The Family Pictures Podcast can’t stop, won’t stop. At this point we’re well over 50 episodes, and lord knows the bava has some blogging to do to catch-up. After our unique awards ceremony, MBS and I decided to re-do one of the episodes he was unhappy with. You see, Michael is kind of an audiophile (or is it audio snob?), which is probably a good thing if you’re gonna host a podcast. Me, I’m not so concerned. I still wonder why anyone would listen at all, good audio or not. But alas, I think Michael is right on this count (as is often the case) even if no one listens—the audio quality should be aspirational, much like the podcast 🙂
The above episode revisits the stand-out horror film of 2025: Weapons. After listening to this episode again in comparison to the original version (linked at the bottom of the post) I’m starting to pickup on a pattern for how MBS and I work. I tend to push on the idea of the film being a cultural document of its moment. For example, during our Hot Summer 70s Family Horror series I was harping on just how good the horror genre can be at critiquing society, and Weapons really reinforces that idea. The true terror in this film lies not in supernatural spectacle but in the aftermath of trauma and the failure of institutions to respond. So, some version of that is usually my take because I’m too sloppy and lazy to get caught up in details and structure.
Michael, on the other hand, digs in on the ways in which each character drives the story and how the technical elements of the filmmaking work. He spends time zeroing-in on the particular details. A good example of just that from this episode is the close attention Michael pays to the grieving father Archer and the scapegoated teacher Justine—which helps us frame the film as a study of how communities fracture after unimaginable loss, while responsibility is deflected onto individuals (such as teachers, parents, the “pushy” or “hysterical,” etc.).
In fact, I believe that’s a pretty good summary of how we work together as a podcasting team—I wonder if he agrees. His focus on the particular details of the story and the characters provides the possibility for both of us to zoom out a bit and get grandiose with our broader claims and connections between films, and that’s where and when the magic happens. It’s happening more regularly too, and I think that means we’re starting to get a bit of juju working between us. Anyway, it’s kind of fun to think about our process in that way.
In our reboot episode of Weapons we sharpen our sense of how the film is at its core about denial—something the narrator returns us to at the close. Pretending tragedy didn’t happen doesn’t erase it, and the real scars (emotional, communal, and generational) persist long after the boogey woman is eviscerated on the neighbors’ front lawn. This film was definitely worth reloading, and personally I think both our episodes were pretty good, which is really a testament to how rich the film is for all kinds of readings. What’s more, now we have that much more “CONTENT” to offer to stem the relentless demand for the inimitable Family Pictures Podcast, you down with FPP?
NB: At some point I started using ChatGPT to help me navigate the technical issues around getting metadata for a ripped CD on Windows 98, so the entire chat might be a useful archive of that. (assuming open.ai is still around in 20 years). What’s more, I had it draft an original version of this post which I entirely re-wrote, but as I continue to play with the machine for writing, I think it is only right to be completely transparent about the process.
I talked about finding a Minidisc player a few posts ago, and I spent some serious time over the last week or two getting this thing working (in every sense of that word).
Let me start with the basics. When I got it in 2018 or so the unit would not power on, so I packed it away for several years until recently. The “gumstick” battery had corroded, so I needed to order a replacement which I eventually did. In the interim the unit had a 3V DC port I could use to see if it had life when powered on. It did and the unit works perfectly, which was nice to learn. Once the battery came I tested that out, but unfortunately the contacts were corroded all to hell.
The above video from sjm4306 takes you through cleaning up the corrosion, recommending white vinegar and alcohol—which both worked well. I also incorporated his recommendation to thread a wire on the battery door to ensure there’s consistent contact. With that fix the player now reliably powers on and holds a consistent charge with the battery.
Windows 98 machine in the bavacrypt where the minisdisc experimenting happens
That was the easy part, what follows is pure retro-computing masochism. I spent way too much time trying to get this unit working cleanly on an original Windows 98 machine in the bavacrypt. As mentioned in the previous post on the minidisc, one of the things that got me excited about the project was the ability to connect a Minidisc to a computer and transfer files using the old school Sony SonicStage software (now discontinued). It’s also always fun to connect peripheral hardware to an old school computer and remember how things used to work.
