keep the wild inside
a correspondence about wilderness and art
ABOUT OUR MOTHER: Escaping Urban Traps
The sky is clear over the City of Angels. I can see from my eagle's nest all the way to Malibu or in the other direction all the way to the mountains in front of the Mojave. The Hollywood sign is radiant. And the wind still billows from the Pacific, and I can stand on a rock in my driveway and look down at the hot nicety of Beverly Hills. I am the hillbilly on top of Hollywood.
But the wilderness beckons even here. Not just the hummingbirds or the coyotes who ate the neighbors' cat on Wonderland Avenue two nights ago, not even the pine cones rolling down the hill; I get no signal from these. The beckoning is deeper, perhaps rushed by the pains in my prostate and hips, other signals that life is coming to an end and how much more do I have to see?
The twinkling souls above the sands and scrub of the Kalahari have decided I should return. (This is me, fantasizing.) So I log onto Withoutabox and write the following entry under 'Job Postings':
NO MONEY - NO MONEY - NO MONEY - YET!
Anyone want to go to the Kalahari and Namibia for a wildlife shoot?
I'd
like to hook up with at least one, maybe two, image savants who can sit
in a blind for three hours to film rhinos or cheetahs for three
minutes. Camp, eat in the bush, maybe clean up once a week at a posh
$100/night safari lodge. Also film kids and professors and laborers in
the urban centers (Gaborone, Moremi, Swakopmund, maybe Joburg). I've
been through the area before, but without the right equipment.
Kalahari, Okavongo Delta, and the dunes of Namibia would be the spine
of the travel, as well as hard-to-describe outposts of civilization,
very cinematic. Ideally, two vehicles would share four or five persons,
all of whom would have some production interest in the final result.
Does not needto be collaborative intellectually; if somebody wants to
make their own African experience and just share the vehicle costs,
fine. Even thinking of shipping a 4-Runner to Capetown instead of to
Iceland, where it is soon bound otherwise.
Koyanisqaatsi and
Baraka would be influences, of course, but the real purpose is to get a
very nice piece done for blu-ray distribution.
I might be able
to offer a little subsidisation to the right person, but you should be
looking at a month and about $3000 out of your pocket. Will you get the
cash back? Hm. I'll try, but I'd rather end up in a Gregory Colbert
situation, sort of following in the footsteps of Peter Beard. Colbert's
jaw-dropping art can be seen at
http://www.ashesandsnow.org/en/index.php
I'm
thinking of trying to do this in the early spring next year, though
with the right enthusiasm maybe as early as Nov/Dec this year.
Interested in hearing from anybody that might be interested in this
sort of collaboration. Thanks!
What kind of response do I think I'll get?
Why not canvas my friends, and find some traveling companions from the usual suspects? Can the video technology be so important?
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