for mira

As ever, for you.

Before beginning, I explained to Mira (the performer) and Cassandra (the composer) my intentions and motivations for wanting to make this.
“I’m doing this so I can untangle some knots.”
“Ok”, they said.

Like Rod’s ‘the keys to everything that ever existed’, this piece is a rite. He is my twin, and sometimes we make art from the same place. This place in particular…we saw this place together, and things kept happening in our lives that just seemed to be the universe folding over, necessitating serendipities.

1

A birdhouse, which months prior I had drawn as part of a set of three, falls with perfect timing. (Reminder: a constellation is an image you can’t touch.)

2

Millie walked a dead bird into the house in her mouth and dropped it next to me. I didn’t know what I was looking at at first.

3

Nirvana was a very important part of my life. Of course I would know that Where Did You Sleep Last Night (which is the ‘source material’ for for mira), was performed on a stage that Kurt Cobain requested resemble a wake. This is why there is an abundance of stargazer lilies up on stage with him.

As Cassandra explains, “the music takes a short sample of Kurt Cobain’s singing voice [from the song “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” as sang on the MTV Unplugged recording] and reveals facets of its quality and structure through repetition.”

Stargazer lilies here…

and used again in our video.
For me, making the video for for mira was a way of saying good-bye; so the inclusion of this reference is quite meaningful to me.

4

A burning heart. A complete, un-compromised heart.  In the world I create, there are no fragments or missing pieces.

5

This video is a marker in time–Another version of me has come out of the middle of the making of this video. This is how I make art. I hope that it will change me. And coming out of this video, I feel it is the telling of a story of a memory. Meaning, I now feel the distance from it’s catalyst events, and underwent the physio-alchemical act of housing this ghost in my long-term memory. That’s what making this video finally did to me. That, or the two things just so happened in parallel. Anyway, the end result is the same: this is where I release. 
Time resonances become more and more faint.

Though as Terence McKenna said, if you pay close enough attention you can feel that Rome falls nine times an hour.

above, from Rod’s score the keys to everything that ever existed

6

I’m adding this final thought 6 years after having made the video. I’m a very lucky person to have met, and become friends with Cassandra and Mira. Since then our lives have moved on, but I absolutely loved this part of my life. As I said, this video is a marker in time.

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On March 13th I shot most of the footage for ‘For Mira‘.
It is a work performed by violinist, Mira Benjamin
and was composed by Cassandra Miller.

Making for mira into a music video opens up the possibility of exploring the piece’s repetition in a way that is unique to this medium. Cassandra, Mira, and Rodrigo are working closely to treat the final audio with that in mind.

There are still a few shots I want to get, and then of course there is the editing (which is really where the heavy lifting occurs), but here are a few production shots in the meantime while it all comes together.

Hands on deck that day: Rodrigo Constanzo, Richard Craig, Cassandra Miller, Mira Benjamin, myself.