Overall The Place Really Blew

February 1, 2023 4:03 AM

There's no way you could write a script so tedious and lacking in drama as Tape of me and my friends, which records a momentous summer day in 1993 wherein four extremely stupid teenagers from Gardner, Massachusetts drive to Nashua NH so Mike can buy a TV. Cluelessness pervades every second of this video. Try to count the amount of times someone raises a middle finger to the camera. And don't blame me if you get that Overkill song stuck in your head.

Gardner, Massachusetts in 1993 doesn't have much to offer seventeen year old Mike McClusken: the Super Stop & Shop where he and his friends work, a few decrepit furniture mill buildings, a deserted downtown, and a bedroom in the basement of his folks' house. But the one thing Gardner has is sales tax. So when Mike wants to spend his disposable income for the next six months on a state of the art 20-inch Hitachi television, he gets his friend Chris to drive him to tax-free Nashua, New Hampshire in his Pontiac Bonneville. Two of his friends come along and make a day of it. Hardy even has a camcorder, so Mike can remember this momentous day forever! Unfortunately, some of it gets taped over with video of a party at Mike's folks' house, but these things happened back then.

This is a fascinating time capsule of American teenagers in the 90s, old enough to drive and work menial jobs but not old or mature enough to engage in adult pursuits or impress women. The old mills are closed, soon to be razed to make way for more supermarkets and retail stores where the kids will work for years to come in our consumer utopia, and complain about their co-workers rather than discuss anything interesting.

Uploaded to Youtube when the maximum duration for videos was ten minutes, the video is in seven parts:

Tape of me and my friends part 1 - The boys meet in the parking lot of the Super Stop & Shop and decide to ditch Dennis. Chris puts gas in his car for the trip. On the highway to Nashua, the boys talk about rock music that either sucks or rules.

Tape of me and my friends part 2- Arrival in Nashua. The boys visit Rockit Records, which really blows. They visit Newbury Comics. On the road after the purchase of Mike's TV, the boys read the instruction manual and try to figure out the remote.

Tape of me and my friends part 3 - The ride home from Nashua. The boys discuss an incident at Super Stop & Shop and people there who suck. Footage of a boring party at Mike's folks' house.

Tape of me and my friends part 4 - More of the party. Mike's sister pretends to be drunk. Someone eats fish food. The boys smoke Mike's dad's cigars on the porch. His friend Mark, who can't sing, sings "The Gambler."

Tape of me and my friends part 5 - End of the party. Footage of the trip from Nashua resumes with Chris pulling into Mike's folks' house. Mike carries the TV into the house and his sister warns him their dad's "pissed." Mike carries the TV into the basement and starts hooking it up in his bedroom. His father enters and gives Mike a drunken lecture on credit management. Chris and Paul drive back to the Stop & Shop to pick up a battery charger from Paul's trunk.

Tape of me and my friends part 6 - Chris and Paul drive back from the Super Stop & Shop, through downtown Gardner to Mike's house. Mike is still trying to set up the new TV and hook it to his Nintendo. Suddenly Chris and Paul are leaving Mike's house in Paul's car, with Dennis in the backseat.

Tape of me and my friends part 7 - Paul drives through downtown Gardner and past the house of a co-worker they dislike. They leave Kay's Dairy Bar restaurant and see some geese in the parking lot. They finish the day in the parking lot of the Super Stop & Shop with Mike. They burn a Bic pen on the ground.

posted by Fritz Langwedge (31 comments total)

Everything can be found-footage horror if you watch it right.
posted by phooky at 4:09 AM on February 1, 2023 [8 favorites]

I’m going to watch these and I’m going to relate to them. Leominster reprazent.
posted by bendy at 4:09 AM on February 1, 2023 [13 favorites]

At least we listened to The Dead Milkmen.
posted by bendy at 4:18 AM on February 1, 2023 [7 favorites]

The crustache / earring combo is really taking me back. I'm a few years younger than these guys, but I can say with absolute certainty that 1997 on Long Island was exactly like this, but with a shorter drive to buy a TV (which you wouldn't do because who could afford a TV). I can't wait to watch the rest of this.
posted by uncleozzy at 4:33 AM on February 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

A basement bedroom!

