TEMPORAL CITIES AND UTOPIAN POSSIBILITIES:

Chicago and New Orleans remembered as the future.

New Orleans: a future-past kind of a city.

In September of 2007, I flew to Louisiana to make a video about everyday life in post-Katrina New Orleans. When I began the
project, I had no idea that the process of producing The Fullness of Time (2008) would not only lead me towards developing a
series of films about cities, but to reflect on my production process for past works like Drylongso (1998) and The Green Dress
(2005). I’d been making films that I now think of as metro-portraits: as much studies of the narratives embedded within locations
as they are narratives which exploit locations in service of story. Over time, the consideration of the social, political, cultural, and
metaphysical elements of place have overridden the structural demands of cohesive narrative in my films. Place becomes
narrative.

For a people who must scrape the bottom of the Atlantic ocean to find our ancestors, and read between the lines to reconstruct
our history, science-fiction narrative devices are natural structures for complex expressions of memory and history. As I oriented
myself to the New Orleans’ lower ninth ward, where my executive producer Paul Chan staged his production of Beckett’s
Waiting For Godot, I joined the collective grief surrounding the way in which “the waters,” as the disaster was often referred to,
had erased an entire community. And the way in which the powers-that-be seemed content with this gaping absence. Indeed, on
the cab ride to my hotel, a radio commentator giddily speculated on the potential for a “new-New Orleans” to create profitable
opportunities for the display, packaging and performance of New Orleans culture for international consumers. Implicit in the
conversation was the way in which the de-population of poor (and black) people in New Orleans could make room for a utopian
recuperation of the New Orleans brand. Most utopias are built upon the deluded notion of a foundational “blank slate”.
Participants leave their pasts behind, they colonize unfamiliar lands, and they create new myths and realities which aid them in
the materialization of their New World. The stark landscapes that were ubiquitous two years after Katrina did indeed provoke
utopian fantasies. But my own fantastical narratives, like the culture produced in New Orleans, and the architecture of the
cosmos, placed blackness at the gravitational center. In a city that is designed as a thing to behold - in which performance is a
part of everyday life and architecture is exalted - there can be much to look at, record, and catalog with a camera. However the
tendency to flip an historical district into a consumable encounter has been so successful in some sections of New Orleans (like
portions of the French Quarter), that everything there is to see has already been seen. And the stories we are told about these
places are no more authentic when you hear them on-site than when you heard them in a documentary in which the site was
featured. What are the stories we tell ourselves about places? And how do those stories affect the way that we see?

Congo Square is a site in New Orleans where African slaves, Native Americans, French and Spanish commoners could
congregate on Sundays to sell wares or do what they pleased. This was the only place in the United States where Africans were
permitted to play drums (hence the (re)invention of the banjo, tap dancing, and other quintessentially “American” cultural
innovations). Without this site, it is difficult to imagine what the world would be listening to; because it is difficult to speculate
on how American music (American Cinema!) would have evolved without the drum. I believe that there would be no jazz and no
rock-n-roll -- and I’d wager that the first feature length sound film would not have been “The Jazz Singer.”

Congo Square has the duende roiling up through its spiral brick brick paving for sure. This mason design is now, in the
imaginations of most residents, linked with the sacredness of the site. The city planners of New Orleans have modified this site
to such an extent as to make it nearly un-photographable. It is hideous; and yet, on a quiet morning, the radiance and power of
the site is palpable. The land surrounding Congo Square was once part of Tremé. Many residents were displaced in the process
of turning this truly free space - into “Louis Armstrong Park.” In addition to a spectacular art deco name-sake archway, the city
perimetered the park with miles of black spiked steel fencing, and a locked gate. So now, 300 years after the land was
appropriated by free and enslaved Africans for a day of respite, trade, and self-determination (of body and mind), the City of
New Orleans determines who can use this space and when they can use it. They also built the Mahalia Jackson Theater, a large
and disappointingly artless structure, directly behind the brick paving. So there is no way to experience the space without being
surrounded by fencing and civic architecture. There is also gigantic bust of the great musician Sydney Bechet poorly placed
beside the gate entrance. Its large bronzeness made wide shots or a tracking approach to Congo Square very difficult. Thank
goodness, they left some of the ancient oaks standing. And Banana trees grow whether you want them to or not in this part of the
country, so greenery is available, though not as abundant as one would hope. Of course there are also benches, lamp posts, and
all the other civilizing accoutrement placed in just the right spot to ruin my shots.
It was the film frame that eventually provided shelter from all that ugliness and made it possible to tell/show something about
this site. Cinema, not urban planning, created sacred space. (fade to black)

the dialectics of disaster:

demolished buildings - minivan seats as porch couches

FEMA trailers - shotguns as green architecture
concrete steps leading nowhere - tourists lining up for beignets.
mateless shoes in the street - spontaneous second lines
bodycounts spray-painted on houses - a fight to re-organize public schools

