Hearing Back

An interlude.

In a desperate attempt to fit in with a group of socialites an insecure twenty-something commits to getting a vasectomy, but soon finds himself in a dangerous world of escalating virtue signaling

An education in the faith.

A high frame rate dawn.

Arriflesh is a diary film recording a period I spent, very much at loose ends, dividing my time between Vermont and New York City. During those months I was also filming Horseflesh, so they are companion films. Various friends filled my universe in that confused, interim period: Cindy Revel, Margery Cohen, Tony Heath, and a bearded neighbor who was perpetually collecting scrap wood and who eventually made me a very complete astrological chart. In imitation of Jack Kerouac's Ray Smith in The Dharma Bums, I would walk up into the snowy hills every afternoon to meditate alone among the trees, with the same results as Kerouac…nada and a sense of the stony muteness of nature. This whole period was colored by memories of a teenage cousin who’d shot himself in a house just a few miles away, two years before. Like my bearded neighbor I was collecting scraps in the hope that they would someday come together into a cohesive whole.

A diary film, recording the summer weeks I spent with Robin Hill at her cousin’s house in Vermont where she’d been hired as a baby-sitter.

Influenced by Andy Warhol’s “Screen Tests” I set about recording some of the artists who populated my world in Kansas City during the 70s.

After the untimely death of her mother, Casey Miller inherits a painting from her mom. Casey becomes increasingly distressed as she begins to notice subtle changes appearing in the painting while a sinister presence closes in on her.

A cat climbs a screen, men squat on the pavement to gamble behind a 7-11, solarized film warbles in and out. A personal, quiet diary film, portraying an early apartment, an early cat, an early relationship in Kansas City. Uses self-conscious Eisenstein cutting to convey the indolent, charged air-before-a-storm atmosphere that pervaded that era.

I have little recollection of filming this except for reacting with a kind of instinctive horror to the subjugation of these large animals, and to some extent the people, to tawdry entertainment. It was a small, shabby, improvised outdoor circus somewhere in Long Island under harsh lights at night. Even back then, it was rare to find such a display without camp or self-recognition of any kind.