Reading

Entry tags:

film

Room With a View

Found out about a neat arthouse cinema that shows a lot of older films & restorations presented by different academics or film enthusiasts. As part of a series on fashion in film, they had a one-night-only screening of the 4k restoration of A Room With a View. Since it's been over a decade since I last saw that film, I decided to check it out. There was a quick presentation at the beginning about Edwardian women's fashion and the rapidly changing styles of dress. In particular, women's enthusiasm for tennis spurred a desire for more practical athletic wear. The presentation was short and sweet, and then we got into the film.

Merchant and Ivory really knew what they were doing, huh? It was and remains an absolutely beautiful film. I mean, I'm sure you could just stick a camera on a roof in Florence and get some pretty images, but everything here is so beautifully composed and edited. It has to be: the story doesn't work if you aren't overwhelmed by Italy's beauty. The performances are also great, of course. I'd forgotten how funny this movie is, but it really is full of laugh-out loud moments, both heavy-handed (the pond scene...) and more subtle (Maggie Smith's supposedly delicate but incredibly obvious manipulations).

The only thing I don't particularly like would probably be hard to resolve. As an adaptation of Forster's novel, it is excellent; the humour comes through more clearly and the use of music as an analogy for Lucy's inner state is easier to understand. However, because we don't see Lucy's interior world in the same way we do as a novel, parts of it fall flat. This is supposed to be a story of her discovering her inner desires, shaping her aesthetic and philosophical views, but in the film she comes across as overly influenced by George rather than truly coming into her own.

Bubble Foam, Explosions, All Around Sticky

If I get liver failure in a few years, it'll be because I bathed in acetone plugging another hole.

So the plug was working fairly well. No flies for 48 hours. No smells either.

Then 72 hours passed and I woke up with another fly in the bathroom.

I troubleshot the latest breach fix and it seemed fine until I checked the back and noticed that installing foam board into the back (which itself was bumpy and uneven because I can do very little to clean out the breach when I can barely even fit my hand back there), and caught an uneven hole back there.

So! You know that part about my hand not fitting back there? I need to reach 28 inches in in order to even get to that point, let alone caulk it.

Alternatives were considered with the Loctite. The Loctite is messy, but in principal should cover any breaches. It's basically instant foam insulation (hence why you should never use this around stoves unless you like watching your hand become hamburger or get your house to go on fire). It does have one advantage over caulk though: I can reach things with it if I make a long enough nozzle.

So we got some aquarium hose and lashed it around the nozzle. Simple enough. Fire it away and it very gradually pours down the hose. This requires a lot of pressure and it seems it was too much pressure because the hose burst on me twice and covered my gloves and the floor with the stuff.

Several acetone baths later, attempt number 3 got me close enough to get some to bubble out but not before the pressure was too much and stressed out the nozzle covering the floor with sticky foam again. SO NOW I NEED TO GET ANOTHER BOTTLE OF FOAM YAY ME.

All that and the metal ruler I used to jury rig the hose line got covered in the stuff and I quickly learned why you don't use acetone on it (because it will rub out all the graduated lines and all you'll be left with is a metal stick).

I was hoping attempt 3 would cover the breach but multiple scrutiny attempts (like I am now using my phone as a flashlight and my camera as a breach inspection) revealed more breach points.

So we got another can of foam--this one with a finer, more expensive, dispense nozzle--and resorted to duct taping the hose into the nozzle multiple times over.

I checked and it looks like it now covers the glaring breaches. I don't see any shadowy holes but there could be more I am not seeing but the camera did not catch any from diagonal nor perpendicular angles, so I think it'll be harder. This probably won't stop roaches or silverfish but at least the fly problem will be solved with this. I think.*

This has been an expensive last breach.

*Please let this solve the fly problem I need to spend my time doing something else like my regular job.

Crawling

The flies have increased to maybe two a day now. One of the light switches is also *really* smelly now and I'm tempted to think that whatever died in the walls has its liquid essence leaking over it. We've replenished the candle supply as all our old candles are now almost gone. Kirkland (not the Costco brand) has some really strong smells with really bad wicks, so we're slowly escaping the Yankee Candle conglomerate but also need a way to work around this.

