Firehose #178: All Are Welcome

Also: Introducing Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

Pretty long year, these past 17 days have been….

Besides the international horrors, domestic clashes, and diplomatic WTFery, there’s the less-consequential but still frenzied activity around this little podcast: 7 episodes, an experimental Second Sunday, nearly 1,000 comments, God knows how many Arch Stanton videos. Because we crossed the 60,000-subscriber threshold this month, including several hundred new ones of the paying variety (DING DING DING, is how we celebrate around these parts), I figure it’s time for one of our sporadic orientation primers. Starting with: The Firehose you are holding is a thing I email & post each w-e-e-k-e-n-d containing whatever non-Fifth activities the three co-hosts were up to over the past week, plus news from the broader Fifiverse, upcoming events, Comment of the Week, and other amusements.

But, even with our stepped-up production schedule over the past five months, much of the best action connected with The Fifth Column only happens in connection with The Fifth Column; which is to say, by and for and betwixt the almost-sane community that has – shockingly, gloriously! – sprung up around the pod. These people do not bite, at least non-consensually, and you will be shocked to discover just how much the ol’ “all are welcome” applies, especially to newcomers, and superly-duperly regardless of individual politics. You may have just found your people.

* Let’s start with the places us three co-hosts (almost) never go. In this Chat thread (access to Chat and Comments being a perk for paying subscribers), people, and especially the nearly ubiquitous Jaye, respond to my prompt by listing links to or at least mentioning the existence of all sorts of subgroupings and subsidiary products, such as Jaye’s Fifth Column Unofficial Book Club. There is tell in that thread of any number of WhatsApp groups, “including regional ones, pets, fashion, etc.” (per Dacia); “Bookclub … NYC and visitors … Sports, including seasonal invites to fantasy leagues (baseball, hockey, football (should we do cricket??))” (Jaye); “Atlanta Fif chat” (Johnny Shampoo); “Northern California/Greater SF Bay Area” (Rebekah N.). Ping those people for specific details (it not being ideal to post private WhatsApp URLs here), and also for rumor of any additionals. For presumably grumpier environs, there’s always the Fifth Column sub-Reddit and Fifth Column Discord channel.

* Some enhancers of the Fifth experience include #jamsthefifth—the Fifth Column Substack outro music (also maintained by Jaye), which collects in reverse chronological order both the outro music on Members Only episodes (usually selected by Moynihan), and the Walkoff songs I put at the bottom of these Firehoses. And also the terrific, self-explanatory TFC Docs: Every Documentary Mentioned on The Fifth Column, maintained (I think??) by Glen Mendoza, with the help of various A.I. robots. Beloved listener ChayaLeah in that thread also points out “If they’re normal they can come to Shabbat,” which is funny, because 1) ha-ha, “normal,” and 2) she absolutely, positively means it. Most every Friday there’s a very generous and fun and sweet Shabbat dinner at the Sufrin household in the LBC featuring (among other awesome people, particularly ChayaLeah’s parents when they show) a handful, and sometimes several handfuls, of Fifth Column listeners. I go most times I’m in Southern California.

* That’s a good transition to the happy category of Cool Podcasts Created by People Who Met Each Other Through The Fifth Column. There’s Ask a Jew, starring ChayaLeah and the great Yael Bar tur (who also throws a mean Shabbat); and Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em, with galpal journalists Sarah Hepola and Nancy Rommelmann. Both of these pods were incubated by the awesome if short-lived Paloma Media, a tale about which you can read here. Hep’s got a new memoir coming out soon; Romm’s been doing a terrific “Musings of the Night Nurse” series; Yael’s got a fun new Substack about social media called The Internet Hates You, and don’t sleep on EdJEWcation, the theologically inclined pod that ChayaLeah does with her Dad.

* There’s tons more I could link to, but there’s too much snow to shovel, so let’s get to the week that was, starting with contentions over Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and protests in Minnesota. Kmele on Friday made his regular appearance on the Tangle News podcast, talking about Minneapolis, Trump’s weaponization of the Department of Justice, plus the Donroe Doctrine:

* The Moynihan Report on Thursday held a discussion with retired Border Patrol chief Chris Clem and immigration attorney David Leopold:

* Kmele on Wednesday went on CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip (guest on our Episode #532), along with co-panelist Ana Kasparian (Members Only #295), to talk solely about this issue. Don’t see any embeddable video, but here’s the audio, and a transcript.

