the clock starts here and now

Currently reading:

Metroland, by Julian Barnes. I remember going to see this film (starring love of my life, Christian Bale, man with the hottest incisors around) at the old movie theater that used to be directly across from the Art Institute of Chicago...oh no! I've already forgotten its name...! Augh! It was such a lovely old theater, it's where I saw my first R-rated movie, I was maybe 9? 10? and my parents snuck me into Short Cuts, the Robert Altman film. I was to ask for the bathroom and head there while my parents bought us tickets and then rendez-vous with them near the entrance, since the ticket-seller never would have allowed a kid of my age to see it. My parents were great, they took me everywhere. I think all that made me grow up a lot faster than kids who stayed home with babysitters all the time, and I'm grateful for that.

Actually, funny tid-bit about Short Cuts -- the movie features Jennifer Jason Leigh as a phone sex, uh, giver? Whatever that job is called. Anyway she refers to oral sex in the film, and when later that week I was reading my Seventeen magazine (told you I grew up fast, I was a 10-year old Seventeen reader) and they were discussing how you can get STDs from oral sex, I had to ask my mom, "How do you get a disease from just talking about sex??" Luckily mom cleared up for me why oral sex is different from an oral presentation, otherwise that would have only worsened the pre-adolescent guilt and confusion about sexuality.

ANYWAY. I saw Metroland years ago at this same theater, and completely loved it -- loved the black & white 1960s sexy Paris nostalgia, loved Emily Watson as Christian Bale's struggling, lonely wife, loved and somehow, even as a 14-year old, identified with Bale's portrayal of a man coming to terms with the suburban life he never wanted for himself.

I found a copy of the book version, written back in the '80s by now-hot-literary-stuff Julian Barnes, in my favorite used bookshop on Charing Cross Road last week and am loving it just as much as the film. Barnes is giving a reading in London this week, you bet I'll be there.

(whew, i've blogged a lot to-day.)