Category: Projects

Like it or not, we exist in a hierarchal patriarchy; one that places cis white men at the top. Gender-based inequality hurts everyone, yes, even men. The vicious thing about our cultural gender inequality is that it is everywhere. I notice it in the way I was raised. I hear it in the news, in advertising, in entertainment. I feel it in the dick jokes I tell on all-white-male film sets. Cis men seem to think the rest of us are allowed to say no. In my experience, denying the demands of an exploitative employer, pushy family, an impatient customer – even with a smile on my face – comes at a cost. This shifting price tag is the insidious underbelly of a sexist beast. Maybe I don’t lose my job, but my boss thinks I’m entitled and I am forever treated as such. If I dodge an expensive visit, my family thinks I’m selfish and cold, an ingrate. And, in our end-stage capitalistic consumerism nightmare, the customer knows they are always right, even when they are aggressively wrong.

It rarely feels safe to say no but endless acquiescence is expensive: to my mental health, my physical health, to my sense of self. Today the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and my socially constructed inability to say no is now coupled with a constitutional one. Being forced to have a child is a life-long sentence.

I pitched this concept to Juxtaposition series creator Christy Anna Wu (@cluumein) shortly after we filmed Like a Fish. She related a lot – self identifying as a “yes woman” too. Christy Anna agreed to codirect and produce and also make her cinematography debut. We each wore about a hundred hats on this single-day-shoot, and while my gaffing attempts made post production tricky, Christy Anna murdered as a one-woman-camera-department, her only support, assistant camera John Thuan Nguyen (johntn.e3), who also recorded our on-set sound and managed DIT.

My very dear friend Heather Peek (@watashiwabunbun) and her gay husband Stefan Parker (@hugeholejoel) lent their talents to this collaboration. Stefan, my favorite wardrobe shopping assistant and interior designer brain to pick, did a fantastic job as our set designer, wardrobe assistant, FX (yes, he is under the table with a shake-weight making that vintage phone appear to ring) and PA. Heather kept us on track as our 1st AD.

When I got into the edit, I found we were light on footage – a common issue on such a short shoot. I found a plethora of interesting quiet moments before takes began thanks to Ruchi Loomba (@ruchil10). I am so honored that she agreed to bring this archetype to life.

Sound design is as important as anything we see on screen and Don Farwell (@earwigstudio) brought so much skill and finesse to this short piece. I deeply appreciate the hard work of this real-life yes-team in bringing this experimental concept to life.

On January 5, 2021 there’s talk of a “stolen” election “protest” to take place at our nation’s Capitol. Here, on the opposite side of the country, I beg my partner to pack up the car with me in the middle of the night. My WWII trauma genetics are flaring up in a big way and I feel a need to escape to Canada, now, before it’s too late. We don’t slip away in the night.

January 6th, I watch things unfold on social media – my good friend and colleague Nate Gowdy is in DC documenting the terrorist attack for Rolling Stone. Within a day the National Guard shows up here too, and my usual dog walk through the capitol campus is interrupted by tall chain-link fences defending the legislators inside.

Nate spent the better part of a year collecting his thoughts, photos and context for his first monograph Insurrection. I feel privileged to have edited his work. Now, over a year later, some of the terrorists arrested at the attack on the Capitol are having their day in court. The book feels important. A limited, second edition print is available here.

Nate and I were recently interviewed by Yuko Kodama on KBCS – you can listen to the interview on their radio archive.

I was honored to include a letter from the editor in the book. It reads as follows.

My maternal grandmother survived for almost three years at Auschwitz. For me, WWII always feels nearby.

Oma is cynical and practical and careful. She is physically active in the extreme, until she can’t be—which dramatically affects her mental health. Leading up to the 2016 election, I live with her and help around the house. Her PTSD-triggered dementia picks up in relation to Donald Trump’s rise in news coverage—she says that he sounds just like Hitler. On election night, huddled in front of her old TV, things start to look bad. Oma goes to bed early, pessimistic and scared. I stay up, convinced that things can’t possibly go the way they do. In the morning, I see the opened newspaper on her table with that smug orange face and the word “President” in the headline. For the rest of the day, Oma mutters to herself, “It’s happening again.”

