Years ago, when the world was still beautiful, when man and beast lived in perfect harmony here upon God’s green earth, there was a streaming service called FilmStruck. It combined Turner Classic Movies with The Criterion Collection. Basically, you could stream hundreds (if not thousands) of films that you might call culturally / historically / artistically significant. Back then I was (and remain still) an unmarried and childless adult who often felt life to be a senseless terror, so of course I signed up as soon as they announced it. Over the course of two years, I chewed through a metric ton of everything they ever put on there. It was a source of happiness for me . . . I could always count on finding something on FilmStruck that completely ripped my mind in half and made me remember that LIFE CAN BE BEAUTIFUL. And each month they would cycle out movies for other ones, and put them in themed collections to honor certain directors or genres or holidays, or whatever else, making it a sort of all-you-can-eat buffet of curated movies . . . an endless cavern of precious stones. It was great! (The only downside was the Apple TV app did not have dark mode. The backgrounds were white, for god’s sake . . .)

Anyway: FilmStruck lasted from November 2016 to November 2018. I seem to recall directors like Scorsese pleading that people subscribe, so delicate was its existence . . . but I reckon it ended up being super niche. By the time they killed it off, there were only 100k subscribers in the whole world versus however many hundreds of millions Netflix had. I was real bummed out when I heard the news. Some of the movies they had on there were essentially impossible to find elsewhere, even to torrent . . . many were over a hundred years old. I watched as many movies as I could leading up to the night they shut the server down, but of course shut it down they did. All those movies vanished into the abyss which is prepared for the devil and his angels. Soon after the world descended into darkness, and I along with it.

MONTHS LATER . . .

. . . Criterion themselves came down like a bolt of lightning to heal the world, announcing they were going to start their own streaming service called The Criterion Channel. Thought I: “Wow!” Still a professional loser with no reason to live, I signed up right away. In addition to getting a reduced annual fee (I pay $89.99/yr versus $99.99/yr like the rest of you freaks . . .), they also sent me this thick metal charter subscriber card. It weighs like a pound:

Since then, I have watched probably a thousand movies on The Criterion Channel. In the darkest moments of my life, when I feel the abyssal lair growing nearer, I’ll remember it exists, and go a-browsing. And lo: more often than not I’ll get lucky and find something truly moving that rekindles the light which burns within the deepest wellsprings of my being . . . and thus I AM HEALED BY CINEMA. It is a beautiful feeling.

Last week, on April 8th, I received an email which I will now share with you. Apparently it has been six years since The Criterion Channel launched:

April 8th! Of course! The date which is writ eternal upon my membership card. So it has been six years after all. Well, there it is if y’all want it: a referral code for a whole free month. Take it and run, for all I care.

I watch something on The Criterion Channel at least three or four nights a week. If they put up a themed collection called “Neo Noir” or “Hitchcock for the Holidays”, you better BELIEVE I’m watching every single god damn movie they got in there. But my favorite thing to do is a thing I started doing during the pandemic, which is to go in completely blind. I’ll just choose something based on the title or the thumbnail or the genre (“Czech New Wave”?? OK!) and watch it without having the slightest clue what it’s even about. I don’t dare read the synopsis! Some of the best movies I’ve ever seen in my life I found this way. It feels like finding a Christmas present under the couch. I highly recommend it~

Anyway, get in there. Thank me later. Criterion in general seems to be pretty popular these days . . . they do those Criterion Closet videos with celebrities and all that, and a bunch of people watch that stuff. I still buy their Blu-rays because I’m an unmarried and childless adult who lives alone and stays up till 5 am, but everyone knows physical media sales are in decline . . . AND SO it is important to support streaming services like this so that they do not suffer the same fate as FilmStruck. Because let’s face it: pretty much everything outside of Criterion and MUBI and Kanopy fucking sucks. And that’s putting it mildly!

