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It's not like it's big news that I have a lot to tell you about my weekend. This is the case more often than not. I'm even tempted to say it was more eventful than usual, but . . . maybe it was more eventful than it is, say, half the time?
If you can believe it, I did not go see a current-release movie in the theater all weekend. (I did on Thursday. Close enough, I guess.) I did, however, watch four different movies over the weekend. I am a movie watching fiend.
Friday was the latest in Alexia's and my Harrison Ford-athon, and we watched
Air Force One. I cannot for the life of me figure out when I last watched it, even though it was within the past few years. I remember finding it super dumb. And, I still found it dumb watching it this time—but, also, undeniably entertaining. I think I enjoyed it a fair amount more this time around than I did the last time. Some of the visual effects are laughably bad, especially the shots of people "parachuting." But, there's a couple of genuinely thrilling action set pieces, especially the one where the plane almost lands and then takes off again, barely avoiding crashes with other airplanes and the building of an airport.
We did figure out, looking at Harrison Ford's filmography, that we have a couple more movies that look to be adequately entertaining (
Six Days Seven Nights,
What Lies Beneath), and then the 2000s bring us several movies we'll be happy to skip. His career has been pretty spotty since then, after a solid two decades of mostly consistently solid stuff.
But, whatever. This marathon of Harrison Ford films is taking a rather long time anyway, as we knew it would, and skipping ahead a bit won't hurt.
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Saturday was Double Feature Day with Laney, in the Braeburn Condos Theater, a couple more horror films in keeping with Halloween Weekend:
Barbarian, a heavily buzzed-about film from last year; and the 2003 Rob Zombie film
House of 1000 Corpses, which Laney suggested because she remembered enjoying it back when it came out.
Shobhit had an evening work shift, but there would have been time for him to join for the first film, but he declined the invitation. I think he would have enjoyed
Barbarian, and Laney and I both did very much. It's unlike any other movie out there, that's for sure. And it was really fun watching it with Laney, who could not stop yelling at the screen. At one point she even asked if I wanted her to be quiet, and she would if I preferred, but I said she was fine.
I have kind of mixed feelings about how I saw that film, because even though I had never seen it, I
did listen to an episode of
The Big Picture podcast last year, in which Sean Fennessey described the entire movie, scene by scene, to Amanda Dobbins, who was never going to watch it otherwise. At the time, I thought, I hate being scared by movies so I'll probably never watch this—and then I heard the description, and I kind of wished I could have gone in cold and watched it without knowing anything about it (as was the case with Laney). It was still fun to watch, regardless.
By contrast,
House of 1000 Corpses was a
very different experience. Roughly halfway through, Laney said, "I'm trying to think of what I liked so much about this movie," and I was relieved. I was afraid I'd have to be diplomatic about how much I thought it sucked. I later texted Gabriel, who has a long history of complaining about how I never give movies bad grades (because, and I've had to say this five billion times,
I don't go to see the movies that you can already tell are garbage), that had I reviewed
House of 1000 Corpses, I'd probably have given it a D-minus. (I
rated it one star out of five on Letterboxd.)
I said to Laney, "So I don't have to feel bad about how much I think it sucks." She replied, "Nope." That movie shows how Rob Zombie is not a very good director; the acting is bad across the board; the editing is abrasively, pointlessly frenetic; and the content may seem to some to be darkly imaginative but it fundamentally lacks originality. The single redeeming moment I found in that movie is when a character is eating a cereal called "Agatha Crispies," which cracked me up.
After the movies were over, I walked Laney back to her apartment—six blocks away!—and came up to see the current state of her settling in. Her furniture was all arranged, and there were just a few boxes left to unpack. It was already feeling fairly lived in. I took four more photos while I was there, two of them
out a
window facing east from the end of the hallway on her floor, the 7th. I went looking to see if there were windows in any of the stairwells, and there were not; a sign in there said "roof access" so I figured it couldn't hurt to check. Nope, the door up there was predictably locked—the building has a "green roof" and is not open to the public or even residents.