Evil is a religious construct that does not exist. Leaders who emerge during times of civil unrest are a reflection of their volatile societal climate. Like pre-WWII Germany, we are divided and in disagreement on where to place the blame. We are governed by a democracy built on racism, bigotry, sexism, and ableism that prioritizes corporate profits over human rights. We exist in a celebrity obsessed culture that mistrusts intellectualism. Together, we are suffering the comprehensive effects of end-stage capitalism. As a nation, we are experiencing intolerable discomfort. People are scared. Our pain and fear present as anger. I am angry. The people in these photographs are angry.

Collective fury is easily manipulated. The eruption of fear and hate documented in these pages does not end with the leader who incited it. We are vulnerable to the next cunning politician who stokes our terror and encourages our rage. Our political activism is more imperative than ever. Vote like lives depend on it—they do.

Period blood is likely the most common bloodshed, with an estimated 800 million people menstruating at any given time on our planet.

I’m in sixth grade and I hate that I’m stuck running a pointless errand with my mom. At a stoplight she uses her hands to supplement the verbal explanation she’s giving me on Fallopian tubes and falling eggs and shedded lining. She’s explaining menstruation to me, in the car, downtown. It feels like a setup. There’s a middle aged man in the lane next to us and the look he shoots over makes me positive that he knows what we’re talking about. I want to disappear. I already know about the impending period – last year in school they took the girls aside and we watched a video about cramps and mood swings and tampons and how embarrassing and womanly our bodies were becoming. The boys had their own presentation – from the jokes circulating the playground it appears to have been about nocturnal emissions and “urges”. It takes a while for the girls’ talk to circulate – it’s about two years before a boy on the bus pops my cherry with a ‘joke’ that I’ll hear repeated for the rest of my developmental years “You know what they say: don’t trust anything that bleeds for a week and doesn’t die.” We all laugh. I get the joke: it’s a play on words, women and our cycles are a loophole to this rule. I feel the undertone too, even if I don’t fully understand it – women are not trustworthy.

When I get my first period it feels like a life sentence. I’m not around people who are talking about women’s business openly. The messages that I get from kids at school, from teen magazines and from society in general is that periods are gross. That’s it. Ewww. I get the message: blood is gross and also women’s life-creating bodily functions are gross.

Period blood. Most cis women get to deal with that shit every month for the majority of our lives. It’s not just regular prick your finger blood -we experience actual viscera. Clots and globules. Coagulation. Old bubbling brown blood and fresh trickling scarlet. Because cis men don’t get periods, don’t hear about periods, don’t see periods – they have very limited real life experience with blood as compared to their menstruating counterparts. I’ve seen blood out in the public world only a handful of times: when David crashed his bike into the house and his nose ran like a faucet, the tip of my finger flying across the hotline at work and a subsequent crimson squirt, blood spatter on bar walls and bathroom stalls after a misunderstanding. Violent blood. Injury blood. Bad blood. Outliers.

In tenth grade I donate blood for the first time. The blood tech has to stab my arm a bunch – she calls my veins squirmy. My mom’s are too. Blood is inherited – it is passed down. When the needle finally enters me properly, I watch my own dark liquid fill a clear bag. I can see my feint pulse in real time outside of my body. It’s estimated that 4.5 million Americans will need a blood transfusion this year. Blood saves lives.

People regularly ask me why I’m so obsessed with blood. The perception is that it’s weird and kind of fucked up. Maybe I am both. But, to me, blood is not inherently violent. Blood is feminine, is literal life – and blood phobia feels sexist. Every single human on this planet came of some blood and we’re all fucking full of it.

On set of a commercial, Shari and I come up with this idea of doing a macabre photoshoot for her new dress, the mini-muu. The concept evolves over weeks, and texts and emails. Months later, we’re brainstorming with photographer Kelly June Mitchell, looking at a picture of some creepy twin girls when Kelly suggests that we edit a twin into the photos in post. I involuntarily blurt out my lifelong desire for twinship. I have always wanted to be a twin. An identical one. Not a clone like Calvin had. Not a triplet. Just another me. My hesitation in modeling dissipates, however fake and fleeting, I finally get to be my own twin.

Playing with these pictures is a new experience for me. I’ve long approached editing tools as technical means to create work for someone else, not for myself. Being able to manipulate these representations and versions of myself has me thinking about things that are buried pretty deep. One past me is bartender. It’s a job that taught me a lot, but it took a lot too. I learned about people, at the expense of my sense of self. Here, I rewrite my narrative: past me serves me our own blood at the basement bar. It gives us the sustenance we need to reinvent. To change. I finally feel like I’m turning into someone that I want to be. Turning back into myself. A relief since there’s no possibility of ever being anyone else.

