THE BALLAD OF JOHN HALL
by Valley Traction
Comprised of bits of found text
culled from the YouTube comments, SubReddits, and Forgotten Websites THE BALLAD OF JOHN HALL
is a story about the stories we tell
and the fragments of what's left behind.
Like old buildings by the side of the road,
an abandoned blog post is all some people know of a place as they pass by.
Here's some notes we toyed with as we built this piece:
Sandcastles. I think when you spend your life making sandcastles, you confront death more directly. I secretly think you control your own story a little better. Through anonymity comes freedom. Architects sometimes think they’re building a legacy. “Vestiges of Grandeur”. It’s the name of a book about plantations in New Orleans.
Buildings that are left behind will take on stories. Or fragments of stories. Like seashells washed up along the coast. Everyone thinks they know what the whole of a thing really looks like. They believe they can imagine it in their mind, and put it all together. But the fragments build and build and build, until they become a mass of their own. The original no longer matters.
We’ve been struggling with questions of truth lately. Since science maybe. Or religion. They used to be the same. Fragments of a larger whole. There’s an idea that truth is beautiful. Will set you free. Maybe that’s true. But for anything that’s true, the opposite is also true. Maybe.
