Finally got round to watching Taxi Driver, another archetypal New York movie. The background to watching it was straightforward - it was only $14.95 in Tower Video and it was 3am on a Saturday night when my neighbour was having a party that sounded like it was 1 foot from my head. Crappy walls. Anyways, the movie was amazing, one of the best things I've seen in a long time. So many of the sequences had been ripped off in movies I'd seen elsewhere that I felt I already knew it. That plus the fact it as so much about New York. Thumbs up from me.

And on the subject of crappy walls... My landlord has had some dodgy builders in hanging precariously on old hemp rope fixing my leaking wall. This has involved lots of drilling types noises at 8am on a Saturday with visions of a large drill emerging 2 inches from my head (with amusing consequences). I'm glad he's fixing it, have to say that I have no confidence that all this work will fix it. I met another of my housemates last night, Antony and his kid Milo. He was saying that a lot of the tenants have filed complaints about the landlord which led to the housing board doing a visit - they found a pool of water collecting, this being the summer with major mosquito and disease issues. Always nice to lose that fake view of your landlord as a reasonable guy... maybe it was the beard, or the way in which he would 'forget' how to understand English whenever I had a complaint, finishing with "but you like the apartment, yes?". Oi vey.

Oh wait. I am.

In an attempt to re-excite myself about the coolness of modern technology I've finally installed RealJukebox. This is a very cute little digital music player that does a wonderful job of recording your CDs while you listen to them. The music you've listened to is automatically categorized, stored on your machine (at great expense to your hard drive) and then used to make your playlists on demand. I'd always been a bit reticent on this as the MP3 encoding devices I'd looked at before seemed to have huge troubles working on Windows NT - but the new drivers seem smooth.

Of course I still can't get my Sony Music Clip to work on NT. Sony have a policy of only supporting Windows 98 which is frankly ridiculous. They make such great little devices, it's such a shame they get so draconian on music security policies and so crap on their platform support.

On a less musical note, went to see the film Memento last Sunday. Amazing film. The story is about a guy with no short term memory since his wife was murdered trying to find the murderer. This means that he can't remember what happened 5 minutes before. So to combat this he writes notes to himself to remind him where he's staying, what his car looks like and so on. This is a strange concept to take in and hard to relate to - so to help us understand what it feels like the movie is filmed backwards in 5 minute segements. You don't know what just happened, like the protagonist, so you get a sense of how he feels in a situation. The difference is you have a memory of his future. It's all very weird and very cool.

There are times when not having the right information drives you mad. Then there are times when having the right information drives you mad. Go figure.

Oh. And then there are times when you have to make a decision and all the options look bad, but the decision you feel you ought to make is one of the most painful. To quote the Simpsons - "The Japanese word for 'crisis' is the same as the word for 'opportunity. Cris-ortunity!"

You just gotta love some bouncers in New York City. Last night we observed some fine specimens at Centro-Fly (no link as I want to discourage you from going) as we waited to go in to go to GBH. Complete lack of any sense of humour, inflated sense of their own self-importance and the size of a small South American country with possibly more tattoos. Having got inside there were even more bouncers randomly deciding who should move between floors based on cuteness and whether they were their mates. I don't mind queuing, I do mind a lack of even handedness that would make Hitler seem humanitarian. So, boycott Centro-Fly and convince your favorite DJs they should do the same.

Of course this would be all so much easier if there were more than 3 major clubs in New York. It's times like this that I do really miss the UK club scene. And also wish that I'd gone to Organic Grooves instead which is always a much more relaxed vibe (just didn't feel like going on my own).

Anyways, the rest of Friday was cool. Took the day off, something I heartily recommend, and drank nice wine from lunch onwards and wandered around SoHo taking in the sights. Highlights were Puck Fair which was playing the Stranglers and had the Mirror and Sun to read, and Mercer Kitchen where the food was wonderful as was the atmosphere (replate with upside down umbrellas hanging from the ceiling to catch the leaks).