I was just barely a preteen when this video was made, but these are the guys I was stupidly trying to emulate in in the late-90s going so far as to convince my dad to awkwardly partition off a corner of the basement so it could be my cool teenager hang out space. The panel board walls did nothing to keep the house centipedes and spiders out or the dust from the crumbling fieldstone foundation, but I tried so hard to make it cool. I taped random magazine cutouts to the walls, had a really janky receiver/cassette deck with speakers, and a television I inherited from my great-grandmother that would randomly turn itself on at full volume if you didn't leave it unplugged.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:30 AM on February 1, 2023 [7 favorites]

These kids def stood in line for Windows 95.
posted by Catblack at 5:42 AM on February 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

I can't wait to watch this. I was 15 in 1993, elsewhere in MA, and my friends and I worked in similar part-time jobs (for me it was Discovery Zone, a children's entertainment center that was basically Chuck E Cheese minus the animatronics) and had similar adventures, but alas no camcorder. We drove to Connecticut for me to get a tattoo when I was 18 as they were still illegal in MA. Told my mom I was going to the movies. I still have the tramp stamp (they were definitely not called that then) to show for it!
posted by emd3737 at 5:59 AM on February 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm a little older than these guys, but I see a lot of myself there too. I lived in NH and was a frequent shopper in the exact same Rockit Records and Newbury Comics stores in the video.

I don't think only New Englanders would relate to it. No one speaks with a discernible Boston accent (though they give Paul a hard time when he says "drah" for drawer), and they don't talk about Massachusetts sites or sports teams.

And even though it's a time capsule of those days as far as the clothes, haircuts and glasses (those glasses!), it's oddly timeless in that the only thing the guys talk about is the musicians they like or hate. They never mention Bill Clinton or any 90s movie stars (the only exception is their friend Mark who meekly threatens the cameraman at the party with a reference to "doing a Sean Penn impersonation"). For guys whose quest is a TV and who do nothing at Mike's party except watch television, they never use SNL catchphrases or voices of TV characters. When Mike first turns on the TV and flips through the channels, you notice one channel is showing the ubiquitous OJ Simpson trial; however, they never mention Simpson or anything from pop culture except rock stars.
posted by Fritz Langwedge at 6:09 AM on February 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

For guys whose quest is a TV and who do nothing at Mike's party except watch television...

We got nothin' better to do.
posted by tclark at 6:37 AM on February 1, 2023 [12 favorites]

This YT channel is a great source of more old great VHS time capsules. I like it since it's from the small PNW town I grew up in and know lots of the people that show up.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 6:39 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I love this so much. Warhol made art out of boring movies, so kudos to the young people making these films.
posted by Czjewel at 7:10 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

What the hell is wrong with these kids?

Everyone knows teenage Massholes drive to Nashua to go to Headlines to buy bongs and rolling machines.
posted by bondcliff at 7:12 AM on February 1, 2023 [7 favorites]

When this was filmed, the audience was precisely These Kids At This Time. They're trying to impress each other with how cool they are, but that's it. There's no unseen online audience. Nothing is going viral. No one is worried about this being the first hit when a future date googles their name.

It's a dead media form, like silent films. No one is making video like now this except as an explicit nod to the past. It's a time capsule of a kind of documentation that's gone.
posted by phooky at 7:41 AM on February 1, 2023 [38 favorites]

Good soundtrack. Nazareth, Hendrix, ...whatever else I didn't hear presumably.
posted by Liquidwolf at 8:20 AM on February 1, 2023

So ... it's been 30 years. What happened to each of these guys?? I NEED TO KNOW.
posted by KazamaSmokers at 9:01 AM on February 1, 2023

Killing Joke: sucks
Nazereth: fine
Jimi Hendrix: rules
Star Spangled Banner; sucks, unless done by a Jimi Hendrix
Rolling Stones: suck
Guns N Roses: suck
Skid Row: sucks
Ozzy: doesn't suck
Steve Vai: rules
Whitesnake: sucks
David Lee Roth: ok, with Steve Vai
Band members with normal (perhaps vaguely foreign last names): questionable
~ not sure about this one playing on the radio
Pink Floyd: rules
Orangutan: suck big time
Kenny Rogers: rules (I guess)

TV: the big guy who bought it can barely carry it in from the car, for a 20" Hitachi. God those things were heavy! Dad gives a credit lecture, since the kid bought it with a payment of $11 a week.

Video #6 Timpany Plaza: time has been really rough on that place. Most of the local places replaced by bottom of the barrel chains.
Hooks up the Super Nintendo to the stereo to play the video game music for Super Mario Allstars, which had to be purchased to play the Japanese-only "The Lost Levels".
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:03 AM on February 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is like a Beavis and Butthead documentary. And it makes the AI Seinfeld from the other post seem interesting.
posted by snofoam at 10:21 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Dad gives a credit lecture, since the kid bought it with a payment of $11 a week.

