Given I will be Catching up on posts from the last month or so, it’s always best to ease back into the blogging process, so what better than starting with what might be the best video rental store I have ever seen? While I was attending a conference at Old Dominion University last month (more on this in my next post) I was able to check out Naro Expanded Video in the Ghent district of Norfolk, Virginia. It is literally aisles upon aisles of DVDs:
And as you can see if you look closely at the above image, the films are often arranged by country (and in the case of US films by time period). The selection from international cinemas is pretty mindblowing. Does your local video store have a section dedicated to Hungarian and Czech films? Do you even have a local video store you Netflix blasphemers?!
The obligatory Italian film area, which could be retitled “we made good films once upon a time”
The story behind Naro Video is an interesting one. The previous owners of the video store, Tim Cooper and Linda McGreevy, donated all their titles to the community. It’s an interesting approach wherein a local business wants to both giveback, but also hold on to a bit of its own history.
They re-classified as a non-profit to keep the lights on, and function as much as an archive and library as they do a video store. In the age of on-demand, streaming video it is no surprise that convenience is king. This means any remaining video stores are increasingly a curiosity and need to get creative, and that’s just what Naro Video has done. And while it’s a shame given there’s no comparison between the selection at Naro Video and a service like Netflix or Amazon Prime (Naro blows them away in both titles and search funtionality 🙂 )—but Blockbuster illustrated decades ago that most folks are film philistines. So, one must both persevere and preserve.
What’s more, from the looks of the neighborhood (a Chipotle just two doors down) I’m sure it’s increasingly difficult to keep the lights on given the ostensible gentrification.* I wonder if the folks of Norfolks realize they lucky they are? I mean talk about rich as kings, right next to the Naro Expanded Video is a full blown 1930s era cinema called Naro Expanded Cinema!
So, if you have a few spare bucks you can make a tax-deductible donation to Naro Video if to help support a community archive that is keeping a bit of cultural history alive.
Below are just some random images from the video store highlighting how awesome it is, with a final box of VHS tapes that I bought from them given they have phased out most of that collection—I wish I was around 10-15 years ago when they were phasing that out 🙂 One really fun bit was that when I bought the VHS tapes and a couple of shirts the clerk and I got to talking and turns out he has visited Reclaim Video on more than one occasion given his daughter goes to UMW. That made my month!
Long live video rental stores!
*I’m convinced America is going through another housing bubble
Father, forgive me, it has been almost 3 weeks since my last post. The guilt, it’s real. But, alas, marrying travel and blogging has become harder and harder for me. The simple fact is the older I get the more my blog brain craves stability and a groove, two things that are not easy to find on the road. Hopefully my road warrior days will be dialed back in a couple of years, but in the near future the blog and the Reclaim Roadshow must go on.
The Terminal begins to haze like a dream after enough time
At this very moment I’m decompressing at Frankfurt Airport on the second of a three-leg journey with the closest thing to a free moment I’ve had after an intense few weeks on the road in both Italy and the USA. We went from Venice to Verona to Durham for Domains19 to Winston-Salem for a workshop at Wake Forest (read Carrie Johnston’s recap here) to Long Island for a family meetup and then back to Reclaim HQ in Fredericksburg for a brief tryst with Reclaim Video before heading back to Trento. Leaving Reclaim video is increasingly more difficult after too short a stay given I really love that space. In fact, I spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday fixing some shelves, hanging posters, head cleaning the Panasonic Omnivision VHS player, and securing another working Pioneer laserdisc player along with a haul of 100 laserdiscs. It was fun!
The saving grace of this trip was I got to bring Tess along, and she was awesome!
In the near future I have two weeks before a two week beach vacation to Sardegna, which I am really looking forward to. I don’t think I fully realized just how tired I am until the last day or so. The last 6 months has been a blur, it is hard to believe the summer is here, but before I check-out for a while I wanted to list of things I still need to share before I worship the sun and sea gods for a spell.
So, what do I need to write about? Well, a lot, and below will be my check-list:
My keynote/workshop around SPLOTs at Old Dominion University at the end of May
My visit to Naro Video n Norfolk, VA, which was awesome
A throwback to my time at the uAPI conference at BYU in January to catch-up on a recent visit I had from Phil Windley, which was very inspiring
I have two or three posts at least about Domains19, that was a blast and so many good people made it everything I had hoped.
The Video Vortex in Raleigh. OMG!
