A Blog About the Writing Life

Blog post #2

INDISPENSABLE ARCHIVISTS

Chapter One of MY SEVENTIES (excerpted here) begins in May 1970 at a chilly studio in suburban Washington. I was one of several college editors debating Elliott Richardson, Undersecretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, who was there to defend the U.S. expansion of the Vietnam War that had triggered massive campus demonstrations, including one at Kent State in Ohio where four students were shot and killed.

I had vivid memories of my performance that day — an incendiary radical telling truth to power. This was not true, I later learned, when I was able to actually view the program, thanks to the help of three different archivists, including one at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, which sent me a digital copy of the program "Divided We Stand." I was an earnest young journalist, albeit with longish hair, which compelled several viewers to send me ribbons in the envelope with their hate mail.

It was just one of the many instances where my memoir would have been incomplete and vastly worse, were it not for the professional archive community. Historians, of course, sort of live at libraries and archives, poring over primary and secondary sources to discover and validate facts. As a self-funded writer, I could not afford to travel to far-flung cities to research. I was dependent upon the ever-expanding number of online archives that have preserved and posted historically significant video and related assets for the world to use.

I am so grateful to the archivists. If you have any interest in this history, you should be too. After all, I was trying to tell my version of the video and cable TV movements in the 1970s. Extraordinary to actually look at some of the work, including the tapes made from 1970 to 1975 at the Washington Community Video Center in the nation's capital.

When I started the memoir, very little of my own work could be viewed online. I should know — I'd been hauling around four or five boxes filled with half-inch black-and-white reel-to-reel videotapes that were degraded and unviewable.

My WCVC colleague Ray Popkin had his own cache of tapes, which he began to restore and post on Vimeo, all on his own dime. I was thrilled when he sent me the links, and agreed that we needed to find a better way to restore our center's work. At the same time, videographer extraordinaire Eddie Becker had begun talking to archivists at the D.C. Public Library, which had launched its fascinating Dig DC, the People's Digital Archive that includes hundreds of underground newspapers, photos, and other documents. They agreed to adopt the WCVC project, raising funds to restore, digitize and post what is now a nearly complete archive. Later, Ryan Shepard single-handedly scanned the ten years of the WCVC's publications, including TeleVISIONS, which chronicles the video movement across the decade.

The companion PDF identifies key archives holding important video repositories, including Video Data Bank in Chicago, Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, BAVC, Minnesota Media Arts, and of course, the public online sites, the Internet Archive, YouTube, Vimeo, JSTOR. Other fine archives were missing from my research, and I'm ashamed I didn't use them.

For guerrilla video veterans, however, one institution stands out — Chicago's Media Burn archive, founded in 2003 by longtime independent videomaker Tom Weinberg. Today, under the leadership of Sara Chapman, Media Burn houses more than 15,000 videos. In 2024, I attended Media Burn's symposium on the history of Guerrilla Television along with dozens of my geezer contemporaries from the movement. The event was the culmination of a three-year project to restore 1,000 tapes from the 70s, produced by groups from around the country. Chapman also hosted a series of "virtual talks with video activists," including yours truly, in which works were presented and history revealed. The Zoom audience was comprised of both veterans and younger video aficionados, many of whom pointed me to relevant tapes and collections during and after the Q&A. Talk about building community!

Building an online archive is no simple matter, but not nearly as complicated and costly as the task of restoring and preserving the original assets. Fifty-year-old half-inch videotapes are often bonded and unwatchable. They have to be carefully baked to fix sticky backing, cleaned manually, and transferred from analog to digital before they can be uploaded and viewed online. Groups like Bay Area Video Coalition and others listed on my PDF are experts and collaborate with nonprofits to bring the work to the public. (Note: film and other video formats require additional expertise, which can be found at the Library of Congress, George Eastman House, UCLA Archives, and other venerable institutions.)

It's fair to say, without these folks, nobody could study and write about media history. So, hail to the archivists, preservationists, and restorationists. Better yet, donate to them. Many are struggling in the current environment of decreased government support.

Blog post #1

WHY I WROTE THIS MEMOIR

At the end of the first year of the COVID pandemic came news of an old friend's death. Phil and I had been housemates in the Struggle and Snuggle Collective, one of many group houses in 1970s Washington, D.C., where I spent my twenties stumbling into adulthood.

It was a singular moment to be young, certainly for gay boys like Phil and me. We acted as though Stonewall's emancipation would last forever, rather than for the handful of years before the Plague decimated our generation.

His death led me to another former housemate, the poet Tom Daley, and to a memoir workshop he was teaching. I'd been puttering with my own story for years but had never committed to sharing the little memory pieces I was writing in workshops. The idea of starting up with Tom reignited the self-doubt that had crushed my ego a dozen years before. "Just who do you think you are?" I thought. "Who would read this stuff? Could I even do it?"

With no small amount of trepidation, I began to write, zeroing in on the decade of the 1970s — my coming of age, my coming out, my politics and career, my loves and losses. Territory I hadn't fully understood at the time, not until I got sober in the mid-90s.

I built a timeline from stacks of letters, odd-sized diaries, videos and photos, the detritus of a packrat's life. I contacted old friends to corroborate events I'd half-remembered or willfully forgotten. I spent more hours than I care to admit on Zoom calls with people I hadn't spoken to in decades, piecing together a world that felt both vivid and irretrievable. More on that in a future post.

My multi-year writing process yielded more than a manuscript for MY SEVENTIES. I rediscovered videos from the period, often salvaged by an army of dedicated and heroic archivists, inspiring me to restore my tapes moldering in my garage. The result has been the creation of the Washington Community Video Center Collection of video and print assets housed at thewebsite of the D.C. Public Library.

My deep dive into the 70s also brought me back to the dozens of short pieces of creative nonfiction I wrote in the early 2000s, some of which are now finding homes as "flash" or "micro" submissions to literary journals — a new world I'm really enjoying learning about. I hope the SHORT STORIES section of the site will grow as the submissions turn into publications. Even more thrilling is the new short fiction I've been writing. More to come on that soon.

A memoir is principally about the writer's reactions to events and their meaning. I've learned that my writing only comes alive when I poke at the vulnerable places in my main character — a headstrong young man named Nick, who rarely knew what he was doing or feeling, but kept on trying. The job for the narrator, also named Nick, has been to figure out what it meant.

What I wrote is explicit in places — about sex, drugs, and the mess I made of my emotional life. I've tried to tell it honestly, without sanitizing events or flattering myself too much. This is not exactly a history of the movements that touched my life — the counterculture and left-wing activism, the PortaPak and cable TV revolutions, gay liberation — though I've tried to depict them accurately. In the end, this is how I remember those days, corroborated where possible, invented where memory fails, organized into something like a story.

I'm a man in his seventies now, looking back at the decade of the Seventies, trying to understand how I became who I am. It's been a terrifying, exhilarating excavation.

MY SEVENTIES: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs and Videotape is currently seeking representation. If you're an agent or publisher and want to know more, visit the Memoir page or get in touch.