Living Room Recordings #005: Tombigbee Waltz

My last piece from my day with Stephanie Prausnitz (fiddle), Barbara Hansen (fiddle), and Matt Knoth (guitar) back in the year 2000.

Like Kristin & Joe's Love Train, this piece from the earlier incarnation of Matchbook Films toyed with some of the conventions that now seem to be part of the language of today's videoblogs. The brevity of the form is conducive to this sort of formal exploration. See, e.g. Scratch Video or Josh Leo's experimental playspace Stone Farm.

In my college film courses these sorts of exercises often seemed pretentious, in part because our department was so under-equipped and -funded that you'd have sometimes as few as two projects in an entire quarter. Ending up with a piece that would never be viewed outside of a classroom seemed like such a waste of time. (So I often went with: funny.)

But here, where the stakes are so aggressively low (do not watch M Verdi's seething R-rated rant on the subject, "The Yang of Videoblogging") and the pace of production as optionally brisk, the payoffs for playful experimentation are much greater.

Make one piece, post it, make another. Learn. Move on. Drop by your relatives' houses and sneak the feed into their copy of iTunes.

No waiting by the mailbox for a rejection letter from yet another festival. Today that seems so... so 20th century.

Length: 1:42

Flashless? (Click to view)

Beach Grape

With the wind sound, the exposure, and the low frame rate this one feels a bit like old Super8.

The title is self-explanatory.

Length: 0:24

Click to view

Coming Attractions: VP

Apropos of The Product, a premise in search of a video.

Length: :20

Flashless? (Click here.)



[Creative liberties taken.]

Mirror

Part of being a first-time parent, or at least a first-time parent with a history of compulsive intellectualizing, is simply sitting back and observing your child's behavior as if s/he were a case study in human brain development.

Jacques Lacan or his adherents might have something to say about this interaction The Boy had with his own image back in March, when he was fourteen months old and not yet walking on his own.

That said, it's also pretty funny.

This one's longer than my three-minute limit, so: oops.

Length: 3:40

Click to view

Living Room Recordings #004: Booth Shot Lincoln

Just got to the point in Sara Vowell's Assassination Vacation where she writes about John Wilkes Booth having expected people would have written songs celebrating his shooting of the despot Abraham Lincoln. I don't think he lived to hear any, but this tune is one of them.

Once again featuring: Stephanie Prausnitz (fiddle), Barbara Hansen (fiddle), and Matt Knoth (guitar). Shot way back in 2000.

With my backlog of video increasing, I'll try for two videos/week through the summer. Could be tough to sustain, but my enthusiasm is high right now; figure I'll ride the wave.

Length: 2:51


Click to view

Hat

My first same-day shoot --> post. Future videos will travel back in time to earlier stages in The Boy's development, but here you see him in his present-day form.

Nearly eighteen months old. Walking... or rather lurching. And the word of the day:

"Hat"

Length: 1:19

Click to view

Kristin & Joe's Love Train

So much of Kristin and Joe's life in Chicagoland revolved around the elevated train system that they decided to let the CTA chauffeur them to their wedding. I was invited along to videotape the ride.

I edited the piece using The Ojays' "Love Train" as the soundtrack, and that was the form I gave to the couple as a finished piece. But when I first posted the video to Matchbook Films, I went back and stripped out the music, feeling timid about copyrights. The quietness of what was left retained, it seemed to me at the time, a feeling of incompleteness.

Thus had I intended to post the original edit, rights issues be damned. But when I went back and watched both, it was the version without music that stood out as the better piece. Perhaps because I've been watching videoblogs of late, and have become accustomed to the rhythms and silences of "real", or, at least, less-mediated, life.

By the standards of this evolving medium, the original soundtrack was completely overbearing, and drowned out several opportunities for a viewer to discover some of the human moments I had managed to capture.

So once again: without.

Length: 3:03

Click to view

[Update: the musical soundtrack has not been removed; it has simply migrated to a position as the underscore for this late night taco run.]