Last Thursday (in Fragments) - "It was, in some ways, a total disaster"

Certain that she had made a good painting at last, she pedaled home from the studio in the moonlight, fervent and giddy with glee.

Tape Extracts:

Don Chambers: The first month, so I had never shown a film at Flicker before, at the place we did the thing. And the first month I got there and they're like oh well this cable doesn't work and this one doesn't work and we don't have a laptop. So I ended up, like, at the last minute, an hour before the show started, I drove around and someone said that I could borrow their laptop and I drove over to their house and they weren't home anymore.

So, then I ended up going to my house and getting my computer, bringing it in and setting it on a chair and just showing the film on the computer. And I didn't even get there until after the show had already started. So it just kind of set this tone.

People seem to enjoy watching someone else in a slight state of panic. I found myself, I did, I found myself at least for the first three or four months...then there was sound. You know one month the PA just didn't work; halfway through the show, stops working.

And you're trying to do this show that I was really thinking of, I wanted to present, like, to create an atmosphere. So those interruptions for me were terrible, but from an outside point of view audience people were like: 

Oh that was great. I loved it that that happened.

Oh really, well I was panicking. 

That happened, that happened for the first six months. And it was nobody. I mean it was everybody's fault and it was nobody's fault. It was just the way the shows seemed to go. But, that also created you know weird, like, I had my schedule of the show printed out for every show, but I would get so flustered by something not working and then I'd forget something else that was actually key to something that happened later in the show because they did have within a two hour window they would have some things would happen early on that needed to be fulfilled later. And I would just forget about one part or the other. So, it was in some ways a total disaster that I learned a lot from.

You know, we're doing these things in one month. And it would take me three or four days to recover from the last one. And then I'd find myself, like, all right. I didn't have any kind of pre-scheduled I want to do this or that. I had, I had a few notes on one page here; building office stuff and it was kind of little what do you want to do next every month. But I didn't really have a... I didn't have any kind of timeline for what I wanted to do for the year.

I made a theme's page and that was based off of either a theme, a story for my life, or a trick that I wanted to do. 

Probably something I was reading at the time.

Well, the first one was hidden in plain sight and that was, the theme came about after I went out to Scull Shoals, John and I went out there, which is an abandoned town outside of Athens. It was abandoned at the turn of the 19th century. It was a town on a little river and it was flooded twice. And eventually the residents just gave the place up. So there's still some of the, there was a cotton mill there, there was a hospital there, there was like 3000 people lived in the town that eventually was abandoned. So, we went there to film that cause it's right outside Athens, not a lot of people know about it, and made a short, little film about it and that was the impetus for the first one, which was hidden. 

Don Chambers (from show recording): Well, we've been doing this for ten months now. This is our tenth and final month of the Last Thursday.  I think we're gonna need some duct tape. John can you grab some duct tape in the back, I think I left it on the shelf there. Always good to have duct tape for these shows. 

I want to thank you for coming out. So these last ten months, among other things, we've had poetry, films, painting, and scripts; readings, body doubles, Shakespeare, and a little bit of murder.  And finally tonight, with your help, we're going to try and recreate an early twentieth century, good ol' fashioned seance. We're going to try and conjure the dead. Anybody who is not comfortable with that, well you should have read the flyer.