Eerie Tom (ago)

I got the idea for my seventh Digital Wonderland video from a scene from Fahrenheit 451 (1966, dir. François Truffaut) in which Linda, the wife of protagonist Guy Montag, participates in an interactive television show where the characters directly address her. What if, I thought, I used clips of people addressing the camera, as if speaking to me? I doubted I could find 90 minutes of suitable footage so I left it on the backburner for a while.

Several weeks later, I was watching Marooned (1969, dir. John Sturges). In one scene, astronaut Jim Pruett is speaking to Mission Control via closed-circuit television. Pruett’s image was in black-and-white (albeit with a bluish tint*), and slightly blurry and overexposed. This made me think of my early days, still living at home, staying up late to watch old movies on TV in my bedroom. What if, thought I, in addition to talking heads, I included clips from old commercials and movies, all converted to black-and-white, then blurred, overexposed, and tinted blue?

*I believe the slightly blue tint of black-and-white TVs is a result of old TV tubes having a single color phosphor, usually bluish-white.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find all the clips I remembered from those days**, so I ended up poring over hundreds of movies and TV episodes to find exactly what I wanted. For example, I didn’t want slick commercials from major retailers and restaurant chains—I preferred ads from local businesses, with amateurish camera work and acting (often by the company president, instead of a professional model), and early computer graphics made on Scanimate and the like. I also got a laugh out of finding out-of-context scenes of men embracing, men undressing, men whispering into each other’s ears, and so on. I also re-cropped when necessary the screen ratio of all the clips to 4:3. In total, I came up with about 630 video clips. Some of the sound from those clips was included, as well as audio clips of people with interesting voices or dialogue without the accompanying video.

**These included a TEAC commercial shown on KSCI, and one for what seemed to be a motocross event in Los Angeles.

Musically, since the video was supposed to represent late night TV, I didn’t want thumping techno music but something more ambient and laid back. I also thought I might, for once, post the entire video online instead of an abridged version, and so chose music with Creative Commons licenses permitting reuse and adaptation. However, I wasn’t able to find enough music that suited my needs, so I ended up composing and recording three pieces myself.

Finally, after considerable editing and re-editing, I completed it! Note: The first 45 seconds are a countdown to give me time to get the headset on. You are welcome to skip to the main feature, though something interesting happens at the 30 second mark ...

Watch on YouTube

I was expecting nothing more than a mix of nostalgia and faux interactive television, but was surprised at the result: I had inadvertently created a “video letter” to my younger self. It was as if I had distilled all the TV-gayness from my youth (plus commercials!) into this video. When I was still living at home, I was as closeted as could be because I was in “enemy camp”—my parents weren’t exactly the most accepting or tolerant of people. I was so closeted that, if I was watching TV with my family and a man appeared shirtless or in a swimsuit, I’d turn my head or pick up a magazine or leave the room, anything to demonstrate I wasn’t the least bit interested in seeing him. Late night TV became a sort of refuge; my parents had gone to sleep and I could bask safely in the glow of a television world where nobody judged me. The out of context scenes, when viewed in “concentrated form”, created a gay-friendly fantasyland of 1980s Los Angeles television, where most of the men are reasonably attractive, where they laughed, cried, fought, triumphed, lived, and died (poor Mischa Auer dies twice!), where advertisers spoke directly to me in friendly, reassuring tones. The sheer man-fulness of the video is relieved only by the presence of “screen queens” and fierce ladies (both real and fictional) like Marlene Dietrich, Maidie Norman, Joan Crawford, Grace Jones, Tuppence Beresford (as portrayed by Francesca Annis), Isis (as portrayed by Joanna Cameron), and so on. Watching the video reminded me of the final scene from Cinema Paradiso (1988, dir. Giuseppe Tornatore), where all the censored kissing scenes have been compiled into a single film full of love and desire.

I am reminded of a May 19, 2017 entry on “Boomer’s Beefcake and Bonding” blog, where Boomer responds to a TV writer (Robert A. Black) for You Can’t Do That On Television who says that nothing he wrote was aimed at gay kids in the audience. Boomer wrote:

Not one tv program, movie, comic book, or cartoon has ever been produced with the idea that there will be gay children in the audience. Not one. Not ever. Gay children are most emphatically assumed not to exist. Writers, producers, directors, and actors all, without exception, assume that every child, without exception, is heterosexual. Gay children are interlopers in an alien country. Everything they see, everything they hear, everything they read is meant for someone else. They have to grab what they can. If they must distort the text, read things that the author didn’t [intend] find things that aren’t even there, no problem. When it is a matter of survival, anything goes.

