But I still listen to that music every night
I wonder when living in a city by myself will cease to remind me of New Haven. I walked out earlier this evening to pick up dinner from Pizza J (they're not good at packing and their chicken Caesar wrap had such structural failure that I just ate it like an ordinary salad off a plate, but it was tasty, fulfilled my desire for something vegetal as well as proteinaceous, and I did not realize when I ordered it that their house-made coconut-milk ice cream sandwich would nearly infringe the bigger-than-your-head food rule; this is not a complaint) and I kept thinking of the years of curry noodle soups and late-night dumplings I bought from the Ivy Noodle, which seems to have transformed in the last decade into the Ivy Wok; Bulldog Burrito where I acquired any number of adequately excellent quesadillas is now the Tomatillo Taco Joint and if the photos on Google Maps are anything to go by, the whole area has been rather stunningly engulfed by a multiple-block retail district that I don't even know what to say to, except yikes. It was bad enough when I willingly patronized restaurants with university tie-in names without them being some kind of literal Yale mall. On the other hand, grad school was when I began seeing movies in theaters for more than social occasions because for the first time in my life I had disposable income and lived about three blocks from a movie theater, the York Square Cinema of blessed memory. Literally I walked across two streets and there was a marquee. I saw Eitan Gorlin's The Holy Land (2001) there the month I moved in. I saw Billy Ray's Shattered Glass (2003) and Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) once the semester began. I never did manage to see Wayne Kramer's The Cooler (2003), even though it had a trailer that actually made me want to. I've been trying to remember where I saw Bill Condon's Kinsey (2004), because I associate it with driving to a movie theater in Orange that may not exist anymore; I definitely saw Mary Harron's The Notorious Bettie Page (2005) at the Criterion Cinemas on Temple Street, for which I had to walk about ten minutes in the opposite direction. Ditto Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), which due to Yale's Old Campus standing in for Marshall College during a chase scene remains the only movie of my experience where the scenery got a standing ovation. Others I've forgotten. The Criterion opened in the fall of 2004; the York Square closed in the summer of 2005. I left New Haven in 2006 and Yale permanently in 2008 and I was going to write that I have never again had that combination of money and immediately accessible movie house, except now ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch works at the Somerville, which is almost the same thing. I'll be making plans to see Alex Garland's Annihilation (2018) there as soon as I get back to Boston, especially with the silliness of Paramount refusing to give it a proper theatrical release because Garland wouldn't soften his female protagonist or de-complicate the ending. I didn't have cats when I lived in New Haven. I have one small cat rocketing back and forth through the rooms of this apartment in Providence, observed from the couch by me and from the chaise longue by the other cat. I didn't die just because I don't have that life anymore.
spatch works at the Somerville, which is almost the same thing. I'll be making plans to see Alex Garland's Annihilation (2018) there as soon as I get back to Boston, especially with the silliness of Paramount refusing to give it a proper theatrical release because Garland wouldn't soften his female protagonist or de-complicate the ending. I didn't have cats when I lived in New Haven. I have one small cat rocketing back and forth through the rooms of this apartment in Providence, observed from the couch by me and from the chaise longue by the other cat. I didn't die just because I don't have that life anymore.
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Some space in case you want to avoid impressions, no specific spoilers.
The first half is horror with a bunch of jump scares, and then it settles down into vaguely dreamlike SF which is quite determindly not answering most of the questions it asks, and was, therefore, entirely worth the jump scares, which is saying something for me, who heartily dislikes them.
(I have friends who loved the books it was loosely based on, and they're sad about it, but I never read them and this was its own quite good thing.)
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That sounds very good to me. I'm glad to hear it!
(I have friends who loved the books it was loosely based on, and they're sad about it, but I never read them and this was its own quite good thing.)
I loved the Southern Reach trilogy, but I'm not expecting the film to be a faithful version of any of the books. Jeff VanderMeer has been talking about how the film performs the same kind of visceral mutation on the material of the novel as the natural world undergoes within the boundaries of Area X and I'm cool with that level of meta.
