Bad Knees
Bed Knees was recorded at the Experimental Television Center, in Owego, over a couple of sessions in July 1985, soon after recording Lumpy Banger. There seems to be another sequence of recordings in the middle of the Bad Knees work that, though I never showed it, could be another piece all on it’s own. This was likely the last work I recorded at the ETC while I was living on Lake Street in Owego, working for and living down the street from the TV Center.
Again this is another super short sampling of a couple of hours of material recorded over two sessions. In part, I made my edits so short in opposition to those long minimalist pieces I was brought up on, and though I loved them, I admit that I fell asleep sometimes. At a certain point I had made a decision to be brief, but this turned out to have marginalize the work. And, in part the work was so stingy because I had very limited access to editing, and when I did manage to be with a pair of decks, I was working on a grant proposal. It was well known that grant panels did not look at more than a couple of minutes of tape, so to some extent the economics determined the form.