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What compelled you to make this piece? How does this work address issues that are important to you or close to your heart?
The usual compulsions and desires . . . basically, I suppose, to mine the bathos-pathos imbedded in the landscape which surrounds me, both natural and human.
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| From SHANGHAIED TEXT. |
How does living in the New York metropolitan area affect your work?
I've always lived in New York, suffering over the years from all the octane, provincialism, and cosmopolitan ennui that it engenders. New York is changed for me now, no longer I would really say that it is "my city." I feel more a hanger-on, a bit set in ways that are tinged with a nostalgia inappropriate to the vibrant, always re-processed city. Except for friends, it seems no longer a creative benefit to be here, but then I've no sense of being anywhere else . . .
In including your work in REEL NEW YORK, do you think your piece in any way pushes the medium of television, or the viewing audiences' expectations of that medium?
Yes, principally because of the risque nature of the material . . . it's sexually caustic, edgy, arcane and manically anti-narrative; i.e., unusual for television which is inherently phobic when it comes to experimentation.
What about access to the tools of production and post-production?
While it seems to me that working in film has become less accessible and more exclusively commercial, working with video image-making has become increasingly more accessible, elegant, and equivalent. The tools, cameras, formats, editing, and post-production processes (all driven by rabid techno-consumerism) have become more and more home-based. And this I believe is a situation worth celebrating, the possibility of home-based production at every level. The need for industrial labs, on-line studios, expensive rental costs, etc., especially when it comes to small, personal work has largely diminished. I am now able to produce in my home what ten years ago would have involved me in expensive and barely controllable, barely supportable industrial/commercial situations.
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| From SHANGHAIED TEXT. |
Why did you become a film/video artist/maker?
I wish I knew. I was going to study philosophy, and was in love with photography. Then I suppose, I realized something about film making . . .
Do you feel the New York independent film/video community has changed in recent years? Do you find support living and working in such a large community of artists?
The community itself seems to be very much diminished. Since the '70s, times have changed, and so have I. So what else is new? But I believe there's a serious lack of small, sustained, and attractive venues in New York, and a serious lack of spaces/places where casual, un-directed interaction between fellow makers might naturally occur. The venues that exist are personal fiefdoms, the aesthetics are cultish, entrenched, and suspicious. In New York as a whole, when it comes to film/video, the attention of even those most culturally sophisticated veers toward TV and Hollywood and is often no more open to the non-normative than the attention of those disdained hinter landers. This leaves the truly independent/experimental work in general to the weird and socially marginal.
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