The Transcontinental Oldbones Project

Sunset that wasn't

2012-02-01T22:12:00.000-05:00

Here's an atmospheric timewarp. Original on the left. Now, it's all made of actual video and it plays perfectly naturally. I mean, sunsets do happen. Boats going up rivers do happen. I know for a fact that sometimes the air can feel like its glowing onto your skin at the right time of the correct beautiful day. That happens. So it's not lying. Yeah, it is. But see, now it's not because I warned you. Ok, what if I said I painted a picture...

Exposition

2012-01-26T10:21:00.000-05:00

In 1855, Charles Goodyear brought a completely rubber room to the World's Fair in Paris. Europeans had seen almost zero rubber ever before, so the sight of rubber walls, floors, furniture, combs, pens and umbrellas wigged everyone out a bit. This party might not be quite like that, but I'm aiming for a close second.

The Homogenocene recycles

2012-01-24T15:25:00.003-05:00

A good video by Ewing and Grady carried on the New York Times site.

Moto co-op?

2012-01-23T14:05:00.002-05:00

They ask: could it work in your hometown? At first, no. Maybe.

Preparing

2012-01-22T21:48:00.005-05:00

Valves, valve seats. All eight have to fit well or it won't go. This one looks good. Some have to be sanded against each other, ground together in place, testing to match. A satisfying process. Reassembled, running now - satisfied again.

Now I can focus on getting ready for our opening night at Artifact. There will be a lot to see.

Columbian Exchange

2012-01-12T14:54:00.003-05:00

Some original Oregonians. My granddad got some prints made at the turn of the century by a Mormon road engineer. This place was somewhere near Mt. Hood. It's a ghost town now. Wouldn't mind dropping in to see how things look now. In Charles Mann's amazing book, Virginia Company traders were sure North America was an isthmus 200 miles wide. They were in a hurry to get across and trade with China. Oregon is a lot further away than that.

High Line

2012-01-09T13:12:00.004-05:00

January's Geographic had a story from Allard and Quammen, two greats. Can't really think of a better combo for a piece about such an arcane part of the American West. Untouchably good work.

I also enjoyed some nostalgia. The green bus rode that high line one summer digging for dinosaurs. From Sewanee via Albuquerque and Potter's West to the badlands north of Jordan and the Twitchell ranch - walking in circles searching for artifacts and nothingness under so much sky can make you an addict for life. This was the Museum of the Rockies field camp with my well-beaten trail from the mess tent. The bus is in my shop in Chattanooga now. Finding photos like this makes me both desperate and hopeful while I think about what it will take to make her gallop again.

Rambler's Admonition

2012-01-04T21:42:00.001-05:00

It's hard to remember how to remind yourself. Daily maybe.

Form/function

2011-12-30T08:45:00.003-05:00

Looks ugly and dirty at first. Because it is. But look closer, and there's a lot to learn. Each shape has tons of implications. Things so precise you can really screw them up. Millions of explosions have happened right there in the dark across tens of thousands of miles - desert, plains, forest, mountains. Hours upon hours it has been a red hot metal gasket sandwich with the bread sliced just so. Hope I can get it to burn again.

Tis the season

2011-12-24T09:03:00.002-05:00

Maybe a little tasteless for the colonial race to brandish - yet effective. The sight of an enthusiastic white man on a terraformed pacific island surrounded by invasive species... it's only iterative. It wasn't long ago, Christmas is summer on the beach. Richard Candler, everybody.

Primitive motorcycles

2011-12-23T09:18:00.001-05:00

Today will be a mechanical day. Lines on cars, motorcycles, surfboards and horses are sometimes what make people waste so much time on them. The right lines on a horse can make it priceless. They're not mass produced. You can't order an '87 Steppe Trotter and expect it to look like anything else. They're all one of a kind, special snowflakes. So analog.

Demolition addendum.

2011-12-20T09:09:00.001-05:00

Shop night

2011-12-19T09:58:00.001-05:00

Some modification required.

whoa.

2011-12-15T23:43:00.002-05:00

Well, the ante has been upped. For good. All.I.Can is one of the most remarkable films I've ever seen. A piece.

Dilemma

2011-12-11T22:12:00.001-05:00

"I have maybe 200 motorcycles. / I never counted. / I don't have any money. If I got some money, I'd buy a motorcycle."

Morning mist

2011-12-09T08:28:00.001-05:00

The Bend is shrouded this morning. Everything solid is frosted. It's cold, the sun is coming up. That dendritic rime on your windshield is pure deposited vapor. Lookout Mountain, Stringer's Ridge, the Moon Pie Factory, and the power grid are cloaked. Night has chilled the air, but the river is still warm from yesterday's upstream sun. It's not a breath of fresh alpine clouds, but I'll take it.

From whence

2011-12-07T18:47:00.001-05:00

An American shepherd watches his sheep. The photo was taken more than a century ago by a man who believed his subject was a descendant of one of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel. It's hard to tell what matters when it comes to the preconceptions of the observer. I want to know what you, the reader, may see here. I'll tell you what I know afterwards.

