Out of Print is a documentary short by Danny Plotnick that reminisces on underground culture in the days before the internet, when finding a copy of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures or Philosophy of the World by The Shaggs might mean a lengthy and expensive hunt through used book and record stores. Plotnick’s nostalgic film posits that it was the intensity of this hunt that imbued these cultural objects with such great worth, mythologized them, and made them all the more valuable when they finally were unearthed.

Nowadays, one only need to hop on ubuweb, soulseek, or any number of torrent sites, and that hunt is effectively shortened from years to mere seconds.The internet doesn’t eliminate the hunt, it merely compresses and expedites it. The result is three-fold…

1) Cultural objects which at one time were hopelessly obscure have now become almost ubiquitous. One commenter on the video recalls, ” I knew people who paid one hundred dollars for crappy bootlegged VHS copies of Pulp Fiction, The Crow, and Eraserhead.”

Perhaps a better example… some of you may remember this video:

It first surfaced on the internet in 2005 on Ebaum’s World, where it has since been watched by millions of people, passed along via emails and blogs and instant messages, getting its fifteen milliseconds of fame before quickly retreating back into limbo. But the clip has a longer history. The tapdancer seen in it is known as The Goddess Bunny. Real name Johnnie Baima/Sandie Crisp, he’s a transvestite who has been left deformed by a combination of child abuse and childhood polio. A decade before he became a hit on Ebaum’s World, Baima was the star of an extremely rare film named after his “stage” persona. Like thousands of über-obscure films before it and after it, second or third generation VHS copies of the 85-minute, no budget The Goddess Bunny were traded from underground video enthusiast to underground video enthusiast. But did it live up to expectations? One Ebaum’s World fan who bought the VHS off of ebay seemed not to think so. “Truthfully, I probably expected too much out of this video and in that sense, I was let down.” And that brings me to point number two…

2) Cultural objects once mythologized due to their rareness can now be viewed more objectively. There’s a reason whoever put that clip on Ebaum’s World only decided to upload two and a half minutes out of eighty five. Pulp Fiction might be a pretty good film, but we laugh at the idea of someone spending a hundred dollars on it not only because it’s now so easy to come by, but because we know it’s not worth that much.But if Eraserhead and Philosophy of the World are no longer very obscure, what is there? What’s left? A lot. With the process of the hunt so accelerated, we become quickly acquainted with the mildly obscure, and are led down the rabbit hole to discover the relatively obscure, the considerably obscure, and the utterly obscure. We now discover The Velvet Underground when we’re fifteen, Teenage Jesus when we’re eighteen, and by the time we’re twenty are gleefully downloading out of print LPs from the Nurse With Wound list. And with rarity less of a contributing factor in determining an object’s worth, the playing field leveled, we’re better equipped to judge the value of these newly discovered gems.

3) Cultural objects which two or three decades ago might have been completely lost now have a chance of surviving. Dozens of blogs and websites are devoted to making films and albums once lost to history readily available. Ubuweb and Karagarga offer films you’ve never seen by filmmakers you’ve never heard of. WFMU’s 365 Days Project serves up golden garage sale finds. Shards of Beauty preserves cassette culture relics otherwise destined to be forgotten. And The Audio Kitchen provides found sounds too obscure to even warrant being labeled “obscure.” The internet is a reminder of just how much stuff there is out there, and an invitation to dive deeper into the pile.

Frank Zappa once described underground culture by saying simply, “the mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground.” Yet in the post-internet culture, that distinction has become blurred. Nothing on the internet comes to you. Everything begins with a search or a string of clicked hyperlinks. Everything is a discovery. Happy hunting.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 9:58 am and is filed under Etc., Film, Music, Youtube. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.