Videofreex: America's First Pirate TV Station & the Catskills Collective That Turned It on [Paperback]

Parry D. Teasdale (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1999

Complete with Abbie Hoffman, the Hell's Angels, the FBI and the Black Panther party this book tells the story of America's pirate tv days.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Teasdale, currently active in New York State's library systems, was a newspaper editor, television producer, and founding member of the first American underground television station, Videofreex, which transmitted 258 broadcasts between 1971 and 1977. (In 1973, he also wrote the Spaghetti City Video Manual, one of the first VCR manuals.) Partially supported by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's Council on the Arts, Videofreex was a small collective of video activists who lived and worked together in a Catskill Mountain community until reduced funding in the late 1970s forced them to disperse. In this book, Teasdale skillfully and humorously evokes the emerging video revolution of the late 1960s and the radical events that Videofreex chronicled (e.g., the antiwar movement, Woodstock, the Chicago 7, and the Black Panthers). Equally compelling is the sharp delineation of individual Videofreex participants and their interactions with Louisville, NY, townspeople and officials, destructive porcupines, the IRS, and the FBI as they experiment with and create a new art form. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.ABruce Henson, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Highly recommended. -- Library Journal

It was, without question, a wild and wooly time. -- Albany Times Union: 7/25/99

Written by one of the founding members of Videofreex, this history and story of their pirate television station is a readable and engaging narrative. -- Afterimage: September/October, 1999

Product Details

• Paperback: 211 pages
• Publisher: Black Dome Pr (July 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883789214
• ISBN-13: 978-1883789213
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,463,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Its definitely worth reading., August 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Videofreex: America's First Pirate TV Station & the Catskills Collective That Turned It on (Paperback)

Videofreex's subtitle is "America's First Pirate TV Station and the Catskills Collective That Turned It On" a phrase that better describes the intriguing slice of counter-cultural history documented in this book. The author, Parry Teasdale, along with his wife Carol Vontobel, were among the dozen or so core members of Videofreex, and so this is very much an insider's tale. And what a tale it is!

Teasdale met David Cort, the elder statesman of the collective-to-be, while making documentary video using that era's 1/2" VTR format, at the original Woodstock. This event was not so much a music festival as a defining moment for the ethics and sensibility of this particular generation. Some of the Videofreex guys and gals taped at the demonstrations surrounding the infamous "Chicago Seven" trial in `69, and also interviewed Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who shortly later turned up dead, a prominent victim of police brutality. Freex had tapes rolling at the huge anti-Vietnam-War May Day rally in DC in `71, where they caught the short-haired government agent provocateurs starting the violence. According to Teasdale, their motivation wasnot so much documentary as precautionary: to distribute accurate information to the protesting side via a portable closed-circuit video setup, to balance the network news' establishment-biased coverage.

Some of the Videofreex's equipment came from CBS's budget, via a wanna-be producer with a dream about how to fill the slot being vacated by the cancellation of "The Smothers Brothers Show" (for being. "too controversial"). His vision was a "60 Minutes"-style video mix of documentary and live music, and he bankrolled a pilot called "Subject to Change" that his bosses viewed and summarily booted out the door, along with its creators. Another of Videofreex's black boxes, a modulator, was an outright gift from Abbie Hoffman of Steal This Book fame, who had in mind jamming the regularly scheduled network broadcasts in New York City with his own version of the news, and became annoyed upon learning that the item he bought didn't have enough power to do the job.

The gear and its collective of operators eventually skipped town and turned up in Lanesville, New York to take advantage of grant money earmarked for video produced upstate. There they invented community-based TV more than a decade before cable, using techniques--like call-ins, hand-held cameras, and jump cuts--that have become so commomplace as to be unremarkable today, but were then revolutionary. How Videofreex felt their way through this process of using technical equipment to create community and art is the theme explored in these pages.

Teasdale describes it all with wit and the wisdom that hindsight brings. The book has its limitations. Out of a collective vision, it's only one person's opinion, and displays Teasdale's particular biases and interests, especially his fascination with the idea of FBI investigations. It also displays the obvious inadequacy of being a print piece about a visual medium. Though snapshots and drawings lifted from some of the collective's publications try to address this, it's a significant problem in an age where multimedia presentation on a CD-ROM could contain not only Teasdale's descriptions, but input from all the Freex, as well as clips from the videos themselves, arranged hyperlink-wise.

Especially for those who have come after the hippie generation, it's necessary to be reminded--by a spokesman from a group engaged in creating counter-cultural reality--that you can't trust everything that comes to you so easily through the media: a lot of the stuff arrives twisted and co-opted in order to pass censors. But as he did in his youth, Parry Teasdale continues to make the most of the technology available to him in the moment, to let folks know directly about news that isn't necessarily "fit" in the establishment's eyes. It's definitely worth reading.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read!!!, September 17, 1999

By 

James Moore ([e-mail]) (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Videofreex: America's First Pirate TV Station & the Catskills Collective That Turned It on (Paperback)

A unique tale about the hippie collective of artists and video experimenters who gave birth to pirate broadcasting in the U.S. "Videofreex" is a story layered with the usual melange of counterculture sex and drugs but takes the unexpected twist of having sobering encounters with cultural icons from the 60's and 70's ranging from the Hell's Angels and the Black Panther Party to network newscasters like Mike Wallace. Parry Teasdale offers a behind the scenes view into a movement that would change the look and content of television forever. His distinctive style, unyielding social conscience and need for intellectual expression was not simply a statement but a way a life.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First-rate, September 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Videofreex: America's First Pirate TV Station & the Catskills Collective That Turned It on (Paperback)

This is countercultural history of a high order, written by an elegant prose stylist who was also a participant. An excellent volume overall. -- Edward J. Renehan, Jr.