I love this time of year. The light doesn’t have that bright glare of summer but seems to rest on everything softly, so the shapes of buildings, shadows, trees, are all a little more sharply defined. Michael calls it earthquake weather. He hates that the days have become shorter. I like it. Autumn always cheers me up.

On Tuesday night I saw my first film at the Metreon, a megaplex that is part o the Yerba Buena complex, which means it is huge, glossy, composed of squarish chunks of brick and window. I felt my way up to the theater through a maze of mall promenades and escalators. It was a New Yorker event, a series of political films put on by the magazine. The theater was nice, the screen large, the seats comfortable. THX sound is such an integral part of the theater experience that we were given the usual ear-blasting THX intro (some wag in the audience kept yelling “louder!”) even though The Contender is a fictional riff on the Lewinsky scandal and consists mainly of headshots and dialogue.

I remember being annoyed by THE CONTENDER. It struck me as one of those context-ignoring Hollywood dramas so naive about politics that it treated Democratic/Republican scandals and tactics as interchangeable.