My Movies
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Story Machines is Online
I just noticed that the Western Folklife Center put my short from this year’s National Cowboy Poetry Gathering online. If you didn’t get a chance to see any of the Deep West Videos this year, be sure to check them out. Mine was in very good company!
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Story Machines
After three weeks of late nights--and yes, a few tears--I just finished my short for this year’s National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. It’s all about my grampa and his PhonOcord. Thanks to Marco for the music, which we recorded in my kitchen. I’m sure that alone would have made Grampa very proud!
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Outlaws, Dynamite, and Really Nice People
Sometimes people do really, really nice things! Take my friend Taki Telonidis at the Western Folklife Center for example. When I asked him for advice about how to clean up a 1970s cassette recording of my great grandfather explaining how he and his brother moved a herd of horses from Montana to Washington in 1903, Taki said, “Oh, just send me the file. I’d be more than happy to do it for you.” He made it sound like it was just a lil’ ol’ thing, but after receiving his new and improved version in the mail a few days ago, I’m pretty sure he spent a fair amount of time on it. I was so excited (and grateful) that I converted it to streaming Quicktime over the weekend so I could share it here with you. There are still a few parts where it is difficult to understand (particularly right at the beginning), but there are some things technology still can’t fix.
Great Grandpa Jack was just a teenager when most of this story takes place, and it is not short on thrills and excitement. There is even some gunplay as they try to cross the Flathead Reservation without paying the required toll. They had very little money at the time and simply couldn’t afford it (at one point they even have to trade horses for food). One of the things that interested me most about his tale, though, is the political and sociological picture he paints of life in the Northwest around the time of the trip.
His brief mention of the dynamite-induced destruction at the Bunker Hill Mine in Idaho was something I’d never heard about before, and I immediately had to find out more. What I learned is there were large and violent labor strikes in 1892 and 1899 at the mine because Bunker Hill had managed to remain non-unionized. When Governor Frank Steunenberg--who entered office as both a Democrat and a Populist--asked the federal government to send troops to quell the unrest in 1899, the miners felt betrayed. The troops rounded up and held hundreds of men in “bullpens” without hearings or formal charges, and a few even died. Steunenberg was later killed by a bomb at his home in 1905. Big Bill Haywood, a prominent figure in the labor movement at the time (and a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World), was one of three people charged but later acquitted due to lack of evidence. I recently picked up the very thick and detail-packed Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America by J. Anthony Lukas, which is about these events. I’ve only read a few chapters so far, but I feel comfortable recommending it if this sort of stuff interests you.
Additionally, Grandpa talks about the outlaw Harry Tracy, who escaped from an Oregon prison in 1902 and (according to Grandpa) shot up Cle Elum, Washington, as well as some other places before finally being tracked and killed by a posse. Hollywood made a movie about it in the 1980s starring Bruce Dern and, it turns out, Gordon Lightfoot (Sundown, you better take care...)? Anyway, Grandpa claimed to have owned one of Tracy’s guns.
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Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Grandpa Would Have Loved the Web
My granddad was an early adopter way before that term ever entered the lexicon. As soon as a new tech product landed on the shelves, he had to have it. We’ve got all sorts of 8mm and Super8 films as well as audio recordings dating back more than sixty years. My mom recently gave me a cassette tape with an audio recording from a family reunion in Washington that Grandpa made back in the summer of 1946 using a phonograph that could record sound on blank discs. It’s so fascinating to hear the voices of long-departed relatives like my great grandparents and also how young my grandparents sound--not to mention my mom reciting Little Bo Peep at four years old. It is such a treasure. I tear up every time I listen to it, and it makes me wonder now that capturing memories like this is so easy if we’ll treasure them as much in another sixty years.
Monday, August 07, 2006
Star Route, New York City
In a show of remarkable restraint (at least for me), I decided not to tell Pat about the dream I had a few days before we flew to New York last week for the East Coast premiere of my short film at the Rural Route Film Festival. There wasn’t a lot to this dream. Mostly just the image of an airplane with the front end torn off and the name of our air carrier painted on the side. I’m sure this was probably brought on by my deep fear of flying, but it took a lot of effort to rein in my superstitious nature, particularly when the flight out there was suddenly rerouted south due to bad weather and someone in the cockpit came on the radio to tell us we had to land in Richmond, Virginia, because we were about to run out of fuel. About five minutes later we hit the runway with a loud and somewhat surprising thud. All of these things sort of seemed like bad omens to me, and yet here I am. I guess it’s time to officially give up on my hopes for a career as a crime-fighting soothsayer.
The flight delay meant we would miss Homemade Hillbilly Jam and a shorts program we were planning to attend that night as part of the festival. Instead, we headed straight for the Tribeca Grand, where Pat had booked us a room. I can be kind of cheap and normally stay at Hotel 17 when I’m traveling solo, but Pat had his fill of shared bathrooms and twin beds during our backpacking days. I like to tease him about his pampered lifestyle, but secretly love it when I get to tag along in his chauffeur-driven Town Cars.
It turns out, though, that it’s not as easy as it looks. Checking into the hotel required a lot of decisions. Do we want synthetic or down bedding? What kind of breakfast do we prefer? Bose sound system or iPod? New York Times or USA Today? Goldfish or sans goldfish? I found myself wondering what demographic profile we fit based on our answers--especially since Pat filled out the first half of the form and then became so weary he asked me to finish it. It must have been the complimentary champagne (which I embarrassingly accepted a little too eagerly) that made me decide that a Jack and Coke paired with oysters in bed would be preferable to dinner in the neighborhood. Surprisingly, this combination worked out OK for me the next day.
On Saturday, we cabbed over to the American Museum of Natural History to check out the dinosaurs and then took a brief walk through Central Park before catching a documentary narrated by John Waters called Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea (when we got home, I saw this story about another massive tilapia die-off there). Later we saw Muskrat Lovely by Amy Nicholson about an almost too-good-to-be-true combination beauty pageant and muskrat-skinning competition in Maryland. That was followed by Women Who Hunt by Carol Wagner and Theresa Davidson, which featured the skinning and gutting of several critters and turned out to be a little much for the urban audience. There seemed to be a lot of snickering and gasping in the audience (at least near where we were sitting), and I even overheard one man saying to another as we left the theater, “That was totally offensive.” I thought to myself he should consider himself lucky he couldn’t smell it.
I guess people’s reactions shouldn’t have surprised me, but in the middle of the film I suddenly felt keenly aware of how different my two worlds are and even a little confused about which one I belong in more. My sister and I are probably the first of many, many generations of women in my family not to hunt, although I like to accompany my dad and help with the butchering. Sure, there were a couple things that bothered me in the film, such as the mother and daughter who go trophy hunting for buffalo on a private reserve (something akin to shooting a cow in a field with a high caliber rifle), but for the most part, the movie reflected a reality I’ve known most of my life. It made me a little sad for the New Yorkers that their cellophane-wrapped view of the food chain allows them to think their hands aren’t bloody. Unless, of course, they are vegetarians...then I just feel sorry for them for being masochists and attending the movie in the first place.
On Sunday, we caught the Cowboys and Aliens program that featured my short. It was fun to see Boot Camp in the context of the other wonderful films, and to see how differently the New York audience reacted to it compared to the cow folk out in Elko.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
The Bootmaker and Me in NYC
Hooray! I learned today that my short film, Boot Camp will be shown as part of the Rural Route Film Festival in Manhattan on July 30. Not sure yet if I’ll be able to attend, but if I do, I guess I’ll need to finish those boots I started late last year. An occasion like this will require very special shoes!