The worst was maybe two days ago when I found a fly and a large white tic tac wriggling on the floor of the bathroom. That's right, one of the corpse fly maggots found a way through the wall. I'm more confused than ever because the placement makes me think it might have found a way in from a bathroom vent but I'm not entirely sure either because it's a vertical drop and maggots suck at moving--seriously, I watched that thing for five minutes while I was on the toilet trying to move around and it was just me staring at something try its best to go absolutely nowhere.

I've been trying to solve the mystery of this victim and I'm somewhere between thinking a squirrel died up there or it was a rat that climbed up, only because the smell has mostly relegated to the second floor. I'm hoping it's a rat because a squirrel means that the hole opened up again also I am inclined to believe a squirrel is just more nimble and capable of getting out of a hole more easily.

I am now putting filters over vents aside from the HVAC since I think all the flies are creating more activity with the ecosystem here. I would not be surprised if we start seeing a ton of spiders and centipedes in here soon from the feast. I'm cool with both, but I'd really prefer they do their exterminator duties within the walls instead of outside. In more concerning news, it means that I still have a potential breach for roaches to sneak into and that's what frustrates me more. There's still some locations I haven't considered only because it means reaching into nooks that I am physically unable to so will have to do something like wrap down an entire section.

I used to save the flies but their presence frustrates me so I've been flushing them now. The fly-to-be received the same treatment. If you can't leave the breach the intruder came from then that's just how it goes. It didn't help that I woke up and found one drowning in the cup of water I brought with me to bed.

So yeah, the filters over vents isn't doing anything either, there's another breach I'm not accounting for.
Ugh.

Michelle has a theory that the body is breaking down and the flies might be coming from microbreaches formed from those parts falling, which, maybe? I don't know though. TBF a lot of this I have no secure idea. This does make me want to check the attic to look at the structure of the vents, but it's a Pandora's box I don't think we're ready to open yet for another week or two at least. Still, the more I check, the harder it gets to believe that there is a breach.

UPDATE: Found another hole and it really was under our noses; whoever flipped this place installed a new sink without any breach fixes to the holes around the corners. We used foamboard I filled with caulk to stick to a side and I sprayed some loctite on the corners because the installation job was uneven and I can't tell if it is covering the entire breach. I can't reach all the sides though which is going to make this even more annoying but it should at least placate some of the problem. I will say though that the smells that were coming out while I was doing this was goddamn rank. The smell is now lessened in the bed bathroom, but the adjacent bath is starting to reek. I'm probably going to use caulk to seal seams from the side side at this rate. I'm tempted to see if I can do a feel test on the fixed loctite and trim it accordingly, maybe I can wrap a swiffer around a stick and then soak it in acetone to clean up any glue smears.

This weekend was a trip to Ellis Island. I would never go to tourist trap central, but then I found out they have "hard hat tours" of the other half of the island that is still a WIP and for the low price of $75 (I know I know, it's going to the preservation/restoration of the site so not really a rip), you can wander around some of the most haunted looking spots of the hospital in all its ruin porn glory and wouldn't you know it that's just too tempting for me to see.

If you are unfamiliar with this ritual (aka you never went to school in the tristate), it was practically a requirement that you take at least one trip to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. It's as entertaining to a kid as you'd expect any old place that resembles their ancient school to be but some great photo ops can be had as adults and oddly enough I found more details about ocean liners here which is adjacent to the whole Queen Mary 2 trip. Anyway, if you want an idea why it's not a great thing to do, I recommend using Google Maps to look at Battery Park, and then the ferry route to the Statue of Liberty. Be sure to use satellite view so you can see the large line of dots all along a sinister trail and I will tell you that this does not include the many hawkers you have to encounter along the way to get there. It's honestly the closest I've felt to Times Square at times but with half the density. For the sake of seeing a half of a building that I never thought I'd see? Potentially worth the risk. At least the security screening was quicker than TSA.

So for the hard hat tour there were only 12 of us (the guide even mentioned this was a big group) so it's mostly for enthusiasts. Expect dust, overgrowth, goose poop, asbestos roof tiles. If you like visiting places like Eastern State Penitentiary, then you'll find this pretty cool regardless but if it feels a bit much then maybe wear a mask (it's actually cleaner than the prison though) and expect a few interesting places to get photos of the Statue.

