This is actually my third submission to bike shorts. I plan on documenting the crowd response again.
But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest of margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right…and that’s when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. you watch the white line and try to lean with it…howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica…letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge…The Edge…There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others–the living—are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Man created time. Time is a fiction. Do you understand? Man created time measurements so…so he could know what time it was. There is nothing out there that says that time actually exists as a universal truth. A human being is part of the whole, called by us a universe–a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. There is no time. No–there is time. It’s eleven o’clock. There is time. It’s just…a fiction.
Took a road trip with some UD folks this past weekend up to Maine to shoot some footy for production of our Documenting Mythologies piece. Got very little sleep and ate some really salty lobster, but it was a good time. We ended our trip at the Harvard Film Archive to present an iteration of the piece to about 40 people on a Sunday afternoon. The archive is evidently the only building by Le Corbusier in the U.S., but that still wasn’t enough to impress me. Still not really a fan of Boston.
Josh made a microphone.
Josh asked for a friend’s help to shoot.
Josh asked for a friend to provide a condom.
Josh asked for a film lab that would process the film for him.
(the lab tends to ruin his films)
Josh wraps the microphone in the condom, tells his friend to start shooting, and tries to swallow what he’s made.
Last week I started production on a documentary piece that I’m hoping will somehow capture the relationship that restaurant workers have with Fifth Avenue, in particular their feelings on the bike lane that stretches from Flatbush to 23rd Street. There’s a strange sort of unspoken competitiveness among NYC bikers that seems to span the range of bicyclist demos. I’ve gotten dropped by dudes who are probably coming off a 10-hour restaurant shift and repping mart bikes with shitty, fat mountain bike tires, who cast a pitying glance over their shoulder as they burn me. It probably sounds silly to someone who doesn’t ride, but that sort of competitiveness is simply driven by pride. There exists something in this world that makes a rider want to prove to a complete stranger that he can dial it up and navigate the dangers of the NYC public street better than said stranger.
The thing that interests me the most about the topic of this piece is the public policy discussion regarding bicycling infrastructure. The most obvious rationale for the absence of restaurant workers from this dialogue is that bike infrastructure advocacy is the sort of “activism” that is normally entirely relegated to the bourgeois class, and for good reason. When you are struggling to stay in your apartment and feed your family, taking time out of your day to lobby public officials for the construction of a bike lane is a luxury that seems laughable. But I really want to try to figure out the relationship that restaurant workers have with their bicycles, with the public street, with pedestrians, with car drivers and with other bicyclists. I equate my bicycle with mobility, freedom and joy. How do they perceive theirs?
In attempting to produce the piece, I’ve felt especially self-conscious about my inability to speak Spanish, and am concerned about fostering an appropriate dynamic with any potential subjects. The seeds of gentrification have already been planted in Sunset Park, and I’m worried about coming across as paternalistic or condescending. Actually, just finding any subjects willing to speak with me has already proved pretty difficult. The language barrier is certainly a problem, but I have a feeling that a lot of restaurant workers in the area might be undocumented, and reasonably wouldn’t feel comfortable answering a lot of questions about their jobs on tape.
In trying to figure out the form of my piece, I was strongly influenced by a piece of audio work done by one of my UnionDocs mentors, Kara Oehler. Her sound portrait was a documentation of the experience of migrants who risked their lives and imprisonment to cross the border from Mexico to the U.S., tied together I was also greatly influenced by an amazing piece done by filmmakers Kevin T. Allen and Jen Heuson, in which they documented the stories of members of an undocumented farm workers collective in Florida. In cribbing their approach, I hope to do most of the interviews on audio, and then pair the narrative that emerges with footage from 5th Avenue shot over the course of a day and night. I’ve only made a few forays to Sunset Park to do some lighting tests and audio gathering, but have already been seduced by the charms of the neighborhood. The storefronts decorated with extravagant quinceanera dresses, the street food vendors, the 24 hour bakeries-cum-diners, the produce stand at 50th Avenue that’s open 24 hours, the Bronco Tacos truck. Sunset Park today is emblematic of the sort of immigrant enclave that makes New York a beautiful place to live. I love it.
