Just A Peck 0030 // Ice stacking, Twin Cities, Catherine O'Hara

Just A Peck

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JOURNAL

We had multiple occurences of ice stacking along our shore this week. It’s always breathtaking to watch–massive floating sheets of ice crashing into the shore, splintering and piling up in stacks. At one point, Jody and I were on the deck watching and the movement of the ice and the roar of the collision (which can go for hours at times) just stopped. Instantly. The movement, the sound, everything.

Ice stacks

We are in the Twin Cities this weekend to spend time with the kids. We caught a movie and the Brave New Workshop show on Saturday. (Kaylee was already in the metro for a conference, so she missed the movie, but joined us for dinner and BNW.) Today, we’ll be having the first of our monthly Family Movie Club discussions and enjoying each other’s company.

All of us but Kaylee at AMC
Just at BNW

What I watched this week:

  • Elegant Beast (1962). A fascinating Yuzo Kawashima film that has one foot firmly planted in classical Japanese cinema style and the other firmly planted in the New Wave aesthetic. It takes place almost entirely in a tiny, two room apartment, and has perhaps the highest ratio of set-ups to square footage of any movie I've ever seen.
  • Jay Kelly (2025). This was Spencer's pick for our first Monthly Family Movie discussion. I'm a sucker for movies about movies, and movies about regret, so this worked pretty well for me. It's definitely in conversation with Funny People and unintentionally with Sentimental Value. "Can we go again?", cheesecake, "All my memories are movies", "When I see you, I see my whole life".
  • The Testament of Ann Lee (2025). Mona Fastvold's depiction of the founding of the Shaker movement, which I knew almost nothing about. Amanda Seyfried gives a powerful performance, and Fastvold, William Rexer (cinematographer), and Celia Rowlson-Hall (choreographer) work together to create some really remarkable sequences of ecstatic dance and religious fervor.

What I’m reading this week:

  • FINISHED: The Ferryman and His Wife, by Frode Grytten. A short, gentle, poignant novel in translation about a man who has captained a ferry back and forth across a fjord for many years who is taking his final voyage. He is joined by his dog (who died many years before) and the ghosts people he has ferried (family, friends, community members) as he reflects on the joys and tragedies of a good life.
  • Ghost Town Run, Moravec
  • Deliverace, Dickey
  • Middlemarch, Eliot
  • Hollywood: The Oral History, Bassinger, Wasson

MEMORIES

Forty Years Ago:

This week marks forty years since one of the formative moments of my life–the Challenger Disaster. The closing remarks from the president’s speech at the time quoting a sonnet written by war poet John Gillespie Magee Jr. still make me tear up: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

Challenger Disaster

MY FAVORITE QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"I urge artists to find a reason to be good. It can't be for awards, or decoration. That isn't a reason, it is a (largely flimsy) outcome. Find a real reason. Find a living, breathing lineage to make yourself responsible to."

-- Hanif Abdurraqib

That’s it for this week. Stay safe, friends. Thanks for reading!

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