Every Friday, I share  the pop culture, fashion, lit and random blips that were on my radar during the week. Enjoy! 

Let’s get the important stuff out of the way first. Is it me, or is putting a necklace on a baby, especially a black necklace of, like, a spider, pretty creep?

Second in importance only to babies wearing costume jewelery, I’ve been exercising. Big deal, right? Well, it’s a big deal when you are starting from ground zero for arm muscles – suddenly you’re in a Body Pump class doing bicep curls in unison with 35 other people, some of whom have something to prove. I’ve now done the class three times and I go home and stand in front of the mirror looking for definition. What gets me through the class is thinking about the day I will wear a tank top, long flowy skirt and some kind of pretentious fedora on a summer day, preferably to an art show in a park, and I look amazing.

Soon I’ll be able to get in on the tail end of the moto craze. I’ll buy cute new clothes from Blank NYC (vegan clothing!) and Everlane (fair trade!).

It’s not all about clothes, even though I make it sound like that. Caring about clothes too much makes you boring, like the intern we just got rid of at work who spent 98% of her free time shopping and getting dressed, 1% sleeping, .5% eating and .5% doing work for us. She would prance into work mid-afternoon in these super cute, trendy outfits (I never saw her in the same outfit in 6 months), full make-up, hair all done up and it would turn out that all the fanfare was so that she could go have coffee with her dad. Hmmm… that brings us to…

Watching
Lifetime: I know the ratings were through the roof, but your Flowers In the Attic was a big yawn. OK, I give you that it was more “true to the book” than the original film adaptation in that you actually followed the plot – mostly – but what’s with no sex scenes? What’s with one little glimpse of Kiernan Shipka in a choppy wig instead of making her shave her head after the hair-cutting scene? Let’s take some cable-sized risks. I’ll tell you one thing: the kid who played Cory in the 1987 movie did a much better job of acting as though he were dying of poisoning:

All this terribleness, combined with Heather Grahams’ insatiable desire to chew the scenery (I think her sole talent is that she can rock a pencil skirt),  made me wonder what V.C. Andrews would think, which made me wonder about V.C. Andrews, which got me to Googling and then this surprisingly thorough VC Andrews article on BuzzFeed.

Project Runway: Under the Gunn… YES! It started out slow but by the end of episode one, which you can watch for free, it started to look as though mentor Nick Verreos is assembling the Bad News Bears of fashion designers. Must watch.

Following
Bad Banana
Senile Don Draper
We Are New Yorkers

Reading
Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow, a fictional account of New York’s Collyers brothers (hermits and hoarders) that is good to read at 1 am when you can’t sleep.

Conquered Tori Spelling’s Mommywood mountain, though it was tough going and I had to start skimming in order to preserve some faith in humanity. That hasn’t stopped me from reserving Uncharted terriTORI at the library (and yes, the grammar on that, including lack of capitalization, drive me insane).

Going (if I ever recover from exercising)
“Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows” exhibit opens at the Minneapolis Photo Center tonight.
Zinnia Folk Arts is having a series of trunk shows with artist B.J. Christofferson.
Don’t forget this month-long vintage sale – Blacklist Vintage in Mpls is closing!
Show your love for the Mpls Institute of Arts by doing this stamp thingy and you’ll get a big discount in the museum store + be entered to win something fab + you’ll be at the museum and can look at lots of art, like this:

Listening
Chromeo!

Making
You could make this Admiral Sackbar puppet for someone and it would be cute.