Vintage Paperback of Philip K Dick’s UBIK from 1991
In this regard a library of physical books feels like a moat against networked information that can be everywhere broken, modified, and erased. This is one of the things writer William T. Vollman returns to again and again when explaining why he does not trust the internet. The following quote is from a 2009 interview for Mother Jones in which he is discussing his self-proclaimed Moby Dick: Imperial (2009):
You know, I have a couple issues with the Internet. One is the fact that you get spied on. That sort of pisses me off. But I guess what really creeps me out is the mutability of the so-called information. It would be so nice if, say, the Library of Congress made archival hard copies of the Internet each day. Because then you would have copies of something you could trust 100 years from now.
And another doozy from that short interview:
I think we’re all going to have a lot more time. The US is losing its economic clout. There are going to be fewer jobs. We’re all going to be idler. So hopefully instead of spending all of that time looking for nonexistent jobs, we’ll have more time to talk about the future and the past. It won’t be all bad, you know?
The optimistic other side of the coin for the flailing and failing US Empire, we’ll all have more time to read. That’s fucking awesome. Also, 17 years later his point hits even closer to home.
But even a moat of physical media like books is being threatened in the name of AI’s all-consuming push towards an ever-mutable Library of Alexandria. Books scanned are literally destroyed in the process, which makes a personal library feel that much more radical.
pH neutral book binding glue
So, to that end, I actually bought some book binding glue and I put UBIK back together, and 24 hours later it was ready for another 30+ years. I mean I know it already, but it is crazy to think that even the efficient technology of the book is so fallible, but I guess we have to pick our poison. It made me rethink buying paperback books all together, but I’m not sure I need another expensive hard cover book collecting hobby just right now.
The Complete Poems of E.E. Cummings 1912-1960
That said, I have a paperback copy of the Complete Poems of E.E. Cummings 1912-1960 that’s been falling apart for decades. I have kept it around because I am sentimental, but it is in pretty bad shape.
Glue from torn spine of EE Cummings Complete Poems paperback
So, inspired by the win with UBIK and my new found inspiration to save all the books, I have bought some book binding tape and will see if I can’t get that book back in readable shape. It will always be beat up, but I like the idea of ensuring it is in readable condition for the future. What’s more, it might be time to go through the entire library and perform some preventative maintenance. Small revolutions might be the only way forward.
Kimberly M. Smith signed the book sometime before the early 1990s, which is when I bought this collection of poems used for $9.00 at Acres of Books in Long Beach, California
If nothing else, I think the previous owner, Kimberly M. Smith, will appreciate this small act of care and love for the culture that reminds us that dreaming through words matters more now than ever.
]]>Anyway, this post is not so much about blogging or not blogging, it is more about being in an early 80s trance. I’ve been watching and discussing a lot of movies in and around the 80s, namely American Gigolo (1980), Risky Business (1983), and Red Dawn (1984) to name a few.
There has been no shortage of podcasting from the bava, and part of that conversation has been all about the aesthetic of the 80s and various pieces like the showcasing of luxury brands like Mercedes, Armani, Porsche, and Rayban as well as an almost immediate reflection (as early as 1980) as the 80s being a decade that will be consumed by, with and for Reaganomics. A tight reading of American Gigolo followed by Risky Business with a backdrop of the Cold War dream scenario of Red Dawn and you are really tapping into some deep cultural ID.
Anyway, anyway, all that to say that two days ago I pulled out the The Cars 1979 album Candy-O and I fell into what seems like another landmark of the creation of the 80s aesthetic—much is said of the British New Wave invasion, but Blondie, Devo, Talking Heads, the B-52s and The Cars were all waiting for them when they arrived. What got me into a re-visiting of Candy-O back in 2009 or so was a fun Tweet-storm by Brian Lamb when he talked about having to wash off the hippie he had been immersed in for some trip or another, and the only real antidote was cranking-up Candy-O.
In fact, as life would have it, I did a #vinylcast of this album on ds106radio for day 29 of lockdown during Covid. I am sure I tell this story and more. I also had this album in constant rotation in the fall of 2009 when I was doing work on the house we bought in Fredericksburg. A lifetime ago when the kids were babies and I had brown hair, that said I still had this blog.