The above video takes you through the process of getting SonicStage working with a Minidsic player seamlessly. The main difference for me was that he’s using a virtual Windows XP machine to make things cleaner when transferring files you want to load on the minidisc. In the road less travelled part in the Minidisc world, I decided to install SonicStage (version 3.0) on my Windows 98 machine and try the process with the OG Pentium III machine. SonicStage installed without issue, and I was able to cleanly transfer music files from the computer onto the disc, it was all so simple. If you like simple stories, stop here cause everything that follows is designed to complicate all this intolerable simplicity.
After getting it to work, I was thinking: “now comes the fun part of ripping my CD collection so I can start taking the long road back to physical/virtual media that I actually own.” Upon putting a CD into the computer and importing it into SonicStage I assumed metadata like tracks, album, and artist info would just appear automagically (as they say). Turns out, that’s not the case. I have a fuzzy recollection of this—probably because it was all happening seamlessly behind the scenes—but audio software like WinAMP and SonicStage were dependent on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB) to retrieve all this metadata because CDs don’t have this info. Turns out a CD contains almost no human-readable information. There’s no artist field, no album title, no track names. It’s just a table of contents: how many tracks there are, how long each one is, and where they start and stop. The WAV format is pretty much a black box.
Now, here come all the complications. Turns out the Windows 98 machine connected to the internet in the bavacrypt is not exactly a web-first machine. Https has made browsing the modern web next to impossible from an old machine. I do have the protweb.org proxy running so I can browse webpages archived through the Wayback Machine cleanly on a 1999 version of Internet Explorer—there’s already a post about this rabbit hole. But what I quickly realized when importing a CD into SonicStage is that the software is depending on a call out to a long defunct Gracenote owned CDDB server to grab all the disc’s metadata. For years this worked well enough that nobody thought about it. You put in a CD, names appeared, and you moved on. The fact that this required a live Internet service, maintained by a company, with rules and permissions and quotas, was easy to ignore until you try and live like it’s 2003 on the modern web—retro-computing is nothing else if not a lesson on how ephemeral and fragile it all can be.
Knowing I had to redirect the CDDB lookup to a service that does work, namely Gnudb,*  the trick was finding a way to have SonicStage call the Gnudb service at gnudb.gnudb.org:80/~cddb/cddb.cgi so that I could use this new server over port 80 (sans https). Long story short, it doesn’t work. I edited hosts files. I rewrote registry keys. I forwarded ports. I even made a Windows 10 machine pretend to be the Internet in 2002 and point everything to gnudb.org. Nothing. SonicStage doesn’t just “look up CD info,” it identifies itself with a hardcoded client ID, talks to specific servers, and assumes those servers still care that SonicStage exists. They don’t. Sony and Gracenote shut down support for these older clients years ago, not accidentally but deliberately—don’t trust Sony or Gracenote to keep the web whole for us retro-computing geeks.
So, admitting defeat, I moved on to Winamp. At first I thought I cracked the code when it happily announced “CDDB: Success” for every disc I inserted. I was naively thinking the proxy on the Windows 10 machine was working, although I wasn’t seeing any metadata added to the tracks. Turns out it announced success even when I unplugged the Ethernet cable. WTF? It did it after I deleted its cache. It did it when I pointed it at servers that didn’t exist. Like SonicStage, there was no place I could find in Winamp 2.95 to change server names and point to gnudb.org. Eventually I learned that for this version of Winamp “success” doesn’t mean “metadata found.” It doesn’t even mean “network access occurred.” It means “the CD drive successfully read the table of contents.” That’s it. Winamp considers this a win and sees no reason to complicate things further. But we both know I do.
