The February Summary
What got watched, heard, and read this past month
Though it is proving to be something of a nothingburger winter, that doesn’t mean that I braved the outdoors any more than if it was blizzard filled. Instead we watched coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano / Cortina… let those more fit for the winter terrain handle outdoor (and indoor activities). Somehow, amidst all of the bobsledding, curling, and silver-medal hockeying, I still found time for media consumption.
This past month’s totals:
Album listens: 59 albums
Movies watched: 14
TV Watching / Watched: 4 seasons
Books finished: 5
You can take in the whole picture at the February Media Diet post, but the highlights were as followed:
Music (first time listens)
Elori Saxl + Henry Solomon - Seeing is Forgetting / True Panther, 2026
Matt Christensen - Time to Collect / Self-release, 2026
Kim Gordon - PLAY ME / Matodor, 2026
Ben Vince - Street Druid / AD 93, 2026
Hen Ogledd - Discombobulated / Domino, 2026
nikofs - Collecting the Moments / MOSHItaka, 2014
Bill Callahan - My Days of 58 / Drag City, 2026
EXEK - Prove the Mountains Move / DFA, 2026
Maria BC - Marathon / Sacred Bones, 2026
—
Movies (first time watches) reviews at Letterboxd:
Peter Hujar’s Day (2025) Ira Sachs
Send Help (2026) Sam Raimi
The Chronology of Water (2025) Kristen Stewart
The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025) Kaouther Ben Hania
—
Television
I kept up with The Last of Us and watched the second season. The rumblings of it being inferior to the first likely had more to do with folks that were looking for a straight adaptation of the game narrative, but I found it compelling. It’s willingness to deliver the action through character rather than simple plot mechanics elevates it above the majority of zombie / apocalypse stories. We tackled a couple of UK shows with varying success. Riot Women was a charming and psychologically deeper than expected dramedy about middle age rebellion and the personal accounting that goes along with it. Under Salt Marsh was a very underwhelming dark mystery with a pretty good cast (Kelly Reilly and Rafe Spall [though he felt largely mis-cast or mis-directed in his part]) and a great setting in seaside Wales. It turned out to be a case of six episodes that felt like they were stretching what might have made a fine 100 minute film to the point of boredom. Did not finish.
—
Books
A real reading surprise was the anthology The End of the World as We Know it: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand, edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene. It was something I knew I wanted to check out as The Stand is one of my favourite books, but the possibilities for it being an underwhelming cash grab was certainly on my mind (see notes on IDW Godzilla anthology below). Instead almost all the stories were well-constructed snapshots that respected the original’s iconography and tone while presenting fleshed out ideas of what might be happening elsewhere in the large world of the book’s blend of pandemic apocalypse and mystical conflict. The collection is divided into four parts: Part One: Down with the Sickness / Part Two: The Long Walk / Part Three: Life Was Such a Wheel / Part Four: Other Worlds Than These… each presenting aspects of the story, from the outbreak / infection tales to the migration and recombination of the population all the way into the farflung future of the world after the end of the original book. Standout tales included Bev Vincent’s “Lockdown,” that presents the population of a small island off the coast of New England and their options for avoiding the pandemic, whether they are immune or not; Poppy Z. Brite’s odd, supernatural story of mermaids and family history; Usman T. Malik’s “The Mosque at the End of the World,” which places the power dynamics and potential utopian vision into an entirely different geography; and Catherynne M. Valente’s “Came the Last Night of Sadness,” where a call to preserving an archive of untold human stories balances against the evolution of untapped human evil. At nearly 800 pages there is a lot of ground covered, and again, most of it well worth the time.
Oh, the mention of the Godzilla anthology above relates to Godzilla Vs. America: Boston, Chicago, Kansas City, Los Angeles, a collection from IDW Press that I started reading via NetGalley. The persistence of Godzilla as an icon of popular culture has been a point of minor fascination for me… especially given how the success rate has remained very low, at least from a critical viewpoint. Still, representations do rake in profits with the population at large, so we’ll likely never be rid of the lizard. The idea of Godzilla stories told in relation to a few American cities struck me as an opportunity to, as in the Stephen King anthology, find some new energies. Unfortunately, with the exception of “Chi Godzilla,” a tale of thwarted urban renewal by Ezra C. Daniels, the bulk of the stories had the feel of 4 panel newspaper cartoons overextended to fill a 6-10 page chapter. I only made it about half the way through before I had to abandon the enterprise. A bit of post-read background work revealed that IDW has struck an ongoing Godzilla licensing agreement, and that these works are just part of their ongoing project to wedge giant lizards anywhere and everywhere they might uncomfortably fit.
—
Outings
I did leave the house a couple of times in February as well. First was to see a performance of Boom: X, the second in a trilogy of multimedia shows by Rick Miller, this one compressing (1970-1995) | The Music, Culture, and Events of Generation X.
I also attended the inaugural presentation by new Fredericton music programming entity Più… bringing challenging and fresh sounds to the capital city. This first show featured Jessica Ackerley & Andrew MacKelvie at Gallery 78.
—