Been taking a bit of a break from the bava blog the last few weeks, it’s been a welcome respite. September and October were fairly intense travel months, and after the US election I really wanted break from the maddening media. I can only stomach small doses of Twitter these days and fortunately I never really Facebooked. Thankfully Reclaim has been keeping me honest, happy, and quite busy. We’ve been planning a Domains conference that will be formally announced Monday (very cool). We leased office space in Fredericksburg that we’ll be doing some major renovations to over the next few months and then opening up as a co-working space/video production house/makerspace. I also have dreams of cordoning off a small piece of the 3500 square ft office to open a VHS Movie rental store, complete with a couple of 1980s stand-up arcade games.
All that said, I have no immediate plans to return to Fredericksburg full-time. I’m still having way too much fun in Italy. I really do love Trento, and part of my hiatus has been to simply enjoy life here. America seems so very far away most of the time, and these days that’s reassuring. I have a blog series I’ll be digging into over the next two weeks to help me organize all the places I’ve been and people I’ve seen over the last year. I’ll probably get that started Monday, but until then let me leave you with the following mashup gem that the great Mikhail Gershovich turned me on to—see, not all Russians are election-throwing commies! Nothing like a Peanuts/Bad Brains mashup to get one in the holiday spirit.
While a nice break, it’s always good to return to the bava. When the online social scene is broken, there’s no place like home to just blog. If something as lame as podcasting could make a comeback, why not blogging?
I’m going to have to make a pilgrimage to this “shop” once it’s up! Can I suggest the sale of local zines/mini comics too? One of may favorite and missed formats of the 90s.
And maybe build the VHS rental store from donations, as well as your prolific collection. I’d be happy to ship any finds from the streets of Brooklyn’s stoop sale giveaways.
*You might even need rent donated VHS players. The makerspace folk could keep them working and/or hack the crap out of them.
I love the idea of a communal video store, and how about 3D printing the VHS protective carrying cases they used to have in the video rental stores in the early 80s. Looks high nd low for an image but could not find it, but it is clear in my mind. East Coast Video had VCR’s for rent, and you never had to even take them out of the blue protective shell, you had spaces to plugin and start watching the film. How cool.