Pele JuJu "Magic" slow Wide uncut test film by Toe Knee A stanger film, ToeKneeStanger.com
I was invited to film Pele JuJu's live recording, complete with packed audience...in two locations.
I set up more than one camera in both places...
Somehow, one shaky live camera, bounced between dancing frenzy always seems to have a 'Cinema Verite', true to life, reality feel... seems to always have a more "True to ART" handmade beauty...and out weighs the shakyness...
Keep in mind that I sometimes view this footage from a premise of "the ship sank".... and we're "still sorting out the survivors from the wreckage".
In other words, I heard a lot of idealism around this band... and they helped produce & sustain many waves for expanded vision of a sustainable planet...
Meanwhile, 10 years later, as we have seen each summer...the heat is hotter... the water's rising...and seemingly ony the few who can afford to build an new habitat on the moon seem to continue to lead the consumers to another xbox... a virtual reality away from nature... while nature dies daily...
In this case, the song, "magic" is a remembrance, for me, of cleaner happier times when certain types of future and present moment simplified to the magic of love... this version is played to an edge, sultry and slow... almost too slow... but the feeling is deep in the music... I just wish I didn't hear it as a funeral dirge.
If Pele Ju Ju, as a band, couldn't last.... what can?
Or is this a time for us to examine what we replace each day, sorting through our existence and replacing a walk in the wodds...or honest human touch with the virtual reality version... silicon that feels like flesh.... nature manicured with no wild life left to shoot... waves too high to surf...but if you get to surf them.. at least you go out happy...I guess.
These are ideas and concepts surrounding this fottage, for me, these days. Because Pele Ju Ju and Dana Hutson gathered hundreds of compassionate organic farmers, natural humans, extended families... and kids playing safe and happy around it all...
The fact that they no longer perform as a band...
Well... it almost suggests that the folks who gathered around them have also dispersed...
Check it out...
I went to many of the same venues, filming other bands...
a dn I kept hearing that folks had moved to Utah, others had moved to Idaho..others to Portland...
Sure enough...the Bay area was feeling like it had been gutted of it's humanity ...replaced by home builders, buyers and sellers shoving the markets through the roof...while others starved...or left..
This was the background current I could feel... when I filmed these shows... it was all slipping away.
Replaced by a new reality where we get to choose how much fear we embrace in this world...while folks in leadership can't even discuss the simplest of differences... cannot come to peace without war...it seems..
so... when you listen to this song... notice that off in the distance you can also watch the last big wave of sustainable reality also slipping.
Just like the titanic... and the rich folks get the first shot at a safe exit... we haven't really progressed out of the cave...
Just being able to notice it... we may hvee a chance to feed life back into our own existence... with the very next thought that you have...and how you live it's beauty or convert it back to the beauty it was meant to be.
The idea was to film this concert from a perspective of indy feature ...theatrical feature length film ... as the final version of all this stuff...
So... You see the wide view, designed to be tested with certain types of projectors, for that edge of screen to screen...
so ...the distortion is intentional..in other words... I'd done a few indy film seminars, and I'd seen first hand, the difference between Mini dv, Super 16, the JVC, sony, and Panasonic remedies for shooting digitally and re-formatting using re=digitized, pixle enhanced video to eventually become film, 35... 70 mm... etc.
The textures of the various formats made me happy to see. I like the moving pixels and the chunkiness of color on the screen. Like a moving painting
I was happy enough with the results, to take extra special care to store the master tapes carefully... I've seen what Jim Jarmusch could do with the low res Neil YOUNG 8mm, super 8mm, and Hi 8mm backstage footage for "The year of the Horse; Neil Young & Crazy Horse", the feature release.... and also Spike Lee's "On the Bus" movie...and other films shot in lower res digital or otherwise consumer level media.
Who knows...maybe a Sundance documentary will come out of this stuff someday...To gather the last missing footage, I'd have to become something like the Lewis and Clark expedition to find Dana in the jungles of France...
all that's missing is the inside story of the process, inside the proces... showcased against the landscape of the world caving in...
-Toe Knee Stanger Futbol Pele JuJu Bay Area World Beat Toe Knee Show ToekneeStanger Santa Cruz Dana Hutson Videos musicales, music y letras
