The Spaghetti City Video Manual (1973) and "Jungletown TV On-the -Air" (1975)

In 1970, right out of college, I became a member of the group Videofreex. My background was in painting and in the years I spent with the collective I did little work with video, concentrating on drawing, photography, and graphics which I felt supplemented the group's main focus of "bringing television to the people."
The drawings of the winking monitor, sick VTR, and the cameras are from The Spaghetti City Video Manual written by Parry Teasdale and a group effort of
		the Videofreex. My drawings for the book were largely technical, serving to illustrate Parry's directions on basic care and repair of early video equipment. The monitor was one of the light touches and it kind of became a signature for the Freex. In 1975 Skip Blumberg asked me to illustrate his story "Jungletown TV On-the-Air" which told the tale of some animals who put together a
pirate broadcast television station in their little jungle community (it was actually a fable about some of the Videofreex' activities). It was submitted for inclusion in Video Communications, the tentative companion volume to the 1976 book Video Art: An Anthology, edited by Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot. This companion volume was never published. We were obviously disappointed, but the drawings, especially the herons in the easy chair, remain among my favorites of that era.
		The original "Jungletown" drawings were long ago lost, but copies survived and Parry Teasdale was able to use them in his work with low power television in the 1980s. In 1999, twenty-four years after they were drawn, they at last appeared in a book, Videofreex, Parry's "true-life" story of Jungletown TV.