(fade in) The inhabitants of New Orleans construct their identities in relation to people and places. “My sister went to McDonogh
High with his niece.” “My Daddy grew up over in St. Bernard Parish right across the street from your Aunty.” “This was Ms
Hawkin’s porch. We used to come over here and she’d give us ice-ees.” (academy leader) But where my guides saw the ghosts of
this connectivity, the camera could only see bucolic landscapes, egrets nesting, wild blackberries growing, and the concrete steps
that once led to wood porches now perched in reed filled lots- like tombstones (two pop) The people were absent, but echoing in
my head were the stories from sages, like writer and videomaker Kalamu ya Salaam, who one day said to me, “Everything here
is happening so fast, but time, it just be draggin’” (freeze frame) Time does drag when you are waiting for a bus that has no
schedule or won’t close the circuit of its route. Time drags when we wait for loved ones to return and (jump cut) time drags as
we travel from one planet to another; drags for so long that by the time we arrive, we forget what we came for and who sent us
(dissolve) It takes a long time to find your relatives when they have been sent to three different cities to escape the shadowy
stench of the Superdome (wipe) The ways in which the cinematic can collapse that kind of time seem, to me, an insult against
what was endured and survived. (jump cut) The distance between West Africa and the Americas is so vast that some of us,
dragged across the ocean chained to the hull of a ship, left our language and our stories at the bottom of the Atlantic;
(superimposition) or the speed by which we were strapped into an airliners and forced to leave our family photos, our dogs, and
our hypetension medication to mildew, starve, and decay beneath willful government neglect. The past and future fold into a
very tight ball (splice) The way forward is not a straight line, but rather leaps and hops from one time/place to another, forward
and backward until the frame has settled, the scene is illuminated, and a structure is erected (roll opening titles)

Because cities - even decayed and abandoned cities - exert an indomitable permanence upon our imaginations, it was important
for me to make a movie in which we are always aware of time as we watch it. The dragging, the acceleration, the loss of time,
the skipping through, and the need for time must be mindfully negotiated. Every elegant porch, every public swimming pool,
every corner store is marked not just by a sign but by the people who regularly inhabited those spaces. One’s compass within the
movie is those relationships to the people, and the place. So my camera had to stay in one place for long periods of time. Figures
had to walk through emptiness, seemingly towards nothingness. Way-finders were pressed out of aerosol cans. And the Classical
Theater of Harlem’s stage lights were transformed into intergalactic aliens who choose to applaud rather than abduct. The project
was not about showing, and not even about seeing, so much as searching. Over the river and through the rubble, the character in
the movie, Lu Tepo / Gigi, searches for herself while the filmmaker discovers that New Orleans in many respects is the
birthplace of American popular culture and everything we enjoy about contemporary music exists because this place exists. The
completion of The Fullness of Time marked the beginning of a series of films about five American cities (New Orleans, Chicago,
Kansas City, Miami, St. Louis) in which jazz had a major cultural/historical impact that transcended its region and its historical
period. The opportunity to engage an eight week residency in a major metropolis (not the middle of the woods like most
residenies!) led me to Chicago. (lay back the track)

The way in to the way out: Chicago and musical radicality.

