The qualities that shine through on the air for Chelsea Handler are also the stuff magazine editors’ dreams are made of. She tells it like it is, takes no (non-nugget) prisoners, and remains a breath of New Jersey fresh air.

In this week’s Hollywood Reporter magazine cover story, Handler hints that in the spirit of her role models Gertrude Stein and Fran Lebowitz, she is hoping to de-emphasize the celebrity gossip quotient of her broadcast day-to-day ASAP. “I want to deliver news that isn’t just surrounded by Charlie Sheen,” she tells reporter Leslie Bruce. Handler seems like she will always have the courage of her convictions:

“I have really strong opinions; I’ll never sell out,” Handler says. “I’m not going to wake up one day and have a perfume. That’s never going to happen.” She adds, “It would smell like rubbing alcohol.”

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Jeffrey Valance (pictured), a visiting professor in new genres at UCLA, shares in the pages of UK’s Fortean Times a most intriguing recent Culver City expedition. He watched as spiritualists Christian Cummings and Michael Decker donned blackout sleep-masks at the Culver Hotel to conduct one of their famous art-seances.

The pair use a Ouija board and specially configured art tools to collaborate with ghosts on paintings, drawings and sculptures. The famous spirits they claim to have connected with include Walt Disney, Norman Rockwell and Gertrude Stein, but in this particular case, the individual whose semi-self-portrait was minted boasted a more modest pedigree.

We discover that Tim [Gondeman] worked at a local Togo’s restaurant on Venice Boulevard, no more than a mile from where the séance took place. We pack up our things and head for Togo’s to catch a late lunch.

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