Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   artifacts from the Queer-Eye-for-the-Straight-Town heyday
Thursday, December 27 2007
This evening Gretchen and I met Penny and David at Davenport's on 209 and rode with them to Rosendale, where we dined at the tiny Chinese Gourmet Kitchen, which is mostly a take-away place but does have a single table for those who want to use it. (Gretchen hadn't had any Chinese food on Tuesday night and wanted something of a do-over for our failed Jewish Christmas. The food at Chinese Gourmet Kitchen was delicious, which came as something of a surprise; I've grown so accustomed to the mediocre Chinese food in the area that I'd actually started to believe that I don't particularly like Chinese food. The head cook spoke fractured English in a frenzied shout, and periodically blew on a water-filled whistle. He was so zany and delightful that we left him a ten dollar tip for a forty dollar tab.
Interestingly, the Chinese Gourmet Kitchen features some exceedingly-modern stainless-steel low-voltage lighting hanging from the stained panels of its dropped ceiling, and later (after noting artifacts from the recent Queer-Eye-for-the-Straight-Town past at the Red Brick Tavern), wondered if perhaps everyone in Rosendale had been a bit more interior-design-conscious during the golden heyday of the former Alamo/Cement Company owners (prior to their flameout).
After dinner we went to the Rosendale Cinema and watched No Country for Old Men. It was a gorgeous movie, about as good as a modern western gets, but near the end it sort of ran out of gas through a series of spectacular (though ultimately unsatisfying) convention-defying scenes. Major actors died in offscreen gunplay and we were left with a series of fatalistic macho conversations, first in a musty old office crowded with cats, and then in an old man's living room. But up until it ran off the rails it was so suspenseful that I actually grew concerned about the tempo of my heartbeat. I knew it was going to be a wild ride with the introduction of Anton Chigurh, a ruthless psychopath of a bounty hunter played by Javier Bardem. Like a robot sent from another planet he stalked through the movie picking off his innocent victims one by one, often using the most absurd of weapons: a cattle gun connected to a tank of compressed air. The role reminded me of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator, but somehow Bardem made it ten times more terrifying. Though I was left unsatisfied by some of the offscreen violence near the movie's end, I found the ghostly remains of pre-movie violence, which our protagonist stumbles into in the vast West Texas desert at the movie's beginning, to be the most effectively-creepy cinema I've seen in a long time.

After the movie we all went to the Red Brick Tavern (formerly The Alamo, "Food Worth Fightin' For") for a couple rounds of drinks. It's the warmest, most appealing bar in Rosendale, though it's not as hip as the Bywater Bistro (formerly the Rosendale Cement Company).


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?071227

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