Hello friends, and thank you for signing up to this mailing list.
Having set it up, I suppose I should probably post something, so here are a few quick items to get us started…
QUICK HOUSE-KEEPING NOTE: if the formatting on this email looks weird, or if it went to your spam folder, let me know. (I’ve left the one swear word in what follows uncensored, just to see what happens…)
1. CORE TEXTS # 1
From a record mailer received circa 2017
One theme which has been broiling away in my brain for a few years at this point is what, by common consent, we might term the "enshitification" of the internet - the process by which this wonderful thing through which we have all shared information & creative work, made friends and enriched our lives over so many years has started to decline at a frighteningly precipitous rate.
This notion first occured to me probably 5+ years ago (late as usual), when I noticed that an academic at my place of work was running a module on "The Death of the Internet"... which initially made me laugh, until I stopped to think, yeah, they've got a point there, haven't they? Certainly from an artistic/creative POV at least. And, things have got a hell of a lot worse since then, that's for sure.
We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater of course - there are still a multitude of incredible, free, uncomtaminated resources out there (archive.org, Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, to name but a few) and some super-fun, accessible platforms to mess about on. (I LOVE Bandcamp, though I make an effort to do so without enriching its union-busting, venture capitalist owners, and Letterboxd is pretty great too, although I can't engage with it personally, simply because needing to rate & write about every film I watch would actually kill me.)
But, nonetheless - how much browser-time is it really possible to spend these days in places which are not, a) focused on selling things, b) mediated via explicitly sinister coprorate platforms & algorithms, or c) unfathomably techy and tedious? Precious little, I'm thinking.
There are innumerable tangents and personal reflections which could spin off from this observation, and I don't intend to pursue them all here, thank god. Instead, I will let other people do the heavy-lifting for me by sharing a couple of pieces I've stumbled across recently which have echoed my feelings on this matter and, more importantly, proposed actions for dealing with the situation.
The first of these is The Digital Packrat Manifesto, penned by a writer named Janus Rose.
Suffice to say, as a persistent refusenik with a long-standing horror of finding my access to culture dependant upon wi-fi signals and the whims of corporate 'content providers', I already do all of the stuff which Rose recommends. But, it is reassuring to know that I am not alone, and that my thinking on this issue is perhaps not entirely backward. "I feel seen", as the young people say.
In short then - .mp3s, .jpgs, .pdfs, .mp4s, .mkvs and .flacs are your friends people. So for goodness sake, get a couple of external HDs and get cracking, before they're all gone. When the lights start to flicker and the servers go down (or when the world's media conglomerates are all bought up by an insane nazi with an irrational hatred of, I don't know, the colour green or the black keys on the piano or something), you'll thank me.
The second link I'd like to share is Opting Out of the Rot Economy, by Jay Hinman.
Hinman may be distantly familiar to music fans of a certain age as editor of the '90s San Francisco-based fanzine 'SuperDope', and, because I'm that sort of person, I've recently been enjoying his Fanzine Hemorrhage and Collected Ephemera blogs/mail-outs.
Hinman's contribution to the burgeoning "mouthing off about the state of the internet" movement admittedly comes very much from a "grouchy old man" perspective - I'm surprised he didn't throw in a shout-out for his pipe & slippers alongside his celebration of reading newspapers - but no matter. As a grouchy aging man, I find his conclusions valid and relatable, even though his recommended prescriptions for the problem are a mixture of things I already do, and things I'm sadly unable to do.
(Sorry, can't go back to a dumbphone for a variety of reasons, and the value of enforcing a 'slow news cycle' seems questionable when we're liable to get steamrollered by the latest outrages each time we step outside our homes and/or speak to anyone.)
But - again, it is good to receive these reassurances that others out there in the ether are thinking along similar lines.
And finally, not a link exactly, but the Summer 2023 issue of the excellent 'Alternative Strategies' zine ("The London punk newsletter" reads this issue's header) features a lengthy interview with writer/academic/punk person Liz Pelly, who at that point in time was working on a book entitled 'Mood Music: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist'. (This book now exists and appears to have been very well received.)
Ostensibly beginning as discussion of the DIY punk subculture's varied reactions to music streaming and the corporate takeover of the internet, the lengthy chat between Pelly and editor Ben Perkins swiftly moves on to address the idea of fighting back by finding ways to carve out "off platform" online space, devoid of oversight from analytics, algorithms and stats -- very much going back to basics in exactly the way you'd hope self-styled DIY punks would.
Quoth Pelly:
"I've had some pretty rudimentary HTML skills since I was a kid, because I grew up making GeoCities and Angelfire websties and Expages, and teaching myself how to do it, like a lot of people around our age did, in the Web 1.0 era. [...] I think maybe some of us who are of a certain generation remember what it looked like when the internet was just a little bit more of a creative place, where you could just make a website. It's really not that hard. It's not like it requires no resources, you need to buy a little bit of hosting space and a URL and know how to do some basis HTML. But there aren't that many steps required."
The discussion goes on to get quite techy and specific, looking at attempts to create "off platform" info sites for local punk scenes and so forth on this basis - all of which strikes me as very much an inspirational ideal vis-a-vis reclaiming and rebuilding the internet.
Of course, as every angst-ridden nostalgist knows, you can never go home again, and it's difficult to imagine anyone really being able to recapture the spirit of the internet back when it was all new, and strange, and exciting... but still, you've got to give it a shot, haven't you? And it's nice to think that 'punks' (still determinedly trying to bring about radical social change via forms of music unchanged for nearly half a century) might find themselves back on the vanguard in this respect.