I also didn’t know while making this video other people had done similar “collage films”, such as Bruce Conner’s “A Movie” (1958) and Chuck Workman’s “Precious Images” (1986).

My only “disappointment” was how un-blue the video looked. On my monitor and online, it has the blue tint, but on my headset everything has a somewhat metallic look, as though dipped in silver. While this effect is pretty cool, wasn’t the point of this video to recreate the old TV look? I tried re-tinting the video several times, making it bluer and bluer, but it never quite matched what I saw on the monitor. Finally, I gave up, lest I spend the rest of my life trying to fix it. Similarly, I had considerable difficulty getting all the volume levels of the music, video clips, and audio clips just right, and after several adjustments that were never quite perfect, also had to let that go.

And here’s the playlist. All links open in new windows.

Song (Year)		Artist	Music	CC-BY License
01.	“Artifacts of Nature” (2019)	4T Thieves	Link	NC 4.0
02.	“Nighttime 2” (2012)	DeepWarmth	Link	NC-SA 4.0
03.	“Clapotis” (2023)	Eerie Tom (ago)	Link	NC 4.0
04.	“Episódio 5” (2004)	Aquarelle	Link	NC-SA 3.0
05.	“Mnemo” (2007)	Lomov	Link	NC-SA 2.5
06.	“Three in One Apartment” (2009)	Dennis Shoker	Link	NC-SA 3.0 US
07.	“Vacuum III - Complexity” (2015)	Sirius Radiance	Link	SA 3.0
08.	“Sun’s Cradle” (2019)	Astrovia	Link	SA 4.0
09.	“Woke Up Surrounded by Enemies” (2007)	Herzog	Link	NC-SA 3.0
10.	“Painting with Light” (2019)	4T Thieves	Link	NC 4.0
11.	“Station 46059 1PM UTC ” (2023)	Eerie Tom (ago)	Link	NC 4.0
12.	“Eight” (2008)	Dimitris	Link	NC-SA 3.0
13.	“Mes Ruines, tes Ruines” (2008)	Muhr	Link	NC-SA 2.0 DE
14.	“Tailoringtape” (2009)	Eleven	Link	NC-SA 3.0
15.	“Shadow of Time” (2014)	SiJ	Link	SA 3.0
16.	“Opal” (2005)	Lomov	Link	NC-SA 2.0
17.	“Mercury’s Youth: The Lost Satellite” (2019)	Astrovia	Link	SA 4.0
18.	“Summer Breeze and Autumn Leaves” (2019)	4T Thieves	Link	NC 4.0
19.	“I Am No Cathedral” (2007)	Herzog	Link	NC-SA 3.0
20.	“Diel Vertical Migration” (2023)	Eerie Tom (ago)	Link	NC 4.0
21.	“Under a Jade Ledge” (2010)	Deepwarmth	Link	NC-SA 4.0

Here’s a (nearly) comprehensive list of clip sources which appear (sometimes only as audio) in this video. Films include:

