May 2011: A week in the Mojave Desert: Barstow, Bishop, Daggett, Trona, Bristol Lake, Ludlow, Tehachapi, Amboy, Keeler… the usual suspects.
My first real attempt to make a video about human settlement and the Mojave, and also to capture some of the feeling of driving through the desert — the desert as it really is (and as I’ve known it in passing for decades now), not the pristine desert of the imagination or tourist brochures.
I wanted to do this video for years — all the sometimes bizarre and unsettling forms of human settlement in the Californian deserts (a topic I’ve touched on obliquely using still photos elsewhere) as seen from a car driving (very slowly) past it all. All those places I’ve been familiar with for years — Barstow, Baker, Ludlow, Dagget, Trona, Mojave, etc. — I wanted to show their strangeness, their steely toughness, their vulnerability, their shiny decrepitude. You know, Pretentious (or, perhaps, Portentous) Art School Motives variant number 7a (there’s a lot of this around). Except I’m no artist, and never went to art school (I’m an engineer by training and profession).
I had the overall architecture of the video in my mind for a long time, and by about 2010 the technology to do it became affordable for people like me. And so I went out and did it, over a long trip into the desert, using a variety of DSLR and other video cameras hanging off my Subaru using jerry-built mounts that only just kept the cameras from smashing to the ground on the rougher roads (it’s essentially an earlier version of the setup I used for Drive-By: Oilfield). I kinda like the end result — and it’s pretty close to what I’d envisioned all those years ago — but it’s really showing its age.
It’s backed by Mahler’s Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (from his Das Lied Von Der Erde); I get criticized a lot for that soundtrack, but that soundtrack was in my mind from the start of the project: what better accompaniment to desert decrepitude and the American West’s endless struggle with entropy than a deliriously-overripe piece of Western Art Music? (Song Of The Earth is actually one of my all-time fave vocal music pieces, but never mind, it’s also over-the-top in ways that just cry out for a little snark — “Dark is life, dark is death!”, indeed). It also happened to be pretty much exactly the right length for the video, and had the right dynamics in the right places. It turned out to be easy to edit to as-is, which is unusual. And it’s not too encumbered with YT-based copyright issues, so there it is.
I’m really tempted to do an updated scenic 5K version in the next year or two…