Termite TV - Life Stories

My life story... um... before now uh, I'll start at the beginning. I was born, actually, this is probably the best thing about my life is that I was actually born the morning after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, and my uh, my mother actually went into labor because my father um, one of his friends was over visiting and they got news on the news that he had been shot and my father's friend said, "I'm glad they finally killed that nigger." And my mother was just uh, emotional about it and very caught up and she went into labor, and I was born... you know, hours later. Um... so that's how it all began. Then, the military life... uh, my folks were in the military. My dad was in the military, and um, we lived in different places. In Florida, in Louisiana, in Illinois, and in West Germany during the Cold War. They were stationed on an air force base near Ramschtein and that was a pretty formative time in my life, and it was also an interesting experiment in socialism, because all of the kids who are living on the air force base, their parents pretty much make the same amount of money some of them make a little more than others, but they also are all getting their clothing from basically the same store. There's one store that everyone buys their clothing at. So everybody has... whatever they are, Nikes, or whatever they are, but no one is like, any... you know what I mean, your clothes are not the status that they could be, so it's not like you're wearing uniforms or anything like that, but you all pretty much have the same kind of class status. So, that was a pretty interesting experience because for the first time in my life the kids that you would hang around with (I was like, twelve) they were just as likely to be Native American, or Hispanic, or Latino, or African American, and... in some way those two things are connected, I'm not sure exactly why they're connected. Then, um, divorce happened, I'll try and wrap this up because I know I'm getting close, divorce, (not close?) divorce happened when I was 13 years old so I entered that majority of United States Children, I think, and moved to Texas. And Texas is a very interesting place to be alive because Texas is a very specific kind of reality. There are lots of sorts of different realities that are going on in Texas. We lived on the Gulf Coast, in Galveston, Texas. The reality in Galveston, Texas was a little different from what you might think of is the rest of Texas. Not as many cowboy hats, or cowboy boots. At one point in the fifties it had been a mob-run town. They had legalized gambling there so it was kind of an issue, you know, it was kind of reserved town. So that was high school, and then college was in Dallas, Texas. And Dallas, Texas is uh, also a very interesting reality. All of the buildings in Dallas are glass and steal, and they're all mirrors essentially and everyone drives a brand new car, almost everyone drives a brand new car, and they're very concerned about their image and how they appear. Very materialistic kind of place... it wants to be very cosmopolitan so all the restaurants are really posh and all that. So that really was a galvanizing moment in my life where I realized what we were up against. in terms of the corporate reality of our world. And I guess from that point on I've been... with what I choose to do with my days, looking into being able to see more of that corporate consumer reality that we some how or other relate to in this world, and then being able to define and see that reality, then also trying to create different realities as well so, here I am in Boulder, Colorado working with a Free Speech TV which is an independent progressive television network so that we can project some of these new images and new realities... and that's a really poor telling, but that's my life in five minutes.