This is the element that I’m building my entire winter wardrobe around. The basic concept: Brooke Astor brunching at a leather bar. Next step: boots.

Q: You love double-entendres and puns. Like the lyric, “The hole is where the heart is.”
A: They call me “Dr. Double-enten-Dre.” Get it?

Thanks, Manson. I needed that this morning.

This is what I look like now:

Tomorrow, when I go back to wearing my glasses and being generally slovenly, I’ll probably look like something in between.

“It’s funny,” [current Gawker editor Emily Gould] drawls. “People in publishing treat you like a celebrity when you do this job, but you live in Brooklyn, make $55,000 a year, and don’t feel like a celebrity until someone comes up to you on the street and says, ‘Buck up, kid. Jimmy Kimmel’s an asshole.’” 

What’s that, a 170% raise in two years?

That’s my packing face. I’m on a 6AM flight to Telluride, where I’ll be covering the film festival there for the first time for Spout. I’ll be there until Tuesday, when I’ll fly all day, spend about 36 hours in New York, and then head to Toronto. I’ll be in Toronto from the 6-10, covering THAT film festival for the first time; then it’s another 36 hours in New York, and then Nick and I are jetting off for 4 days of mostly leisure in San Francisco. If I survive it all, I’ll be speaking on a panel at the IFP Conference the day after I get back to New York. If you want to keep track of all the goings-on, check out Spout’s new festival page, where we’ll be streaming all the goodness from Telluride, Toronto, and festivals to come.
With all of that going on, I’ve had to take a month-long hiatus from my column at NewTeeVee. I’m really proud of the stuff I’ve been doing over there lately, but unfortunately there’s just no way in hell I’ll be able to do it during high festival season. You can check out my back archives here. I should be back at it the first week of October.

You can listen here, or subscribe to FilmCouch via iTunes by, um, going to iTunes and searching for FilmCouch.

Read the rest here.

FilmCouch is amazing — and don’t take my word for it, it was nominated for a Webby this year alongside podcasts produced by NPR and The Onion — but I have to admit that one of the reasons why I’m excited about podcasting is that, in a fucked-up internet way, it allows me to talk to people. I spend most of my time alone in my apartment staring at a computer, so having an assignment that requires me to actually pick up the phone (well, in most cases, launch Skype) is welcome.
My first segment was ready for inclusion in this week’s episode. In it, I talk to The Broad View’s Lisa Rosman about Broken English (a film that I was inspired to see based on her blog post about it) and various problems/issues surrounding contemporary female spectatorship. You can listen here, or subscribe to FilmCouch via iTunes here.

The basic concept is that each segment will have me puzzling out the answer to a question, so if you have anything you’d like answered, let me know. These could be basic trivia questions, or something more open ended. Right now, as I write this post, I’m procrastinating on working on next week’s episode, which will ask and answer the question, “Why are we so skeptical of celebrity activism?”