From a dictionary:

The construction from whence has been criticized as redundant since the 18th century. It is true that whence incorporates the sense of from: a remote village, whence little news reached the wider world. But from whence has been used steadily by reputable writers since the 14th century, most notably in the King James Bible: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help" (Psalms). Such a respectable precedent makes it difficult to label the construction as incorrect. Still, it may be observed that whence (like thence) is most often used nowadays to impart an archaic or highly formal tone to a passage, and that this effect is probably better realized if the archaic syntax of the word without - from - is preserved as well.

Earthling

2011-12-04T08:30:00.001-05:00

It might be December, but here in cragistan we don't worry about that. Sure, on a shining 62 degree day just weeks from the solstice, you could expect the rocks to be crowded. Earth has 7 billion people, and half of them were probably at Foster Falls yesterday. But don't forget that Chattanooga is made of cliffs - there's no shortage. Trees leafless and shivered from the night frost bask in solar wind. Light blasts down on what seems more and more like the surface of one sweet world. On Lookout Mesa, The Refuge is just waiting for some love from Wurzel while he raps in. It's the east-facing limb of a noble syncline exposing one hundred feet of pure sandy butter. By the time you clip the anchors on Earthling, there might not be anyone else on the planet.

Blank Slate

2011-12-02T08:09:00.001-05:00

Erik has scored the keys! Now it's time to make something happen. Visualize, o ye slathering dudely craftsmen, visualize.

Duran Duran

2011-11-30T16:07:00.001-05:00

I dont know what's wrong with me, but there is something amazing about this. This is your fault, Ben Long.

Cyber Monday

2011-11-28T18:20:00.001-05:00

Got a few pieces of holiday mail today for various non-tenants. They pretty much edited themselves. Now I'm not sure what's on sale. Enjoy responsibly.

Underground Fire

2011-11-27T23:05:00.001-05:00

Hiked up soggy North Chick today, crossing tumbling creeks in the fog. Got a whiff of Auld Reekie, wondering where it could possibly be coming from. No forges or steam engines anywhere. Mines in these renegade Plateau seams, but how does coal spark on a day like this? Katelyn spots the smoldering hillside through the trees. Roots boil in the hot rainy ground. Sizzling boots, an acrid nostril steam. Not a very sensible place for a stroll. It's no Centralia, but it sure is weird.

Like this, but way slower.

2011-11-15T10:53:00.001-05:00

A friend asked me what I want do in this new workshop we've got. Yeah, this. At a fraction of the speed, quality and coolness - but with all the stoke.

Rowdy

2011-11-14T08:45:00.001-05:00

Bring it on, winter. Lando Blankenship.

Cooper Heights

2011-11-10T08:46:00.003-05:00

Another highline from the plateau ether. Ed Yates.

Buzzard Point

2011-11-07T08:20:00.004-05:00

They circle, circling. The sun slashing rock sends spirals in gusts under their wings. They plane and wheel around a lit ring burned in the blue. The star radiates and cleanses, the birds purify. Cathartes aura. We walked up there to climb, Wurzell, Whale and I. But this prow of boulder stone is an altar of repentance. We sat, consumed. Like some vernal cleaning inverted to autumn - somehow very appropriate, the dying time, time to lay the forest fallow and start anew from short hibernation. Time to let the blazing light pick your bones clean and shamble up rickety down the mountain, fresh-eyed to the fiery world. Carry nothing un-needed, take that animated skeleton and ramble the twining trail.

I just moved out of my old house. The corners were thick with a bundled year of baggage, much to jettison. Now the rooms echo with a knowing wave. I did my part. The walls are scraped clean and my buzzards will wait until next season. It's good to keep them handy.

Dirtbag Metal Horsemen

2011-11-02T08:49:00.004-05:00

A great project from Scott Toepfer

Samhain

2011-11-01T01:07:00.000-05:00

The time of year when they say our world is somehow closer to that of the Night Country - the low dark alternate universe full of mystery. The one where people and creatures who lived before return in stories and rhyme. Happy Halloween.

Obed River

2011-10-27T23:02:00.000-05:00

Rocks and Trees. Check. Autumn.

Strix varia

2011-10-26T20:59:00.001-05:00

Harbinger of autumnal wisdom. Or, I guess, bringer of silent death if you're anything smaller than a possum.

The Unexpected, (expect)

2011-10-20T22:39:00.000-05:00

This has been one of the only solo motorcycle trips I've taken in a year. It was just three days, which used to be the time I would use to get from Utah to Tennessee. Three days was a matter of course among weeks of unplanned moto wandering.

Now it's a boomerang to West Virginia. One day up, one there, one back. Like someone tied a rubber inntertube to the back of my belt, put a stake in the ground in Chattanooga, and told me to run. When you get the rabbit in your blood, improvisation works better than planning. Glad it didn't go smoothly.

