I
would have been destroyed from the inside out as a kid had I not been rescued by a band
of drug dealing hoodlums on skateboards. Growing up as a moody poor kid on the
outskirts of a pristine and wealthy college town, I was an insecure misfit yearning
to belong. I had almost given up trying when I was adopted into the “do it
yourself” ethic of punk rock and graffiti. I learned to embrace my informal education gathered bit by bit from thousands of hours of watching TV, reading
comic books and science fiction and experimenting with drugs and alcohol.
As I figured out how to cope and adapt to poverty
and loneliness in a yuppie paradise, I also became concerned with the social
and political cause of other underdogs. Today I’m the reluctant champion to the bitches, freaks,
psychotics, bums, thugs and junkies of the world. This focus has exposed me to
many of the deep rooted contradictions and injustices imbedded in our culture. Belieiving
in the promise of technology to level the playing field, I’ve immersed myself
in every digital craze to come along since the arrival of desktop computers. My
latest quest is to master what I call “at a glance” cinema.
My current work is the 2-minute epic video The Gunfighters. While gun violence
terrorizes our communities, we still lack the political will necessary to change
course. Gunshots have ended the lives of my three closest friends, my youngest
uncle and, most recently, my 86 year old neighbor. He survived combat in
Germany on the battlefields of WWII but his life ended in his own living room with a single shot from
an intruder whom he refused to give a cigarette. The Gunfighters was assembled entirely
from found bits and pieces from the Internet and explores the visceral experience of staring down the
barrel of a gun.
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