intro

Chon and the Kern. from Beaux Gest Mingus on Vimeo.
This was made a few years ago along the Kern River by film maker Beaux Mingus.

My most recent visit to Bakersfield has inspired a tendency to chronicle such things as my friend has. While helping my dad install new ceiling lights, we turned the power off in the entire house and the silence was stunning. No humming kitchenware, no blue glows from bypassed appliances, no lamp signals, no pulsing time signals and although the flashlights remained as a reminder of our dependence, I was reminded that at least I would have my acoustic guitar to continue being creative if such darkness was a reality. I wonder, how reliable are hard drives or disks (pfft disks. HAH)?

It's amazing we have a few codices to represent generations of peoples such as the Mayan but would their hard drives last? The only reliable disk that comes to mind is encapsulated in the Voyager crafts spearheaded by Carl Sagan. Having the power off reminded me that memory is a beautiful craft - we are the archivist and have been remixing over nighttime fires for generations. These practices may be less reliable because of the tendency for memory to to modulate the image but their authenticity remains. When the lights go out our stories will remain as long as we continue to breathe and recite.

I'm not a woodsman, the beige suburbs and gray city is my jungle and the I-5 is my river. While dependent on the wifi clouds and energy companies for now, this is my medium to etch on our eyes and ears. This is the best effort I can afford and its an experiment worth trying. I hope this practice will help me remember the melodies, hues or flickers worth reinterpreting over future fires and secretly it is my wish that the artifacts presented here are appreciated enough to survive as a hiccup in your memory stage. Hopefully we'll find a smile surface when something from here comes to mind in a quiet drive or the next outage.