Towards the end of college my roommate Barry and I moved straight across the ravine behind our house to another three-story place on Eden Avenue. Sandy and her boyfriend Todd found the place and needed people to share the rent; there was plenty of room. Binder took advantage of the shift to finally move full-time down to Cincinnati.

Eventually friends Fran and Fred moved in, too. We partied, we watched a lot of movies; we listened to Bowie (Station to Station), Patti Smith (Horses, Radio Ethiopia), the Rolling Stones and the Ramones' first album. Finally Fred had the thought of focusing our efforts into a joint endeavor and we set up the media arts collective We're Just Like You. We borrowed money for equipment and all paid monthly fees on the loan. Eight of us lived together in the house on Eden Avenue.

Just before Fran and Fred moved in we threw a party. On one of the floors we ran a 16mm library copy of It From Beneath the Sea; in other rooms guests might see themselves or those coming up the stairs displayed on a wall of TV monitors. The living room was strictly for dancing: Bowie and the Rolling Stones. There was a keg and plenty of food. For the town and the time it was a good party. L-R: Binder, Barry, me, Todd, Sandy.

"Taxi Driver is a hell, from the opening shot of a cab emerging from stygian clouds of steam…" - Roger Ebert

I’ve talked about other films having some importance to me: 2001, The Fountainhead, Vertigo, The Sound of Music, etc., but there’s not one of them that had the same degree of impact as Taxi Driver.

I was in a film society at the university. They’ve been around almost as long as movies: Satyajit Ray had one in Calcutta where Indian cineastes first saw Double Indemnity. Léon Moussinac had one in Paris between the wars so the French could see Eisenstein. Amos Vogel started Cinema 16 so New Yorkers could see Maya Deren. And our film society in Cincinnati caught a pre-release screening of Taxi Driver.

The picture completely shattered me. My face was white exiting the screening; I couldn’t talk for about an hour. My date was a sweet and sympathetic woman who understood my reaction; she was experiencing it, too, though perhaps not to the same degree. For me it was a sucker punch. I’d never seen Mean Streets or any other Scorcese pictures. I’d never seen DeNiro and hadn’t yet caught up to Godfather II. I didn’t know the movie was dedicated to Bernard Herrmann, and I didn’t know that he was dead from a heart attack hours after completing it. Though I was a Herrmann obsessive, that sort of news travelled a lot slower in 1976.

Another thing I didn’t know was how much this film would influence the course of my life. Four years later I was a night-shift cabbie in NYC, working out of the same garage that De Niro had used for his prep work. I had a license like Travis, green with that same typewriter font for the license number and my name. I walked through the same blasted streets as Travis around Times Square, on the Deuce at four in the morning. I lived a block away from where he first encountered Iris, near that same spot on 13th Street where he killed Sport—#204—one door down from the hot-sheet hotel on the corner.

I remember the first poster I saw after the film was released, the image that opens this item. It’s still one of my favorite posters, in fact one of my favorite images from film history. The artist was a Belgian named Guy Peellaert who had put a book together in 1974 with writer Nic Cohn called Rock Dreams. If you’ve never seen it do yourself a favor and run down a copy; there’s nothing quite like it, with Peellaert’s almost photo realistic style married to fantasy images of rock decadence. Take a look at the Jim Morrison entry, like a frame from Friedkin’s Cruising. It’s no wonder discerning rock hipsters like David Bowie commissioned Peellaert LP art soon after he was discovered.

On my sixtieth birthday, in the cozy and gorgeous rural splendor of my house in Putnam County, I rigged up a projector and screen and ran Taxi Driver for an audience of friends.

Why would this movie affect me so? I was a chicken-shit suburban boy from that most typical city in that most typical state. No criminal history (not on the record, at least), no interest in guns, no experience of psychosis—depression, yes, but no hallucinations, no voices in my head. Perhaps the movie mapped-out a future for me where I might become a man. You know, like when you join the army.

In 1976 I was reeling from several years of art history and was very anxious to duplicate my mentors, John Cage, Warhol, Kafka, Borges, Buñel—dozens of others. Thinking about the San Francisco arts group Ant Farm and their Media Burn piece in particular, I made a twenty-one minute one-take video about slicing, hammering, and burning. Binder did the slicing and another member of our group, Steve, took photos. The object in question was a movie screen. A defining quote for this video could be the Buddhist tao I found among Cage aphorisms: anything boring becomes interesting if it goes on long enough. We called it a process piece in emulation of video artists we admired, none of whom were from anywhere near Cincinnati. We showed it at parties and finally at the Contemporary Arts Center downtown.

This was the first video recorded on our Sony Portapack. The Portapack system was an early consumer camera and recorder kit that depended on half-inch video tape on a reel. One threaded the tape around a drum containing spinning tape heads.

The deck could theoretically be portable, flung over one's shoulder. A six-foot cable connected it to the camera. One of the first things we did was to buy a fifty-foot cable, since the over-the-shoulder idea didn't work very well. The video recorded glitches when the deck was moved around, a condition made even worse when it was not horizontal. With the long cable we could park the deck and move wherever we wanted.

