Eye and Ear Text WE ARE HERE

In 1996 I decided to say yes to everything for a year to see how my life could change. By simply saying yes I managed in one year to be in three bands having never played music before, and making my first attempt at a movie, then finally going to Mexico to shoot a movie that I had co-written with director and dear friend, Paul Rowley. My life had in one year moved into one of intense collaboration and community.

Though my attempt at making my own film seemed to fall short of what I wanted the thing itself to be, I began ten years of performing and composing music with an incredible array of people, and it seemed the terms of both my life and art were altered forever. The making of things was how we socialized and how we spoke to the world outside, and for me it was never about being inside the identity of an artist as much as it was being with those people and doing those things.

I came to Berlin in 2004, leaving behind that incredible community to see what else life could throw my way. One of the negative sides to this was that what once was all about community pretty much for its own sake, had become a hermetic activity. I did make work with friends, an experience that helped me grow in so many ways, but I was alone in making the music for these projects, stripping making music as a communal thing.

For years I had kept shooting footage, and made movies with that raw footage in my own head, and my first winter in Berlin found me putting them together as films with a fury. It was solitary yes, but soon giving them away as presents to friends opened up a world of community again. I guess I write this now in the context of a blog for the Forum Expanded because part of a festival is a great deal of coming together as like minded people. As Friends and collaborators, exchanging ideas, growing, loving and fighting (for, with or against).

I spoke in an earlier blog about people falling from the sky. So now folks are here, and the community grows. More is possible. Wilhelm Hein, Annette Frick, Ludwig Schonherr, Trixie and Daniel, C.C
, Paul Rowley and Nikki Gogan are here, Phil Hoffaman, and Jeanine, Scott, Jim, MARIE! Losier And Sebastian, Marc, Susi, Vag and Daniel, My brother John, The folks of bbooks, Vassily, Evi and Isabell, Michel, Gustavo and Melissa, Barbara Hammer, Heinz Emigholz, Rainer Bellenbaum. I mean, FUCK…….how much love and inspiration and potential can one feel in ten days. The Ten Days that Shook the World! So many good folks, and I beg forgiveness for each name who knows you would be here if I was not typing this in five minutes.

I do not want this to seem like it is all about me, but rather give attention to this side of a festival, and to encourage anyone who would read this to talk to these people, they are here, for chrissakes! Go hear them talk, watch their movies, become friends with them. Make movies and music and ask them to help.

In 1996 I was also flooded with love. At the moment it happened I thought I had cancer or something, but it really was the feeling of the speed of takeoff. Now we are here.