I spent a lot of precious time swapping CD input plugins, because different versions of Winamp shipped with different ideas about how CDDB should work. Some had hardcoded servers. Some allowed editing. Some hid everything in INI files. Some looked editable but weren’t. It started to feel more like an archaeology dig than anything else. To be fair, part of this project was an excuse to put AI Maddeness on ice for a week or two, but it was starting to get ridiculous. In case you lost the thread, all we’re trying to accomplish here is to get artist, album, and song metadata for a physical CD ripped on a Windows 98 machine—why does everything have to be so hard?
Eventually I moved on to yet another audio software of the era: Exact Audio Copy (EAC). Turns out the third time truly is a charm. EAC used another service (also now defunct) to grab disc information called Freedb, which forked off the CDDB project in 2001 when Gracenote bought CDDB and it turned its back on the community that created it—turns out enshittification is an age-old story on the web.†EAC version 0.95 (not 0.99 as I learned the hard way) works cleanly with Windows 98 and it was dead simple to replace the Freedb server settings with the Gnudb server settings. While holding my breath, I asked EAC to look for disc info and it actually worked. REDEMPTION! Three days of work and finally a little love for Windows 98.
Freedb server settings that I could re-write to point to gnudb.gbudb.org
Now that I figured out how to grab the metadata remotely, now I had to figure out how to apply it regularly in EAC so it’s recognizable in SonicStage. [Shakes fists at the sky!] While EAC 0.95 can fetch artist and album information just fine from Gnudb, WAV files themselves are a terrible place to store that information. Seems the WAV format was never designed to carry tags in a standardized, universally respected way. There are multiple hacks and conventions to try and deal with this, but SonicStage mostly ignores all of them. Folder names don’t reliably help. Filenames don’t reliably help. You can do everything “right” and still end up with a library full of anonymous tracks once you import them.
This is where the old advice starts to collide with present reality. For years, the standard wisdom was to use WAV with SonicStage. The reasoning was simple and technically “sound:” CD audio is lossless PCM, WAV is lossless PCM, and ATRAC (the proprietary codec MiniDisc uses) is lossy. CD to WAV to ATRAC means one lossy encode. CD to MP3 to ATRAC means two. Therefore, WAV is technically “better.” That said, SonicStage doesn’t manage WAV metadata very well, probably relying heavily on CDDB to fill in the gaps. With CDDB defunct, WAV stopped being friendly. MP3, on the other hand, works beautifully. SonicStage reads ID3 tags reliably and consistently. Artist, album, track names all come through without complaint.
So you end up with a wannabe purists dilemma: is avoiding a second lossy encode actually worth manually typing metadata for every album? On Minidisc hardware, at Minidisc bitrates, for portable listening, the honest answer is probably no. Most people cannot reliably hear the difference, and many of the people who say they can are probably lying, or simply remembering a time when the distinction felt more important than it does now.
SonicStage was built for a world where CDDB worked, WAV was temporary, and metadata lived inside proprietary libraries that no one imagined would be defunct twenty years later. Once those assumptions collapse, the “best” workflow becomes the one that causes the least friction. For some people, that still means WAV, manual metadata entry, and the satisfaction of knowing there was only one lossy step. For others, it means using MP3 as a metadata carrier, letting SonicStage read what it understands, converting to ATRAC, and moving on with their lives. While neither choice is wrong, one is purer and the other is kinder 🙂
I decided to use EAC to create both WAV and compressed MP3 files simultaneously using the compression tool lame.exe, which is something we needed for Audacity back when we did audio in ds106. It brought me back. So now the ripping takes twice as long and I get the original WAV file and a compressed MP3 file (sometimes as much as 1/10th the WAV). Not only does the MP3 codec handle metadata well, but it does a damn good job at compression which explains why it won out in the end.
What all this rear-view mirror navel gazing made clear for me is that a niche audio device connected to the web 25 years ago tells a familiar story. Namely what started as an open project, namely the CDDB, quickly moved from a community-driven tool to a corporate-owned convenience that just happened to be a key piece of a fairly fragile system. As the rise of online music made CDs more and more obsolete CDDB vanished and everything downstream started to feel brittle. Software didn’t so much break as it outlived the world it was designed for and was abandoned. The only reason this service is still alive is because it was originally written under a GNU license and folks could and did fork the code to route around the obstacles corporations created in the name of growth/profit.
