15 November 2002 - 12:04 p.m.

I forgot to mention last night why I love, love, LOVE eating at Nawab in downtown R-noke. It has surprisingly little to do with the fact that eating good Indian food is one of the great pleasures in life.

It has the most flattering ligthing of any place in the world.

I swear to God, you guys, it was like Carlo freaking DiPalma was filming my outing last night. I have never made so many mental notes in my life on how to make the colors in my future home as saturated as the Godfather movies. And now that DiPalma is Woody Allen's bitch, I can give in to my impulses to take notes when I watch Everyone Says I Love You and Bullets Over Broadway.

Film class is really rubbing off on me.

Speaking if which, and this pertains largely to something Ms. Virginia wrote last night, but should not me skimmed by the rest of y'all because it's damned entertaining (sorry, that was obnoxious), while at Nawab with five of my fellow assholes, we got into an argument over who has the ultimate lifestyle: tenured professors or rock stars.

I, was, of course, arguing for the tenured professor faction, and might have even argued for the grad student population were I not painfully aware of the fact that, ten years from now, I'll still be paying interest on my naan. (Ok, my husband will be paying interest, but, you know.) But I did get an idea that might help me become the patron saint of the underrated.

Ok, Ms. V, how's this for making a subtle statement: We start a band, and make it really, really big - not Beatles big, because, you know, we still need time to write and teach and do research, but maybe Led Zepplin big. In fact, Led Zepplin is a really good analogy, because just the name sounds a lot like "Val Lewton," which is of course what the band will be called. And anytime someone asks us about our influences, we'll just be like, "Val Lewton, man. Who needs musical influences when you have I Walked with a Zombie?" So fans of Val Lewton will become fans of Val Lewton.

Are you with me so far?

And we will borrow LZ's sytem of naming albums, only we will be a little bit subversive about it, and instead of number, we'll use letters.

So, in order, the albums we release will be:

Val Lewton R

Val Lewton H

Val Lewton W

Dillard

Dillard being sort of like Zoso, maybe even with a cover of "Misty Mountain Hop," because "hey, whoopie cat" is my personal favorite Zep lyric of all time. But now I'm getting ahead of myself.

Now, the message there is WAY easier to figure out than say, the fact that Dark Side of the Moon synchs up with The Wizard of Oz, or any facet of the whole "Paul is dead" phenomenon, and it won't just aid our own edification: we will be helping out our friendly prof, and Inman will finally be able to purchase an unused copy of After Borges!

Man, I have a lot more work to do this semester than I'd thought.

What I'm wearing:

What I'm reading:

What I'm doing after this: