Month: February 2026

Frigid

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I’m sorry but it was simply too cold (17 degrees before wind chill) during Sunday’s visit to Mount Peter to experience any concept of enjoyment. Biting, jagged-steel cold exacerbated by gusty breezes…later.

We went tubing down semi-steep slopes. My tube was a subdued orange color, and that in itself was a problem. Neurotic on my part, but generally true.

Just before pushing off a 17-year-old slope monitor told me to park my butt on the edge of my tube and not in the center of it — advice I didn’t like and therefore ignored.

Halfway down the slope the tube whirled around and I was suddenly speeding backwards at 25 mph or thereabouts, unable to see what was coming. Exhilaration + potential collision = EDGLRD!

I’m glad we went but next time the temps need to be in the 30s or at least the high 20s, and no wind.

I’m not a fan of crab-apple green either..

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Any Film Student Who Has “Trouble” Sitting Through “The Brutalist” Has My Empathy and Allegiance

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No, seriously….Aaron Couch’s 1.30.26 THR story sounds all too familiar, unfortunately.

The ADD fast-forward trend has been increasing over the last 12 to 15 years, and certainly over the last ten.

That said, I could probably come up with a fairly long list of acclaimed films that I’ve also had trouble sitting through, or have even dozed through portions of. Unlike the vast majority of snooty, know-it-all film crickets and essayists, I’m just being honest. This is mostly a failure on my part, of course, but in the case of, say, Mascha Schilinski‘s Sound of Falling or Mona Fastvold‘s The Testament of Ann Lee…

Ostensibly Alluding to Trump, But If You Think About It…

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We all understand what Ethan Hawke is talking about here, obviously, but my first reaction, frankly, was that he could be talking about the climate of woke terror that began to permeate the Hollywood-journo realm in ’18.

The Robespierres finally began to weaken and dissipate in mid ’24, thank God, but they’re still with us to a certain extent.

Hawke’s 2026 words could be my own seven or eight years ago: “I never felt scared about what I was gonna say until ’18 or thereabouts. In which you feel, like, ‘oh, I have to be careful.’ There’s a fear in the air that I’ve never felt before. And it’s not America.”