Howdy. Jennie, Mike, and I got back into Bloomington early yesterday morning, deciding to drive through Sunday night rather than stop for a snooze along the way. Mike is heading to Japan now (and probably is somewhere above the Western US as I write this), and just returned from playing with the great DM Stith on his European tour. Dude is a modern day ramblin' man. Here's a little recap of our first international film fest.

The first two nights, we thought it would be fun to stay in Atlantic City and live like high rollers. As soon as we got to the Trump Marina hotel/casino, we figured out that any rolling we'd be doing would be pretty low. The restaurants were closing down at 10pm or earlier and the Wi-Fi was $13. The next day, we felt like being treated like cattle, so we ate at the buffet at the Trump Taj Mahal. This is where I finally had the revelation that there are two types of people who eat at these things: the first group are inveterate gamblers who are comped up the wazoo. The second are suckers. I am the former. It was more than $20 and the food wasn't even Golden Corral quality. Worse, they made us wait behind velvet ropes after paying, admitting us according to some impenetrable system of capacity maintenance. While a horde of elderly gamblers seethed in line with us, we gazed at dozens of empty tables that looked perfectly usable. Every few minutes a buffet employee would lift the rope and let a few people into the dining area. After about ten minutes, we were finally guided to a table. After paying what we did, we decided that we had to fill up as much as possible to limit the damage to our budget.

Oh yeah, the fest itelf. It was fun. It was the first year for the Lighthouse International Film Festival, and it was clear that the organizers had been scrambling to make everything go as planned. In order to satisfy all of the towns on Long Beach Island, screenings were spread over the whole length, with most of the high profile ones happening near the middle in a church rec hall, which had the largest capacity. For opening night, we watched Big Fan, a feature length comedy starring Patton Oswalt as an obsessed Giants fan, which was pretty rough but nailed the culture of meathead sports talk radio callers. After that, we watched the rowdy and completely recommended The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (here's a longer review, and comment thread). The director, Julian Nitzberg, turned out to be a very nice guy and we spent some time hanging out with him, including taking free surfing lessons offered by the Festival, which brutalized me. There were also plenty of parties and opportunities for free food, so it cannot be said that the folks at LIFF did not treat the filmmakers well.

Our short screened before a doc called Facing the Fat, about an obese man's radical water-only diet. It was early on Sunday afternoon at the very tip-top of the island, in the visitor's center accompanying Barnegat Lighthouse, from which the fest gets its name. It was pretty sparsely attended, which is understandable considering its location and the not-too-sunny subject matter of the feature. The people who were there laughed in the expected places and seemed to enjoy it, so that was good - as I've said before, the real reward was just getting accepted. Hopefully the fest soldiers on for a second year and we get to attend again.

As a little treat, here is the trailer for may favorite short of the fest, Elegy for the Elswick Envoy, a beautiful little film:

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

Well, Jennie, Mike, and I are leaving for New Jersey and the Lighthouse International Film Festival in a few short hours. I'm sure Mike is dozing merrily at his place, but Jennie and I are just now packing. This is customary.

I think I've got a good attitude going into this. No pressure. Really, the reward was being accepted. So I'm just going to enjoy Long Beach and the other movies in the fest and the experience of watching what we've done with an audience of unsuspecting strangers. If time allows and circumstances are interesting enough to warrant it, I'll try to post daily wrap ups. At the very least, I'll have a wrap-up next week.

Tally-ho...