Der letzte Mann, 1924
Seven Chances, 1925
The Monster, 1925
A Page of Madness, 1926
3 Bad Men, 1926
Flesh and the Devil, 1926
Poor Papa, 1927 (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short)
The Unknown, 1927
The Bat Whispers, 1930
The King of Jazz, 1930
Corsair, 1931
The Devil and The Deep, 1932
Shanghai Express, 1932
Murder at Dawn, 1932
The Death Kiss, 1932
Rain, 1932
The Monster Walks, 1932
Sinister Hands, 1932
Night After Night, 1932
What Price Taxi, 1932
The Old Dark House, 1932
The Mummy, 1932
Scarface, 1932
Sucker Money, 1933
Alice in Wonderland, 1933
The Phantom Broadcast, 1933
So This is Harris!, 1933
Only Yesterday, 1933
The Kennel Murder Case, 1933
Night of Terror, 1933
Secret of the Blue Room, 1933
The Ghost Walks, 1934
Murder on the Blackboard, 1934
The Mysterious Mr. Wong, 1934
The Search for Beauty, 1934
The Whole Town’s Talking, 1935
Loss of Sensation*, 1935
Hats Off, 1936
The Preview Murder Mystery, 1936
Yellow Cargo, 1936
Hollywood Picnic, 1937
The Face Behind the Mask*, 1941
Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake, 1942
Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943
Captive Wild Woman, 1943
The Lost Weekend, 1945
The Flying Serpent, 1946
Lady in the Lake, 1947
The Intruders (Heckle and Jeckle short), 1947
He Walked by Night, 1948
Meditation on Violence, 1948
The Amazing Mr. X, 1948
La Mancornadora, 1949
Outpost in Morocco, 1949
Knock on Any Door, 1949
Everybody’s Dancin’, 1950
The Killer Who Stalked New York, 1950
Where the Sidewalk Ends, 1950
The Thing from Another World, 1951
The Well, 1951
Kansas City Confidential, 1952
Suddenly, 1954
Who’s Right?, 1954 (Marriage for Moderns series)
Bride of the Monster, 1955
Roger Williams: Founder of Rhode Island, 1956
La momia azteca, 1957
Varan the Unbelievable, 1958
A Bullet in the Gun Barrel, 1958
Opening Speech, 1960
Last Year at Marienbad, 1961
King Kong vs. Godzilla, 1962
La Dénonciation, 1962
8 1/2, 1963
From Russia with Love, 1963
Dogora, 1964
Invaders from Space, 1964
Vapors, 1965
Alphaville, 1965
Attack from Space, 1965
Planet of the Vampires, 1965
Juliet of the Spirits, 1965
Fahrenheit 451, 1966
Gamera vs. Barugon, 1966
Playtime, 1967
The Incredible Machine, 1968
Destroy All Monsters, 1968
The Color of Pomegranates, 1969
Marooned, 1969
Gamera vs. Zigra, 1971
Dark Star, 1974
Tiger and Crane Fists, 1976
Logan’s Run, 1976
The Instant Kung Fu Man, 1977
The Ways of Kung Fu, 1978
7 Grandmasters, 1978
True Game of Death, 1979
Per Aspera Ad Astra*, 1981
Heartbeeps, 1981
Looker, 1981
Blade Runner, 1982
Attack of the Joyful Goddess, 1983
Home of the Brave, 1986

Commercials include National Lumber, Truckmaster, Phil & Jim’s, It’s a Good Sign featuring Julianne Gold, Aqueduct City, and Control Data Institute. Music videos include Siouxsie and the Banshees, GusGus, Mew, Santigold, Cabaret Voltaire, Amii Stewart, Laurie Anderson, Missing Persons, Björk, Wall of Voodoo*, Stone Temple Pilots, Tom Tom Club, Dead Kennedys, and The B52s.

TV series include:

Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime
Antiques Roadshow (UK)
Armchair Thriller
Armored Fleet Dairugger XV (aka “Vehicle Voltron”)
Backstage Antiques
The Big Story
Charlie’s Angels
Concepts in Science (Senior Biology: Organic Evolution)
Danger Man
Getter Robo
Gunsmoke
NBC News Overnight
Night Beat (WGN)
Noah and Nelly in ... SkylArk
The Saint
The Secrets of Isis
The Serpent Son (aka Oreisteia)
Shazam!
Skorpion
Space: 1999
Star Trek (original series)
Super Friends
TV Powww* (Los Angeles, with Ralph Harris)
V.I.P.
WSB-TV Action News
You Rang, M’Lord?

*April 2023 update. I still wasn’t completely happy with how all the clips looked so I re-edited the vid, swapping out those clips with a few new ones. I won’t be uploading that version to YouTube, however.

I had the opportunity to spend a night away in a hotel, and thought I should have a new Digital Wonderland video to watch. I already had a few ideas for the next one, but not enough of any single idea to make an entire 90 minute video, so decided to cobble together a potpourri video.

Here's an abridged version.

Watch on YouTube

And here’s the playlist. Number links refer to previous playlists on which the artist appeared.

Song (Year)		Artist	Link
Vortex 1: Mario Kart A single lap around 18 increasingly futuristic courses.
1.	“Heaven” (1987)	Eurythmics	Link
2.	“Green Jellyfish” (2008)	Dynastic 4	Link
3.	“Gizmo” (2014)	eM	Link
Vortex 2: Sci-Fi Movies, Part 1 featuring clips from: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Dark Star (1974)
4.	“Changes Come” (2011)	Gus Gus	Link
5.	“Taurus” (2004)	Zombi	Link
6.	“Ballad for Amalia” (2010)	Opolopo	Link
7.	“They Them” (2001)	Jan Jelinek	Link
8.	“Eidolon” (2011)	NOEL-KIT	Link
9.	“Quantum” (2009)	Keinzweiter	Link
Vortex 3: Akihabara (link)
10.	“Fly” (2012)	dayz & knite	Link
11.	“Combo4” (2007)	TEC	Link
12.	“Tokyo” (2020)	Nohumano	Link
13.	“Sealed Dimension” (2007)	Tatsu 1, 2	Link
14.	“Valve POD” (2019)	Peel Seamus 2	Link
Vortex 4: Sci-Fi Films, Part 2 featuring scenes from: Blade Runner (1982) THX-1138 (1971) Zardoz (1974)
15.	“Disrupted Neural Gateway” (2014)	Transllusion	Link
16.	“4th Experience (Morning Star)” (2011)	Blurix	Link
Vortex 5: “Faux Shouwa”, Japan Actually, Shimokitazawa (link)
17.	“Yugao” (1965)	Master Hagiwara Master Hatta Master Kitagawa Master Kikusui Master Mineuchi Master Yamaguchi	Link
18.	“Echigojishi” (1965)
19.	“Godan-Kinuta” (1965)
20.	“Haru no Kyoku” (1965)
21.	“Shin Takasago” (1965)