As we learned from Goodfellas, once they’ve busted it out, they “torched the place.” There’s no sense of responsibility or stewardship once the value has been extracted, and to be fair I’ve seen the same approach play out in more than a few large-scale web projects at universities as well — so it’s not just evil corporations. The web is too often treated as disposable infrastructure, and that’s unsettling when you consider how much of our cultural memory now lives there. Turning things off and walking away is easy; reckoning with what’s been lost is harder. This is why entities like the Internet Archive, and passion projects like GNUDB, are doing what feels like God’s work — not preserving nostalgia, but refusing to let the web become a memory hole. More of us need to be doing that.
*Thanks to the passion and good will of the project maintainer there’s an alternative that doesn’t depend upon giving over your data or cuddling up with the corporate behemoths. A very cool project that I’ve now benefitted from directly in my strange misadventure through the world of music CD metadata. I just wanted to give a huge thanks the ther person behind Gnudb, and a donation to follow cause I know what it means to try and keep the lights on. Also, if of any interest, I run a hosting company and we do have some server space and CPU we can donate to the project if that might help.
†Gnudb is the last database standing in this lineage, if you will.
Taylor and I have recommitted to the retro-gaming/retro-computing streams in 2026 because they’re just so much fun, and this one did not disappoint. We do recognize out of the gate this stream has nothing to do with hosting and it’s also ridiculously niche. That said, there is something super fun in geeking out over how to ensure your emulation gaming system (or even the real console) looks as much like an old CRT as it can when running on a modern monitor. And, in short, that’s exactly what this stream was all about.
The more involved discussion gets into how the RetroTink line of products are designed specifically for this rarified niche of old school gaming nerds. I have the good fortune of being surrounded by old school CRT machines (I probably have more than 30 if you count my collection of video games), but the reality is they can be a lot of overhead. They’re  bulky, heavy, and simply less and less a reality. Getting these machines can be tough now and will one day soon be a near-on impossibility unless you have a ton of luck, CRT knowledge, and/or money.
As a result, finding ways to make the more recent TVs mirror the experience of what these games looked like on the devices they were designed for is important given the games look like total crap on upscaled 4K screens. So, in essence, the RetroTink is a programmable scaler that can reproduce era-appropriate displays for specific consoles to get as close to the original look and feel as possible. For someone playing Madden 2001 on the Playstation for nearly a year now, this becomes very important.
RetroTink website
RetroTink is essentially the Cadillac of old school game scalers, and was designed by Mike Chi, who is both an electrical engineer and old school gamer who is obsessed with making his childhood gaming experience come alive in the world of modern tech. These are the people who make life wonderful for the rest of us. I mean he named the project after his pet rabbit, need I say more?
The actual stream leads to us comparing the RetroTink 5X Pro (the version I bought) with Taylor’s RetroTink 4K CE —which was pretty impressive. Thanks to relative streaming chops, we got an up close and personal look at the scan lines for these old school games to understand the real difference. Also, the 4k CE model provides templates that mimic the display of specific TVs, such as JVC or Sony CRTs from back in the day—pretty amazing. It was a fun stream and I learned a lot more about my RetroTink, which was the reason we did it. This conversation helped me appreciate how powerful this little tool is that much more, so thanks for all the insights and joy Taylor.
Sometimes a plan just comes together, but I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge it’s all about Riky Saracco keeping on top of my lazy ass. The Halloween bava.studio event was a blast and Riky did most of the work for that one, but it’s still overhead. As a result, I tend to shy away from events at bava.studio. That said, Riky lined up another banger, this one featuring Giovani (more details forthcoming) the world’s best(?) Tetris player for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). So the idea is to have an event where we have a competition wherein folks sign-up to take on the world champion—hopefully he goes easy on us.
