How to have style

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, On Style columnist Christina Binkley wrote about the suit that turns her into a VIP. The writer, who says she’s middle class and typically shops at Saks off Fifth Avenue or Banana Republic, has one investment that completely transforms her: a St. John suit. Valued at over $5000, she says it gets her a prime seat at swank restaurants, and even got a pro baseball player talking to her on an airplane, telling her where she should go for shoes. When she changes back into her Banana Republic pantsuit? Back to the end of the line.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122532908184782719.html?mod=article-outset-box
I just went on a shopping spree at Target for my fall wardrobe, and with this economic climate, could relate more to the Cheapskate column, directly below Binkley's:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122532749442982533.html

I think my attitude falls somewhere in between. Having kept my best dressed friends' fashion cues in mind while shopping (stick to basics, mix and match, above all, LAYER), I think there's a way to "dress for success" on a budget. Just putting in an extra ten minutes of work into my appearance in the morning (you mean it's not the best idea to just roll out of bed?), and pairing a cute (but $7.99!) belt with an outfit I already feel more confident at work, which in turn makes me better at my job. Which means maybe some day I can afford that St. John suit...but for now, will settle for getting a cab quicker.

Next on the reading list: How to Have Style, by Isaac Mizrahi. http://www.amazon.com/How-Have-Style-Gotham-Books/dp/1592403921/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225385751&sr=8-1

Baby Steps

Taking a cue from my friend DP's blog, I am injecting some stream of consciousness here. I just worked up the nerve to email an influential magazine editor I interviewed many years ago for a small newspaper when her first novel came out. Seeing if I can nudge my way a little further into this freelancing career... my ratio of disappointments to success has been alarmingly large in the past two weeks so hopefully my career karma will realign itself soon. If I throw enough darts at the board, one of them has to make it. Well, not really, but I'm weirdly good at darts.

http://74.205.125.148/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=U1BFLzIwMDUvMDkvMjkjQXIwMjkwMg==&Mode=HTML&Locale=english-skin-custom

Hell's Bells, Trudy

With the Cuban Missile crisis as its backdrop, the outstanding and measured Mad Men concluded its second season with its most satisfying episode yet. It brought Don Draper (swoon) home, and back to Sterling Cooper where he belongs, and made some surprising (and not so surprising) revelations to both the audience and to some blindsided characters.

As the panic of nuclear threat left each character fearful and distracted in their own way, the business of ad agency Sterling Cooper continued, just as the messy personal lives of its employees remained hidden beneath that polished and neat Madison Avenue veneer—a veneer almost as attractive as the characters themselves. But just like the society around them, the unrest is bubbling closer and closer to the surface, and has been just barely restrained in its final episodes leading up to the finale.

The two things I love most about this show is how so much of their dissatisfaction is a result of the world around them. Some (cough, Betty Draper, cough) are practically on the verge of madness and you want to just reach through the looking glass (or television screen) to shake them and shout, “It’s not you! It’s the world around you! Betty, pop a Xanax!” So many of their personal problems could be resolved with just a little more perspective, like when Don (Jon Hamm), dealing with the possible dissolution of his marriage, explains his problems and expresses his fears and doubts to a confidante. When she suggests calling his wife to tell her, he responds simply and without a trace of doubt, “No, that would just complicate things.” Dude, you are about to lose the super hot January Jones (the actress who portrays Betty). Just tell her you love her, damn it! They are so clearly trapped in their time and only vaguely aware of their prison, it sometimes hurts to watch. You want to hand them the key so badly. Never is this phenomenon more painful than it is with Joan, the curvy, mother-hen secretary of the office, whose wits match her stunning good looks. For her, the glass ceiling is more like a glass box. At work, she’s thwarted at every turn toward professional success by less talented men. At home, she’s resigned herself to an engagement with a handsome, successful doctor that looks great from the outside, but in reality is devoid of all love and respect. The dude is insecure, bossy, and so jealous of her sexual past and life at work that he forces himself on her after hours in her boss’s office. And worst of all, there probably isn’t a happy ending for Joan, and wasn’t for most women like her at that time.