I popped a throttle cable at 75, winding it up on a strip of federal shipping lane on the state line. Just so you're clear, the Interstate Highway system only qualifies as road in a few places. When they started making bikes for it, we got all our metal covered with plastic. Because at around 75, the wind feels great when you're alone, poor when you're in the slipstream of an eighteen wheeler. Once a mile.

Decided to do surgery roadside, stashed gear in the woods, ended up with a handful of cables, thumb out. Got a ride all the way to a vault of a million Honda parts, none of which I needed. Was directed to a bicycle shop. Got dropped off there. The bicycle shop tells me to go back down the road to a man named Henry. The taxi woman took me to Bristol. I found him sidling up an aisle of pre-1960 Triumphs, a BSA, two Nortons, seven Hondas and an above-average collection of mirrors behind a window painted with the word 'Henry's.' He was wearing a grey jumpsuit embroidered with a red 'Henry.' I was pretty sure this was the guy.

Henry's is one of those places you could search for. You might only find it by accident. "I don't advertise," he tells me. The best don't need to.

He soldered a new barrel on that cable. Gave the pickup truck ride back to my bike, told race stories, talked about prize metal horses, spoke this language of shaped ore and controlled explosions. Told me nine different ways I could have dealt with the problem. "There's always something." Ask if it will hold for Fayetteville and back, he says "Don't wring it out all the way. Maybe."

Google actually just offered to write this post for me. There's a new utility that helps you choose your next word. I went to college for that. Now, your computer (actually, the probability of your similarity to other thoughts in Google's hive) can guess the next word you're likely to type. So far it has suggested a string of mediocre malapropisms, apparently boilerplate in the cloud. As planned. Here's to the unexpected.

Machine

2011-10-17T22:45:00.004-05:00

This has been flying about the moto digiverse... but it's so dope I have to join the club.

New River Gorge

2011-10-17T06:39:00.003-05:00

Bridge Day, morning after.

Combustion

2011-10-13T23:29:00.003-05:00

Fire and rust. The rusting leaves, the burning oil. All oxidizing in a brilliant flame. Leaves and petroleum, the rocks speak. The autumn leaves blaze and burn, and a motorbike surfs among the confetti zooming tiny explosions of forgotten trees. Bringing the present to life, burning the past.
West Virginia this weekend, through a flaming forest forged in the Pleistocene.

Friend John sends a tiny text message from the North Slope of Alaska. Finding more - faint black all powerful sunblood from under the rocky hood. Stethoscope to the ground. "Up all night talking to the slope. Drilling a well, hit an unseen fault last night at 2am. Chaos. Awesome."

Moto

2011-10-10T22:55:00.000-05:00

Sequatchie Valley. Bavaria? Nein - TN.

Goldilocks

2011-10-09T21:01:00.002-05:00

When is something just right? It's too hot - you're naming what is there. Too cold - you can name what is not. Just right: that's its only name. If only it were as easy as porridge.

Fruitathevine

2011-10-07T08:55:00.001-05:00

Leaves like solar panels make laden vines. This year was great for muscadines, scuppernongs, fox grapes and their ingenious corollaries - jelly, juice, wine, cordial, and grapa. Every autumn in Tennessee these puppies start to drop off all over the forest, primates plucking away, drunken bees swirling around as Ann says. Here's her recipe for juice and jelly. My Dad's classic grape brews have been circling campfires for years, Mom's jelly rainbow is in full bloom and Kelsey's first run of grapa is already famous. Muscadines always mean fall, the waning sacrament, the prolonged delicious last rites of summer.

North Chick

2011-10-02T21:15:00.001-05:00

Chickamauga is a funny name. TiVo is a funny invention. Like playing outside, but worried about all that television you might miss? Nothing a rattlecan can't fix. The future is for you. Some rock glyphs here from the early Anthropocene - sure to become a classic.

The Crust

2011-10-02T09:03:00.003-05:00

Map it all you like. The fabric of this planet, bent, folded and riven with a thousand kinds of riddles and pockets, cloaked in vastness, drenched by time, layered in paradox, woven over with water and blasted by the sun will never, ever fail to mesmerize me with its mystery. The rock speaks. The geostoke abides.

Rocktober

2011-10-01T09:51:00.000-05:00

Wurzel is starting it off right. The clock strikes midnight, 56 degrees at LRC.

Plungetaking

2011-09-30T14:37:00.005-05:00

Yeah, do it.

Carboniferous

2011-09-29T23:34:00.001-05:00

Stacks of it. Orange sunburst, lisegang flare. Skin of the earth.

Al Smith for scale.

So dangermus

2011-09-29T14:28:00.001-05:00

When I see videos like this I always try to remind myself that you can easily dismember yourself going 28 mph in a straight sober line with all your blinkers and leather in order. One drop of chaos and statistics take over. Sometimes motorcycling is a frozen scary dark tunnel of wet danger. Safety is all like "oh no, what should I do next to insulate myself from the unpredictability of the universe?" Then this grocery-getting chopper skaterider shreds underpasses and hucks the curb standing on the moto seat in a tee shirt. My daily ride seems more like a blankie now, and fate is that much more remote.

