That “debate” last night was awful. I think most people already knew who they are going to vote for anyway before last night, and if they didn’t, uhmm, what’s wrong with them? I think it’s pretty clear we need a change. I’m not thrilled with the candidate, but we can’t go on the way we’ve been going on. That’s really clear to me.
Yesterday I went over to Earth-1 to hang out and visit and while there I decided to pull out the old 8mm movies. I still remember how to run it! The old Keystone 98Z! My grandmother taught me how, and in fact, I think that was really the first time I got into shooting scenes although I didn’t realize it at the time. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the real good films of me and my immediate family – have to look around, there’s one where we all are in makeup as KISS circa 1978 with my mom as Gene Simmons and looks amazing – so we only watched ones of like my uncle’s wedding and my cousins little league games, and ones when they were newborns (boring). There were some gems scattered in there though. There was a scene of me, possibly aged 3 or 4, running around the bases after one of those little league games. I have no recollection of that event. There was also me riding some kind of duck but it didn’t have any eyes for some reason – also no recollection. I enjoyed looking at the cars in some of the shots from the early 1960s and the bouffant hairdos on the women. Some films we had no idea where or who the people were. Let’s just say my grandma’s film labelling wasn’t the greatest. There were some of my mom as a youngster and recently married – so young looking! And some of her practicing for upcoming performances back in the day (she was somewhat of an entertainer back then, her mother, my grandmother, even made all her costumes! Some of them were on these films and they looked killer!) I’ll have to do an entry on this someday because I think it’s pretty cool and I’d like to learn more about that.
I was amazed that I remembered how to run the projector. Not sure if I’d remember how to run the camera, which we still have. I remember you’d load the film and wind it up as you filming the scene, of which you wouldn’t know how it came out until you got it developed and waited 2 or 3 weeks. I remember we would go to Sears and they would send it out and let us know 3 weeks later that it was ready for pickup. Since you couldn’t tell how the movie came out while filming, a lot of times the picture is too dark to see anything or overdeveloped and everything was too white and washed out. I learned early on that it doesn’t work well in darkened rooms. I remember at one point while filming you would have to stop, open the camera, and flip the film over for the second half. These films would them come back to you developed on a reel that you would place on the projector. You feed the film through and kind of thread it through, almost like a sewing machine, until you have enough film the get it onto the second reel, and then watch the movie. The films themselves are only a couple of minutes long, and none have sound. Also can I also mention the original bulb is still in there and still works like a charm? It has got to be over 50 years old! That’s craftsmanship!