Was also told that you can book photo tours for three hours there. Very interesting, but given what we have planned I think it's best to wait on it.

This aside, we did a ridiculous amount of walking and the feet are beat up. Michelle has a weigh in and despite sweating over two days of consistent strain and minimal food she's annoyed that she's gaining weight. TBH her weigh ins are timed around her periods and she's been stressing over work so I mean come on it's kind of expected.

Saw a lot of cops around the tour group hawkers around Battery Park btw. No idea why, but it struck me as curious. Formal complaints?

Oh, here's a weird observation: I felt like 80% of the West coast was 20 somethings that were influencers or models. I joked with Michelle that the Standard hotel, once a hotel that felt home to exhibitionists, was now laden with people we could see flaunting for their socmeds.

The more popular places also felt frequented by youth which made it so damn weird. Like the weirdest part for me was seeing a Cybertruck along Hudson Yards driven by a college age teen girl to drop off her grandma. Like what the fuck is going on? Did I stumble through an alternative reality? Is NYC officially AI?

Anyway dumb rant over, back to work.

Entry tags:

opera

Got to see Poppea!

So I had mentioned on

chickenfeet's review of L'incoronazione di Poppea how disappointed I was to have missed it & how I was having trouble keeping up with what performances were happening - especially one night only events. He kindly pointed me toward The Whole Note, which does a weekly roundup of Greater Toronto Area music and theatre (and then I created

the_whole_note_feed on here so I can see it from my flist).

This is how I found out that Toronto's Summer Opera Lyric Theatre was doing their own Poppea & somehow managed to get front row tickets (I think they are struggling a bit; they're papering the house for today's showing of La Vie Parisienne...). It was an okay production given that this is kind of a "junior-league" company (basically a showcase for opera singers still in training). They did a pared down, English-langauge version of the opera (ran about 2 hours with intermission). I was a bit nervous that the English translation would be bad, but it was pretty decent & I think the problematic parts were unavoidable (si, si -> yes, yes means your harmonizing on a worse vowel, but what can you do?); all the singers had pretty clear diction, so you didn't miss the supertitles at all. In terms of the performances themselves, I think what I'd say is that everyone involved was a great singer, but still working on their acting and stage presence (plus some felt out of their comfort zone singing the baroque style; a lot of bits felt a bit slower or looser that I'd have expected).

Caveats aside, there was some really great stuff here! Grace Budoloski was a pretty perfect Poppea. Her singing was great, but her acting was something else. Poppea is kind of a weird role, simultaneously murderously ambitious and childishly naive (a good match for Nero...) and Budoloski nailed the subtleties here. Minerva Lobato was also excellent as Ottavia, Nero's scorned consort. She's clearly a vocal powerhouse & was able to just overwhelm you with the strength of Ottavia's rage and sorrow. I think Lobato is the one I'd most want to see in something else. Jeffrey Liu was a lot of fun as Nero and one of the stronger actors in the production (not particularly subtle but... it is Nero, after all). Vocally, I think he did a pretty good job, but it is weird for me to see a Nero with a conventionally masculine voice (the part was written for a castrato & the production I saw in Berkeley cast a soprano who had a really lovely, dark vocal quality), so I have a bit of a blocker there. In the smaller roles, Handaya Rusli came across very charming and charismatic as the conflicted Ottone and Lori Mak was similarly a lot of fun in the tiny part of Damigella. Lots of names to keep an eye out for.

Overall, it was a pretty good showing & a lot of fun, but I don't know if I'd recommend this to be someone's first exposure to Poppea... I feel really spoiled to have seen the production I did in Berkeley. Even the Toronto Summer Music Festival did not fully stage it (theirs was a concert version) & it looks like the orchestra was smaller. Berkeley's had a baroque orchestra,full staging, and costumes. Someone must have gotten a fat grant to make that happen! And the more time goes on, the more I am realizing how rare an experience that was. But I also just genuinely love this weird little opera and its unsettling plot, so I'll see it where I can. I also would like to see a countertenor sing Nero at least once? Come on Opera Atelier, give us this soon! The people crave Poppea!!