But I still listen to that music every night

[sovay]

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 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.

Comments

[vandrendehare]

Ivy Noodle has changed its name? That must have been fairly recent. Or... maybe not as recent as I feel it was.

I do miss that place.

[sovay]

Ivy Noodle has changed its name? That must have been fairly recent. Or... maybe not as recent as I feel it was.

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.