Adam Smith, “The Work of Leisure” (Local Culture, Fall 2025): For Snyder the main obstacle to the rebirth of leisure is our devotion to work. We’re so devoted to work that even our play is workaday, since play for us is recuperation for work, and “we are still toiling when we are watching television,” as Snyder notes. Watching TV is a necessary evil, like work. It’s “like recovering from an injury.
Rachel and I are watching the X-Files for the first time. (We were around in the 90s but were busy being crazy fundamentalists.) We just watched “Beyond the Sea” and, wow, that was great. When weird stuff started happening to the guy who played Major Briggs in Twin Peaks it caused some flashbacks!
We watched The Mask of Zorro tonight for the first time in many years. What a stone cold classic. I don’t care if it makes me sound old: they don’t make movies like that anymore.
Happen Films is a great New Zealand documentary film company. Their latest is “The New Peasants,” which follows a family living mostly outside the money economy. Worth watching. The opening of the film, where they imagine their peasant ancestors, is something I’ve been thinking about lately.
If I had to, I think I could go the rest of my life with a boxed set of Fraiser, Lord of the Rings, and the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. 🎬
I’m caught up on all the available seasons of the new iteration of All Creatures Great and Small. The pre-WW2 seasons were exactly what I was looking for: low-stakes, low-drama. The onset of the war changed that, of course. But I’m totally hooked at this point, despite all the feels it gives me.
Speaking of things to watch, I’ve been enjoying Tia Weston’s YouTube series in which she remodels a house with her dad. You can watch the start to finish video here but I also recommend just watching the whole series.
We started watching the newer All Creatures Great and Small series this evening and it’s delightful. There’s nothing I love more than a low stakes British drama.
Finished watching “Twin Peaks: The Return” (aka, season three). I almost stopped watching it early on. This is clearly Lynch at his most experimental–and that’s not why I watch TV. When I watch TV or movies, I’m just looking for entertainment; I do intellectual activity elsewhere. (I say this only as a description of my own habits. Yours will obviously be different.) I stuck with it, though, and I did feel much more engaged by the end.
I watched the Twin Peaks prequel movie “Fire Walk With Me”—and it was dark and disturbing. It had none of the tension relieving humor of the series. It covers the days leading up to Laura Palmer’s murder, and shows the murder itself. It fills in the story but I’m hesitant to exactly recommend it.