JANUARY 2026 UPDATE
everything feels at mildly possible again edition
Happy New Year to you from Portland, Oregon, the home of locally-produced, small-batch ennui. I deeply love the electric potential and shimmering possibility of a new year, don’t you? Let’s begin:
WHAT HAPPENED IN December (BROAD STROKES):
- my short experimental film How Do You Move in This World was selected to play at the Vastlab experimental festival in February 2026 in Los Angeles (more below)
- my 10-second-film contribution to Fall of Freedom is available to watch (more below)
- my daughter and I ran a holiday 5K
- i sold a photograph (thanks Alex!)
- i put together my 10 favorite photos of the year
- celebrated 5 years of no alcohol
BEST THINGS I READ in December: Every Man a King by Walter Mosley, Transformer: the complete Lou Reed story (in progress).
BEST THINGS I SAW in December: The Alabama Solution, Mountainhead, Bullets Over Broadway (rewatch), Undercover (S1 of Belgian detective series on Netflix), Black Bag, Heaven’s Gate: Cult of Cults (HBO 4 episodes), Holy Hell, The Source Family (on Tubi).
therein ends the undercard portion of this endeavor. on to the main event:
PROJECT UPDATES
How Do You Move in This World (experimental narrative, 2 min) Super excited to report that my new short film will world premiere in Los Angeles in February 2026 at the Vastlab Experimental festival. A very cool thing Vastlab did was to send all accepted filmmakers a list of 10 questions to answer about our filmmaking process, who we are, things that interest us and so on. We in turn were to respond to these questions with a video. Here is mine.
All the other artist Q & A’s are extremely compelling. I love to hearing how other artists work and how they get snagged by daily life or the art they turn to and so on. Every festival should do a version of this to my mind. Check out the other 2026 Vastlab artist Q & A’s here and learn more about my short project here.
ADDITIONAL PROJECT UPDATES
Freak Farm (experimental short, 3 min) just finished and out to festivals. excited about this one.
Grief Stick (documentary short, 17 min) planning some west coast 2026 dates, stay tuned. more about Grief Stick here.
Apology Ghost (narrative short, 5 min) - out to festivals. more about Apology Ghost here.
Sister/Brother (narrative feature, 75 min)- currently re-editing but with the hint of a gleam of a possible pathway forward. More about the project here.
FILMS FOR FREEDOM
This fall the Filmmakers Cooperative and Canyon Cinema joined forces to support a nationwide arts movement to defy the rise of authoritarianism, called Fall of Freedom, and put an open call to filmmakers to submit ten-second films that, in whatever way the filmmaker deemed, cohered to the stated purpose of defying the encroachment of totalitarianism. I’m really excited to be included in this project not only due to help extinguishing autocracy and hegemony, but also because the level of quality and the other film submissions is awesome.
The whole film can be found HERE. It runs about 25 minutes and features contributions from over 100 filmmakers. My ten-second contribution comes at 21:22 (see above pic for reference) but I really recommend watching the entire thing uninterrupted in a dark room with great headphones and maybe a fresh hot coffee in your hand. Right away you can feel the rising power and strength of it all. I found it extremely inspiring and hope you do too.
DEATH OF ROB REINER
Oh man. A battery of strange sensations upon learning of Rob Reiner’s death to put it mildly. I worked at Castle Rock Entertainment on Maple Drive from December 2000 to October 2003. I was an Operations Assistant during this time, meaning mail room and reception but also other duties as needed. As mailroom staff we interacted with any and all departments and personnel. The vibe company-wide for an outfit of its stature really was quite open and warm, and any dealings with RR, despite his outsized personality and mythos, were equally warm. He was a pretty low-ego, no BS, open and accessible kind of person, though it was abundantly clear he was the head of the ship. My shift was 10 am - 7 pm Monday through Friday. At 10 am every day all 5 of the Operations Assistants would meet with our boss AK and her boss CP, in CP’s office to review anything and everything of consequence (which could mean in the building, in the area, in the office needs of the productions that were mounting or going, in regards to the new keyfobs we all had to use as a result of the recent aol time-warner merger and so on), then we’d disperse to begin our work day: 3 of the 5 of us would go to mail room, 1 of us to main reception desk (on 1st floor where publicity, legal, marketing, executives lived), 1 of us to satellite reception desk (on 3rd floor where development, production, several offices for some embedded producers, a couple of in-house script readers, video services, and others lived). Of the 3 remaining Operations Assistants now in the mail room, 1 would be designated for reception breaks and reception lunches for the day, and the remaining 2 would essentially be on call for the day after delivering the mail. Those 2 would leave the building and walk a block to the post office with a loading truck and get the mail, (usually 2-3 mail tubs full) then we’d wheel it back. take the elevator back to 3rd floor, sort the mail, toss unsolicited screenplays or packages into the trash, load the mail cart accordingly, and deliver mail to the 1st and 3rd floor offices. Oh, we also were responsible for daily stocking and cleaning of 7 kitchens, an enterprise which included emptying and running dishwasher, cleaning any dishes in sink, restocking all fridges with 3 kinds of canned soft drinks, and 3 kinds of bottled mineral water, wiping all surfaces, and essentially making sure all were spotless and stocked and ready for any snacking or beverage contingency. On weekends 1 Operations Assistant would go to the nearest Ralphs (Beverly at Doheny) and purchase half-and-half, milk, and skim milk for all 7 kitchens (usually 80-90 dollars worth if memory serves, paid out of petty cash) and then deliver it to each kitchen accordingly and then do a deep clean of each kitchen, typically on a Saturday or Sunday AM. This netted 4 hours of OT, which we were all grateful to receive. Film productions and/or releases that happened when I worked there: Hearts in Atlantis, Murder by Numbers, The Majestic, A Mighty Wind, The Salton Sea, Dreamcatcher, Two Weeks Notice, Alex and Emma.