For this foray into a non-stop The Cars listening party, it’s been all about being able to crank the stereo at the office, work on the diorama, deal with the influx of Reclaim issues as the semester starts (the constant Microsoft-driven botnet-like attacks on our infrastructure is tiresome), and finding a soundtrack that helps me both check out and lock in all at once. “When I was crazy, I thought you were great.”
]]>If you’ve been around these parts for any length of time, you know I have a special place in my heart for DS106 Radio. It remains one of those beautiful, weird corners of the web that refuses to die. A radio station built by a community, periodically hijacked by whoever feels like broadcasting, and still capable of making the internet feel less like a endless scrolling feed and more like a place.
#4life, indeed.
The good folks at Reclaim (i.e. Maren Deepwell) have put together a ridiculously fun schedule running from 10 AM until 10 PM BST (11 AM–11 PM here in Italy), and god know what crazy hour in your neck of the woods. The day will be filled with music, conversations, records, retro computing, role-playing games, podcasts, crafts, open education, and a virtual campfire thrown in for good measure.
You can check out the full schedule and register here, and the event will be streaming from the Summer Camp site.
Jason Teitelman already wrote about his late-summer soundtrack for the event over on Reclaim the Blog, and Maren has the broader invitation and details in her DS106 Radio Summer Camp post. The whole thing is deliberately less conference and more hanging around the radio together for a day, which is an online event format I can still get behind.
And somehow I have managed to insert myself into a fairly significant chunk of the proceedings.
Good Morning Campers!
My first shift is at 11 AM BST / noon in Italy / 6 AM Eastern for Good Morning Campers.
I have been given an hour of radio with the instruction to start the day “as only I can,” which seems dangerously open-ended. I’ll be playing some tunes, talking about what is coming up throughout the day, rambling about the summer, Reclaim, and whatever else occurs to me once the microphone is live.
In other words: ds106radio.
No slides. No learning objectives. No breakout rooms.
God is good.
Retro Tech and Home Networking
Then at 1 PM BST / 2 PM Italy / 8 AM Eastern, I am back with Phil Walker for a conversation about retro technology and home networking.
We met Phil at the ILTA conference in Dublin earlier this summer and quickly discovered that we shared the extremely healthy adult impulse to fill our houses with obsolete computers and then spend untold hours trying to get them talking to networks they were never designed to understand.
So naturally we needed to put that on the radio.
Retro computing has increasingly become one of my favorite rabbit holes over the last couple of years, particularly the point where old machines intersect with networking and the web. Getting some ancient computer online is almost completely useless, while simultaneously feeling like the most important work imaginable.
That is the energy I am hoping we bring to this hour.
EDUPUNK Walks Into a Bava Studio
At 2 PM BST / 3 PM Italy / 9 AM Eastern we’ll air a conversation I recorded with Jöran Muuß-Merholz while I was in Hamburg earlier this summer for OERcamp.
Jöran invited me there to give the keynote “Is EDUPUNK Dead?”, which resulted in me once again digging up a term from 2008 and asking why I am apparently incapable of letting anything go.
I’ve already written a bunch about both building a blog you can walk into and my eventual conclusion that punk’s not dead, but the conversation with Jöran gave us a chance to connect all that back to the BavaStudio, blogging, physical spaces, and what an independent web might mean almost twenty years after EDUPUNK first reared its ugly head.
Turns out the corpse may not be dead yet!.
WOLVERINES!!!!!
Finally, at 4 PM BST / 5 PM Italy / 11 AM Eastern, Michael Branson Smith and I will be doing a special Family Pictures Podcast session.
“And what wholesome exploration of family dynamics have we selected for summer camp?” you ask. John Milius’s Red Dawn, of course.
If you somehow escaped the 1980s, Red Dawn imagines the United States invaded by the Soviet Union and its allies, leaving a group of Colorado teenagers to head into the mountains, form a guerrilla army, and begin blasting communists while screaming:
This movie is going to give MBS and me plenty to work with.
Beneath all the Cold War insanity, exploding tanks, teenage insurgency, Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson, Jennifer Grey, and Harry Dean Stanton screaming “AVENGE ME!”, there is actually a pretty fascinating family story lurking in there. The kids lose their parents, siblings become soldiers, friends become a surrogate family, and the whole Reagan-era fantasy of defending the homeland gets compressed into protecting your family, your town, and your high school mascot.
