Three Ways You Can Enjoy Weird Art for Free

Last week, a friend of mine asked me how my broke ass keeps up with all of the various DVD releases and other expenses related to being an obscure media nerd. The simple answer is that I do not. My media diet is a patchwork of things I have figured out how to access for free or cheap, and I do almost all of my research the same way. I don’t even know how to use JSTOR, and at this point, I’m kind of afraid to ask. 

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a curious pirate dirtbag like me, so welcome aboard. Below are three potential launchpads for your buccaneering. I picked them because they are easy to access, free or low-cost, and will reward you for the time you put into them. All I ask is that if you see something disgusting, you tell me all about it.

Tubi

There are some movies that are worth the time to track down in HD and watch in a darkened room in complete silence. And then there are movies like VAMP, a dire horror comedy where two frat boys are sexually menaced by Grace Jones playing herself playing a vampire. VAMP does not need a Criterion release, or even a great deal of your time and attention. You can laugh at the cheesy jokes and dumb kills and also appreciate the weird queer art created by Jones and Keith Haring’s visual collaborations. These are movies you watch based on the box art or a vaguely remembered recommendation, preferably while you text your friends about how dumb they are. 

That sort of film is the heart of the Tubi experience. Somehow, Tubi is the only streaming service I have found that gives you approximately the same feeling as aimlessly wandering around a grimey video rental store on a Saturday afternoon. All films are equal in the land of TUBI, and the selection is surprisingly vast; AGFA and Drafthouse Films releases lurk on the shelves, and it takes the same amount of effort to watch SUSPIRIA as MICROWAVE MASSACRE. Movies also rotate through the platform monthly, so if you want to watch something, do it now. (I watched VAMP on there and it's already gone!) You can take a tour of your favorite special effect artist’s work, get really into a micro-niche like 70s-era feminist folk horror, or figure out how to creatively summon the pornography that is just barely hidden behind an algorithmic beaded curtain. And yes, it has commercials, but that’s why it’s free. You gotta check your phone sometime.

Museum of Home Video

The world of found footage can be rewarding, but digging through it can also be a lot of work with little reward. That’s why collectives like Everything is Terrible find their audiences: anybody can show you some weird shit, but curation is king. I love found footage, but I’m still figuring out how to find the good stuff. That’s why the only thing on this list that costs money is the Museum of Home Video’s Patreon. Their programming does stream for free from their website at regularly scheduled times, but I’m an insomniac who writes and edits late. For me, 24-hour archive access is well worth a measly $5 a month. 

There’s a lot of fun programming to be had from this pirate TV network (fuckin’ love MUSICVIDEODROME), but my favorite offering is the weekly flagship show. It’s a two-to-three-hour melange of whatever footage compilations result from the particular media tastes of VJ Brett Berg. A given episode might include a montage of Andre the Giant fart stories, a supercut of YouTube-salvaged theater snipes, or an entire episode of Police Squad!. Somehow, it always hits. Brett feels like the Joel Robinson of the show, gently cutting in every twenty minutes or so to say hello and explain what’s going on to the audience. Watching it feels like spending a couple of hours on the couch with a fellow media nerd, splitting a joint and laughing at the weird excesses of popular culture. Check it out for free every Tuesday night.

The Internet Archive

The only reason I’m cool at all is that my favorite things to research are queer shit and pornography. I believe that if you are researching those things in particular, you need to learn how to access archival materials. If you don’t do that, you’re relying on the collective memory of a culture that is built to destroy you in order to learn about yourself. One of the reasons I write the things I do I that I want to cure that amnesia, so I am driven to create connections between the past we’ve been commanded to forget and the apocalypse we’re living through now. That means I spend a lot of time researching weird ephemera, and that means I spend a lot of time on the Internet Archive.

It is an intimidating and complicated website to figure out, but if you’re patient, the gems are worth it. I was able to read 70’s-era sadomasochist dykes dissecting the leather scene in their own words, giving me the history I couldn’t find anywhere else. It’s where I’ve found archives of my transmasculine ancestors gossiping about sex and art the same way I do with my friends today, a comfort I’ve come back to over and over again. I enjoy regarding archiving as an act of love. These materials others would throw away and forget are my connections to the queer family I never knew, and because other people like me value them, they are seen and preserved and loved. In my dreams, some future leatherdyke is fucking around on the Internet Archive and getting their mind blown by some wild thing I wrote. I can only hope.