Just like the old days, for a day

[dorchadas]

I used to run around like crazy all the time--I remember showing someone a picture of my calendar and having them say "You're insane." The day I met britshlez it was the fourth (of six) events I was going to that day. Saturday wasn't that many but it was far more than I usually get to do.


I started the day by waking up early, drinking matcha and eating some yogurt with berries on top. sashagee got dressed and sat on the couch, but mentioned she was feeling increasingly ill. Laila for her own part was also on the couch with the blanket pulled all the way up to her chin, occasionally coughing. In the end we decided that they would stay home and I would go, so I gave them a hug and kiss goodbye and left to the first event of the day--hannah.bloom.75's eldest son's bar mitzvah.

I told sashagee that if you go to services and there are a bunch of people there you don't know in very fancy clothes it's someone's bar/bat mitzvah, and that was definitely true here. Friends and relatives and grandparents and all kinds of people I've never seen before, including all of the bar mitzvah's friends from camp, being invited up for aliyot, carrying the Torah around, the works. I listened to the bar mitzvah's drash on Parashat Chayei Sarah (Genesis 23:1 to 25:18) which partially involved this famous meme that I've seen multiple rabbis post:

...but also talked about how Rashi stated that all of Sarah's years were good despite the hardships she suffered, and how at 127 she contained the innocence of a seven-year-old, the youthful vitality of a twenty-year-old, and the wisdom and experience of a one hundred year old. Pretty good if you can manage it. And lucky for the bar mitzvah too that his Torah portion came at the beginning of the Jewish year and not in the part where you shall make the lamps of beaten gold and the lampposts of cedar--those parts are always harder to get a good drash out of when you're thirteen.

After the service I stayed and ate a bit of lunch catered from Schmaltz and Vinegar while I chatted with some of the other attendees and gave my congratulations to hannah.bloom.75, but I had to leave before too long because I had another event to get to. I got on the bus south on California, then took the red line downtown, then switched to the #6 bus, and rode all the way down to Hyde Park because ayasembe was having an art exhibition! I got lucky and just happened to open up Instagram at the time that ayasembe posted a story about it, and since it was the same week and this was the last public opening, I knew I had to go. It was a beautiful fall day as I walked past a bunch of old houses with lovely Chicago architecture and through an alleyway into a back courtyard which caught ayasembe completely by surprise (I hadn't told her I was going at all). We hugged, I explained why I was there, and she offered to give me a tour. The art exhibition was inspired by ayasembe and her boyfriend moving into a new house. Here's an example of the art that I took, there's other at the exhibition website:

You can tell right away what it's representing. There were others that seemed like doors, or light on the wall--ayasembe said that people tended to be divided between the picture I posted and the sunny yellow picture that you can see in the link--so we looked at them and talked about our lives until another one of her friends showed up. We all chatted, though the two of them chatted in much more depth about the actual process of making the art since they were both artists and indeed worked in the same studio, mentioning ways of producing the paper--ayasembe made all her own paper--and then hanging it on the wall in a way that didn't damage it and didn't require framing:

Friend: "I'm glad you were able to hang it. I'm always sad when you have to frame your artwork."
ayasembe: "I know, it's like caging a wild animal."

At that point it was approaching three o'clock and the end of the exhibition, so we all said our goodbyes and I left with ayasembe saying she'd invite us out to her new house at some point. It's in the far west, but not so far away that we can't get to it!

I had a bit of time now, so I went home and ate dinner with my family because I ran off to my next adventure--a movie that worldbshiny had invited me to. Alamo Drafthouse was having a showing of Glass Onion at 6:30, and worldbshiny and I and some other friends all went.

I had seen Knives Out years ago, also with worldbshiny, but I had never seen Glass Onion and so I was caught a bit by surprise when it was very obviously set during the Plague Years. There's a scene of Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc playing Amogus with Angela Lansbury, Stephen Sondheim, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and others since they all have to remain remote, when the main characters shows up at the pier to go to the eccentric billionaire's island they're all wearing masks, etc. This is all dispensed with pretty quickly so that the movie is easier to film, but it

Further comments are spoilers since it's a mystery movie, so here's a cut:

Glass Onion plot spoilers

So one of the really neat things about this movie is that it plays with memory and perceptions. Near the beginning when trying to figure out who the murderer is, Blanc immediately dismisses the eccentric billionaire Miles Bron because he thinks no, committing murder yourself would be extremely stupid when you have billions of dollars and could easily find someone who would be willing to do it for you. And, spoilers, this is false because Bron did commit the murder because he's actually kind of dumb but extremely good at PR, and all the money-making ventures at his company were pioneered by his ousted co-founder Cassandra Brandt. This is hinted at during the movie, when she speaks with great conviction but occasionally uses the wrong word--"the predefinite detective" instead of pre-eminent--or a totally made-up word like "embreathiate" but otherwise speaks normally. Blanc asks rhetorically why Bron would murder his co-founder just after an extremely public trial over the ownership of his company's intellectual property, obviously no one with a modicum of intelligence would do that. Of course, Bron isn't actually an eccentric genius despite his lack of a phone and habit of faxing ideas like "AI for dogs = discourse" late at night to his workers. He's an idiot. Blanc spends half the movie trying to find the culprit after making an assumption that turns out totally wrong.

Hence the title of the movie. It's not just a reference to the Beatles song, though it is that, it also refers to the idea of the glass onion itself, which has ever-more layers the further you get in but none of it matters because the layers are all transparent.

In addition there's a bunch of actual misdirection. There's one scene just before the on-screen murder where Bron hands a glass to another character, who drinks it and dies. I saw this and thought, "Wait a minute, did he just-" before the characcters in the movie started debating what happened and they replayed through the scene as Bron described it, where he put his glass down on the table and then another character picked it up, which of course made me doubt my memory of what I had seen (and being in a movie theater I couldn't stop and go back to rewatch it). This also happens with a stolen gun and phone, both of which are visible if you're paying attention before they're brought up in dialogue. I preferred those revelations to the ones that it's totally impossible to predict, like that Cassandra Brandt has been murdered (by Bron) and the person on the island everyone thinks is her is actually her identical twin sister Helen Brandt. There is foreshadowing to this too, in that at one point Blanc calls her Helen, but of course before you know the twist you think you misheard it and he's saying "Hell!" or something, because she's just been shot. I don't think this impossible-to-predict reveal is bad, because it rewards repeated rewatching when you can see all the setup that went into Helen impersonating Cassandra, watch the way the characters behave--especially Bron, who knows that Cassandra Brandt is dead--but it doesn't quite fit the glass onion. Even with all the layers transparent there's no way to see it coming.

I'd watch it with sashagee, but she doesn't like mysteries where they're totally impossible to figure out due to hidden knowledge, which Glass Onion does kind of count as. Maybe she'd like it anyway. Maybe someday we'll see.

We hung out in the bar and chatted afterwards about life for an hour, and then I went home and went back to my normal life. It's nice to step away for a day every once in a while.

Comments

[omnipotent]

Aya's art seems quite interesting. Definitely unique.

It sounds like you had quite the busy day. I wish I had the energy to do such things like that! I'll content myself with living vicariously through others. :)

[mudousetsuna]

Wow, you do pack a lot into a day!

I can't believe that is a drawing and not fabric textiles. I zoomed in so I can see all the detail and when you say that she made her own paper, I can see it, but it's such a trick on my eyes until then! It looks great!

I still haven't seen Knives Out. I had never heard of Glass Onion. One of these days I'll see them!