My second project, I opted to venture the opposite direction on the timeline from the first. Rather than comparing past and present, I decided to investigate the present and its future. Using non-representational film set to an audio collage which I engineered, I created a piece I liked to call "The Red City". I named it this after the name by which I refer to the collection of radio towers way out in the distance, west of my apartment. I have previously gone on the record as saying that if the world came to an end tomorrow, and all that modern technology has built comes crashing down, so long as those towers are still standing, with their red lights waxing and waning incessantly, everything will still be beautiful and everything will be all right.
To me, they are a sister city that watches our own, almost as though they are peering in from another dimension. And in our everyday lives they are an often overlooked constant. No matter what may be going on, whatever banality is currently occupying our existance, the red city in the distance is a piece of beauty that was there before the problem came up, and will continue to be there after things have worked themselves out. And there is some level of comfort to be taken there.
The video is comprised entirely of painted 16mm clear film leader, which I digitized through use of the university's steinbeck. It was cut in Final Cut Pro, with desaturation, inversion, and brightness/contrast filters applied.
The audio was constructed on my home computer, using Steinberg's Nuendo, a cubase based multitrack recording program. There were several cuts created, the first was much less densely constructed, and lasted for approximately four and a half minutes. That is available here. The second was what actually appears in the final cut of the film, due to a mix-up in data storage, but the only difference between the second and third cut is the inclusion of an additional two tracks of my own voice, recorded with an iRiver H10's voice recording function, in which I am reading a piece I wrote that I consider highly inspirational to the work, as well as a quote by John Darnielle, in which he wrote "One reason we fear death is that we worry that all our toil and trouble will ultimately have come to nothing." This struck me rather profoundly. Frankly, I am grateful that there was the whole mix-up and the second cut made it into the final cut anyway, because in retrospect, I believe that the second cut was substantially better than the third. The third cut is available here.
The piece I referenced that I had written is quoted below. The first line is a lyrical lead in, from the Mountain Goats song, "Letter From Belgium".
"when we walk out in the sunlight, we tell everyone we know it hurts our eyes, when the real reason we don't like it is that it makes us wonder if we're dying.
voices, words, exchanged from a million miles away, through the expanse of space and static. the open nothingness of life. recipes for disaster. set up for destruction. we wear our most intimate feelings on our skin, branding ourselves with that which we know to be most true. and there is nobody's name emblazoned upon my flesh, a foolhardy symbol of everything i once felt i was. raised from an early age on a steady diet of self reliance, survival at any cost. the light paints us any way it sees fit, the blues, the reds, the most glorious colors and textures you or i could imagine. the dreamworld is useless when you don't walk its streets alone.
when you place your faith in an ideal, you must realize that it is quite literally, little more than an idea. when the same chemicals you once sought to take solace in no longer offer the same liberating embrace, there is little more you can do than look for that next big fix, that new high, and pretty soon, it all comes at great cost. this is life and this is the way of things. i don't care if it means putting an end to that which you carry with you, in a world like this, it is probably better for the both of us.
but that is not my place to try to hunt down, to exterminate your demons. to dig through the pages of your past, present, and future, pulling out the pages you have left lurking in your private journals, pages echoing your hopes, fears, joys, and suffering, your reminders of a past that just won't die - but not because you don't want it to - pulling out these pages and destroying them with unholy fire. to do so creates little more than more demons, fuel to fill the pages i would have already sought to destroy. it's all in the things we say to each other, but it is really more in the things we don't. our secrets lay buried for our own reasons, and no one should seek to uncover them, lest they find themselves facing an undead horde, a town slaughtered by pistols forged in the fires of hell.
but you direct me down these roads, and i pull you down these alleys, these side streets i have come to know and love. this is where i live, and when i put my ear to the ground, i can feel the pulse of this city and the hiss of its airwaves coursing through my body. and on the day it all goes silent, there is little more we can depend on except ourselves and shurikens under which we voyage, whose pulse matches only that of the constant ebb and flow of that great red city just beyond our reach.
i'll see you on the other side of this great slumber. that day we all awaken."
The audio in the final cut contains samples from the following (some are sources used more than once):
Additionally, there is a manipulated test tone accompanying the rest of the content.
The film can be downloaded in divx format here.