Q: We Are The Physics? A: No.

Boy I sure love the band We Are The Physics.  Their debut “We Are The Physics Are OK at Music” gets alot of play around here, much to the delight of my wife and childrens.

One time, one summer, they were getting rid of shirts for post price only and I sent them Two Dollars and they sent one and it never got here.  Then they were all like, “sorry.”  Then after the eighteenth email, they stopped taking my calls.

Cut to today (that’s right, I’m Joe Hollywood so I can talk like that), they get these great new shirts in stock that they will only be selling at shows.  Shows that will not be in the greater NY area because apparantly they can travel to Russia like they’re rich and fancy but cannot grace teh America with their brand of Atomic Age New Wave leaving Man or Astroman? to maintain their monopoly now that they killed Servotron with their bear hands.

Now I love shirts only available at performances on account of them being rare and more important, but I was unable to be a big enough person not to blog the shit out of this shirt shit.  But fact is, if you want something done poorly, you have to do it yourself.

And so I did.  I did something else…myself.

ALSO AVAILABLE IN BLACK!

VIDEO: 1911 Fire via 1962 La Jette and 2010 Alice Donut

I’ve been obsessed with the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire since I was about 14 (23 years ago) and I’ve always wanted to make an experimental film about it. In college I was going to but I opted for something far less meaningful as I couldn’t and still can’t tackle any serious subject matter in any medium including talking.

I’ve seen Chris Marker’s French post-nuclear war, La Jetée tons of times. It is made (almost) entirely of static still images using almost all hard cuts with a few dissolves and voice overs in French with some muttering in German. In the last week I watched it seven times in two sessions (it’s only a half hour, but still, I was obsessing on it and thinking about it alot). I’ve been watching it lately on IFC in “HD” but it’s viewable on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClvTYd4XnEc.

I’ve been wanting to make a video for Cavalry from Alice Donut’s 10 Glorious Animals since the great album first came out. I was initially going to use footage from Medic (a 1954 NBC show starring Richard Boone) but found the footage to not fit my vision. Also, it would have taken a long time and I don’t have the luxury of doing videos that take long to create for fun. So I gave up on it.

Yesterday, I decided to combine the three in a historically partially accurate story of the Fire, in an imperfect homage to La Jette set to the somewhat relevant tune.

After hour and hour of hard labor, this is what came out.

This is not an officially sanctioned Alice Donut video and I own no rights to it, though the photos are public domain. The song is actually called Cavalry, but I thought a French title slate was necessary as the parody was unclear due to the quality of the photos, the quality of the edit and the lack of narration.