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I need direction to perfection
Right. Yesterday. I had a yesterday.
My father and I were supposed to cook dinner the day after the Fourth, but somehow the simple act of cleaning up the kitchen table so we could chop onions on it turned into a housewide epidemic, so that the kitchen was practically renovated and my room (or the room that was once mine before I moved to New Haven, and in which I now stay when I'm in the Boston area; it still contains several shelves' worth of embarrasing middle-school books, so I can't disown it that easily) has much more space on the floor than had heretofore been considered possible. And that was pretty much how we spent the day before yesterday.
Yesterday, we actually cooked; so first we spent the afternoon shopping, which is an activity I can stomach so long as I am not expected to return home with either new clothes or new shoes. Groceries, however, are fun.* We then set up shop in the newly-spotless kitchen, and if I had had a hand free, I would have taken photographs. Dinner involved the creation of corn chowder with chilis and a semi-successful attempt to imitate the beef negimaki served at Samurai in New Haven. The latter mostly unraveled while in the pan, and unfortunately steamed more than they seared, but when drizzled with ginger barbecue sauce were sufficiently edible. The chowder, on the other hand, was fantastic. It suffered from too much potato, because we should not have tried to make up the difference of an ear of corn with pure starch, and between the poblano peppers and the half-jalapeño I had expected a little more heat, but it was delicious. There was also bacon, celery, onions, garlic, and cilantro involved, and if anyone is curious, I will post the recipe—it's one of the few dishes whose making we wrote down (beyond a list of ingredients penciled onto a notecard, which does happen). Mostly, dinners around here are improv.
After dinner, we watched The Matador (2005), which my mother and brother had brought home; and my entire family liked it, which is not unprecedented, but intermittent enough to warrant comment. It's not as spiky a film as its initial set-up promises, but it's dark and funny (in the proper places) and serious (in the others), and Pierce Brosnan is magnificent. I fear that for the rest of his life, his performances will always be weighed against his image as Bond, and audiences should just give up and accept that he is, in fact, quite a talented actor. Here he's Julian Noble, an international hitman half a margarita away from a nervous breakdown that not all the booze and whores in the Philippines can stave off.** He's matched with Greg Kinnear's Danny Wright, a mild-mannered and quietly desperate consultant whose business life has been on the rocks for years and who fears that his marriage may soon go the same way; and with Danny's wife Bean, who married him out of high school and who may or may not have changed her desires in fourteen years. In between, there's some excellent, occasionally unbelievable—in the sense of "Oh, God, does this man's mouth have no off switch?"—dialogue. It's a three-character play, really; it even has a clearly divided first and second act. But I was just as glad it's a film, for the cinematography and the flash-cut images like Homeric similes, and because if it were a play with Pierce Brosnan I'd never have gotten tickets.
I hope to see any number of you this afternoon at Readercon. Where I will no doubt purchase immense amounts of literature (and, with all luck, sell some: I've already agreed to run the SFPA table for an hour) and meet up with cool people. All is happiness. With translation first.
*Books are another universe entirely. I can browse like nobody's business.
**He reminded me of a line from Terry Pratchett's The Truth, in which it is said of Sam Vimes that "everything about the man could be prefaced by the word 'badly'—as in -spoken, -educated, and -in need of a drink" (the list also eventually includes "-dressed," which is appropriate to Julian's tourist-loud shirts), only Julian has more boundary issues and fewer social skills. But he is not without self-perception, however haphazardly he applies it; as he describes himself after a particularly bad night, "I look like a Bangkok hooker on a Sunday morning after the Navy's left town."
My father and I were supposed to cook dinner the day after the Fourth, but somehow the simple act of cleaning up the kitchen table so we could chop onions on it turned into a housewide epidemic, so that the kitchen was practically renovated and my room (or the room that was once mine before I moved to New Haven, and in which I now stay when I'm in the Boston area; it still contains several shelves' worth of embarrasing middle-school books, so I can't disown it that easily) has much more space on the floor than had heretofore been considered possible. And that was pretty much how we spent the day before yesterday.
Yesterday, we actually cooked; so first we spent the afternoon shopping, which is an activity I can stomach so long as I am not expected to return home with either new clothes or new shoes. Groceries, however, are fun.* We then set up shop in the newly-spotless kitchen, and if I had had a hand free, I would have taken photographs. Dinner involved the creation of corn chowder with chilis and a semi-successful attempt to imitate the beef negimaki served at Samurai in New Haven. The latter mostly unraveled while in the pan, and unfortunately steamed more than they seared, but when drizzled with ginger barbecue sauce were sufficiently edible. The chowder, on the other hand, was fantastic. It suffered from too much potato, because we should not have tried to make up the difference of an ear of corn with pure starch, and between the poblano peppers and the half-jalapeño I had expected a little more heat, but it was delicious. There was also bacon, celery, onions, garlic, and cilantro involved, and if anyone is curious, I will post the recipe—it's one of the few dishes whose making we wrote down (beyond a list of ingredients penciled onto a notecard, which does happen). Mostly, dinners around here are improv.
After dinner, we watched The Matador (2005), which my mother and brother had brought home; and my entire family liked it, which is not unprecedented, but intermittent enough to warrant comment. It's not as spiky a film as its initial set-up promises, but it's dark and funny (in the proper places) and serious (in the others), and Pierce Brosnan is magnificent. I fear that for the rest of his life, his performances will always be weighed against his image as Bond, and audiences should just give up and accept that he is, in fact, quite a talented actor. Here he's Julian Noble, an international hitman half a margarita away from a nervous breakdown that not all the booze and whores in the Philippines can stave off.** He's matched with Greg Kinnear's Danny Wright, a mild-mannered and quietly desperate consultant whose business life has been on the rocks for years and who fears that his marriage may soon go the same way; and with Danny's wife Bean, who married him out of high school and who may or may not have changed her desires in fourteen years. In between, there's some excellent, occasionally unbelievable—in the sense of "Oh, God, does this man's mouth have no off switch?"—dialogue. It's a three-character play, really; it even has a clearly divided first and second act. But I was just as glad it's a film, for the cinematography and the flash-cut images like Homeric similes, and because if it were a play with Pierce Brosnan I'd never have gotten tickets.
I hope to see any number of you this afternoon at Readercon. Where I will no doubt purchase immense amounts of literature (and, with all luck, sell some: I've already agreed to run the SFPA table for an hour) and meet up with cool people. All is happiness. With translation first.
*Books are another universe entirely. I can browse like nobody's business.
**He reminded me of a line from Terry Pratchett's The Truth, in which it is said of Sam Vimes that "everything about the man could be prefaced by the word 'badly'—as in -spoken, -educated, and -in need of a drink" (the list also eventually includes "-dressed," which is appropriate to Julian's tourist-loud shirts), only Julian has more boundary issues and fewer social skills. But he is not without self-perception, however haphazardly he applies it; as he describes himself after a particularly bad night, "I look like a Bangkok hooker on a Sunday morning after the Navy's left town."
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Yes, please. Recipe, recipe...
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Posted; finally. Enjoy!
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This year: sushi mat and appropriate accoutrements?
I hope you enjoy the con, and maybe soon I can come out there and see this Cleaner Room . . .