I was wrong. There, I said it. And it’s not the first time…

Back in the early days of PopText, my tag line was “Because life’s too short to listen to Snow Patrol”. And then I began to really, really like their last album. So I changed it. To “life’s too short to listen to Coldplay.”

(You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you?)

I’ve just spent the afternoon with Viva La Vida on repeat play. And I love it.

So yes, I was wrong.

I guess I don’t need to worry about the future. According to E Lockhart’s MASH game:

You will live in a Apartment.
You will drive a pink convertible.
You will marry Clive Owen and have 8 kid(s).
You will be a cake baker in nyc.

Sounds good to me!

When SATC first aired in England in 1999, a year after its HBO debut, I was fourteen years old. According to my mother, I wasn’t allowed to watch the show, as it would give me a damaged view of relationships. With that decree, I just watched it on the old TV in my bedroom with the volume low, creeping quietly so the floorboards wouldn’t creak. To me, there was more damage in Ally McBeal’s waif-like passivity and constant, aching loneliness than the defiant, hopeful energy of Carrie and friends. They had careers, dreams, and most importantly, each other; the much-touted sex was simply a distraction from all those beautiful shoes.

At least, at first it was.

(full feature for the Tribeca Film Festival website after the jump)

So, good news. Excellent news, in fact, and plural at the same time (newses?). First, the thing I can share right now: we sold Dutch translation rights to Sophomore Switch! There was even an auction, which is amazing, and so come 2009, the Netherlands will experience the joys of Tasha, Emily and The Hot-Tub Incident.*

Amazing News 2 is even bigger and better, but sadly also Super-Secret for now. I will tell you that The Book Of Doom can officially get retitled now…

In other thoughts: SYTYCD returns tonight, which is great, because watching bad reality dancers audition is 1000 times more bearable than watching bad reality singers. And, you know, DANCING. I was thrilled and relieved to see the muppet defeated on American Idol, so that D. Cook can go on to bring us the Greatest Middling American Rock Album Of All Time, circa 2003. He should get some songs from these guys (who my friend sung back-up for last night) who are but a stylist and the Augustana producer away from owning US rock radio. 

And I’ve been branching out into some film blogging too. Think of me as the US Weekly guide to Cannes..

*Not together. I don’t want to mislead anyone by billing this as a Girls Gone Wild lesbian orgy of awesomeness. Sorry.

The weather was grey and depressing today, so I did the only thing that can lift such gloom: I baked. My project? A cupcake version of Nigella’s divine Butterscotch Layer Cake, complete with caramel drizzle and enough butter and sugar to kill me—with pleasure. Despite the fact my mum is the least domestic woman ever (but a goddess nonetheless), I somehow managed to cast off her hatred of the kitched and wind up adoring baking, and cooking, and any process that involves the production of amazing edible treats. In fact, such is my devotion that I have a special baking apron that I bought in Santa Monica last year (despite the fact that my luggage couldn’t physically hold another thing and I had to bounce up and down on it to make the thing close) and packed right away for my move to Montreal (despite the fact that my luggage couldn’t physically hold another thing… etc).

Exhibit A:

So, cupcakes. Simple, I thought. Take a bunch of ingredients, throw in a bowl, mix, put in oven, gorge until sick. Perfect! Only..

It was at this stage, I realized I forgot the baking soda. In England, we use self-raising flour. Not so much here, so you’re supposed to add soda to make everything rise. Whoops. But cake is cake, whether light and fluffy or dense and delicious. I mean, adding air just dilutes the awesomeness, if you think about it. so, I give to you, un-risen cupcakes!

Which, I’ll admit, look a little forlorn. But not once they’ve been smothered in an assortment of icing… Lemon drizzle, Pink Vanilla and Butterscotch Joy. 

And now it’s sunny, so apparently I’ve restored the natural balance of the world. Go me.

It’s that special time again—that blazin’ hot molten lava of a time—oh yes. It’s American Idol time…

Lil’ Archie is first up, and the most I can muster for this boy is a wholehearted ‘meh’. Billy Joel? Simon, of course, is secretly salivating at the thought of bringing out the entire Westlife back-catalogue for a whole new generation. Just think, ‘Flying Without Wings’—the junior years. Lil’ Archie in that powder blue suit, rising from his stool at the key change, spreading his arms wide with puppyish love and devotion…

Please, lord, no.

Syesha, on the other hand, they’re determined to send packing. Why else would they give her an Alicia Keyes song? Hell, if they gave Mariah Carey an Alicia Keyes song, she would end up sounding like a pale imitation, so poor Syesha does an awesome job just managing to sound half-way decent. She’s also brought out the gold sequins for like, the fourth week running, as if she’s decided that it’s not the voice, song choice or crazy obsessive fan factor that’s been pushing her through, oh no, it’s because she’s been DAZZLING them with her GOLDEN BRILLIANCE.

Which leads us to D. Cook, who I can’t help but like despite a) the hair, b) the facial fuzz and c) the oodles of smug. ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’. Honestly, the best thing for his long-term career would be to fail, and fail hard at this point, but here he is, doing his soft start/hard finish thing, but god, I wish he’d stop being so damn controlled! Lose it, freak out, just show some passion, boy, instead of the Scott Strapp school o’ messianic rock.

But that’s nothing, because oh. My. God. Lil’ Archie just said “My boo.” And “Lil’ mama”. And he’s bobbing! He’s swaying like it’s junior prom, and all with that fixed thousand-yard beam. This is bad, people. This is Jason Castro butchering Marley bad—the kind of cringefest that ensues when an awkward white boy tries to bring out reggae or hip hop or in this case, squeaky-clean chart r ‘n’ b, and shows how entirely without game he truly is.

