My Time as a Human

As I creep my way out of the cold, fog-filled stone streets of Amsterdam and into the hotel, they eye me with suspicion. “They’re on to me,” I think, and then realize that I have a giant poster of an obscure homeless musician duct taped to the front of my body. It’s either that, or the towels. Every day we open the door but a crack and leave the “do not disturb” sign on the handle. They’ve responded by leaving bundles of towels and soap outside each day. Each day a giant bundle of towels goes in… but nothing ever comes out. We’ve also been obsessively calling the front desk, demanding that they give us our package from Germany. Each time, they’ve refused, claiming it’s never arrived.

On the desk is some kind of survival spork and I carry metal chopsticks at all times. A long line of parachute cord is stretched tight across the length of the room from the door to a gas line. It’s continuously dripping with socks and long underwear. In a wild attempt to overcome wasteful weight in travel, Kevin and I have stripped our wardrobes to the barest essentials. We arrived with nothing but a book bag of clothes that we wash with hotel soap in the sink each night. Anything else we need to keep warm or look good can be produced with duct tape and towels.

The posters have been a master tool for meeting people. Everyone loves asking me about the guy on my chest and I have a pocket of postcards with the dates of our screenings at gunslinger height. I have it down to a smooth snap and the cards are in their hands. If I talk enough about our insane twelve years of working on this film their eyes glow and their grip on the cards shifts like they are more likely to survive the trip home.

Our second screening of, “Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah” went pretty well. Kevin wasn’t able to get an HD tape made in part because that Tsunami you heard about destroyed the factory that makes tape. He decided that the Beta copy of the film didn’t look nearly good enough and so he got them a digital copy of the film by using the sd card in his pocket camera and a laptop. A good sized crowed stuck around past the QA to hear Gurf Morlix perform and while the funny but crude, “Wouldn’t That Be Nice” got a few on the run they all loved the beautiful songs like, “Ooh Love” and most made a point to meet us afterwards. The legend of Blaze is definitely continuing to spread.

As a random bonus I ran into Andrew Berends at one of the schmoozfests. I still insist that it was my blog post that finally tipped the scales and had Hillary Clinton calling for his release. He doesn’t disagree. Fortunately Kevin hasn’t thought up a scheme to get us arrested in Amsterdam for the same kind of publicity. Yet.

Above: Kevin Triplett sporting a custom duct tape tuxedo made by a fan of Blaze and Kai Mantsch with the poster. We’ve been telling people that it’s a playfully told, fun and uplifting movie about a homeless musician who gets killed.

When I first signed up for this ride, I was looking for a launch into my next phase of life. But as I tear down all of my physical possessions a pattern emerges in the distribution of memorabilia. The framed photographs of the Chinese countryside. The paintings of Huan Xian. The Chinese sword. The Go set with flat bottomed stones. The Chinese coins. At last I pulled out the photo album sent me by my Chinese girlfriend of 12 years ago with the tiny handful of the only photographs I have from that time. There are six of our two and a half weeks in China. Six photographs. Two and a half weeks.

Even given my four year relationship with Weishi, that time seems so short compared to the lifelong sense of connection it established in me. The craving to return stayed with me ever since, and that journey has been delayed repeatedly over the years for one recurring reason.

The first big documentary film project I worked on was the story of an eccentric Austin songwriter that was shot and killed many years ago protecting an old man from his son. My friend Kevin Triplett started following the story and then built a small team including Mike Nicholson, Chris Ohlsen and myself. We interviewed hundreds of people over the years, traveling from Colorado to Georgia. Four dudes in a little van crossing the country picking up the pieces of a dead man’s story, looking through the tears and laughter and smiles of those who loved and hated him, many of whom were both, trying to get a glimpse of the man known as Blaze Foley.

Every time a relationship ended, it was time to move, and my ties were loose I would swear I was off to China. But this film, this epic project of so many years, kept creeping along. New discoveries. That one more great interview. Just plain getting it edited. At one point, after I had spent months doing early edits, all of the hard drives and computers were stolen and we had to start again from scratch.

Tonight, at 10:20pm at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin Texas, I am going to see the finished film. Exactly two and a half weeks before my flight leaves for China.

Thanks Blaze. It turns out that, now, I can fly.

I wasn’t sure when I started this public forum blog how much I would write directly about people and situations in which I was currently involved. The trouble is that, like any human, once I get the sense that anyone is really listening, some lever deep in the human construct clicks into place with a quiet kerschnap and, like the huge boulder unleashed on Indiana Jones, a distant rumbling builds to a thunder as the unstoppable force of my inner thoughts roll out. It can be terrifying or thrilling depending on how you see these things and which side of the boulder you’re on, but I became a documentary filmmaker because I so love mental archeology and the rush of standing directly in harms way, coaxing out the next chance to be flattened. Go ahead. I’m listening.

