About the Photo:

Tony playing his beloved brother's song. All the love in the world here...in all the various directions and layers and places it takes us to.

 farolito

pw: kateri 

About Kateri. The Film:

With Kateri, everything was memory. Kateri may not have known, but this might have been the most direction I have ever given in these videos. Those moments when the memories pour out of your soul, overflow without regard to your stability, without regard to the reality external to your body, making a bench so much more than wood and metal stitched together. The nature of life cycling between mothers and children, your place within that stream or cycle.
There is a path where Kateri moves uphill toward the epicenter of the light to find whatever has been buried inside, buried so far buried. She finds it, and it dissolves. She moves back to her comfortable darkness, to her little farolito within her soul, to remember...to remember whether or not this piece of light burns the way that it should the way she needs it to burn and burn her so good...
Remembrance and beginnings, infertility, light, darkness, pregnant, blue, green, babies, slippery mud.
Things remind you of things that never even existed within your life, but even the new attaches to memories...and this was this place for me...I've walked by it, but never fully fit myself into it.

She continues her walk, and this time finds the beginning of a new kind of light, something more golden, something more crisp, shrouded by darkness and blue...she walks toward it, she's pulled toward it, I am pulled towards it, and I get lost in it.

Kateri embodied a lot of what I feel, and for anyone who watches this it may be the same for them...after I make these films I find this very uncontrollable, deep connection with the people that I make them with. It is very hard to explain, and not very obvious by how I act, but most of the time I feel very alone and disconnected from the people that I exist with. Making these films....they let me lose myself within the soul of these beautiful people that we make them with.

Kateri became everything. Everyone.

Cama De Piedra
password: cama

Cama De Piedra connected so closely to me, and at the moment it connected a squirrel nibbled on my ear. Other people, animate, and inanimate things may be passive and in completely different states of mind than the ones that we're in. These passive forces all around us sometimes make the heaviness lighter, easier to bear, and maybe even absurdly hilarious. That would be the most optimistic way of wrapping our minds around this constant battle with the seriousness of things. But, here it can also make us feel alone, isolated in our own minds where no one understands, making the heaviness even more heavy.
There is a truth in those heavy tears, and also in the fluffy, absurd communication breakdowns.

olvido
password: cruz

At one level, this is a prologue to a new beginning with The Ocean, as well as a memorial to the chapter before with a sacrificed Love whom I shared eternal moments with the Ocean. We sat, Luis and I, waiting for the sunset, rolling cigarettes, smoking, laughing through walls of awkwardness, because this was really the first time we've hung out before. The session was completely necessary. The conversation before filming was one that unconsciously prepared us for what happened next. The conversation had nothing to do with what would happen next at all, it only was to help us know who we are...what happened next without our conscious decision but decided by the Sun, was a musical, circular back and forth jam forced by the magnetic pull to the Ocean and the sky and the dying Sun. The moment was captured so fluidly that it was never felt as captured, it was only felt. The drive back to our homes was fairly silent, but connected within a song where Luis said, "this is me. this song is me!"

The Ocean held all the answers and all the memories. Neither birth nor death. The Ocean washed over all of the things, with its cold and fresh and rhythmic lull. And that rhythm...that rhythm...it is...a cruz de olvido...and I'll ride with that, as Luis and I did.

Cucu
password: cucu

Before making (and remaking...) this piece, I read Octavio Paz's  The Labyrinth of Solitude in the same sitting as reading Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I found a very odd strand between the two. Paz is not only speaking for Mexican people in the U.S, but about men and specifically hermetical men in a universal sense as is Nietzsche. There is unraveling of our past in Paz's writing that shows how we may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us...a very circular process...The demons that we deal with are dealt with in Paz's writing. I find them true beyond the speaking of them on a mythic level, I can feel them and see them everywhere and in everything when I am completely open. And this opening makes the demon no longer demonic, but the layers within me and the working parts of every person, and they walk along with us, and they play with us, they fuck with us, and it's beautiful and sublime. These demons combust within us, and our denial of their existence leaves us in an emptiness away from Home.

In this film, the intention was to find these demons within these men, that reside in this block of the Mission district, to find the past's contention and ridiculously obvious presence in their daily lives, and in the block itself. Something about this place feels so wrong, but also right. Something about this place feels very alien, in limbo of the past and the future.