Notes:

• One of the clips came from the 1974 movie Zardoz, which gave me the idea to call each section a Vortex. Here’s an audio clip from when Sean Connery’s character approaches the periphery shield—the voice is that of actor David de Keyser.

• There was another Vortex between Akihabara and Sci-Fi Films Part 2, but I was dissatisfied with the original footage, despite several attempts to re-edit it, so I deleted it, making this Digital Wonderland video shorter (about 68 minutes) than the others (usually 90 minutes).

• Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Blade Runner all feature the work of the late Douglas Trumbull (1942-2022). Even after all these years, his works still look more futuristic than modern CGI effects.

• I wanted a mid-century “faux Shouwa” look for the final Vortex. The best I could find was a clip from Shimokitazawa of a festival taking place in narrow alleys. To make the footage look older, I blurred it slightly, increased the exposure, added a warm golden glow, and an “old film” filter. These effects, however, made the footage look more like a colorized silent film! More Taishou era than Shouwa, perhaps, but it works for me!

The trouble with making my “Digital Wonderland” videos (first, second) is the amount of time it takes to find suitable videos from the internet, or to create my own. I had an idea for what I thought would be a quicker-to-assemble video: clips of people walking, either in nighttime Japanese cities or underground malls, and of POV drives. Superimpose some computer graphics over them for a “cyborg-eye” feel, then add some music. Nothing could be simpler, right? Alas, even a “simple” solution takes time if one wants it to look good, and this was no exception. After considerable trial-and-error, I came up with the fourth* video. Since I was using various locations, I divided the “journey” into six “districts”, with voices in Japanese and English introducing each one:

Here's an abridged version. Note: the district order is different here than on the full-length version.

Watch on YouTube

Success! What makes the video particularly trippy (not apparent in the abridged version) was exporting it at a very low resolution (480 x 270), then watching it on a phone using a stereoscopic headset. This created some extreme Moiré pattern distortions, such as:

1. Illuminated windows seem to crawl across distant buildings like insects; as the buildings come closer, each window becomes a television monitor, each broadcasting something different.

2. Lettering (especially kanji!) shimmers and looks like rapidly changing characters—or perhaps spasmodic Space Invaders.

3. The low resolution makes distant objects blur together; as they get closer, they morph and shift into different objects and become a sort of Rorschach test. For example, what looked like a herd of zebras eventually morphed into its true form, a group of parked bicycles.

And here’s the playlist. I made it a point not to use music by any musician from the previous videos, with one (inadvertent) exception (Spirit Catcher).

Song (Year)		Artist	Link
District 1: Ōsaka: Dōtonbori, Namba (link)
1.	“Attlan Techno” (2015)	Barce	Link
2.	“Gravity Waves” (2002)	Drexciya	Link
3.	“Samalaginibad” (2008)	Dynastic	Link
District 2: New Transit Yurikamome, from Ōdaiba (link)
4.	“Bleep” (2013)	Lunatique	Link
5.	“Real Exchange” (2012)	Cliff Tower	Link
6.	“Love Theme” (2008)	Fred Falke	Link
7.	“Order” (2018)	Archaic Revival	Link
District 3: Nagoya Station (link)
8.	“Together” (2017)	1st Day Today	Link
9.	“Ne-uter” (2018)	Anton Lanski	Link
10.	“Spring Water” (2017)	cold00n	n/a
11.	“Offshore” (2004)	Yatsuo Motoki	Link
12.	“Toss and Turn” (2009)	Knifestyle	Link
District 4: Tōkyō: Ginza (link)
13.	“Reliability” (2011)	Kel’	Link
14.	“Black Skyline” (2004)	Neurotron	Link
15.	“Dunaj” (2009)	Sublime Porte	Link
16.	“Um Dada” (2019)	Stephen Mallinder	Link
District 5: Shuto Expressway: Tōkyō to Kanagawa (link)
17.	“Sedona” (2010)	Spirit Catcher	Link
18.	“Mutual Method” (2014)	Fcode and Xen Meyer	Link
19.	“Honey Rydes” (2021)	Robe Strobe	Link
20.	“Nerd Dreams” (2009)	Bingo Boy	Link
21.	“Twin Wash” (2017)	PVLMS	Link
District 6: Ōsaka: Umeda Underground (link)
22.	“No Data” (2015)	Hermetico	Link
23.	“Press This Button” (2012)	Tilman	Link