In other words, Family Pictures catnip.
I cannot promise we will handle any of this responsibly, especially MBS who may be far too close to this material for his own good. One thing I can promise you is that it’s gonna be fun.
Turn on the Radio
And those are just the bits I’m involved in.
The day kicks off with Chahira Nouira and rolls through Simon Horrocks spinning records, Pilot Irwin’s apocalyptic call-in role-playing game, Clint Lalonde and Martin Weller doing Radio Across Oceans, Alexis Block talking with Laura Gibbs and Sam Hooper, Meredith Huffman returning to the Reclaim airwaves, a community campfire with Alan Levine, and Jason Teitelman bringing the whole thing home with a final hour of tunes.
After that, the station gets turned back over to WFMU, as always.
There are plenty of technologies that have become dramatically more sophisticated since ds106 started, but I remain convinced there’s something magical about the fundamentally stupid idea of putting a microphone on the internet and saying: NOBODY’S LISTENING! I happened to watch an episode of Andor last night with just that title. Turns out and freedom from the Empire is possible once you realize that no one’s really listening.
So come hang out tomorrow, you don;t have to listen!
You can also join us in the Reclaimed Discord, or follow along on Mastodon and Bluesky with #ds106RadioSummerCamp.
]]>What struck me throughout this episode was how perfectly Amelio’s film brought us back to the theme that had slowly emerged over the previous five movies: the family as a way of understanding the state. Rosetta and Luciano are children failed at virtually every level. Their biological family has collapsed, the institutions supposedly designed to protect them treat them as problems to be processed, and the Catholic orphanage literally refuses to take responsibility for them. They are being chaperoned by two one carbiniere to an orphanage outside of Rome by our protagonist Antonio (Enrico Lo Verso). Rosetta understands the futility of the journey far better than anyone around her: she’s eleven years old and has already been forced to navigate the world like she’s thirty.
And all of this is happening in the Italy of 1992, with Mani pulite beginning to expose the endemic corruption of the First Republic while the mafia murders of magistrates Falcone and Borsellino would further shake whatever faith Italians still had in their institutions. There’s even this amazing scene back in our Antonio’s Calabrian hometown where everyone casually explains how you get things done—you know somebody, you grease somebody, you work the system—and Antonio, the actual representative of law and order, looks like the most naive person at the table.
What makes the film beautiful, though, is that the more Antonio sheds his official role, quite literally taking off the Carabiniere uniform, the more capable he becomes of actually caring for these kids. The stop at his sister’s ramshackle but loving family home in Calabria gives Rosetta and Luciano perhaps their only glimpse of what family could actually mean: food, noise, cousins, grandparents, stories, a family photograph, and most importantly a chance to simply be children for a few hours. The state keeps moving them along; family gives them somewhere to belong.
And that turned out to be the through-line of this entire series. Muriel’s Wedding, The White Balloon, Life Is Sweet, Raise the Red Lantern, Central Station, and Il ladro di bambini could hardly be more different culturally or aesthetically, but every one of them asks some version of the same question: what happens to families when larger political, economic, and social systems bear down on them?
We started this series thinking we were taking a tour of 1990s international independent cinema. Somewhere along the way we stumbled into the state of the family around the world.
And goddamn if the 90s weren’t a hell of a decade for movies.
]]>It was a fun bit, and you can listen to the whole thing here. It holds up because Tom Woodward is 100% locked in, and Brian Lamb plays a pretty amazing Art Bell.
So you can imagine the sense of bittersweet validation when I got the following email from the university my daughter is going to this fall:
GradGuard Tuition Insurance Plan
What happens when your education is disrupted by an unexpected injury, illness, or other serious life event? Depending on the timing of the withdrawal, you may not be eligible to receive a refund for all of your tuition and fees. GradGuard Tuition Insurance strengthens and broadens the scope of our existing refund policy and can help students and parents avoid a financial loss due to an unexpected withdrawal for a serious covered illness, injury, or other covered reason.
