My Movies
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.
Permalink • History • My Movies • Technology • (34) Comments
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.
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!
How to Recognize a Celtic King
I bought a new HDV camera last month and have been spending most of my free time learning how to use it. My big problem, though, is that every few days it seems I discover I need to order an additional piece of equipment, or an adapter, or some new cable if I’m going “to get the most” out of my new picture takin’ machine. It turns out this film-making thing is a lot more expensive than last year’s firearms hobby, but still cheaper than high fashion. Anyway, once our friendly UPS man delivers a new package, I run experiments to make sure I understand how my new stuff works with the camera. But doing science by yourself is hard, so I occasionally must roust Pat to help me. In this Quicktime 7 clip, I was testing the wireless lavalier. I still have much to learn, but I"m happy with the way things are looking and sounding.
Oral History
A few years ago, I went with my mom and Veltha Coleman to videotape an interview with Irene Stapp out in Hettenshaw Valley (that’s in the southwestern part of Trinity County). One of Irene’s great-grandfathers opened the first store in Blocksburg, while another, as legend has it, battled a grizzly bear with a knife by shoving his arm down the animal’s throat and stabbing it from the inside. Grizzly Mountain is named for the incident, although Irene says that isn’t where it happened. Anyway, I just got around to putting up this Quicktime clip, where Irene talks about her Wailaki heritage and Lucy Young, who lived through the massacres of the 1860s and provided anthropologists with much of what is known about Wailaki life before the arrival of white settlers in that region.
1950s Footage of San Francisco
A couple years ago, my aunt gave me a bunch of 8mm film that my granddad shot in the late 1940s and ‘50s. I was going to transfer it all myself, but after researching the process, I decided it looked like too much work. Last week, Pat took three reels to Digital Pickle. They cleaned it all up and transferred it to MiniDV and DVD for me. This is a short Quicktime clip taken, according to my mom, at a ranch “in San Francisco.” She is pictured on the horse. I don’t know who the little boy is.
Added April 7, 2006: My mom says the little boy’s name is Herbie Brenjolson. Are you out there, Herbie?
RSS 2.0 | Atom
My Projects
- Web: TED's Translation Project
- DVD: How to make cowboy boots
- Book: My grandmother's life story
- Always: The House!
My Short Films
- What's a Nice Girl like You...
- Story Machines
- Boot Camp
- Moving Horses from Montana to Washington in 1903 (audio)
My Tweets
My Photos
The Blocksburg Book
