I snorted what I thought was coke, but it turned out to be heroin

derspatchel is eating chowder out of a bread bowl. The chowder came from Legal Sea Foods; I made the bread bowl out of a loaf of homemade bread my father left us after Christmas. Results appear to be delicious and entertaining. There may be photographs. [edit] Photographs! Commentary by Rob.

The remainder of Friday after the return of Bertie Owen was usefully mundane: I did hours and hours of work to make up for the rest of the week. Three things of note happened this weekend:

We cleaned our entire apartment in a day because our landlords who live on the West Coast were dropping by on Sunday to meet us in person and check out the property. We found out on Friday while I was in the middle of my Nokia marathon. Saturday we cleaned. Excited by the chaos, Hestia and Autolycus leapt to help with all claws out and I had to spend some bonus time cleaning up after them. On Sunday afternoon, our landlords said nice things about the condition in which we had kept the place. Especially since we live with active young cats and fragile old hardwood, this was actually quite rewarding to hear. Plus we finally learned the secret of the Mystery Shack, or at least what it's doing on the third floor of this house. We still don't know why the original owners were so terrible at home repairs, though.

Saturday night, I celebrated Cagemas with rushthatspeaks, gaudior, and B. by watching Werner Herzog's The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009). The primary impetus was Nicholas Cage and hallucinatory iguanas, but it surprised all of us by turning out to be a quite good, bizarrely heartwarming comedy in the shape of a crime film whose genre is best described as anti-noir. Nothing about it would work without Cage. It could have been made in the '70's with Klaus Kinski, but that's the level of commitment to batshit we're talking about. Nobody in between. The genre is not really apparent until the third act, so there are several stretches in the middle of the film where it feels like the adventures of a whacked-out guy who runs around making bad life decisions with a .44 Magnum shoved down his trousers, but the themes coalesce eventually and the results were delightful. Eva Mendes is a sex worker who does not have a heart of gold, but she has agency and interiority and a storyline that runs parallel to Cage's rather than depending on it. Brad Dourif has a small role as Cage's long-suffering bookie. The film is startlingly aware of the basic, brutal racial inequalities of the American justice system. Also it is very clear that somewhere offstage of this movie is a revenge flick starring an alligator versus the Louisiana Highway Patrol, but we only see the beginning. My respect for Werner Herzog—always quite high, ever since I first saw Fitzcarraldo (1982)—remains undiminished.

Sunday I planned to nap after our landlords had left, because I had stayed awake until seven in the morning working on the new story I'd had to abandon when Bertie Owen died for a week and a half, but instead I wrote some more and then Rob and I celebrated our successful landlord visit with dinner at Pescatore in Ball Square. They were recommended for fried clams; the recommendation did not lie. Extraordinary seafood. Plump-bellied clams, very lightly fried; I had smoked salmon fettuccine and Rob believes his gnocchi were the fluffiest and sweetest treatment of potato he's ever enjoyed. We did not then go grocery-shopping per our original plan. We returned home and watched Thorold Dickinson's The Queen of Spades (1949).

( Why, you might end up by gaining a fortune. Or losing your precious soul. )

This post was begun much earlier in the day and all but complete before we went out to catch The Razor's Edge (1984) at the Brattle Theatre. Mixed, melodramatic, and only partly successful, but absolutely worth seeing. My major takeaway is that I should see more of Theresa Russell. Anyway. I've got my computer back. I can write tons about film now.