GradGuard can reimburse up to 100% of the student’s investment, including other school-invoiced fees, after a withdrawal due to a covered reason such as:
- Covered serious injury or illness, such as mononucleosis or severe head injury
- Chronic illness, such as diabetes or an autoimmune disorder
- Mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, suicide/attempted suicide
Covered withdrawals can take place any time during the covered term. GradGuard offers members special access to an Assistance Hotline to help students and their families take care of emergencies and unexpected issues.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but given my son’s tuition in Italy is more akin to a utility bill than a down payment on a house, there was definitely a sinking feeling of dread.
The sticker price for the four-year college “experience” in America is nuts. However I try to justify the money I’m about to spend—and I’m swimming in the shallow end of the cost pool—Italy provides a healthy reminder that there is such a thing as affordable higher education that’s not predicated on student loan debt.
And you sure as shit don’t need an insurance plan to guard against a lost semester.
WTF America!
]]>For this episode we talk about the new-to-me 1981 French film Diva directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix. The crux of this episode is how the shift from the sociological grit of the 70s films, epitomized by The French Connection (1971), gives way to a slick, advertising-like language that fetishes objects and prioritizes art over message.
Mike draws a really interesting comparison between Brian DiPalma‘s Blow Out (also from 1981) and Diva arguing that Blow Out is kinda of a final death throe of the 1970s aesthetic—especially when compared to Body Double, which comes out just 3 years later—whereas Diva feels like the start of something fresh and new aesthetically.
Mike does a great job making his case, and, as always, I’m the high-dollar, fact-checking comic relief
From the beginning, we have used WHM (the cPanel server software) in combination with WHMCS (the software that allows us to automate the creation of cPanel accounts), and finally WordPress as a wrapper that integrates the WHMCS middleware for sign-ups and embeds the cPanel dashboard in a WordPress page. The use of WordPress was strategic because it allowed us to leverage various plugins, particularly those that help manage single sign-on (SSO). This makes DoOO an integrated tool that allows us to automate sign-up for web hosting accounts through cPanel using SSO.
This has worked well for the last 13 years or so, but one of the major pain points has been the middleware WHMCS because a) it’s terrible software, and b) as a result of the previous point, it’s confusing for DoOO admins to use. Our systems administrator and team lead, Chris Blankenship, got so tired of WHMCS during his eight-year tenure that eighteen months ago he decided to write it out of the equation—for everyone’s benefit. You gotta love the possibilities that can be born of frustration and sheer contempt for bad software
Anyway, it’s Chris’s world; I’m just living in it. He wrote a fairly extensive post at the end of May narrating his journey toward rebuilding an entire element of DoOO, and he was finally comfortable hitting publish because we’d had DoOO v2 in production on several servers for more than six months by late May.
As of now, both Chris and Taylor Jadin are working on rolling upgrades to all our DoOO servers over the next several months, and if all goes well, by 2027 we will be all but free of WHMCS for DoOO. For the time being we’re still stuck with it for shared hosting, but hope springs eternal.
“Why make this change?” you ask? Well, there are many reasons, but let me list a few below because everyone loves a bulleted list:
- WHMCS has proven to be increasingly terrible software over time (did I say this already?)
- Fewer pieces of software in the mix means less complexity for DoOO admins.
- Fewer pieces of software in the mix means a smaller surface area for malicious attacks against the product.
- Chris has essentially built the functionality of WHMCS into a WordPress plugin, which means DoOO is now theme-independent. That was not previously possible without a lot of overhead.
- This eliminates a significant amount of the monthly subscription fees we pay to WHMCS, which means we’re not constantly being forced to readjust pricing based on vendor increases. This kind of economic independence is huge for a small company like ours.
- It also opens the door to eventual product agnosticism, given that the plugin already integrates with cPanel alternatives like DirectAdmin, CyberPanel, and Virtualmin. So, should there come a day when we need to pivot for whatever reason, there is a potential path forward.
But I’ll end with a quote from Chris’s post on version 2 because he sums up where we’re at with DoOO v2 beautifully:
I have no delusions that everything is resolved or that this is the most perfect WordPress plugin ever written. We’ll always be finding things to fix or make better. That’s just how software development works; it’s a continuous process. And I’m excited for this process to continue to make DoOO safer, simpler, and more stable.