Mike seems like the king of the bad excuse. He admits after his dad leaves the room that the TV cost $369 rather than the $200 figure he initially gave, so I assume his financing estimate is similarly fanciful.

I love how Mike's dad reminds him about how he tried to hide his purchase of "the umbrella." What kind of teenage boy buys an umbrella anyway? And how much could it have set the old man back?

I need closure on the umbrella.
posted by Fritz Langwedge at 10:53 AM on February 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'd partially disagree. I've got tons of goofy videos of my nieces doing stuff that has never appeared on social media

Me too. You have to view these videos through the mind of a 17 year old - they are documenting themselves 'before they are famous'. So heck yeah they have some expectation they will be viewed publicly one day, by adoring fans who go "yeah, they are so cool - they are just like me". They aren't part of the build-up to fame; that part is different. So they aren't nearly as polished or need to contain a narrative.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:07 AM on February 1, 2023

Can relate. In the summer of 1994 my cousin came over from out west, and we decided to drive up north to visit our other cousin that we hadn't seen in a while. We had a camcorder. Not the most fascinating videotape, but fun times.
posted by ovvl at 11:35 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

There was a time when people bought camcorders and because you had a camcorder you wanted to get your money's worth and use it as much as possible.

I wonder how many hours (days/months/years) of video was recorded and never watched again. I have gigabytes of various cute videos of my kid crawling around and drooling but I don't think I've ever watched more than a couple minutes of it.

Hell, I don't think we've ever watched our wedding video.
posted by bondcliff at 11:38 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I mean, /Reality Bites/ would come out 6 months later, a film about a bunch of dopey Gen-Xers making a film about themselves and selling it to MTV, so these dudes were pretty deep in the zeitgeist.
posted by nickzoic at 12:18 PM on February 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

One day (or probably today) there will be an AI video processor that will clean up this (and all old) footage, enhance the audio, and convert it to 4K. Not long after that another AI will covert it to a fully 3D ar/vr environment. Then these memories will never die. No matter how much we want them to.
posted by blue_beetle at 1:48 PM on February 1, 2023

One related video genre I'm a little fascinated with are the daily life videos that were made public on Youtube or whatever.

A college friend's wife remains over the moon gaga about him some 30 years after they married. About twice a month she posts video tributes to him, which consist of numerous photos manipulated using the cheesiest of special effects: think exploding fireworks, zooming hearts and spinning images set to swollen violins. It's utterly sincere, completely sappy and inadvertently hilarious. I never miss them and apparently I'm not alone; she seems to be developing a following.

I'm also fond of cornball old Harvard Graphics, PowerPoint and Keynote shows, especially when they are rife with animations and old timey business platitudes.
posted by carmicha at 2:02 PM on February 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

My mate in high school had a camcorder and an interest in making movies. What he didn't have, and what nobody we knew had access to, was editing equipment, so what he did was borrow two video players from friends (since he didn't have a player) and some cables, hooked one to the other and to the TV, and stop-play-record using two machines. It was janky but it worked enough. The problem was when he got back in his car to deliver the VCR players back to the parents of his friends he borrowed them from; wrapped them in towels against damage and put them on the back seat. Then got pulled over by the Police and had to explain.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 2:45 PM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I love this kind of stuff. There was something fundamentally different about growing up pre-internet. The world was a much smaller place.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:43 PM on February 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Leominster reprazent.
Ditto. I grew up in Townsend and had friends who lived near The Turnout in Leominster.
Scenes from Andre Dubus III's book 'Townie' really seemed familiar.
posted by Arctan at 6:10 PM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

What he didn't have, and what nobody we knew had access to, was editing equipment, so what he did was borrow two video players from friends (since he didn't have a player) and some cables, hooked one to the other and to the TV, and stop-play-record using two machines. It was janky but it worked enough.

Ah, the ol' vidding one-two.
posted by praemunire at 6:17 PM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I grew up in Townsend and had friends who lived near The Turnout in Leominster.

Leominster reprazent.

I didn't grow up near Gardner, but you folks might be interested to see the old (invariably red) mill buildings in the footage Hardy films through Chris's windshield, since they no longer exist. The furniture factory on Victoria Street that you can see at the three minute mark in video #1 is now a Planet Fitness. Just past the nine minute mark in video #5, the boys are driving down Willow Street and on the corner of Main the old GEM factory is still there. It's now a Walgreens. At 3:25 in video #6, the old mill complex that housed another GEM business is still on the right, and is now the site of the Gardner News building.

