I Recently heard My friend Joel Schneider reveal a few personal details about his past that included his time living with me on a radio interview. I figured since he broke the ice, I can now write about my relationship with him and tell some stories from my perspective. For those who don't know, Joel currently fronts a band called "My Goodness" in Seattle. They aren't on the cover of Rolling Stone (yet) but are doing quite well these days and are about to release their official debut album. My filmmaking has blossomed into a professional realm over the same timeline that Joel's music has and that's no coincidence. It's because the top three milestones that represent clear leaps forward in my art were all music videos for My Goodness. This wonderful artistic collaboration that has benefitted both of us wasn't just a chance encounter. Joel was the star of my first short film over ten years ago and I directed his first music video for his first band while he was in high school. Those projects never went very far but they were the building blocks for what was to come. Looking back now the stories that fill in the blanks are full of hilarity, humility, and inspiration.
I might as well start from the beginning, I've known Joel all my life, well...all his life. I'm four years older. Our parents were friends and My mom often babysat Joel when we were young children. When I was ten and he was six our dads took us up to Alaska for a fishing trip and that's where this story really begins. There's something about Alaska that will drop your balls. It's like a country within a country. A land that's mission is to make men from boys. When I got off the plane in Anchorage I was welcomed by a taxidermied Grizzly bear standing on his hind legs about 12 feet tall permanently frozen in the "I'm going to eat you now" pose. Next to that was a video playing on loop of a bear chasing down a Jack Rabbit in a field and catching him with ease. The message I got: "Welcome to Alaska, if you plan on going hiking here, you better be faster than a Jack Rabbit, good luck!"
After a couple of days we camped one night in a field on Kodiak Island where true to the warning in the airport, a bear had shredded a cow a few days before. Although any size bear that was charging at me would cause me to brown my pants, it's important to understand that bear hierarchy goes like this; Polar bears are bigger than grizzly bears. The only bear bigger than a Polar Bear resides exclusively on Kodiak island and is fittingly named the Kodiak Bear. Guns are of little use when faced with a charging Kodiak bear because bullets only slightly slow them down. We first heard about the cow incident from the locals then on our way to pitch the tent we saw what was left of it. It looked like someone tried to make a rug with a chainsaw. To avoid a similar fate, Joel's uncle (who was a resident of the area) took the next half hour to catch about 40 salmon, which is not hard in Alaska. He didn't even use bait in favor of the more efficient Alaskan weapon of choice: the "snagging" hook. He proceeded to place them in a circle around our camp creating a 50 yard perimeter of tempting snacks to distract the bear if he returned. Somehow this gesture genuinely made me feel better.
While the adults were fishing the next day, Joel and I invented a fantastic game that looking back was something so ingeniously gross, only six to ten year old boys would be able to come up with it. We first caught two bullheads (a common bottom feeder fish). We then whacked them dead like we were taught to do at the beginning of the trip. The next step involved our newly acquired responsibility of wielding survival knives. After a brief scientific dissection we discovered that bullhead intestines were very tough and could be pulled out about six feet or so. As the fish dried out they became quite sticky. We already had our shirts off because of how warm the day was so it was the logical next step to wrap the end of the strung out intestin around one hand and start swinging the dead bullhead club around in an effort to fish-slap each other. Come to think of it, that might have been the name of the game; "Fish-Slap". If contact was made the fish would slap onto our skin and stick. Once pealed off, it would leave a red fish stensil welt as a badge of honor or a score for the other person (I feel like that last detail was less clarified). Needless to say, It was certainly more about the thrill of playing the game than who won although I'm sure Joel's version would end with me hand carving him a trophy and kissing his feet begging for mercy.
