Down with the sickness.

No on-site adventures for me this week. Thanks to the rain that everybody else is all in love with, I caught a gnarly cold over the weekend; I had hoped to be better by then, and on Tuesday I even wrote my supervisor and told him I'd be coming in, but I was actually in my car and driving toward the freeway on Wednesday morning before I admitted to myself that I was in no shape to be around other human beings, let alone in an environment with no climate control to speak of. (It's something my supervisor had told me once over the phone when we were talking about me coming in, the fact that whatever it's like outside is what it's like inside.)

So, I worked from home, which hardly qualifies as a demerit, since that's where the "virtual" part of the "virtual internship" kicks in, and my supervisor had also made it clear that I was by no means obligated to actually come in. Ergo. Didn't make me feel like any less of a flake.

Anyway, some of the film clips in the most recent batch made me realize how perfectly suited I am to this sort of thing, that all the useless knowledge I've accumulated over the decades about trashy and/or ephemeral culture may finally come in handy. Like, it's a little thing, but I immediately pegged this as being Liz Renay reading her autobiography My Face for the World to See:

Okay, sure, that's not too difficult to piece together 'cuz the title of the book is easy to make out, but I'd like to think the fact that I was already familiar with Liz Renay and that book made it easier for me to track down the source of the clip -- a largely forgotten adult film called Deep Roots (link SFW) -- especially since the only existing description of it is "Queen of Heaven Show Reel 1". That description right there intrigues me; I know Carol Queen used to run play parties called "Queen of Heaven," because that's the kind of thing I know, but I'm not sure if there's a direct connection there or not, and there aren't enough hours in the day for me to solve that particular mystery.

Less overtly saucy was a Chevrolet film called "The Rainbow is Yours," from back when the rainbow in question was happy white people enjoying colorful cars, including but not limited to "Gay Cherry."

Researching it on WorldCat, I saw it had once been released on Rick Prelinger's Our Secret Century series on Voyager CD-ROM. That's a series I'm familiar with, and in fact I still own one of the other Prelinger CD-ROMs from Voyager, Ephemeral Films:

See? That's totally sitting on my desk.

Everything on the CD-ROM is freely available elsewhere (the Prelinger Archives being the most obvious) and in considerably higher quality, but I've hung onto it anyway because it makes me happy. As does getting to work with this sort of material, even on the strictly intern-y level. And I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts, and hope that it can last longer than expected.