I think without the opportunity to observe the equestrian elite in their natural environment I would have gone totally insane. Instead I tried to convince myself that I was engaging in important anthropological work studying horse society. It was actually a rather fascinating peek into a strange, strange world of wealth, competition and appearances. About halfway through it dawned on me to do a study in the vein of Hunter S. Thompson’s Kentucky Derby article, but by then we were far too busy to suffer such distractions.
The job consisted of, you guessed it, shooting horses. We had a platform on one end of the main arena with a view of the whole floor where the horses came out and did their thing. What they did usually consisted of riding in circles, fast, slow, reversing, stopping. From our perspective it was pretty nonsensical, particularly the competition where they make the horse “present” by sticking its neck out for an imaginary carrot while the crowd hoots and hollars to get the animal to perk up its ears. It took us a few days to figure that one out.
Each of us was hooked into a hard drive/DVD burner and a TV monitor so that our boss could watch our shooting. We were either assigned to a particular horse in the competition groups or were assigned a general tape which meant trying to get equal footage of all the riders. The hard drive/DVD was so that we could provide footage to the customers as quickly as possible. No edits, just straight out of the camera. This had its drawbacks, such as when James inadvertantly zoomed in on a girl’s butt during an award ceremony.
As you can hear in the mp3 a degree of sexual frustration was already starting to set into this sausage party by day two. I also mention the pub we tried to get to for lunch when time permitted. There were a couple of days where I have to admit we came back a little shy of the legal limit, but I always say that a little bit of liquor makes for smoother pans.
Conditions at the show were pretty crummy. There was a second arena that usually only had one shooter stationed there, effectively stranding them there for the duration of the competitions. Spencer quickly discovered that he was severely allergic to horses and had to take a trip to the hospital for an asthma attack. At the beginning of the week our days were about 12 hours long with breaks throughout, but soon that would seem like a luxury as the pace of the show picked up.
And of course every night we returned to the same seedy hotel…
Here’s some audio from the trenches.
This is a small town
Etnographic notations
The origins of Dr. SARS
The flying Elvises
