Dear you's,
Salty Eyes on youtube--
What's the story?
We spent weeks with friends scouring and scamming Oakland for working televisions and VCR's (nearly 50 pairs), and endlessly practicing the motion diagrams on chalk-drawn concrete with cardboard box TV surrogates-- all for less than 1 and 1/2 minutes of footage. (The video was shot in double speed in order to then slow it to the 2 and 1/2 minute video you are now watching)
The one-take, do or die video was shot for relative pennies, and if you like it and forward it to a friend, or put it on your page, it will be promoted for just as little.
The idea was to create a modern appropriation of what is often dubbed the first music video ever shot, which is Bob Dylan's cue card dropping Subterranean Homesick Blues. It's been referenced hundreds of times, which a simple wiki-search will illuminate, if you're curious. Our concept: to replace the cue cards with recently-antiquated box tv's (as flatscreens, HD's, and plasmas have recently and quickly become the new staple). Old box tv's of the 80's and 90's have lost nearly all value, so are being discarded at such a rate that it was just plausible enough that we would be able to, with a bit of conniving, score enough of them for free to illustrate our song's lyrics while still funding the video on our own pocket jingle.
The catch, we found, is that due to a chemical found in the vacuumed picture tube, called cadmium, and lead particles in the glass, the government is paying a quarter per lb for recycled televisions, and has deemed it illegal and hazardous to break a television's picture tube. Now really, the harm that can come to a person from this chemical is probably no worse than sitting on the Jersey Turnpike with one's windows down, sucking on truck exhaust, but nonetheless, they don't want these things imploding in landfills, and so are quite serious about rounding these box tv's up.
So sometimes we were schoolteachers, trying to get monitors and VCR's for our classrooms, and other times, we were simply doing a brief art installation, and "no mam, in any way, would we accidentally puncture a tube."
We did tests. 19 Times out of 20, you can drop the tube on it's screen, and it will not break. Mind you, this glass is leaden-- Superman can't see through it, for damnsake. We searched youtube, looking for people smashing their televisions. It's a popular anti-cog image (especially prevalent in the grunge early 90's); some fed up, half brainwashed american leaping from the couch to liberate himself by obliterating his television's control over his desires. But search as we may, most videos on youtube of people attempting this rebellion looked more like aluminum baseball bats bouncing off of unscathed glass, muttered curse words, and good old realistic anticlimax.
And it was true, we wouldn't accidentally puncture a tube. It was an intention. Like I said though, 19 times out of 20, you couldn't break the thing with an anvil. But we dropped about 50 of these things, so if you're curious as to whether any tubes were broken, you can do the math. (A deserved thanks to Bryce from Street to Nowhere, his brother Cooper, our tour manager Boomer, and some home sewn hazmat suits-- all wreckage and rubble was returned safely enough to the proper recycling authorities.)
This is a diagram of the shoot, which we studied as a Harvard law graduate would for a bar exam. The stars are the points of television/concrete impact, and are color coded with the name of the dropper. The numbered squares are the tv's, staged behind the backpedaling camera dolly, where we would retrieve them, and follow our colored path on to the frame.
The song at double speed, we found impossible to synch our screen-words with, so we recorded a set of audio cues over the chipmunks-do-decomposer style mp3. Perhaps you've already stumbled upon it on our myspace, or on a friend's page.
And what's with our drummer Matt Whalen? It has lately been implied that he is our contrary reply to Tommy Lee. I think this hilarious, refreshing, and accurate. When the Wizard and I pitched the rest of the band the concept for the video, Matt was visibly concerned with the safety issues, and so it was written that he would not partake in the destruction. He and his white tv with a fire hose roll of extension cords are my favorite part of the video. Without his element of salvation, the video wouldn't have been a successful reflection of the song, and damn certain I was so wrapped in the glory of destruction that I would never have entertained the idea, if not for Matt's unique, well, disposition isn't the right word, but it's the first that comes to mind.
And now, a list of pleases and inferred thank you's:
Help us get the vid seen, and the tune heard?--
Make the sped up cue track on our myspace your default song?
Embed the video in your page?
Forward links to your friends and enemies?
As minor as it may seem to you, your support makes a big difference to a little video (and band) like ours.
Enjoy, and
keep it no secret.
-co-director of Salty Eyes (along with Michael Coleman, Emilee Seymour, and the Wizard Miles Hurwitz.)
