Around this time every year falls to me a solemn duty. And each year said duty sort of sneaks up on me.

It comes here at the endish of the summer when the weather is hot, tons of stuff is still spilling from the garden and I’m only sort of getting really geared up for fall pursuits, much less those of a much whiter character.

Not only that but most years I get a hint, a teaser, a trailer that presages the arrival of my duty. This year none of that, just an innocuous weblink showed up in my inbox and it took about 5 minutes for me to figure out that this wasn’t the harbinger of the event, this was the event. Fuck, winter is almost here apparently cause the PowHos have finished up the latest installment: TeleVision. Fuck yeah baby.

I won’t bother to bore you with the tedium of a scene by scene. And really, do I have to tell you that this is their strongest effort to date? Which is weird, cause that isn’t how everybody else operates, they run hot and cold bad ass and blah but Noah et al just get consistently better at this game and for me that is pretty neat in itself. I can’t even really convey how far the cinematography has come. There are now entire segments of the movie that would easily stand alone as pure art photography were it not for the live action of the skier, including more insanely dramatically lit shots than any ski movie I’ve seen. Ever. And it sort of freaked me out when in the middle of the first beautiful time-lapse I thought to myself, self it’d be cool if they did some live action in the time-lapse; and Noah said it is good, there shall be live action in the time-lapse.
We’ve also come back to a genuinely amusing/funny bunch of detritus mixed in. (plus a whole song’s worth of slams, nice!)

Otherwise, the skiing is oh so satisfying. Not one but TWO sweet expeditions. I find it interesting that the athletes are starting to talk about the AK trips in the way that the alpine/snowboard ones do; which is to say with more than a little bit of trepidation. And in the way of compliments, Jake Sackson is clearly the inheritor of the BJ Brewer school of “looks like fun but I am fucking charging” skiing.

Two Hamm’s Up baby.