This may have been the best weekend of 2006 so far. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and gaudior, the best cousins in the world, came to visit this weekend. Along with them came the boy (whose livejournal name, if he has one, I do not know), whom I had met two or three times before, once when he was unconscious and once or twice when he was not, and who spent much of the weekend reading Patricia McKillip's Riddle of Stars. This alone would have conferred automatic coolness upon him, but fortunately he turned out to be cool in all sorts of other directions as well. They showed up Friday afternoon and left much later on Sunday than planned, and in between those two dates there was much bookstore and much film and much, much conversation. And all of this more than made up for my week.
There was also food. On Friday, because the universe requires such meetings, I introduced the above-named best cousins and boy to Miya's, the home of weird sushi in New Haven. This is a restaurant where you can order rolls made with curried tuna, goat cheese, and cranberries; or krill, mozzarella, honey, banana, and burdock; or shrimp, potato skins, and havarti cheese; and they work. Do they ever. And they are all named things like the Water Piglet Roll, the Bad-Tempered Geisha Boy Roll, the Bestu Jamesu Bondo Ever Roll . . . You get the idea. We ordered a plethora of sushi based generally on the strangeness of their components (and the occasional classical Japanese literary reference), and were not disappointed. I should have stolen a menu so I could describe precisely what we got and what went into it, but I was particularly impressed by whateverrushthatspeaks ordered that flat-out shouldn't have worked—it was the krill, mozzarella, et cetera deal—and gaudior's vegetarian roll with havarti cheese. This is a restaurant that has a record of Puccini's Madama Butterfly in the ladies' room and clearly never worries about anyone stealing it. Miya's is worth its insane expense.
In retrospect, I can't imagine how we managed it, but we still found room afterward for gelato from Ciao Bella on Wall Street—I am always susceptible to hazelnut, but I am rapidly developing an incurable addiction to their pistachio—and met up withhans_the_bold for a showing of The Constant Gardener at the Yale Medical School. This was a film I'd been meaning to see ever since I'd learned of its existence, because of Ralph Fiennes and John Le Carré, and I was not disappointed; but Rachel Weisz surprised me. She has the difficulty of a character who must be as ambiguous to the audience as to her husband, who only starts to become comprehensible after her death—rushthatspeaks argued that their marriage works best posthumously, and in some ways I can't argue with that—and yet ultimately can't be unreadable, or the film crashes and burns. And she carried it off. We made it into our seats with a minute to spare (and so missed five episodes of Red Dwarf that other friends were watching back at HGS, alas, but I have hopes of borrowing the DVDs from chriscrick) and afterward debated the precise degrees of bitter and sweet in the film's ending. And Ralph Fiennes is working his way toward culture hero status so far as I'm concerned.
I can't remember how late I stayed up on Friday.gaudior and the boy had crashed a little after one in the morning, although not before perpetrating a hard shutdown on my brain. (Bad manga? Can be harmful to your health. Shonen-ai that features the tender relationship between Loki and Baldur as broken up by possessive Odin? You might as well nailgun your frontal lobes while you're at it: at least that way, you won't care afterward that you've actually looked at lovingly illustrated and implausibly plotted Aesir butt-sex. We didn't even want to put it on the same table as D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths in case there was some kind of inimical chemical reaction.) I remember talking to rushthatspeaks about Peter S. Beagle and Susanna Clarke, but I don't remember what time we turned out the lights. Undoubtably later than we should have, I'm sure. Again, no regrets.
Saturday, yea, there were bookstores. We started at Labyrinth Books on York Street—rushthatspeaks wore, most appropriately, her Jareth-silkscreened T-shirt that reads, Fear me, love me, do as I say—so that gaudior could pick up a book she needed for class. I believe that's where rushthatspeaks got her six-dollar hardcover of A.S. Byatt's Possession, marred only by the film-trailer cover. From there we progressed to Barnes & Noble, where I was introduced to the first volume of a dark, intelligent, terrific manga called Death Note: a bored shinigami, a death-god who looks in this comic rather like a cross between the Kurgan (in his black-leather-and-chains phase), Tim Curry (in his black-corset-and-fishnets phase), and a cathedral gargoyle (no corsets or leather; actually Gothic), accidentally-on-purposes loses the notebook in which he writes all the names of the mortals whom he will personally cause to die, like an inverted recording angel, and then collect. Sure enough, a straight-A honor student at a prestigious high school finds the notebook and, after ascertaining its nature and uses, begins to experiment with building a better society through the elimination of evildoers. Where's the place whose road is paved with good intentions? I am inexperienced in the ways of manga, but this one I could invest in. It's like a morality play with no obvious moral: I love.
