As you may know, some asshole giant media corporation (Warner Music Group) has been a prick and has made YouTube disable thousands, if not millions of amateur videos because they featured music owned by them without proper copyright compliance. (ie. they didn't get paid).So we simple amateur video creators, just putting up our fun, little, certainly not-for-profit or commercial-use videos, that happen to feature a song by a Warner owned (re: pwned) artist ('cause let's face it musical artists of the world...if your publisher can say who can and cannot hear your art, then you are a slave to them) get our videos censored or effectively banned.
Well, YouTube has at least a stop-gap solution. Audio swap. You can substitute the music in your video that is "inappropriate" for a selection from their rather large list of public domain or free usage stuff.
So here is my personal and a tad painful memorial video to my childhood memories of Vietnam spurred by recollections of a trip to an upstate New York lake resort in the early 1970s...redone. No narration of me reading my FLASHBACK post that was the inspiration for the video, but a really neat song replacing the verboten "American Pie" by Don McLean. I've also included the text of the original voice-over below.
Aunt Ruth (my father's sister) who we refered to as simply "Ruth", or, as we pronounced it "ROOT", announced to us kids that we were going to go with her and Memere (her mother/our grandmother) on a trip to Lake George!
Lake George, New York, then as now, is a tourist attraction due to it's beautiful surroundings and, most likely, proximity between Montreal and New York City.
It sports great entertainment and lodging, but also, has it's share of campy "tourist trap" venues.
We went to this "themed" attraction called "Frontier Land". It was basically a replica of an Old West frontier fort (ala "F-Troop") and the adults bringing their kids were probably thrilled by it's policy of "immersion" of the "young ones" into the "atmosphere" of the Old West.
Before I knew it, I was being sworn into the "U.S. Army" with an official pledge and "realistic" looking parchment document which I had to sign.
Then I was ordered to march out into the coutyard of the fort with about 40 other kids and made to stand at attention for review from our commanding officer.
The uniformed officer barked terse commands and sounded like a movie-version drill sargeant. He demanded that some kids stand more upright for attention and others to spit out their gum.
Everything for the adults (and I guess most of the kids) was all done "tongue-in-cheek" and in simulation of an old west indoctrination into the frontier army to, no doubt, "fight injuns", but I was either too stupid or too sensitive to see it as "play".
I remember in my minds-eye back to this event that I really didn't "get it". I didn't see this as a simulation, but I actually thought that some how, I, at the age of 8, was actually going to be called up to fight (and likely die) in Vietnam.
Nowadays we have the V-Chip in Tvs to resticts what kids watch. But let me tell you from experience...the worst stuff for a kid to watch on TV won't be blocked by a V-Chip. It's the Nightly News.
In 1972, I watched Walter Cronkite diligently every evening...yes, even though I was only 8. I had an insatiable thirst for knowledge and the TV News was one of the quickest and most dependable sources of information. But, for a youngster without either the parental care and concern for what I was watching or the intellectual capacity to effectively reinterpret what I was witnessing, I was entirely left to my own assumptions.
And, though I "knew" that the Frontier Land attraction was a paid entertainment venue, I misinterpreted that acting and role-playing as "real", and that though touted as "entertainment", this attraction was in fact a drafting station to feed more young boys to the "Evil War Machine" that was Vietnam.
I broke down and cried.
The other boys were laughing at me and that made me even more embarrassed, so I cried harder.
When I was "dismissed" from the reviewing line, I went to Ruth, but she looked around frantically and scolded me sternly in a low voice, "You are such a baby....you're embarrassing me!! You're embarrassing me!!"