*The third was footage of a drive through nighttime downtown Los Angeles and a walk through a Japanese mall, with music from three artists (Sheaf, Soarer, Yu) as well as various announcements from train stations, stores, etc.

I have a bit of a cyberpunk / cyborg “fetish”, which includes things like:

• what I call “monorail music” (somewhere between house and chillwave)
• cyberpunk environments like Kowloon Walled City and Anata No Warehouse
• alternately: pristine, futuristic, utopian environments
• electronic noise, audio glitch
• retro computer graphics, vector graphics (such as Atari’s Quadrascan), Quantel Paintbox
• the computer entities from films like Dark Star, THX-1138, and Logan’s Run that, even when warning of impending doom, sounded calm, detached, almost seductive
• disorientation, sensory overload, detachment; a hazy dreamlike feeling
• Yuki Nagato from Haruhi Suzumiya and Canti from Fooly Cooly
• many pleasant memories of sitting in Japanese internet cafés, which were cool, dark, and quiet—they were oases where I could escape, relax, listen to monorail music, and have free coffee. I could imagine I was in a spaceship, sitting in the dark, with only the glow from the monitors providing illumination.

I decided to make a 90-minute video I could play on my phone, inserted into a virtual reality headset. The video was made up of short clips which included footage from Triterasu commercials, Takako Minekawa’s “Plash” music video, Tokyo’s Yamanote Line display, Digidrive (a video game from the bit Generations series), and Jimmy Edgar’s “New Touch” music video. Using a stereoscopic viewer without a stereoscopic image produces an odd effect: each eye sees half of the image, but the images overlap and create a single image. I discovered this while testing the video, but decided the disorientation would be just fine for my purposes.

And then I added music; the playlist was:

Song, Year		Artist	Link
1.	“Deep 1.3”, 2015	Q-Calm	Link
2.	“Amplify”, 2019	A.L.I.S.O.N.	Link
3.	“Bubble Gum”, 2008	Mr. Pips	Link
4.	“El Tren”, 2007	Tatsu	Link
5.	“Subliminal”, 2010	Yoshinori Sunahara	Link
6.	“Dive”, 2018	Yu-utsu and A.L.I.S.O.N.	Link
7.	“Caligula”, 2018	Windows96	Link
8.	“These Waves of You”, 2016	Gridline	Link
9.	“Berauschen”, 2007	Fineline	Link
10.	“Tenth Floor”, 2015	Ishii Fuwa	Link
11.	“Gossiping”, 2013	Geolm	Link
12.	“MEGA”, 2017	Emil Rottmayer	Link
13.	“Dive Control”, 2008?	Morgenklang	Link
14.	“Clear”, 2017	Yu-utsu	Link
15.	“WISDOM”, 2017	Ian O’Brien	Link
16.	“Home A3”, 2004	Uese	n/a
17.	“Dive”, 2018	Yu-utsu and A.L.I.S.O.N.	Link

“Dive” appears twice simply because I like it so much I would’ve been happy to listen to nothing else!

After a few viewings, I tried it with a little THC in the form of a tincture (0.75ml). I felt as if I were in some kind of digital utopia or wonderland, kept “happy and placid” by subsisting only on data, imagery, and advertising carefully chosen by the (supposedly) benevolent powers-that-be! Here is an edited version for demonstration purposes:

Watch on Vimeo

Note: please excuse the image quality: the video was exported at a low resolution since it was meant to be viewed on a phone.
One thing I noticed when I used THC was how different the music sounded. I felt like I was hearing all kinds of detail, some nearly imperceptible, that I had not noticed before (and which led me to item 5, the “audio bonbons” described here). Even the synthesized instrumentation and samples stood out: with headphones, I could hear how carefully and artfully sculpted they were. It gave me a new appreciation for creators of electronic music.