Why I'm Looking Forward to the End of Summer.

And look at that carpet, will you? *insert leopardy swoon here*

Okay, as you know, tonight is the Season 3 premiere of Mad Men. I've watched Seasons One and Two twice this summer in preparation. To tide you over for the next several hours, there's a great article on Mad Men in the September Vanity Fair. Click here to read it.

It's like a peek inside Matthew Weiner's perfectly obsessive little head...

I Love Meryl Streep Again.

I saw Julie & Julia yesterday and am happy to inform Meryl that she is off my shit-list from the whole Mamma Mia debacle. She was wonderful and really stole the movie (it should have been renamed Julia & Julie).

I was completely charmed by the love story between Paul and Julia Child and fell a little in love with Stanley Tucci, too, as Child's doting husband. Nora Ephron wrote the screenplay and cleaned it up tout de suite (the book and Julie's blog had the f-bomb every other word and offended many delicate readers).

The kitchens Julia Child cooked in were very small and tended to be unfitted because they lived in Europe in the late 40s and early 50s. Which is funny because the larger and fancier the American kitchen has become, the less cooking actually goes on in it. I love a kitchen with tiled walls and a big pine table in the middle of it, separated! (gasp!) from the family room so I can hide the mess I made from actually cooking! I've always been a renegade...

Speaking of kitchens, the new issue of House Beautiful is a must-buy (and not because it's practically THE ONLY SHELTER MAGAZINE LEFT!). Windsor Smith did this Polo Blue kitchen which I am head-over-heels in love with. There are also black rooms galore (so Black is the New Black, after all, or is Blue the New Black? whichever, I solemnly promise not to use that phrase anymore :-).


But I do find myself admiring blue in a way I never did before. So when I saw 500 Days of Summer starring my girl crush, Zooey Deschanel, I fell in love with her little apartment. Simple, blue toile, iron bed, white-tiled kitchen, quirky little touches like origami birds. Sweet. Sweet movie as well, although as it warns: it is not a love story.

Bill Clinton is Still Awesome.

And I dare you to say otherwise.

Perfect for a Rainy Summer Afternoon.

The scenery in A Summer Place is just breathtaking (it's supposed to be set in Maine but was shot mostly around Carmel and Monterey, CA) and the beautiful old oceanfront Queen Anne inn really exists (although now it's private property). An equally gorgeous Frank Lloyd Wright beach house appears later in the film (and really exists on Scenic Drive in Carmel).

In addition to the beautiful properties, the storyline is really romantic. It's about a man who revisits (with his frigid bitch of a wife and lovely teenage daughter, played by Sandra Dee) the inn where he had a summer job as a lifeguard and a summer romance with a guest's daughter. He discovered that the guest's daughter married the innkeeper's son and they now run the place. There's lots of mad love and drama and sex - it was really quite racy for its time (1959).

You can probably rent it if your video store still exists (I bought it from the local record store).