From my music collaboration with Bentley Wood. These cuts come from an EP we’ve got brewing called Black Sprigs. Gothic folk songs set in a fictional midwestern town, loosely based on police blotters from Montana. Somber, heart-wrenching, and strange. Songs of frustration, homelessness, unfulfilled promises and buried desires. Threadbare, stark instrumentation with acoustic guitar, tonewheel organ, and humming. It’s the music of a many lost days.
In 1998, I spent Christmas with my paternal grandparents in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. There I recorded my grandfather, a WWII veteran Army Air Corps pilot, recounting one of his missions from the war. It was footage that I had shelved for more than twenty years. I knew I wanted to make something of it someday. Now it’s been almost more than ten years since he passed away. Making this video was also a chance for me to spend time with him again. I’m so glad he was one of the “lucky” ones to survive the war.
This is a mini-doc/interview with Reuben Radding. He’s photographer who often takes pics in and around New York City.
So, what does Diopsis mean? Good question. For starters, it’s the name of a video production company I founded with Benjamin Pryor in the mid 90s; there’s also a bit of philosophy behind the word itself. What snippet I can recall is something to the effect of “encounters with transitory beings with target as self.”
These videos are about walking through walls, or roaming downtown Asheville at night as our own mythic beings.