'Bred Crumbs

This is now the past. Go to the new 'Bred Crumbs.

01.19.01

02:51 PM Scenes from an impromptu forget-my-troubles-and-spend-money-
while-I-have-it lunchtime trip to the Embarcadero:

-- I wound up chatting with a cop in the men's restroom. And not in the gay-porn way. I was waiting behind him while he completed his restroom requirements, and a call came over his radio reporting someone "in a Los Angeles Lakers sweater shooting up drugs." "I guess he's a Lakers fan," the cop said amiably to me. "Yeah, that's surprising," I said. "A Warriors fan, I could understand." He laughed and agreed. Talking sports with a cop, on top of wearing my biker jacket today, loading up on sale sweaters at Structure, and buying financial software, left me feeling muy macho.

-- Meanwhile, sisters were doin' it for themselves. On my way back to the office, I passed a road construction site at which a woman was lugging a beam. As I walked by, she said to her male co-worker, "It may take me a little longer, but I can do it." She wasn't angry, just casual. She lugged the beam a little farther and threw it to the ground most capably. Then she smiled and said to the co-worker, "Thanks for the offer, though." It is important to note of the woman that I heard her say these things, not roar them. As any good feminist knows, roaring is not always an effective means of communication.

Send e-mail

01.17.01

06:04 PM I wanted to like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I really, really did. And for the first 45 minutes or so, it had me. The story was elegant and interesting and the older characters were the more appealing ones for a change. I wasn't buying the flying, but the first couple fight scenes actually held my interest, which fight scenes usually don't. But then the story seemed to wrap itself up though the movie was clearly far from over, and suddenly the flick veered into a flashback that seemed to be from a completely different movie except that it featured the girl from the first part of the movie who had gone from intriguing to annoying once her not-so-secret secret was laid bare and there was romping in the desert with the Martha Stewart of cave-dwelling outlaw men and a comb was being traded back and forth like that damned Deeply Symbolic pocketwatch in Contact and there was restaurant fu and the fighting got tedious and I really wasn't buying the flying and there was a near-climactic scene that was simultaneously eerily beautiful and quite stupid, and hours later the film finally returned to its emotional center for the climax, but by then the damage was done and a movie that I'd hoped would relieve the strain of recent days just made me crankier.

Send e-mail

11:56 AM Amid these, um, challenging times, one thing does not fail to cheer me: the memory of what happened Saturday at the laundromat. A guy climbed into a dryer and spun around. I was already admiring his cuteness and stockiness, and his appeal shot right up with his joyful little stunt. He and his girlfriend (of course he had a girlfriend, I being attracted to him) were doing their laundry, then suddenly they scanned the laundromat crowd, and the guy curled himself up adorably into a tight little ball in one of the lower dryers, and the girlfriend closed the door and hit the button. He spun for about two minutes, I think, until his face started getting red.

As a co-worker pointed out, you do not get to enjoy this sort of thing if you have a washer and dryer in your home. Furthermore, she pointed out, even sans girlfriend the guy clearly would have been straight, as rolling around in clothes dryers is not the sort of thing gay men do. Of course the problem is, I want a gay guy who would do that. Not all the time, mind you, but yeah.

Send e-mail

01.15.01

04:45 PM A browsing of several reviews of O Brother, Where Art Thou? -- which is a very odd, gorgeous and quite good movie, one that gets better the more you think about it, and one that proves that Entertainment Weekly movie critic Owen Gleiberman, who graded the movie with an inexplicable "F," has some very peculiar burr up his butt -- gives you a good indication of how many details film critics get wrong. About half the reviews surveyed botch the name of George Clooney's character -- Ulysses Everett McGill, usually shortened to "Everett," not "Ulysses." O IMDB, where art thou?

Send e-mail