Into the winter, traveling light

Things I have determined from my trip to D.C.:

More Indian restaurants should serve coconut lassi and naan with cherries and almonds. We ordered both items at Angeethi the night I got in and they were rather, as they say, best. I remain mildly wistful that I did not order the goat balti, but that's what return visits are for.

I watch very little television these days except for TCM, so it is not all that surprising that I had never heard of Flight of the Conchords (2007—2009) before rushthatspeaks and B. showed me two episodes on Wednesday night, but it will be monumentally stupid if I don't get hold of the rest. (I told you I was freaky.)

I should also stop being surprised that Rush and I were unable to watch all of Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993) despite its standoffish, funny, Brechtian surrealism and the doppelgänger talents of Karl Johnson,¹ because every single book I have ever tried to read by or about Ludwig Wittgenstein has attempted to destroy itself. We probably got off lightly that the disc only froze. It could have started talking about pineapples and taken B.'s audiovisual system with it.

Ishtar is munificent with her fur. This sentence is less semantically striking if I explain that Ishtar is the cat whom B. belongs to, but if you could see the bag I took to D.C. (and the clothes, and the books, and my jacket) you'd be impressed anyway.

Somewhere in Reston, Virginia is a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant called, I believe, House of Mandarin, that produces the best General Tso's chicken I may have eaten in my life. We had to eat it with borrowed chopsticks in Whole Foods, because of the way the timing with another errand worked out, but that only added a kind of endearing haphazardness to the whole endeavor. Also the Books-a-Million in the same shopping plaza contained a Star Trek novel by Laurell K. Hamilton, which really does not need to exist.

I don't know what it is about the combination of ultraviolence, philosophy, big-band jazz, holy fools, screwball comedy, and nonlinearity with a vengeance, but Baccano! (2007) turned out to be a show I'd been waiting all my life to see. Rush screened it for me in two blocks on Thursday, on either side of the aforementioned Chinese restaurant. Jacuzzi Splot is a marginally less silly name in Japanese, but I'd love him even if it weren't. Isaac and Miria make me think of Kabbalah. I kept flashing on Benny Goodman throughout.

At least the first four novels of the Death Gate Cycle (1990—1994) hold up reasonably well as plot and character work, but my God, Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis write like a yak.

There is a a stunning exhibit on Cyprus at the National Museum of Natural History. There is art in it like nothing else I've ever seen, even the Cyclades or Anatolia: a shoulder-to-shoulder trinity of mask-nosed, bull-horned figures, a two-thousand-year-old vessel crowded all over with little clay enactments of everyday life, an owl-eyed woman with a child at her breast, her hair and ears pierced with rings; not to mention Byzantine icons, coins from the time of Venice and the Ottomans. It seems to be the first real exhibition of Cypriot antiquities in the United States. The doorway was flanked by sphinxes with eyes like almonds in their shells. We spent a lot of time there.

The Tempest (1979). I wish he'd lived to make A Midsummer Night's Dream.

My godchild is really adorable.

And my grandfather's birthday party was lovely: lots of Thai food and candles in chocolate frosting and an impromptu four- or five-part rendition of "Stars and Stripes Forever" on kazoo. Both of my mother's siblings came in from out of town. One of them is still here; we watched Black Narcissus (1947) on TCM last night. Tonight I am going to show her the restoration of The Red Shoes (1948), as an antidote to her feelings on the ballet in Black Swan (2010). She was a professional dancer for years. I suppose this has nothing to do with D.C. anymore, but it is nonetheless good.

1. Seriously, there is a shot in which he looks precisely like this picture of Wittgenstein, to the point that Rush wondered very reasonably if Jarman had used it as a reference. Honestly, that impression persists even when he's looking like this.