There’s a slang word in common usage in Chicago that I’ve not encountered so frequently in other places. That word is “out.” As
in, “His playing was so deep. He was just out.” Or “Yeah, she paints-- her stuff is real out.” Out, meaning out-there, out-side,
outer-limits. This term enjoys stock applications in Chicago’s African-American working class communities. Conversations are
the directive driving this Chicago film, shaping its structure, and informing its aesthetic. Monologs, from testimonial stories to
virtuoso acoustic solos, will be stacked like vertebrae, supported by squishy fluid meanderings into the city’s charged sites. I
came to Chicago to find out why this city produces more “out” African-Americans than all of the other American cities
combined. I won’t make a full list here, but we can begin with the influence of Oprah Winfrey and then note the fact that as of
this writing, the most powerful man on the planet, the president of the United States of America, is a black man who cut his
political teeth in Chicago. But the out-being that got me here was actually Sun Ra, the experimental composer, jazz musician,
performance artist, and philosopher whose depth, range and sophistication are only now being fully appreciated. Sun Ra paved
the way for a set of equally radical artists to develop, evolve, and coalesce into a sphere of lasting influence in music and
experimental sound: the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). These musicians, the more famous of
whom are Alvin Ayler, Anthony Braxton, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, but which also includes geniuses like Edward
Wilkerson, George Lewis, and Nicole Mitchell (to name a very few) talk about their creative compositional practice in much the
same way that I would describe my process for making experimental films. These artists are dedicated to craft, technique, and
theory. But the thing that makes them truly unique is their application of this practice towards collective compositions which
(unlike free jazz as practiced in other regions) are deeply rooted within the architecture of traditional African-American cultural
and spiritual practice. In the same way that my idea of experimental film is the application of film craft, technique, and narrative
upon historical speculations, the AACM make music that cannot be known until it has been created, but they do it by applying
all that is known, remembered, and felt. It is not random. It is not chance. It is not solely a spontaneous expression of how one
feels or discovers in the moment though occasionally it certainly can and should be. The AACM matrix for making music is a
discipline. It is a science that I cannot get them to discuss because it is as personal and spiritual as it is complex. When one’s
craft and intellectual practice is funneled through one’s body and spirit the road to comprehension is not translatable through
mere words; and no values can be fixed, weighed, and measured in relation to what has come before. This is because when
AACM musicians compose improvisationally, the present can be a conduit to the past or a catapult to the future. We have not yet
found ways of quantifying this kind of science This is a stark contrast to the modernists who occupy the canon of experimental
sound and music (Cage, Stockhausen, etc); and who elucidate in painstakingly authoritative detail the way in which their sonic
practice is radical, innovative and important. (reference tone)

Though he is not an official member of the AACM, Tatsu Aoki is a Chicago-based experimental filmmaker and
musician who has been embraced by the most visible members of that organization. In its inception, the AACM was to be, and
still is to the ire of some North Side (i.e. white) musicians, an organization that supported the initiatives and innovations of
African-American artists, even though the majority of members voted for the moniker: the Association for the Advancement of
Creative Music, thereby asserting the thing that is most important to them was not their blackness, but their music. While race
may be a (surmounted) barrier to membership into the AACM, it does not influence the musicians’ choices for collaborators and
recording partners. Mr. Aoki grew up in Tokyo, the son of a Geisha, and settled in Chicago over thirty years ago. He explained to
me that improvising musicians who want to work with the AACM go through a kind of “certification” process in which their
skills of creativity, collaboration, performance and rhythm (and I would add empathy) are evaluated, tested, and challenged, in
real time. If a musician can withstand this certification process then they are essentially “in” and will continue to be invited to
gig with band leaders. He survived the vetting process and has been playing bass in AACM combos for decades as well as
creating modern Taiko drum-based compositions which fuse African and Japanese folk idioms. (mix down) I was keen on
meeting him, and after weeks of trying to connect, Aoki graciously sat me down and schooled me, one outsider to another.
(feedback loop) He explained that when the AACM musicians are improvising and creating music (despite or perhaps because
their deep knowledge of theory and technique) they are always seeking the out, and they are always simply “playing
themselves.” (I suspect that this assertion will sound familiar to any great actor.) He added that, as a band, when they get on the
stage to play original improvised compositions, they do not talk about what they are going to do, they simply listen to each other.
(dub) Listen to each other. (splice) I finally realized that Aoki was trying to explain to me that I was also being vetted, and that I
may not be accepted and embraced by the radical core of the creative community until it was clear that I too possessed a mastery
over creativity, collaboration, performance and rhythm (and I would add empathy), and this certification process would occur in
real time - time I feared I did not have. But that is the way I must enter this city. Before I am permitted to see anything, I must
prove that I can listen. What a wonderful task for a filmmaker. (rewind)

Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future1

(pan right) Herman Blount left his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama in 1945 to follow his star north to Chicago (pan left) In
1961 this same man left Chicago calling himself Sun Ra with a group of obsessively rehearsed musicians he called his Arkestra.
Herman Blount was never heard from again. For fifteen years, Chicago served as an incubator for thoughts and sounds of the
artist we know as Sun Ra. This city allowed him to cultivate his transformation from a talented southern musician into a
cosmological sonic philosopher. (fast forward)

While working as an arranger and composer, Sun Ra involved himself with a group of academic and autodidactic scholars, the
Thmei Group, whose goal was, among other things, to publish a “dictionary” for black people which shared their creative
revisions of language, new interpretations of history and illuminated various occult practices. 2 (pause) While privately

1 This is one of the slogans of The Art Ensemble of Chicago.

2The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Raʼs Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets. Edited by John Corbett.
WhiteWalls Publisher, 2006.
composing, and experimenting with his assembly of musicians, the Arkestra, Sun Ra’s public practice consisted in part of writing
and distributing broadsheets and leaflets in Washington Park. (boost levels) The fifties was a time when working-class black
Chicagoans were generously endowed with a public sphere (Washington Park) in which many competing philosophies, from
evangelical Christianity to the Fruit of Islam, to Sun Ra attempted to lead the receptive towards their respective brands of
enlightenment. According to the testimony of many Chicago musicians, Sun Ra was frequently among the soap-boxers,
preaching and distributing his logophilic philosophy. Sections from this broadsheet, which Sun Ra typed in full capital letters,
have become the opening words of the film I am shooting (play):

WHAT MUST NEGROES DO TO BE SAVED? THE FIRST THING NEGROES

MUST DO IS TO BE ABLE TO TELL A FRIEND FROM AN
ENEMY….NEITHER THE NAACP NOR THE NEGRO CHURCH HAS DONE
ANYTHING TO TEACH THE NEGRO AN APPRECIATION OF BEAUTY, AND
ALL THE EQUALITY IN THE WORLD IS A LIE, IF THE PEOPLE ARE
IGNORANT…. I STRONGLY ADVISE THE AMERICAN NEGRO TO CLEAN
HOUSE IMMEDIATELY…. TO CONTINUE TO BELIEVE THAT YOU ARE
GOING TO BE SAVED WITHOUT ANY EFFORT IS TO DECEIVE YOURSELF.
SINCE YOU HAVE BEEN IN AMERICA…. YOU HAVE NOT SPONSORED
YOUR ARTISTS OR MUSICIANS, OR SCIENTISTS…. THE PEOPLE WHO
SPEAK OF BROTHERHOOD SHOULD DEMONSTRATE IT BY SINCERE
ACTION IN MAKING IT A REALITY. SUCH A REALITY CAN BECOME
REAL ONLY IF APPROACHED FROM A POINT OF CULTURE AND ART….
THE ONLY THING THAT DISTINGUISHES A MAN FROM A BEAST IS THAT
A MAN CAN PAINT OR WRITE OR PLAY MUSIC INDULGE IN
ARCHITECTURE. 3

To celebrate this inchoate chapter of Herman “Sonny” Blount’s process of becoming, I conceived of a series of live
performances which would be filmed, and audio recorded. It goes like this: a) AACM musicians and other Chicago musicians
who have a deep affinity for Sun Ra were commissioned to arrange Sun Ra tunes into marching band charts. b) Community and
High School Marching Bands were commissioned to interpret and perform those arrangements in public places that radiate
cultural and historical significance. c) The Marching Bands do not promenade in traditional militaristic fashion, but rather
descend upon a location from several trajectories while playing, for example, Space is the Place, or Where Pathways Meet, or
Love in Outer Space, and then scatter once the song is completed; thereby leaving the public space transformed by cosmological
sounds and youthful energy. (cascade) These performances - actually a more apt term is “flashmobs” - function as a both
celebration and protest. The disturbance celebrates Sun Ra’s ability to materialize his ideas into image and sound. The event also
protests the fact that these issues, fifty years after Sun Ra’s Chicago exodus, are just as pressing as they were when he held court
in Washington Park and argued with brothers from the Nation of Islam. (sync pop)

Cosmological Axiom #1: “Sandwiches make the world go ‘round.”

