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Here's a great Michael Logan interview with Ilene Kristen (One Life To Live, Ryan's Hope, the gal in my default icon) on OLTL's cancellation and the Prospect Park fiasco.

In other news, we're supposed to have another bout of Big Old Winds here in LA. If my power goes out again, I'm gonna be pretty cranky.

I'm so pleased to learn that One Life To Live headwriter Ron Carlivati is set to join the General Hospital writing team after OLTL wraps. Carlivati is by far the most talented headwriter currently writing for daytime (plus he was a protege of Claire Labine, creator of Ryan's Hope and headwriter of GH during its last great era). I hope he will quickly get promoted to headwriter or at least co-headwriter.

I still wish OLTL were not being cancelled. Besides, GH's days may well be numbered anyway, but if it must go out, I would rather it go out in top form.

Someone has made a fantastic Ryan's Hope tumblr. Really gorgeous.

I seem to have become a huge fan of The Good Wife--especially of Alan Cumming's character Eli Gold. I really wish America Ferrera would join the cast instead of just guest-starring, because she and Cumming have amazing chemistry. (But now I'm hearing the show may be "on the bubble" of cancellation, which would really suck.) Are any of my LJ friends fans of this show?

General Hospital currently seems to be trying for "most depressing storyline of 2011," as if what anyone wants to watch five days a week (especially with the goings on in Japan, Libya etc.) is children dead and in peril. ( more about GH )

It's Thursday already? I keep thinking it's only Wednesday (because I took Monday as a sick day).

Head cold: I still have it. It's abating, but it's taking its sweet time. Possibly due in part to...

Weather: About as far from cliched California weather as it gets. The Garage Kitty and I would prefer some nice cliched weather, thanks.

Garage Kitty: Availing herself of every warm car hood and patch of sunlight at her disposal.

Writing: Today I think I figured out how to proceed with the new part 2 of the Jo book. Tomorrow I will get to work on the new chapter 5, and I'm really looking forward to it. Hooray, it's back to 1975! And speaking of which...

Ryan's Hope: SOAPnet is currently airing the 1975 episodes for the last time (since SOAPnet will be kaput in a year or so). I wish everybody was watching (or at least everybody who even vaguely likes serial drama), because it is such damn good, intelligent, juicy storytelling. And watching young Kate Mulgrew and Ilene Kristen is always a delight.

One Life To Live: Tuc Watkins/David Vickers is back, along with his extra-meta hilarity.

I told willowgreen I would post when the Writers' Strike episodes of Ryan's Hope (airing on SOAPnet) ended. They haven't run a credit roll, but I'm pretty sure the Actual Writers have returned to the building, as the soap-within-a-soap storyline began to air today. The writing is already much better, though now the writers have to dig the show out of the ditch the scab writers drove it into.

Of course, there are only four more months of 1981 episodes left to show before SOAPnet will either go back to 1975 (the beginning of Ryan's Hope) or pull the plug on the show altogether, so we'll see what happens towards the end of the year.

Last night I saw Ilene Kristen perform at Room Five. She's one of my favorite actors (playing Delia on Ryan's Hope and Roxy on One Life To Live), but she's also a fantastic singer (mostly in a jazzy soul vein) and has just as much charisma in a live setting as she turns on for the camera. This was apparently her first LA show, but she gigs from time to time in New York, and she's not to be missed. (And when she grins, she still looks just like Delia Ryan, circa 1976!)

Here's a clip from a NYC appearance of Kristen's (with a different band, but the same outfit!):

Today I went to the Vista Theatre for a special screening of House of Dark Shadows (1970), the kickoff of this weekend's Dark Shadows Festival. I had worried I wouldn't find parking and gave myself lots of extra time for that. I easily found parking on a side street and then had to stand in line for over an hour in the broiling sun, ugh. (My shoulders are very sunburnt.)

Eventually Jonathan Frid arrived and put his handprints in the cement outside the movie theater. Then we finally got to go inside, and I had a great wide-rangingly geeky conversation with a couple from Chicago before the film started.

It was great fun to get to see House of Dark Shadows on a big screen in a movie house full of like-minded Dark Shadows fans, though, as I'd recalled, the film lacks the charm of the TV series. In its attempt to shoehorn a sprawling soap opera into a 90-minute film, the movie feels like a weird short-hand alternate universe of the TV show. It looks beautiful, and it has a polish the TV show lacks--no one stumbles over their lines--but the story moves at light speed, to the expense of the characters. ( 40 year old spoilers )

Tomorrow I'm off to Burbank for the Dark Shadows Festival!

Meanwhile, in Ryan's Hope-ville: the Writers' Strike of 1981 episodes have begun to reair on Soapnet. Goodbye subtle writing, hello bizarre melodrama!

Today I got to meet skogkatt! We had brunch at Coffee Table, and then she got to meet the Garage Kitty. The kitty skedaddled when Julia tried to take her picture, but later on she managed to sneak a photo.

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In Ryan's Hope news, this evening I watched an old Law & Order ep (from 1993) that featured both Michael Levin (Jack Fenelli) and Tovah Feldshuh (Martha McKee #1), but, sadly, not in the same scene.

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I had a three day weekend, but it sure has zoomed by.