Both LIFE (1979) and GOOD THINGS AND BAD THINGS (1979) are actually collections of brief sketches created in the aftermath of Phillis as a conscious departure from that earlier tape’s distended narrative format. Life is a series of short vignettes that are thematically linked in their depictions of contemporary, mutually-destructive relationships and which, along with the five selections comprising GOOD THINGS AND BAD THINGS, represent the artist’s first explicit articulation of a dualistic worldview. The interdependence of good things and bad things – a dialectical system of opposing yet complementary forces fundamental to human consciousness – is a central omnipresent theme in all of Oursler’s work, and one which receives its most sophisticated treatment in the haunting, hallucinatory Grand Mal.

[Source: "THE VIDEOTAPES OF TONY OURSLER" by John Minkowsky]