In the next life

2011-09-28T15:27:00.003-05:00

Some quality recycling from Classified Moto.

Castle Rock

2011-09-27T23:42:00.002-05:00

Tradition

2011-09-21T00:18:00.001-05:00

The Jim Wright Studio

2011-09-15T23:31:00.001-05:00

Some people just need a good place for all the things they do. And then there are places right enough that more people come to fill them magnetically. The place generates some kind of creative amplification field. In the Cove, the Studio is where pancakes, music, canning, reading, pingponging, painting, winemaking, philosophizing, dreaming, birthdaying, crashing, love and love and loving happen of their own accord. Thanks, Jim.

Catch as catch can

2011-09-10T08:18:00.002-05:00

Here come the fall days. Mullet last week, muscadines today. Tides, seasons, marsh, vineyard. The harvest is on. Cast wide.

New kid on the block

2011-09-07T19:53:00.001-05:00

Hi kids, meet your new nephew, el GS. Mr Bill says you're supposed to come live with us. Oh yeah, and you're the third oldest. Now we'll fix that old eyeball of yours and maybe find you some better clothes, remedy your rheumatism. There'll be picnics and oil changes and curvy roads with crisp air and glowing confetti leaves. And I hope you get along with the other ponies, because you're part of the family now. It's 1981 in our hearts, you'll be right at home.

Flat

2011-09-04T08:26:00.003-05:00

Scouting it up. Aeolian dunelands have their own sandy tides underfoot.

Pelicans

2011-09-04T08:10:00.000-05:00

Sweet picture from the archives here. Looks like they used to have an old Piper Cub from the 40s. Some beachside hot rodding. Wonder what happened to it.

Break

2011-09-03T16:24:00.002-05:00

Broke. Big baftub. Looks like somebody kicked up some waves, ebb tide. We was going off Stafford Shoals style. Break out the little guns, o sand grommet. Soar amongst the whitewash.

Ingredients

2011-09-02T13:48:00.001-05:00

Barrier island: geologic
1. rising global sea level
2. constant high volume sediment supply
3. passive continental margin
4. good tides

Conditions are perfect. We're here, foraging for wrack, waves. Sirens forage for us.
Turtle bones, whale skeletons, Jurassic pelicans. Tidal timekeeping. We found some old film in one of the closets with the shrimp nets. Thinking maybe we can restore it.
Barrier island : therapeutic. Check.

Holocene

2011-08-31T09:15:00.002-05:00

Some edit effects are gimmicks, and some shake your chest. From Bon Iver and Nabil Elderkin, the latter.
We're going away tomorrow to send off the summer, the warmer age.

MCL: brief.

2011-08-24T11:07:00.002-05:00

Moto season is HERE.

The cutting room floor

2011-08-12T13:43:00.002-05:00

It often happens that you can't use everything you shoot, even if it's cool. For the last few days I've been editing backwards. In this sequence, water is doing all the wrong things. The eye can catch a lot in a miniscule amount of time - droplets flowing in reverse trigger a kind of alternate reality. Like being in love at a secret swimming hole. We shot a couple playing in the creek, but I need to end up with a non-provocative version of events. I sure don't remember conducting many innocent creekwalks for two, but hey. Sometimes the best way to find the right feel is to go all the way in one direction and try to pull back from there. I decided to first do an edit of a hotter, maybe more memorable part of the trip, then axe it with the de-sexing delete key. Shuffled a bit, I think the second one is a tighter edit. You sure hate to lose the mojo though. See if you can spot the changes.

Inhabitants

2011-08-09T08:22:00.000-05:00

The myth of the wild is pervasive, especially in North America. Everywhere you go, people have been there. Even on a seemingly uninhabited swath of sand, there are denizens. There is no virgin land, there is no virgin art. Everything is a remix. It's new in your imagination, but only because you can't see the tracks anymore. The most you can do is discover things new to yourself - and that's a tall enough order.

Life after FCP

2011-08-06T13:12:00.008-05:00

Now why would I submit you to some arcane discussion of tools when I've tried so hard to stick to simple stories and keep that kind of stuff off of here? Simple. A few reasons. 1) the rumors are true, I'm a dork. 2) maybe you're wondering what I do all day. 3) as an editor, I haven't been spending much of my working life in the real world lately. Like, 12 months lately. Since manipulation of image and sound happen in a kind of imaginary electronic space, that's another layer of representation already applied to a layer of representation. Which (at some point beyond boredom) is a fascinating idea for a dork.

I learned nonlinear video editing in high school, and I've been using the same program for ten years. To me, learning to use Final Cut Pro at 18 was like understanding how to use a pen or a camera or to drive a car for the first time. Imagine looking at letters and pictures all your life but having no idea how they were made. All of a sudden, I could control the story.

