Hair clumps

[gwyn]

Had a very sad conversation with Evil Twin last night, who broke down into sobs on the phone because her hair has started falling out. I totally get how traumatic it must be for anyone, but especially for someone who is very vain and who just finished growing her hair out to shoulder length, finally getting it to the length she wanted. But I also think she will look good bald -- she got all the chin in the team, and has a strong jaw and actual cheekbones, a really clearly defined nose, and an actual forehead instead of big blank empty billboard-sized one like me. My big pudgy blancmange of a face would not look good without hair. Though I'm not going to tell her that. This is the first time she's really lost it; she told me about the panic attack and how overwhelmed she was the day she had to go cut off all her hair (they recommend that so the loss isn't so traumatic) and how she couldn't go get fitted for the wig because she freaked out. But I haven't actually experienced her having a meltdown and I felt so hopeless and helpless on the phone.

I know I will get to see her tomorrow night if nothing happens with my flight, but I still feel so useless and stupid when she's collapsing from the weight of the Brave Face. I fucking hate the Brave Face and the way everyone expects you to be all noble suffering and think positivey. I'm sick of the Brave Face and the expectation that people who have terminal illnesses are supposed to be models of strength and grace. It makes me angry that people expect victims of illnesses to be stalwart and strong. As Calamity Jane would say on Deadwood, Be fucked. Because people deserve to feel sorry for themselves and have breakdowns every once in a while. I liked that episode of Without a Trace last year, where Martin's aunt had cancer and was tired of wearing the Brave Face and holding everyone up with her Noble Acceptance of Fate. Feh.

I tried to amuse her by telling her I was tearing my hair out in sympathy with my old song video digitizing project. At least it got a tiny laugh out of her.


I'm a little over halfway done with the project to digitize and put on DVD my old La Femme Nikita vids and most of the X-Files vids. It's been interesting, when I'm not actually tearing my hair out or sniveling in frustration. I've learned a few things:

1. I've made a lot of vids. I mean, a lot. These aren't even encompassing my pre-button pushing vids, where I just sat on the couch and helped pick clips, or vids I've made in other fandoms (of which there are many many many).

2. I don't think there's a single vid in there that people really remember much or hold to their breast with deep abiding love. Not the way others make vids that are treasured and remembered. I know part of it is that I was always making vids to less popular fandoms (evil het! sssss). And part of it is the depressing thing, because people have complained that most of my vids are depressing and they don't like that. But damn, that's a lot of vid time that's just kind of washed out to sea! The XF audience has moved on, and there never was much of an audience for LFN, since it's such a feral fandom completely ignorant of vids. It's why I wonder why I'm doing something so hair-pullingly annoying when there's essentially no real audience for these ancient artifacts. I guess it's more about preserving a part of my own history, which somehow seems peculiarly egotistical.

3. Putting the songs in is the hellish part. It's totally a breeze to capture the original source (if painful, because many of my earliest vids I don't have original masters of, and the quality is really fucked) for me with my pass through and the editing deck, but when I used songs that I originally had edited onto tape or something, it becomes a total bitch. I also can't match many of the fadeouts because we often just turned down the volume, and that precipitate drop in sound is hard to match on the computer (i.e., it's not as easy to mimic bad technology with good tech!).

It's also been a total trip down memory lane, both good and bad. I haven't watched many of these vids in years and years. So all these feelings come flooding back -- remembering sherrold teaching me how to push the editing deck buttons on Only Happy When it Rains, the great waste video* we had, how she erased the vid accidentally but was too afraid to tell me! All the endless hours at Nicole's house, eating bad food and drinking gallons of soda pop. Or my first vid driving the decks, As Girls Go, a kind of follow the actor vid for David Duchovny (girly Mulder, Dennis/Denise on Twim Peaks, etc.). The first vid I made on my own editing deck in my own house, I Am a Rock, and how hard it was to wire my setup... all this stuff comes back to me, good and bad, and it's so strange because I haven't thought of it in so long.

I think out of all the vids, the closest one to being "remembered" was the first vid I ever made on my own, and it happened more by accident than design, There's No Way Out of Here. I remember so clearly the crazy, loud reaction to it at the Escapade show I brought it to, and how stunned I was that people liked it. Last year, the_shoshanna was talking about how we should have a show at Vividcon for our first vids, so that vidders could show how much they learned and their awkward first steps and feel better about early-days vids, and I said, Well, No Way Out was my first vid alone... and we howled, because the truth is, I know I'll never make anything that good again. In some ways, I wonder if everything that makes me so unhappy about vidding is because I know I shot my wad early, to be vulgar, and can never achieve that success again.

