Home on the Tube: The Immediate Future of Video Free America

Publication TypeJournal Article
AuthorsAigner, Hal
SourceCity Magazine (1973)
Keywordsbibliographic
Abstract

Excerpt: During the sixties there sprang from what is popularly known in television a technological offspring called video. Made possible through the development of low-cost taping and play back devices, video differed from its progenitor in that it was relatively inexpensive and occasionally came within the economic grasp of independent artists. Those early days of personal porta-packs and home television monitors were much like anything else in its infancy. There was lots of high energy, frequent lapses in maturity, and much ado about very little. The Bay Area's participant in the mayhem was a now defunct collective called Electric Eye, some members of which went on to form the production group, Video Free America. VFA subsequently created the finest video theater work to date. an avant-garde soap opera titled The Confirming Story of Carol and Ferd.The piece is an hour-and-a-half documentary chronicling the attempted marriage between a one-eyed homosexual junkie and a woman who,among many other things, was once mistress to Lenny Bruce.By maintaining close contact with the better video artists throughout the country, and by exercising considerable taste, VFA has gathered and programmed an extended series of the finer material generated by the rising tide of tape freaks. Bill Creston's tapes. Mr. Creston is an independent New York humorist with a sense of vision so, uh, unusual he may actually be the person running this country. This night's show presents Creston's "Cripple", "Cracks", "Bert Lahr", "The Grey Speckled Bird", "From Grandma's House to Bar Mitzvah", and other works of questionable reality. Presentation wi!l be' August 24-25 at 7:30 and 10:00 p.m. General admission is $2.50."