When someone takes something from you it feels like a kind of rape. Like some kind of home invasion. I’m feeling that now because my $450 bicycle — a really nice one, my pride and joy — was stolen last night. It was locked to a sign pole in front of the Clarity Screening Room building at 100 Crescent Drive, where I went for my second viewing of Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu’s Babel and a small after-party.

I knew it was gone and filing a theft report was probably a waste of time all around, but I called the Beverly Hills Police three times anyway between 11 and 11:45 pm. They never managed to send a car over. I finally took a cab home. Stuff like this puts you in a foul and bitter mood. I feel like joining a support group for people who’ve gone through similar traumas. Maybe the guy who stole it will meet with appropriate payback some day. I wish I could go to Don Corleone for justice.
It was a dark green racing bike with slightly thicker tires and a really nice squishy seat, and a little strobe light on the front bars and a rear-facing red-blinker light , and dual collapsable baskets for putting groceries into. And it had one of those great compressed-air horns on the front bars — a horn so loud that it would make SUV-drivers stop cold.
I loved seeing Babel again. I’m more convinced than ever that it’s going to do well with paying audiences over 25 or 30 because it’s about parenting and children, and who outside of childless singles doesn’t have strong feelings about that? Memories and worries and regrets to dip into? It sank in emotionally a little deeper because I saw it at home in a more settled frame of mind, and not in one of those cranked-up states that I’m always in during the Cannes Film Festival.