Did you all read the latest from Helen? I'm not quite sure what it all means, but I think it bodes well for us... www.createhere.org

DRAFT rev1.0

Capture Chattanooga is an interdisciplinary group of photographers, filmmakers, folklorists, storytellers, painters, musicians and writers working together to create and present culture-centered contextural works of art in, for, and about Chattanooga.

Capture Chattanooga will produce collaborative and solo projects including exhibits, live performances, publications, online multimedia, and film, and provide technical resources for Chattanoogans to creatively document their lives and archive their stories.

Because we recognize the synergistic potential of this location, Capture Chattanooga has chosen a studio space on Rossville Avenue. We join Terry Cannon, Ignis Glass Studios, Thomas Mann, and the Chattanooga Pulse in this burgeoning creative movement on the southside.

Our centralized location on the southside will put us literally at the crossroads both physically and metaphorically. We envision working in an open studio where anyone can see works in progress, record their own story in the soundbooth, search our archives, browse the current exhibit, make a purchase, or contribute ideas for our next project. We endeavour to create an atmosphere that inspires and illuminates our commitment to the bigger picture as a body of work.

In its first year, Capture Chattanooga will produce four unique events showcasing the intersection of artists in the collective, beginning with a portfolio exhibition of the group's principal artists. The entire series of exhibit events will be held in the all new Loose Cannon performance hall and gallery.

The statement

Is there no way to show how the doc has changed? I didn't see the old versus the new in the changes Mary & Christie had made.

Statement of Purpose Redux

I converted Jim's SOP to a Google doc, and Mary and Christie have been tweaking it all afternoon. You can see it here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddfm7ntp_0c67h42

If you can't see it, then I misspelled yr. email address, contact me and let me know and I'll change it. Also, if you think that there are others who should be allowed to edit this, let me know too, and I'll add them.

thanks.

Beginning Statement of Purpose

Here's the beginning of a statement of purpose from this morning's meeting. Please share your thoughts.

Capture Chattanooga is an interdisciplinary group of photographers, filmmakers, historians, folklorists, storytellers, painters, musicians and writers working together to explore, document, preserve, and share Chattanooga’s people, history, & neighborhoods through the arts.

Capture Chattanooga will produce collaborative and solo shows including performance arts, gallery shows, online multimedia and film, and provide technical resources for Chattanoogans to document their lives and archive their stories.

In its first year, Capture Chattanooga will produce four shows, beginning with a portfolio showing of participating artists in the brand new Loose Cannon performance hall and gallery.

In our space on the south side, visitors can see works in progress, visit the recording booth to record their own story, search our archives and library for information and photographs, or offer ideas for our next project.

Funding for Filmmakers

You all may already know about this, but I just got this in an email from the CDS at Duke:

Foundation Center: Reference Guide for Film and Videomakers -
http://fdncenter.org/getstarted/guides/film.html

If you are looking for financial support to make a film or to work on a video project, the information on this website can help you in your search.

Rick

Next Meeting

Hello all,
Jim and I have decided we'd like to see all your faces again, and so would like to have a meeting on either Tuesday or Thursday this week. Email Jim or me to let us know if either of those times work for you.

Thanks!!

Thanks for the invitation - or what I'm doing up at 4:45AM on Saturday

Good morning!

Thanks for the invitation to join this blog, Christie.

My wife and I moved here through the Arts Move Program about 8 weeks ago. I am a musician and music teacher, and have some training in things documentary, as well, with interests in audio, video and photography (no darkrooms, though, please), as well as some basic experience in web site design.

I'm interested in what Christie has told me about documentary efforts and ideas here (see my comments in my profile), especially as it regards music. The next few months, likely through the end of the year, will be taken up on the documentary front mainly with work on my final project for the certificate at Duke.

So, I'll have to browse around more as I have time to see what all is going on here, and am interested to see what might develop. Having moved from Raleigh, NC, to here since the beginning of the year, and basically starting over with the local teaching and performance aspects of things, I'm exploring to see what direction(s) to take here in Chattanooga. Some are clear, but many are not. Hopefully, seeing what you all are working on will help me to get more clear than not, and maybe offer me a local outlet in documentary, as I can be of help.

OK, it's too early to be writing this much. But it's pleasant to sit on my front porch, write, drink a bit o' tea, and listen to the birds and that factory fan/motor on the east side of the tracks at Rossville Blvd. OK, the fan isn't pleasant, but the birds are. ;-)

Cheers!

LIBRARY TAPES

my computer has been crashing for two weeks straight. i have been trying to post an update all week. sorry for the lag re the library. there is another entity in hot pursuit of digitizing the tapes and they have submitted a grant to incorporate this task into a larger project. It is the Bright School and they are trying to launch an oral history project on their alum. I have a call in to the project director. i'll find out some more info - but i think they need tomeet CBURNS enterprises and the amazing interactive wonder world of oral history's online.... i think the timing is bad tho for Highland Park + Main street immediate needs to have the tapes digitized NOW!.. but we shall see....

