lemon ice cream

hellie and i went to the symphony on monday - on the one hand, i do agree alot w/ some discussions ive had with friends (who know alot more about concert hall music than me, ty hellie + mikah specifically) about the sort of dire state of the modern symphony repertoire. CSO + the civic orchestra are playing like 4 of mahler's 9 symphonies over the course of 18 months (spanning back to last summer). even their modern programming is The Guys (john adams cough cough). looks like they played the schoenberg variations once, like 50 years ago while boulez was conducting... please pretty please give the modernists a chance <3 but also it's mahler. he goes crazy mode the whole time. even when he does it too long (20 minute final movement. its a little indulgent.). it's kind of like eating chocolate cake for like 70 minutes straight. and your teeth kind of hurt at the end. but also if you're like "idk kind of sucks that i had to eat chocolate cake" its like come on, ...

i got about 80% of the way through a blog post last week about Jorgen Leth's cycling films, but figured i would leave that sleeping dog lying rather than try to revise it a week after the fact. he had it though. so ill say something different, but related to that theoretical post. (this is all about a sunday in hell, fwiw). bike racing seems to make the most sense to me when i view it through charles sanders peirce's (brought to my attention by jean-jacques nattiez) concept of the infinitely multiple interpretant; (defined crudely, apologies) bike racing (the concept) is an (virtual) object, which exists through the infinite multiplicities of interpretants, which all allude to the object (and to each other). while the tangible "getting to the velodrome the fastest" is a notable, important part of "the bike race", "the bike race" is made up all of the other things leth chooses to show us, as well. what's neater is that all of these other things ...

hello friends, reds (1981) had very little staying power in my head beyond diane keaton looking so swagged out the whole film. lots of yelling! loren, helli and i dnf'd it at the theater so i watched the rest at home today. i honestly enjoyed the first half but it was a great film to pull the cord on; watching the post-intermission half today was not rewarding. i feel like my history with michael snow dates back like 15 years despite my never having seen any of his work. he is kind of a quintessential "guy you find out about when you're randomly searching for ~weird~ artists" guy (like schoenberg, cage, roden, you get the idea). the impetus for new york eye + ear control (1964) is maybe the most i've ever identified with a filmmaker; snow had seen the albert ayler quartet and thought they went so crazy that he pursued + used a "film employing jazz" grant from ten centuries concerts so he could "buy a half hour of music" from ayler + co. i liste...

    tried to eat my vegetables on some older freeskiing tonight. i feel like i have a pretty good understanding of what makes an edit appealing to me; as i watch more and more film i feel like i'm developing a good vocabulary to put into words what makes a good ski  film  as a opposed to a  ski  film (or a film with good skiing in it). Both Poor Boyz productions, Tracing Skylines and Propaganda are really mired in the conventions of the time(s) in which they were made. This is not purely negative - i found there to be a lot of charm to what Propaganda specifically celebrates - but it can make them feel like just budget skate-videos-on-skis, when the medium has room to be its own (similar, but distinct) art form. We can get the ugly out of the way first - Tracing Skylines. This will focus on the Detroit section of the edit, as it is what is readily available for free on youtube. the Nike SB-esque stink is all over this fucker. drone shots, self serious narra...

 3/25 (and 26)/2026      things that are new to annie belle: - the city of san francisco and its surrounding areas; the humble Hill is kind of goated when going up and then back down is the vibe. my trip was largely very quiet, and i spent alot of time thinking about how i want to spend my time while traveling. this was the first trip i've taken since going on a literal pilgrimage (~20 hours after a "divorce-level breakup", to borrow a maxine-ism) and i sort of felt out of practice on it. not having a plan was in many ways really rewarding, but i think i could've done with a better outline sketch of my time there rather than winging ~80% of it.  that said, a lot of my quiet time spent mulling/reading alone was really rewarding. San Bruno Mountain was a really fun hike - it is always a pleasure to do (more than) the entire elevation change of the state of illinois in <2 hours. i entered on an access route that was vaguely marked as possibly closed (it wasn't t...

most gutter has some awesome chicago spots - here are some:  Foster + Kildare (6:45) clybourn metra stop (~8:30) evanston main street metra stop (14:55) winnemac park (17:15) (there are more but i cant identify them off the clips) it’s hard to be a street edit not named zoot space or jetskis, because those films are as close to formally perfect as they get; Most Gutter suffers only in that it shows too much polish at times. the music choices are a little too serious for my taste, and the skiing is arguably too good for the format (the Forre crew has some of the same issues - spin-to-win skiing and great film don’t always intersect). Ultimately, most gutter is really fucking good, and i o a couple Chicago spots in this film:  i only feel capable of nitpicking it because it grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. there’s some serious beauty in the still camera shots (~17:50 is a good example) and the sequence starting at 19:08 gets me every time. showing people ski ed...