The other thing I love about this show is that the characters are so finely drawn, and so complex, that it took me a good 4 to 5 episodes to realize that most of them are, quite frankly, despicable. In the span of an average 4 to 5 episodes, nearly everyone commits adultery, has babies and doesn’t tell the father, neglects their children, and only stop smoking and drinking to commit adultery, have babies and neglect their children some more. But the beauty of the show is that despite all of this (slightly exaggerated here) bad behavior, you can’t help but sympathize with them and root for them as they blindly stumble about trying to make sense of their lives. Beneath Betty’s steely, Hitchockian blonde façade, there’s a vulnerable woman who took all the steps she was supposed to and still can’t figure out why she’s not happy. And beneath the narcissism of Roger Sterling (John Slattery) is well… more self-involvement, but he sure is fun to watch. Especially when he’s headed to the bar or the nearest 20-year-old female, which is pretty much all the time.

The show wrestles with all the great themes, like religion, mortality, and the definitions of personal and professional success, often seen through the lens of the ads the mad men work so hard to create. The acting is almost theatrical (especially the performance of Elizabeth Moss, who plays Peggy Olson, the ambitious young secretary turned copywriter, whose scenes were so electric in the finale); it’s so alive on the screen you’d think the emotions were happening right before you.

I jumped in this season and can’t wait to see what I missed in Season 1. Marathon soon. I’m wondering if I can get away with dressing up in a 1950s costume, drinking scotch and smoking Lucky Strikes all day while living in my parent’s house (They may think I’m crazy though. I’m living in the looking glass, too).

Mad Men

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-AP-on-TV-Mad-Men.html

Review to come after the Sunday night Season 2 finale! But as the article notes, leading man Jon Hamm will be on Saturday Night Live this weekend. Will be interesting to see him do comedy after being so used to his reserved, chilly manner on the show. I hope they do a Mad Men skit...

Dead Until Dark

At the end of last week, I found myself headed for a long train ride with nothing to read, a precarious position for someone who barely knows how to charge her ipod. I was actually ahead in my galley and manuscript reading for work for the first time in…ever, and had just finished the un-put-down-able “Time of My Life,” by Allison Winn Scotch. Hoping for another score, I stopped into the Borders by Penn Station with the vague idea I might try “American Wife,” by Curtis Sittenfeld, the story of Laura Bush’s life put to fiction. Instead I found myself with the unexpected purchase of Dead Until Dark, by Charlaine Harris, the first in a series of books upon which the new HBO show True Blood is based.

This all happened because I couldn’t find American Wife anywhere, which is always aggravating for people who work in publishing. It’s hard enough to get people to buy books! And to go into a store, looking for a book you know is popular, and not only does it not stand out when you walk in but is not in its proper place in the fiction section? Sigh.

What WAS appropriately placed in the front, due to the popularity of the HBO shows, was Dead Until Dark. Though I wouldn’t normally pick out a mystery book about vampires (despite having been a Buffy fan back in the day) my curiosity was piqued by it’s connection to the show (http://www.hbo.com/trueblood/), which recently occupied me for 6 straight hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon. As the Amtrak train pulled out of Penn Station at 5:45 p.m., I dove into Harris’s campy, sexy world of mind readers, vampires and shape-shifters and by Sunday morning, had polished the whole thing off. So good!

The story is set in the fictional town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, sometime in the near-ish future, where vampires are “out of the coffin." No longer hiding their existence, some try to co-exist peacefully with people (now that a synthetic blood has been developed for them, making it not totally necessary to feed on humans), while others hold strong to their predatory ways. One vampire in particular, Bill Compton, tries to “mainstream” by settling back into his family estate (which was left empty by the passing of one of his descendants) and catches the eye of pretty waitress Stookie Stackhouse. Sookie has a bit of a disability of her own: she can read minds, which has hampered almost all her relationships, let alone a sexual one (try getting in the mood when you know what they really think of your butt, she laments). Though she tries to keep up a mental guard blocking her from people’s heads, in Bill, she finds peace, since for some reason his thoughts remain effortlessly closed off to her. Just as an attraction starts to develop (really, who can resist a dark, brooding vampire who was last human during the Civil War? No, seriously, he’s kind of hot, check out Stephen Moyer http://www.hbo.com/trueblood/ who takes on the role for the show) the unease, tensions and suspicions of the supernatural come to a head in this small town in terrifying and violent ways. A series of murders erupts, targeting women who have been involved with the vamps. Will Sookie be next?

Addictive as the television show, this book too proved impossible to walk away from (even if you are confined to a railway car and don’t have a choice). Memorable and recognizable characters dot the hot, southern landscape, and Harris plays with the town’s reaction to the vampires as a metaphor for racism or homophobia, and the effects of vampire blood as similar to drug use. Finishing the book, you kind of miss the paranormal and captivating world these characters inhabit. Is it weird I kind of wished I could work with Sookie at Merlotte’s, dodge the undead, and hang out with people who remember the Civil War? Probably, but hey, I did say I was a Buffy fan. My only regret was that I didn't have the second installment for the train ride home!

