Bread and Bread

1. dr. frankenwhatever, just hand me a cigarette When I was in college, I accompanied some friends to Rocky Horror at the Nuart . They were aging punk rockers, meaning they were twenty and had been going Fugazi shows since they were twelve and were sort of over it all. They still wore twenty-hole Doc Martens, but there was no way they were going to make the effort to dye their hair green and shape it into a mohawk again. Once upon a time, they’d been Rocky Horror cast members. My friend Jenessa’s boyfriend Bill had played Dr. Frankenfurter perhaps for years. Now they watched a few minutes of the movie and spent the rest of the time smoking in the lobby and making snarky (unscripted, unrelated to Rocky ) observations. I suppose they weren’t actually smoking in the lobby. Even in 1998, I’m pretty sure smoking in movie theaters was illegal. But they were all but smoking.  It's just a jump to the left, and a step to the lobby. I was bummed out because I’d never seen...

I'd spend more time like this if our couch were long enough to lay down on. I broke my No Movies About People In My Demographic rule this weekend to watch Hello I Must Be Going , because the trailer assured me that Melanie Lynskey’s character, Amy, would be sufficiently bummed out as to not stress me out. (Can I just say how refreshing it is that a character allegedly born in 1977 is named Amy? Not Lily or Ruby or Madison, or another name given to humans born circa 2007 and movie characters born in 2012. AK and I have a thing about how trans guys tend to rename themselves, like, Brayden, even when they’re thirty years old. If your female name was Jennifer, your male name should probably be Dave or Brian, not Owen. That is, if you’re going for realism. If you just want a name you like and you don’t mind turning around every time the parents at your hipster coffee shop call their two-year-olds, carry on, Brayden/Owen.) Where was I? Hello I Must Be Going and realism, righ...

Ollie takes ownership of the cube. Ahem. Hi. Well, gosh, I feel kind of bashful. When you’re internet-quiet for four months, you feel like the next thing you say should be really important , even if that was never the aim of this blog. But all of a sudden this is turning into that worst-of-all-creative-writing-products, the I Don’t Know What To Write A Poem About poem. Or its blogosphere equivalent, the Sorry I Haven’t Posted blog. I’m not sorry. I’m…rested? I actually have about a thousand things to do this week, so that doesn’t feel like the right word, even if it’s true in the mental sense. I took some time off partly because I felt like my blog was alternately disingenuous or TMI-ish, or maybe both at the same time. This morning I was wondering how to create a voice that is both authentic and not overly revealing. It would have to be some sort of experimental narrative that is always doubling back on itself and calling attention to its own tricks. And that would be no fun...