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)
Labels: Barbara Hansen, Matt Knoth, old-time, Stephanie Prausnitz
posted by cjereneta at 2:45 PM
1 Comments:
Howdy. I just learned to play the Tombigbee Waltz today from a Jay Ungar video. It occurred to me that I hadn't heard of the tune from any other source before, so I Googled it. Your videoblog was the first link to come up. I'm also interested in blogging, low-budget videography and old-time music, so I'll have to read and watch more of what you've done here.
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