The Oddness of the Near Past

Few things are as perplexing as the recent past as it starts developing an odd patina, even the morning after an event. I've been finding that in my obsessive transferring of VHS tapes to digital, a project that I started in 2006 and am intent on completing by the end of this summer. I've not made accurate estimate of just how many hours that translates out to, but I'd say it's somewhere between 1,500 to 2,100 hours. How many of these I'll actually sit down and watch again is probably slim, but at least I can say that I have that option. The shot on the right represents the stash I transferred from Friday morning until tonight. I promise that I have enough of a life that I don't sit deligently monitoring the process and usually don't do that many in one weekend. But it's been dreary and rainy lately.

The photo below has been circulating a lot the past six and a half years as an eerie premonition. But does anyone recall the video above that aired as a TV ad for Jet Blue in June 2001? Needless to say it was shelved three months later.

I will have to post some Enron commercials I've come across as well.

Las Horas y el Silencio

One of the many projects I started tinkering with during the two four-day holidays of December that I am continuing in the new year is the digitalization of VHS tapes that date back to my first VCR from around 1983 to 1984. There are a number of yet-to-make-it-to-DVD treasures in there that I can wow my friends with, including such obvious ones as The Boys in the Band and more really obscure ones like À corps perdu (Straight to the Heart), a late 1980s Quebec filmed drama.

Beyond that are some of the broadcasts captured through the years. It's fascinating to see interviews from Jon Stewart's mid-1990s Fox TV show, Charlie Rose asking Kissinger for his opinion on Iraq circa 1991. Then there are the commercials! A spot for a record retailer in Asbury Park from 1993. An ad for a strip club in Oklahoma City called Show Girlz with shots of poles, feathered hair and Jellies circa 1987. Another for something called The Hair Genie that comes with an instructional VHS tape all for just $19.95!

A particular surprise is 1991's The Hours and the Times that speculates on what might have gone down between Brian Epstein and John Lennon while on a holiday on the Continent. I really liked it when I acquired (I'll refrain from sharing how) more than a decade and a half ago. What I had completely forgotten is that it is set in Barcelona. About a quarter of the way through they go to see Bergman's El Silencio. It is one of the best uses of the city's scenery of a film set there that I can recall, especially of evoking foreigner's spending time there, at once a part of and distant from the landscape. It feels like it actually was made just before A Hard Day's Night and not in the Bush I era. It's also such a great title, so familiar sounding that you can swear that it's the name of a Beatles song you know that you have heard but can't find on any of their albums. I look forward to other similar discoveries as I weave through the hundreds of hours of other mystery VHS tapes.