railing

I was inspired to make this by Morgan M. Page's “Tgirl Video Postcard Club". It's mostly video that I gathered while I was living in Berlin, though the main substrate of the whole thing is actually a snippet from a 30 minute shot out the back of a train on a ride from Prague to Berlin from May 2024.

I wrote in Swamp Rail Pussy that “I assemble a layered video collage of signal boxes and blinking lights, timetables and switch rails." This was not actually true. I recorded an awful lot of footage related to trains and transit but I never assembled any of it. When I read Morgan's newsletter I thought it was a perfect opportunity to finally make good on my video fantasy and attempt to assemble something. Plus, I had been back to visit Berlin in May and had recorded more footage, most notably that long long substrate shot, which felt vital and important enough to move me into making.

The text that I'm reading (it's my voice) is an adaptation of bits from Swamp Rail Pussy, but brought a bit more into the present and massaged to fit the format.

A few citations:

• The third shot (the dark one after the U-Bahn hit) is the very same Zeesen platform that I talk about in the text.
• Josh Woodward's Memorized (which is the music that comes in on the video) is the guitar undercurrent of Devi McCallion's Traincar of Personal Hell, which I talk about in the text.