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.