STAGE & SCREEN
Sandpoint leaders to speak at No Man’s Land Film Festival Panel discussion will focus on accessibility and inclusivity in the outdoors
By Reader Staff
ture, Relationshipping, and Other Hazards of an Off-Grid Life. Her stories are the raw, humThe No Man’s Land Film Fesbling and often hilarious occurtival, which serves as the premier rences of an adventurous life as adventure film festival for women a woman, mother and outdoor and gender non-conforming athadvocate. letes and storytellers, will screen “I believe that representation is Friday, March 31 at the Panida essential in the self-actualization Theater, capped off by a panel of the individual. When we see discussion with leaders from the people with some semblance of Sandpoint community dedicated to commonality to us doing a thing, making the outdoors inclusive and it expands and inspires our own accessible for all. ideas of what we have access to or Speakers include Ammi Midare capable of,” she said. “Beyond stokke, Maeve Nevins-Lavtar and giving us hope for self-efficacy, Gwen Victorson. representation is Midstokke is a how we build our No Man’s Land popular columnist sense of belonging, Film Festival for the Spokesand belonging is Friday, March 31; doors at man-Review and essential to our 6 p.m., show at 7 p.m.; $15 Out There Outmental well-being adults, $5 children. Panida doors magazine, as individuals and Theater, 300 North First. Ave., 208-263-9191, get more info even the health of whose writing has also appeared in the and tickets at panida.org. our communities.” Sandpoint Reader Nevins-Lavtar and is the author of the recently works for the city of Sandpoint as published collection of essays All its first Park Planning and Dethe Things: Mountain Misadvenvelopment manager, focusing on
inclusive and accessible design and land use of public parks and trails, with the mission to improve equitable access to public lands for all. “Children who have access to bike trails on their route to school have an increased attendance rate,” she said, underscoring one of the many benefits of outdoor recreation development and active play. “By advocating for funding toward equitable outdoor recreation, and at the local level for park improvements, such as those prioritized in the Sandpoint Parks and Recreation Master Plan, we can strengthen not only the family unit, but ultimately create a positive ripple effect community-wide,” she stated. Victorson is a lands resource specialist with the Idaho Department of Lands and co-founder of True North Treks, a Sandpoint nonprofit focused on connecting cancer-affected young people and their caregivers to the outdoors.
“I feel the outdoors are life’s grandest classroom, and we all should spend more time soaking in her countless benefits,” Victorson said. “It’s important for the outdoors to remain inclusive and accessible so all creatures are able to reap these big rewards. Part of my hopes for my Idaho Department of Lands career is to continue to help our state balance unprecedented use and the conservation of our resources, so my grandbabies’ grandbabies have the same opportunities I have today.” The film festival is sponsored by Claire Anderson, a co-owner of Burger Dock in Sandpoint, as well as Matchwood Brewing Company and Alpine Shop. Raffle sponsors include Le Chic Boutique, Heartbowls, Embody Studio, Outdoor Experience, Sandpoint Medical Massage, Syringa Cyclery, Carousel, Evans Brothers, Rachel Baker Photography, Bula Stone, Bluebird Bakery, Cognito Brands, Kristine Rae
Photo by Zoya Lynch. Physical Therapy, Zabrielle, Longleaf Wilderness Medicine, Finan McDonald, Azalea Handpicked Style, Mountain Flow Riders, and Keokee Media and Marketing, among others. All ticket and raffle sales go to Kaniksu Land Trust and Pend Oreille Pedalers.
HBO Max series Succession enters its final season, setting up a messy endgame By Zach Hagadone Reader Staff There are few villains on either the big or small screen more suited to our times than Logan Roy, the tyrannical head of the fictional Fox News-ish media empire at the center of the hit series Succession, which just entered its first fourth and final season March 26 on HBO Max. Roy, played to brutal perfection by Brian Cox, is frequently likened to News Corporation head honcho Rupert Murdoch, but with more than a little King Lear thrown into the mix. The central tension throughout the series has been (and remains) Roy’s power struggle with his own three children over the multi-billion-dollar family business. Logan Roy is unashamedly a bad guy. He’s foul-mouthed, conniving and as overbearing as he is manipulative — all traits that he’s passed on, in varying portions, to his eldest son Connor (Alan Ruck); middle kids Kendall (Jeremy
Strong) and Siobhan, a.k.a. “Shiv” (Sarah Snook); and youngest son, the absurdly named Romulus, a.k.a. “Roman” (Kieran Culkin). All of them think they are much smarter and capable than they actually are, having strived and scrambled sometimes in concert, sometimes against one another, in the so-far unsuccessful attempt to dethrone dear old dad. The Roy family’s generational tussle should be un-relatable to most people because of its ultra-wealthy trappings, but it isn’t — standing in for the broader real-life cultural conflict between a class of elders who by the luck of the timing of their birth came up in a climate of unprecedented wealth and opportunity (featuring structural barriers to prosperity that were objectively far lower than the ones we have today), but who refuse to relinquish their grip on the levers of economic, social and political power. At least that’s the broadstroke case for white people, as the Roy family most definitely is.
Meantime, wrapped up in the literal notion of “succession,” are ruminations on the moral rot at the core of post-post-industrial capitalism, in which the ultimate commodity is the degree to which an individual is able to control the narrative and therefore bend reality to their will. Logan Roy has been defining the “truth” not only to his own family but the country at large for so long that he has constructed an unassailable vantage point, from which he swats away his kids in one instance, while cajoling them to join him near the summit when it suits him. As the series enters its Götterdämmerung, the big question is whether Roy’s god-like position is really so unassailable after all. In the onset of Season 4, the first episode evocatively titled “The Munsters,” the Roy kids are plotting a sortie in their bid to be… richer than they already are? (Character motivation beyond greedy spite and family trauma is sometimes hard to discern in the show.)
The Roys’ plan: Start their own media company, described in high-finance buzzword poetry as “Substack meets Masterclass meets the Economist meets The New Yorker”; a “private members club but for everyone”; and “an indispensable bespoke information hub,” serving up “high-calorie info-snacks” spiced with the “ethos of a nonprofit but the path to crazy margins.” Even Forbes, which also highlighted those particular phrases, wrote that “it all feels too real sometimes,” despite its essential absurdity. Added to Logan Roy’s Lear complex may be an even older storytelling tradition — that of the tragic Greek trope of hubris. That’s also a particularly apt concept for the show to play with, insofar as a viewer might be inclined to think of the patriarchal Roy as an avatar for the kind of prickly 21st-century American exceptionalism so well exemplified and propagated by the likes of Fox News and its collaborators. Will Roy be “disrupted” by his
own progeny? Will he give one (or two or all) of them a pathway to the figurative throne? Why would we even care? That’s a valid question, but I suspect that the answer lies somewhere in the vicinity of the compulsion to watch rich people be mean to each other, even though they always win at some level, so long as they remain fabulously rich. Essentially, Succession manages even after three seasons to remain a finely woven grab-bag of the most poisonous aspects of our current civilization; and, while containing literally no characters worth rooting for or feeling sympathetic toward (and that includes all the various in-laws, extended Roy family members, handlers, toadies, executives and nemeses), staying riveting. New episodes of Succession stream Sundays on HBO Max.
March 30, 2023 / R / 19