On the camera itself we used a wide-angle lens swapped from a 16mm Bolex. In daylight a lens like this can go anywhere without the need to focus. It felt like a Gregg Toland deep-focus setup and was a pleasure to use. Though it was very sharp the low resolution of the video technology softened everything—now seen as part of its charm.

Most of the video from these years is in bad shape; the tape sheds and the heads clog. On analog audio recordings from the same years I've followed the Wendy Carlos technique of baking the reels for eight hours in a convection oven. This frees up the lubricants and you get one or two passes over the heads before it becomes unreadable again. I have absolutely no idea if this would work with reel-to-reel video tape.

In August of 2023 I made the decision to donate the forty-six reels—the entire archive of We're Just Like You plus solo projects and miscellany—to Chicago-based media archive Media Burn. They've promised to attempt restoring them; I sincerely wish them luck. (They've also promised me digital copies, and I have my fingers crossed that this will happen before my death.)

This was a difficult decision for me to take. I've tried to protect those reels for over forty years, moving them from basements to bookshelf bins to storage facilities, all with wildly varying temperatures and humidity levels. I'm not sure that I've been that great a caretaker. I'm also not sure that there was any point to the effort; is there anything there worth protecting? Was anything we made worth watching? Media Burn thinks there is an historic interest: this is what underground video looked like in southern Ohio in the late seventies. All other judgements await posterity.

The digitized version seen here is from a VHS dub taken directly from the Portapack editing deck back when VHS was in its prime. It's been cleaned up as best I could in Final Cut Pro.

There was a QA after the interview; I was able to ask him in person if he (as long rumored) had directed The Thing From Another World. The film is credited to Christian Nyby, a longtime colleague who needed a director's credit to get into the DGA. Hawks answered in the affirmative. That doesn't prove anything, of course, but I offer the tidbit. (You won't see that in the IMdb.)

It was thrilling to see Hawks; he made so many of my favorites: I Was a Male War Bride, The Big Sleep, Red River, His Girl Friday, Scarface, Only Angels Have Wings, etc. etc. etc.

I also had the opportunity to do a lighting workshop with Lee Garmes, the fabled cinematographer. Garmes was behind the camera on Shanghai Express and Gone With the Wind and Nightmare Alley to name just three among dozens of others. I didn't learn a thing; I just stood there and watched the guy work. I still can't light for shit, though I'm pretty good with what comes in through the window.

The film revival movement that had started in the 60s was then at the point that industry people whose moment had passed began to attend these types of events at universities across the county. I was fortunate enough to see both George Stevens and Frank Capra up at Ohio State around this time, and also had my introduction to A Place In the Sun and Lost Horizon.

Barbara was a Mecklenberg's waitress. Several of us in the WJLY collective made a living by working there; it was a landmark beer garden-gourmet restaurant that was just a few blocks from Eden House. I washed dishes there for about a year, then tended bar for another year. Binder was a chef. A couple of gurus from a Kundalini yoga ashram ran the place and their unpaid members held most of the staff positions. Almost all the waitresses were outsiders, though; the job required a degree of initiative that the ashram members no longer possessed.

There was no inventory control on the liquor and most of the ashramis left the place by nine or ten; they had to be up for meditation at five in the morning. This led to hedonistic parties in the bar when the customers had all departed. The way I drank in those days woud kill me now.

Barbara was a sweet woman with a delightful Kentucky accent. 16mm test footage was shot at the same time with our Bolex and Jerry Hagner's ingenious portable crane. Hagner was a documentary filmmaker who had been one of my teachers at the UC College-Conservatory of Music's Broadcasting Department, where my concentration was in 16mm film.

When I graduated from the College-Conservatory of Music my grandfather gifted me a thousand dollars. I bought a tent, a backpack, and a sleeping bag and snagged a driveaway car as far as Phoenix, Arizona. It was 110° in Phoenix so I immediately hopped a bus to LA where I would visit with my old Columbus pal Kathy.

Of course I took pictures along the way, all Tri-X. After I printed this photo of a Colorado milestone it looked like the background had been painted; the mountains did not look real. They reminded me of shots from the many RKO westerns of Tim Holt; there are twenty-six of them and I probably saw them all. Holt had a peculiar manner of rolling up the legs of his jeans to form five or six-inch cuffs. It seemed so awkward to me, not cool at all. I couldn't figure out why Welles, Ford, and Huston had all cast him in some of their best movies. He's grown on me since, particularly in The Magnificent Ambersons.

Shot on the third floor of the house on Eden Avenue and developed in our community darkroom. We're Just Like You has its own page on this website; click here to see it. Fran played with The Ed Davis Band in their last few gigs in Cincinnati before the amicable breakup in '79. She also joined me in NYC about a year later and played there with Desi, Desi, and Desi.

The Italianate glory of the decaying main lobbby of of the RKO Albee, just prior to demolition. The city was particularly savage and short-sighted in its ravaging of the downtown architecture that stood in the way of mega redevelopment profits. Join me in pissing on the graves of the rich men who made this happen.