Quite a few years ago I went to see a play at Fronterafest that featured a man dying of cancer. He did a whole series of bits, including a short and terrifying magic act with knives, a musical performance, and a poem. In the end, he talked about finding one’s purpose in life by thinking about this question: “What is the one thing that you do so well and so naturally that you don’t even realize it’s hard to do? In fact, likely the only way you found out about it is that at some point other people were astounded and asked, ‘how do you do that?!’”

I went out to lunch with my friend CC and her friend of many years a few months later. During the course of conversation CC’s friend began talking in depth about how she fought with a long period of depression and what it took to work her way back to owning her own life. As CC and I were leaving together she kept saying, astounded, “I’ve known her for ten years and I’ve never heard her talk about that. She’s never opened up like that before…” and then she stopped and spun to face me. “It’s you! It’s that thing you do!’”

Over the years I’ve tried to understand what it is that I’ve picked up from my mother and grandfather that has caused complete strangers around me to spontaneously burst out in the song of their greatest struggles, triumphs, and fears. On a flight from Alaska to Chicago I met a middle-aged business woman and started chatting. This built to a sudden breakthrough and she decided that she was going to quit her job the minute she got back and travel europe like she’d always wanted. A young Philippino woman on a bus told me the story of how she had been abused as a child and began reflecting on how this still affected her daily interactions. Sadly, it’s shocking how many women have revealed rape or near rape stories to me, and how often it is the first time they’ve told the story to anyone.

Listening seems like such a simple task, but I’m still trying to understand it, as it’s something I do so unconsciously. I at first feared that thinking about it at all would be like trying to drive a stickshift car after attempting to explain it to someone– impossible. At first it appears to be nothing more than doing nothing at all. Simply not speaking, however, is not enough. For someone’s lever to trip, I have to also stop wanting and, most importantly, stop being me.

There are several impulses and desires that lie behind “wanting”. I have to not want to respond, or jump in with, “wait, I have a story just like that!” I have to stop wanting them to respond in a certain way, or wanting them to be anything other than who they are in that moment. I have to stop expecting them to tell me anything, and, in fact, genuinely not want them to tell me anything at all. Yes, I know, very zen. Well the zen gets even worse. I think that when I’m most effective, I am not myself at all. I become egoless. For a little while, I become this person before me. When the cab driver tells me how he wants to stab every black man that gets into his cab before they stab him, I nod and listen and feel what that fear and hatred must feel like for him. By feeling through his experience, I can respond to what he says without judgement. I’ve noticed that when someone talks for long enough without feeling judged, they often find themselves with their defenses down and not only willing to say more, but listen to themselves for the first time. In fact, in the absence of having to defend their beliefs against the judgments of others, I’ve seen people begin to re-examine and bring their own fresh observation and judgement onto themselves.

Of course, the byproduct of this process is that afterwards I have to remember to step back out of that person’s skin, re-enter my own and make use of some of my own judgements. This cabbie is not, for example, someone I need to introduce to my black friends.

There is one more side effect, too. I sat interviewing an amazing older woman as part of a documentary project. As is typical she started out the two day long interview with repeated glances to my eyes, to be assured that I was still watching and listening, and to be sure that I still cared. By the second day, she so trusted my interest that I don’t think she looked at me once. There were tears of joy and sadness, times of reflection, and wonderful stories. In the end… I was in love. Maybe we both were, I’m not really sure, but it created some strange moments as the reality of our situation slowly re-emerged. Her age, the physical distance, and the fact that she didn’t know much at all about me, sank in as we stepped out of the bubble that is created by this listening magic.

Powerful and dangerous. That’s listening.

One of the things I’ve learned about both travel and film work is that I’m happiest when I’m completely self-contained and self-sufficient. If I have everything I need I won’t waste time or energy getting cranky when the producer forgets to arrange food, or only provides beef. When I’m knee deep in mud I don’t have to run back to a truck for anything. When the lights suddenly cut out while I’m half naked washing laundry, I don’t even notice the transition to a waterproof flashlight because the reflex is so fluid and automatic it’s already in my hand and lit. (I literally experienced this: looking down, startled, to realize I was already holding the lit flashlight. It was very cool.)

Here is what I had with me every minute of every day, strategically placed on my body (thanks to cargo pants) such that I could grab it without even thinking:

- Leatherman tool
- Waterproof flashlight
- Notebook
- Pen
- Extra camera batteries
- Extra Firestore batteries
- Nylon cord
- Twist ties
- Handkerchief
- Lens cleaning brush
- Lens cleaning fluid and wipes
- Rubber bands
- Tiny bottle of hand soap/body wash
- Expendable wallet with money and business cards
- More hidden travel wallet with:

- Real money
- Passport
- Immunity shot list
- Contact number for emergency evac
- Phone numbers for credit card cancellation
- Phone numbers and addresses of people in states and local
- Credit card (backup left elsewhere and uninitialized)

- Water
- Organic dried fruit and nuts mix
- Warm hat
- Wool scarf
- 300 weight fleece
- Brim hat (to swap with warm hat when the day heated up)