Thank you Wally and Brian for the photography
MAILING LIST SIGNUP
“[Referencing Chinese Three Character Classics]:
Chloé Zhao
‘People at birth are inherently good.’
I still truly believe [that] today, even though sometimes it might seem like the opposite is true, but… I have always found goodness in the people I met everywhere I went in the world. So this is for anyone who has the faith and the courage to hold onto the goodness in themselves, and to hold onto the goodness in each other, no matter how difficult it is to do that. […] You inspire me to keep going.”
I’ve thought deeply about Chloé Zhao’s words ever since hearing them live during the 2021 Oscars. I remember specifically watching that year to see the first Asian woman win Best Director. I obviously don’t imagine myself in the Hollywood playing field. I’m not even wanted in the general no-budget field, so I gotta force-hedge-trim my way on a solo patch. But change matters across all avenues, and it inspires us to keep going.
Spring 2021 I needed hope more than ever. Society gave that to me through the Stop Asian Hate movement. Outsider art gave that to me when Caroline Golum and Spectacle Theater programmed my 45-minute proto-prequel-pilot segment of Open Doom Crescendo. Pop culture gave that to me when Chloé Zhao won the Oscar for Nomadland and said those words.
I’ve grown up with popular culture, while socioeconomically I could not be artistically operating from a farther away distance. And as a result I wish to give the closest equivalent to outsider art pop culture.
If I may be briefly self-serving, I wanna think I hold some layer of grit, both in ethos and action. But I went to New York City with what could only be humbly bracing myself for the spoons and tomatoes that is New York City’s finest tough crowd. If the at-best-muted/at-worst-hilariously-backlashing response from the first 2 of 3 Spectacle screenings would hint at, I should walk into the screening of my lifetime-up-to-this-point already mourning how reality would ground me back from my relatively naïve giddiness towards finally playing my self-and-exterior-assessed magnum odyssey to the venue and city I’ve looked forward to as the crown jewel, endgame, and one place if nowhere else that I’d want my work certified by.
Montreal’s pathetic-ass provincial language/identity politics notwithstanding, my city has certain iconic parallels to NYC, maybe most notably that they’re both islands and that drivers can’t turn right on a red light. But as tough as anglo/allo/non-sissy-franco/phones in Montreal can be, New York City is the toughest most badass city in the world. And I had enough humility going in to embrace whatever turnout and response I’d get. It was already (k)enough that this happened at all.
And yet, what I saw was the kindness and empowerment of the toughest most badass people who showed up to Spectacle’s final screening of Open Doom Crescendo.
There were people who I’ve never met nor in some cases even corresponded with online, welcoming me and making me feel seen and heard in ways that no well-adjusted life, money, or mainstream success could ever usurp. Being there, sharing my life’s work, in the place I was looking forward to all these years—that’s what it’s all about.
That’s it—there and then.
I regret having not asked someone to record the post-screening Q&A (if by chance someone did, please holla), but I was lost in my appreciation of being present. If no one’s to ever see in archival action how honestly spectacular it was, then it’s just as appropriate that this will live as legend between the people in the theater that night. [I will share with my Toronto homies that whereas the conversation with youse transformed into the customary Insidious 2 convention, in New York City it transformed into a Spider-Man 3 dissertation, and how Spider-Man is in Spider-Man 3 for less than 3 minutes. Tobey Maguire maskless or with half his Spider-Man mask sandpunched off to reveal the gaping bloated frown of Tobey Maguire Does Not Count As Spider-Man. There’s more dancing than Spider-Man. There are more appearances by amateur child actors than there is Spider-Man. Even the film’s editor must’ve been so self-aware about the borderline non-existence of Spider-Man in Spider-Man 3 that when the editor broke into Sony Pictures to edit his own version of the film, he restored ~3 seconds of black-suited Spider-Man swinging from the second trailer.]
Caroline has championed me since 2019 with programming mangoshake, and since then she’s continued to do so with ODC’s proto-prequel-pilot in 2021—lighting hope when I needed it most—and finally with Open Doom Crescendo in all its completion throughout this July. I didn’t think there was any way I could ever repay her, but alas she requested I open a microcinema in Montreal. I’ll start looking into it.
If being self-owningly poorer than I’ve ever been after this suck-it-world tour didn’t hold my reality hostage, I’d relocate here. But the days I’ve spent in this city have already been amongst life’s most cinematic, and I say this as someone who’s spent 130 days in the greater Montreal area’s most sprawling ex-urban voids. Until then, this city and the bonds I’ve formed here have already given my hopes and dreams a place to call their own.
I ❤ you all and NY.
OPEN DOOM CRESCENDO 