Blogging at Cannes is like trying to hit a moving target from a high-speed motorcycle. The minute you’ve successfully perched yourself down on the sidewalk, opened up your laptop, typed in your WiFi password and started writing, your power supply runs out, or the security guards let you into the theater early. Having already written most of the rest of this entry, I’m inclined to save Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys for some other time time. Suffice it to say that the movie is to his career as Story of a Love Affair is to Antonioni’s—it starts as almost a conventional genre film and then becomes a more typically Ceylanian study in mutual alienation. And like Climates, it features another suspenseful is-it-or-is-it-not-consensual? sex scene. One question: Why monkeys?

Hypewise, this year’s edition is off to a slow start, partly as a function of programming; Dardennes, Eastwood, Soderbergh, Egoyan and Kaufman won’t bat until next week. As of this evening, four Competition titles have unspooled, but that still leaves a lot of empty slots in Screen Daily’s critics’ ratings grid. (With less than half the jury in, Blindness is averaging a tepid 1.6 out of four stars.) Meanwhile, the horserace to the Palme d’Or was stabled for part of the day as Cannes rolled out the red carpet for the cast of Kung Fu Panda.

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When it comes to the laws in the country, being gay and feeling gay rarely coexist. But not today. At least not for Californians, whose state has ruled that gay marriage is quite legal. I defy anybody to look at these photos and not get a little emo. Just think: One day, it could be us.

Waiting outside last night to pick up my tickets to Flight of the Conchords, I noticed something strange on the Chicago Theatre’s schedule of upcoming performers. FOTC was marked as sold out, but the Kids in the Hall gig May 29, a long-anticipated reunion tour (more on that later, my friends), still had tickets available. How could these two New Zealanders sell out in 20 minutes, yet the KITH can’t reach capacity a month after tickets went on sale?

Guess Stuff White People Like is accurate when it says they love musical comedy. But if last night’s show is any indication, they also love yelling for Bret to take his shirt off, then turning their attention to Jermaine, then air-humping in their seats when the opening notes of "Business Time" ring through the air.

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Yesterday at lunch, I scurried off to a reading at the Cultural Center to do some writer-stalking…er, attend a Stuart Dybek reading. In case you reside under a rock, Dybek is a Northwestern prof, MacArthur ("genius") grant winner, and masterful short-story writer, well-known for his depictions of the Pilsen/Little Village ‘hood where he was raised.

The themes of his reading for this series titled "Conversations Within Communities" were Dybek-ian in that the beauty inherent in ugliness, neighborhood life, and the remnant strains of nature are available even in the grittiest of Chicago ‘hoods. He also talked a lot about Chicago’s thriving and wonderfully experimental food and theater communities. (When asked what had changed most about Chicago between his Pilsen boyhood and present day, he said, "Well, the food’s a lot better; that’s for sure." Thank you Grant Achatz, Charlie Trotter, Hot Doug, and Michael Carlson, for keeping our writers happy.)

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As you may have heard, McDonald’s is giving away free Southern-style chicken sandwiches today, with the purchase of a medium or large drink.

The verdict is in and it’s neither Southern-style, nor particularly chicken-like.

We’ll give Eat Out editor Heather Shouse the first word:

"First, this is not a real chicken breast. If it is, the chicken has been amped up like some Anna Nicole Smith Butterball. It tastes like stringy white meat formed with some gristle for "juice." Beyond that, the bun is sugary and there’s no mayo. Fact: If you serve a chicken-fried-anything south of the Mason Dixon with no mayo, you will be shot on sight. Overall, I really can’t see much difference (aside from having only a lone pickle slice for toppings) between this and their Spicy Chicken sandwich (which, yes, I have tried). Chik-Fil-A is safe, even if their crazy Southern religious ways mean that I am denied their pickle juice–marinated goodness on Sundays."

And lest you think that we’re expecting too much from a lowly McDonald’s sandwich, those of us with less-learned palates didn’t much care for it either:

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Before watching last night’s Top Chef episode, I was fairly confident that salad could not be sexy. And after watching the episode? Yup. Still not sexy.

But Sam Talbot? Holy sesame. If my mother didn’t have access to the internet, I’d make five or six jokes about tossing salad right now. Suffice it to say, he totally had me on the sexy salad thing for a minute. (For those of you who didn’t actually see the episode, I should explain that Sam was the guest judge [because he won season two…oh, wait…] and the Quickfire challenge was to make a salad—a sexy salad—in a generous 45 minutes.) Sam had this attitude about him that seemed to scream “I don’t care! I’m sexy Sam! Top Chef is so over! I haven’t cooked since the show ended! I love chunky necklaces!” And yet I was still following his lead like a street dog in heat.

But then Padma said “sexy salad” and I almost puked. It was a reality check. Salads aren’t sexy. You could make love in a Jacuzzi full of spinach and ranch dressing, and they still wouldn’t be sexy.

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Whatever my feelings about R. Kelly, I am willing to give him this benefit of the doubt: I do not believe he had anything to do with 9/11, unlike a dismissed potential juror. But he was working on this in 2001, which in historical retrospect seems even more self-involved than he usually is.

Here are five things to do today:

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For a while, one of my pet harbingers of the apocalypse has been the way Google has taken over my life and the lives of everyone I know, except my uncle who refuses to buy a computer. I run my e-mail through Google, I get all my directions from Google, I store a majority of my writing as Google documents, I even text Google repeatedly when I can’t watch my favorite basketball team underplay against weaker opponents and I need to know the score. So I get particularly interested when other folks raise alarms, and have been following Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book-as-blog The Googlization of Everything.

All of which brings me to Cory Doctorow’s story in last October’s Radar, "Scroogled," a short sci-fi tale of a former Google exec who gets pulled right back in like he’s an ex-don.

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If you’re at all involved in the art community, you’re familiar with Richard Driehaus. For years, the fund manager has been lavishing money on Chicago artists and architects in the form of grants and well-paid jobs in his private collection.

In some ways, he’s also kind of a kook (in the best way of course). He is obsessed, OBSESSED with neoclassical design. And in homage to that fixation, he’s opening the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, an immaculately refurbished 1880s mansion that will house his vast collection of Louis Comfort Tiffany statues, wall art and lamps.

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Today the festival proper began, and those crowds you see in the glorious Cannes sun are waiting for the black-tie opening-night screening of Fernando Mereilles’s Blindness (based on José Saramago’s novel). The film was shown to journalists this morning, and taken together with David Lynch’s festival poster (pictured at right), it’s possible that "blindness" may become the festival’s unofficial theme.

Certainly that’s the impression you might get from the blindly polite questions at this morning’s press conference, which included one individual who speculated that Julianne Moore would get an Oscar nomination. The broader reaction seems to be along the lines of "not as bad as expected" (perhaps because opening night films are frequently dogs).

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