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This post (by Josh Rhodes) on the history of the first official tribal band convinced me to dig out some old highschool tapes that have yet to make it to the digital age. The first one I found is a video that was laying around Jenny Bradley’s house – she had taken it from the a/v lab at our highschool, and from what I can make of it, someone in the video production class decided to do a little filming of a day in the life of Jake Fiolek. This tape chronicles fairly typical behavior for the two forming members of the Perpetual Elvis Machine (one of my favorite bands of all time, composed of Jake and Josh).

Yes, that’s me playing the tupperware and giving pretty lame excuses to the principal when he tells us to stop annoying the popular kids on the quad. Yes, that’s guy underneath the hair is really Jake skronking on a clarinet.

I’m trying to figure out why the hell we were being so obnoxious back then – what was our motivation other than to annoy? I’m wondering if it’s sorta like that book The Polar Express, where it says that as people get older they no longer have the ability to hear the silver bells of Santa’s Sleigh. Is there magical music and feeling beneath these spontaneous jazz compositions on the Liberty High School campus that I can no longer “hear” ? You be the judge.

Two of the tribal council(wo)men got married a couple months ago, and I am chronicling that historical event right here on the blog. As I said in my wedding sermon, this is the first “Iverson” betrothal that I have personally condoned. (For those not in the loop: The second year that my group of friends were living in Arcata, seven of us decided to move into a house together – the largest concentration of any of us under one roof (excluding perhaps, “The Carriage House”). The house, dubbed “Iverson” after the street it resided on, has already churned out four marriages. The first two were inconsquential and pertained to excommunicated members of the inner circle. The third, a scam between Jake and Isabelle so that she could pay lower tuition at UC Santa Cruz, is perhaps the epitome of the ancient Greek Tradgedy. )

But the wedding that you see here between Josh Rhodes and Bethany Cowan is one of the most beautiful events I have ever had the opportunity to be a part of. It was really magical to stand there and support my two friends commitment to eachother. It was equally moving to know that our tribe had come together again – even for an event ( a wedding) that otherwise would be made the subjet of ridicule and scorn: (i.e., “Oh great, they’re getting married … what, did he knock her up or something?”

Here’s a fifteen minute short film I found at an antique mall in rural Arkansas. The VHS tape had five or six siblings – analog tape chronicling one man’s journey as told through the annual Christmas gathering. I decided to take only two (they cost two bucks each and for some reason I was feeling too stingy to get them all and risk ending up with more vcr recordings of daytime television).

But nothing prepared me for what I would find; I still can’t quite explain what I am watching here. I’ve been really striking it gold in the old (at least in the kinds of found things that I like to come across), and this is definitely one of those intriguing mysteries that I enjoy uncovering.

How did this film even get made ? The edits seem both polished and meticulous (there is voice narration which I find strange for a home movie), but the scenes are amateurishly long and hypnotic.

What I ultimately like about this short is that it pretends to be a video about Christmas, when it is so obviously a film about coming to term’s with one’s finite being.