Left Over

If you’re old enough to remember when music was only records and radio, then you remember the ignominious B-side. Purely a consequence of physics (you had to have another side of the record) and enamel, the B-side was the inevitable, unequal twin of the A-side, the hit. As in some of those folk tales, though, the B-side wasn’t always the misshapen one, not in the long run. In the long run the B-side could outshine its favoured sibling, and be treasured for its unlikely, particular genius.B-roll is what they call it in the documentary movie business. B-roll is how the director gets from one scene to the next. It’s real, but it’s ephemeral, useful, but in its particulars uncrucial.

I’ve been documented a time or two. A lot of what I said ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor. Fair enough. I wasn’t making the movie. I was submitting to it. But it does leave me wondering from time to time: I wonder what’s in there. I wonder if it stands on its own, minus the story line.

The older I get, the more I’m willing to credit myself with hitting the mark most of the time. I’m not looking around for what I mean. I get at it, most of the time. I am, a bit, like Johnny Cash’s guitar player Luther Perkins who, when asked why he didn’t shred like most players, said, “They’re looking for it. I found it.”

I sat for Mattias Olsson’s camera late last summer, at a time when I was up against it, life-wise. He made a good film from our time together. He called it Murmuring of the Land. I did some murmuring myself. But there was a lot of sit-down stuff that didn’t survive the edit.

I just saw some of it. Pretty good. Worthy, I’d say, of the Scriptorium. Worthy of the labours of transcription. Worthy of the life I’ve been afforded.

Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom