Arts & Culture

The Secret Handshake, Furai and the Rescue of Naked VHS Tapes

The Secret Handshake rescues naked VHS tapes that lost their boxes, and Philadelphia street artist Furai is drawing the new identity for them.

By Harry Hayman 8 min read
The Secret Handshake, Furai and the Rescue of Naked VHS Tapes

The television was out at the curb on trash day, and somebody had given it a face. The shell had been drawn all over, turned from a dead appliance into a character, and then left there with the rest of the week’s garbage for whoever came by first. I pulled over. There was no plan involved in that, and I want to be honest about it. I got out, crouched down next to a broken television on a Philadelphia sidewalk like a person with nothing better to do, and found a tiny tag stuck to the casing. The tag had a name on it. Furai.

So I took the television home, and then I went looking for him. That is how I met the artist who is now drawing the visual identity for a growing pile of rescued VHS tapes that belong to my brother. None of this was planned. In my experience almost nothing worth talking about ever is.

A Tag the Size of a Postage Stamp

This city trains you to look at small things stuck to large things. Philadelphia has been a sticker town for more than twenty years, and the people who made it one are not abstractions to anyone who walks here. Justin Nagtalon drew a friendly, slightly mischievous cartoon water buffalo called El Toro and started putting it up around 2003, and Billy Penn reported this past March that he and the artist Bob Will Reign are widely credited as two of the first sticker artists in the city, the ones who effectively started the scene here. Nagtalon died in March of this year at 43, and the tributes that followed came from artists whose own work carries pieces of what he figured out first. Twenty three years of a cartoon buffalo on poles and junction boxes turns out to be a body of work.

None of that happens inside an institution, which is part of the point. Philadelphia also runs the largest public art program in the country. Mural Arts Philadelphia has been formally organized since 1996, takes on between fifty and a hundred participatory projects a year, and puts roughly 2.7 million dollars a year into the creative economy of this city. I have enormous respect for that work and for the people who do it. But the television at the curb was not a project and nobody approved it. It was just a person making something and letting it go.

WHYY built a five episode podcast called Art Outside around this exact layer of the city, hosted by Conrad Benner, with interviews of Kid Hazo, El Toro, Symone Salib, Busta and Nile Livingston. The piece notes that Philadelphia is the birthplace of modern graffiti, going back to Cornbread spray painting his name here in the 1960s, and that the city now holds more than four thousand murals. Benner has been documenting all of it at Streets Dept since 2011. Kid Hazo has said he stays anonymous because he wants people looking at the art instead of at him, and I thought about that for a while after I found the tag. A name that small is not marketing. It is closer to a signature left where almost nobody will look.

What Ben and Ruben Built

My brother Ben and his partner in crime Ruben created The Secret Handshake. The shortest honest description I can give is that it is a beautifully obsessive little world built out of movies, books, VHS tapes and the forgotten cultural stuff the rest of us walked straight past without ever registering that it was interesting. It is not a store in the ordinary sense and it is not a museum. It is closer to what happens when two people take their own taste completely seriously for long enough that other people start showing up for it.

I did not build any of that and I do not want credit for a minute of it. I am the brother. What I have is a habit of noticing when two things belong next to each other.

The Naked and Filthy Salvage Project, in Plain Terms

Their newest idea is called The Naked & Filthy Salvage Project, and I freaking love it.

Here is what it actually means, because the name is doing a lot of work. A naked tape is a VHS cassette that has lost its original packaging. No sleeve, no clamshell, no box, no cover art. Just the black shell and whatever somebody once wrote on the label in ballpoint pen. In the collecting world a naked tape is usually treated as worthless, because the box was the thing people wanted, and the box is where the artwork lived. Ben and Ruben find those tapes and give them another life instead of letting them go to the landfill.

Are the tapes valuable? Probably not. Did anybody ask them to save them? Definitely not. That may be exactly why I like it so much.

A Tape Without Its Box Is a Tape on a Clock

It turns out that the instinct behind this project is one that professional archives have been arguing about, with real urgency, for a decade.

Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound, a nonprofit that helps libraries and archives digitize analog video, describes what the field calls the magnetic media crisis. Magnetic tape has a predicted life expectancy somewhere between twenty and thirty years, and real world lifespans run shorter than that because almost nothing was ever stored properly. Very few organizations kept the machines needed to play back tape formats over twenty years old, and the technicians who can keep those machines running are becoming few and far between. A 2018 white paper from the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives put it even more bluntly, saying the window to preserve the millions of videotapes made between the 1970s and the early 2000s had nearly closed.

Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive gave that argument its name in 2015 with a report called Deadline 2025: Collections at Risk. It identified three risks, and only one of them is the tape itself. The others are the machines going out of production along with their spare parts, and the engineers who understood those machines retiring out of the industry. The archive has since reported that some formats are holding up better than feared, out to fifty years or more when they are stored in the right conditions, which I appreciate them saying out loud. The United States National Archives makes the same practical point about the hardware: the equipment needed to play these materials back may be old or obsolete, and working machines are genuinely hard to find.

So a naked tape is carrying two problems at once. The chemistry is on a clock, and the box that told you what was even on the thing is already gone. Somebody has to decide it is worth the trouble anyway. That is the entire project.

Philadelphia Has Saved Tapes Before

This city has form here, and the story is remarkable. Marion Stokes was born in Germantown in 1929, worked as a librarian at the Free Library of Philadelphia for nearly two decades, and in 1979 began recording television news onto videotape. She did not stop for thirty five years. When she died in 2012 she left roughly 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes, and her son donated the whole archive to the Internet Archive the following year. It took four shipping containers to move it. Nobody asked her to do that either.

The impulse is alive here right now in a more ordinary form. PhillyVoice reported in June that Dylan and Keri Wise, a Passyunk Square couple, were opening a video rental shop after a pilgrimage to the last Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon, with Wise pointing at the vinyl comparison and the simple fact that people want to own the thing rather than watch a title disappear off a platform. By September the Little Movie Store had a location at 2001 South 10th Street, an October opening, a library around twenty thousand titles deep across DVD, Blu ray, 4K, LaserDisc and VHS, assembled out of thrift shops, estate sales and their own shelves, and 465 people already on the founding membership list. The last Philadelphia Blockbuster closed in 2013. Thirteen years later there is a waiting list to rent a tape in South Philly.

Why Harry Hayman Keeps Pulling Over

So now the two worlds are touching. Furai is taking a swing at the visual identity that will live on these rescued tapes, and everything I know about how he works tells me it will be hand made, imperfect, analog, a little weird and unmistakably his. Which is the right answer, because a tape that lost its cover art does not need a clean replacement. It needs a new one with a person’s hand visible in it.

I want to be clear about my role, because it is smaller than it looks and I like it that way. I did not make the tapes matter and I am not drawing anything. I saw a television in the trash and I got curious. I knew two people who were building something strange and completely their own, and I had met a third who does the same thing in an entirely different medium. So I introduced them, and then I got out of the way.

That is the part I would do again a hundred times. Culture in this city does not usually arrive through a program or a budget line. It arrives because somebody kept a thing that was headed for the curb, and somebody else put a name on it. My brother is building something wonderfully strange. Furai makes wonderfully strange things. Now I get to stand back and see what the hell happens, and I cannot wait.

Sources and references

About the Author

Harry Hayman is a Philadelphia-based entrepreneur, music producer, and cultural advocate. Through his work with the Feed Philly Coalition, he explores and documents the creative, culinary, and civic life of a city he believes is one of the most inspired places in America.

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