From there I decided to walk north on Broadway and browse a few stores for the one accessory I needed for the Halloween "costume" I finally thought of for this year, on Thursday. I told Gabriel last night what it would be and he scoffed: "That's the quintessential I-didn't-work-at-all-on-this Halloween costume." Yes! Very intentionally! I don't want to have to work hard on my Halloween costume, it almost never feels worth the effort. After Shobhit, Barbara and I
dressed up as KISS for Halloween 2008, which was very work and time intensive, I vowed I would never choose a Halloween costume that elaborate again. By and large, I have succeeded in keeping that vow.
Granted, my "
Crazy Cat Lady" costume from last year took a little more work than usual, but it was also fairly easy, once I found all the stuffed cats I needed. I was really racking my brain for ideas most of the month this year, though. And one thing that really irritates me this year is that I thought of a great idea several months ago but, stupidly, did not write it down. And I cannot retrieve in my mind what the fuck the idea was now.
Anyway. I went into three stores on Broadway and could not find what I was looking for. One store employee even said to me, "You'll have to go to Spirit for that."
Well then, Light Rail to the rescue! How awesome that I could then just walk the couple of blocks down to the Capitol Hill Light Rail Station, ride the train two stops to the north, and be in the U District within like six minutes, walking out of that station all of three blocks from the Spirit Halloween on 45th & Roosevelt. Back in the days when I had to rely on busses for this route, it would have taken me at least another half an hour to get up there, or
maybe twenty minutes of a bus was coming by at the second I got to the bus stop.
Now, this detour still took me some time, just because of how long it took me to find exactly what I needed, and then, of course, there was a huge line at the registers. It was more than an hour later before I was back on Capitol Hill again and walking home from the station—I probably got home around 7:10. But, I had exactly what I needed! Whew!
I made pizzas for dinner and after Shobhit got home from work we watched the requisite two episodes of the old British Judi Dench sitcom
As Time Goes By that airs on PBS every Saturday night, like the couple of gay geezers we are.
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So that brings us to yesterday—the one day from which all three of today's embedded shots come: I spent the day with Shobhit, and we did not one, not two, but
three Halloween-y things, all between 11 a.m. and about 1:30 p.m.! I guess you could start it closer to 10:30 because that's when we left for "Halloween in the Junction" in West Seattle—the thing I'm pretty sure used to be called "West Seattle Harvest Fest" but I could not find that phrasing used anywhere this year.
It's an event that occurs in conjunction with the West Seattle Farmers Market, which would be the thing that catches Shobhit's attention the most: he loves to shop for fresh produce at farmers markets. But, on the Sunday before Halloween, they also have daytime trick-or-treating among the vendors for kids, along with a costume parade, led by a local high school marching band, at 11:00. That's really the biggest thing to go there to see.
Shobhit noted that the costume parade seemed smaller this year than it was last year, and I think he's totally right about that. Nevertheless, I got some good photos, and between the parade and a few shots around the farmers market, I got
a 27-shot photo album out of it.
We were there maybe a quarter to 11 and left a quarter after. We drove all the way out to West Seattle to hang out for all of half an hour or so. I'm happy to have gotten a Halloween-season photo album out of it (again), so I would not at all call it a waste of time—but, I am realizing that I think I may be feeling about this event similarly to how I feel about the Washington State Fair: there's no need to go every year. I'm going to make a note
not to go out of my way to return to this even next year—although if both Shobhit and I have the day off and we have nothing better to do, then okay, maybe we'll go. But I'm not going to make it a priority.
So, we drove back into downtown from West Seattle, and then Shobhit humored me and we embarked on an activity that I
had scheduled for yesterday with Tracy: touring the "
SEA Giant Skulls — Día de los Muertos Art Exhibit," with "giant skulls" scattered between Pioneer Square and South Lake Union. Tracy has a cold and canceled, but I still wanted to do it—when she had originally suggested it, I was like, yes! An excuse for a new Halloween photo album! And even though she had to cancel, I still wanted to do it.
Now, here's the unfortunate part. These skulls have been on display all month, and the longer something even remotely fragile is on display in public, the greater the risk of vandalism. The event pages lists six different locations where these skulls could be found, and we only found them in four of the locations:
Occidental Square had two skulls, and I suspect one of them perhaps used to be in what the event page lists as "Pioneer Park" even though Google Maps takes you to Mercer Island for that—what they really meant was Pioneer
Square Park, with the famous pergola, which we did go and check out, actually—only to find no skulls in it. I suspect that at some point the skull there was moved to Occidental Square.
