Things have been pretty quiet around 19th State for the last year or so, but not because we haven't been doing stuff-- we just haven't been telling you about it.

This past weekend David Orr, Jennie Orr, and Mike Dixon headed to Long Beach Island, New Jersey for the inaugural Lighthouse International Film Festival. They took our short documentary "The National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest: The Makers and their Machines" along with them. The video was originally produced for Make Magazine's blog (http://www.makezine.com), and now it's making what we're hoping will be the first stop on a respectable tour of the festival circuit. If, for some strange reason, you didn't happen to be on the Jersey Shore this weekend, I guess you could probably still watch it by going here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv4dyaH2V-E

A couple other new (old) projects have been added to our Youtube page over the last few months. The first is a 20-minute experimental film collaboration between Goatmother Industrial (aka Mark Rice of The Coke Dares, Magnolia Electric Co, The Impossible Shapes, etc) and William Winchester Claytor entitled "TALL." It's split into 2 parts due to Youtube's 10-minute time limit, but you can watch it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX996b_Z0AM and here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaW8vsay7NY . Probably best viewed on drugs.

Speaking of collaborations featuring William Winchester Claytor, you may have seen his video for The Impossible Shapes' absolutely freakin' beautiful song "Infinity's Lips," which came out last summer. Unfortunately the video was released before Youtube started allowing HD content, and in our humble (biased) opinion, the version available there just didn't do the video or the song justice. So we've now uploaded a new High Definition version of the video that looks as good as it's supposed to. Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgl2_lSEic0

In other music-related news, we should mention the new record by Vollmar entitled "Tell The Dirt," which is out as a limited-edition (only 300 copies!) vinyl release on St Ives Records. Each record sleeve is hand numbered by Vollmar himself, and features a different photograph from a time-lapse sequence shot over the course of an evening last winter. The entire sequence can be viewed here:http://www.vollmarmusic.com/videos/Tell%20The%20Dirt-Tell%20The%20Dirt-H.264.mov Justin Vollmar came up with the idea, William Winchester Claytor shot the sequence and provided valuable fire-building advice, and Nathan Vollmar worked real hard to keep all our lights from blowing over in the wind. We're all very proud of both the album and the cover art. Did we mention that it was also available digitally on iTunes, eMusic, and a bunch of other online music stores?

Something to look out for in the relatively near future is a short comedy we made a couple years ago called "Little Sister Manipulator." It was written by Kristin Peach, directed and edited by Nathan Vollmar, shot by William Winchester Claytor, and has sound by Justin Vollmar. It stars Peach, David Orr, and David Brant, and features music by Matty Pop Chart. This one kind of got lost in the vault-- it went through a number of different edits and overdubs over a period of many months before we felt we finally had it right, and by that point we'd all moved on to other projects and didn't really do much to get it seen. We will soon be rectifying that mistake.

We have lots of plans coming up that we're really excited about, including some music videos from the aforementioned Vollmar record, and some new scripts by David Orr. We're hoping it will be a very productive summer, and we're gonna try real hard to remember to tell people about the stuff we're doing from now on...

Wishing you all the best,
Your buddies at Nineteenth State