Ye Olde TLASILA Vid: Unearthed!
It's been a decade since I've pried open the original ('93-'95) TLASILA video vault, and almost as long since I last shoved a VHS tape into a VCR. As sleeplessness has returned, my reluctance to gulp down doses of Ambien has doubled. What to do with one's cancerous early hours? Watch Ben, Rat and myself be pelted by debris as we run through early versions of Wigmaker songs at Churchill's in the autumn of 1995, that's what. Or, marvel at the cohesion of the group during our first foray into dank Detroit redoubts with Weasel Walter on saxophone and Nandor Nevai on trombone... God, Miami seems three lives ago. I found: tapes of my ex-wife Angie and I making out on the set of Doris Wishman's ill-conceived, straight-to-oblivion feature Dildo Heaven; a newsreel I directed for the now-defunct Alliance Film and Video Project on the arrival of Fred Phelps' inbred, thoroughly batshit Westboro Baptist mob on South Beach to picket the funeral of gay Real World cast member Pedro Zamora (they weren't exactly accorded a warm welcome), and very early "noise scene" footage of TLASILA and Harry Pussy live at Washington Square in April '93. Pretty amazing stuff...
I've really got to put a proper retrospective Shave DVD together.
On the television monitor I see a proscenium ankle deep in newspaper, plastic cups, and other detritus; minutes before, a pit escapee actually launched himself from the middle of the Churchill's stage... It seems as though we played 30 or 40 shows in Miami before anyone took notice - watching a dude stage dive to "Is This Good for Vulva?" seven freakin' years before its release completely blows my mind.
Oh yeah, I found the master footage of our '95 appearance on Danny Jesup's über-mongrel Miami Springs cable access show. (Which was shot in the rear room of an incomparably sterile commercial real estate office.) As we performed a song from the (then-unreleased) Mitchell Brothers album, the staff videographer zoomed in on the cover of Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run. Fucking classic.
Below, a pair of still frame grabs from our '95 Detroit set with Weasel and Nandor. Rat's outline is unmistakable in the first (WW's to his left in the image); in the second, you can see NN playing trombone in the center and my elongated form on the right...
Best,
Tom
I've really got to put a proper retrospective Shave DVD together.
On the television monitor I see a proscenium ankle deep in newspaper, plastic cups, and other detritus; minutes before, a pit escapee actually launched himself from the middle of the Churchill's stage... It seems as though we played 30 or 40 shows in Miami before anyone took notice - watching a dude stage dive to "Is This Good for Vulva?" seven freakin' years before its release completely blows my mind.
Oh yeah, I found the master footage of our '95 appearance on Danny Jesup's über-mongrel Miami Springs cable access show. (Which was shot in the rear room of an incomparably sterile commercial real estate office.) As we performed a song from the (then-unreleased) Mitchell Brothers album, the staff videographer zoomed in on the cover of Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run. Fucking classic.
Below, a pair of still frame grabs from our '95 Detroit set with Weasel and Nandor. Rat's outline is unmistakable in the first (WW's to his left in the image); in the second, you can see NN playing trombone in the center and my elongated form on the right...
Best,
Tom
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