Take a look at what is like a quarter of my watchlist on CC, some of which I keep in there because I love them so much:

Listen: This is not a plug, but rather a case for your very soul. I am your Movie Friend. Join me. Step into the light. Take off your bib and turn your back on the sky-high baby food machine that is essentially every other streaming service. OK? YEAH!!!

There are so many things I wish to write about . . . I feel compelled to make a list:

• visiting Nicole in Poland last May
• visiting Demet and Ege and Aysu in Turkey last June
• touring the Southeast with Chalk Talk
• traveling nonstop around the United States and Canada between August 2023 and February 2024
• traveling nonstop around the United States and Canada between August 2024 and February 2025
• staying at my cousin’s cabin in rural Virginia
• cat-sitting Bilbo in Portland last Christmas
• being apprehended by US Border Patrol when reentering the United States from Vancouver days later
• the Dutch girls I met at Kuckucksei
• the Danish girls I met at Fahimi
• a radio station I found called Hearts of Space
• the strangers on the U-Bahn who eerily seemed to recognize me
• Madison huddling with me at sunset atop Grandview Park in San Francisco when I’d just moved to the Bay Area
• the much-missed Sunday ritual of Tom’s Diner in Portland and its similarities to Towson Diner from when I was a teenager
• being haunted by my friend J, the tall goth German girl who completely vanished from my life with no explanation
• the dream of the Haskell house
• the little spiders who guard my apartment
• sleeping next to M at K’s house
• the dead man I saw hanging from a tree
• the dark liquid behind my right eye which will not go away

. . . and so on. I’ll get to it. I’m about to have a lot of time to make thing for reasons I will explain in the next few days. Actually, what I’m about to do with my life is probably extremely stupid but I’m going to do it anyway. I’m going to do it because it means I will be free. Ain’t that all that really matters? Being free? That’s what I think, anyway, but then what do I know . . .

It’s 3:40 am in Berlin. Shaina is asleep in my bed and has to catch a train to Rotterdam in a few hours. I guess I will go to sleep now too.

For now . . .

What we professional liars hope to serve is truth. I’m afraid the pompous word for that is art. Picasso himself said it. Art, he said, is a lie, a lie that makes us realize the truth. Reality? It’s the toothbrush waiting at home for you in its glass, a bus ticket, a paycheck, and the grave.

orson welles

Well, it’s like the fella said . . .

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke.

(MAHLER is incredible, by the way. It’s one of the best movie’s I’ve ever seen . . . I’ll write more about it later~)

For now:

This is like a fraction of the insanely cool imagery the unsung hero and underrated master KEN RUSSELL stuffed into 115 minutes. It is a masterpiece. Wow!!

Quoth brother Ishmael:

Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.

Yeah. I’ve been saying this for years!

In the late afternoon of Thanksgiving day I left McCune Compound where I was housesitting and drove a dozen miles south into Oakland in the Heshmobile. I was on my way to San Francisco to have dinner with Laura and her boyfriend Campbell, but I had neglected to pick up any food to bring the day before. I did not want to show up and be a mooch, so just before the Bay Bridge I detoured to the Safeway in Rockridge, which was essentially the only grocery store open just then. I drove around the building and parked on the rooftop parking garage. I took the escalator down to the store and outside the front door a guy with a bad haircut and a clipboard asked me if I wanted to sign some sort of petition. I said: “I’m Canadian,” and kept walking. If you say this to a stranger who is beckoning you over for your signature, saying you are Canadian is a bulletproof way to quickly and politely get out of listening to a canned spiel about government spending.

Anyway: I stepped into the store and saw that it was crowded as hell . . . everyone had put off shopping till the last minute just as I had. I squirmed through the madding crowd to get to the baking aisle. I had told Laura I would get cornbread mix, to which she replied: “I don’t even like cornbread.” I regarded her insane opinion and said OK, OK—well, I’m getting some anyway. As a red-blooded son of the Old Dominion state, I shudder to imagine a Thanksgiving dinner bereft of cornbread. And so I searched in vain, only to find a single box left over, and it was made by some brand that makes tortillas and salsa. I wondered what business they had making cornbread. And this cornbread was jalapeño-flavored, which I felt ambivalent about. With no other choice, I accepted my fate and grabbed the last box of it. I thought: Even weird cornbread is still cornbread, and that sure beat the alternative, which is oblivion . . .

