A little while ago I posted a quote from Finnish musician Jan Anderzén of Kemialliset Ystävät that concluded with him saying, “I feel really thankful for being alive at this very moment, experiencing the pre-internet world and then seeing what is happening now.” That’s something I am also very thankful for. I can remember my first 20-something years of life when I had no idea what it the internet was. Life was not in any general sense better—maybe it was in some ways, and it was surely worse in others—but things were absolutely different. And to be able to remember that world vividly feels like a gift (even as I know that it also has its disadvantages).
In the late 1990s I lived in San Francisco, and one of my closest friends lived on Shotwell street in the Mission. He lived in a third floor flat and his building had a nice big back yard, at the other end of which was a large white metal building that might have been a mechanic’s garage or something.
My friend happened to be a collector of strange moving images of all types. In addition to doing design work, he also provided visuals for DJs, so he spent a lot of time searching out and trading for images that he could mix into sets. He was also plugged into a small, mail-based scene of people who traded video tapes of various kinds: television shows and commercials from around the world, old shows and commercials, weird videos that circulated via skate magazines, and so on. A famous example of this sort of thing was the short film Heavy Metal Parking Lot, which circulated in tape trading circles (and of course my friend had a copy of that too). In addition to collecting strange videos, my friend also shot a lot of Super 8 footage and he was an excellent photographer.
Given the layout of the yard, that large white building turned out to be the perfect surface for projecting moving images. So once in the spring and once in the fall, my friend would throw backyard movie parties. There’d be a keg, food on the grill, some weed, and we’d eat and drink and then when it got dark he would commandeer the video and film projectors.
Everyone in my circle of friends has great memories of these parties. It was exciting and strange to see these weird commercials, excerpts from strange documentaries and training films, and footage my friend had shot mixed together without any context. As each new piece started, your mind would turn trying to figure out what it was, where it came from, and what was going to happen.
At one of these parties, he showed a longer version of this video. Harmony Korine’s Gummo was just about to enter the theaters and I’d never heard of it, so I believe this section must have been copied from a review screener of some kind. I found out what it was later, but he presented it without comment, as he did with all the videos.
It will be hard to convey this now, and it may not make any sense to someone who has been watching YouTube since age 16, but this clip on that night had a hugely powerful effect on me because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I might be watching. It seemed “real” and I couldn’t imagine why such a thing would be staged, but on the other hand I couldn’t understand why someone would have a camera handy during a moment like this. I couldn’t tell where or when it might be from, whether it was fiction or documentary. It was also frightening because it conveyed a sense of explosive and unpredictable violence, like I was waiting for something terrible to happen to one of the people in this room.
When I think of those backyard video parties now, I think of them as an early and very crude version of YouTube. It seems possible to me now that someone now who is younger who has absorbed a lot more media—and so much more reality television—would be able to decode this scene much more quickly than I could when I first saw it, because my consciousness was far less sophisticated when it came to context-free moving images. And that’s part of the “good news” / “bad news” about growing up in a certain historical era, I think.
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