The Night #1

From an exhaustive pile taken over many nights submerged in bulerias and whisky, below are some photos taken while working on an evolving live film of flamenco cuadro Arte Kanela. It is a deliberately simple work, trying only to capture the immediacy of the moment without trickery or complications. The end result will be a feature length live performance that tries to capture the elusive sublime possibility of what happens when artists surrender themselves to the moment, to the night, their intense lifetime of training becoming something transcendent when let loose in collaboration and improvisation with each other... 

Federico Garcia Lorca:

"The real struggle is with the duende…. To help us seek the duende there is neither map nor discipline. All one knows is that it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, that it rejects all the sweet geometry one has learned, that it breaks with all styles….These dark sounds are the mystery, the roots thrusting into the fertile loam known to all of us, ignored by all of us, but from which we get what is real in art…"

Dry and Wild and Faint

"So it wasn’t just memory.  Memory was just half of it, it wasn’t enough.  But it must be somewhere he thought.  There’s the waste.  Not just me.  At least I think I dont mean just me.  Hope I dont mean just me.  Let it be anyone thinking of, remembering, the body, the broad thighs and the hands that liked bitching and making things.  It seemed so little, so little to want, to ask.  With all the old graveward-creeping, the old wrinkled withered defeated clinging not even to the defeat but just to an old habit; accepting the defeat even to be allowed to cling to the habit – the wheezing lungs, the troublesome guts incapable of pleasure.  But after all memory could live in the old wheezing entrails:  and now it did stand to his hand, incontrovertible and plain, serene, the palm clashing and murmuring dry and wild and faint and it the night but he could face it, thinking, Not could.  Will.  I want to.  So it is the old meat after all, no matter how old.  Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it wont be memory because it wont know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be. – Yes he thought.  Between grief and nothing I will take grief."

William Faulkner, The Wild Palms 

Lover's Archive/Archive of Lovers

Nights out wandering with a R3D weapon and Hawk anamorphics shooting lovers and would be lovers for a new clip for an old friend. Sometimes I think some kind of lovers archive is the only way to keep extending these sequences of filmic yearning that I insist on shooting. A vast anamorphic archive of embraces and intimacy.