Deleted Tape, Magnetic History

Tape 1

In the year Nixon was to resign as president over the Watergate Tapes I had become fascinated with the possibility of deleting an act by removing it from its own record. Cassette tapes were a new technology, replacing the reel to reel, and I looked at images and prices of them in the weekly advertisements. I knew that the President had been caught on tape saying things that got him in trouble. I was shocked to know that he regularly used foul language, said horrible things about other people, and that he was being punished. This I could relate to, and saw him the way I would see a child. In his fear of being caught he had erased many sections of these tapes, and I imagined that the bad a President could do to be far worse than anything I could imagine, so I felt his fear in a way.

The sight of shiny, black cassette tape littering the ground, tangled in the steel of fences, or in the branches of trees soon was a thing I noticed more and more. I imagined this tape holding innumerable secrets from people in power. Secrets of war, of spying, of police abuse….things that I had heard of but knew nothing about. I thought that people in City hall must have dumped them in my neighborhood because it was unlikely that they would be found by anyone with the money to buy a machine to play them.

Tape 2

The small house at the coast was being built for years, at first by my grandmother’s husband. After he died she did much of the work herself. I had heard much about it, but never had the opportunity to see it first hand. After my own father died the travel ban to my grandmother’s seemed to ease a bit. There had always been a distance kept between our family and the families my parents grew up with. A distance kept because of the damage done to both of my parents by the lives of their own.

I don’t recall why or how I ended up at the Beach House, but I went there with my grandmother and my uncle, who was two years older than myself. I had begun spending time with my uncle after my father died. His bedroom was covered in black light posters from the then current albums and bands at the time; Pink Floyd, Peter Frampton, Led Zeppelin, and he had a number of marijuana plants growing under lamps, the resultant crop of which he sold at his school or in our neighborhood. But the beach house was incomplete, piles of lumber and fixtures lay about in the dust of unfinished rooms. Mostly I spent my time alone, being right at puberty, my uncle being solidly rooted in that American structure called a Teenager. Which suited me, I had always spent most of my time alone when not with my own brothers and sisters. In the evening my uncle and I would sit in his unfinished bedroom, rolling joints and smoking from his collection of glass pipes.

One afternoon when it was too damp and cold to enjoy my usual wanderings in the forest, I stayed inside instead, finding a few cassette tapes, which were labeled on their covers by a series of places and dates. Putting one of them in the player I heard my uncle’s voice with the voices of different girls. Never having had sex before, it took me some time to realize that my uncle had secretly recorded himself having sex with these girls. When he returned that evening I told him I had found the recordings in hopes he could tell me more about sex. Up to that point my sex life had been spent negotiating with Jesus and Satan over my inability to stop jerking off and my chances in either Heaven or Hell. Real, obtainable sex between actual humans had become remotely possible. My uncle was angry with me, and asked me if I had listened to all of the tapes. When I said that I hadn’t he took the tapes and later hid them.

Tape 3

At the time of the early 1980s there came onto the market the Jonestown tapes, where the suicide and murder of 900 people were heard on tape with the background sound being gunshots and the voice of the leader, Jim Jones, ranting on and on over a field of corpses, and in another notorious case, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley had recorded the voice of a young girl they were about to murder. Cassettes soon became a banality, but not without a fight. In the late 1970s there was the emergent myth (perhaps) of snuff films, where the murderers would videotape the horrific desires they released upon mostly women. I always wondered why these tapes were spoken of in the context of the pornographic market. Who produced them? How were they replicated and released? Who bought them? For some time these questions occupied my time, accompanied by a very sick feeling. I thought simply to watch such an event, even as a recording would change something so fundamental to what it meant to be a human, that the purported existence of these products posed a grave danger to anyone who could happen to view one.

Tape 4

Deleted tape in the case of magnetic history later visited me, once again linked to death. Yukio Mishima had rehearsed his death in the form of art at least twice before his dramatic action of suicide as attempted military coup. Once was in the publishing of the imitate and very strange book, Sun and Steel, where he outlines his thoughts on politics, the body and death. The other was the one film he actually directed, wrote and starred in, Patriotism. This film was ordered destroyed by his wife after he died. In it he acts out his ritual death prior to actually doing it. This film had been made and viewed, but all surviving copies recollected and destroyed. One day when visiting my friend who is a jazz drummer, he showed me this film. I could not believe my eyes. When asked where he had got it, he told me a friend of his was on tour in Japan, and when browsing the stalls of video and cassettes he saw a video simply labeled, Mishima in black felt pen. It turned out to be a pirated copy of the original, in very degraded quality. He had it digitized, and for years I had it on VCD prior to its official re-release by the DVD company, Criterion.

Rewind, Record, Erase.

Recently at a film festival I saw a few films made from discarded, clandestinely and anonymously recorded video footage of political unrest. While these films played at the festival, the Middle East was being forever reshaped by the demonstrators who were toppling governments like dominoes. In Libya there are reportedly over 1000 demonstrators dead. There are, no doubt, instances of this mass murder recorded on cell phones, on cameras, from the point of view of the demonstrators and the murderers. These tapes are a fearful thing, and a hopeful thing as well. We record ourselves constantly. Having sex, killing, playing in the neighborhood, having weddings, being executed. This background is what leads me to record onto a broken reel to reel the sound of panic, played back into the computer and set to a red film of depictions of violence. At once an archiving and an erasure.