lemon ice cream

 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...