Secret Life of Bees

Last night I joined fellow Penguins for an advanced screening of Secret Life of Bees, the movie adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd's bestselling novel. You certainly can't beat the ensemble cast of Academy Award winners, musical talent, and er, blonde child actors like Jennifer Hudson, Queen Latifah, Sophie Okenedo (the adorable actress from Hotel Rwanda), Alicia Keys and Dakota Fanning (who, as my colleage quoted a friend, is on her list of people to kill. Disturbing, but I suppose understandable. (Disclaimer: this post is in no way a threat to Ms. Fanning)). The movie was enjoyable, but I felt like something was missing. I can't tell if it was just because perhaps the movie's plot doesn't adapt well to the big screen -- not a whole lot happens, in my mind, to move it along (though it is an enchanting coming of age story) or if it just simply didn't work, despite the enormous talent behind it.

Lily is a 14-year old motherless girl from South Carolina, who has grown up with a terrible knowledge and guilt about her mother's death. Raised by her abusive (but at second look complicated) father, T-Ray (played by Paul Bettany, who found ways to inject a bit of sympathy for the character, who otherwise would have been flat and hateful), life for Lily is spent writing and daydreaming of her mother, who she feels is the only person that ever loved her. When her nanny, Rosaleen (Hudson) is beaten by local racists, and T-Ray tells the young girl that her mother had abandoned her without a second look, Lily decides to flee, taking her nanny with her. Armed with the few belongings she has of her mother, including a mysterious picture of a Black Madonna, their journey leads them to the home of the Boatwright sisters, who make the best honey in South Carolina.

Then the thing that happens in all female bonding movies start to happen. August (Queen Latifah) teaches Lily about the world and about love, through the lens of life in the bee kingdom, set to an out-of-place emo-ish soundtrack (with the occasional Motown thrown in). Hearts break and mend and everyone learns a shiny new lesson about themselves.

The cast is incredible, and some of the actresses seem to be molded perfectly for their roles -- Queen Latifah nestles effortlessly into the motherly character of August, and Okenedo is perfect as the ultra-sensitive May, as is Keys for the volatile June. Dakota Fanning is just what I think most pictured for the part of Lily. Director Gina Blythewood-Price (Love and Basketball) clearly had a vision when making this film, and stuck to it with a professional touch.

Worth seeing, but maybe wait for video?

(Except TOTALLY buy the book, which is charming and lovely and written by the incredibly talented Kidd. In fact buy a few copies. Times are hard and I need to pay my bills!)

Body of Lies

Before I see a movie, I've usually read at least one review, either because I was interested in it and wanted to check it out, or, because I read the review and then chose to see it (an act that makes me happy as a publicist that my job serves a purpose). I saw Body of Lies last night for a friend's birthday knowing nothing about it, because aside from Leo Dicaprio being really freaking hot, didn't have much of an interest. Which is interesting, because my marketing friend who I went to see it with said she read that this was a challenge for marketers of the movie -- people rarely go out to see movies about the current "situation" in the Middle East (I say situation in quotes because there was a great part in the movie where a Jordanian character takes offense to Dicaprio's character referring to the Iraq war as a "situation," when it had wreaked such havoc on their lives).
Anyway, it was nice going into this movie with no preconceived notions. We entered the theater and went on quite the ride through Imman, Jordan; Baghdad, Iraq; Turkey; Langley,VA and Washington DC and through the dark tunnels of American and Jordanian intelligence, and the ugly underbelly of terrorism in the Middle East. We entered the movie much like the characters entered dangerous situations: "Shoot me if anything goes wrong, I do not want my head cut off on the internet." I kind of felt like, poke me when it's time for me to take my glasses off and be blind because I can't watch someone get tortured right now.
But it was good -- fast-paced, and really forced your nose in all the crap that is going on over there, when it's usually easier to just change the channel when it comes up on the news. Lines between good and evil are blurred, unexpected turns, who's your friend, who do you trust, guy falls for hot girl, hot girl falls in harms way, blah blah blah... but good blah blah.
Ok so that was my first stab at a movie review in years, next one will be better!

i should write more

This is just a reminder to myself and the one reader out there that I should try to post on here more regularly, to stay in the habit.
That is all.