Someone who has game, eons of it, is my girl Syesha. Silver sequins! This girl’s got range, y’all. And a chair. AND AWESOMENESS. The judges all despise her, obviously, for standing between them and an all-David, all-profit finale, and I understand that, I really do—I mean, what kind of fight can Syesha put up in a marketplace where even Nicole Scherpussycatzinger lies dejected in a heap of unwanted fishnets in the corner? But she’s a FIGHTER. With a CHAIR. And dude, I’d take her cabaret performance over the freaking cartoon Pinocchio bleating on, because despite all his protests to the contrary, he is so not a real boy.

Meanwhile, I’m too relieved that the rumors about Cook breaking out the Collective Soul are false to care that he’s replaced it with Switch-freaking-foot. And his voice is so… wrong. Wafty and wavery and surprise, it’s starting slow but FINALLY he gets some damn emotion in his delivery and then… It’s over. Huh. And Paula agrees with me? I’m scared. I’m not sure I want to be on the same wavelength as somebody traveling through time and space to an Idaho prom store in the late 80’s to buy their dresses.

And now it’s even worse because Lil’ Archie READ MY MIND. Powder blue shirt, stool, squinty emotion—and why the hell is Randy freaking out over that? But sheesh, the dullness! And when Simon complains about the saccharine-content of a performance, you know it’s bad, because people, this man inflicted ROBSON AND JEROME on the general British public.

Yup, they hate Syesha. ‘Hit Me Up’? I don’t even know this, but it’s totally a Lumidee/early Rhianna type jam and it’s so too much for her. The white sequins have diminished returns. Sad.

Umm. ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’. And Diane Warren is there to see the sacrilidge, with weirdly OTT production: violins and guitar and a METALLIC CRAVAT. Or is it an undershirt? Does it even matter? I mean, we all know he’s going to be a finalist, tied to a 19 Management contract and a debut album of syrupy Goo Goo Dolls cast-offs and regretting forever his choice to prostrate himself at the alter of American reality capitalism. So, metallic under-garments or not, dude is screwed.

I’m a bad blogger, I know. Just terrible. I don’t even have a good excuse, because most of my current projects are out with other people and I’m just waiting on them - and by waiting, I mean strolling around parks, eating Bilboquet ice-cream and Cocoa Locale cupcakes and humming along to fragrant indie playlists. See, I’ve sort of hit a block on one book (we’ll call this The Book O’ Doom), so I’ve had “Chapter Eleven” blinking at me for three weeks now. It doesn’t help that I’ve technically written TBO’D four times over already, and this is just another guise; another year, another draft - and it’ll pretty much keep happening like this until it actually sells. Anyway, the characters started talking to me again today - well, not me, they started talking to each other in my head as I did the washing up - so maybe something will break through soon.

(And yes, the ‘characters talking to each other’ is actually a good thing, not a mental health red flag.)

If there’s a web-monitoring watch-list, I’m probably on it by now. 

My google search history currently reads: nuclear missile sites america; terrorist targets; supreme court building; washington landmarks; anfo.

It’s teen book research, I promise!

The Great Okkervil River Conspiracy of Spring ’07 was designed by my best friend to keep this band from my innocent ears. She banned them from car stereos and playlists and mix CDs for months in a determined campaign that climaxed with a grand live show in a shack in Providence, RI. See, she figured I’d hate them, and would boycott any pilgrimage to see them if their indie musings ever entered my orbit. Obviously, she was wrong. Maybe if I’d had time to absorb their music, I would have spent that wonderful show focussing more on Will Scheff and his posse of melody makers, and less on making out with the random cute bearded boy (although then I suppose that whole weekend in Connecticut would never have happened…), but in the end, I didn’t take this band to heart until my next trip across the Atlantic in the Fall.

It was October, and a book of mine didn’t sell—as books of mine are wont to do sometimes. I took my iPod and the dull ache in my chest and slipped into a bookstore full of wood and crimson sweatshirts and a sweeping staircase. There was a corner upstairs I tucked myself into, surrounded by all those books that had sold, and I wrapped myself in Will and his plaintive stories and waited for the pain to ease a little. It took a while, and a few tears, but I suppose it did, because that’s just the way it goes. But I remember the intensity, of his prose and my small grief, and this recent rooftop serenade makes it all seem like yesterday.

Also, this Modern Love distils all the reasons why I try not to date a) indie hipsters and b) musicians into one neat tale of dude-ish casual incompetence. Unfortunately, Montreal seems to have nothing but, so I might have to relax that one…

Ashlee let me down. All that time I spent cheerleading teen-pop, defending her honor and persuading people that “really, she’s not bad at all!” and then she gives me this, this mess of an album. Sigh. I wanted Pete to be her Benji and/or Joel (I always get those Good Charlotte boys mixed up, and now that they’re double-dating Paris and Nicole, it’s like 2005 all over again). See, once he got involved in Hilary Duff’s work, she went all Killers-lite with interesting synth squiggles and electro musings, and Fall Out Boy may be approaching their cultural nadir of annoyance (shilling for Walmart? With Rumur Willis and the awesome-yet-undeniably-Z-list Kristin Cavalleri? Oh really!), but they write damn good pop songs.

But it was not to be.

Other than that, spring is finally springing. There is green on the trees, and in the afternoon, I can sit bare-legged on my balcony and eat home-made grape popsicles and try not to drip pink splashes onto the pages of wonderful books like ‘The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks’. I enjoyed E Lockhart’s Boyfriend List books, but they pale in comparison to the magnificence of this tome, which is more explicitly feminist than any YA I’ve read in a while and yet maintains joyfulness through steam-tunnel escapades, sassiness, really well-written boys and a blissful absence of any silly morality concerns. Seriously, seek it out. Read it. Marvel.

(She’s right over there in my links list.)