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...