Three things to make your Thursday happy

1.

Tonight in L.A.'s the third annual Focus on Female Directors, a shorts program featuring movies and videos from Mira Nair (director of The Namesake), Valerie Faris & Jonathan Dayton, and up-and-coming filmmakers like Sophie Barthes, Sarah Wickliffe, Michelle Hung, and Mariam Jobrani. I'm most curious about Hilary Goldberg's "In the Spotlight," a "literary hoax" starring Guinevere Turner and Michelle Tea. Oh, and Jennifer Aniston and Andrea Buchanan's "Room 10," mostly because I've got a big giant crush on Kris Kristofferson (though more like the 1974 version), who co-stars here with Robin Wright Penn.

I've gone to Focus on Female Directors the last two years and both events were so grand; at last year's I got to see a short by Zoe Cassavetes and the unspeakably wonderful - and eventually Oscar-winning - "Danish Poet" directed by Torill Kove, which you will please watch right now if you want to have a lovely day:

2.

If you go here you can download an mp3 of "Blood is Clean," the new single from Speck Mountain. As with any band that's got hushed, dreamy vocals and weirdo lyrics and lots of spectral guitar lines, my first impulse is to liken them to Mary Timony, because in some ways I want everything in the world to be like Mary Timony. Suffice it to say this song so goes with my mood today, that mood being, "It's cold in my little tiny house and I just want to burn some jasmine candles and hide under a really old grandma-made blanket that I don't actually have." And the horns totally creep me out. It's a gem for sure.

3.

With the help of darling Creature Comforts, I've recently discovered this fantastic Etsy shop called Berkley Illustration. The artist, Ryan Berkley, makes $7 portraits of animals all dressed up to the nines, each with its own little backstory (his Siamese Cat, for instance, likes to make furniture out of salvaged materials, the panda reviews restaurants for his local weekly newspaper, and the barn owl excels at Sudoko). My favorite's the tiger, who's a general and "pretty nice guy," according to Ryan. If I had kids right now I'd want to decorate their room with stuff like this, and then they'd probably turn out all weird.

Posted by Liz in Favorite Things
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