Joel and I stayed close over the years and as we got older, as most kids do when they reach the age of rebellion we clashed more and more with our parents. Our shared religious upbringing multiplied the clashing and gave us a struggle even more in common than typical teenage angst, especially when we developed our mutual love for metal and punk rock. I remember getting in trouble for lending Joel a Greenday CD that my parents didn't know I had. As I got older, my parents gradually accepted my interest in alternative culture and gave me more freedom to make my own choices. Without going into further details, it seemed that Joel's situation was not improving when he entered his high school years as mine had. It finally came to a point where he could no longer continue to live at home but he was still a year shy of 18 (and graduation). I was 22 at the time and had an Apartment in Seattle. My roommate was gone for six months so I invited him to live with me. He accepted and finished out high school by commuting across a few towns while working almost fulltime at a construction job. Somehow we balanced a regular routine of partying almost every night amongst all this. I should mention that his friend Evan became a permanent fixture in our living room during this time which didn't bother me. I had just quit community college film school not having passed a single quarter because I felt it was a waste of my time and money (I still do). I knew if I was going to quit school I would have to do it on pure self motivation so I began shooting music videos for punk rock bands on VHS tapes. Even early on I was pretty ambitious given the lack of any budget whatsoever because I really wanted my video concepts to stand out since nice equipment was out of the question. Joel and Evan were always eager to assist often appearing as extras. One video involved building a set with large sheets of wood painted to look like an office that the characters could break into. When my roommate finally came back from his trip and reclaimed his room, we kept Joel around and built him a bedroom in our living room with the fake walls from the office set. Joel didn't own a guitar at the time so he would borrow my acoustic frequently. I knew if he had been playing it because he never tuned it back to standard when he put it down. This was annoying at the time but was laying the foundation of an innovative sound that would years later be fully realized as My Goodness.
I eventually got married to my longtime girlfriend and moved out. My wife had drug addiction issues that would come and go throughout our marriage and would eventually lead to the end of it. About half way through my five year marriage, my wife and I moved out to the small town of Deming, Washington to get away from the city after a particularly terrible bout with her substance abuse. I quickly realized that moving to a small town does make it harder to score but it does not solve the problem when someone's facing addiction. A few incidences later she was court ordered into a rehab clinic which left me broke, depressed, and all alone in a small house with no neighbors. My Pizza delivery job that was 40 minutes away left little to spare after it paid for the commute. I spent a lot of my time during the days walking my dog along the river bank near my house. There was a particular bend in the river next to an open field very near my house that was a popular spot for Bald Eagles to fish aptly named "Eagle Park". One time I decided to count all the Eagles I could see from a single vantage point and got to around 70 when it started to get confusing. The breathtaking nature I was surrounded by wasn't enough to distract me from the turmoil in my life and I usually sobbed myself to sleep in a half panic attack.
When she got out of rehab she introduced me to a guy she met in the clinic who needed a place to stay. I reluctantly granted him our spare bedroom because we were going to be evicted without some financial help in paying our rent. I found out later that he was an Iraq war vet that suffered from PTSD and claimed to be who one of the characters in the book "Jar Head" was based on. Anthony Swofford, the author of Jar Head was near the top of a "People to kill" list I found in his bedroom once.
Things between my wife and I didn't improve and I couldn't handle my helplessness over my life situation anymore and told her we needed a break from each other. I left without a plan and drove the two hours to Seattle where Joel and Evan took me into the house they were renting without a moment's hesitation. A few weeks later I returned to the Deming house to collect the rest of my stuff and my psycho ex roommate pulled a gun on me and for a second I was certain he was going to pull the trigger. My wife had moved out leaving him there alone, it wasn't long after that incident that he defaulted on the rent and left the place. A few months later the Earth swallowed up the vacant house with a tremendous landslide that came off the over-logged hill behind the property. We all would have been buried alive had we still lived there. I saw it in a newspaper and recognized the yard, did some research and found out it was in fact the same house. It was almost like a mysterious force beneath the Earth was causing opposing energy in the house, dramatically driving the three of us away in separate directions before it got to the breaking point where it could hold on no longer.
Due to the struggles in my life that led to me moving in with Joel and Evan, I had not made any videos in a while. Evan had been pursuing a career in sound mixing and landed an impressive job at a popular club that booked well known touring bands almost every night. Joel fronted a band playing organ instead of guitar and was writing tons of songs. Their positive artistic energy motivated me to pick up the camera again and I made my first short film "Secret Agent Shopper". It was a comedy based on my experience of being a secret shopper who got fired because another secret shopper was appointed to follow me secretly to make sure I did my secret shopping correctly. Secret shopping secret shoppers was such an absurd and hilarious concept to me that the script basically wrote itself. Joel was cast as the lead and Evan ran sound naturally. I cast my friend Felipe and a guy named Michael from craigslist as the other two actors. We shot the entire thing in one day for about $50 with a borrowed DV camera. I showed it later at a filmmaker open screening and got a great response from the crowd, much bigger than they guy who spent ten grand on his short that played before mine which made for an awkward Q and A. It was a huge motivator for me to keep going with film and to start taking it more seriously. I recently reminisced over this film greatly because tragically, Felipe passed away because of a serious heart condition he had been battling for years. Joel and I ran into him a few months ago as he was loading his band's equipment into the very club that Evan ran sound at years ago. We had a good laugh and talked about Secret Agent Shopper for a moment on the street. It was a brief encounter but I'm glad I got to see him one last time.
