Last night I did not have nightmares for the first time in months; I dreamed of watching a TV show adapted from an award-winning mystery series, either of which I wish really existed, because while awake I feel my brain sort of mashed up Iron Fist and various revisitings of Arthur Conan Doyle, asleep I was just following the adventures of a Cantonese-American detective in New York City's Chinatown after World War II, his brilliant sister who caught a ghost from an antique store (the ghost is Hong Kong British, a self-styled Sinologist, and a pain in the ass), his supernaturally impervious boyfriend who runs some kind of small local business, and the boyfriend's mother who is almost certainly some kind of vampire, although he's really not good at telling these things. Both he and the detective are veterans of different theaters of war; the sister owes none of her sharp observation to her inconvenient white ghost. I remember some great chase scenes down those infinite spirals of stairs you get inside old apartment buildings and one time they were pretty sure the mother ate a would-be thief with her hair.
Some mostly links.
1. Having to disagree with the man in the White House by reminding him that no, actually, he's our president is a sufficiently repellent necessity that it has temporarily shorted out my capacity for simile; it is not like anything except anti-Semitism, unsurprising but especially gross for supposedly being directed at a part of his own political base.
2. I am fascinated by the technical information contained in this interview: "Equitable Cinematography: Director Lexi Alexander on the Politics of Focus."
3. I might buy an album called Drone Butch Blues (2019) just for the title, but fortunately I also really like the one track I've heard from it: Your Heart Breaks, "Somewhere in Between."
4. Did I remember to mention that I got hit in the eye last week with a spatter of hot fat while roasting a chicken with spices and apricots? I did. It really hurt. I fled immediately to the sink and dashed the injury with cold water; I spent the evening keeping ice cubes on my closed eye and rinsing it out with preservative-free eye drops; it stopped hurting after a day or so and seems to have healed just fine. Now I feel a little paranoid about maybe wearing goggles while I cook. The chicken was delicious.
5. I love this four-thousand-year-old murex shell.
The day before yesterday,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I glimpsed a wall of swirling blue-and-green graffiti inside the hollow brick shell of the former Reid & Murdock warehouse as we went up School Street, the whole back side of the building ripped off and the clear spring sky looking in through all the windows. He wanted to go back and photograph it. Yesterday as I left for rehearsal, Pearl Street and School Street were blocked off for demolition: all of a sudden the crook of the intersection at the foot of my street was no longer a channel of old warm brick but one brick face and one pile of concrete and plaster rubble smoking so much debris into the air that a fire truck was hosing it down while cranes and excavators prowled and swung over the wreckage. It looked like a bomb site. I couldn't take a picture. I know that not everything from 1929 needs to exist in 2019, but I had grown very attached to that building. Ten years ago it was slated for preservation as a historic property, not demolition as a nuisance. At least we saw the graffiti while it was alive. At least the lion's head was saved.
Some mostly links.
1. Having to disagree with the man in the White House by reminding him that no, actually, he's our president is a sufficiently repellent necessity that it has temporarily shorted out my capacity for simile; it is not like anything except anti-Semitism, unsurprising but especially gross for supposedly being directed at a part of his own political base.
2. I am fascinated by the technical information contained in this interview: "Equitable Cinematography: Director Lexi Alexander on the Politics of Focus."
3. I might buy an album called Drone Butch Blues (2019) just for the title, but fortunately I also really like the one track I've heard from it: Your Heart Breaks, "Somewhere in Between."
4. Did I remember to mention that I got hit in the eye last week with a spatter of hot fat while roasting a chicken with spices and apricots? I did. It really hurt. I fled immediately to the sink and dashed the injury with cold water; I spent the evening keeping ice cubes on my closed eye and rinsing it out with preservative-free eye drops; it stopped hurting after a day or so and seems to have healed just fine. Now I feel a little paranoid about maybe wearing goggles while I cook. The chicken was delicious.
5. I love this four-thousand-year-old murex shell.
The day before yesterday,
spatch and I glimpsed a wall of swirling blue-and-green graffiti inside the hollow brick shell of the former Reid & Murdock warehouse as we went up School Street, the whole back side of the building ripped off and the clear spring sky looking in through all the windows. He wanted to go back and photograph it. Yesterday as I left for rehearsal, Pearl Street and School Street were blocked off for demolition: all of a sudden the crook of the intersection at the foot of my street was no longer a channel of old warm brick but one brick face and one pile of concrete and plaster rubble smoking so much debris into the air that a fire truck was hosing it down while cranes and excavators prowled and swung over the wreckage. It looked like a bomb site. I couldn't take a picture. I know that not everything from 1929 needs to exist in 2019, but I had grown very attached to that building. Ten years ago it was slated for preservation as a historic property, not demolition as a nuisance. At least we saw the graffiti while it was alive. At least the lion's head was saved.