The Wake Forest workshop that Lauren and I ran right after Domains19 that was a tour de force and quite rewarding
Impressions of Long Island
Reclaim Video’s bright future, but the loss off our very first video clerk to college 🙁
A general Reclaim Hosting check-in on some thoughts around building community and capacity
My ETUG envy and more recent thoughts on the NGDLE
And that should catch me up for a bit. We’ll see how far I get before I leave for the beach, but hope springs eternal in the blogger’s heart.
I am finally starting to get over the fear and dread of putting on Domains19, and moving into the enjoyment phase of the process. I am very much looking forward to landing in Durham, North Carolina in 10 days to meet with an awesome group of folks ready to explore the limits and possibilities of Domains. Few things get more excited than some fun remix art, and Bryan Mathers—as is often the case—has created just what I was looking for. The Pimp My Deck Remixer is playing off the retro-futurism theme by allowing folks to remix their own skateboard/hoverboard in homage to Back to the Future (1985)—pretty freaking amazing. This will go brilliantly with Martin Hawksey‘s McFlyify piece! I just spent the better part of 30 minutes creating a OG skate decks that I would love to own. For example, this one featuring the cabinet art of the 80s video game Centipede:
Or the Toxic Avenger deck, that is actually inspired by a skateboard deck I recently saw, and desperately wanted to buy and hang on my wall:
It’s no exaggeration to say that @BryanMMathers changed my aesthetic life indelibly when he began visually animating @reclaimhosting’s soul. We love this guy! And he is an amazingly generous collaborator. https://t.co/eo14nVNNiN
It’s been over 4 years since I met Bryan Mathers in Barcelona, and I regularly count my lucky stars for that chance encounter. While shooting the shit at a table with a selection of fine folks Bryan quickly sketched out what would be the iconic image of Reclaim Hosting, one that remains near and dear to my heart. The Reclaim Vinyl icon:
It’s so beautiful!
Since then we have collaborated on quite a few projects and he has been an absolute joy to work with. He is the best kind of art therapy for your organization 🙂 In fact, a believe it is the Reclaim aesthetic, which has evolved to the VHS tape, that has provided us the freedom to actually create fun projects like Reclaim Video and Reclaim Arcade with a certain amount of impunity. I personally think the power of art is woefully undervalued or overlooked in edtech, which is a shame given how much an organizing visual principle makes for good design. In fact, the coolest thing about Reclaim Hosting has been the ability to collaborate with artists like Bryan Mathers, Michael Branson Smith, and Ryan Seslow. And hopefully we will get the opportunity to work closely with Amy Burvall here soon as well, I think we can play with a whole Putin-inspired 80s Soviet revival 🙂 In fact, Domains19 is very much premised on the idea that we should be focusing more on art to communicate what is happening with tech that everywhere surrounds us. it is a tall order, but in the spirit of #ds106 we are all artists, and we should spend a lot more time exercising this facility that everyone has access to.
Anyway, I’ll step off my soapbox here for a second to plug our most recent collaboration with Bryan Mathers in which he has created the Reclaim VHS tape as remixable object in his amazing Remixer machine. He wrote a most kind post about the project, and we are happy to regularly support his work in all its wonderful emanations. In fact, you should too. In these troubled times I want to believe it is the artists, not the politicians, that will light the way forward and give is a vision to believe in, so I’m gonna double-down on that belief with my support, and a Remix or two 🙂
While back at Reclaim HQ I took a quick video providing a tour of the space, highlighting Reclaim Video, the burgeoning collection of 80s arcade cabinets, as well as a sneak peak at the installation we built with Ryan Seslow over the weekend in preparation for Domains19. I’m not gonna lie, the space we have built over the last 2 and a half years is pretty awesome, and the siren song to return to Freddy to work there full-time is strong these day. What’s more, we are mulling the possibility of doubling Reclaim HQ’s footprint to enlarge CoWork and possible add a fully operational 80s arcade. Pretty sick, right? Not a done deal by any stretch, but definitely something we are now strongly considering. Spaces matter, and this past week we had 6 of the seven Reclaim Hosting team on the ground and it felt really good to be able to take breaks and watch a random VHS tape or laserdisc or play Asteroids or Galaxian or simply just hang out in the coolest space in Fredericksburg bar none! #4life
I mentioned as much on Instagram a few days ago, but May 22nd marked the 39th birthday of Pac-Man, which was released on that day in Japan but would not hit North American until October of 1980. What’s wild is that Tim and I actually own an original Pac-Man arcade machine which we acquired this March. That game marks the beginning of my deep love of arcade cabinets, and I was unapologetically knee-deep in Pac-mania in the early 80s. It was the game I was best at, having memorized patterns through the second or third key, and owning a video game like this was beyond my wildest dreams until recently. But given Reclaim is seriously considering opening up an old gold arcade in Fredericksburg, it only made sense to start building the collection—which has grown yet again this past week with the addition of a Track and Field cabinet from 1983.