I lived at Joel and Evan's for about six months before repairing my relationship with my wife who had proved herself clean over that span of time. Together, we moved to Portland for a fresh start. To make a long story short, we struggled considerably financially, most of it being my fault for not being able to hold down any job for more than a couple months. I blame my chronic back pain as the main culprit but there certainly were other responsibility/maturity issues I needed to conquer in addition to my poor physical condition. My wife, relapsed a few more times and by the last time, I could tell that it was a pattern that wasn't going to have a happy ending if things kept going the way they were. I left her when I found her stash after warning her that I would if she relapsed again.
I was in the lowest place I had ever been. I told myself the only way to go from here is up but I knew it all had to be different. I could not go along anything that resembled the same path that led me to where I was so I bought a van and moved into it. I hadn't seen Joel or Evan for a couple years so I drove to Seattle and found out that they were both in new bands and were booked one after each other for a bar show that night. Joel's new band was My Goodness. There was only a handful of people there when My Goodness took the stage as the first band of the night. The show was incredible. I knew from the first song that there was something special in front of me. I confessed to Joel when he got off the stage that my socks had been officially blown off and that I think he's going to make it big with this new sound. Joel shook my remarks off humbly but I could tell that he recognized the potential as well.
I knew that even though Joel was my good friend, I would have to act fast to make the first music video. I also knew that I would have to follow in Joel's footsteps and up my game considerably if I didn't want to get left in the dust. With no budget for a video between us, I had to think outside the box and ambitiously. Instead of thinking reasonably because of our lack of funds, I came up with an idea that involved 40 cameras and a warehouse. Joel told me he could afford to pay me $200 to do it. Since I needed all $200 for survival money I decided to try and make my concept happen without spending a single dollar. I did some research and found a small community run warehouse that had art workshops and gymnastics throughout the day. When I went to inquire about usage I was greeted by a man wearing a full body dog costume who claimed to be the operations manager. Talking to him about rental fees was difficult because along with the dog suit I was constantly being distracted by his ten year old son who was cheering loudly while driving large holes into the wall behind him with a fork lift. I called it to his attention a few times but I could tell that the man-dog-dad was more annoyed at me for pointing out what was happening than what was happening so I did my best to ignore it. He was very excited about the idea of a music video being shot there and told me he would waive the rental fee before I could ask him to. The only stipulation was we couldn't turn on the heat.
My next stop was Widmer brewing. I had heard that Widmer had supported local film events with free kegs before and if I was going to ask 40 people to show up with cameras for no pay; I needed to give them beer, bill it as a networking event, and get the vid shot in under an hour. Widmer provided the keg with hardly a question asked so I started littering facebook and craigslist with cameraman recruitment ads. I was completely honest about what was going down and that the pay was in beer. Instead of 40 I got 20 which was still quite impressive. Twenty proved to be a more ideal number once I got to post production anyway.
As I predicted My Goodness got signed to a label three days after we shot the video and they were already trying to hook him up with different filmmakers. I finished the video a week later and the label loved it. They didn't give me any money for it but down the line My Goodness became involved with a different label that saw it and ended up funding the next one.
The band wasn't officially signed to the new label so they gave me a very small "starter/tester" budget to see what i could make with it. Once again I decided to over shoot my means and make it a period piece that took place in the 1940's. One week after I wrote the concept it was cast, shot, edited, and delivered for under a thousand dollars. This was an unbelievable feat for how good the video turned out and I owe at least half of that success to my newly acquired powerful teammate who has worked with me closely on every film project since. That person is going to be my wife this fall and goes by the name Rachel. The label was so impressed they gave me an additional stipend as a reward.
When it came time for the next music video, they approached me again, this time with a typical professional indie rock video budget. This made me happy but I also knew that expectations were increased as well as funds. With pen in hand staring at a blank page, I found myself second guessing wether making the last one so good was such a good idea after all. The new song had a deeper more emotional tone than the last two which helped guide my inspiration. I decided to reach within myself to come up with a meaningful story that was mostly fiction but based loosely on a series of otherwise unrelated events from my past and then spice it up to cinematic proportions to match the intensity the song had. I sent the overly complicated treatment to Joel for his approval and to my dismay he responded by telling me that he liked the idea but since he had replaced his drummer with a new one he wanted a video that showcased the band to introduce the new lineup visually. His logic made sense to me, you don't want two videos floating around youtube as you climb the charts with an old drummer especially since My Goodness is only Joel and a drummer. I told him that I could incorporate both the concept and the band. Given the complexity of the story, I really didn't understand how this would work as this new plan would cut my already pinched time in half to tell my story. However, I also knew that Joel knows what he wants and compromising was the only way I was going to be able to execute my idea. He agreed but made me promise that I was confident I going to be able to pull it off.
