VIDEO: " The Legend of Hollow Sleep"
April 2005
Besides my poetry & carvings, I did make this one video, a sort of take off on "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" which I think was by the same guy who did the Rip Van Winkle thing where the guy wakes up after 20 years and everybody has turned into a gnome. Anyway so my piece is kind of like where I fall asleep because hey I'm laying in bed all day doing percocets, so it's kind of a metaphor for - um - well just laying in bed all day doing percocets I guess. So, in the video I do some percocets & fall asleep and when I wake up I'm like a burning pumbkin head - what do they call them: jackal lanterns, I'm this decapitated jackal lantern and I fly or sort of hover over town & I find out that it's 20 years later & everybody I know has turned into garden gnomes & they are, like, living in Prairie Hills (the nice sub-division) and gardening or taking the kids to Wal-Mart in the mini-van or still working at Javacide. It was tricky making this without being able to go out to shoot locations, but I did pretty good using my garden gnome collection & some videos I'd previously shot. It got a little hairy when I had the burning jackal lantern hanging by a pulley sort of over my bed, in front of the video monitor playing Wal-Mart, with the garden gnomes all stacked around, but we all survived & I'm really pretty happy with the result. In the end I did sort of a video installation in my living room window. The neighbors all came & looked at it, but nobody's really mentioned it since, to say if they liked it or not.