Riky is working through the specifics of the actual event, and I get to create another diorama. What I came up with this morning was pretty simple: take one of the 27″ CRT TVs in the studio and hook-up a Raspberry Pi running Batocera that loads to the NES version of Tetris. When people walk by they’ll spy an old school TV with Tetris playing, dead simple. Put the TV on a small entertainment center with a VHS player and some other tid-bits and we’re all set. The console and controllers will be on a thick living room carpet (preferably orange) and the scene creates itself. The best part is I have most of the pieces already: the NES, controllers, CRT TV, VHS player, etc. I just need to find some old school carpet and an entertainment center.
Above is an image of a test run with the JVC TV (NTSC) and little throwback Classic Mini NES I picked up a few years back. The original NES I have is PAL, so I’ll need to run that through the PAL Sony CRT (media regions complicate my life). Keep in mind the throwback NES in the window above is just a prop, Tetris is being emulated through Batocera on a Raspberry Pi. One of the things I was playing with today—given the idea and setup came so easy—was how to get a remote game controller on the sidewalk so that a passerby can actually play Tetris. I got the proof-of-concept working with a wireless playstation 3 controller I had lying around, and a quick search online brings up cheap, NES knock-off controllers that should work wirelessly with the OG console (I grabbed one for $9).
So, in terms of the final shape of the diorama: swap the NTSC TV with the Sony PAL TV and have the original NES console in the window that folks can play with a cheap wireless controller outside the window. The thing I need to figure out now is how to mount the controller so that it’s both usable and secure. Losing a $10 controller is not the end of the world, but figuring out a way to secure it well would mean everyone could enjoy the fun and I don’t have to worry about it walking off.
Anyway, off to find an entertainment center, carpet, and some kind of way to secure a wireless NES-compatible controller. Life is good.
This is a quick note about the diorama after the next one. I will be working furiously over the next week or two to get a Tetris diorama up for an event honoring Italy’s own Nintendo Tetris World Champion. I’ll have more to say about that diorama shortly, but first let me plant the seed for another one my friend Mattia suggested a while back, a shot from John Carpenter’s They Live (that’ll be the second diorama honoring Carpenter for any fans keeping score out there).
Shot from John Carpenter’s They Live
The above shot was the one Mattia and I both agreed would make the most sense. We’ll use cardboard or foam core to build out the cityscape and employ the same kind of perspective that worked so well for The Shining and Halloween. The one piece I wanted to take care of right away was shifting the shot so it’s head on—helping to simplify things a bit. To that end, Tommaso did a quick treatment that centered the shot and also highlighted the various values of the buildings so we can can get a sense of the composition and depth needed to bring this scene to life. Gotta say, loving that Tommy can spin this up for me in a quick afternoon so we can immediately get a sense of what it might look like head-on.
Tommaso’s treatment of the scene that center’s the road and provides a sense of the various grays we will need for the buildings, sky and road.
They Live Trump Poster
I’m not sure what to expect with this scene. Building out a cityscape is exciting, but the fact that it is gray scaled means we’ll have to nail a bunch of different shapes, not to mention the various details of the buildings. It’s gonna be a challenge, but I have to say that’s welcome. hell, that’s the very reason I created this whole diorama thing in the first place. it means the dream is coming alive. It Lives!
Also worth noting is that the city scene will only take up the bottom half of the diorama (about 65-70 cm in height), the top will have posterized scenes from the film. This will be a nod to the pop cultural adoption of this film as street art. Front and center will be a poster featuring some version of the idiot-in-chief, like the one to the right. The others on either side could be something like Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David adjusting their glasses and across from them two aliens calling for reinforcements on their watch phones (that’s Mattia’s idea, and I love it).
So, in short, the city scene above will be the base of the diorama and the various signs/posters will highlight the imagery of the film that has continued to give it so much cultural resonance. It might even make sense to have Tommy and his friends spray paint the various scenes.
