Cocaine to Rogaine
I didn't come up with the coinage "cocaine to Rogaine" , but it seems to define a certain period in the mid-eighties, when editing was wild and crazy fun. And now we look back and tell war stories about those "good old days". Yes, it used to be fun.
We were young and on fire. Video was a new medium -- MTV was king and Michael Jackson's videos were mini-sojourns into a magic merging of music and storytelling. And everyone wanted to do video art. Or a music video.
At that time the newest techo box to come out was the ADO -- which faked a 3D cube which you could place moving video into. And it spun around or sailed across the screen in a layered effect. Hours of fun...
The device that had a small screen with green formatting type that you had to toggle through with a joystick to set up an impressive X and Y axis of spins and twirls. Whoa. Do that again!
But really, the biggest advantage was the industrial plastic casing on the box. It had horizontal lines of grooves in it -- perfectly sized to hold one nose-full line of white powder. It was an instant hit with the rock star crowd. No muss, no fuss and equal shares for everyone!
There is no mystery that the 80s were the peak of the white powder drug culture in the TV world. We sat in dark rooms without clocks and the effect of the powder made the day into night fly by in the snort of a straw. The paraphernalia was always on the dashboard of the console -- razor blades, straws, rolled-up dollar bills.
What seemed to pose the biggest problem was the plodding technology -- linear editing used large video switchers and one inch tape machines which were deadly slow. We knew we were on the cutting edge, however, cocaine moves very fast and editing moved very slowly -- one foot or one edit in front of the other. The cutting edge was the razor blade technology.
It wasn't a surprise that the pot-smoking eased the impatience prompted by the white powder crowd. What goes up, must come down. More paraphernalia entered the room -- paperclips for roaches, towels to block the rising clouds of reefer floating under the door. You could tell what type of music video that was being produced by the drug culture behind the closed doors. Head banging to Pothead -- and now those heads are showing that Rogaine is the new drug of choice.
We were young and on fire. Video was a new medium -- MTV was king and Michael Jackson's videos were mini-sojourns into a magic merging of music and storytelling. And everyone wanted to do video art. Or a music video.
At that time the newest techo box to come out was the ADO -- which faked a 3D cube which you could place moving video into. And it spun around or sailed across the screen in a layered effect. Hours of fun...
The device that had a small screen with green formatting type that you had to toggle through with a joystick to set up an impressive X and Y axis of spins and twirls. Whoa. Do that again!
But really, the biggest advantage was the industrial plastic casing on the box. It had horizontal lines of grooves in it -- perfectly sized to hold one nose-full line of white powder. It was an instant hit with the rock star crowd. No muss, no fuss and equal shares for everyone!
There is no mystery that the 80s were the peak of the white powder drug culture in the TV world. We sat in dark rooms without clocks and the effect of the powder made the day into night fly by in the snort of a straw. The paraphernalia was always on the dashboard of the console -- razor blades, straws, rolled-up dollar bills.
What seemed to pose the biggest problem was the plodding technology -- linear editing used large video switchers and one inch tape machines which were deadly slow. We knew we were on the cutting edge, however, cocaine moves very fast and editing moved very slowly -- one foot or one edit in front of the other. The cutting edge was the razor blade technology.
It wasn't a surprise that the pot-smoking eased the impatience prompted by the white powder crowd. What goes up, must come down. More paraphernalia entered the room -- paperclips for roaches, towels to block the rising clouds of reefer floating under the door. You could tell what type of music video that was being produced by the drug culture behind the closed doors. Head banging to Pothead -- and now those heads are showing that Rogaine is the new drug of choice.
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