Every Friday, I share  the pop culture, fashion, lit and random goodness that crossed my radar during the week. Enjoy with a glass of wine and some party peanuts!

Reading
I did some thrift shopping this week and I stumbled across this:

 

That’s right, a self-published memoir about years spent goin’ to da club. Oh, I’m sorry, I mean, “the COMPLETE Guide to Emergent Nightclub Dancing.” People, this is over 25 years of nightclub dancing wisdom in one comprehensive book! I’m talking tips, tricks, techniques, social strategies, outrageous tales, emotional alchemy, physiology, physics, theory of mind, self-preservation and dance archetypes all in one 336 page book.

I want to make the infomercial for this book. I want to sell this book on QVC.

I paid $3.99. It really should have been $1 but it’s like someone in the back room knew I was coming. “Oh, Rebecca’s coming today. Put this thing out for, like, three more dollars than it’s worth so she can have that moment of wrestling with herself before she totally puts it in her cart anyway.”

Here’s the last line in the book, “I grabbed a light beer for the hair of the dog thing and jumped in the shower to make ready for heading to the club tonight.”

Epic.

I’m eager to read this densely-typed book that is surely 326 pages longer than it needs to be. Meanwhile, Moby Dick has been sitting on my shelf uncracked for over a year. What can I say,  I’m someone who craves new ideas about what it means to be human.

I will be tweeting the better lines from this book.

Also reading: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, one of my all-time favorite memoirs and  You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz, a novelist who is new to me and one of those writers I find and wonder why I haven’t heard of them before. This always gives me so much hope – so much good reading yet to be discovered!

Interneting
When You’re at the Crossroads of Should and Must – this is where I feel like I am lately. You? Money. Time. Security. Success. Being misunderstood. What are you afraid of?

Watching
I was so excited to watch An Unmarried Woman this week. It was just me and the dog (and the stupid cat, who was upstairs conducting his ongoing love affair with the bathroom faucet) and Netflix. All I knew going in was that the movie was from 1978, takes place in New York and that it got Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Actress. These are all good things!

But the movie is ridiculous to someone who lives in 2014. The world has changed in leaps and bounds and, for better or worse, I don’t know, we do not tolerate knee-high socks in our love scenes anymore. The sweat socks, worn by star Jill Clayburgh in every scene in which she got naked and with every outfit, needed to have their own credit. They actually acted more than she did.

Everyone was so ugly in this film. The hair… Listen, the world before good conditioners and  anti-frizz hair products was a confusing and disappointing place. And the clothing… I know that the Official Palette of the 1970s includes avocado, rust, tan and beige but X took this to the very limit, going from gray sack dress to muted sack shirt to a cape the color of a sad bowl of oatmeal. Did I mention that the socks are also beige, not white?

The therapist in the movie looked like Edie Beale’s uglier cousin visiting from England. And the three best friends… well, I can’t even go there. One of them wears a pantsuit to go ice skating at Rockefeller Center.

You can catch a glimpse of the socks in this trailer, at about 1:35 in:

You could make a drinking game out of taking a drink every time they say, “Make a pass,” in this movie. “Did he make a pass?” “Why, did he make a pass at you?” “Are you making a pass?” “That was a pass!”

I admit I never even found out, in the end, who made the last successful pass because I pulled the plug.

Better ways to spend your viewing time: Broad City, if you, like me, don’t have cable and can just now get around to watching it, and FX’s Fargo, which I was skeptical about but ended up enjoying (first episode, anyway). Mad Men… oh, Peggy.

Doing
Detroit at the Jungle Theater
Antique show at the State Fairgrounds (although odd weekend to have it  – no show on Sunday because Jesus)
Matisse at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Chromeo at First Ave on May 6

I hope that you, like me, have a long weekend in which to put your feet up or set them on some bike pedals or get them out on the dance floor because “deep inside of you there is a great club dancer waiting to emerge.”