2025 Snow Daze festival in Kenosha, Wisconsin from 6th Av

January 25, 2025: Snow Daze Festival in Kenosha, Wisconsin seen from 6th Avenue.

Another Week: Number 109

by Mark Czerniec | January 26, 2025

Some realities are too grim to look at directly.

When my wife Amy was first diagnosed with breast cancer, we both engaged as much as we possibly could. We documented all the appointments and treatments online. I stayed awake at night reading about the disease. After a year or so, Amy was in remission.

Eventually, though, her cancer returned. The second time around, we still jumped through every treatment hoop available, but we didn’t produce videos or strategize so much. As she started losing the energy to climb stairs, Amy spent many of her last hours watching old episodes of Fixer Upper, one of her favorite shows.

Monday was the twelfth anniversary of my sobriety. It was also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It was even Blue Monday, the “saddest day of the year.”

And it was Inauguration Day. Donald J. Trump is back.

I was watching women’s tennis — the Australian Open. Shortly after 11:00, several people began texting and phoning me, looking to commiserate. I tried to explain that I was watching tennis.

Then he takes her out to dinner, buys her new clothes

Of course, complete avoidance is impossible. At halftime during the College Football Playoff National Championship (Go Irish!), ESPN aired a pre-recorded, poorly-read propaganda message from Big Brother-In-Law. The twisted fuck looked like a peeled apple, browning and decaying before our eyes as he slurred his mumbo jumbo about the “golden age of America.” What the hell does he have to do with college football?

On Tuesday, Hallie Jackson NOW was interrupted for Trump’s announcement of some vague, $500 billion AI initiative — and before I knew it, a steady supply of horseshit was plopping out of the puckered hole in his face. His accordion hands were moving in and out as he rambled on and on about tiny fish and a giant valve as the cause of the California wildfires.

I wanted Jackson to cut him off: “Okay, the president is talking nonsense now and we have other stories to cover.” But no — the rational world forever defers to our nude emperor, and it was only Day 2 of 1,461.

This was our coldest week of the season so far, with single digits above or below zero on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Since my car is old and runs on diesel fuel, I decided to drive it three times daily to keep the fuel stirred. I racked up over 100 cold and lonely miles.

In a Facebook post on Sunday, TV meteorologist and Kenosha native Sam Kuffel repeated five times, “We just have to get through the next two days.”

Sadly, she didn’t make it. On Tuesday, Kuffel reportedly protested Elon Musk’s Nazi salute at the inauguration on her Instagram account, then was fired for doing so by Milwaukee’s CBS 58. In the online backlash to her termination, one commenter observed, “I guess free speech is just for rich people.”

It’s too bad, because CBS 58 News suffers from blandness and poor ratings, and Kuffel stood out there for her absorption and enthusiasm. Meanwhile, many more TV meteorologists are losing their jobs nationwide — and our idiot president had decided to deal with natural disasters by “getting rid of FEMA.”

Me? I watched Madison Keys win the Australian Open — and I walked 3.5 miles this week.

Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg (2024)

Anita Pallenberg was a blonde European beauty — a model and movie actor who had relationships with three of The Rolling Stones: Brian Jones, Keith Richards, and, to some extent, Mick Jagger.

Well beyond serving as the muse who inspired various Stones songs, Pallenberg was a fearless ringleader who taught them everything from fashion sense to their brazen swagger. She died in 2017, leaving her unpublished autobiography behind. It serves as the basis for this documentary, with passages read by Scarlett Johansson. There is commentary from her husband Keith Richards, and her children Marlon Richards and Angela Richards, among others.

Watching this film via Hulu on Friday night, I was struck by the way it stayed on a very human level. The international superstars may sail to Brazil on a whim — but they do it on a freighter, and we hang out with them, bored and barefoot on the deck. We see young Marlon at play in the south of France at Nellcôte, while the heroin-saturated Stones assemble Exile on Main St. and Anita handles all the logistics and meals. We hear from Theda Zawaiza, who Marlon was lucky enough to have as a nanny. We see home movies of the Richards family’s rustic life in the Swiss mountains after evading the French police.

There are times of escapade and romance, there are moments of friction and bitterness, and there are several instances of hair-raising loss and pain. There is a drug-assisted spiral into madness and death — and an astounding recovery.

Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg is much more than the usual rock bio. It’s a study of the unbridled joy and terror of life, as plumbed by one adventurous woman.

Roy Wood Jr.: Lonely Flowers (2024)

Many months have passed since I’ve watched an hour of comedy this satisfying. Lonely Flowers was filmed in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Theater and is currently streaming on Hulu. In his show, Roy Wood Jr. uses society’s lack of interpersonal connection as the trailhead to which he returns between each of the story-paths he traverses during this performance.

He’s not a wanderer; he’s a tour guide. Each loop is a cleverly constructed jaunt into increasingly revelatory territory. It’s all leading up to something, and each segment adds foundation and intersects with the others.

Is it funny? Sure, I laughed out loud a few times, watching alone at home. Mostly, though, it’s just thoroughly entertaining. Wood uses the familiar conventions of standup comedy — at which he is masterful — to deliver more subtle insights.

His final hunk is a doozy — an elaborate work of art from simple materials that unfolds like origami. I gasped.

A Real Pain (2024)

Jesse Eisenberg (who also wrote and directed) plays David, a non-observant Jewish New Yorker who works in internet advertising and obsessively wants everything to go smoothly. He is a husband and father whose cringe sensor is on a hair trigger.

Kieran Culkin plays his cousin Benji, an unattached, underachieving pot smoker with a desperate need to cut past propriety and bullshit. He has an uncanny knack for both offending and liberating perfect strangers.

The pair recently lost their beloved grandmother — an especially grievous blow for Benji, who says she was the only person in the world who understood him. Now they’re going to Poland together on a Holocaust tour, with a side trip to the home where she grew up before surviving the Holocaust and emmigrating to America.

In Warsaw, their British-educated tour guide is Will Sharpe. Fellow tourist Kurt Egyiawan escaped the Rwandan genocide and converted to Judaism. Jennifer Grey escaped Los Angeles after her divorce. Her mother survived the camps.

What should we do with the horrors of this world — like death, concentration camps, and divorce? Benji feels life’s pain intensely and wants everything on the table. Most others, especially David, prefer to put it away somewhere, speak politely, and focus instead on their work and families.

I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes, which seems especially timely this week:

Nice people made the best Nazis.
Or so I have been told. My mother was born in Munich in 1934, and spent her childhood in Nazi Germany surrounded by nice people who refused to make waves. When things got ugly, the people my mother lived alongside chose not to focus on “politics,” instead busying themselves with happier things. They were lovely, kind people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away.
— Naomi Shulman, in a commentary for WBUR,
November 17, 2016

The lovely music in A Real Pain is by Frédéric Chopin.

I watched via Hulu with my mom, who loved the postcard shots of Poland and the Chopin, but found Kieran Culkin’s character quite annoying. Culkin has won a Golden Globe Award for his performance which, like Jesse Eisenberg’s screenplay, is nominated for an Oscar.