First of all, happy holidays to all of you that are reading this, and even to some of you that aren't. I am back on the East coast, right now in Boston, to spend Christmas Eve with my side of the family, then we will go to Connecticut to spend Christmas day with my wife's family.

I am exhausted for two reasons. Neither of them are any of your business. Just kidding. I am very tired because we took the redeye flight from Los Angeles (11:15 pm), thinking, in our hopeful stupidity, that the baby would sleep on the flight. She did not, and neither did I or my wife.

The other reason I'm tired is because I've been working over-time, to finish the present that I'm giving my mother in-law. What kind of present takes such hard work? Let me go back a bit...

About two months ago, I wen to my mother in law's storage space with her to get a couch that my wife had left in there. My wife has lots of furniture in lots of storage spaces and she occasionally remembers that she needs a piece of it right away. So I went with my mother in law, in my Ford Ranger pickup, to get a couch. As we were getting the couch, I noticed a box filled with 8mm film cans. I asked her about it and she said that these were films that her father, my grandfather in-law, had taken throughout his life. She had never watched any of them. I asked if I could take them and she was glad to let me. I decided immediatly that I would make her a Christmas present of transferring them all onto video and burn her a DVD. I was excited because I suck at buying presents for people and this was a rare opportunity to give someone the perfect thing. I didn't realize, however, what I was in for.

First, i went online and researched transfer houses and found out quickly that sending all this film away to be transferred to video, (a very large box of it) would cost a LOT, take who knows how long, and could put this film at risk. So I went on Ebay and quickly found a good 8mm projector and a very simple box by a company called Goldbeam. The Goldbeam box is basically a black box with a hole on one side to project into from close range, a hole on the other side to stick the video camera lens, and a system of mirrors inside. That's it. You don't even plug it in. It cost me about 21 dollars. Both the box and the projector arrived within a few days and I was off and running. As soon as I had set the whole thing up, I started running film through as my wife and I watched it on the TV montior. I was amazed at the quality of the image the goldbeam provided. My wife was immediately stunned to see her mother, Grandmother, and Uncles, at such a young age, in moving pictures. It's so completely different from photographs, it is much more like looking into the past. Especially those old 8mm cameras, because not so many people had them, so the footage feels rare and almost magical.

We settled down and started watching while transferring these little spools, about six minutes each, one by one. What became quickly apparent is that this guy who took the films, was an excellent cinematographer. He is not your basic dad pointing a camera at his kids. Every rare shot of him in these films, shows him wearing a light meter around his neck. He was very concientious about exposure and he captured some incredible images. Besides seeing my wife's extended family, therefore my daughter's blood relatives, at such a young age, in such a different while still American culture, we were also treated to very beautiful tourist scenery films.

There is something about the colors in these films that is absolutely addictive. The colors of a blue sky over an amber wheat field, captured on 8mm Kodachrome that has been sitting around for forty years! It takes on this almost water-color look to it. It's hard to describe but I've become completely obsessed with it.

We also found some very weird footage of my wife's grandparents throwing a New Years Eve party in their basement. At first, we are just watching all these folks, basic suburban Michiganites wearing good clothes and drinking cocktails by the furnace in someone's wood-panelled cellar. Then things start getting wild. Everyone starts kissing. Sure, it's new year's eve, but then EVERYONE is kissing EVERYONE regardless of who is married to who. And I don't mean pecks on the cheek. I mean long, on the mouth making out. Always followed by nervous laughter, so it seems like they're just kidding around, but I have never kissed anyone on the mouth that long, who I have not then or previously fucked at some point. The thing that made it so shocking to us was that they all look to be in their late forties and they're all wearing old style suits and horn rimmed glasses and the ladies have their hair done and lots of lipstick. It felt like watching a bunch of school secrataries making out with a bunch of school janitors.

After several hours and much back fatigue from bending over this contraption and feeding film through it, I was done with the transferring to video. Now it was time to feed it all into my computer. I painstakingly logged and captured each reel onto my harddrive, turned it into one big movie with Final Cut Pro (editing software for you non-mac people) And authored a DVD using DVD studio pro. Then I scanned the boxes and reels that the film came in and used those images to create a kind of collage for the cover. That all took about twenty seconds to write but it took several sleepless, eatless, shitless days to accomplish. It's one of the hardest things I ever did. I felt, when it was over, that I'd made an entire film. It's only frustrating that I can't now show it to an audience. I can't wait to show it to my mother inlaw. I know she is going to be floored by it. But my wife is worried that her mom will get very emotional when she sees this footage. Much of it is of her with her two younger brothers, both of who died recently.

The whole experience has been draining but kind of profound. Grandpa inlaw, the filmmaker, was apparently not a good guy. He made much of his family miserable. But I just saw all of their past through his eyes. Even watching mundane footage of trees out of his car window, I was keenly aware that I was watching the past through someone else. I got to know his rythm of filming, his style. He actually edited some of these films, and these were especially interesting because this was him telling a story. A story without sound. There's one film of just him with his three neighbors. First they play horseshoes, then they each cut their lawn, then the three of them sit down and have a beer. The whole series was carefully spliced together by him in his basement. So this was him documenting his life and showing someone, I guess me, what he did on the weekends. The reason people took 8mm films back then, besides to watch it once when it comes back from the lab, is for posterity. They are showing their lives and the people in their lives to someone. They don't know who but they figure someone, someday, will watch it. Being that someone for him, I guy I never knew and who, because of the bad things he did in life, is now lonely in death, has been a sordid and singular experience.

Anyway. That's what I've been doing. I will try to write a few more times before the end of the year.

That's all for now, my friends...

Thanks for reading,