Hell does freeze over

I can't ever see a title by the Doctor Angelicus without recalling my second-favourite description of my alma mater: "A Baptist university where Jewish professors teach atheist students Thomas Aquinas." (Sometimes told with "Jewish" and "atheist" swapping places; I guess it depends whether one's thinking of the Leopold-and-Loeb-era or the WWII-era.)

My favourite summation, of course, is "the greatest collection of neurotic adolescents since the Children’s Crusade." (Again, A.J. Liebling had a particular, earlier era in mind, but it's not a wholly inaccurate description of how the College was in my day.)

Wise Guys

I didn't make it to Bear Night last Saturday due to what transpired at the previous Bear Night.

I'd arrived at Touche rather early because I'd mooched a ride from the Scoutmaster and he wanted to attend the 9 o'clock business meeting. This really held no interest for me, but I figured it would be every bit as boring in the front room. It wasn't. I'd forgotten that, for reasons I will never understand, they usually play a groovy mix of pop and rock earlier in the evening and only switch over to vapid dance music at 10 p.m. (Why bother? No one's paying attention. I've never seen anyone dance there ever.) Also, there were a surprising number of guys around already and some of them were cute.

The cutes were two who arrived only shortly after I did. I was screwing up my courage to approach one of them when he came up to me and said to me in lilting Georgia accent, "My partner and I thought we were the only two gay men in Chicago with long hair." "You aren't from Chicago, are you?"

I ended up talking to them for a couple hours--if they hadn't had mass to get to the next morning, it might've been most of the night. I gave them my contact info before they left and, a few weeks later, an invitation came for their Epiphany celebration, which was held the day after traditional Epiphany (but the day before Epiphany according to the current RCC liturgical calendar).

I had a glorious time--it more than made up for a very quiet and phlegmy New Year's Eve. Mr Macon made all the food himself, including pulled pork and a scrummy spice cake with caramel frosting that I could've eaten until it made me sick. His partner, a grey-haired gentleman from North Carolina, showed me his collection of sculpted turtles and the plans for their dream house. I was plied with bourbon and male attention until I was pleasantly blissed out. At first, seeing a room full of attractive, manicured gay men, I was expecting to have to put up with some attitude, but they were polite and welcoming to a man; there's not a one I wouldn't be pleased to run into again.

As a result, I completely lost track of time and stayed longer than I should've, but my hosts were such consummate gentlemen that they didn't show the least impatience. They even gave me a book before I left, a copy of Christopher Moore's Lamb. (Reasonably well-written and entertaining as all get-out; I'm already about 100 pages in.) Now I'm trying to think how I can repay the favour.

Watch the flicks

Bend It Like Beckham Pretty much exactly what I expected: Feel-good sports movie meets culture-clash comedy; wackiness ensues. I was particularly amused to see baldy-man Anupam Kher concealing his big shiny pate under a Sikh turban. (Note to the hair-challenged: It's never too late to convert!) The only thing that really left a bad taste in my mouth was the lesbophobia. Did we really need the scene of Juliet Stevenson (looking eerily like Michael Palin in drag, but with even more crackerjack comic timing) disrupting the wedding with charges of dykery? Or the underwhelming education scene following it (best summed up as "Y'know, lesbianism isn't that bad!")?

Also, for a few moments, I thought the filmmakers would actually have the gonads to give us a happy ending which doesn't require the female lead to be paired off with a male, but I guess that was simply too radical a departure from formula and I should be content that it wasn't felt necessary to assign a man to Keira Knightley as well. But my biggest disappointment was not being able to find out what all the Punjabi was. The closed captions simply say "[Punjabi]". I thought for sure some geeky Punj would've produced a web page similar to, say, the guide to Chinese dialogue in Firefly in the four years since the movie was released, but no joy.

活著 (To Live) For a while there, I made a point of watching pretty much every product of the collaboration between Zhang Yimou and Gong Li so I'm not sure how I missed this one. She was beautiful, of course, even when artfully aged and succumbing to some decorous wasting disease. Likewise, the whole film was beautiful, even when depicting awfulness that should've been unbearable. I'm not sure what I really got from it besides "Sucks to live in China", something that I kinda knew already.

All films are manipulative, of course; what we ask is simply that they not make it too obvious. But I felt that the melodrama was overdetermined in spots. (C'mon losing both children, respectively to the excesses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution?) Moreover, the long takes of parental histrionics verged on emo-porn. If The Sweet Hereafter taught me anything, it's that depictions of grief can be so much more wrenching when they're quiet.

Next in the queue: Bollywood Dreams. Which reminds me that I really need a short list of recommendations from local Hindi movie musical maven mollpeartree. If anyone else has suggestions for films we simply must see, feel free to pile them on.