Final Cut Pro did that for thousands of other people at around the same time. Video used to be possible only for big studios and TV stations and companies. Suddenly anyone with a camera, a cable and a mac full of hard drives could make their own little movies. Tell that to the millions of teenagers uploading videos to youtube this weekend and nobody cares - but a decade ago, it was unbelievable.

Then, a month ago, Apple kind of dumped FCP by making the newest version essentially useless for professionals. I'll admit, I was a little heartbroken at first. I'm plunged straight into learning a new set of tools under a deadline - and I'm surprised and happy to say that's a good thing. It's forcing me to break some old habits and concentrate again on making a story. Sometimes breakups are great.

Now I work with about five different programs at a time, all doing different parts of that job - arranging images and sound to tell a story. There's an endless amount of tweaking to be done with a different tool for each thing. The massive sensor inside the Red One camera generates an enormous amount of information. Four million points of light every 1/24th of a second - incident photons electrified and stored as raw computer data copied onto dual onboard hard drives. When I hook up those hard drives to a computer, open RedcineX and start working, this is what I see.

The fact that the data is raw from camera's sensor is significant. It starts out as flat and honest pixel information, ready for manipulation. You can do absolutely anything to it. With FCP, we would then render out these movies and then start editing them. That's very time consuming. And every time you change your mind about the look of a clip, you have to render it all over again. You get to continue sitting in your dark little box watching a bar crawl across the screen lying to you about how it's almost done. Lame. Tape has all but disappeared, but we've been living under the shadow of those filmish tape-like habits. Digital workflows can be the worst of both worlds. Remember how everyone used to talk about the paperless office and it never happened? And now you have just as many papers and TPS reports and piles of memos and things you could never make time to care about duplicated in two different electronic and physical landscapes? Like that.

For me, that is beginning to change. This is one example. The great thing about this new set of tools is that no matter how much I distort the image using all those settings, it never messes with the source file. I can give a clip as many different kinds of looks I want, and it just saves little matadata files. They're called .RMDs - like a handful of transparent celluloid sheets plopped over the original image, all interchangeable. And the best part is that in Adobe Premiere, I can cut a whole sequence, then go back to RedcineX, change anything, and it instantly reads the new .RMD and new colors ripple through into the movie with no waiting. What used to take a roomful of $10 millon machines and lights and 3 specialists and miles of film and hours of tweaking to achieve a single final irrevocable result now can be done in seconds by me alone at a cheap computer - and I can change my mind and redo it tomorrow.

Now, whether that fact alone will destroy all of the time-saving advancements in my digital film workflow... we'll see.

I had a mullet before it had a name

2011-08-03T22:17:00.003-05:00

Says Mike Pilcher, a guy I first met years ago at a random Krystal in the Atlanta sprawl. He was rigging lights to the ceiling tile like some flannelless McGuyver. Even pulling a 12 hour, 100 degree shoot feels good when the stories start rolling in.

River, time.

2011-08-01T23:40:00.005-05:00

Time can drag sweetly, sliding long on moments of endless opportunity. Sometimes it is swift, unidirectional, unrelenting, intractable. What was a tree or a forking stream is now a canyoned river, a rudderless boat. We move like water skimmers, adept and hovering on this thin tension, the present. No eyes for the enormous flowing body, palps to the ripples at our feet, hope only for luck and the next stride.

Won't you be my neighbor?

2011-07-21T22:49:00.005-05:00

I live with not just one, but two artists. My neighbors Shane and Elspeth are grand. Elspeth creates sewn everythings and fabric allkinds. Headbands to wedding dresses to awesome. Shane does photos and sculpure. Wood around pictures, pictures on wood. Their house is a hub of doing that spreads all kinds of good vibes. It's incredibly inspiring to roll home during an office lunch break and see them both working hard on the directions they own. A good video here done about Shane by CreateHere folk showing some of his elements.

Generations

2011-07-13T22:17:00.002-05:00

More than two in one place in this country is great. Four is incredible. Being part of a good community is an old piece of wisdom not to be followed lightly. You can only choose so much, choosing friends is critical. Ashley by the fire, on solid ground surrounded by friendfamily in the Cove, the center of the universe.

Gertrude Saddle

2011-07-11T21:46:00.001-05:00

Phases of water. Fiordland. Every single conceivable state of the molecule can be seen at once there. And probably some you couldn't dream of. It's so hot in Chattanooga today, I couldn't help thinking of naked alpine rock. Even there the sun makes vapors. Seems long ago.

River of Shadows

2011-07-08T07:17:00.003-05:00

My friend Richard and I sometimes toss around a saying that is like an inside joke. We'll call some place the 'Center of the Universe,' which is a kind of anecdotal way of saying it's the middle of the best story of the moment, the anchor point of some ephemeral and relative cosmology. Maybe an unusual proportion of my friends think in terms of maps.

Lots of places have been the Center of the Universe. Notably Williams Island, Moturata, Smaills, Morgan's Steep, Cumberland Island, The Confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, Hovenweep, The Fiery Furnace, the list goes on. Being there was the important part - and not only that, but fully being there in a way that centers our confusing networked experiences of places and times into a coherent story with a definite origin, at least for a moment. Sometimes there's a picture to go with it.

