On What Are The Best Audiobooks For A Road Trip?
Yes, yes, yes, to Donna Tartt's reading of True Grit! It's wonderful!
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On What It Cost Eight Women Writers To Make It In New York
@Lemonnier I paid $500 a month for a closet in a DUMBO loft in 1998!
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On What Books Make You Cringe To Remember?
After reading every male hardboiled or noir detective story I could find from Chandler to Parker, then going through every female detective series I could find, I thought, why not try some lesbian detective stories? Well, there was so much schlocky stuff about nipples going erect under pale silk shirts at the drop of a hat all the time, around all the clichées and old tropes. I'm glad I tried them, and I've gotten a new list of potential good ones from thehairpin.com's thread about lesbian novels (so there's hope!), but the titles in my Kindle still kind of smirt at me with their erect nipples from my archives list. Sometimes I wonder if I should delete them permanently, but they kind of make me happy that they're in the peanut gallery of everything else I've read. Also, from childhood: Queenie, by Judy Blume. All I remember is how bad and embarrassing it was, nothing else.
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On What Movies Make You Ignore Everything Else?
Holiday, with Kate Hepburn and Cary Grant! They even interviewed me about how it changed my life!
http://www.studio360.org/2010/oct/01/aha-moment-cary-grant-in-holiday/
Love that movie!
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On Larry David's Rough Night Out With The Aging Literary Lion
I loved this episode. I still say "Batch-room" instead of "bathroom," because of it.
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On Celebrities And The "Rape" Of Photography
I have to admit, I know it sounds like celebrities are overreacting, big babies, saying it feels like a sexual violation, but having been a model, and not having been prepared for it by, say, being considered beautiful all my life, it was a remarkably icky, slimey, violating experience for me, too. I can't explain it. Go ahead and say I'm a big baby, too. But seriously, you feel violated, even if you were being paid for the shoot. There IS something weird about it, just like Depp says. I always felt depressed, and... slimed, afterwards. I was so glad to get out of it and not do photographs anymore. Now, when I model in-house, and someone wants to take photos of me, say, for their catalogue, I react very badly. I get mad, and say, "I don't do that anymore!" I really really don't want to do it. But I have no problem being photographed among friends, like any normal person in normal life.
How to explain it? Hmmmm. Maybe it's easier to say it feels like rape than to say it feels like you just whored yourself out? I just had that revelation just now... Yick.
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On Rental Brokers Are Useless
PS - for anyone looking for an apartment, broker or no, use propertyshark.com. If you pay for a membership (I think you can do a month by month membership renewal), you get to see if there are any complaints about health hazards (rats, bed bugs, mold) reported for that address, and also who lives there already, crime reports, who owns the mortgage on the building, if the mortage is paid, what the building is worth, you name it. It's a great tool. I saved myself some time using that. And no, I don't work for them.
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On Rental Brokers Are Useless
Well, I spent two years searching for a decent 2BR or 3BR (at the time I included the option of moving in with my BF if I found a place big enough). By the end of two years of looking at crappy apartments on CL, and finding out that half of them were in bedbug-infested buildings or neighborhoods, and the other half were fake 2BR's (walls up up in a 1BR), I got a broker. The good thing about having a broker -- I knew I was paying him so I gave him all my requirements right off the bat: must be no more than two blocks away from an express subway, must have building heat, must be pre-war building, and must have an elevator if the apartment is above the 4th floor. I refused to see anything that didn't meet those requirements. My first broker was a ditz. Luckily I spotted a better one at the same office, and hijacked him. He found me exactly what I needed. It was totally worth it. Yeah, I could've used that 15% for myself. But man, two years of looking with no success told me CL was a losing bet. It used to be good. Not anymore.
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On The Color Pink
I can't abide pink most of the time, but I find it strangely endearing on little old ladies wearing pink saris and sneakers.