unterwegs in Sachen Film >>> <<< on the road making films!
Oops! Suddenly I am on another planet. Car dominated too, but louder. Different colours, many colours, warmer wind, more palm trees. Gentrification buzzing in real time. A Russian truck with yummy Russian Food: Pelmeny! Beer breweries everywhere. One millimeter, sorry: inch! away: many many homeless tents. A little Kreuzberg feeling coming up. No, much tougher, I guess. Do I like it here? Yes!
Strolling through the streets … this is my favourite front garden.
Wow, I think I love this one! Taped my little can camera on a tripod, guessed the angle and exposed the negative inside 30 seconds long. Developed it in Caffenol and this is the result! I love it!
I don’t know why but for some reason I am fascinated by these electro poles or posts or however they are called … maybe for me as a European they look so retro?
Anyway, of course I must portray them. Set up my tripod and my Illy pinhole camera, hole pointing pole upwards, never really knowing what comes out, perspective for sure unordinary, risk of sunlight beams falling into the camera, they would darken the negative but who cares, I’m the devotee of adventures and accidents!
Right on the bottom: first of three, positive paper from a negative, both developed in coffee.
I like you nevertheless.
How can I present my photos?
I made positives from the pinhole negatives using 40 years old ORWO (made in the GDR) paper which is still amazingly awake and alive and gives me crisp results! I develop them in coffee / turmeric / bark tea / kelp-coffee …. and some more.
I thought about wood pieces. Noel (one of the two founders of North Street Collective) said: „Oh! I have lots! You can have them!“, came over with his gigantic chainsaw and sawed me some little pieces.
Pictures of tree, developed in tree, mounted on tree. I love it!
I put my favourite pinhole camera on the beach and let it take dramatic pictures!! 🙂
In the can: a piece of black & white negative sheet film. Put it on a piece of photo paper – FOMAbrom baryta – so I receive a positive image! Develop it in Caffenol … which seems to give it an extra dramatic tone! Brown-greyish. I love it!
I’m in love with the bus line 65 that takes me from Willits to Fort Bragg. 32 miles. A curvy street through the forest. A trip a little more than 1 hour. A 16 seater van.
Today, a hot day, a crisp blue bright day. Pure beauty for a long moment, I forget everything, all the shit and crap and assholes that are about to kill our wonderful earth and for a moment it all swooooshes in the unimportant background, there is only the bus and us 3 women on bord and rock’n’roll in the bus radio and countless glimpses of beauty looking through the window. Even Bob Dylan does not ruin my mood. Mama’s in the factory, she ain’t got no shoes – Daddy’s in the alley, he’s lookin‘ for food – I’m in the kitchen with the tombstone blues.
The ocean. The beauty. Calms me. Seagulls look at me. I look back and smile.
My first week’s circle is quite narrow: I wander through the village, I get to know my streets, my neighborhood and all the plants in our garden. My pinhole synapse itches! I brought two pinhole cameras made from a coffee and a spice can. Simple but wonderful. I browse the garden and get attracted by tomato plants, by peppermint, by pink lillies, by a planetlike flower, already dried, by other unknown garden fellows.
I take small photos (negatives), develop them in Caffenol (instant coffee, washing soda, vitamine c), and then later at night when it’s dark I lock myself in my improvised darkroom and make sandwich prints on paper. Then I have positives! Testing them with Caffenol, later then probably in their matching soups (tomato picture – tomato soup!!)
Come back!
… in North California. I am a lucky artist, I got an artist-in-residency here up North in Mendocino County where the sky is high and blue, marihuana lingers in the air and the wild ocean is so close! Actually 33 miles and there’s a bus going there but only twice a day … not more, why, everybody has a car in oil wonderland! No, that’s not true, I see cyclists. I realize bike lanes. It’s California!
I live in a sweet village house together with two other female artists and I love our daily life: someone makes tea, someone talks to the phone organizing poetry congresses, someone is looking for walnuts to dye something, someone sits on a withered wooden chair leaning on our (our!) garden redwood tree, someone stirs magic developer made from cowboy sage (me!!) and falls in love with the huge outdoor sink every single day …
7 more weeks!
Hooray!
Paolo and me we were the first two to play the game in Los Angeles!
[For those who want to know more, go to my other website www.ambassadorsofcoincidence.com, you’ll find tons of information and pictures and some films.]
It’s all about exploring your city. You can play it, too. Zigzag through your city, find paths and spots with the help of coincidence and philosophying over things, trash, objects, marks, graffiti – whatever – to get to the next spot. A street and a block or house number.
We started in the Echo Park, rolled the dice and, by narrowing down the LA street index (a sweet old book from the eighties) from pages to one page to columns to lines until we finally found our starting point: Harrington Avenue 3000!
We went there (by car of course) – a tiny street with only a few houses – and immediately stumbled upon a neat little house, embedded in roses with a striking golden statue, quite small, Buddha? A man appeared and told us that he found it in the back yard when he bought the house and it was him who painted it golden and set it up in the front. It was rather a Mary than a Buddha.
And on and on and on …. this spot led us to … Marygold Avenue! Another very short street in Harbor City. Deserted, hot, a giant beige building, a sand colored van and another one labeled „Southwind“ … three men lingering around, partly teethless … but friendly when we started to explain that we were playing a scavenger-like game. They told us about a beautiful park nearby with a lake where one good old day a crocodile was found.
And on and on and on … the whole game presented us 4 stations, we ended up in Electric Street in Silver Lake and immediately spotted a shimmering balloon tied to the electric cable above saying „hero“ …
Whow.
If you want to watch and listen to the whole story, check my website in about 1 month, it’s all been recorded and filmed … the whole trip, the whole day. Lots of footage. Going to edit a little film when I’m back in Berlin!!
This mural displaying elements … wind, water, sun, earth … plus the pipe next to it led us to „electricity“.
A beautiful park with a lake in Harbor City … and no crocodiles around!
And finally … coooool Hefeweizen and a cigarette in a beergarden in Silver Lake!!!
My lovely hosts and I went for a small holiday in the desert of Joshua Tree. (The name Joshua tree was given by a group of Mormon settlers who crossed the Mojave Desert in the mid-19th century. The tree’s unique shape reminded them of a Biblical story in which Joshua reaches his hands up to the sky in prayer.) A night of a zillion stars and many planes and two sputniks and a day of clear heat. No snakes crossed our ways, thanks, Rattlesnakes and Mojave Green!!
We visited Noahs place. A man who collected junk in the desert and made weird monuments of it.
And then we found the World Most Famous and Tiniest Crochet Museum (German friends: Haekeltieremuseum!!) which was unfortunately closed today. Happy Labor day!
I’m in love with the 704 bus (the faster version of the 4) that goes all the way from Downtown over Alvarado (my access) to Santa Monica Beach. It takes a little more than 1 hour to get to the beach. You pass interesting quite different parts of LA and so are the people that get in and out. A new short film was born today … dedicated to the bus drivers, a hundred times friendlier than their brothers and sisters in Berlin.