The generative power of a game like Pac-Man on my imagination is hard to quantify. I rank it up there with films like Star Wars and Alien when it comes to helping define a burgeoning sense of what culture meant to me—whether popular or not was not even a question yet. These were things that filled me with wonder while at the same time were not unique to me, they were shared broadly as a kind of popular phenomenon becoming iconic of 80s culture. What’s more, it was kind of ground zero for video games becoming part of the public discourse more broadly, something that has only gained more and more momentum and relevance since.
If you are looking for some more insightful history around Pac-Man beyond my nostalgic longings, the Arcade Blogger has a great post on the development of Pac-Man that Tim shared with us the other day and I highly recommend it. Some take-aways I did not know were the following: Galaxian was the first game to use color RGB graphics (we own it); the Japanese name of Puck-Man was changed to Pac-Man for export given the possible variations North American teenagers might come up with; and the power pills were inspired by Popeye’s transformation after eating spinach.
Happy birthday Pac-Man, you have aged quite well! In fact, to their great credit the twelve 1980s cabinets we have acquired not only feature impressive gameplay, but also have withstood the ravages of time quite impressively. They are closing in on four decades of gameplay and they remain remarkably solid and simple, making them relatively easy to troubleshoot and repair. Long live the arcade culture of the 80s!
I am just coming off a quick, fun trip back to Virginia. I was invited to talk at Old Dominion University (I’ll say more about that in my next post) which meant I was able to sneak in some time on the ground at Reclaim Hosting‘s headquarters in Fredericksburg. Despite it being so quick, it was a really productive trip given we invited Ryan Seslow down last weekend to finish up his installation for Domains19 in what is yet another post to write 🙂 But before any of that, I need to write about the goings on at Reclaim Video because it is the best thing ever.
Part of our latest setup is the ability to both archive and stream our collection simultaneously. We are using a splitter out from our VHS/Laserdisc/Beta/Selectavision switcher to run the signal both to the TV in Reclaim Hosting as well as the iMac that’s archiving the films with the Elgato Video Capture software while at the same time streaming with OBS Studio to http://reclaimvideo.com/live. It is a slick setup, and essentially allows us to capture anything we play at Reclaim Video for posterity as well as to share it more broadly. Beyond that, we are storing our archived videos in a Plex Media Server that we can then create programming and effectively run Reclaim Video’s TV both locally and streaming from anywhere. It’s hard for people to fully wrap their head around a fully digital VHS store that can be imagined as a localized and eventually communally curated and programmable Netflix, but that’s what we are talking about here. It’s the coolest thing I have been a part of yet, and the idea that Reclaim Video is simply self-indulgent nostalgia is far too limiting, it’s that and so much more!
I spent the time on the ground getting familiar with the ropes of the system Tim put in place, and I spent most of my free time archiving and streaming movies from Reclaim Video—it’s a dream come true!
The first film I archived and streamed was the original Amityville Horror (1979). It’s an old go-to from me given I grew up on the South Shore of Long Island where the story is set, and the beginning of this film when the kid kills his family still freaks me out. This film brought the horror home and even mixed in Satanic spirits from hell, making it doubly relevant for a young Catholic kid. What struck me about it this time around was that the invisible Jody and her creepy rocking chair and fleeting demon eyes never get less scary. What’s more, James Brolin performance reminded me a lot of Jack Torrance in Kubrick’s The Shining, a dad with the potential of going murderously bad is a scary plot line. What’s more, Brolin also looks a lot like Christian Bale with a beard in this one. Finally, more and more the 70s seem so far away. But watching Margot Kidder walk from the station wagon to the kitchen with two armfuls of groceries in the old heavy duty brown bags transported me back to my childhood and images of my mom only like movies can.