]]>
I don’t consider myself a businessman in any way, shape, or form. The formation of Reclaim was as much dumb luck as it was right time, right place, and right people—probably like most of life’s happy mistakes. So, as we finish our thirteenth lap around the sun—thirteen is actually a lucky number here in Italy—it might be a good moment to express some gratitude for our good fortune, in particular by thanking all the awesome folks who have supported us over the years. You know who you are, and we love you for it.
I have more to say about all the goodness happening at Reclaim at the moment, particularly Domain of One’s Own version 2, but I figured a simple post saying thank you shouldn’t be mixed with anything that might seem like marketing. This is a post about your support and the simple understanding that, without you, none of this would ever have been possible.
You rule, we drool.
]]>We went, we saw, and we enjoyed it thoroughly. I love a good action movie, and turning the epic into a compelling three-hour action film was pretty impressive. My kids and wife had all read the epic recently and were pretty up on what was kept and what was left out. I know there were some concerns about this being a fairly godless world, but I had no real qualms. If I want the gods, I’ll watch Ray Harryhausen‘s Clash of the Titans
Speaking of which, on the ride back from Verona Antonella was reading around about the film, and it seems Nolan wanted to minimize the use of CGI—preferring old-school effects like those of the great Ray Harryhausen. As a result, they filmed in a real cave and used a 60-foot mechanical puppet to represent Polyphemus—which is wild in this day and age. The Polyphemus scene was definitely the highlight of the film for me, and there were more than a few contenders to be fair (Circe, the Trojan Horse, the Laestrygonians, etc.).
Going into the film, I was wondering if Nolan would be referencing Mario Bava‘s vision of Polyphemus from the 1968 TV version of The Odyssey produced by RAI. I’m just spitballing here, but like Nolan’s, Bava’s Cyclops was very human-like, and his murdering and then eating of the crew was quite brutal (see video above). Also, throughout Bava’s episode for the 1960s RAI series you can see his signature exploration of color, along with ingenious camera tricks that make the Cyclops look like a gigantic monster without the budget to actually create one.
I think what I love so much about the recent version is that it combines the art of two of my favorite special- and practical-effects artists of all time: Harryhausen and Bava. What’s not to love with that kind of mashup?
Now, to be clear, Nolan never mentions Bava, but he does name-check Harryhausen and Guillermo del Toro when it comes to the Cyclops. But I find it hard to believe Bava wasn’t somewhere in the equation, given that he was not only behind the Cyclops from the RAI TV series, but also worked on the Polyphemus sequence for the 1954 sword-and-sandal film Ulysses*, starring Kirk Douglas and Silvana Mangano, You would think those versions would have had to be on someone’s radar while making this film, right?
Anyway, it’s always fun to imagine and speculate that Bava’s under-rated magic is continuing to find its way into the billion-dollar blockbusters of 2026. Harryhausen is definitely an established GOAT, so that should come as no surprise. But with Bava you always have to dig a little more.
____________________________
*This film inspired the novel Il disprezzo by Alberto Moravia, which Jean-Luc Goddard would later adapt for the screen having Fritz Lang play the director of the film Ulysses. It’s all always related in culture.
]]>Anyway, our most recent series on indie international family films of the 90s has been a real treat. Of the six films we have lined up, I saw half of them in the theater when they were released in the US, specifically Muriel’s Wedding (1994), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), and The Stolen Children (1992).
Life is Sweet (1990) I never caught in the theater when it came out, but I’ve seen it over the last two decades given Anto and I are huge Mike Leigh fans. The White Balloon (1995) and Central Station (1998) were new to me, and they were a total treat. In fact, the six films in this series are all pretty amazing in their own way, and as MBS and I have commented repeatedly during this series, looking back, the 90s were a definite golden era worldwide for independent film.
In this post I wanted to quickly map a theme that has been coming up again and again for me during this series, namely the way in which the family becomes a lens for reading the state of the nation. It might be a bit of a stretched thesis—so be kind and rewind your aggression—but I can’t help but want to see these films as missives to the rest of the world (as well as domestically) about the struggles of a moment.
