Are you old enough to remember the 1-hour photo kiosk? God, those places were magic. You’d walk through those drugstore double-doors and into the harsh beam of fluorescent lights baking down on the eggshell linoleum. Inoffensive soft rock wafting from somewhere above the acoustic ceiling tiles would entice you to proceed. You would veer left, past the check stands, toward a long counter with racks of batteries, disposable cameras, and green and white film envelopes. Behind the counter stood the big, mysterious photo processing machine. According to your memory, this contraption looked kind of like a big FedEx copier that groaned and lurched under the strain of decades tasked with developing a continuous stream of birthday parties, weddings, vacations, graduations, and wild weekends.
And corralled in the space between the counter and that photo machine was the 1-hour photo guy, who, in your memory looks suspiciously like the Robin Williams character from that film, but was almost certainly one, or possibly two, sixteen year old kids.
It was in their careful custody that you entrusted your precious memories, your foggy and forgotten moments, your dirty little secrets committed to film. All you had to do was place your roll into the envelope, jot down your personal information, check the correct boxes, and, once sealed, deposit the parcel into the drop box. This was enough for these 1-hour wizards to work their magic.
I made many runs to the 1-hour photo kiosk in the mid-2000s. One time, I walked into a Longs Drugs (before CVS absorbed the chain in a merger) with film I found in a box that had come with me when I moved away to college. I dropped off the roll, and when I came back the photo guy warned me that the film had come out over-exposed. He handed me the prints to see for myself. I was shocked. “See those two ten and eleven year old boys?” I said to the 1-hour photo guy. “That’s me and my brother, thirteen years ago.”
Pure, friggin’ magic.
The Video
The concept for the “Hijacked Plane” music video came from the strange power of film photography to trap moments of time, only relinquishing them when exposed to a cocktail of chemicals under specifically controlled conditions. While writing the songs of LA JOTA, I had accumulated a stack of old photographs from my childhood in the Napa Valley in the 1990s. The most potent image was one of me, my brother, and our friends standing at the bottom of a 25-foot tall cascade of angular volcanic rock called Linda Falls. The image of Linda Falls became a central motif of the album’s design. It seemed fitting to carry this imagery into a video. I wanted to create a live-action collage, weaving together these old images, personal history, and real locations, into a fictional narrative.
I already had a trip planned to California to play some shows promoting the album’s release. So I called my friend Andrew from the Bay and enlisted his help with the camera work. Together we traveled to Napa County, and used my stack of photographs as clues to a scavenger hunt that would lead us to the mythical waterfall of my youth. The result is a story that’s a little more impressionistic and surreal than the sum of these historical parts.
The Song
“Hijacked Plane” is probably where I get closest to spelling out the emotional thesis of the LA JOTA. The line, “maybe this would all seem strange if we knew anything else,” was a refrain I kept coming back to while writing the songs for the album. In putting personal events into story beats, I found myself pulling back and questioning the validity of my own memories. All these stories sound crazy! I guess that’s how moments of your life feel when you remove them from context.
I structured the song similar to others on the album: a story told in two or three anecdotes used to make a larger case. The actual events of the song played out between 2001 and 2003, but I used the events of September 11th to tie these seemingly unrelated incidents together. There was a strong sense after the terror attacks of a nation unraveling whilst vainly projecting a shallow form of patriotism to itself and the world. This became a salient metaphor to describe a family coming undone.
Thanks for subscribing to TSUGA’s newsletter. I know it’s been a few months since I last posted. The new album, LA JOTA, came out on January 31st, and I would just like to extend my sincerest gratitude for all of your support, kind words, streams, and downloads.
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