Rebecca Solnit finishes out River of Shadows by questioning not just the nature of frozen photographic time and motion pictures, but of all informational representation and its place in our lives. Seems like an old question, but her work gives it new light. It's a good book.

"...The premise of the efficiency and convenience of every technology is that it will save time, though as Stanford himself remarked, "if you could limit man's wants it might be called 'labor saving,' but as there are no limits to his wants, the machinery really increases the power of production." That production is now dematerialized too. Because machines streamline the production of material goods from apples to automobiles, more and more first-world labor is concentrated in the production and management of information, the virtual substance running through all those satellites and cables.
   The Modoc center of the world was the center of a world just a few hundred miles across, and just as the world once had an infinite number of local times, so it had countless centers - what we mean by a world rather than the world. ...
  California is the center of the contemporary world, but of a world in which time and space have been annihilated, a world that is in some obscure way so disembodied, dislocated and dematerialized that the very idea of a center is perplexing. ...
  ...his grandfather in the same town had moved at a predictable pace through a world in which human beings and their voices and knowledge were no faster than the animals and water and wind that surrounded them. There are infinite ways to measure what has been gained and what has been lost, and only one clear thing: the world is utterly changed. "

Strange to saddle up now and head into the office for another day of tweaking picture signals.

Shop time

2011-06-25T21:36:00.003-05:00

Good for what ails you.

Why Photographs?

2011-06-21T09:58:00.002-05:00

One good reason.
Let the summer hope.
Happy solstice errybady.

Rail and Wire

2011-06-09T08:51:00.001-05:00

Devices for annihilating time and space. Count the camera as well. Nobody really thought about time zones until trains were invented. Before that, travel was always slower than the sun - something to be measured in days. Trains and clocks are intimately connected, creating and sustaining the need for schedules. "The steel rails knit the country together" said somebody on a page in my passport. He was talking about the railroad that slashed an enormous hole in America's western frontier. Today, that's a job for fiber optic cable.

I took a train across Russia once for about a week. The eerie similarities between the continents means that every time some writer mentions big American train lines, I think of a long train ride across Asia - headed to the unknown East instead of the West. Everything inside the train stays on Moscow time, even when things flashing past the windows are in a world five hours earlier by the clock. You can walk into the dining car and get supper at 1pm. By the time you hit the southern edge of lake Baikal, there are no meals served later than that.

It's an weird feeling to being hurled through a landscape in a box that's far out of your control. It's not steerable like a car, and it's not far far away like an airplane. A train travels fast enough to bend time, but slow enough to remain in limbo.

The River

2011-06-07T21:20:00.002-05:00

Always flowing nearby just out of sight. Been spending a lot of time with it, as I should. It's hot. Climbing the Hunter bluffs it's a blessing to fall in. You can feel the gorge sighing out when the sun goes down. The river defines this landscape. But it doesn't pulse the same and bring dirt and ruin every year anymore. It's really a squiggling interstate highway. The freight trucks lumber on. We're all connected to some supply chain, some branch on this very big river.

But it's also a moat. An object that demands your attention, demands bridges. I'm reading Rebecca Solnit's excellent River of Shadows (thanks Shane.) During the industrial revolution, photographers were just starting to take droplets from flowing time. Photos freeze just the smallest representative pieces of a great arc of being, these fluvial molecules in a vial. Stored and ordered and interpreted and obsessed over. Like fossils.

Volkswagen Group.

2011-05-26T15:40:00.003-05:00

German engineering for everyone. They have about 30 factories pumping out 7.2 million cars a year stamped with 10 different brands including Lamborghini and Bentley. The only thing more eerily impressive than the engineering in these vehicles is the social engineering used to create them. We just lucked into a seat for the grand opening ceremony of the only North American VW plant. An enormous theatrical production in itself. The plant is controlled now, along with a large segment of our local economy, by a classic Wilsonian example of a Superorganism. This guy is the queen ant.

Dad, brother and me just dragged a '77 bus into my garage. I'm helping a friend shop for another one in an hour. But it is the Superorganisms that will probably last.

Like cold water.

2011-05-20T15:25:00.007-05:00

Incredible movie from the guys at Astray films. A surf flick in spirit, not necessarily in content. Good advice. Very difficult to follow. Watch it in HD.

"If I only scrape a living, at least it's a living worth scraping. And if there's no future in it, at least it's a present worth remembering."

Sequatchie Cove

2011-05-12T14:52:00.000-05:00

Potluck sounds lucky when you're headed to the Cove. Tonight will be good.

Market Day

2011-05-11T14:54:00.000-05:00

It's Wednesday, and I look forward to the Farmer's Market here every week. Last week I spend days shooting local farms for a new commercial about food. Tomorrow we'll spend the evening in Sequatchie Cove - where our milk and cheese and so many other good things come from. Reading about war and rough times all around, we're lucky that Tennessee hills hug us like Trimble says.

