telescoping improvement montages in film, but the ending, in which Sandy must Slut, is too fraught and huge to just Watch. Oh, okay, I dunno what to say here and now, but...GAH. GAH!

• If you never have...you must. Actually had this happen to me recently and couldn't stop gigglin.

• Another thing dying to write about? The bizarro, Woody Allen-manque, barely Eric Rohmer, here-are-the-adults world of the Alan Alda film of the 70s80s, films which in retrospect are less well-written than your average sit-com. The Four Seasons is so BAD! I mean...really bad. Hilariously, fascinatingly bad...the Vivaldi is the best thing about it, hands down. Would be kinda fun to tackle that ouevre.

• The best shot in The Natural? Three-second clip of the grey scoreboard as the number "2" is slowly put up after Roy's first big hit. The music in that movie doesn't age well, but some of the editing in those sequences is still really amazing, with bits like that interspersed with other elements at different speeds and feels. Like the series of shots interleaved in the sequence when Roy pitches for the hell of it when you see the Duvall character, twice, then from the same POV his empty seat... Really good.

• I had a tarot reading recently!!!! Thank you darlin Hanne. I am still...metabolizing it. Really interesting.

• Needed on men's personal ads: a small designation (maybe "+ NH"/"-- NH") to show whether men are either before or after di rigeur heterosexual male transformative experience to connect them to demands of Domestic Life and human connection. K? ("NH" = Nick Hornby)

• Been craving donuts recently, must really be fall. The whole-wheat ones from Gibson's in Oberlin. Pppppliiiiiiiz! Also gebakener Camembert and good brie and spaetzle and other German fuds...it's the fall. Nostalgia + the climactic whip to the appetite. Calvados...sage.

• Went to a lovely reading by John Porcellino Friday night that was to do with his new King-Cat anthology. It's a really beautiful book, I highly recommend, as I do all of his work. So great.

• With unemployment: more laundry, not less. Why?

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.