Around and through this time, I made some tiny inroads professionally, gaining a manager and taking a spate of meet-and-greet meetings around town, based on a script of mine that opened one or two doors. Some of these meetings, if they were near Beverly Hills, I would take on my lunch break at work. A real strange sensation to go from a being a guest at a tony westside office suite, being told how much they love my script and how genius it is, only to return to work and be ordered via walkie-talkie to restock the stirrer straws at the first floor kitchen. So it goes. [note: after a few of these meetings I realized they said those things about every script and I shouldn’t take them at their word. all part of the game.]
This span was a highly formative time for me in voluminous ways and I have many specific memories - about productions, about personnel, about very specific items and moments - but I’ll save them for another venue and time. [sidebar: A couple weeks ago I was added to a fb messenger group of former Castle Rock staff and employees that ballooned quickly to include scores of alumni which in turn led to a shared document many pages long filled with individual tales, memories, narratives about people’s time and experience there, before/during/after my time which was quite moving to absorb in totality.] Suffice it to say when I started at Castle Rock I was a young pup, a year out of film school and oh so dewy-eyed and quaking with desperation for my ship to come in and presuming/believing this would be my last refuge until that occurred. Instead, I left employment there slightly discombobulated and wildly unhappy - though to be clear there was a wide variety of personal and professional considerations at play - and in fact would leave Los Angeles altogether in February 2004 for Portland. I remain extremely grateful for my time at Castle Rock and all the instruction i received there from the top of the ship on down. Thank you RR.
2025 SUMMATION
This was a really great year for me. I had 3 different projects play at or get accepted to play at 3 different festivals in 3 different categories (documentary, short narrative, short experimental), first time that has occurred. I released an album and an EP, each with corresponding music videos. Grief Stick had some great local events in Portland. I found a pathway forward to finish editing Sister/Brother (currently in progress.) Had a photo published in The Sun. And so on. On personal fronts, M and I celebrated 25 years of being married (plus we were together a few years before that) and travelled back to Humboldt to honor it. Also, our son started HS, our daughter started MS. I hit 5 years of no alcohol. Most important milestone for me however, and one from which all the above is predicated: I hit 20 years of brain tumor survivorship. I could write here for a year straight about the cascade of thoughts of gratitude and mercy and unfairness and anger and black fear and really just the gnarled mess of it all and still not come close to approximating what it feels like or unraveling enough of it to express it to another person, but I’ll reduce it to this: man, what a gd gift to draw breath. You might/probably already know this. But I had to say it. On to 2026.
(note: if your 2025 was terrible or less-than-good, I am sorry. I have had some of those years as well xo).
ETC
impermanence clock
days i’ve been alive: 19,558 | days until i turn 80: 9661
music
my music project impermanent marker recently released an album called EMPTY CONVERSATION. stream below or find here
running
Very good in December. feeling steady and strong again. Ran a 5K with my daughter on December 14th. Took a few days off running afterward but then got right back to it, running 4 days a week, usually with the dog. Excited to run more in 2026.
photography
I was excited to sell a print of this photo this month to my friend Alex. Do you want to purchase prints of my photos? please go here and you can find some of them.
fivver account!
I offer film editing, screenplay proofing, voice acting, and editing your kid’s AAU basketball footage into a reel. Do you have need of any of those? Does your loved one or friend? If so please go here. I could really use the support.
okay that’s it for now. Thank you for reading and supporting this. I hope your new year is a period of personal transformation and growth. I’m going to work on trying to keep my eye on the clock, running more, not heeding negative internal voices, volunteering more, and essentially trying to keep the engine going and the lights on. How about you?
Philip Glass. Oh yes, such a genius. And the death of Rob Riener and his wife, Michelle. My mind is still reeling. In a year that has left me gutted in so many ways, that was the icing on the cake. So heartbreaking. It's really cool that you worked for Castle Rock. That's something to be proud of. I keep hoping we will return to some kind of normalcy in Portland. I want so much for this old city to heal... I'm looking forward to the films, particularly Apology Ghost...