Ashley and stubborn cow pulled from Red 4K

Hooray for Earth

2011-05-02T14:16:00.001-05:00

Great video from the True Loves. Has everything - desert, sea, rocks, beats, spectral women.

Tornado

2011-04-29T10:12:00.001-05:00

Yesterday 500 yards from my parents' house. Incredible destruction. Friends and family mostly unscathed, but neighbors here and farther away under different clouds got a really bad hand. Feel awful. Who is your neighbor?

Photo by Sam

Morph!

2011-04-26T23:08:00.001-05:00

Sam in the Studio

2011-04-21T22:28:00.003-05:00

Today I loved my job.

Fix it.

2011-04-01T10:33:00.002-05:00

Sometimes you just can't go any further without fixing something. Those times are easy to identify when you're floating in a Fiord. You can't choose to face the problem later or you'll be on the rocks. It can be easier to get down into the guts of the ship and root around to make it better when you know there's no choice. Captain Pete aboard Southern Winds makes up with her two 1000 horsepower Mercedes diesel engines. They're his "german girls." You can't get sour with them. Carry on like a man hard in love.

Stems

2011-03-29T23:15:00.001-05:00

Whenever I notice trees in flower, my conception of forests suddenly transforms. Big swatches of pithy plants all grown to seed - like an unruly backyard. Unruly just how we like it. Lit up from below, burning timbers of sugary xylem hold it all over our heads - smoke again. I admit it. Spring is here.

Seattle

2011-03-23T22:05:00.003-05:00

Saw it for just a few hours in that way that makes you suspect what's under the surface. I have no idea. Lakes and sounds, a cleft between two massive mountain chains. Funny how you can feel the Pacific without seeing it. Totem poles full of whale riders, a market full of equal parts kitsch and grist. Good people. Wild happenings.

Flotsam

2011-03-13T21:59:00.002-05:00

"It was out there a-swirlin fer abaut a day long in that eddy. Reckon it was about the biggest thing that's warshed up here 'bout fiversix years." Four miles downriver from where it is supposed to be, the trusty floaty Williams Island Farm dock is marooned in an old lady's yard. The rapids in the gorge just aren't what they used to be, but with the river an extra 15 feet deep this week it's easier to imagine.

Richard is trying to haul this thing off the rocks and get it back into service. Ratchets and pulleys are amazing. It'll move easier once it's in the water again. Problem is, without a tugboat the Tennessee is still a one-way ticket to the ocean.

Muskrats

2011-03-10T00:00:00.003-05:00

Under the powerlines, a swampy substation hums away. The busy rodents have created a mote around this island of electricity, gnawing away at their own shoots and roots, energy for busy dambuilding. This month's storms keep EPB men busy with felled trees and chaotic water. The muskrats act busy, just soaking it up in their overflowing pond, chewing this or that. Glad, maybe, to be ignored.

RIP Springtime.

2011-03-03T12:17:00.002-05:00

I know it seems like it's here - the frog soundings, the subtle leafings out, flowerings, sproutings, birthings, sunnings and all the trappings of Spring. But there's one more thing that's missing. Seems like every year when the season is really unstoppable you can feel the massive shuddering tilt of the Earth's axis shifting beneath your feet. But I haven't felt it. It's a pessimistic thought, yes, one more big heavy frost. There have been years like this before when spring jumps the gun and winter pipes up and insists on the last word. In 1993 we got a blizzard in March. I hope I'm wrong.

Welcome to the Anthropocene

2011-02-16T00:48:00.003-05:00

We're not sure if it's started yet. Officially. Everything we've built to last will fail, and the rocks will still know we were here. Might as well name it after us.

Urban Exploration

2011-01-05T15:00:00.001-05:00

Undercity by Andrew Wonder follows Steve Duncan underground and on high bridge towers in NYC. He finds unused vintage tiled subway stations and no-safety gear views of Manhattan while trying not to get electrocuted or seen by police. All of it, of course, illegal. Reminds me of Adam Hermans. Just because you're in town doesn't mean you can't push bounds.

Mistakes

2010-11-16T11:15:00.001-05:00

Tradesmen. Currently reading Shop Class as Soulcraft. Motorcycles, metal, unyielding material real-life feedback of working with the mind. The anti-narcissism. Here a metal craftsman talks about learning from his mistakes.

Owl

2010-10-11T23:08:00.002-05:00

It might be hard to see him, but he's there. The urban night owl, hanging in the husk of a tree overlooking Chattanooga. Feel like one myself this evening. Seems like cities get more interesting at night - everything happening is highlighted by absent familiar things that aren't. Suddenly the land is transformed, the city floats into context, focused by its own alien light. The northshore goes all Marty Stouffer. That owl swooped down to assert the waning of the year on some helpless rodent. Tonight I got a load of crannies and nooks on the river's industrial bend. We're squatting cool in the flood plain of a flowing highway. Such a two-way imprint, people and place. There's so much urban exploration to be done - how did I ever forget? Two wheels get you closer.

