To Live and PXL in LA

I haven’t been to LA since living there in '89-'90.  I drove a front-end loader at a garbage plant in Long Beach on Terminal Island for 8 months and shot footage on my Fischer Price PXL 2000 camera that I had bought at Toys-R-Us for about $100.  The camera uses audiocassettes to record audio and visual simultaneously, running at about 5 times the speed the tape normally runs on a tape deck.  The best description I’ve heard compares the b&w picture quality to a Chuck Close painting; grainy, fragmented and blurry.  I documented a whole lot of junk on my PXL, particularly while living in LA for those 8 or so months and had two short films in the 'PXL This 14' "festival" held every year in LA.  By “festival” I mean night-of-PXL-films- at-a-small-video-gallery. Last Friday afternoon I realized that the 15th Annual ‘PXL This’ festival was happening on Saturday the 19th at Sponto Gallery in Venice.  I done did book my flight and arrived in LA Saturday morning at 11AM.  All told, I spent less than 24 hours in LA County.  I had to take a nap the minute I arrived at my hotel and then went down to the beach in Santa Monica to see how commercialized everything had become.  I can’t say I recommend LA for a single day when flying from NY, the whole time I felt like I was on the verge of a mental coma.  I’m not one of those New York types that hate LA., I honestly could live on either coast.  But I must say, it is a strange and curious place.  It’s just so…. different (from New York).  Take the weirdo’s for instance.  They have their whole own breed of weirdo’s out there, I can’t even relate.  More like hippy-Manson-weirdo’s than your East Coast, city-bred weirdo’s.  West Coast Weirdo’s seem more like they’re on Angel Dust than actually 'touched'.  And another thing that stood out was the LA Homeless Army.  I guess you could say that the homeless population in LA seems a lot bigger and possibly more intelligent than our NYC homeless, it being warm and beautiful in LA all the time.  LA’s homeless don’t live in the subways, they live under palm trees, next to flowering Bird of Paradise plants , which until yesterday, I had never seen except in the florist.  Our homeless are defiantly quieter, too.  Being homeless in LA practically requires that you walk around shouting inanities into the air, or dance in the street, or do things with a plastic bag that I can see on next season’s runways.  So that night, after my nap, after my walk, feeling like I was coming off drugs and knowing I had about 5 hours left to enjoy myself, I drove my rent-a-car to Venice for the big PXL event.  Evidently, PXL usage is alive and well, which was a real treat, having never seen any PXL films beside my own.  And boy was there enough PXL to go around, 4 full-blown hours worth, mommy.  People are putting a lot more thought into it than I am.  Evidently other PXL’ers actually try to make something whereas I just aim for throwaway whatever-ness.  My entry, of course, was totally retarded; titled '10 Movements-America', it consisted of random footage from a family reunion in the Live Free of Die state of NH.  My mom kept running us up there in the early 90’s saying that my grandmother was sure to be taking her last breath any day then.  One of the ‘PXL This’ organizers, Eli Elliot, my personal heaven sent PXL guru, edited my footage in the name of art and turned my scrap shots into a titled, credited, edited PXL film.  Without him, I’d be nothing.  LA in a day, what the hell!?

Comments

[Krys O.]

Can we see your movie? Please?

[Angie]

I've got a friend (PXL director Lance Wagner - "God’s Little Soldiers") who's been doing the PXL camera thing since the late 80s - just this past week I was wondering if the PXL camera craze was still in full-swing and (thanks to your blog entry) it's seems to be doing fine.

I was in a little grunge band in the early 90s, and (to everyone's amazement) Lance shot an entire video for us with his PXL camera. Movement is key when shooting in PXL, so he draped reams and reams of aluminum foil around the soundstage in order to get the right, shimmery effect. Thanks for pointing me in the right PXL direction!

PS - I wonder if these PXL cameras are still being manufactured anywhere (??)
Seems like the demand would be worth it - - even for a small company to do

cheers - Angie

[Kelly Jones]

Krys O.,
The FMU techies will add video to this blog after the Thanksgiving. Hope you can check back.

Angie,
PXL's are not being manufactured anymore, Fisher Price only made them for a couple of years, they flopped with the kids (so sad). I saw one for sale on the web for $600 (yikes). Guide your friend to the 'PXL This' site to submit, submit, SUBMIT!

[Henry Lowengard]

Kelly:
I'm outing myself as a PXL owner too... it used to be my only video camera. I did the little mod that let it put out NTSC video so it could use a real VCR for recording, but I also have a box of PXL tapes I made about 10 years ago. PXL runs about 8 times normal cassette speed - a 10 minute
cassette lasted about 90 seconds! I used my old 4 track casette machine and some software I wrote to put a bettter quality sound track on it. Last time I tried it, though, the PXL wasn't working so well.

The original video in this mpeg, colorized triple head, was taken with a PXL, captured with homebrew video framegrabbing software and maniputated with homebrew animation software.

I oughta stop talking about myself!