Ravi tried showing this film at the Hoff Theater circa ’98. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but something got fucked up and the screening was aborted, leaving a gaggle of vegan anarchist crust punks without a venue in which to indulge their inflated sense of irony. Maybe it got booted because shit was too real for the film programmers whose budget Ravi managed to sweet-talk his way into, I dunno. Some people tried relocating to an off-campus house to watch the film, but I didn’t make it out for reasons that now escape me. Watching Heavy Metal Parking Lot today is kind of like watching a reverse glo-fi doc. Or something. The aesthetics of this thing are amazing; now I just want to shoot everything on analog tape. Now let’s all give destructive linear editing a great big hug.
Capital Centre R.I.P. (1973-2002)
I recently started a new UnionDocs project with collab member Hyatt for which I am greatly excited. I don’t want to give too much away yet, but the piece is somewhat focused on ideals of beauty as perceived and propagated within gay black male culture. When Hyatt pitched the piece to the group he noted that most work that explores ideals of beauty within black culture in America focuses on feminine ideals, and that the ideas of beauty as they are perceived/propagated on the masculine side of the gender spectrum are generally left unexplored.
The project gave me a reason to get in touch with Rashaad Newsome, an artist who I worked with several years ago at Film/Video Arts. I remember Rashaad working at the time on pieces that explored the “cliched” or expected hand movements often employed by emcees. Since then his work has evolved to similarly explore affectations and gestures strongly tied to race and class identities among black females in his Shade Compositions work. He’s also created some amazing heraldry pieces that explore the links between the power symbology of European nobility and hip-hop culture. As he says: “Heraldry is a way of assembling symbols of power. I thought about how that would work for black youth culture. A modern-day translation would be bling. So some of the most recognizable aspects of these collages pull from heraldry and the body ornamentation associated with the hip-hop community.” Since I knew him, Rashaad has blown up, recently being named one of the 50 artists featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, among several other amazing accomplishments.
Some of Rashaad’s work explores the newer styles of Voguing, particularly the hyper-feminine practice of Vogue Femme. In one of the recent interviews I read of Rashaad, I learned that the excellent 1990 documentary film Paris is Burning was part of the inspiration for his interest in Voguing. I remember being blown away by that film the first time I watched it, more because of how closely the practices of Voguing hewed to the unspoken rules of b-boying. It can’t be mere coincidence that the two forms of dance would mirror each other so closely in structure (houses↔crews) and practice (battles↔balls), and that both movements were created by dispossessed young black and latino males from the Boogie Down. I always thought that the cross-pollination between the two artistic movements merited further investigation/documentation, but maybe someone much better suited to the task than I has already done it.
“Ninjas hit hard. They hit fast. An invisible assassin. And that’s what we are.”
-Willi Ninja (So ill! His style is like live action Fist of the North Star.)
An exercise/experiment in collaborative filmmaking and soundgathering I conducted with my UnionDocs collabo compatriots William Martin and Andre Valentim Almeida. Video and audio by Will, Andre and I. Poem by Willie Wills. Cut by me. The idea was to pool all of the video/audio that was recorded, share it, and let each person come up with their own cut of the material.
Will’s poem got me to thinking about the nature of memory. How when we are trying to recall something, we are in an almost thought-less mode of being as we try to access information buried somewhere in our grey matter.
It is as though the entrance to Plato’s cave were sealed off and all we can see behind us, casting shadows on the wall, are the figures on the parapet. These figures, though, are not the world of historical reality. They are themselves there in order to cast shadows; that is their function and reality. Nothing else exists behind or beyond them; the only other thing are the shadows that make up a circular implosion of image and reality, signs and what they refer to. Reality has been constituted by and for the shadow-play it entertains. We can no longer say that there is some structure or concept for which the figures on the parapet are an imitation and the images on the wall but copies of this copy. All metaphors of depth and abstraction, of “higher” or “deeper” levels of meaning and reality collapse into the endless surface of simulations and simulations of simulations.
Intriguing as these assertions are, I do not accept them.
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