At the Drive-In
Seeing Nope at a drive-in theater: highly recommended.
I haven’t been out to the movies since the (ongoing!) pandemic began, but I really wanted to see Jordan Peel’s Nope. Honestly I would have broken my streak and gone indoors, but a friend was Not Into It. Understandably. And luckily it was playing at a Poughkeepsie drive-in theater. The picture above doesn’t do the size of the screen justice. Nor does it capture the fireflies floating up after it got dark, or the cheerful lines for the concessions, or the way you can sit outside (if you’re not mosquito bait like me), or the feeling of watching a movie with other people but from your own little safe bubble.
Part of the pleasure of Nope is the way it unfurls without a lot of explanation, and reviewers have grappled with how to talk about it without saying too much. But everyone has revealed that it’s a mix of westerns and sci-fi, and has a lot of smart filmic references to both — like both The Searchers and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In Close Encounters, Richard Dreyfuss is in his truck, and I think it stops? It’s been a long time. Anyway, the UFO sweeps overhead, and he looks up.
Yes, awe, but he gets a wicked sunburn (UFO burn?) thanks to his curiosity. In Nope, Daniel Kaluuya’s OJ finds himself in a similar situation: truck, big scary thing overhead, deciding what to do next. If you’re sitting in your car at a drive-in watching the movie, you, too can play this game. Stick your head out the window and look up: will there be a big scary thing up there? Probably not, but you will see miles of stars.
Books
I’m currently reading a biography of a forgotten writer from the early 20th century. So forgotten that the biography, from the ‘80s, was deaccessioned by a library and wound up sold online by a used bookseller. I went down the rabbit hole because I found an old book by this writer at an estate sale in California for maybe a dollar, and it had illustrations by Diego Rivera. He and the writer, I now know, were friends.
As you might guess from someone who was friends with Diego Rivera, the writer had an interesting life — not to mention pretty remarkable insights. But I keep falling asleep reading the biography. I get a few pages and KLUNK, I am OUT. I’ve finally decided that it’s because it’s a bad book! It is giving me a swift and complete overview. But the biography is just deathly boring. Nevertheless, I will get through it, eventually.
DIY update
Here’s how to make a 24 hour project take a week. The project is turning the very messed-up closet in the living room into a clean, unobtrusive media closet.
This odd closet in the living room was in really rough shape. It was very dirty; it used to be carpeted; it had maybe 100 little squares of glue from where things had once been stuck on its walls; it used to have crummy uneven shelves high up covered with grimy shelf paper that had to be removed in a certain order, and left behind awkward holes. I used it for tools and whatnot; I also tried to ignore it. But when I sat on the couch watching TV it started to bother me.
I started doing the deep clean, removed the carpet staples, scraped and scrubbed at the adhesive and did wall repair and prep. Then I went to the hardware store and bought paint — Benjamin Moore Chrome Green (not chrome-y, just quite dark). According to what they said, a quart would do it, I figured. I joked with the paint guy that if I got a gallon, it would be too much, but, haha, I’d probably come back for another quart.
A few days later I started painting and it was soon clear that I’d forgotten a) that closets have ceilings and b) a super dark paint was not going to cover the rubbery gray-pink of the walls in a single coat. So back to the hardware store I went and hoho, I said to the woman behind the paint counter, I need another quart of this after all, dumb old me, and got my second quart of Chrome Green.
When I got it home and started painting, it seemed like it was a different color. Paint is different colors at different stages of dryness, but this was much lighter. First I thought they must have given me a different color — but I got the two quarts side by side and they were both Chrome Green. But the paint inside definitely appeared to be different colors. I put the tops back on and mystifyingly, the tint formula was totally different. Same name, but different colors. I took a picture of the old one, grabbed the new one, and went back to the hardware store.
So it turns out in the 5 days between when I bought the first can and the second can of Chrome Green, Benjamin Moore had changed their color formulations. In the case of this color, that change was a lot. Five days! Who knew?
I got a new batch mixed of the original formula — but I think the base is different, too, because the color didn’t completely match. Which meant of course that I wound up buying a third quart to finish the project, and if you know weights and measures, 3 quarts is just one shy of a gallon, I should have just bought the damn gallon to start with, which probably would have been cheaper, and never had to go back and back and back to the hardware store and learn about Benjamin Moore’s new color formulas at all.
Then I assembled the record shelf while watching the last summer impeachment hearings. That was fun.
New favorite house
As the Hudson Valley’s premiere book critic-slash-realtor, I want to share my latest favorite place that’s for sale. It’s an octagon house. AN OCTAGON HOUSE. It’s on 4 acres, has its own pond, needs heaps of TLC and the price has dropped to $399,900. It’s about 20 minutes southeast of Hudson proper and 20 minutes east of Germantown.
OMG, right? If you want to rescue this house, email me! Let’s make it happen. I can help. I will suggest you buy more paint than you think you need.