1991 at the Waterfront Bar.
I cast a schmaltzy spell over the audience, while they murmur about my identity. I had just cut off my long hippie hair!
Sweet video production by Reel `N Video, George and Penny Frazier. They now live in Licking Missouri, selling pine nuts from wildcraft, and promoting related environmental concerns. They appeared before the lens on
FOX TV's Trading Spouses last year.
In the early 90's, not long before the date of this performance, I sat in the local food co-op's dining area, sharing thoughts on using the Homer cable access to make and share TV programs using my Amiga video computer. Brother Asaiah Bates told me emphatically, "Call it WKFL, brother," for wisdom, knowledge, faith and love.
I was barely aware that the letters had originally been associated with
Krishna Venta, WKFL Fountain of the World cult, and the Barefooters who settled in Homer in the 1950's. WKFL as "station call letters" seemed charmingly anachronistic, yet edgy! The name also belongs to a Homer park dedicated to peace, on land donated to the city by Brother Asaiah. You can read about controversy sourounding that issue in the sample pages of
Brother Asaiah at Amazon.com.
George and Penny contacted me when I had some recognition for
Beef-- Having It Your Way. They contacted me again soon after, and presented me this edited Singing In The Rain Karoake performance. We touched bare feet, that peculiar intimacy seen on Penny-Meets-the-Zandi's on Trading Spouses.
Soon we were making a local cable access pilot. We combined my ideas, abilities and video computer with their complimenting VHS video equipment, skill sets, and brain children of their own. I lasted through the pilot episode, which presented an interview and the chant of a visiting monk from Tibet; a moderated panel on values, featuring a varied swatch of community representatives held at the Homer Family Theater; and Behind The Scenes of The Wearable Arts Show.
That was fifteen years ago. It no longer requires full-blown legal skills to broadcast, since this internet obsoletes local cable access channels. My
Sanyo Xacti
camera exceeds VHS. It's tapeless, fits in any pocket. My just-average PC runs my old graphics programs better and faster under Windows XP, using an Amiga emulation program. Many more locals are film-making.
I'm ready to do art again, after having mostly dropped it since WKFL TV, to grip a personal value system that includes art, while purging mystical notions. Art need not require sacrifice, just sensible risk. I'm less easily directed by those who know the secret of manipulating personal mysticisms in others. I'm older and I've gotten wiser, at least to some notions.
Thanks to nanotech, for the last nine years
I've had better nutrition. I'm fit from maintaining my boycott on the motor industry, and I'm capturing and sharing the sights. The City of Homer is catching up to my stride, putting down more paths for walking and biking, encouraging personal fitness and the reduction of fossil fuel dependancy.
"I'll walk down the lane
with a happy refrain..."