I did not achieve this vision. It's a film that I'd like to continue editing, but on the other hand I think that I do not have the material available to make it. I feel very incomplete leaving it at this, it's one of the first films that I truly feel that I have not "finished" and it's a very sickly feeling.
But I'll go on! Next subject...

Noor Whoop
Password: Nooor

Making the films in our class allowed me to attempt to penetrate the soul of the people that I make films with. Most of it has to do with Tony's aura that pervades through the class, I think it's ridiculously contagious, I get high off it. He sees an alien unique quality to every person that most people are blind to (especially themselves), and that really rubbed off on me. As if each person is a universe in their own rite, and it has made me make films in this way. For this film, everything (a formation of rocks, swaying trees, cars passing, Noor's existence, her feet, her love, her accordion), they are all equally important or maybe unimportant depending on how you view life. The power of the film is how it can open you to feeling a sense of importance...human life is composed of rituals.

While Noor and I were preparing for the film she told me a story (she's PACKED to the brim with the most amazing stories(I get emails that I don't respond quickly enough to(soak))), that her mother went to the beach one day and started yelling in Arabic, "WHAT IS THIS?! WHAT IS THIS?!"...that was the jumping off point (pun intended) for the film for me. I was there to capture the soul of everything that is Noor, her mother included, everything included. The only thing I told her to do was to speak in Arabic to herself as she walked along with her Box. There is a ritual here...and I didn't even realize what this ritual stood for, other than it was true while making it (it was true while making it), and that's all that mattered. THEN, Tony, right after screening the film comes up to me and whispers, "I really felt the existential quality of the box Kouros...", and it couldn't have hit closer to truth...especially because while making this film, this existential BOX CARRYING was fucking aggressively hurting the soul of me, for weeks upon making this...I've been feeling like I'm dying every single second lately(and this feeling isn't true enough for me, another distraction)...right before making this I blacked out at 5AM while peeing (nyquil), and woke up laying on the floor minutes later to a concussion...
It's an interesting film, and it's my favorite of the bunch I've made as A FILM. On a simple level (unconsciously) I took the sensual cacophony of the films of the first half of the semester and mixed them together with the raw, still framed humanity of the last half. The previous films were experiments on opposite ends of the spectrum leading here...
Still, I have reservations of it. I'd like to perform this ritual with Noor again, under less time restraints, and make it more finely crafted if that is possible. Maybe it's not though, maybe that moment was a moment that cannot be reproduced.

I loved being able to explore my friends in our class, and to find out how they can just "be". I felt like Alan Lomax. It was a completely rewarding experience on so many levels, and has changed the way I'm approaching the moment-to-moment method of shooting film. I really feel like this semester freed me in this aspect.

Brother John
password: brother

By going through the Blues album compiled by Tony, a whole contextual tradition of blues from the Delta to Chicago was born that I previously did not fully understand. It shed light on a mysterious concoction of sounds that I always would emulate on my electric guitar, revitalizing the way I feel the Blues, but didn't consciously theoretically understand.
 
A white man going through the blues stemming from an unknown history, being put in a situation where he needs to help someone else in relatively speaking bigger blues, which may not even be the case. This is a little story of brothers, with familial bonds akin to a Faulkner piece, extremely connected yet full of contradiction and honest flaws. I don't believe it was executed as good as it could be, but as a rough sketch outline for a similar situation for a later film, I actually loved it. And picking Baylor for the part was particularly exciting, because like a handful of the worthwhile musicians, there is a true natural force that exudes out of his pours with or without his consent that is something perfect to capture in general, and especially for Brother John. Brother John is a man who loves with all of his heart and may even have problems of his own, but he'll help you how he can if you put him on the spot. But can he actually help? I didn't give Baylor any introduction before this other than he'll be taking drugs in a bathroom, walk into a restaurant and continue lunch with his brother who is contemplating suicide. There is something within this conversation between two brothers that I absolutely love. Brother John is feeling these extraordinary feelings while being sobered by the suicidal thoughts of his brother which alter his high immensely and maybe even create the feelings Stu has within himself, maybe even recalling the same feeling, and my character "STU" (Baylor named me on the fly, which I absolutely loved) being in a state vulnerable to any force that comes at him, which is a very scarily malleable situation to be in. In the end it results in an explosion of love within the two brothers instigated by cocaine. Is there hope for them? Does that matter? The fact that they exist makes me feel at peace.