Always On My Mind
New episode of Private Life: "The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey"
Last night I watched Videoheaven (2025) (streaming on the Criterion Channel) Alex Ross Perry’s three-hour essay-elegy on the rise and fall of video stores as they appear in film and television. I’m a sucker for this kind of thing, but several times I turned to Candystore to say, “this is such a good idea!” and “so fucking smart!”
As signaled by the parenthetical “back to physical media!” in my last transmission, I’m fairly nostalgic for stuff like video stores. In the early 2000s I was spoiled by Lost Weekend (RIP) on Valencia Street, where you could get everything from rare art films to cult-classic TV specials. Along with the excellent programming at The Castro Theatre (RIP, for all intents and purposes) I consider indie video stores to be an important extension of my education in San Francisco. Videoheaven convincingly argues for the video store as a brief, yet historically precise, period—not just in media technology, but in the life of our culture (RIP?)
Following last week's conversation with Joyce Carol Oates, the new episode of “Private Life” is a reading of her 1999 essay “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey” — a brilliant analysis of the “unsolved” killing of the child beauty queen that defined the late 1990s.
It is read by the inimitable Alissa Bennett—you’re welcome!
Here’s a taste: “Except that a child is dead and the lives of numerous other people badly shaken, or ruined, the JonBenét Ramsey case is a comedy of errors. David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino could not have devised a scenario so surreal and bleakly comic: the most inept crime of the century investigated by the most inept police department of the century.”
