Chris' Home Movies at College: John

Long post, short video.

Length: 1:02

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A high school friend moved into the same residential college as me, but as the story so often goes we drifted apart fairly quickly. He sought the newness of college life, and I did what I could to withdraw from it. In visits to his dorm room, however, I struck up a friendship with his roommate, John Byrne, a Medill (journalism) student from Elgin, IL. He was smart, bookish almost. He almost always wore a button down shirt and sweater. And he made me laugh a lot with his dry wit. Again there's little here of a video record of our friendship (beyond the standard ribbing), but after Laura he was my next best new friend. He and I would hang out late into the night, and wind up joining dormmates Dave and Ted for their graveyard freeform radio show on friday nights (glimpsed here, more video to come). Looking back on it now, he wasn't the kind of fellow I picture at a college radio station at four o'clock in the morning.

After freshman year we spent less time together, and by the time we were seniors, John was co-Editor-in-Chief at the Daily Northwestern. I have no idea where he is now. There are a lot of John Byrnes in the world.

Chris' Home Movies at College: Laura

Long post, short video.

Length: 1:02

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When I arrived at Northwestern University in the fall of 1986, I was in a place of intense grief. I had left behind a community of close high school friends (and a girlfriend) back in California, and was more invested in maintaining those relationships than in creating new ones. And of course I was entering a place (college) where all my freshman peers were bouncing off the walls with excitement at their new found independence from their families, their towns, their high schools, everything associated with home.

All except one.

Just a few doors down the hall from me was a girl named Laura Allen, from Oak Park, Illinois. She was also having trouble detaching from her close-knit circle of friends back home. Some were still in Oak Park, and several had headed to school up in Madison, so they were occasionally accessible on weekends. But in the rhythm of day-to-day life it was still too far away.

Laura and I found each other pretty quickly, and we would stay up late together swapping stories of our crazy friends, and showing each other photo albums of high school memories. We also hung out, shared meals, and spent time exploring the campus and town together. Our intimacy was intense, but it wasn't romantic, or sexual (Laura was starting to date, and I was still preposterously attached to my girlfriend back home). We clung to each other I think because when we were around each other we could be homesick. In other social settings you had to put on a good face, pretend you wouldn't rather be someplace else (and with somebody else). Other people asked you to live in the present.Together Laura and I let each other live in our separate pasts.

As I was editing this segment together late that fall, I was struck at how I had failed to record any hint of our actual relationship (I didn't realize at the time that its hidden-ness was part of its function). As I showed these brief video moments to my family and friends back home, I had to work to explain how important Laura had been to me, to THEM. Because in the footage there's no evidence.

Looking back, I can still identify my friendship with Laura as one of the most significant of my time in college, and yet after that first quarter we drifted quickly apart. When we got back to school after Christmas break, something unspoken had changed between us. Of course what had happened is that over the break each of us had experienced collisions both large and small between our expectations of home and the realities of it. So that as we returned, our shared homesickness habit was less able to deliver the fix it had the quarter before. And in clinging to each other a little less, we were each free to find a few more things about the new place that could help get us interested in the present (and ultimately the future). In a way I needed to let go of Laura like I needed to let go of home.

Chris' Home Movies at College: Rod

The phases of my life become accentuated as I look back at this snapshot of my freshman year roommate, Rod Gingrich. I wasn't really playing music then, and we didn't have a whole lot else in common. After the first quarter we retreated to our separate spheres (as much as you can living in the same room) and didn't interact much, not until we met up as seniors to collaborate on a video rock opera.

Now, of course, I'd be wanting to make music with him. (Although I can't claim to be as proficient on any of my instruments as he was on guitar at the age of nineteen.)

I believe the pieces performed here are © Rod, so no Creative Commons license on this one.

Visual note: this was shot mostly at nighttime in ambient light on an aging tube camera, so much of it may appear dark and visually indistinct. Especially with a standard Windows monitor. It's more about the audio anyhow.

Length: 5:06

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Chris' Home Movies at College: Equipment

I forgot that I'd first started videoblogging in the fall of 1986, during my first quarter away at school.

Only then I was using an over-the-shoulder VTR with the camera attached by a cable. Editing was linear deck-to-deck with insert capability. And distribution meant dubbing to VHS and putting a tape in the mail (I abandoned that quickly and just brought the tape home at Christmas to show my friends and family.)

I'll be putting up several of these two decade-old videoblog posts in the coming weeks. I've added titles, and cleaned them up a bit in iMovie, because I can.

This first bit is from my only surviving copy on VHS, and it comes at the head of the tape, so the dropouts are pretty rough. I'd considered leaving it out, but I believe it's important to start off with a full disclosure of what. a dork. I was.

Length: 0:47

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