First I’d like to apologize for not updating this in a couple weeks. It’s been extremely busy hustling for places to sleep. Now that we’re in Austin and have a guaranteed home base for a couple days where we can sort out where we’re headed next, how much money we have left, and what we want to get in the last three or so weeks of traveling and shooting, I’m going to be filling in gaps and possibly updating more than once a day until said gaps are filled.

So far we have four basic kinds of shots we’ve been getting with numerous subcategories in each, I’ll stick to the broad ones:

1) Landscapes with varying degrees of motion.
2) Street scenes of people moving around, some funny, some meditative.
3) Street interviews where we ask people their feelings about the country and where it’s headed.
4) Long tracking shots…

Snippets overheard:

Asheville:

“He introduces himself with ‘They call me dirty’ and I said ‘Well I don’t.'”

“Who are ‘they’?”

Athens:

“So he goes out this farm and it turns out it was a cult.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, full blown religious cult.”

“Oh nice, Buzzcocks 45s.”
——

We made it into Birmingham last night after two nights in Athens during Athfest. Athens is an interesting town; my initial impression admittedly formed getting there in the middle of the night during an indie rock festival, was that this is what it would look like if the Williamsburg people had won a war of secession with the rest of Brooklyn. Grown men in t-shirts celebrating childrens’ cartoons. The now archetypal ironic facial hair in seemingly more corkscrewed than a pig’s tail than last I remembered, or maybe they just don’t fuck around in Athens with that stuff how they do in Williamsburg. Maybe…

We stayed in the Sunburst Campground near Waynesville two nights ago; it’s a small one. We were the only campers there and we wondered if we were even supposed to be there because the bathrooms and box to drop the campsite fee were locked. It turned out when a campground supervisor actually did show up in the morning we got half our fee refunded because of the bathroom problem. The tent worked out nicely.

In the morning we hit the Blue Ridge Parkway to get landscapes and clouds.

The overlooks on the Parkway are interesting; we got to them about thirty minutes before it rained (it’s still raining now) and you could see the massive monolithic clouds coming over each side of mountains to converge about where we were and flood us out. We packed everything in the car and headed back to Waynesville.

The owner of a Thai restaurant…

At a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. The only trace of civilization is a gas station that has a truncated version of a Subway sandwich shop that you’d have to walk for three hours down a steep road made of little blue rocks to get to. The houses here are spread out by several acres, all of them, and besides a couple parked cars and pick-up trucks the residents seem very comfortable setting their own leisurely pace in the slow waddle towards the neolithic revolution; there are spacious pens with donkeys and horses and fields with cows. The road periodically has “NO TRESPASSING” signs posted on trees next to what look like untouched woods that I guess function as driveways. They have blue spruces with needles coming off the branches; the younger ones are wholly blue while the senior spruces have blue on the tips and…