Great moments in prescription eye wear

Jason Schwartzman

Marilyn Monroe

Jarvis Cocker

Jessica Hart

Woody Allen

I’m reading: The Biography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

This book was written quickly, maybe thoughtlessly, with the goal of making Gertrude Stein a whole-lotta-fast-cash so I guess it was like the Eat, Pray, Love of it’s time. Gertrude and Alice are a cool, gay, hipsterlectual couple in 1900’s Paris whose apartment (through the sheer force of Stein’s personality) becomes a buzzing centre for the arts scene.

This book is fascinating because of the constant name dropping (Hemmingway! Matisse! Picasso! TS Eliot! Cezanne! ) but mostly because of the pure ego that is writing a biography of your lover that is essentially an autobiography of yourself (in a brilliant, glowing light). I bet she was a Leo.

Alice (left) and Gertrude with their dog Basket

Sensibility

I love Jane Austen. Girl can write an elegantly structured, irony rich, feminist portrait of 18th Century romantic politics and my goodness can she slam dunk a love triangle. I've never checked out those books where they mince up her work like Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters or Pride and Prejuidice and Pool Ponies or whatever it's called but I guess the release of this new CD is a similarly dark moment in marketing Austen. I give you... Bonnet Dramas Revisited.

The presser says "'Bonnet dramas’ is TV-speak for those wonderful, detailed costume productions on TV and film that have given us all so much pleasure! Whether it’s the joyous score of Pride & Prejudice with its historically-informed colour or the thrilling nobility of the music for Persuasion, you can have it all! 

Having it all never seemed quite so terrifying. I say leave Jane alone... unless you are the makers of a classic BBC mini series then, please, go about your magical business of creating the greatest television period dramas of all time. Thank you.

Norwegian Wood

Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood is being made in to a movie! This news fills me with immeasurable joy and a desire to use exclamation points! Beautiful Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi (the one who got nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Babel) will play fragile, basket case Naoko and until it is released later this year I will live in the hope that it will be better than the film adaption of his short story Tony Takitani which put me to sleep like a powerful sedative.