Anyway, this is a first pass at explaining the forthcoming They Live diorama, but now I have to backtrack and get ready for some Tetris on the NES.
Last week I did my first “On Writing” chat of 2026 with gym teacher/blogger Laura Hilliger. Laura and I have been circling each other on the web for a long while, and her fun Reclaim Open submission “My Website is a Junk Drawer” had a really wonderful conceit about how she imagines her online presence. I spent some time reading through Laura’s site, and you should too. She has an incisive and poetic voice that makes reading feel like an escape from the drab walls of social media. It’s an outpost of the real, something that is harder and harder to find in the online spectacle that has become more about content than concern—and to be specific the idea that a concern is a “matter of interest or importance to someone.” There’s certainly someone on the other side of her website—it’s refreshing and hopeful.
Unfortunately for Laura, I couldn’t help but use this chat as a kind of therapy session around my recent struggles with AI and writing. Her clear-eyed understanding of why she writes and what it means to her offers a welcome reminder that the act of writing has far less to do with the product and much more with the person. My only real regret about this conversation is that we didn’t have it sooner, Laura was an absolute delight to talk with. I immediately felt a sense of connection with someone else who is trying to make sense of a moment—in many ways it reminded me that these chats are about that sense of communion around who we are and where we might be headed. Thanks Laura, I’m a big fan!
About a month ago now Michael Branson Smith (MBS) and I did a special episode of the Family Pictures Podcast in order to look back on all the films we had discussed up and until that point (there were 48). We treated it as an award ceremony with off-the-wall categories like “Family member likely to blowup Thanksgiving” or “Worst surrogate parent” or “Family you would like to be a part of” etc. It was a total blast to do, and we did a pretty good job of mentioning a character from almost all 48 films.
This was also the first episode where MBS and I did not share notes beforehand, so part of the fun was surprising one another with on-the-spot categories. The funnest part was just taking the time to reflect on all the films we discussed over the last year and change. Re-listening to the episode it just reinforces how much this podcast is about MBS and I connecting on a very human and playful level—it’s one of the best things I have committed to in a long while. Long live the FFP!
I was playing with ChatGPT to explore a couple of versions of an essay I wrote back in 1999 during grad school. I was pretty impressed with both the feedback as well as a re-write ChatGPT did. After the machine re-wrote my Frederic Jameson-inspired conspiracy take on The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), it recommended a quick treatment of a comparison of Invasion with David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983).
If you want, next we can:
Contrast this with another paranoia text (The Conversation, Blow Out, Videodrome) to sharpen the edges
The Videodrome reference made it very hard for me to resist. I’ve spent a fair bit of time playing with the philosophy of Videodrome on this blog, and even tried to “embody” Dr. Brian Oblivion as part of my first online ds106 course.
So, bringing Videodrome into the equation was a brilliant move on the machine’s part. After having it polish off the Invasion blog post I returned to the Videodrome recommendation:
Earlier you suggested comparing Invasion to another conspiracy film like Videodrome, what might that look like?
I think Pac-Mania was one of the earliest manias I gave myself over to. The others that may have been as all-consuming in scale for a younger bava would’ve been some collecting Smurfs and all-things Star Wars. Also, a bit later, in 1981, there would be an acute affliction of a Raiders of the Lost Ark mania. There are probably a few other object-orientated obsessions I’m neglecting from my childhood, but I think this does a nice job covering the major ones between the ages of 7 and 11 years old. 7-11?! All my pretty ones? Hellkite!
