About the Event
Pepper Mouser presents What is a PortaPak?
Featuring selections from 50 years of his Super8 and Video street tapes.
Includes:
Chappell Hill House - Summer 1969
A client near Chappell Hill, Texas wanted a place she could meditate, practice her guitar, and keep a couple of horses. Our Guerilla Builder style was to go out without working drawings, maybe just a study model (seen at about :20 seconds next to the stenciled and dotted armadillo) and some flexible ideas, live on the site and build it till it was done. Pay was $30/week plus room and board. Of course you slept out till you actually built a room and helped with meals. It was a fun summer and the house still stands, with newer ones around it, as a retreat for meditation and yoga groups as The Margaret Austin Center. http://macenter.org/
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Austin Trip - April 1969
This is a longer story than I want to relate right now, but briefly… on Friday Big Al Elder bought a school bus. We took enough seats out of the back of it to load in some motorcycles. The word went out and on Saturday about 30 or so of the usual suspects piled in for a trip to Austin. That took a while and it was after dark when we got to The Armadillo, or maybe it was The Oprey House. The Conqueroo was one of the bands I think, but that could have been another time. Our Bandito friend, Sunshine, was the bouncer there and he invited everyone out to his place in the country to spend the night. It wasn’t a very large place and I eventually went to sleep under the kitchen table to keep from getting stepped on. The next morning we set out to get some breakfast and as we got back into Austin we were pulled over by the Highway Patrol. We were a little more than they wanted to mess with on a Sunday morning and just gave us a ticket for impersonating a school bus. Bosco hopped on his BMW and found a store and some spray paint and we sprayed over the s and the h to make it read Cool Bus. We got some eats and went to the park where an anti-war/peace march ended up and evolved into a Love-In. The legendary Shivas Headband was one of the bands that played that day but that footage ended up in another film.
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Bob’s Birthday - May 1969
A few weeks after the Austin trip, the Cool Bus rolled again, along with a lot of other vehicles, South of Houston where Bob’s dad had some ranch property he offered up for Bob’s epic 21st birthday party weekend. This is kinda long for a FB post, but you’ll want the see the Shivas Headband clips near the end.
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First National Moratorium against the war in Vietnam - 15 Oct 1969
Different groups on campus did different things, the politicos, SDS etc., railed on with the usual speeches, religious groups offered up prayers, another group read off the names of soldiers killed in battle as they released a helium balloon for each one, but our Southcoast group of Architecture students, dropouts, radicals, and artistic and creative misfits did what we usually did and treated it as a celebration of life. The night before, we commandeered the Architecture building and used it to construct two inflatables and other preparations, including the obligatory *saftey meeting* in the men’s room.
Low-Fi
Analog Deep Cuts from the Archive
Thursday nights at 7pm at Rice Cinema
Unusual films screened on obscure formats curated and introduced by Friends of the Media Center.
Every Thursday
Excluding Holidays
Free and open to the public.
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Directions to Rice Cinema, Rice Media Center:
Entrance #8 via University Blvd & Stockton Drive
For specific directions from any location Google map ‘Rice Cinema’.
For parking information: parking.rice.edu
Shuttle service: transportation.rice.edu
Campus maps: maps.rice.edu