This capture was of an early VHS tape (will get all the details), but the quality was pretty decent and the archiving went off without a hitch.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BxqV687IwqJ/
The next film up was a change of pace, I jumped forward a couple of decades to 1997 for the taut action film Breakdown starring Kurt Russell. This is a Dino De Laurentiis production, and it underscores his understanding of solid action film: simple and solid. I also changed up mediums and watched this one on laserdisc, given 1997 was one of the golden years of their existence before the DVD fully took over. The plot is brilliant, a married couple changing careers and coasts drive cross country from Boston to San Diego to start again. During their road trip they are targeted by a group of thieving rednecks who note their nice new car (a jeep Cherokee with leather seats—which tells you something about the 90s) and figures they have money and if they kidnap the wife they can get the husband to wire himself cash and pay them off. But it’s not that easy, as you can imagine, and J.T. Walsh plays an awesome, matter-of-fact villain in this one which is a perfect foil for the flustered and incredulous Russell. It was also fun to discover we have not one, but two copies of Breakdown on laserdisc, one which is still factory sealed!
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxq38scIcSR/
Breakdown was on during the day, but as evening came I returned to the 1980s with the 1983 classic Valley Girl on good old VHS. This film is evergreen for me, the soundtrack is amazing and Nicholas Cage’s performance is everything. The 80s class tensions of so many teen films that often frame wealthy suburbanites versus the kids on the other side of the track never gets old for me. And this one nods to punk and new wave in some fun ways with out being as sociological as Suburbia (1983) which was made the same year and made the cut for my playlist as you will see shortly. I think the stand-out for me this time around was Deborah Foreman’s relationship with her hippie parents. They are like totally understanding and don’t punish her, which pisses her off. What’s more, they run a health food store which, as she notes in the movie, is about the un-coolest thing your parents could do at the time. It’s interesting how much times have changed on this front, and that part of 80s youth culture was defined as a reaction to the hippie generation—something I remain proud of about the 80s 🙂 It is also interesting to compare the middle-class kids in Valley Girl to the misfits in Suburbia whose parents, rather than being hippies, were often Vietnam vets who were all messed up by the experience—the two films who make an interesting double feature about two films by women who document opposing visions of LA subculture at the time.
I had to duck out for a couple of days to go down to Norfolk and attending the Old Dominion University’s Faculty Summer Institute for online teaching and learning, which was amazing and it provided the opportunity to visit arguably the best video store I’ve ever been to: Naro Video. But I’ll save that for the third post I need to write bout this trip 🙂
Once I returned from Norfolk I planned a VHS double feature of Suburbia (1983) and Straight to Hell (1987) —two recent additions to the collection—and it worked out well for at least the first film.
Suburbia played fine, and it is one of those VHS films that I would have never seen in the theaters, but when I heard about it through the skateboarding subculture I had to watch it (other films that punk skaters championed were Basket Case(1982), Clockwork Orange (1971), and Repo Man (1984) to name a few). Suburbia is darker than I remember it, and the kids—as I mentioned above—are outcasts that have no where else to go so they squat in an abandoned neighborhood on the city line that is over run with wild dogs (which was the inspiration for the Pet Shop Boys song Suburbia). The film deals with the misogynist, homophobic, and racist culture of these reject punks quite adeptly, and the scene wherein one of the women is stripped naked by marauding punk rockers while D.I. is playing “Richard Hung Himself” live is particularly powerful years later.
Penelope Spheeris was not exploring the tropes of class-driven romantic comedy like Valley Girl, but rather exploring the socio-economic realities of an LA in decline. Again, this would make a great double bill with Valley Girl given they came out the same year and show pretty radically different visions of LA.
The next film was supposed to be Straight to Hell (1987), but that was not in the cards given our workhorse VHS player, the early 80s Panasonic Omnivision, stopped working right after Suburbia. I think the heads need a good cleaning, but hope it is nothing worse given I have deep emotional attachments to that machine given it is the same make and model I grew up with. Anyway, to salvage the evening I switched to laserdisc and put on Carl Franklin’s 1992 independent masterpiece One False Move. This movie would not only pre-sage Franklin’s amazing Devil in a Blue Dress a few years later in 1995, it was also my introduction to Billy Bob Thornton who co-wrote the script. When I saw this film in the theater in 1992 or 93 I was blown away. It almost has a Faulkneresque feel to it when dealing with violence, race and the South, and the low-budget adds to the horror of the opening scene, as well as focus on good writing and excellent acting. Bill Paxton is a perfect foil to Billy Bob Thornton as the good ole boy sheriff with a heart of gold and some skeletons in his closet. It’s independent 90s cinema at its best, in my humble opinion.