The Same Name is the Same

Well hey! I'm enjoying the exchange of info on this blog. Say, by the way, another way to get to this here web site is www.capturechattanooga.com and/or www.capturechattanooga.org.

Hope this helps!

Alton Park

Hello to all and thanks for the invite.

My cousins own a salvage yard/repair shop for European vehicles over on Workman Road (formerly Hamill Road) in Alton Park. The shop operates in the guts of a monolithic, abandoned textile mill from some minor industrial heyday of Chattanooga's adolescence.

I used the setting and the cousins for a digital video project in graduate school. My focus-- if in fact I managed any during grad school --was the relationship between my older cousin and his son, and I was never really satisfied with it, swore I'd try to make it again some day, yada yada yada.

What is relevant to our discussion here is the sense of rebirth, or at least recycling, of these stalwart old buildings that live in the forgotten communities of the valley--and I believe this is a much different thing than the commercial clamor of urban renewal and historical preservation.

The beauty and memory of these places are worth examining as we try to tell Chattanooga's stories.

Virtual archive of Chattanooga history?

As promised, I met with this gentleman today, Tom Carson, and he showed me some of his enormous PDF archive of Tennessee and Chattanooga history. He leads this area's Adobe users group, and is making much more out of a PDF than I've ever attempted to. I always thought it was just a handy way of getting a word file from point A to point B without losing any of the formatting or font styles. But there he is, with clickable hyperlinks built into maps, really nice images of old Tennessee currency, sketches of the city, etc. He's definitely coming at it all from more of the collector's or archivist's point of view, whereas I'm more into the creative "let's make it look beautiful" side of things when it comes to digitizing history. What I saw of his work today seems very well-suited for the library (although he said they weren't interested in purchasing it from him), and he says his goal is to make a "virtual archive" of Chattanooga history. If that were to happen, I'd love to see his "stack" of documents spiced up with video, oral history, art, etc... but that's me, always wanting a little more. Anyway, we certainly haven't seen the last of this guy!
Here's an article about Tom Carson's work.

unexpected phone call

Check this out. This evening, I get an unexpected phone call from a guy who says he's been collecting Tennessee history (including Chattanooga) for years, and has thousands of pages of it, all fully searchable in PDF format. He was given my name and number by my dulcimer student's mother, who just knows that I'm into historic stuff and figured it wouldn't hurt to connect us. So I'll be meeting with him tomorrow to see some of his work. I'm hoping he's a genius with the databasing and would want to step in and help should we ever launch a really big project around here involving video, audio, photos, etc. I'll keep y'all posted!

Hey Jim--
Have you spoken with the guy at the Oriental rug store up on Main and Central? A recent Chattanooga native-gone-Chicago returnee like yourself gave me that tip. Said the old man there knows it all, and has been there since she was a kid many decades ago.

By the way, you people rule for taking me up on this blog idea!

Am I cool now?

I saw that all the cool people (sorry Butch) only use their first names, so I changed mine. Am I cool, now?

i feel so....exposed. let me go put on something more appropriate...

Hello!!
is it coincidental that all of this collective energy swirling around these parallel paths we all seem to be on is tangibly surging to the surface right now, just as you three have made your way to chattanooga? If so, THANKS!

By the way, I am going back to see M.Helms at the Library tomorrow (yes, she works saturday) to see if she can set up a meeting with the half century folks re: underwriting digitizing the oral history tapes there. If that can not happen in short order, we'll need a plan B to get that done soon for Highland Park and Main Street projects, at the very least. Any other ideas? At the very least I need to hear the quality, if not the just the content, to know if its usable audio.....

cheers and thanks for the blast-off blog!

It's great to be a part of the conversation! I had a feeling, coming to Chattanooga, that there would be great things happening and great stories to tell, but I never dreamed there would be such a collective energy!

Along those lines (conversing, feeling, happening, collecting and such) I am in interview mode. Next week, I will meet with the self-labeled "Y boys," a group of men who lived in the neighborhood six or seven decades ago and hung out at the industrial YMCA. I also have time scheduled with my cousin Grace who lived in the neighborhood around that same time.

Who knows where this will all lead, but I have a great feeling about it all.

On another note...scrabble? drinks? scrabble and drinks?

The Beginning

Welcome to our new blog, where all of our brilliant ideas will be posted and kept for the ages (at least all of the ages who'll be interested in reading old blogs). I'm telling you, we'll be glad we did it. There's no telling what adventures we're going to have, what incredible projects we'll finish. It's best just to keep urging each other on, and perhaps inspire a few along the way. Someday when we're old and wise, we'll have this journal to accompany our legacies.

Orrrr.... maybe it just ends up in the forgotten blog pile with the rest of 'em. Anyway, here goes!