It was 2003 and I needed something for the Gong Show. I didn't have any specific ideas. But I was at a dinner party one night, and as we were sitting around after the meal the host pulled out a VHS tape and popped it into the VCR just to entertain us. It was all footage from WWII that contained male nudity. He had spent some time in Washington DC, and while he was there he had a friend who made a living by finding archival footage for various television and movie production companies. They would request something, and he'd find it and copy it for them.

As he was fulfilling customer requests he would occasionally stumble upon WWII footage that contained maile nudity. After a while he began to figure out what kinds of keywords would return such footage, so he actually set out to find as much as he could, and he put together that compilation tape. He gave a copy to my friend just for kicks.

As we were all watching these random clips, I immediately knew I could do something with it. I could pull out the best clips and stitch them together in some semblance of a logical order and set it to music. I thought that Boy George's song "G.I. Josephine" would probably be a good fit. Once I had it all together it would be the perfect Gong Show video.

I borrowed the tape, digitized it, and cut up all the segments into individual clips. While I was doing this mechanical task I put on some music just to keep myself from going stir crazy. I put it on the Easy Listening channel so I would have something in the background but it wouldn't distract me from what I was doing. While this was going on a song started playing that I thought might work well for the piece. It had a very WWII era vibe to it. I would later learn that the title was "Always True To You (In My Fashion)". But because it was the Easy Listening version it was an instrumental, and rather schmaltzy to boot. It was perfect. I immediately abandoned my previous notion of using "G.I. Josephine".

Because I was playing the DirecTV Music Choice through my Tivo I was able to rewind it to the beginning and pull the entire song into my computer. The song served as a basis for me to organize the clips. It's rather easy to match images to the sound once the soundtrack is already down, especially using digital technology. It took a little time to work through it all, but it came together very naturally. I was really happy with the final product.

I brought it with me to the Gong Show, but like the previous year they ran out of time before they could show it. And like the previous year, I used it for my submission the following year because I still hadn't completed "Wasteland". Once again they accepted it into the festival proper. That was much greater validation than whatever score the so-called celebrity panel might have given it.

Years later when I started streaming my videos online, this piece got the distinction of being banned from a porn site. It was nothing new that my work would get banned from mainstream sites due to my subject matter, but getting banned from a porn site was something new. It turned out that they considered the clip of the naked army boy washing the puppy to be bestiality. In later years the guildelines would change to prohibit any genital contact with an animal, but back then the mere presense of a puppy dog with a naked man, however wholesome and innocent, was enough to ban it.