I’m so glad I used a fraction of my zillion hours of banked time-off to extend the holiday into the Inauguration; this was just a fantastic weekend.
I’ve been invited to put some art in a ladies’-only Valentine’s Day themed show at All Asia next month; more on that closer to the event. I’m thinking sculptural, but it also depends on how much time I’m willing to put into making something from scratch, and how complicated what I have in my head will be to get out.
Last Thursday I had one of those amazingly intensely productive evenings that most of the time you just fantasize about without ever achieving: I spent all night attacking the apartment while the boy was at work. We’ve been traveling a lot lately, returned to my birthday and final class project deadline looming, and so we’ve been falling behind domestically. Last Thursday I emptied, scrubbed, and refilled organizedly our front hall closet, unearthing a trove of circa-2006 Christmas gifts; did about 6 loads of laundry; washed dishes; bought pretty storage containers for and organized my belts and scarves and stockings and gloves; unpacked and put away all our luggage from Christmas and New Year’s travels; eliminated the giant pile of wrapping paper and gift boxes in the livingroom; ran errands (stockpiling enough groceries to guarantee we didn’t have to leave the house during the impending snowstorm), and was an all-around Very Good Girl and Best Girlfriend Ever. On Friday I got to hang out with our amazing friend M. for the first time since her husband told us about their pregnancy. She’s due in early July, and already planning her 40th birthday party for August.
The official weekend was awesome: we stayed snowbound and watched old horror movies all day Sunday with bloody marys. On Monday, I met up with my friend James, who wanted to take me out on a belated platonic birthday date. We saw Slumdog Millionaire, because J’s the reason I’m such a huge Danny Boyle fan: he was the first person to introduce me to Life Less Ordinary; he made me revisit Shallow Grave and Trainspotting with fresh eyes, and I saw both 28…Later movies with him in the theater. Plus it made sense with Oscar nominations coming out tomorrow and knowing that my boy has no desire to see it. After the movie, we Wagamama’d.
My take on Slumdog Millionaire is that it’s certainly not going to sweep the Academy the way it did the Globes, but with one corollary. If all is right in the world, it will be nominated for exactly one Oscar: for Art Direction (here’s my take on the difference between Art Direction and Cinematography), and won’t win it. However, people may be looking for happy-happy-joy-joy this year, and so a magically filmed rainbow party of ugly third-world could-be-worse escapism full of freakishly pretty people with a silly-happy happy ending might pick up more nods than it deserves. None of the acting was stellar, and I doubt this will get Danny a directing nod. The soundtrack was fun, and the costumes entirely unimpressive. There is an ever-so-slim chance Slumdog will be nominated for Best Picture, though it’s got the exactly same odds as Wall-E being of nominated in that category, and for the same reasons. If it’s nominated for Best Picture, I guarantee it won’t win.
And that brings us to the Inauguration. The boy and I slept in late enough on Tuesday that there was an after-shower, after-breakfast scramble to be on the T by 11am, and we were at one of our favorite bars ten minutes later; we really wanted to be social, be out of the house, be watching on a big-screen TV. There was Rick Warren trying very hard to be inoffensive, Aretha’s crazy church-lady hat, Chaney strikingly both more Blofeldian and more Strangelovian than usual.
I liked the speech; not many people thought it was strong. Rhetorically, some pretty nice framing and flourish devices: the themes of water in the opening and close verged on Shakespearean. I liked that the audience was explicitly not just American citizens, but citizens of the world. His poet had the sentiment right but the delivery all wrong. And when we stepped outside in aftermath, it was cloudless and bright and as warm as Boston can be in January. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon at home watching parade coverage before making the most amazing lasagne ever assembled by human hands, and then watching ball coverage after dinner.
This lasagne was a thing of beauty: Cristo sauteéd sweet Italian sausage and onions and babybella mushooms and whole grape tomatoes and diced yellow peppers and roasted red peppers in the sauce with two whole bulbs of garlic and half a bottle of wine; then while I layered noodles with ricotta and soft damp slices of fresh mozzarella and the chunky sauce with handfuls of spinach, he fried up some garlic-chicken sausage to sprinkle in, too. And just when I thought we were done, he sprinkle-spreads almost a pint of grated pecorino on top. Oh, it was delicious and deluxe, and makes a phenomenal next-day lunch. We cook good together.
And next weekend we’re at his parents’ chalet, and its huge kitchen … !