The first flashmob (aka The Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band #1) was in Chicago's Chinatown Square. The Rich South High
School Band, under the direction of Mr. Y.L. Douglas performed Mr. Frederick Tapley’s very funky arrangement of Space is the
Place. The event taught me everything I needed to know, and didn’t know that I didn’t know about what this Chicago film
should be and what it definitely should not be. It is worth mentioning that Mr. Tapley is the only commissioned arranger that is
not a member of the Chicago jazz or alternative rock scenes from which all of my other composers come. After studying with
the legendary Florida A&M music program, Mr. Tapley apprenticed with Mr. Douglas at Rich South H.S., and therefore knew
the band’s instrumentation and performance tendencies intimately. In the footage gathered by my School of the Art Institute of
Chicago graduate student video grew, Mr. Tapley can be seen shaking hands with each member of the brass section and
congratulating them on their performance of his Space is the Place arrangement. That shot always makes me smile. After the
March was over, one of my camera people (there were four) ventured onto the school bus. Rain had poured down on us. I guess
he wanted to record the mood of the young musicians. They were all sorting through the sack lunches I’d made them the day
before. One young woman can be heard off-camera sweetly proclaiming, “Sandwiches make the world go ‘round.” It was not
reviewing the footage, listening to the music, or reflecting on the herculean effort that went into the producing the flashmob that

3 Ibid, page 126-127.

made me feel that this event had been a success -- it was this young woman’s enjoyment of her turkey sandwich. And that is
good.

(presence) Chicago film shoulds:

Intersections of interior and exterior spaces: the way in to the way-out.
Intensive concentration of the master innovators of free-jazz, (i.e. mature black musicians)
21st century narrative strategies. (i.e. There is no truth)
The application of portraiture to encourage listening.
The application of eavesdropping to encourage looking.
Green Screen: because traveling to outer space is still fiscally prohibitive; and if Carl Sagan could do it so well in the seventies,
then I damn sure can do it now.
Architecture. Sun Ra enjoyed the ubiquitous Egyptian facades. We will too.
Urban legends, occult practices, rumors, stories and dreams presented as reality.
Academic and journalistic analysis presented as myth.
Rides on the elevated trains.

Chicago film should-nots:

Verite style shooting presented as un-augmented reality.
Historical recuperation in defense of underwritten black histories.
Authoritative interviews in which scholars/journalists explain things that cannot be explained.
Long doting pans of the fussy fussy miracle mile.
Sun Ra biography.
A document of a place, person or thing.
Flashmob sequences as documentation, rather they must function as cinematic Lagrange points.
Advocacy for an issue, place or thing.
Documentary footage of live performances or rehearsals presented as dramatic structure.
(white noise)

The Changing Same of movies and metropolis.

Cities divert resources, create hyper-dense concentrations of matter, consume the natural and nurturing in order to replace it with
the engineered and the toxic. And yet cities are clear expressions of desire. Cities simultaneously express our aspirations for
utopia, while manifesting the dystopia of our failed initiatives. It is difficult for the movies that I make to be understood within a
rubric of style or aesthetics, because my formal strategies and materials adapt in response to content. The threads that do travel
through all of my work are: confrontations with history, expressions of nostalgia, framing the (black) figure, and exploration of
space and place. My films are always about place; and the places I prefer tend to be cities. Indeed, when I am faced with the
wilderness, a forest, an ocean a meadow, a desert, I am speechless. I am dissatisfied with the way unmarred land looks through a
lens and is caged by a frame. What could be said about a landscape that so eloquently speaks its own language and demands that
we humble ourselves to listen? What can a camera do for a geological event that moves so slowly that twenty four frames per
second not only fails to capture but distorts the scale of our planet’s endurance and creativity. In the face of the geological our
persistence of vision is not persistent enough. But cities succeed in reducing this majesty to the potency of a postcard. Urban
land has been staked by concrete and steel, bound in roads and tunnels, and blanketed with human footprints caked in asphalt.
Cites move and mutate through and because of human markings and initiatives. And the moving image has grown within and
alongside our cities. It is almost as if the two inventions powered each other. Urban and cinematic engines serve as muse and
mirror for each other: the city and the movie, eternal relics both. Like movies, cities sing our songs, and manifest our dreams.