The Trachtenburg Family entertains with song, delivering a vegetarian, anti-cell phone and anti-gender stereotype message.
By: Anthony Stoeckert
If you’re at someone’s house and are asked if you’d like to see some slides, it’s generally acknowledged that you’re about to be bored by images of family vacations and old block parties that is, if you know anybody who still has slides to share.
In the era of digital cameras, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players are keeping slide collections alive, and one thing for certain is that these presentations are anything but boring.
The New York City-based Trachtenburg Family (dad Jason plays keyboards and writes the songs, mom Tina Piña projects the slides and daughter Rachel plays drums and bass) performs songs written about (and accompanied by) slide collections they purchase at garage and estate sales.
As Jason tells it, the gimmick was born from the family’s "garage sale-chic lifestyle," adding that the family purchases everything it owns second-hand for two reasons.
"One is to get a higher quality product, the other is to save resources," Mr. Trachtenburg says, calling the amount of plastic bottles used for drinking water "obnoxious" and suggesting that people use reusable glass jars or stainless steel canisters for their drinking water (an interview with Mr. Trachtenburg leads to several unexpected topics).
The slide collections became a part of family life after the purchase of a projector that came with some slides. "I started watching them and they were interesting and voyeuristic, and (I thought), ‘Let’s write a song about them.’ That’s what I did and it stuck and people liked it, so I stuck with it."
The family will perform as part of the Concerts at the Crossing series at the Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing in Titusville Sept. 30. The family’s music is marked by purposely clunky piano and keyboard, steady but somewhat off-the-beat drumming, and enthusiastically sung lyrics about vacations, relationships, eggs, corporate presentations, or whatever else is featured in the slides. The family has been written about in The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly and has performed on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Among their celebrity fans is comedian/actor David Cross (whom Mr. Trachtenburg could resemble, if Mr. Cross had long hair and a caterpillar mustache).
Many of Mr. Trachtenburg’s lyrics are word-for-word descriptions of what’s seen in the slides, and the combination is strange, funny, infectious and sometimes thought-provoking.
Take the band’s first slideshow song, "Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959," which is about a couple’s, well, mountain trip to Japan in 1959. Amid pictures of the apparently retired couple posing for photos and arriving at the airport, Mr. Trachtenburg sings the following lyrics:
"He’s a very fine man, he is so well-rounded/ He’d like to see the world before it ever started/ We’re getting off this plane before we’re both departed/ On a mountain trip to Japan 1959."<</i>br>
The song takes an unexpected turn when the family shows a photo they believe is a man being walked to his execution. The man appears to be wearing a black bag and is accompanied by uniformed men wearing large smiles. Mr. Trachtenburg’s lyrics (sung enthusiastically) for this slide are:
"Death will come in a matter of time/ He’s being backed up by a military line/ With a bag on his head he will soon be dead/It must have been something he said/ Public execution can be so degrading/ Better get it over with cause the ladies are waiting/ On a mountain trip to Japan 1959."<</i>br>
Another family favorite is "Look at Me," which is about two women who were nurses in the Army and are good friends. The lyrics include lines like, "Here we are in a parking lot/ My friends… they smoke a lot" accompanied by slides of people smoking. A surprise (for some of us anyway) comes when a picture of one of the women topless appears (the Trachtenburgs blurred the image). You’d at least think the woman who took the photo would have removed the slide from the collection before selling it at a garage sale, but Mr. Trachtenburg seems unfazed by the picture.
"We’re here to break sociological configurations and sexual stereotypes," he says. "If there are three (ideas we want to share) through this act, number one would be to break through sexual stereotypes. Number two would be to drastically encourage vegetarianism and the third would be to discourage the blatant overuse of cellular phones." Indeed, for an interview, Mr. Trachtenburg called from a payphone in Lincoln, Neb.
Another interesting aspect of the Trachtenburg family is its approach to parenting. Twelve-year-old Rachel has been playing in the band since she was 6. A DVD about the family, Off and On Broadway, in part explores Rachel’s life and how she’s being raised. Because of the band’s concert schedule, she’s often up until 1 a.m. She’s also home-schooled. Mr. Trachtenburg says they’ve heard cries of "exploitation" during concerts from disapproving people, but the family is unfazed.
"People are always looking for answers as to how to raise their kids, and I think the answer is… to do what you think the right thing is to do, whatever that is, and to just try and get better and better at it. So that’s what I’m going to try to work on today."
The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players will perform at the Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing, 268 Washington Crossing-Pennington Road, Titusville, Sept. 30, 8 p.m. Deirdre Flint opens. Tickets cost $20, $18 advance. For information, call (609) 406-1424. On the Web: www.crossingconcerts.com. Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players on the Web: www.slideshowplayers.com