Unfortunately we had VHS issues this evening so we moved mediums to laserdisc and are enjoying Carl Franklin's One False Move, and early Billy Bob Thornton vehicle https://t.co/rH5jMZgp8Vpic.twitter.com/l673OsDk2A
From there I kept the laserdisc train rolling until I figured out a temporary replacement for the VCR, so I re-visited George Romero’s Creepshow(1982) which requires 3 discs making the archiving a bit more difficult because you have to actually remove the disc and put in a new one at about an hour and forty five minutes in during “The Crate” episode, which was Miles’s favorite when we watched it recently. I am still partial to Leslie Nielsen and Ted Danson’s performances in “Something to Tide You Over.” What else can I say about Creepshow that watching it yourself won’t cure?
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bx08Swdopmq/
My last order of business before taking off was getting a temporary solution in place for the VCR. As luck would have it about 6 months ago I purchased another Panasonic Omnivision, but this one was a Portable Recorder VCR (also from early 80s) and it was owned by John Grahame (you can get the entire back story here) who bought it in 1982 for almost $1300 given he was doing video work for a living at the time (he shot Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart on video as a dry-run). So, I hooked the portable VCR and it worked like a charm (which is in mint condition and arguably a museum piece) to keep the VHS flowing on the ground. To celebrate, I concluded my run on the ground at Reclaim Video with Sean Penn’s juvenile delinquent prison film Bad Boys (1983). [For some reason 1983 was the year this time around.] Bad Boys is a personal favorite and a film I discovered in the early 80s thanks to VHS rental stores and the rise of the VCR. I was transfixed by the prison fight scenes and Penn’s cell mate who was a nebbish nerd who used his knowledge of science and electronics to exact revenge on the prison bullies. It was also the beginning of seeing Penn as an actor beyond Jeff Spicoli for me, and this would make for a good double-feature with At Close Range (1986), another classic 80s film I discovered on VHS that I need to secure a copy of for Reclaim Video.
We swapped out the malfunctioning VHS player, and are now showing the juvenile delinquent prison classic Bad Boys (1983) starring Sean Penn and Allie Sheedy https://t.co/rH5jMZgp8Vpic.twitter.com/7zyTGeiEel
And that was my run at Reclaim Video. And while I enjoy the fact I can remotely run this amazing little video store from Italy, nothing beats being there and locking in for a bit.
I use this blog to track time, and in many ways it’s a chronicle of my warped history of the world. Many of the most regularly recurring themes on this blog, such as WordPress, UMW Blogs, ds106, Domain of One’s Own, etc., were part and parcel of the work I did while an instructional technologist at UMW. I spent 10 years at UMW, and crazily enough it will be 4 years this September since I worked there. Part of me will always be #UMW4life because I recognize and appreciate that that small, liberal arts public institution provided me a prolonged opportunity to dream about the possibility of edtech in partnership with some amazing colleagues. It’s hard for me not to look back with pride at the work we did together, and it makes Tweets wherein public higher ed is simply lumped in with for-profit that much harder to stomach.*
One of those colleagues who was particularly central to my professional development during my time at UMW was Martha Burtis, who recently announced she will be taking a job at Plymouth State University. In many ways this post is not only a congratulations to Martha for her new position, Plymouth State just got that much more awesome, but also as a way to mark history on this blog. With Martha’s departure does definitely mark the end of an era for edtech at UMW. Martha’s accomplishments in the field are legend, and there is no need for me to rehash them here. So, in an attempt to mark the occasion I just wanted to recount a memory of one of my earliest professional interactions with Martha.
When I was just getting my feet wet at UMW, not on the job more than a week or two, Martha came over to Campbell Hall (at that point all the instructional technologists were embedded in buildings rather than co-located as a centralized group) to accompany for one of my first faculty visits. We were to meet with Linguistics faculty member Paul Fallon, about what exactly I don’t remember. But I do remember strange details like Martha was wearing a brown overcoat, it was really cold outside, and how much that meeting set the tone for my career at UMW. Martha brought me to the meeting and modeled for me what it meant to be an instructional technologist at UMW. After the meeting we walked across campus and I remember her telling me how excited she was we finally had a team (Patrick Murray-John and I had just been hired, rounding off a 5 person team that would be more or less in tact for 10 years) and her genuine sense of the real possibilities for all of us was both inspiring and prescient. I’m not sure why this moment still sticks with me, but I think for me it was my formal initiation into a career in educational technology that I have come to love. Martha is one of those people who “made me.”