Anyway, I’ve been coming up with a plan to try and get better at all of my 1980s video game cabinets. This is a project that has to be taken in pieces, so the plan is to spend a full week (at least an hour a day) playing one of them intensely. Pac-man is my favorite for all kinds of deeply psychological boyhood reasons, so it’s natural to start there. My current high score on the turbo version of Pac-man is 420,000. I hit that a couple of years ago, and then stopped playing it consistently. I made the switch from slow Pac-man after I realized how painstakingly slow the original is. Games were taking me 30-45 minutes at least. With turbo Pac-man I’m down to 15-20 minutes a game, which is a real consideration given I never have as much time for games as I would like.*
Beyond playing the game for at least an hour a day, I also promised myself that I would do the extra research online to figure out how to get better. In the world of Pac-man this means learning the tried and true patterns that ensure you get as many points as possible without dying. I found all kinds of resources for the original, slower Pac-man. Here’s an example of play-through video from Biff’s Gaming Videos channel that demonstrates how to get a perfect score on level 19, or the eight key. This is not easy to do, and pretty fun to watch (at least for a Pac-man nerd like myself):
Anyway, I couldn’t really find any resources for turbo Pac-man patterns. I’ve started to figure out a few of my own patterns for turbo that work pretty well for me. That said, nothing that gets me perfect levels every time, so that pretty much makes them uninteresting to most Pac-man enthusiasts. Another part of me struggles with whether or not I should succumb to patterns at all, there’s some rough structure to my best games but I inevitably go off-script and that’s when it’s most dangerous, and as a result most fun. But fun aside, I’m pretty much plateauing between around 350,000 to 400,000 points for a while now, so I need something to push my game forward.
One of the things I really enjoy about the1982 Pac-Mania booklet is the various strategies it provides to up your game. In particular, they map out patterns in print—which are ridiculously difficult to follow along with. I remember 11 year-old me studying this book trying to figure out where that green arrow was leading me—I finally gave up
The other vague memory I have was how I was of the Mike Weiner figure who had this all figured out. He comes off not only as super smart but also quite zen—unlike the manic 11 year old me. Not only did he figure all this out, but once he got to the keys (the hardest patterns in the game) he would let his friends play for him because those screens bored him. Talk about feeling like a peon in the Pac-man world.
Parking lot behind Grand Venue and Merrick Road in Baldwin, LI
The other odd thought that comes to mind when I found re-discovered this booklet online again last week was how strongly it is tied to a very specific place from my childhood. There is a parking lot in Baldwin, Long Island that is behind the library, bowling alley, and pool hall—all of which hand back entrances.
The Bowling Alley and Library are still there, as is the Pool Hall, which is pretty crazy.
Billiards sign points to the back entrance to pool hall (Grand Ave). Behind the red van was once Howie’s Stationary (Merrick Road)These places were big parts of my childhood, and they were all on the same major street that ran through the town latitudinally, Grand Avenue. It’s an overflow parking lot that’s also connected to some other super important places from those years: Howie’s Stationary store and the single-house theater cinema on Merrick Road, another major thoroughfare that ran longitudinally through Baldwin.
This long, non-descript doctor’s office was the Movie theater of my boyhood. You’re looking at it’s side, the front was on Merrick Rd by telephone pole
The cross-roads of Merrick Road and Grand Avenue was the external, extra-institutional world for me from about 8 until 13 years old. As soon as I saw PacMania my mind went right to this parking lot, in particular the back entrance of the pool hall, one of the many places I played these video games. The visual is so strong it’s almost more than a memory, it’s like a vision into the past. I might be sounding weird here, but I can’t shake it.
Billiards sign points to the back entrance to pool hall (Grand Ave). Behind the red van was once Howie’s Stationary (Merrick Road)
Not sure what all this has to do with getting better at video games, but having these visions from my past is pretty intense. I think I need to play some Pac-man to get grounded—It’s I am time traveling or something.
____________________________
*Shit always comes up: accounting spreadsheets draw me in, tickets consume me, and the real life of an everyday Reclaimer takes over.
I was originally going to call this post “Invasion of the Content Snatchers,” but what’s happening in this process is more than simply “stealing content” (if we can even call it that), but a shift in how we might potentially offload our own cognitive mapping. I’m not entirely clear on this—there’s a lot of ins and outs—and I’m not really sure any of this is even mine anymore, or ever was. It’s a cosmically liminal space, man!
