Video – TheStoryIstheThing

The art of benches, documentaries & jazzy faces

September 21, 2023

A couple of eightysomething artists refuse to stop being wonderful, while the capital city of West Virginia pays colorful homage to the passing of another master artist.

It’s true—I never slept with Allen Ginsberg

June 4, 2023

About the night I never slept with Allen Ginsberg and the interview, song and music video this yielded after our encounter deep in the West Virginia hills in 1983.

An “Over the Rainbow” Primer and Duet

May 24, 2023

"Let the boys have the damn song." How "Over the Rainbow" almost didn't make the cut for "The Wizard of Oz." A look back at a "sacred" song in the American canon, on the occasion of a down-and-dirty music video version by the boys.

How to experience a text rainstorm

April 14, 2023

Still fun after all these years. On my timeline this morning, Facebook surfaced an offbeat video I did with my brother and a friend, from an encounter we had in 2013 with the truly cool, interactive video installation 'Text Rain.'

A brief and ‘alt-video’ tour of being way-out in Ohio

April 13, 2023

Sometimes, in order to self-soothe, I make short, odd videos. Or 'alt-videos,' as I describe this one below in the end credits, with footage from wanderings from nuclear power plants to Lake Erie last week.

A starry exhibit vividly worth one’s time

February 19, 2023

While "VAN GOGH: The Immersive Experience" wows you with its flash, such as a 7,000-square-foot Immersive Gallery animating his work and a must-experience virtual reality fly-through of Arles, I came away just as intrigued and moved by the more intimate details.

It’s a Cuba Thing

February 11, 2023

I claim no grand comprehension of the challenge of life there. But Cuba is … well, Cuba. A confounding, transformative, depressing, challenging, intoxicating place.

After an Influenza Retreat, what the sky looks like

February 10, 2023

After weeks upon weeks of miserableness, suffering though the worst bout of sickness in his adult life — aka Influenza A — your videographic interlocutor finally has (mostly) passed out of the Valley of Miserableness. This is what he saw looking up once sprung from his sick house.

Thumping out a solo on a West Virginia winter afternoon

February 8, 2023

What can I say? I make weird, short videos. This one goes out to the 7 to 17 people with an odd enough sensibility to appreciate this brief, thumping encounter with the sculpture 'Earth Portal' in Ritter Park, in Huntington W.Va., which if you didn't know it, is playable.

It was a Baby Jesus Thing

December 21, 2022

What do you do when Baby Jesus is Missing in Action — but you have a decades-long Christmas family tradition to enact, with children awaiting? You go with what you've got, even if what you've got is a bit ridiculous.

The song I composed one potentially bullet-riddled night in Italy

December 20, 2022

The boys were missing somewhere in the wilds of clubland in Rome. Perhaps dead. Or just dead drunk. I wrote one of my favorite songs that night, while worrying about their whereabouts as the Italian night deepened ...

Miss Francis’ First Birthday Party

November 23, 2022

As she approached her 77th birthday in the year 2018, Frances Buzzard has never once in her life had a big birthday party. That was all about to change for the Belle Elementary School custodian one afternoon in Belle WV.

“And we’ll all go together …”

November 8, 2022

What to keep an eye upon come what may on the political scene and in our lives: beauty. A one-minute harmonically converged reminder ...

‘Nathan Brings the Light’

November 1, 2022

When a father steps into and then down from the pulpit as his son brings the light and then snuffs it out at the end of a church service, watch for the moment of grace between father and son ..

“Dragon Ramble” by Douglas Eye and The Scribblers

September 12, 2022

To finesse and regulate some troubled energy, I fire up a jacked-up classical guitar, get the Garageband Foundry roaring, and hunker down. The result is "Dragon Ramble" by Douglas Eye and The Scribblers.