Muriel’s Wedding (1994): “You’re terrible, Muriel!” —this was our first discussion of the series, and I don’t think my mind was really thinking about the politics of Australia, in large part because I was not studied up on Paul Keating’s Labor government and the ambitious vision of a new Australia in the wake of the early recession of the 90s that hit hard—I can remember shit being tough in the US too. That context gives the Heslops’ unemployment and the marginal local politics of Porpoise Spit a different resonance—the land outside that grand national story of prosperity. I’ll have to dig in on this more, but I spent most of the podcast talking about how refreshing it was to see intentionally grotesque characters celebrating everything but Hollywood beauty. When I first saw this in 1994 it felt so new and fun that I hadn’t even thought about the politics undergirding it, but when MBS and I write our book about the State of Family Around the World in the 1990s, all that will change.
The next film in the series, The White Balloon (1995), blew my mind. I remember its release and subsequent acclaim in the US, but I stupidly wrote it off as a kids movie. In this brilliant film you follow the young girl Razieh into the streets of Tehran, where a lost banknote turns a simple trip for a goldfish into a child’s journey through the strange and contradictory world of adults. In reading around the film, it was clear that children’s stories and parable offered Iranian filmmakers a way to address larger social questions without confronting censorship head-on. That gives the film’s apparent simplicity a political function from the beginning. Unlike in Muriel’s Wedding, in this film we finally dig in a bit on the political context: the post-Iran-Iraq War reconstruction, difficult economic conditions, Afghan refugees, and the Rafsanjani years of 1989-97. The film’s tiny street-level story gives us an image of what “rebuilding” actually looks like in ordinary life for one family.
By the time we get midway into the series with the wonderful Life is Sweet, the political is impossible to refuse, and that is due in large part to the fact that Leigh is a poet of the proletariat. To understand the politics of a working-class family in 1990 Britain is to understand the brutal war waged against labor throughout the 80s. Class is no longer background texture; it is the organizing framework. It’s everywhere in this film: the details of the house, the jobs, the kids still living at home, the father’s boring but competent institutional kitchen job, the mother working multiple jobs. This is a family operating under real financial constraints. Both Leigh and Ken Loach deal with class in a way Hollywood rarely does. That said, Leigh’s politics emerge less from somebody being politically “correct” than from what political-economic conditions actually do to people. This might also be a result of us having a bit more knowledge of the Thatcher 80s given our own experience under Reagan, but nonetheless few filmmakers capture the impact of such widespread political turmoil on the average family as Leigh does. Leigh understands better than anyone that politics can be read through the family because the family is where economic and social policy becomes lived experience.
What really clicked for me in Zhang Yimou‘s Raise the Red Lantern was this idea of the family as system. The master barely needs to appear because the rules do all the work: the wives are kept fighting horizontally for lanterns, massages, meals, status, and attention rather than ever punching upward at the source of their misery. For one woman to win, three others have to lose, and that competition gets reproduced all the way down the hierarchy as Songlian, herself trapped by the system, turns around and brutalizes her servant. That feels especially potent in a film made just after Tiananmen, with an educated student as its protagonist, at the very moment China was opening economically while maintaining intense political control. Songlian keeps trying to resist the logic of the house, but the house always wins. Eventually the system takes you by the neck and makes you play by its rules. That is what makes the film so much more than a period melodrama: the family is not simply affected by politics, it is the political system in miniature.
What I loved about Walter Salles‘s Central Station is how the idea of family seems to expand until it becomes Brazil itself, which feels all the more significant given the politics of Brazilian filmmaking in the 1990s. After Fernando Collor de Mello gutted state support for cinema at the beginning of the decade, film production in Brazil nearly disappeared, only to re-emerge later in what became known as the Retomada, or rebirth of Brazilian cinema. Central Station comes directly out of that rebirth, and fittingly it seems determined to put Brazil itself back on screen—not simply the familiar images of crime, street kids, and poverty, but this enormous landscape of ordinary people, faith, memory, class, stories, and care. Dora and Josué begin almost completely unmoored, failed by fathers and institutions alike, but as they travel the country their search for family becomes something larger: a search for belonging within Brazil itself. If Raise the Red Lantern turns the family inward until it becomes a prison, Central Station turns the family outward until it becomes a nation—and, in a sense, the film is part of Brazilian cinema rediscovering that nation for itself.