The difficulty though of course will be in actually FINDING these defiantly DIY outposts if they're out there, given that they're presumably untethered from Google search results and the like, and when was the last time anyone (other than me) actually TYPED IN or even READ a URL at this point..?
In fact, at the end of the day, this entire discussion basically seems like the set up for a joke:
We socal media-hating malcontents need to stick together!
But how will we keep in touch??
Thank you very much, and that's hopefully the last thing I will write about tech or the internet for the foreseeable future, because it's not a great deal of fun to contemplate, to be honest.
2. HOME VIDEO EXCITEMENT # 1
Likewise, I promise I won't do this as a regular thing, but a couple of really exciting (to me) announcements popped up this week on the unending whirlygig of boutique blu-ray label mail-outs which is my inbox.
Firstly, next February the BFI are putting out three discs-worth of Daniel Farson's Guide to Britain Volume # 1 - an easy one to overlook for those not 'in the know', but I practically punched the air when I saw it.
Invariably described as a "Soho bon vivant" (which I think is code for "he was gay, and liked a drink"), Dan Farson was a pioneering TV journalist, author and great-nephew of Bram Stoker, whose work I first encountered via the absolutely fantastic 1974 BBC documentary 'The Dracula Business' (not included on this set, but easily find-able online).
Subsequently, I was lucky enough to catch (on seperate occasions) screenings at the BFI Southbank of two episode of his late '50s TV series OUT OF STEP, produced for ITV forerunner Associated-Rediffusion, both of which are included in this new set. In 'Out Of Step', Farson - who adopts a blundering, Boris Johnson-esque demeanour, but don't let that put you off - sets out to bother people whose belief systems are deemed to be (yes) "out of step" with the norm (surviving episodes cover UFOs, witchcraft and nudism), asking them sensitively phrased questions like, "you don't really believe in all this stuff, do you?!"
The UFO episode is great, but the witchcraft one is absolutely jaw-dropping, including a segment on the founder of modern Wicca, Gerald Gardner, which reveals him to be quite possibly the creepiest motherfucker who has ever lived (seriously, he would be arrested in seconds if he popped up in 2025), as well as an interview with legendary, then 90-year-old anthropologist Dr Margaret Murray, during which Farson is unable to appear on camera, apparently because he'd been in a fight the night before and arrived with a black eye.
Needless to say, three whole discs of this sort of thing strikes me as essential viewing. Everything I've seen or read from Farson's oeuvre to date has been fascinating, slightly anarchic and hugely entertaining - he's a cult figure waiting to happen I feel, and I hope that this BFI set will belatedly help to get him over the line.
Meanwhile, almost as thrilling is the news that the Radiance label are finally putting out a deluxe, bells and whistles UK edition of Richard Rush's extraordinary 1980 film The Stunt Man, which I can't wait to see again in proper, shiny HD.
Here's some blather I did about it on my blog, when I deemed it the SECOND BEST film I watched for the first time in 2020:
"For the benefit of the uninitiated, ‘The Stunt Man’ follows a PTSD-damaged Vietnam vet (Steve Railsback) who, on the lam as a result of his Rambo-esque misdeeds, stumbles onto the set of an epic World War One movie, and finds himself taken under the wing of the film’s flamboyant, quasi-messianic director (Peter O’Toole), helping the production avoid legal difficulty by standing in for (and effectively assuming the identity of) the leading man’s inconveniently deceased stunt double.
From that simple(?) premise, Rush’s film casually spins us down a rabbit hole of worlds within worlds, frames within frames, as Railsback’s character becomes a kind of feckless, emotionally obliterated Faust, desperately trying to figure out what kind of story he’s been catapulted into the middle of, as O’Toole - in a magisterially OTT, divinely unhinged performance - hovers perpetually above him, swooping about on his camera-crane like some foppish Mephistopheles, shifting the sands beneath his protégé / pawn’s feet on an hourly basis.
Whether viewed as a metaphysical odyssey, a exhileratingly plausible take on the gonzo madness of movie-making (the whip-smart dialogue of Lawrence B. Marcus’s script, combined with the chaotic, Altman-esque naturalism of Rush’s staging, is a joy throughout), or simply as a rip-roaring, mad-cap action picture, ‘The Stuntman’ is… well, I’m running out of synonyms for ‘extraordinary’ by this point in the evening to be honest..."
All of which may sound a bit pretentious, and god knows, it probably is - but if so, it is pretentious in an extremely enjoyable manner, and one of those rare films for which I'm willing to immediately shell out £30 to own an oversized edition packed with unnecessary bumpf. (Actually, who am I kidding - there are THOUSANDS of films in that category, as anyone who has visited our flat in recent years will attest.)
Director Richard Rush had an interesting career arc actually. He started off directing a few low budget biker movies in the late '60s, then seemingly spent the best part of ten years trying to get 'The Stunt Man' made, eventually succeeded... and then did very little else.
A rare example of a "put everything you've got into one towering masterpiece, then quit" filmmaker, perhaps? I can't think of many others who fall into that category. It must be a tough gig. Steve De Jarnett ('Miracle Mile', 1988) fits the bill I think? And, too early to call, but Panos Cosmatos has yet to follow up 'Mandy' (2018)...
Anyway, I digress.
In case you were wondering, the #1 best film I watched for the first time in 2020 was 'Across 110th St' (Barry Shear, 1972) - another movie which could do with a decent disc release, and which I would like to see again. And if you now have the Bobby Womack song in your head - you're welcome, enjoy.
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Aaaand, that's quite enough for today I think.
I'll try to keep these mail-outs shorter in future, I promise, but thank you for reading to the end.
Take care and speak soon,
Ben