And I remember how angry some people were with me that I was wrecking the Media Cannibals -- I had het fandoms, I was using non-vidding music, blah blah. I grew very flinchy over time, very fan-misanthropic. These days I see people congratulating online vidders for using envelope-pushing music (rap, etc.), and it annoys me. Because a) online vidders are the only ones who count, you know, and b) where were these people when I was getting attacked for using a simple ethereal electronica song like Fall in the Light? I wish they'd been around, because at the time I felt like checking under my shirt to see if I was bleeding from the scratch wounds. "That's not vidding music" was one of the more polite ways someone put it; "it's a tone poem and I don't get tone poems" was probably the nicest comment. There were a handful of people who seemed to get it and supported it, but now, having to really do a lot of editing on Fall in the Light again and watching it a bunch of times, I feel like the vid is so quaint and insignificant; the idea that it would provoke people to say vicious things to me is so odd. I still love the vid dearly, maybe even more for having not seen it in so long, but it hardly seems provocative now.

And I sympathize so much with people like sockkpuppett, watching a vid they made a few years ago to an unusual song turn up every five minutes on the vidder LJ "I just did [the 5,000th] vid to Gary Jules's Mad World! Go watch!" Back in the day, I remember our Only Happy When it Rains being the single vid for that song around; now there are probably 3,000 done by all the people who haven't used up all the Evanescence songs. No one pays attention to anything that's happened before. It has the strange effect of making vids I once felt really pleased with turn into kind of a bore -- not because the vid itself is bad (I still just love our Only Happy), but because the music's been ground into the dirt by so many people since then, often in bad vids, that the luster of our own creation has worn off. This is one of the odder things about this project that I've discovered. It isn't so much the song reuse issue that I'm discussing here, but the effect of seeing something you did become so ubiquitous that it loses its freshness or vibrancy.

Now that I've gotten to the place where I'm using my own masters for the digitizing process, it's going faster and the video quality is better, but it's still a lengthy process to get it all together. Sound is the hardest part of the thing, because it doesn't come across through to the computer as well as the video, so you want to replace it. Fortunately I kept some of the edited music (on a computer! At the time, believe it or not, that was a Big Deal), and never got rid of CDs I bought only for those songs (we didn't have kazaa in my day!). But tape stretch and tape speeds of multiple decks makes it really challenging. Fall in the Light was the worst, but a couple of others are still off by hair-seconds; no one will likely notice, but it bugs me.

It's funny, too, how fond I am of the vids that never went anywhere. For all the crap I took, Fall in the Light is still maybe my favorite, and I love Writing Notes, an LFN vid that I don't think anyone has ever even paid attention to! I made it so many years ago, and wonder now what it would have been like to be able to include subsequent seasons of LFN. (Though I have the last laugh on Fall -- CSI: Miami used it at the end of the episode where they introduced the new NY-set series! Ha ha, I was there first!) I wonder if other vidders feel that way about their runt of the litter babies -- that they love the most ignored or least-appreciated vids the most, sometimes.

I guess it's been good to get away from making new vids for a while and just concentrate on preserving at least a little of my history, even if it's just for me in the end. They may not be as sophisticated as even my little iMovie can make, and they may betray my baby steps in vidding (even though I was learning from a Master), and they may seem awkward and old-fashioned as hell to a modern day audience expecting cool effects and super fast edits, but I do find the trip they take me along memory lane to be an enlightening one. At the very least, sometimes I can just sit back and go, man, I did that? On decks? Wow, I'm better than I realize!

* Waste video was the video track you used to lay down your song. The music used one of the stereo tracks, and the other track was used by your insert edits for your vid. To get those tracks, you taped over waste video from TV or another VCR, and then blew out the second track with your shiny new edits. We often had hilarious, wonderful waste video -- on Only Happy, we had a stupid Z-grade kung fu movie that was hysterically timed to the song; the HL vidders once got a nature program with squid that seemed to fit the song perfectly. And it was due to waste video of the Tombstone DVD that Jo and I discovered it fit for Never Left, our Tombstone vid on Don't Fight in the Snow.