That brings you up to date on what I believe has been one of our best tears yet on the Family Pictures Podcast. Our last film in the series will be recorded next Tuesday, and it’s Gianni Amelio‘s 1992 throwback to Italian neorealism: The Stolen Children (Il ladro di bambini). In a rare moment of actually being caught up on the next film we are going to discuss, I’ve had some time to talk with Antonella (my Italian insider) about the Italy of Amelio’s film. One of the things that immediately stood out was the widespread corruption surrounding its release, given that the film appears at the same moment the Mani Pulite (“Clean Hands”) investigations begin. Mani Pulite was a nationwide judicial investigation into political corruption that was rotting out the core of the republic. It started with the arrest of Mario Chiesa on February 17, 1992, and subsequently exposed the vast Tangentopoli system of bribery linking politicians, public institutions, and business, ultimately helping bring down much of Italy’s First Republic.
Within months of the beginning of Mani Pulite came the murders of magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. They were assassinated separately by the mafia for their extensive work prosecuting high-level bosses connected to the Maxi Trial. My kids described these murders as “Italy’s 9/11 moment” to try and give me a sense of how deeply they shocked the nation.
So, in essence, the film comes out in an Italy where Mani Pulite has begun tearing apart the political establishment, and within months the murders of Falcone and Borsellino produce something like a national 9/11 moment—an extraordinary sense that the country’s institutions, politics, and very social order are coming apart. That’s my context going into the discussion for next week’s podcast, and now I have to re-watch the film and see how Amelio’s world of a makeshift, found family deals with crumbling institutions that have lost sight of their mission to help those most vulnerable.
]]>Here’s the actual PSA I remember:
For years this would air before the nightly news. It’s kind of wild to think that, 40 or 50 years ago, this was the moment parents were prompted to wonder where their kids actually were.
There are plenty of memes about how feral kids were in that era, but what struck me today was how baffling the premise seemed to everyone in the meeting. The idea that children would simply disappear into the neighborhood until dark—and that a television station would have to remind parents to check on them—felt almost unimaginable.
Oddly enough, many of the people in that meeting are probably the children of that very generation, which suggests there was a pretty strong reaction against the free-range childhood of the 1970s and 1980s. Did this PSA help usher in the helicopter parent who would begin to emerge in the 1990s?
I found a pretty fun compilation of some of these from the 90s, featuring Cyndi Lauper, Andy Warhol, Grace Jones, and more. It’s almost like those celebrity READ posters from that decade, just stripped down to their most primitive and survivalist.
MBS and I have talked about the enormous differences between our childhood and that of our kids on the Family Pictures Podcast (FPP). I think a mini-series documenting those differences could be a lot of fun.
Family Pictures Podcast gets all sociological.
]]>For both podcasts, I see my role as wannabe color commentator *cum* comic relief. One of my sons told me it can’t be very good because all I do is laugh the whole time. Oh, how little the youth know! Having fun is the key to everything, and I’m doing my fair share of that these days.
The *Couch to 4K* podcast was born out of the premise that “physical media will save the world.” That came as a result of Mike going all in on collecting DVDs (particularly Blu-rays and UHD discs). I’m convinced the only reason I got called into the project was because he figured I’m the only person stupid enough to buy any and all physical media I’m told to.‡ Our first episode featured Arrow’s UHD release of the early ’80s science fiction film Outland (1981), a movie I have come to love over time.
As we’ve experimented with different formats and approaches, we’ve settled—at least for now—on pairing two films around a central thesis, something like “How a 1955 plot twist changed the way we watch films.” That was the latest iteration for our discussion of Les Diaboliques (1955) and Psycho (1960), and I actually think it works.
We’ll see how things evolve, but what I learned from doing this with Michael Branson Smith for almost two years is that it isn’t about who’s listening or how many likes and subscribes you get. It’s about forming relationships through sharing the things we love. It’s like going back to college for just the fun stuff, and that’s exactly what I crave. I want to be pushed to watch and discuss more and more films. What’s more, it’s probably the best antidote I know to falling into a grumpy malaise about the state of the web.
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*Unless, of course, you start arguing that Moonstruck is a good movie.
†The other being the long-running Family Pictures Podcast with Michael Branson Smith, wherein we explore all matters of family when it comes to film—and, 72 episodes in, it has been an absolute blast.
‡It’s a compulsion that’s only made harder (and more expensive) by the fact that I live in Italy and all the English-language DVDs I want and need are usually an ocean away.
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