Notes, 5/16/07

Wakow 5/16/07

themes in our photography:

sky—indirectly spiritual, beauty of sky as opposed to landscape
natural vs industrial
ironic harmony of industrial and evangelical
signs: words reorganized, fragmented
advertising transformed into something silly or sinister
windows: blocked-up (DG), broken, reflective, transparent
water manholes, gas meters
connectives: wires, pipes, roads, railroads
debris: detritus of the modern
journey, movement in stasis (our evangelical salesman selling holy oil)
commerce: religion and oil are both businesses. Connects back to advertising, and to writing about commodities (snake oil, holy spring water)

oil as energy dredged from the earth, used to move
vs
religion as attempt to escape earthboundness
but really two sides of the same coin

G: the threat of the downfall of modernity is what has electrified evangelicalism

first well drilled in 1859; American Theocracy: the rise of America is predicated upon the rise of oil
empire’s inability to adapt to the new energy source is the cause of their decline, the stubborn clinging to what worked

images: take bunch more pictures in Catoosa, Guts Church, Church on the Move

text: continue to develop characters, do more writing

sound: need to listen to stuff together, but we can skype it out in a conference call

one session before we leave to bang out a clearer picture of the project

G: chapters—narrative—characters—filmstrips. need more text.
M: exercise: storyboard a few chapters, using text, images, etc?
N: we need the text to emerge improvisationally from the materials we’ve got already

our initials: GDMN (god/man? goddamn?)

some narrative will come out of our current text, some will emerge from photos and sound. That’s how we’ll really integrate the media in this one.

let’s meet regularly from a distance and see how it goes

go to Living Arts again before we leave

technical issues:
M: 3 projectors, while one is going, the other two are frozen, then it switches. The soundtrack keeps going, though it may shift sonically across projectors. Similar to the installation about auctioneers we saw in Dallas.
Could do only one or two projectors, but the idea of a triptych has a long religious history

If we’re working w/ a triptych, it might be interesting to start w/ an oil derrick (maybe an old one?) that also somehow evokes religion and/or commodity (remember the oil derrick repurposed as advertisement for a hotel on the way back from Bartlesville

sound: I want the sermon to be broken down in parts until you can tell it’s a sermon but can’t make out words

our salesman is a lot like the preacher, both searching for meaning in the world

dip into my church, my washbasin—use image of sinks and tubs

Texas is a real place. Oklahoma is not a real place. It doesn’t exist, is out of joint, there’s no here here.
How is OK defined in the national imagination?
—the musical
—Grapes of Wrath
—oil
—evangelicals
the first is a Hollywood set, the second is a novel, the third has gone dry, the fourth is a story told endlessly and incompletely
We’re creating a sort of lost travel guide to OK
How does OK promote itself now? Route 66, a way to get through, a memory that does not exist.
How else?: pioneer woman, Indian pipe, oil derrick, scissortail (when our senator doesn’t believe in global warming)—all of these are myths, all are nostalgic memories of something that doesn’t and didn’t ever exist
the fact that guidebooks always leave out OK
the fact that no one in NY could remember where we were going