We repaired to HGS for The Fearless Vampire Killers, about which I have rambled at length before, and emerged again for dinner at Atticus Books. (They have food. They have books. When compared to most sandwich places, which only have food, the proper choice is obvious. Also, they contain customers who look like professorial hobbits.) Having successfully resisted the temptation to purchase numerous books earlier in the day, I gave up and surrendered to Gypsy Rose Lee's The G-String Murders and Rachel Shteir's Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show as a sort of double feature. (gaudior tells me I now need to write historical fiction with burlesque. I'll see what I can do . . .) Laden down with our purchases, we then returned to HGS to watch Arsenic and Old Lace, because rushthatspeaks and the boy had (somehow) never seen it, and afterward agreed that when Peter Lorre's character is the sanest person in the story, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. I am intensely fond of Peter Lorre. I've seen him only in M, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and this film, but even the latter was enough to imprint on. I have high hopes for Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Secret Agent. But I will concede that he does not usually play the voice of reason . . . Much of the night was spent in the kind of conversation where people are mostly draped over the nearest furniture and one another and at least one person is reading and at least fifty percent of another person is asleep; it was awesome. I fell asleep around eight in the morning. I'm faintly impressed I'm still awake.
And on the seventh day, we rested. Well, mostly we got up and cobbled together breakfast out of seven-grain bread, goat cheese, kalamata olives and olive oil that I was sent by a friend of the family whose father is in the olive trade, and there was more desultory conversation while the boy read Patricia McKillip,gaudior read Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, and rushthatspeaks and I traded off on the computer. And now they are gone, back to the wilds of Boston, and I am mostly ignoring the Super Bowl. I can live without the Rolling Stones at halftime, thank you very much . . .
This was a good weekend. You guys rock.
rushthatspeaks and gaudior, the best cousins in the world, came to visit this weekend. Along with them came the boy (whose livejournal name, if he has one, I do not know), whom I had met two or three times before, once when he was unconscious and once or twice when he was not, and who spent much of the weekend reading Patricia McKillip's Riddle of Stars. This alone would have conferred automatic coolness upon him, but fortunately he turned out to be cool in all sorts of other directions as well. They showed up Friday afternoon and left much later on Sunday than planned, and in between those two dates there was much bookstore and much film and much, much conversation. And all of this more than made up for my week.There was also food. On Friday, because the universe requires such meetings, I introduced the above-named best cousins and boy to Miya's, the home of weird sushi in New Haven. This is a restaurant where you can order rolls made with curried tuna, goat cheese, and cranberries; or krill, mozzarella, honey, banana, and burdock; or shrimp, potato skins, and havarti cheese; and they work. Do they ever. And they are all named things like the Water Piglet Roll, the Bad-Tempered Geisha Boy Roll, the Bestu Jamesu Bondo Ever Roll . . . You get the idea. We ordered a plethora of sushi based generally on the strangeness of their components (and the occasional classical Japanese literary reference), and were not disappointed. I should have stolen a menu so I could describe precisely what we got and what went into it, but I was particularly impressed by whatever
rushthatspeaks ordered that flat-out shouldn't have worked—it was the krill, mozzarella, et cetera deal—and gaudior's vegetarian roll with havarti cheese. This is a restaurant that has a record of Puccini's Madama Butterfly in the ladies' room and clearly never worries about anyone stealing it. Miya's is worth its insane expense. In retrospect, I can't imagine how we managed it, but we still found room afterward for gelato from Ciao Bella on Wall Street—I am always susceptible to hazelnut, but I am rapidly developing an incurable addiction to their pistachio—and met up with
hans_the_bold for a showing of The Constant Gardener at the Yale Medical School. This was a film I'd been meaning to see ever since I'd learned of its existence, because of Ralph Fiennes and John Le Carré, and I was not disappointed; but Rachel Weisz surprised me. She has the difficulty of a character who must be as ambiguous to the audience as to her husband, who only starts to become comprehensible after her death—rushthatspeaks argued that their marriage works best posthumously, and in some ways I can't argue with that—and yet ultimately can't be unreadable, or the film crashes and burns. And she carried it off. We made it into our seats with a minute to spare (and so missed five episodes of Red Dwarf that other friends were watching back at HGS, alas, but I have hopes of borrowing the DVDs from chriscrick) and afterward debated the precise degrees of bitter and sweet in the film's ending. And Ralph Fiennes is working his way toward culture hero status so far as I'm concerned.I can't remember how late I stayed up on Friday.
