Big Art Emerging: Super-8 Stills

Took a few screen shots tonight, with various degrees of success, from the DVD transfer of my Dad's super-8 footage. That's a still of my Dad above, emerging clearly refreshed from some body of water during the course of some family vacation somewhere. Like most family vacations, beaches were involved. We went to Cape Cod a lot in the early 70s.


This still of me was taken from footage of me running around the porch off my parents bedroom, sometime in the spring of 1973. That's almost a white boys fro I'm sporting there, an impressive accumulation of curls that I wore with a minimum of care throughout much of my childhood. By high school, with varying degrees of success, I tried to tame it with a hairbrush. I even flirted with mousse.


This is Robin, she looks all of about 2 here, sitting on our kitchen table and communing with and delighting in the lamp directly above her.


Lastly there's this shot of Randy and Mom from those heady days in the mid-70's when she was frosting her hair. I like this period of my Mom's long and varied hair history. These old stills have a patina that makes them particularly suitable for a certain EP cover aesthetic. My Mom, with her frosted hair and impressive white collar action, even looks like she could have been playing keyboards or the tambourine (maybe even taking lead vocals on one track!) for the band who would have released the EP with this as its cover.

I started a Flickr set for these super-8 stills and a few others here. With any luck I'll expand on it over the summer.

Abby Is the Iggy Pop of 3-Year Olds

Abby will sometimes run around the house in a pair of tights with no shirt on. It's what mermaids do. Abby's mermaid names are either Ariel or Magdelena and she's been swimming around shirtless for a while now. Less now then she once did. Back in February or March she'd swim the murky mermaid depths wearing only her tights just about every day. I'd turn the heater up a degree or two. We made her wear a shirt to bed, though even that would end up discarded on the floor next to her bed.

A shirt's on now more then it's off. But it still comes off from time to time when that old mermaid feeling overcomes her. It was during one of these moments of mermaid whimsy that I recently broke the news to Abby that she was like the Iggy Pop of 3-year olds. She immediately wanted to know who this Iggy Pop character was. So later, when Megan was down for her first nap, we watched a couple Iggy Pop videos on YouTube. I was quickly able to demonstrate that Iggy Pop was just this singer who felt more comfortable performing his songs for folks while naked from the waist up. Both Abby and I respected that.

So now, in those increasingly rare moments when Abby feels compelled to take her shirt off and become a mermaid, I remind her that she's still like the Iggy Pop of 3-Year Olds. A couple days ago she amended that title to something more befitting. "Daddy, I think I'm like the mermaid Iggy Pop of 3-year olds." And she is.