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...

a rewatch inspired by alot of thoughts i have had today about my first time sleeping with a trans woman, around the time i was 19 or 20 (and not out). it makes me sad that the only way i could reach out to trans women was on cl personal ads. you checked my id before we did anything; i think i carried the posture and general ignorance of someone in high school for years after i had graduated. none of the (much older than you, probably 22 or so) men i had met on cl cared when i was 17, crawling into some motel out off roosevelt or north avenue. (google maps + my intuition seem to suggest the du wayne motel as a site for a lot of these interactions). you seemed to care though. and we really struggled to actually have sex (your little 90s era coupe didn't help matters). it is a feeling i struggle to describe, to have seen trans women and not know why i wanted to cry in their lap. and listen to their industrial music on a phone speaker. (some things never change). and to turn a 30 minut...

  january 25th   hellie and i were discussing danger music the other morning (actually following a conversation i had with loren ~a week ago). basically, pieces that require bodily harm to come to the performer to perform or for the listener to hear (often theoretically; the fluxus scores most heavily associated with this are largely unperformable within "reason"). it got me thinking about the role of danger and bodily harm in film - specifically, street ski edits. Rudy Lepine has described this proximity when discussing his work in 'Delirium' and (especially) 'Psychoactiv'; "As my ski dreams were coming true I was dealing with this debilitating injury, and I wanted to be able to link the two authentically". Oliver Hoblitzelle's work in his newest film, 'The Jet Ski Movie', really kept this idea in my brain. we are used to skiers (and skateboarders, etc) bailing in clips, often with a redemptive success at the same spot later in the film...

 truly freezing out there today, but i made the perilous trip to rogers park for "annabelle's delight" (afternoon caffeine with friends on a weekday). loren + i watched rohmer's 'claire's knee', a true stinker in a body of work that has been mostly hits. i first had sex with a 40 year old man when i was 16 years old. having an opportunity to be around older gay people was probably the preferable outcome compared to the weird, reclusive shape my life was taking at the time (although maybe i wish i met the guy in like a sharing your feelings group instead of a motel). the feelings of a young abused person towards those that abuse them is a subject that i think deserves to be written about/explored artistically, which is a tough needle to thread. rohmer fails (with gusto!) to give his young girls in this film the humanity necessary to let such a story unfold, which just fucking sucks. laura + claire, our girls in question, exist literally in our narrative as ...

my return to religious life ~8ish years ago found me immediately drawn to the advent season. amidst the most banal and excessive month of the calendar, advent presents the concept that we must wait - and wait, and wait, impatiently this time, for the coming of Christ - and, at the end of waiting, we are presented not with Easter, the reconciling of humanity and God, but with an infant. so we wait some more. waiting moved me to devote a year to wait: 'what if i did everything more slowly in 2025?'. so i resolved to do everything more slowly in 2025. i ran, slowly. i joined the religious society of friends, where we sit and wait slowly for Spirit's call in our life. i accepted that i read slowly. i practiced walking to nowhere in chicago so i could go walk to nowhere in particular in scotland, and i listened on these walks. (slowly). all of this willful slowful movement was joined by unwilling slow movement - an end to relationships and to the whole shape of my day-to-day lif...