Next stop was "2+U," or Qualtrics Tower, one of the newer skyscrapers downtown (completed in 2020). Shobhit found parking on 2nd Avenue and we made our way into an inner courtyard of the building that I didn't even know existed. I
took a photo going down the stairs into it, and there was a lady high in a window of the neighoring brick building staring down at us with almost unnerving stillness. Anyway there was a skull in there.
After that: Westlake Center, where there definitely used to be more skulls than there are now—at least three, maybe four; now there are only two. Still, it did yield
one of my favorite shots.
Next was McGraw Square, which is the small park at the southern terminus of the South Lake Union Streetcar, right across from the side of Westlake Center opposite Westlake Park. Shobhit decided to check out this new tenant in Westlake Center first, "Asean Streat Food Hall," which hadn't even realized was there. There must have been a dozen Asian food joints in there, pretty efficiently packed into the space, around dining hall seating.
We just looked around a bit, then went up to the second floor so Shobhit could use the bathroom. After that, back down and out the back side of Westlake Center—only to find the skull that used to be in McGraw Square missing, even though I had walked past it at a slight distance several times over the past month. Some city workers were moving some other stuff around in there, and Shobhit asked them where the skull was. "Someone broke it," we were told.
So, in terms of locations: Pioneer Square Park and McGraw Square, both busts. Clearly I should have done this tour earlier in the month, closer to when they were first set out. Lesson learned! But, this was the only day Tracy was available to do it, before she then caught a cold.
The final stop was "Van Vorst Plaza," and I was delighted to discover it was very much a save-the-best-for-last kind of thing: not only did this location have two beautiful skulls framed by a kind of plastic floral rainbow, but they are at the top of a set of stairs also painted
with Day of the Dead motifs, which are very cool. I took nine shots at this location alone, taking the
full photo album for this little tour up to 20 shots, nearly doubling the number I had before getting to that location.
From there we drove to Seattle Center, which Shobhit himself had actually wanted to go check out. I have no idea how he heard about the
Día de Muertos Festival happening at Seattle Center, but I was just as interested in checking it out once I also knew about it—and of course, it dovetailed perfectly with the giant skulls tour.
Shobhit went around Seattle Center looking for parking, and eventually found a spot right across the street from Climate Pledge Arena. Since we were walking into Seattle Center from that direction, the first thing we saw was
the event sign draped over Fisher Pavilion. I quite incorrectly assumed there would be nothing inside the Pavilion building, but decided we should check it out just in case—and it was packed with several elaborate Day of the Dead memorials, and that location alone yielded 17 of the
25 shots taken for that particular photo album, the third album created for yesterday alone.
There was a lot of really beautiful stuff in there.
The next eight shots were taken inside the Armory, where there was a lot more shop vendors, and as is typical, performers on the Armory stage. I took one brief video clip of a young woman singing up there, in a fairly elaborate getup.
It really felt like we had done a lot already, and still we headed home mid-afternoon, and just hung out at home the rest of the day. I spent a lot of time on editing and uploading the day's photos, which along with some more photos Ivan sent from his current trip to Puerto Rico, amounted to about 80 shots total.
Today is Shobhit's 50th birthday, and I blocked out the evening to do whatever the hell Shobhit wants to do. Just like last year, he's decided he wants to cook a big Indian dinner. He did suggest I invite Alexia from next door over for dinner, which I did—but he didn't want me to mention it's his birthday, so I didn't. He knows she'll come with desserts or a gift or something if she knows it's his birthday, and all he wants to do is just cook dinner and feed us. Whatever floats his boat! He really loves to cook, so that's what he plans to do for his birthday. I'll have to vacuum as soon as I get home tonight.
Later in the evening, we just watched the season two premiere of
The Gilded Age and the latest episode of
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, both HBO shows on Max. I worked on logging photos on Letterboxd while we watched. And then, that concluded the weekend.
— पांच हजार पांच सौ एक —
[posted 12:30 pm]
