Notes 4/29/07

Notes 4/29/07

W/ tulsita, text was the backbone
here, sound is the backbone. Voiceover more important.

Development of a narrative—connections between the poems that develop a story, weave a narrative

Think Cardiff, Robertson

come up w/ a loose but specific narrative structure? List of characters, etc?

Lonely Soul Oil: use as a kind of word from our sponsor?

Grapes of Wrath: vignettes that separate the parts—turtle crossing road, used car salesman

N’s problem w/ getting a sense of structure, what’s fair game for sound

M: if we come up w/ a narrative structure, it gives a jumping off point for N’s and M’s work process

G: let’s say 7 sections, each with voiceover, separated by interludes, given to N to work with

N: runs the risk of me creating soundtrack for a text

M: much looser than that. Last time, the only thing that tied it together was process. This time we’re trying to focus it by giving it a sense of travel, movement

N: my process is based around sounds I think are interesting. If I think oil pump sound is boring, do we use it, how do we use it, do we process it? Do we use only sounds that come from oil and religion? Could be boring as piss.

G: constraints are going to be productive. N: I’m questioning that.

M: constraints are a starting point, should be a factor in at least one of our modes (text)—but we should be able to open out, not have to take pictures of gas pumps all the time.

D: I’m a little mystified by this: if it becomes less interesting, switch to something else; if it doesn’t end up fitting in, we’ll use it for another project.

N: but if I’m working on something I become attached, and if someone says “this isn’t about O and R,” I’ll wanna punch them. Let’s review sounds as they get made, as we do texts and images.

M: that’s about working in isolation. We need to be more collaborative with the sound as with everything else

G: pictures sound and voices blending a lot, as they did in Tulsita

N: not that hard to soundtrack the voices; not enough. How to go beyond that and bring in a variety of sounds we’re all interested in.

M: likes idea of chapters and vignettes. Combination of soundtrack and other things involving the interludes, other stuff. The soundtrack could be a totally sonic piece. How do we incorporate image w/out competing w/ each other? What if we did do chaps w/ interludes? Have a chap that’s meant to go w/ an image, like a slide show; then the interlude w/out image, just sound.

G: or varying approaches, like one that parodies Ken Burns…

N: in favor of having text in small portions, at least on the wall, maybe quoted as if it’s someone’s philosophical sayings

D: I agree; that’s what we accomplished in Tulsita; collaboration of text and visual is part of the point of our process, and we should evolve that in the next project

G: 2 models: 1) chaps loosely related, connected by sonic interludes; 2) frame narrative into which chaps ostensibly fit—frame is intro and conclusion, and interludes

[fight and argument—blah blah blah]

then we start reading the texts:

“Here are artists”: first part of it, M and I imagine a filmstrip style, with the sound and the same border—can we photoshop this? Nathan wants one to melt. Filmstrips also usually have text—high five! Also, one of the fun things about filmstrips was that the sound and image always went out of whack.

Here are artists, yuppies, and Baptists
Here is a block in the America of heart
Here is manifest wind coursing through oil derrick park
tfos
ykcits
drah
who work for oral.

Images: Tulsa parks, Glenpool, oil parks, derricks, refineries (through oil derrick park)
flag sticking up (manifest wind)
who work for oral—janitors at ORU

get some brown recluses jumping

If I experienced a wave of oil notions, it would sound like this:
first the rusty doublewide door opening into the empty warehouse
then the skyscraper scraping steel
then the motorcycle of advance warning, the apostle
higher, then training my sights lower,
ticking off the paperthin railings as they melt by

images: ticks, melting

skyscrapers/ scrapes/ sorrel/ scapes

“then we then” trying to find sonic equivalents for Nathan’s d.j.ing

“Deep Long”:
two characters: 1) doctor in graphoilogy, “Dr. Cocktail” 2) ape-man

http://graphoilogy.blogspot.com/
contains a diagram that describes our process: cumulative production/proven reserves/future discoveries

“Resale the Copious”
Jesus is a doctor like Dr Cocktail—Cocktail as reincarnation of Jesus?

“film strip” or “filmstrip” on youtube

“DavidGrantMindyNathan”: the way G reads it, sounds exactly like a filmstrip

Maybe 2 filmstrips that comment on each other—start and end w/ filmstrips? In the first, the sound and image get out of whack; in the second, the image itself becomes deformed, transformed into a different kind of media.

use the graphoilogy graph, modifying it in various ways over time