gaudior and the boy had crashed a little after one in the morning, although not before perpetrating a hard shutdown on my brain. (Bad manga? Can be harmful to your health. Shonen-ai that features the tender relationship between Loki and Baldur as broken up by possessive Odin? You might as well nailgun your frontal lobes while you're at it: at least that way, you won't care afterward that you've actually looked at lovingly illustrated and implausibly plotted Aesir butt-sex. We didn't even want to put it on the same table as D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths in case there was some kind of inimical chemical reaction.) I remember talking to rushthatspeaks about Peter S. Beagle and Susanna Clarke, but I don't remember what time we turned out the lights. Undoubtably later than we should have, I'm sure. Again, no regrets.Saturday, yea, there were bookstores. We started at Labyrinth Books on York Street—
rushthatspeaks wore, most appropriately, her Jareth-silkscreened T-shirt that reads, Fear me, love me, do as I say—so that gaudior could pick up a book she needed for class. I believe that's where rushthatspeaks got her six-dollar hardcover of A.S. Byatt's Possession, marred only by the film-trailer cover. From there we progressed to Barnes & Noble, where I was introduced to the first volume of a dark, intelligent, terrific manga called Death Note: a bored shinigami, a death-god who looks in this comic rather like a cross between the Kurgan (in his black-leather-and-chains phase), Tim Curry (in his black-corset-and-fishnets phase), and a cathedral gargoyle (no corsets or leather; actually Gothic), accidentally-on-purposes loses the notebook in which he writes all the names of the mortals whom he will personally cause to die, like an inverted recording angel, and then collect. Sure enough, a straight-A honor student at a prestigious high school finds the notebook and, after ascertaining its nature and uses, begins to experiment with building a better society through the elimination of evildoers. Where's the place whose road is paved with good intentions? I am inexperienced in the ways of manga, but this one I could invest in. It's like a morality play with no obvious moral: I love.We repaired to HGS for The Fearless Vampire Killers, about which I have rambled at length before, and emerged again for dinner at Atticus Books. (They have food. They have books. When compared to most sandwich places, which only have food, the proper choice is obvious. Also, they contain customers who look like professorial hobbits.) Having successfully resisted the temptation to purchase numerous books earlier in the day, I gave up and surrendered to Gypsy Rose Lee's The G-String Murders and Rachel Shteir's Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show as a sort of double feature. (
gaudior tells me I now need to write historical fiction with burlesque. I'll see what I can do . . .) Laden down with our purchases, we then returned to HGS to watch Arsenic and Old Lace, because rushthatspeaks and the boy had (somehow) never seen it, and afterward agreed that when Peter Lorre's character is the sanest person in the story, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. I am intensely fond of Peter Lorre. I've seen him only in M, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and this film, but even the latter was enough to imprint on. I have high hopes for Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Secret Agent. But I will concede that he does not usually play the voice of reason . . . Much of the night was spent in the kind of conversation where people are mostly draped over the nearest furniture and one another and at least one person is reading and at least fifty percent of another person is asleep; it was awesome. I fell asleep around eight in the morning. I'm faintly impressed I'm still awake.And on the seventh day, we rested. Well, mostly we got up and cobbled together breakfast out of seven-grain bread, goat cheese, kalamata olives and olive oil that I was sent by a friend of the family whose father is in the olive trade, and there was more desultory conversation while the boy read Patricia McKillip,
gaudior read Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, and rushthatspeaks and I traded off on the computer. And now they are gone, back to the wilds of Boston, and I am mostly ignoring the Super Bowl. I can live without the Rolling Stones at halftime, thank you very much . . .This was a good weekend. You guys rock.
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