* The subject also came up Monday on The Reason Roundtable, the other weekly podcast I appear on. Here’s an edited/enhanced short of my comments on the issue:

And here’s another from me about the madness of California’s Billionaire-Tax Initiative (a subject we also discussed on the Kasparian episode):

* The Reason Roundtable will be doing a live show in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 4; have already heard that some of nearby Fifdom will rally. Additionally, Never Fly Coachers within striking distance of New York City should maybe save the date of Feb. 24, for that thing we were talking about & will soon officially announce.

* One more Report from Moynihan. On Wednesday, he had on Fifdom fave Eli Lake (#52, #65, #141, #174, Special Dispatch #51, #326, #368, #407, M.O. #184, M.O. #244) to talk about his recent Free Press piece “The Wrong Lessons from Iran’s Past.” Moyn at the top also freestyles a bit on Greenland:

* I’m tickled that so many of you are enjoying our new Members Only Semiquincentennial miniseries The Revolutionaries! I see from our crack clip-posting squad that freeloaders can still view a solid chunk of our debut episode about the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, with the amazing Charles C. Mann. (Who, incidentally, had a great Twitter thread this week taking seriously and with receipts the accusation that America was built on “stolen land.”) Here’s our tease:

* In the most recent Revolutionaries episode on the underratedly awesome Paul Revere, explicated by (Never Fly Coacher!) Jack Henneman of The History of the Americans podcast, I lamented that the insane 16^th century story of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca had not been made into a movie. Well, color me corrected! Alert listener Lowell Vizenor informs us that “There’s a 1991 Mexican film titled Cabeza de Vaca, directed by Nicolás Echevarría, and it’s available free on YouTube.” Submitted for the consideration of the East Egg Film Festival!

.* Speaking of movies, time for a new regular Firehose featurette: Producer Jason’s Video Vault! In which Mr. Mojica scrapes out the weird corners of his cinematic brain. Here’s the first installment:

I’ve got two words for you: mermaid horror.

Some years back when I was in Kyrgyzstan with the great Thomas Morton, we stumbled into an memorably named place called Art Club Good Zone. It was one part co-ed strip club, one part musical variety show, and it was 100% awesome. “Only in Bishkek,” I thought.

Apparently not. I came home one day to find my wife watching a film that contained scenes of a similar bizarro cabaret that took me right back to Art Club Good Zone, and it only got better from there. The film was The Lure, a 2015 horror musical retelling of The Little Mermaid by Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska that manages to be sexy, gross, funny and tragic all at once. There’s a lot of Smocynska’s childhood baked into the film -- having grown up with her mother running a communist-era Warsaw nightclub where she had her first shot of vodka, her first cigarette, her first sexual disappointment, and her first important feeling for a boy.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll kiss three bucks goodbye. Trailer:

* Oh hey, remember that Sebastian Junger episode you people liked so much? Well, ol’ Seb-Jung is newly on Substack, with a newsletter called Tribe. In his kickoff post, Junger declares that “As a journalist, I believe that marshaling the right words in the service of truth and dignity is a sacred calling among many, and the only one I have any chance of being good at,” and also: “I’m a busker.” You’ve been warned!

* Comment of the Week comes from Laura:

Small part of the pod, but the brief discussion about unaccountable nonprofits getting increasingly larger pots of government money to ‘outsource’ gov responsibilities. . . I wish more journalists would cover this. It’s happening across sectors and at all levels, and it’s ruining everything - hunger programs, drug programs, environmental programs. . . just in my small part of the professional world, military and veteran nonprofits are simultaneously gobbling up multimillion dollar grants from foundations and STILL lobbying the government to pay them for services the government has been doing for years, to solve problems that no longer exist [veteran unemployment is at 3%, yet we need more government money to fund nonprofits to supplement government programs??].

Nonprofits may have boards, but they are often hand picked by nonprofit leadership and do little to kick the tires on impact figures. Many nonprofit leaders make gobs more than for-profit CEOs, yet they use their privileged access to government officials to convince the government that greedy companies are ripping off their constituents, so they shouldn’t enable free markets for [insert their program here]. It’s disgusting and so ripe for some great muckraking.

Walkoff, from that playlist I can never quite finish, has that winning combo of clumsily obvious organizing gimmick, 1970-era group-vocal Bacharachania, and uncanny-valley Northern European accent: