What I read at lunch

You get pretty far into Mary McNamara's LAT piece on Mary-Louise Parker (pegged to tonight's return of "Weeds" on Showtime) before you learn that she is not a happy faux pot pusher. She thinks the show's creators are mishandling her lead character of Nancy Botwin.

"I feel like I have to protect my character at all times, that they are going to mess with it or break it," she said. "And they can; they can take a performance and turn it into the exact opposite of what I intended....I make fairly strong, big choices, and they just cut around them. So when I see the scene, it's as if my choices weren't there. And there's nothing I can do....I am trying not to sound cranky, because I'm not really cranky. I don't really have anything to bitch about. But it does get frustrating sometimes. I mean, they hire you because you make these choices and then they don't let you make the choices."

Doesn't sound like she's completely over Gwyneth Paltrow playing the leading role in the film Proof, either. Parker had earned raves for the role on Broadway: "Was I happy about it? No. Both those plays ["Prelude to a Kiss" being the other] I took from basically table readings to Broadway. But I wouldn't trade the experience of being in the plays for being in the movie. How could I? I did like 500 performances of 'Proof.' Every one a different experience. And that's what it's about, the experience. Otherwise, you're just, I don't know, drifting around, going to Williams-Sonoma."

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New Media Musings blogger J.D. Lasica, author of Darknet, ran into Jack Valenti at the Aspen Institute and chatted him up on video about the media future. "His son, John, has been one of the biggest cheerleaders of the book and its central message: that the entertainment industries need to embrace their digital future by adopting new business models," Lasica writes. "The senior Valenti had nice things to say about the book as well." The video runs ninety seconds.

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Ed Humes speaks at, and blogs about, the Steinbeck Festival in Salinas.