This post picks up on my last one wherein I took an old grad school paper/presentation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers and ran it through the ChatGPT machine. I mentioned in that post I actually had two version of this paper. I re-wrote the original to try and wrap my head around Frederic Jameson for a film paper on Philip Kaufman’s 1978 re-make Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I re-read this one and was definitely not too impressed. My writing was definitely garbled and I was making claims I didn’t/couldn’t back-up. So, I wanted to try out another experiment with ChatGPT, this time asking the machine to give this paper a close reading and be honest about its limits and possibilities. Here is what I asked:
I am going to give you another essay I wrote on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but this time using Frederic Jameson’s post-modern theory on the geo-political aesthetic. Couple of things to consider a) has this research/reading of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a part of the paranoid films of the 1970s [been done]? b) have others used Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic to read Invasion? c) what do you make of the writing? where does it falter and why? Refrain from re-writing this as a blog post for bavatuesdays.com just yet given I have some ideas of how I might want to update this.
A bit of a tripartite ask where I am seeing if others include the ’78 Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the genre classification of ’70s paranoid cinema. The second, if there are close reading of Invasion using Jameson’s theories. Finally, and most painfully, how’s the writing? Here are the results:
(a) Is Invasion read as part of the 1970s paranoid/paranoia film constellation?
Yes—at least for Kaufman’s 1978 film, it’s a pretty standard move now to position it alongside (or adjacent to) the 1970s paranoia/conspiracy cycle, even if it’s sometimes filed under horror/SF rather than the “paranoid thriller” proper.
Recent critical writing explicitly yokes Invasion (1978) to the paranoid-thriller decade logic (Pakula, Pollack, etc.).
Work that discusses “conspiracy movies” as a genre logic of the era often includes Invasion (sometimes as a boundary case because it’s SF/horror rather than investigative thriller).
Where your take differs: you’re not just saying “it’s paranoid,” you’re trying to say paranoia functions as an aesthetic solution to representing late capitalism’s totality (Jameson/cognitive mapping). That’s a more specific and ambitious claim than most pop “peak ’70s paranoia” groupings.
(b) Have others used Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic to read Invasion?
What I found (and what I didn’t)
I did not find a widely-cited, canonical film-studies article whose central project is “Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic reading of Kaufman’s Invasion.” (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist—just that it’s not surfacing as a standard reference point.)
What I did find is a consistent pattern in which scholars:
Use Jameson’s “cognitive mapping / conspiracy as representational workaround”
…and then place Invasion in the orbit of conspiracy/paranoia cinema as an example of “the system” becoming narrativized via an enemy network.
Cite Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic in bibliographies/dissertations that discuss Invasion among other Cold War/postmodern paranoia texts—without necessarily doing a sustained Jameson-on-Invasion exegesis.
Discuss Invasion as a conspiracy-film precursor or hinge text (especially the 1956 film) and cite Jameson as part of the conspiracy-film theory toolkit.
Bottom line on precedence
Jameson is absolutely used to theorize “paranoia/conspiracy cinema” in ways that can include Invasion.
A direct, sustained Geopolitical Aesthetic. Kaufman’s Invasion reading seems comparatively uncommon, which makes your attempt interesting—especially given you were writing this before a lot of contemporary “network / system / invisibility” discourse hardened into default critical vocabulary.
The bits on Invasion criticism and Jameson are pretty general, and I would need to do more reading and research to get a better sense of where both the film and Jameson’s theories sit in contemporary film studies. This is cursory at best, so I’m not sure I trust it very much. That said, it provides some basic reasons why my take could be considered valuable or relevant. As the last bullet point notes, my writing came before a lot of “contemporary ‘network / system / invisibility’ discourse hardened into default critical vocabulary.” I love it when it suggests the paper is ahead of it’s time. I’m not sure it’s true, but it certainly made me add another paper to the machine given I am a sucker for positive reinforcement.
I think the part where I ask it for feedback on my writing is actually the most valuable. After reading its thought and recommendations, I tend to agree: Continue reading →
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