The Mixtape Chronicles — Barbara Maclean (2 min. 2002) Directed, shot, and edited by Lester Alfonso as part of his ongoing series on this cultural artifact.
Once you get to know my work, is it any surprise that the title The Day of the Serial Epic is used to astrologically describe me in the book The Secret Language of Birthdays? Almost everything I do is repeated in a variety of different iterations under an umbrella name. For example, there are currently ten episodes of the podcast SoundProof, seven episodes of the web series What is Art? There have been fifteen or so iterations of [sound+vision], forty-nine Instant Videos, one hundred and seventy episodes of Uke Box, and the list goes on.
It was a dirty job but someone had to do it.
This Archive Project is another example of a Series. Episode 52, if you will. Today I’m premiering a remastered version of the Barbara Maclean episode of The Mixtape Chronicles (previously only available on an old YouTube channel.) All in all, I think there were about sixteen episodes fully made and they were all clumped together in a linear sequence once. And, the resulting twenty-minute compilation was actually well-received at a film festival in Victoria, B.C. in 2002.
The Mixtape Chronicles wanted to be an epic, globe-trotting, non-linear documentary web series intentionally edited so that each installment could all work together when randomly organized in a playlist.
I had originally meant these two-minute episodes as “tracks” that one could order, re-order, and randomize in the playback sequence. I had already begun experimenting with this kind of presentation on Trying to Be Some Kind of Hero which I had originally entitled 30 One-Minute Movies About a Mystery.
I describe The Mixtape Chronicles as “globe-trotting” because each episode took place in a different city. Episodes were shot from Brooklyn, San Francisco, Toronto, London, Vancouver, and Bancroft, Ontario.
I picked up some cleaning work with my friend Jesse one summer in Bancroft. I met Barbara Maclean because she needed her crawl space cleaned out. It was a dirty job but someone had to do it. When she found out that I was making a documentary series on “mixed cassettes,” she was intrigued and allowed me to shoot one on her.
I think the image of those submerged cassettes will always haunt me.
More soon! — LA
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