It’s been years since I was in front of a camera so it’s familiar and foreign because I’m not the same person I was back then. There’s a freedom in photography that doesn’t often extend to film. A trick of the light is more coercive in a single moment. Things become however they’re framed. There’s an intuition to just follow – Kelly and Shari and I gently wheedle it out. We scurry around trying things. We don’t agonize over what we had in our heads, we work with what is here in front of us now.

And then, alone, at home on my computer, I get the same intuitive gut feeling when I finally figure out what the hell my face was saying or could’ve been saying – what that hand of mine was trying to convey. While I edit, I feel a flutter of twinship. There is the me, that was captured on camera and there’s me, now. In this moment we both exist.

Onus music video was an idyllic collaboration where I got to work with creative and talented people, play with some blood and make a weird piece of art I’ve always wanted to make. I love this song by Christy Anna Wu more every time that I hear it.

There’s a line in there that might have snuck under the radar on your first listen: Reparations. For whatever racist reason reparations are something our capitalist af country still fails to address. Money is not a fix, but the absolute bare-minimum-starting-place to a sincere apology. Decades after WWII my Oma started getting her reparations from the Dutch government. They were sorry that they allowed Nazis to take their Jewish population so easily. They were sorry they didn’t do more to protect them. The payments she received for the rest of her life did not bring her entire family back nor did they stop her epigenetic trauma from being passed down to me. Reparations were Holland’s attempt at a real apology. The United States has so much to apologize for and reparations are a desperately needed first step to authentic and meaningful healing. Until this country gets its shit together, you can support individual reparations through organizations like this: https://voixnoire.com/

Christy Anna Wu was the catalyst for this project – she’s a talented director, musician, producer, art director… I could make an entire website dedicated to her creative capabilities. Above all she is a productive badass and I love making art with her. It was actually through Christy Anna (@cluumein) that we found a dope dream team: Avery Johnson (@averyjohnson.photo) and Kelly June Mitchell (@intrepid_hermit). They went to school together, they love working together and the level of creative comfort and shorthand they share elevated this project. My friend Julia Bergland (@juliab3291) took such compelling BTS that I spent days drooling over her photos. My very talented friend Ashley Gonzales (@mestizaoriginals) supplied some beautiful pieces for me to wear – I loved wearing her creations alongside very sentimental pre-war jewelry from my Oma. Don Farwell (@earwigstudio) did the final mix – his work is flawless. What a great team <3

I have this dream of making a tiny film: two actors and a five woman/femme/gender nonconforming crew. I’ve been working on a script for well over a year, but it’s so. fucking. stuck. There are all of these fragments rattling around in my head. Making these disjointed scenes fit together is proving an elusive process.

Film is still a newish medium for me. I used to paint and draw. Sketching – getting things out of my head and onto paper always gave me some clarity – but I don’t really know how to sketch in film yet. In March, a friend of mine hosted Vaginomicon (an annual femme horror performance raising money for Planned Parenthood https://m.facebook.com/events/479808483039121) It felt like a good opportunity to attempt a sketch in film.

My partner helped behind the camera. My friend Bryce Beamish gave me access to his horror music sketchbook. Youtube’s finest, Lara’s Horror Sounds (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCejRwWhTN76XWgNVNU_ZExA) supplied the ambient humming. Natalie Portman voice reviews and breakdown videos served as my voice coaches.

Something not everybody knows about me: I have a drinking problem. I’ve been sober for over two years now. When Christy Anna Wu shared her concept of Like a Fish with me, I related to it a lot. I jumped on as the production designer/wardrobe/HMUA. Our crew of collaborators came to know the project as “Juxtaposition”. Our main character can’t eat, he can’t sleep, he can only drink – even if it kills him. The lighting theme is a sickly green. Now, Christy Anna and I call it Juxt-1; Juxt-2 is almost through post production, with Juxt-3 in the works.

This was the first set I was on since the height of the pandemic and subsequent hiatus. It was surreal in so many ways, but also, it was cathartic. I’ve been reading about therapy techniques where people reenact their trauma with friends-turned-actors and intentionally positioned furniture, and it’s benefits and impact on healing. I think I got to tap into that here. Intentionally making this mess, placing old pizza crust and mustard stained napkins – painstakingly recreating the life I used to live; feels different than waking up to it.

Keep an ear peeled for updates on the Juxt series – watch the completed film here: