TRANSCRIPT OF STONEYMOLLAN TRAIL, SINGLE-CHANNEL VIDEO, 2015
TAPE NAME: Brixton fox 2002
Fox shot from closer and closer
Starts inside my room, shot through window
Fox on mattress asleep
In camera cuts
Sound of washing machine
Move outside
Down steps
Walk across paving
Camera strap and lens swinging
Adidas Superstars
Twisted Levi’s
Climb through foliage onto fence
Shoot from top of fence
Fox still on mattress
Me mouth noise
Fox ears twitch
Zoom
Iris fluctuates
Banding
Bus horn
Enter car park
Approach fox
Fox looks up
I whisper
Fox continues looking
Fox stands up
Walks away
Looks back
Walks on
I follow
Focus shift in dark foliage
Fox eyes glow
Tape ends 4 minutes 6 seconds
TAPE NAME: Scotland October 2002
Arran ferry wind noise
blue wake
Me “there’s no battery anyway”
Sound of glass breaking
Camera hum
Massive sea wind noise
Shore
Oyster catchers
Wind noise
7 min Landscape camera on off
8 min 30 sec Sparkle looks like static
Timecode sticking
9 min 51 sec Dripping outside cave
15 min Forest on off
16 min Drip (audio only)
Voices background
34 sec Seal blown out zoom
Blue island on off
8 sec Train to London cloud pylons wind noise
TAPE NAME: Italy Sept 2002 (1)
6 min Worth shooting screen of Alps from train
7 min Fuji zoom
Followed by church zoom
8 min David and I talking about sleeping badly and the cheese
(take away image)
then
Lens cap on, talking about tripping.
He asks if I’m recording. I say no then yes.
Lizard close up infra red.
Infra red wandering around house. Take away image. Subtle. Camera hum. Camera creak.
Synch the clock beep with something
Spider bleep at 2010
0 min Thunder: “Shit it’s on special effect”
It’s on strobe
1 min 10 sec Dog bark and voice (audio only)
51 sec Museum mummy face red camera light
Sea swell just before 1 minute
5 min 34 sec David topless filming the sea
7 min 30 sec Waves into kitten run
17 min Man stretched out on sea wall
19 min David jumps in
TAPE NAME: Snowy landscape Charlotte Katy 2001
Whole tape has pixel corruption down the right side of frame.
Retriever in pond
Pond sleet focus shift
Pond snow surface
Cut: “Is Charlotte in there?” (Katy)
Log poking through frozen surface
Oil rigs in a row
Oil rig zoom
Infrared
Katy in baseball cap on mushrooms massive pupils
Me vertical red with pixel corruption along bottom of frame
Me: “I feel like I can’t talk”
Car snowy landscape
Door slam
Indicator
Me “its really blue”
Snow tree tunnel, snow creaking walking slow
K: “I’ll come back later for that other shot”
Me: “OK, so will I”
Various stages of moving dusk landscape, blue cold with the pixel column on the right of frame.
This recording was made in 1968. Its name led me to think it was recorded in a monastery, but I later discovered it was a studio. It’s the final track on side A. There is harp, bass, drums. The harp is dominant. This track is used in a long sequence over silent footage in a film which takes place on a fishing dredger. All the work on the deck is done by one man wearing yellow waterproof dungarees and rubber boots. He repeatedly hoists a rectangular cage up from the sea and over his head and onto the deck. The cage is the scale and shape of a plasma screen. Over and over again it comes in from the sea, being lowered to head height in front of the man with the changing sky behind it. He holds its sides to guide it in, each time crammed full of stuff from the sea bed. Each time it comes it he unfastens it and the contents spill onto the deck, transfiguring from a vertical pictorial plane into horizontal scattered entropy. Each time he kicks about sorting through it, and every time I want to see everything, all of it, to know the contents fully. And this goes on and on, this continuous sequence, and it felt like the end of the film although it wasn’t, and there were other parts to the film but I would like it to have been just that, I could have watched it for hours, the rectangle being lowered in over and over again with different contents each time.
