Interview with Weird Paul Petroskey, the original vlogger

Weird Paul Petroskey is a lo-fi musician, a comedian, a collector, an autobiographic historian, and the first vlogger in the world. A.V. Club calls him “eternally boyish”. Vice calls him “the Pittsburgh prince of DIY weird”, but there are not enough predicates to summarize Weird Paul Petroskey. We interviewed him by email.

TBP: If a young Paul could see the future on September 7th 1984, he would see that thousands of people from all over the world would watch his video tapes on computers and phones. He would see an adult Paul giving a packed concert in Hollywood. How would he have responded?
WPP: He would have been so happy. That was what he wanted. He’d seen other people’s home videos on TV and he just wanted to make ones that would be on TV, too. He wanted people to care about the music he made. He also would have said, “2012! The world will still be around?” I remember thinking how even the year 2000 was ridiculously far off. Just because it was a different century and I wouldn’t be a kid anymore. I didn’t really believe it would ever come!

TBP: If you could say something to young Paul, what would you say to him?
WPP: If I could tell him one thing, I’d say – whatever you have to do, film MORE! Whatever it takes, just make it happen!

TBP: Who was your audience back then?
WPP: My audience was very, very limited. First and foremost, it was my family (and of course, myself). Occasionally, I would make a tape of videos for a friend in school and a few times I was allowed to show my videos in high school classes, which I absolutely loved. But not many teachers were that progressive back then.

TBP:  You have your entire life archived in video tapes, diary entries, audio cassettes, food labels, newspaper cut-outs, etc. What was the reason why you saved everything?
WPP: Well, here’s a reason that I just came up with recently that I never told anyone before. I saved things because I didn’t have much. We didn’t have a lot of money when I was young. I found enjoyment in things that didn’t cost anything, like collecting bottle caps and matchbooks. If I had a magazine or comic book, I wouldn’t get rid of it. It was the only one I had and I wasn’t getting another one, so I’d keep reading it. It was better to have something than nothing. Now, a lot of people think I saved EVERYTHING, like you just asked in your question. I didn’t. I went on binges in the mid-late 80s throwing out bags and bags of stuff. If only I had that stuff now! Some of it, I’m starting to re-collect – but most of it, I’ll never see again. As for the food labels, well I didn’t save those. My mom saved them for refunds that the products used to give. And I convinced her to throw away HUNDREDS of those in the 80s. We’re lucky she still had the ones she did, so I can now share them.

TBP: Were you stimulated by your family to keep everything?
WPP: In some ways. My grandmother saved a lot of stuff, she’d cut things out of magazines and just put them in boxes. I had to watch my grandfather throwing it all away when she died. I was just a kid, but I remember thinking, “Man, all of that stuff is going in the trash…lost forever”. My grandmother always said, “Waste not, want not”. My mother took after her, even though she wasn’t cutting things out of papers. She just collected things. She saw something she liked at a rummage sale and she’d buy it.