Gabriel Garcia Marquez Shoots Reese Witherspoon, and I Can't Walk in These Heels

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I don't know why I dreamt of him last night and woke up thinking about him this morning. I hope it's not one of those "Bella dreams about people, and they die the next day" kind of thing. (Seriously, it has happened. Don't cross my path.) Here's a 1999 New Yorker profile of him. Also, a very cool short live action/animation film, based on a Marquez short story, made by a Colombian friend of mine.

Yesterday Sloan and I actually sat still for a daylong photoshoot with a fun photographer/graphic artist friend she recently met on a video shoot for Josie Aiello. (Actually, he says he's not an artist; I disagree.) We used my apartment, since I have a white couch and a white wall to work with, although I'd forgotten about the egregious mountain bike tire tracks I've somehow managed to smudge across every vertical surface in my home.

I urgently need a decent author photo that doesn't make me cringe with "oh, fug," and doesn't make me look like Deep Frost Robotron 2000, like my current author photo. (That was the cream of the crop of a two hour self-directed photoshoot last May. What can I say? Like any other normal human being, I hate having my photo taken, and by the time I got to that one, I was so irritated that I couldn't fake a smile anymore.)

Reese Witherspoon is a plucky lass (or at least, she plays one on the big screen). Did you know she had it written into her contract that she would keep all 63 pairs of custom-designed Jimmy Choo shoes from Legally Blonde? Really, you 'd have to be dumb not to go for that.

Speaking of which, British design critic Stephen Bayley has said of high heels: "It is the flagrant lack of practicality that makes high-heeled shoes so fascinating: in terms of static mechanics they induce a sort of insecurity which some find titillating...her bottom sticks out like an offering. At the same time, the lofty perch is an expression of vulnerability, she is effectively hobbled and unable to escape. There is something arousing about this declaration that she is prepared to sacrifice function for form."