We did go on to do a lot of amazing stuff together, and while I wasn’t always the best colleague—I was unbearable for a while when Martha was director—but coming back to UMW after my 6 week sabbatical at the University of Richmond was the beginning of one of the richest professional collaborations I’ve ever had. Martha’s work on UMW Blogs, her WordPress development chops, the building of the ds106 infrastructure, the co-teaching ds106, the framing of Domains, the building of DKC, and on and on. I promised I would not re-hash her long list of accomplishments, but how could I not?
So, here is to the end of an era at UMW, but more importantly the beginning of a new chapter of possibilities for Martha and her family in New Hampshire.
_____________________________________
*The edtech landscape is increasingly dire these days and it has been depressing for me to think about. I am struggling with writing more about it, but until then can I say how much I am missing Audrey Watters’ voice online these days. She did a lot of heavy lifting fo the rest of us.
Just the other day I hot what might be my last Katexic Newsletter. I hope there are more to come after the hiatus because I dig the format, but I can only imagine the time that goes into each of these carefully curated missives. Filled with crazy ass vocabulary words, an excerpt of some brilliant literature, and a list of awesome, annotated links it was one of the highlights in my email inbox. In fact, after a quick search I see I subscribed in October of 2017, and looks like he may have been sending them out since 2014 making for over 400 newsletters! Since October 2017 I’ve gotten roughly 100 of those newsletters, and I have the email archive to both prove and cherish it. What a run.
Thanks Chris, I really appreciate your razor sharp sensibility and absolute, undying love of words, it makes me better reading you.
To heal my wounds I just subscribed to Notabilia (I know, I know, I’m late to that party too), but reflecting on Katexic and the life of any project we engage over time, I can’t help but think of Chris’s championing of online emphemera, in fact he has been known to just up and delete a blog or two—which is akin to Grand Moff Tarkin obliterating Alderaan for me. So what struck me about Katexic, and by extension newsletters and email, is that the archive is built-in.I now have 100 issues in my email archive, and I am sure many others have the newsletters I am missing. It could almost make for a peer-to-peer seeding archive that is insurance against Lott up and deleting katexic.com 🙂 Interesting that despite my tongue-in-cheek smack-talking on email newsletters, many years later I can see the long-term archiving value as near and dear to my anti-ephemera stance to shared resources (on, and sometimes off, the web).
https://www.instagram.com/p/BxJ_B2KlZKv/
Finally, for all my love of writing, linking, and then futilely trying to preserve my little plot on the web, something about getting snail mail from an online friend is special. Dr. Garcia has been consistently awesome about this, and she sends the family postcards on the regular. On the other hand, I have been terrible at responding. So the same week I read about the shuttering of Katexic I get a letter from Chris for National Poetry Month 2019 with two chapbooks, and a typed poem by Stanley Moss titled “Allegory of Evil in Italy”:
The Visconti put you on their flag: a snake
devouring a child, or are you throwing up a man
feet first? Some snakes hunt frogs, some freedom of will.
There’s good in you: a man can count years on your skin.
Generously, you mother and father a stolen boy,
to the chosen you offer your cake of figs.
A goiter on my neck, you lick my ear with lies,
yet I must listen, smile and kiss your cheek
or you may swallow the child completely. In Milan
there is a triptych, the throned Virgin in glory,
placed on the marble below, a dead naked man
and a giant dead frog of human scale on its back.
There’s hope! My eyes look into the top of my head
at the wreath of snakes that sometimes crowns me.
This whole thing brought me so much joy. I know have two typed poems from Chris (he sent me another by Oscar Wilde in 2016) so that I can’t say, with any authority, that no one writes to the Colonel anymore—and that make me very happy.
I don’t know why, but I love that someone took the time to isolate this 3 second clip of Scatman Crothers speaking truth to power in The Shining.
And if you’re not into the whole brevity thing and you feel you haven’t gotten your money’s worth for clicking on the link, the scene below may be my favorite of the film (at least right now):
There ain’t nothing in bavatuesdays, so stay out, ya hear me, STAY OUT!
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Just the other day I hot what might be my last 