Crawling from the Wreckage: Prepending a Prologue?

You will find below, my friends, the contents of a post that I wrote just shy of a year ago, which I was using as a prologue to a new project, which I was then supposedly undertaking as part of my attempt to go through the massive pile of garbage that had been dumped into our abode just a month before. The attempt has continued through the year that followed, but the project went astray. The point was to go through what remained of my old VHS collection, cherry-pick a handful of interesting tapes that I had recorded years ago, and then re-watch them, sometimes for the first time in eons.

Circumstances have changed, the pile has lessened somewhat, and it just happens to turn out that I am now at that juncture where it is imperative that I do such a project. I am currently going through each tape and determining that which is now on disc since I moved three years ago, and that which stubbornly remains obscure or missing to this erstwhile DVD aficionado. We would like to get a few more of these boxes out of here -- and so my winter project of last year is now the winter project of this one! But, before I launch into a series of Crawling From the Wreckage posts detailing my misadventures while tripping through these taped nightmares, I figured that allowing one to catch up with the previous lead-in post would be, in the words of the Elephant Man in the pages of the National Lampoon, "devilishly apropos." Some things must be updated, however... Evil Roy Slade has arrived on disc since the initial post. Wheww! That's one I thought would never come out...

Herewith, the prologue:

Think you can do a better job?

Really, I invite you to come over and sift through 40-odd years of assorted fooferaw and folderol, all jammed into a one-bedroom and offset-den apartment -- keeping in mind the limited monetary range when planning such an epic trek through one person's lifetime of nonsensical ratpacking -- and work out a more efficient means of gaining some sort of control over the avalanche. By the second day, the two thousand CDs were already stacked and alphabetized (and yet, with no shelving on which to place them); a month later, all 200 boxes had been at least opened in some manner, half of them unpacked and obliterated, the contents sorted and placed on what shelving I did have going into the project. Now, three new cheapie bookcases from Ikea will cut us a decent swath in which to place our annual Xmas fetishism altar; the bookcases are the sort of things we can easily excise or take down should we ever find the extra bucks to gain the sort of furniture that actual adults tend to purchase.

With all the stacking and unpacking and sorting and contorting came the realization that, even with the massive selling, swapping and trashing of a couple thousand videotapes (supposedly to signify my complete transition into a DVD-aholic), I still had several boxes of the things taking up valuable floorspace. The first step was easy: sort through them and eliminate any tapes which have been released onto DVD in the two-and-a-half years subsequent to my packing these tapes into boxes. This actually cut the amount of tapes down to half, but please, close and personal friends of Rik who became beneficiaries of my last Great Tape Upheaval -- please, please don't get excited about numerous tapes showing up under Christmas trees. The tapes to which I am referring are of the personally recorded ilk, and many of them are not of the greatest quality. They just happened to have items on them with which I simply could not part at the time.

And if you wonder why I would take such pains to transport hundreds of videotapes thousands of miles, then you just don't know me very well. It is the obscurity of some of the films in my collection that provides my very interest in them. I would no sooner get rid of my ancient and well-loved WTBS showing of John Astin's Evil Roy Slade than I would my own immediate family. Of course, for a while now, this tape was just as far away as some of that immediate family, but now it is here, and it is most decidedly not being trashed. But its reappearance into my life did pose this question to myself internally: just why am I hanging onto some of these films?

Thus begins a new regular feature on the Pylon -- Crawling From the Wreckage -- as I scour these long-lost tapes and find out exactly what is on each one that makes me not wish to depart with them. You might not care, but that is not the point. Really, it's just another blazingly transparent excuse for me to write about a bunch of obscure movies. (Not that I ever truly need an excuse to do this...)

So, come on over and get cranking on your new and better plan to sort through all of my crap. I will welcome your presence with much appreciation... and the key to the city... and fireworks... and a parade... and a laurel... and hardy handshake... and whatnot. After the celebration, dive right into doing "that better job." After all, I've got writing to do...