A Long Way From Home / WORD

Two versions of a biblical video project.

Around 2012 (?) my friend Davin Abegg asked me to make a music video for his band, Secret Abilities. I had a reel of b/w 16 mm film that I had shot and processed a few years earlier around some beaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. I had been wanting to edit the reel into some kind of “creation story”, and so I thought the track “A Long Way From Home” (at least in terms of its title) might go along with either a narrative of a corrupted world, or the concept of a spirit inhabiting a corruptible body… also I was really interested at the time in the idea of mediated distortions of the real world… I won't say that this particular video that I ended up making is easily described using any of those concepts individually, but somehow they came together into an expression of some things I had been feeling at the time. It made for a pretty “out there” music video. I don't normally make music videos that function as advertisements for the band. If someone wants a music video, I just do an experimental film that goes with the music. Over the years, I've had different opinions of this video (though I've always loved the song) and I'm still not sure what I think about it. I made an alternate version in 2013 that is also here in this post. The first video you see in this post is that one. A (mostly) silent film using most of the same footage. The second video is the original music video.

Speaking about these two videos today, I would simply say that they represent a sort of confusion that maybe we all feel at the nexus of new technology and ancient wisdom.