Naturally the self-checkout machine did not work properly. It shrieked out to me in a robotic feminine voice that the cornbread box had not been properly scanned, and to remove it from the bagging area, and on and on . . . a cashier who is always a jerk to me for some reason came over and was a jerk to me for some reason. I thought: Come on, you creep! Can’t you at least be nice today, on Thanksgiving?! but it would have been out of character for me to say a thing like that, and anyway I felt exhausted on a bone-deep level, so I simply said nothing. Looking at the screen he sighed theatrically and entered an override code. I paid and got the hell out of there.

Back on the roof in the Heshmobile, I turned the ignition and sat there with the engine idling and waiting for the heat to kick in. The sun was setting westerly, having no alternative, over Oakland toward San Francisco . . . the sky was blue and yellow and pink and orange, autumnal as hell, and streaked with pink clouds. The trees across the way were fall-colored and the air was a nice November kind of cold. Whenever I am someplace else during that time of year, it is always a little sadness to me that I have to miss the East Bay fall, which is real even if you don’t believe it, and so it felt good to see it again.

I scanned the parking lot with my eyes. In front of me and to the left I saw a white car with its parking lights on. Inside a young woman was sobbing and wiping tears from her bright red face. She looked so sad. I wondered what had happened that this woman would end up crying in her car in a parking lot above a grocery store at sunset on Thanksgiving. I felt rotten as hell about it and it did not feel right to simply drive off. I figured I should at least ask her if she was OK. I thought also: Well, but if this woman had gotten to a point where she could not help but cry hard in a semi-public place, then perhaps it would be embarrassing to her if I brought attention to it . . . perhaps she just wanted to be alone to cry.

And yet I could not let it be! . . . so I got out of the truck and approached her driver’s side window. She was probably in her mid-20s and had wavy brown hair and green eyes and freckles. If you can tell that someone is a “good person” simply by looking at their face, then to me she looked like one. There was nothing sinister about her, no malice . . . I just saw a sad girl with a kind face crying alone on Thanksgiving. And it broke me!

She looked up at me a little surprised and rolled down the window. I said: “I don’t mean to bother you, but I just wanted to see if you were OK. Are you OK?” She pulled a Nights of Cabiria and smiled through her tears, saying: “Oh, I’m OK. I’m OK. Thank you for checking on me, though.” And I said: “Well . . . sometimes you gotta just make sure.” I wished her a happy Thanksgiving and walked away.

Back on the wild streets of Oakland, I aimed the big white-lightning Heshmobile across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel with the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond in the rearview mirror . . . heading towards a strange part of San Francisco I had never seen before, way the hell out there, to be with my friends . . .

In my mind there is a constellation of thousands of these little moments I have had with strangers that I remember vividly, maybe because there was some quiet tragedy to them, or because there was some element that remained mysterious to me years later. This one is both. I have thought about the crying woman and have wondered what had made her cry that day. I have wondered if she spent Thanksgiving alone. Maybe she just had a bad moment, or maybe her whole life had just been ruined. Maybe she just felt she needed to cry, and who could blame her. I guess I’ll never really know either way. But I remember her and I will always wonder.

Dude has been possessed by a guy who is essentially a lieutenant for Satan and forced to commit horrendous deeds, and as soon as his old friend mercifully releases him from that long dark coma-dream, he immediately starts dropping the coolest lines in the entire trilogy. Monty and I dig King Theoden . . . he’s essentially a Shakespeare character. Dude is King Lear!

King Lear rules. Imagine saying this to your daughter:

You do me wrong to take me out o’ th’ grave.
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.

And that’s just one of like a thousand cool things he says. I love stuff like that. I want as much of it as possible!!!