I worked with two engineers, one astrophysicist
I worked with two engineers, one astrophysicist, one astronomer, one surveyor and his assistant, one road grader, two dump truck operators
I worked with two engineers, one astrophysicist, one astronomer, one surveyor and his assistant, one road grader, two dump truck operators, one carpenter, three ditch diggers, one concrete mixing truck operator, one concrete foreman, ten concrete pipe company workers, two core-drillers
I worked with two engineers, one astrophysicist, one astronomer, one surveyor and his assistant, one road grader, two dump truck operators, one carpenter, three ditch diggers, one concrete mixing truck operator, one concrete foreman, ten concrete pipe company workers, two core-drillers, four truck drivers, one crane operator, one rigger
I worked with two engineers, one astrophysicist, one astronomer, one surveyor and his assistant, one road grader, two dump truck operators, one carpenter, three ditch diggers, one concrete mixing truck operator, one concrete foreman, ten concrete pipe company workers, two core-drillers, four truck drivers, one crane operator, one rigger, two cameramen, two sound men, one helicopter pilot, and four photography lab workers. [1]
At one, at two, the activity among the trucks tended to fall off—except for weekends. And even then, there was always some change of tenor. Sometimes to walk between the vans and cabs was to amble from single sexual encounter—with five, twelve, forty minutes between—to single sexual encounter. At other times to step between the waist high tires and make your way between the smooth or ribbed walls was to invade a space at a libidinal saturation impossible to describe to someone who has not known it. Any number of pornographic filmmakers, gay and straight, have tried to portray something like it—now for homosexuality, now for heterosexuality—and failed, because what they were trying to show was wild, abandoned, beyond the edge of control, whereas the actuality of the situation, with thirty-five, five, a hundred all-but-strangers is hugely ordered, highly social attentive, silent, and grounded in a certain care, if not community. At those times, within those van-walled alleys, now between the trucks, now in the back of open loaders, cock passed from mouth to mouth to hand to ass to mouth without ever breaking contact with other flesh for more than seconds; mouth, hand, ass passed over whatever you held out to them, without pause; when one cock left, finding a replacement mouth, rectum, another cock—required moving only the head, the hip, the hand, no more than an inch, three inches.
That evening, because it was late, because it was not the weekend, as I crossed under the highway, I expected to find the former. But because activity always increased just before dawn, because the rain had kept people in at the night’s start, the latter is what I stepped into. It was engrossing; it was exhausting; it was reassuring; and it was very human. At one point I heard someone say to one guy who, I guess, got overexcited, “Okay, okay—calm down now. Relax for a moment. Just take it easy.” And later, when I emerged into a small opening, I saw, sitting on the back of one van, a tall black guy, in jeans and a red T-shirt, about thirty, who I’d seen there every night I’d ever come, but who never seemed to do anything, fanning himself with a folded newspaper and looking very pleased. I vaulted up into the van and was caught by two guys (“You okay there?”) steadying me, one of whom, I realised as I moved forward, was naked.
Later, pausing for minutes, I stood at the great beam along the edge of the water. Beyond the covered dock to the south, the sky was getting light. Looking to the west, I saw the black had taken a cobalt glaze. The water shook and shimmered with the cobalt reflection. A little way down stood a white guy in his late twenties, early thirties. He wore workman’s greens, short sleeves rolled up over muscular arms. He had one work shoe up on the weathered ten-by-ten that ran the concrete edging. He saw me looking at him and beckoned me over. I walked down the few feet between us, and he squatted, then sat on the blackened wood, put one hand on my hip, and, with very thick fingers, tugged my fly open. He moved forward, and I took his head, his ears against my palms. His brown hair was pulling away from his temples and thinning over a coming bald spot. He grinned up, then went down. Looking over his head at the water, I felt very good and very tired. Running across the stretch of dawn river just below us, two nets, one of shadow, one of light, on the wrinkling and ravelling blue interlaced, interpenetrated, pulled endlessly one out of the other. It seemed for a moment that both would become one, or would reveal themselves to be two aspects, differently lighted, of a complex singularity. The wet heat of his mouth on my engorged penis retreated, came forward, retreated, came forward, retreated, came forward again. The third time, he just stayed there. He let me go from his mouth to lean his head against my lap. Then he laughed and looked up. “I’m tired,” he said, with a kind of embarrassment. If he’d had a morning like mine, I wasn’t surprised.
“Okay,” I nodded. “Stand up a minute. I’ll do you.”
