Bulletty

Since I never got around to writing entries for the rest of my weekend, let's knock off the highlights in bulletpoint format:

• Friday was Homecoming and I pulled off an afternoon reception hat trick, proceeding first from the café dedication (crudités, hummus, cheese, fresh fruit) to the language lab open house (pâté, almonds, ripe cheese, cookies) and thence to the alumni reception (cake and cake pops). I thought for sure I'd end up with a stomachache but I didn't.
• The café has been christened[*] for Henri Bergson, so monshu naturally asked if any of his works were available there. I laughed and said, "Well, they put a quote of his on the wall." I did a little Wikiresearch on him and his philosophy was actually sounding somewhat interesting to me until I hit the line "the more recent resurgence of scholarly interest in Bergson is related to the growing influence of his follower Deleuze".
• At the language lab event, I came face-to-face with just how outmoded my experiences of language paedagogy are. The Mandarin demo was little more than glorified flashcards, but for the other languages, you had a complete multimedia experience. A slim young Petersbourgeois who recognised me from the shuttle convinced me to contribute to a dictionary of campus slang and I told him my regrets about not finding a way to do that kind of work for a living.
• On the way back from the reception, I pulled Mr Smith aside to look at one of the marching band videos on display in the corridor. He wasn't as struck by the resemblance of one of the formations to a female human reproductive system as I was, but he was equally at a loss to suggest what other figure they could have been intending to depict.
• As a joke, I wore to work a t-shirt from my alma mater. Three times I ended up unbuttoning my overshirt to reveal it, the last time just as I was leaving work, which was enough to make me barely miss the shuttle (which was running very badly ahead of schedule) and add another half-hour to my commute time. Oh well; more time to read Dostoevsky.
• Saturday morning, the Old Man asked what my "plans for the day" were and I said, "My plan is not to make any plans." But I gave in and agreed to go with him to La Fonda that evening. It helped that I wanted to swing by a friend's get-together afterwards. Then, as the time grew nigh, I had an attack of abulia. Near as I can tell, it was brought on by mild food poisoning. Fortunately, it only lasted about two hours.
• The food at La Fonda was as good as always. I particularly liked their play on sopes, which were made of fried plantain and filled with juicy cooked-down beef, onions, and green peppers. Unfortunately, there was some kind of meet-up going on and our quiet table in the corner ended up being uncomfortably close to the bar. Between the insipid opinions on current cinema and the noise level in general, we were happy to get out of that place.
• On the way to the party, I passed a couple of greying hippies who were tidying up in front of their house on Ardmore. The guy complimented my beard, then my long hair, then he shook my hand and said, "We're going to smoke some kush." I politely took a raincheck.
• By the time I got there, the party had been underway for at least four hours. Almost immediately, I met a stylish young Polish woman who was mock-bragging about her ability to "turn" gays. With a couple hours, it was just a bunch of homobears in the kitchen. I tried to drag the party into a cool lounge adjacent, but that just ended with me alone with a very drunk man who was using pseudo-profound nonsense to try to hit on me. Things got better after his buddy took him home and we ended up in the front room talking about our high school music crushes.
• As a result of that conversation, I ended up listening to some Krautrock before going to bed. I wonder if I'd've gotten into it if I'd really been given the chance (i.e. been able to borrow recordings instead of having to buy my own with the money I didn't have). But the last thing I listened before I went to bed was "Tears" by the Chameleons, the song that taught me the meaning of Sehnsucht.

[*] Infelicitous choice of terminology, I know.

Mumblecored

Pit Stop did have some elements I liked. For starters, most gay films end when the married guy comes out. Here that's already happened and instead we get a look at what happens when the lovers don't ride off into the sunset but the responsible one sticks around to give his child a stable home. We also don't see the accident that put someone into a coma, and we don't see them miraculously come out of it either. A less-than-accepting relative doesn't get lectured or undergo a sudden change of heart.

What it didn't have, however, was a satisfying arc. It feels unfinished, like there was at least another ten minutes of movie they forgot to film somehow. The central romance, if you can call it that, feels idealised and arbitrary and there's no sense of how it changes the characters whose backstories have been exposited so leisurely. So it all ends up feeling rather slack. I also joked to monshu that it could just as well have been called Awkward conversations with poor lighting. But that's true of any indie mumblecore film, gay or straight, isn't it?

Given the sketchy plot, I'm not sure how much better calibre actors would've helped. It goes to show that there's more to making a good gay movie than simply steering clear of all the clichés which make so many bad gay films bad.