I'm converting ... my videos to DVDs

I did it. I did the DVD thing, the Third-Thirds-DVD-thing: I sat down with the VHS videotapes and now they’re being converted into DVDs.

It was the carpet that pushed me over the edge. Of course, that’s what it’s been doing with everything. The pile of videotapes is in a crate that sits on the carpet. If the carpet has to go, I have to face the videotapes.

Videotapes come in several sizes. Big cassettes which have been copied from little cassettes. Uncopied little cassettes and even tinier where-did-those-come-from-what-are-they cassettes. While the little cassettes have no labels, they’re still first generation, which is a good thing. To watch them, you have to put them in the adapter thing. First one in got munched. Now I know how to use the adapter.

So I had to sit and watch. Unfortunately, last week I finally donated the pile of dust-covered remotes for things we didn’t own anymore. Hmm, one of them must have been the remote for the VCR….

I have a friend who said, when her daughters were grown, that she still saw herself as a mother of young girls. I know how she felt. Going through those videos, I remembered that bond and I craved it. Craved it. I was like a long-sober addict who still feels the biological pull years later. When that little girl in the video spied me in bed, she giggled and ran under the covers to cuddle with me. When she put on dress-up clothes and pranced around like an actress possessed, I marveled at the world she inhabited. Even later on, when we were filming her science experiments and had to do a dozen takes because things weren’t working and she was in such despair but then it FINALLY WORKED, I knew our family was a team.

The most dramatic thing about those videotapes? How much laughter they record. You can’t watch hours and hours of people laughing and enjoying each other’s company without being affected. It’s like that guy who cured his disease watching funny movies. I got in the car, drove to Tim’s workplace, and kissed him.

You don’t take videos of making beds, vacuuming, cooking dinner. You don’t take videos of watching TV, mowing the lawn, going shopping. No videos of laundry, being bored, writing to-do lists. But to see all of us laughing and enjoying, telling stories and laughing, ice-skating, swimming, riding waves and laughing. The camera operator always laughed at what he or she was filming; you could hear it. All that laughing! The laughing was contagious.

Studies have shown that Facebook makes people depressed. They look at all those fun, happy things other people are doing and get bummed out. But the videos were of US! We were looking at ourselves having a terrific time. Yes, some of those videos were taken during times of unemployment, stress, fatigue. But despite that, we were still laughing – there’s evidence!

Maybe watching videos for so many hours is like brain-washing. There I am, kind of negative and harassed about carpeting, and I spend six hours watching laughing videos. You can’t come away unchanged. I am resolved: I will add more laughter to my days and appreciate all the people who are part of that laughter.

At the same time, it’s bittersweet. Time has passed. I discovered the oral history tapes I’d made of my mother in 1997. She was thrilled to be filmed, needed no prompting to tell me of her grandparents, her parents’ immigration, her life growing up in Brooklyn. This is the woman who now can’t remember the beginning of a sentence by the time she gets to the end. It made me want to fly to New York and watch these videos with her.

The videos just keep on giving. Pulling out the camera back then meant it was a special occasion and made it even more special. (It was before iPhones, before oppression-by-camera.) Watching the tapes this week has been such pleasure, such happiness. Taking them into Karl at Action Video was such a treat, too; all that personal attention! Now, when the DVDs are ready, I get to share them, to spread all that laughter around to my extended family. I can hardly wait. I bet we laugh.

RIP: Floppy Disks, VHS Tapes, and Slide Photographs

Glenn Kurtz came to speak in Anchorage. He’s the author of Three Minutes in Poland.  While moving his grandparents out of their apartment, he came across old family 16-mm movies. By now, they were so old they’d melted into hockey pucks in the can.

But Glenn knew the movies were of his grandparents’ European tour in 1938. What he didn’t know – but later uncovered – was that they visited their tiny homeland village in Poland one month before the Jews in it were liquidated.

So Glenn had the film restored, and the book chronicles how he found a few survivors with great memories and was able to re-create a view of now-extinguished village life. It’s a fascinating book, described in this video clip.

I had a question for Glenn:

 Okay, I knew this was a futile question….

But what Glenn also included in his book was a discussion of how long things last. Think about it: How many of you still have VCRs to play your VHS tapes? Cassette players to play your music? How many of you have a new version of Microsoft Word that can’t read your old documents? And how on earth would you read a floppy disk? (What’s a floppy disk?!?) Seen a slide projector lately? Even CDs and flash drives erode over time.

I found this liberating. Why save all this stuff that will prove un-readable and un-viewable? Get rid of it!

Except that I did transfer the 8-mm movies to VHS years back and just recently showed them to my 89-year-old mother, and she was thrilled to watch them and see her parents, her sisters, herself so young. But when will I transfer them to DVD?

And just imagine being a filmmaker like my friend Mary and how you have to keep updating all the creations of your professional life.

Unfortunately, this still leaves me where I started … with lots and lots of things on paper.