This week I want to give you some insight into how the creative process can be longitudinal, that is, how a piece of art can be informed by the unfolding of time and feature many stops along the way at which points it could have been called “finished” but was not. I’ll also give you a content advisory at the top that this article features a high-resolution image of a freshly dead animal.
Last month saw the release of the fifth Guma LP, Riprap, and along with it a short film debut and a couple of live soundtrack performances. The soundtrack to the film is the B-side of the record, titled “The Public Service Announcement.” The film is also called The Public Service Announcement. But although the culmination of a period of artistic work usually brings together different elements of design and media, it might surprise you to know that I did not set out to create any of it.
The seven-piece Riprap band (not pictured: me behind the camera) setting up and soundchecking for the debut screening of The Public Service Announcement. The two performances of this piece last month marked our last shows with drummer James Gwyn, who is moving abroad this summer.
Nothing is created in a vacuum. I’ve already told the story of how this record was recorded and some of the inspiration behind it in the post, “Introducing Riprap” , but what about the impetus? Can any piece of work be said to have a starting point, or is there always necessarily a starting point that pre-dates the starting point?
I’m lucky enough this time to be able to put a pin right at the start of this project. On May 27, 2022, I was riding a motorcycle on the back roads of Bastrop County, Texas. Summer heat was starting to creep in early, but the morning light still had a spring-like quality to it, and the country was lush, green, and overgrown. On my back was a backpack with camera equipment inside and a tripod strapped to the outside. That month I had finished mixing the Workingman’s Guma album, and I had gotten the idea that one way to present the record would be through a series of eight static, long shots—literally “moving images”—that would represent the eight songs on the record and could be strung together in one full-length video online. I was taking the motorcycle out a few times a week and had already gathered a handful of shots that I thought suited some of the tunes on that record.
Ironically, as art projects often go, this video was never finished. Whether it was because of the chance encounter on May 27 or another reason remains unknown to me. Sometimes you just move on.
Out in the country, people dump dead animals by the side of the road all the time. Dogs, sheep, and goats are most frequently seen around here, but wild animals and roadkill abound as well. I had it in mind that in this album-length video presentation, a song called “A Death on the Farm” should feature an image of a dead farm animal. And so for a couple of weeks I had been looking for one of those, among other things, on these morning motorcycle jaunts.
That day, not far from the house, I saw a telltale cluster of thick, black turkey vultures hanging around on and next to the road. When I pulled up, I could see that they were picking at a dead deer that had been very recently killed. It lay on its side in dappled shadow, wind softly blowing the leaves above it and lending it a belated sense of motion. I thought it looked beautiful, and importantly to the project at hand it wasn’t totally rotten, gory, or otherwise terrible to look at. I parked the bike and started setting up my camera.
Since I was planning on long, unmoving takes of about five minutes each, I was spending a lot of time on each shot arranging and adjusting the composition in the camera. I probably stood next to the deer for about 10 minutes checking the settings, the light, the exposure, making slight adjustments. I was about ready to begin recording when a dusty white minivan pulled up next to me and the driver got out.
The driver did not introduce himself but began talking right away. He was dressed in a stained t-shirt, baggy exercise shorts, socks, and slip-on sandals. He did not seem to notice that we were standing next to a dead deer, at least at first. He was working on a video project (go figure) and wanted to interview people about the dangers of alcohol use, but no one in the parking lot at the grocery store would talk to him. He explained that he had gotten drunk last night as usual, woken up this morning feeling terrible, the idea had come to him in a flash of hungover inspiration, and he had immediately set out to realize it.
He was speaking at a rapid clip and was soon deep into describing the whole idea to me. Remembering that my camera was set and ready to go for the image that I wanted to capture, I leaned over while he was talking and hit record:
Excerpt from Chatting w Charles, digital video, 2022 (unreleased). Total Length: 13:29
There is something thrilling and marvelous about this piece to me. It sits at a crossroads of pure chance between Charles, myself, and the deer. Our position relative to the camera results in a nearly perfect stereo separation, with Charles’s voice on one side and mine on the other. The deer is an obvious metaphorical stand-in for Charles himself, if not via the smell of either (to which I can testify), then certainly via the redness around its mouth and the flies that pour in and out of it. The combination of sound + vision is both intentional and completely up to chance. At some point during the conversation, he pulled out an iPhone and started recording me, which means that somewhere out there is another angle from which this very same conversation was captured.
After a quarter of an hour, Charles departed and I never saw him again. I rushed home, dumped the video to my computer, and shared it with a couple of close friends. At the time I was convinced that it should be playing on a loop in a dark gallery of a modern art museum.
I was so energized by the encounter that the very same week, I wrote it out as a kind of free-form poem, in line form, and read it over the air on my FM radio program, Small Cool World. For the bed music I used an ambient, soft Jon Hassell tune. The length of the piece was about as long as I had spent talking to Charles.
As do many first drafts, this version of the piece featured some parts that were later cut out or refined. It would be more than six months before the story picks up at the recording session for Riprap in January 2023.
When the record was done and I was meeting with Grace Reyer and Laurel Coyle, who would help me make the film The Public Service Announcement, I gave them the choice to do either “The Public Service Announcement” or the “The Signature,” a piece of fiction that is the A-side to the record. It was chance again that they opted for the former.
If you’re keeping track, this single 15-minute encounter on May 27, 2022 is responsible for originating a digital video, a spoken word radio performance, half of an LP, and now a short film. The idea for the film became the foundation on which I wrote and was awarded an arts grant last year, and we made the film using City of Austin money in November 2023, a year and a half after meeting Charles.
Screenshot from The Public Service Announcement. This shot was taken on the same road where I met Charles, about a mile away.
I wrote, edited, and provided some additional photography (including the image above) for the film. When it was time to put it all together, I treated the editing process exactly as I had approached mixing the record: I edited the film separately, as if it were a silent film, and only after it was roughed-in did I layer the narration on top, observing and accentuating the coincidences between the text and the image.
In this way, this particular piece now represents a trinity of sorts: separate components (music, voice, image) which are indelibly linked and are, technically, one “thing.” At any point I could have stopped their merging; the story is unique and entertaining as-is; the music itself is beautiful and whole and, with no vocals, would have ended up much like the Jon Hassell tune I picked to originally score the radio performance; the film is also whole in the story it tells and represents a successful collaboration between myself, the production team, and the cast. But instead I let the waters continue to crash into each other, to merge, to mix, to multiply their meanings. This is part of the power of setting many things in motion at once, and there was no reason to my mind to shunt that power away from the center. It means that for over two years now, a chance encounter on the side of the road has provided me with inspiration, with activity, and with purpose. It means that, whether he knows it or not, Charles did make a public service announcement.
What Am I Watching?
The Public Service Announcement, of course!
We are going to try submitting the film to festivals and events, most of which usually require that submissions be unreleased, which is why I have not published it anywhere after the premiere. But for being my reader and my companion, I want to share a link to watch “The Public Service Announcement” with you.
Much like the titanic narratives by Robert Ashley on which the record was modeled, my hope is that there is no way to consciously experience its totality in real time. With two disparate stories being told at once, sonically and visually, your focus is pulled in one direction or another, toward the image or toward the sound, and you have no choice but to submit to it, puzzle over it, and form your own conclusions. Good luck, and thank you for your attention.