Rachel and I spent a month in preproduction this time. We cast my cousin John without an audition because I was already familiar with his stage acting talent which ended up working out great. Somehow, we pulled it off and the video has gotten some great write ups including one from a DJ I used to listen to religiously when I was younger.
The same label sent Rachel and I on a complete U.S. tour for two months with two other bands they also represented. By coincidence or fate Evan was hired to be our tour manager and we were reunited once again. My ex wife got clean for good the day I left her and is currently leading a much healthier life as an exception to the statistics, thank God. Joel is my best man in Rachel and I's upcoming wedding and I'm sure we'll be close for the rest of our lives. One of the most powerful lessons in maturity I've learned from growing up with Joel was how to make the transition from big brother figure to an adult with equal standing. I feel if I had not humbled myself in those crucial few years I might have missed the ambitious wisdom that he had been dying to share with me and now together we bring each other up to higher and higher levels professionally and beyond. If I could sum this whole story into some advice, I would say to surround yourself with people full of capability and ambition who aim higher than what seems feasible and make sure you listen as much as you teach. The best part about writing this all down and reading it back is I know that someday it will all be considered chapter one in a much longer story.
I referenced a lot of videos in this post, instead of listing a ton of links I'm going to leave you with one. I've chosen the first My Goodness video because it has been removed from Youtube recently to not be confused with the new version of the song (this one features the original drummer, Ethan). It still lives on my personal account on Vimeo and is a lot harder to search for. www.vimeo.com/22049997
Monday, May 20, 2013
Monday, May 13, 2013
The Power of Free.
For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
-1st Timothy 6:10
Money sucks. Some people think that it only sucks when you don't have any, but I say it sucks all the time. I'm not advocating Communism, that sucks too. I'm just saying that Money dictates far more of our lives than it should. Money starts wars and then sustains them. Money rips families apart and creates classism. Money breeds jealousy, greed, and depression. That's why I love when things are free, not because I'm a cheapskate or even "thrifty", but because free is just that; it's freedom. A transaction, or should I say an acquiring of something that does not involve money is a temporary release from the binds of the financial system we're so caught up in day after day weather we like it or not.
My uncle once told me there is a great power in giving something away for free. He was speaking from a marketing standpoint within the context of our conversation but I'm sure he would agree with me that the statement can be applied to an idea larger in scope as well. For me, and this is all intertwined with the van life, it's a philosophy. Maybe it's because I've struggled considerably with money over the course of my life but I absolutely hate being nickel and dimed for petty things. I can't stand getting ripped off on any scale. I could get a bad deal on a car or a sandwich and I'll probably be just as pissed. I am always on the hunt for a way not to pay. Over the years of getting into concerts for free, free haircuts, free dental work, and countless things large and small I've realized that there really is a power in "free" that super cedes the notion of simply getting a good deal.
One of the powers of getting something for free is it completely eliminates the chance of getting ripped off. You can't get mad if your sandals fall apart after a month if you found them on the street corner. Even though managing my finances hasn't been a strong point for me, I feel that it doesn't really matter if you're rich or poor when your wallet is being taken advantage of. It's the principal of getting what you paid for that matters. If I were a millionaire, I'd still get angry over an eight dollar beer at a music festival served to me in a plastic cup that's mostly foam. Someone at the same festival tosses me a warm PBR because I sat near him -highlight of my day (Free beer = new friend).
Which brings me to another power of free, you never forget the things you get for free (well not as easily at least). It's always special to get free stuff and a lot of my best memories are when I didn't have to pay the fee. The cost of something doesn't just set an arbitrary expectation (usually too high) for what you paid for, it sets a negative precedent from the get go that must be then turned positive if what you paid for delivers. Let's say you ride a roller coaster that cost fifteen dollars then another one that's thirty and you decided you had more fun on the fifteen dollar one. Most likely, you'll find yourself frustrated that you paid too much for the second one instead of relishing the fact that you had a lot of fun on the first. If you just rode two roller coasters without forking over any dough you probably wouldn't even be comparing them. The memory would play out in your brain as two rad roller coasters, and maybe if you were being really analytical that day, one ever radder than the other. Which makes the day the raddist! (sorry I couldn't help myself once I got to "radder" there was no going back).
