about a month ago we presented clips from Pines to a live audience in the cozy backyard of the Random Tea Room in Philadelphia. All the musicians working on the score where there to preform orchestral versions of the soundtrack pieces and Allen Crawford read new prose.
photos by Michael J Dur
musicians: Gretchen Lohse, John Pettit, Jesse Sparhawk and Ben Warfield
On Saturday Mayor Gary invited us to his place to spend the day. Gary is an incredible character; professional decoy carver, antique car collector, sheep farmer, an in fact Mayor of Port Republic, NJ. Gary lives in the house he was born in on land that his family, ship builders and sawyers, settled in 1637.
One of the great things about the Pine Barrens is the way that the experience of being in the woods is heightened by the stories and folklore that play in ones minds while traversing this powerful and often mystical landscape. I’d like to find some people who would be into the idea of telling their own stories or stories that were told to them on camera. I’m interested in all kinds of stories; your own memories, your childhood, what happened yesterday, what happened to a parant or friend, what happened in history, it’s all important to me and you are welcome to exaggerate and embellish as much as you like. Tall-tales are welcome. Sing me a story if you feel inclined.
I’m also interested in creating video portraits of people of the Pines. If you live around the Pine Barrens and you feel like it might be fun for a small camera crew to follow you around for a day, I’d love to hear from you. Or maybe right now you are thinking of the perfect character, a storyteller whom I would be remiss not to talk to.
Historians, naturalists and survivalists are also invited.
and in case you are wondering, I’m not specifically interested in Jersey Devil stories but I’d love to hear a good one if you’ve got it.
We walked a shorts ways to get up to Apple Pie Hill fire tower. This was the flooded trail on the way back starting to freeze.
Karen Riley and her business partner, Andrew Gioulis are helping us make vital connections within the Pine Barren community. I read Karen’s book, Voices in the Pines and I feel like I have much greater insight into daily life in the Pines.
From the author of Whispers in the Pines: The Secrets of Colliers Mills, comes an exciting new non-fiction book that’s sure to please! In the spirit of John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens, author Karen F. Riley roamed the woods, rural communities, and farms of the Pinelands in search of compelling stories. From true life tales of murder and mayhem to inspiring accounts of triumph over adversity and “Pineys” fighting to protect their way of life, Voices in the Pines brings the storytelling legacy of the Pine Barrens into the 21st century.
buy here
Steve and I made a quick stop in Batsto and wandered around Wharton’s manor and the reconstructed historic houses. I didn’t have enough to make another video sketch but i thought I would post some of the stills from the video.
Chapter 2, The Vanished Towns
‘Driving along a sand road between the vanished town of Calico and the vanished town of Munion Field, we passed a house that was so many miles from any other house that Fred said with evident admiration, “He got well in away from everybody, didn’t he? He got well in away from everybody.” Fred made a similar remark every time we passed a house or cabin that was particularly deep and alone in the woods. Getting – or staying – away from everybody is a criterion that apparently continues to mean as much to many of the people in the pines as it did to some of their forbears who first settled there.’
The Pines crew has been honored and damn lucky to have Allen Crawford aka Lord Whimsy grace us as our guide through the seemingly impenetrable woods of the Pine Barrens. Without him we would probably have all been eaten by owls already. Allen’s knowledge of the land and what grows there is as impressive as his ability to embody a class and lifestyle that is as unique and splendid as the rare Schizaea pusilla.
Allen will be featured heavily in the film – as himself, as Whimsy, as someone altogether unknown – I’m not saying. Who is Lord Whimsy? I’ll let him answer that.
below copied from lordwhimsy.com
After twenty long years, Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy (a.k.a. Victor Allen Crawford III) has at last achieved his dream: unemployability. He is an artist, designer, author, re-explorer,failed dandy, tin grandee, gentleman trespasser, bushwhacking aesthete, parenthetical naturalist, pseudo-intellectual, and a middle-aged dilettante.
Having taken a solemn vow to do as little in life as possible, Whimsy was dismayed one morning to discover that he had accidentally wrote, designed, and illustrated The Affected Provincial’s Companion, Volume One (Bloomsbury 2006), which has been optioned for film by Johnny Depp’s production company, Infinitum Nihil. His face and his words have graced the hallowed pages of The New York Times, Interview, Frieze, Vice, Tin House, and Art in America.
He and his wife are proprietors of the design and illustration studio Plankton Art Co. Their most notable project to date is the collection of 400 species identification illustrations that are on permanent display at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Ocean Life.
A devoted enthusiast, lower-case adventurer, and explorer of what he calls “the local frontier,” Whimsy spends most of his time among the nooks and margins of the forgotten, the curious, and the speculative that is found beneath, around, and between the everyday. He smells like gusto.