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This writer of this article at Tor says they wish they had known one aspect of the books had been left out, because they kept wondering if/when it was going to show up in the movie, which distracted them (no movie spoilers; perhaps no book spoilers, either): https://www.tor.com/2018/02/23/annihilation-jeff-vandermeer-adaptation-movie-review/
If you don't mind my directing your attention, please use rot13 (e.g. rot13.com) to decode the following, which I feel is spoiler-free: I saw one thing, as did the writer of an article, but their friends said they saw something different. I don't think the other thing would materially affect how I interpret what happened, but I am curious what was literally depicted in the movie.
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Please link if you do! I am expecting to like the movie; I just don't know if it will be for the same reasons as the novel. I am otherwise trying to bring as few expectations as possible.
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I am not surprised to hear it, but thank you for letting me know. Even if not Kinsey, I know I saw movies there.
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The addition of cats to a life is, of course, a good thing. We finally finished seeing the telenovela Lady: La Vendedora de Rosas; in the penultimate episode, a kitten saves her life, and that cat's still with her in the last episode, which takes place years later.
... A bigger-than-your-head coconut-milk ice cream sandwich sounds pretty great too, but I realize that's Providence, not New Haven.
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Thank you. Those were parts of those years that I enjoyed, along with the opera and learning Akkadian and the people I knew. And I will always miss that apartment, or the idea of that apartment, even when the reality (THERE WERE HOLES IN THE WALLS AND THE BASEMENT FLOODED ON THE REGULAR AND THE TILES IN THE HALLWAY CAME UP SPONTANEOUSLY) was somewhat terrible.
I have relatively distinct memories of all of those movies, too, even though I have no notes on them—thanks to digital archives being black holes waiting to happen, I'm missing most of my e-mail prior to 2008. The only one I've seen since is Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, because it's one of my favorite sea-movies and I own it on DVD. I'm thinking about rewatching Shattered Glass and Kinsey: the first was my introduction to Peter Sarsgaard and the second (in which he reappeared, in what I did not yet realize was a rare portrayal of a comfortably bisexual character who was neither morally ambiguous nor indiscriminate) got me to notice Liam Neeson. I would not rewatch The Holy Land, I think, or The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull unless it turned up at one of the marathons and I wanted to see that chase scene again, but I have good memories of The Notorious Bettie Page and wish my options for watching further well-regarded Mary Harron were not overwhelmingly American Psycho (2000). I should just watch The Cooler. Who knows if it will even be good, but fifteen years is a long time to still think occasionally about a movie.
We finally finished seeing the telenovela Lady: La Vendedora de Rosas; in the penultimate episode, a kitten saves her life, and that cat's still with her in the last episode, which takes place years later.
I believe it. Hestia and Autolycus have been wonderful anchors. I am looking forward to being home with them again, which Lydia will almost certainly find heresy. She's been dropping at my feet all evening and making mrrrp noises so that I'll stop what I'm doing and pet her fluffy belly.
... A bigger-than-your-head coconut-milk ice cream sandwich sounds pretty great too, but I realize that's Providence, not New Haven.
I realized I was expecting an ice cream sandwich like they serve at Mamaleh's, small and rich. This one was the size of a salad plate. I have no regrets, but I'm also not sure I need to eat another chocolate chip cookie any time soon.
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Yeah, the thought that seeing more of an actor entailed watching American Psycho... ouf.
Salad-plate-sized ice-cream sandwich. Wow. But you know, if you make a salad-plate-sized cookie--and those have been around at least since my college days--then it's going to need to be slathered in ice cream at some point. It's like Give a Mouse a Cookie.
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I do miss that place.
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It happened in 2015. That's recent.
I do miss that place.
They had wonderful curry noodle soup. I get the tantan-men from Sapporo Ramen in Porter Square and it's delicious, but it's not the same.