He stood. I got down in front of him. He let me go at him for about a minute. Then, with his work-hardened hands, he stilled my head. I’m too tired,” he repeated and patted my shoulder. “I can’t make it. You work on him for a while,” and fed another cock—from a black guy who’d stepped up to watch us—into my mouth. He let one hand stay on my head and with the other cupped the teak testicles with their tight hair, loosed below my chin. I held onto his heavy reddened ones, his uncircumcised dick slowly lowering, warm, over the back of my hand, till he patted me again, took a breath, turned—and my hand was empty and cool—to walk, unsteadily, away. But I was exhausted too; the black guy helped me up and, about three minutes later, I started home. [2]
Clyde Falls vertical 1
Clyde Falls vertical 2
Clyde Falls vertical 3
Clyde Falls vertical 4
Collieston clifftop dusk Adidas stripe
Crickets 1
Crickets 2
Crickets ginger halo
Crickets hard halo
Crickets orange cap finger
Crickets people
Crickets wind
Dumbarton quarry
Dumbarton quarry 2
Finger Ex Easter Island Head
Flight clouds loud
Flight navigation screen 1
Flight navigation screen 2
Flight navigation screen 3
Flight navigation screen 4
Flight navigation screen 5
Flight navigation screen 6
Flight navigation screen 7
Goat bells 1
Goat bells 2
Goat bells 3
Goat bells 4
Goat bells 5
Goat bells 6
Golden Teacher
From: Jamie Crewe
To: Charlotte Prodger
Friday 12 December 2014, 3:13pm
Hiya!
Sorry for the slow reply to this - I actually don’t get a pornographic vibe from it - the first wave I get from A-Core co. is phonic, like ‘acorn’/’rococo’, the smack of hard ‘c’ sounds on the roof of your mouth, and then the second wave I get (which is maybe why it seems not pornographic to me) is nullification - A-core, like asexual, atonal, ahistorical. So yeah, I see the a-hole/hard-core crossover, but I don’t feel it when reading the title actually. I like it! That element of nihilism in the ‘A’ warps the industrial tone of it too.
J X
From: Ian White
To: Charlotte Prodger
Friday 2 August 2013, 3:33 pm
hey charlotte... i really think the visualisation technique helps a lot. like, for me, it’s as if i’m making a parallel story in my head about which word follows which or which sentence comes after which sentence according to some visual story that might make sense only to me, but it only needs to make sense to me! if there’s like a visual narrative somehow it’s easier to remember. and also listening and repeating the words until the rhythm of them is the thing the mouth/tongue/throat just remember automatically, like muscle memory, like how the body can remember dance moves. the mouth will just go to say the next word because that’s what its muscles expect to do. splitting it from another body movement that’s happening at the same time is the really difficult bit. Good luck.
Rotating white Shimano reel
Sap smoke
SPT Caterpillar boot brown jeans striped floor fingernail
SPT grey jean noise 1
SPT grey jean noise 2
SPT window wind tunnel 2
SPT window wind tunnel
Subway sleepers 2
Subway sleepers
Sun Tunnels EAI 2
Sun Tunnels EAI 3
Sun Tunnels EAI 4
Sun Tunnels EAI 5
Sun Tunnels EAI 6
Sun Tunnels EAI 7
Train bare thighs
Train laptop screen LED sign phone
Train undergrowth
Trainers 14th March
Trainers 19th April
Two boys rapping in A and E
Two radiators
Wysing satellite car slams
White telephone crackling noise with text
White telephone crackling noise
But anyway that isn’t what I meant to say
I meant to tell about a story
Since we all have stories
But I can’t remember it anyway
But I’ll continue anyway until I get it together
We always
We always
We always have a story
The latest story that I know is the one that I’m supposed to go out with
And the latest story that I know is the one that I’m supposed to go out with
And the latest story that I know is the one that I’m supposed to go out with
And the latest story that I know is the one that I’m supposed to go out with
Feelings
Nothing more than feelings
Feelings
Nothing more than feelings
Feelings of love
You know that? [3]
[1] Sun Tunnels by Nancy Holt, Artforum, 1977
[2] The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village by Samuel R. Delany, 1988
[3] Nina Simone Live at Montreux, 1976