These interminable trips through Gardner between Mike's house and Timpany Plaza take on a real Jim Jarmusch character when the boys traverse them wordlessly, oblivious to the way their hometown is disappearing.
posted by Fritz Langwedge at 6:51 PM on February 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

This makes me nostalgic for the videos we always had to make for some fuckin' school project or another, and how we'd use them (and the school's loaner camcorders) as an excuse to film our own stuff. Surrender at Appomattox but it was a wrestling match, etc. One of the most common sights in my neighborhood while I was growing up was some group of kids on a driveway or in a common area doing something incredibly stupid, and always one kid off to the side with a camcorder.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:11 AM on February 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have stacks of older tapes of a similar unmade epic documentary of the absence of taste or creativity on an intimate scale, albeit less tinged with this particular sebum-lubed variety of noxious privileged suburban masculinity and more the work of a not-yet-out teenpomp from Scaggsville, Maryland with a nicotine-stained used Datsun wagon and a sister who’d moved to NYC for work and opened up a firehose of mixtapes of gloriously unknown music to serve as an antivenom to hair metal, yacht rock, lifted pickups, and Howard County grit culture.

It was the era, for me, of Heavy Metal Parking Lot as an immersive, inescapable reality of strutting stupid dude culture, and I had Laurie Anderson's Big Science practically lodged in my Toshiba, except when I'd swap out for a uneasily blended mixtape of Telex, Czukay, Birthday Party, and Snakefinger, at which point some kid, probably a Ken or a Mark, would scowl at the cover photo of Laurie on my scuffed-up cassette and say "I know who that is—that's Laurie Anderson, and she's CRAZY—like a total nutcase. How can you listen to that weird-ass shit!?"

It's just funny, though, that my beige Datsun wagon with one primer-colored fender slowly passing an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme handed down by a grandmother who'd had had her keys taken away full of greasy dudes opining at length and in inch-deep chatter about heavy metal were just two sides of the same coin, and for all the efforts I made with my own cohort to distinguish ourselves as young representatives of some secretive Belgian avant garde by appearing at 2AM on the Potomac Maryland lawn of TV's Lynda Carter with a portable Lowrey Micro Genie organ on which my best friend played a credible rendition of Bach's English Suite #2 while I read from a copy of the Communist Manifesto on which I'd pasted a hand-traced picture of Smurfette over Marx's glowering face, when we looked across the rushing void into what we saw as the lesser experience, we were united by a stupidity that you can only ever really fully experience when you're sixteen and greasy enough to fry three pounds of potatoes in your hair lard.

At the light, the Oldsmobile sidled up, windows were cranked down, letting the blue-grey smoke out, and the other team went broadsides with a fusillade of the F-word…the other one, that didn't hit so hard yet because I hadn't put all the pieces together yet. My then-girlfriend Lurleen flicked a Benson & Hedges Mentol Light 100 butt across the breach, and in her phlegmatic trailer park drawl, said "Gentlemen, I believe you'll find that we're not f****ts—we're situationists." With that, I cranked up Laurie Anderson's "So Happy Birthday," which wasn't necessarily the most definitive fuck-you to the Foreigner track playing in the Oldsmobile, but cassette was a difficult medium for le musical mot juste. I chirped the tires on the Datsun on the green, then darted off to the west, full of the sense of smug superiority that I'm sure the other carload also held.

Idiots.

"You wanna drive down the embankment at the exit ramp over by the industrial park?" I asked.

"Duh."

"We're gonna get stuck again."

"No we won't," I said, but of course we did, and of course, we happened to have my dad's enormous video camera behind the back seat, complete with the full-size VHS deck that you wore on a strap and powered with a ten-pound battery, so the filming resumed.

Idiots.

And in 2022, two of the four of us from that Datsun are gone—one from a freak accident involving a handgun and a laundry basket, and the other from some degenerative disease somewhere off-stage, after we lost touch, but fragments of it are baked into patterns of magnetism in videotape, there to remind us what we didn't know then.

Idiots.

But I resist—nostalgia is a poison, a revision of what actually happened to suit that strange erasure that we do where we let the mundane prattling of our dailies fade and only think of the good stuff or the particularly traumatic incidents, so I suppose it's good to have a semi-permanent record, fading as the rubber and plastic bits in our VCRs dry out and crumble into fragments, to remind us just how little of what we did had any substance.

And for god's sake, what was I thinking with that hair?
posted by sonascope at 5:12 AM on February 4, 2023 [2 favorites]