Significantly rad:

2010-10-11T17:17:00.001-05:00

Fifty two cameras, one button. Enough to make you sweat and pine for some ridiculous break where several dorks on a scaffold can retweet your shred so well my face feels salty. So what if it's a wave pool...these guys invented bullet time, and this footage invented awesome. Here's how they did it. Rad.

Twowheelers.

2010-10-08T17:56:00.003-05:00

my 82 honda might be hemorrhaging oil, but I can still dream.

Shinya Kimura from director Heinrich Hansen.

Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch

2010-10-06T08:36:00.004-05:00

Theobroma and garden tobacco, watching like refugees raiding Tenochtitlan while Johnny Depp dies all the way across North America. Maybe one of the best films ever.

Flying with cameras

2010-10-05T13:34:00.003-05:00

Chopper test of a dual-gyro Kenyon KS-8 + 5DmkII rig. Bungee cords. Actually, it's just shot on a flipcam. But the 5D was there.

pilot : Michael
old cameraman: Bobby Stone
music: MGMT

Hound Ears

2010-10-04T09:28:00.001-05:00

450 climberers can't be wrong. These rocks are cool. One day a year, they're packed. Why not for the rest? You guessed it - golf course. Finally, autumn in the Appalachians.

Boone, NC

tie in

2010-09-30T16:36:00.002-05:00

All the gridded hooks can seem so heavy. Wired-in every which way, a cat's cradle of electric obligation. With the first rolling cold autumn clouds though, the trees want to fade ecstatic and burn - it's just the way time goes. Learn to love it.

Capitol Street

2010-09-23T16:34:00.001-05:00

Jackson, Mississippi. Not as down and out as you think. But just about. Crannies. Nooks. It's not far to the gulf. Empty sidewalks while the sterility fights the crime - microcosm leaves just enough to love.

Goff.

2010-09-15T08:42:00.003-05:00

Ponciest sport in the world. The grass. The green. The entire edifice. The lameness can be difficult to endure. Not like it needs more ridicule. It's almost ridiculous enough to understand. Almost. Grown men spend millions, perhaps zillions of dollars every minute to make a hill look the way a bunch of Scottish sheep always used to do for free. But far be it from me to comment on which obsessions are constructive.

Time to Pretend

2010-09-09T16:20:00.002-05:00

At work. Maybe a little too much MGMT. Just practicing for Moogfest.

Morenings

2010-09-02T07:48:00.003-05:00

This compulsion to wake up early. Now what do I do? Guess I'll write down my morning groundrules for the whole world to see. I love getting up early for a photograph, or for some hike or maneuver that needs to set up the rest of the day. It's easy to get up when you have something cool to do, but harder if you spend all the other mornings lollygagging in bed until the last possible second of obligation. I guess it's about staying in practice. After living in both modes, here's what I need:

1) To see the sun, or be able to imagine where it is. Low. Way down on the edge of the earth if not still under it, where it's not beating on your brain yet to go get things done.

2) To read a little something that's not the internet or on a screen. Made of paper. And not the news. Nothing is older than the news. No TV.

3) Music.

4) Chemicals. Coffee or water or enough anticipation-induced norepinephrin or peace-induced oxytocin to get ready to crush, or hang loose for a long peaceful front porch AM.

5) To do something, anything, (if there's no project or adventure pressing) that I want before I go off and work, i.e., do something someone else wants.

At the Ruins, the solution to all these were ready at hand. Hills, beach, surf. Choose challenge or relax watching the sheep and clouds. Rough, I know. Building a fire was one of the great cold morning rituals. But what to do in a Montgomery Alabama Hampton Inn stranded behind a Dillard's in a sea of parkinglot?

Still working on that one.

Faster

2010-08-30T14:12:00.003-05:00

Andy spins a few around Rocky's roundabout. Tire warmers, lights, cops, cameras, speed action - great attitude and support from everybody. This is the first big set shoot I've ever pushed the trigger for, and I realize now more than ever how hard it is to pull off. No chance without the help of my friends, and no hope without the example of my mentors.

Runrunrun

2010-08-27T14:30:00.002-05:00

Seems like everything is going faster now. Even under a full slow moon.

RR tracks, TN

Tilting

2010-08-26T08:15:00.003-05:00

The air just turned. Seasons. Dig the breeze, even chill. It's written in the clouds. Long and floating, bulbs of vapor and wisps of coming fall. Underlit by one rising moon, the next one for harvest. Dylan scopes it from the light tower, old Tennessee's Norfolk Southern RR.

Howardsville Crossing, GA line.

Thundaclap

2010-08-23T10:33:00.003-05:00

Maybe the best thing about summer is a honking dark storm sweeping up and blasting out. Here comes a sheet of rain up the Tennessee, the water pelted, trees swayed and vultures surfed. Gone in 20 minutes. Ain't nobody dope as thee, yo so fresh so clean clean.

Williams Island, TN.