At this point in my speech I can almost hear the nay sayers thinking to themselves in a condescending internal brain tone "well Jon, you can't just get everything for free, we live in a capitalist society, people need to make a living, how do you think they built that roller-....bla bla bla". Guess what? You're wrong! If you are an optimistic opportunist who believes in yourself you can get just about anything you want without paying for it. You've heard it before, Oprah has her vision boards, there's that cheesy DVD "The Secret" stacked on a spool underneath your soon to be outdated DVD player but the message is true; you are the master of your own destiny. If you want something bad enough, remain positive, and always assume you will get what you want, somehow it will come to be. Don't dwell on the question of "how" too hard but still consider it. The universe will conspire to make your dreams a reality. Now it's time for some great stories about free stuff.
FREE SNOWBOARD
I grew up in a house with a modest income, my parents weren't broke but because of the neighborhood we lived in, I was the poor kid by comparison. It hardly ever bothered me, I was always happy with what I had for the most part but certain things came up now and then that made me feel pretty left out because my family just couldn't afford it. The biggest one of those things was certainly snowboarding. In seventh grade, I did everything with my group of best buddies. Weekends were especially good hang out days except when the bike riding and swimming bliss days of summer turned to winter, I was alone. I would reunite with my friends on Monday at school where I had to hear about all the fun stuff that happened on the mountain during lunch. Sure I wanted to fit in but even more so it just sounded like a blast. I wanted to snowboard with my friends very badly but with all the gear and lift ticket prices, it was way out of range for my parents to just foot the bill and I understood that.
My wonderful mom was aware of my longing and one day she told me she heard on the radio that a local snowboard manufacturer was looking for kids to demo their new boards. The ad went on to say that they would also provide a ride from the factory to the mountain with a lift ticket voucher. She bought me some cheap gloves and goggles and drove me down to the warehouse to see what it was all about. The radio message reached a handful of kids but shockingly, there wasn't an overwhelming response so I called up my buddies and instructed them to join me as fast as possible. The people running the program immediately took a liking to me and my eight or so buddies because the rest of the kids were horribly disrespectful and acted very entitled to their free stuff. A few of them were caught stealing boards almost right away and almost caused a shut down of the whole thing before it even launched.
Once I was hooked up with a board to demo I asked them if I could borrow some snowboarding pants, and possibly boots as well. They informed me that it was just a board demo and that I should have brought my own. It was then that I informed them that I was not actually a snowboarder...yet, but that was all about to change. The timing was perfect as I was already their golden boy for bringing the cool kids. One of the guys disappeared for a moment and returned with pants, a jacket, boots and even gloves as mine were clearly not adequate. I found out later that he was the official brand photographer and regularly snapped shots for posters and magazines of all the famous snowboarders of that time. I just remember his first name was Pat.
We all piled on to a school bus with a driver named Butch who wore a huge cowboy hat and blasted AC/DC from a boom box he had duck-taped to the dash. Once on the mountain Pat gave me a two hour lesson which I appreciated greatly. I learned quick and was flying off jumps within the day (I didn't say I landed them). The mountain was pretty empty and was magnificent all lit up at night. I was captivated from my first day. Even from the top of the chair we could see Butch doing donuts in the empty parking lot with the school bus. The revving diesel engine echoed loudly across the whole mountain. Pat and the rest of the brand reps hung out and took pictures of us sporting the new boards for their catalogue. I was the hero among my friends the next day at lunch and we continued night boarding with Butch, Pat and the whole crew every Wednesday night for the duration of the two month program. At the end of each night I thanked them profusely and returned all the borrowed gear. On the last day after everyone piled into cars to go home, one of them motioned for me to come back in to the warehouse. I opened the door to see everyone who worked there standing in a half circle around a snowboard and a pile of gear. They told me it was mine and that they had a great time hangen with me over the last two months.
I continued snowboarding for years barely paying for anything, always finding a way around the fee. For lift tickets, Shell gas stations had a great promotion they ran all winter for a few years. The deal was if you spent more than $30 to fill your tank they would give you a voucher for a buy one-get one free lift ticket. I would pick up a voucher on my way up then find someone in line to purchase a lift ticket and ask them to use the voucher to help me get one since they were going to buy one anyway. It never took me more than five minutes as people in the mountain sports community tend to look out for each other and are generally in a pretty good mood once they're about to get on the lift.
Snowboarding had become an important part of my life and it never cost me more that what it would have to have taken up tennis instead.
FREE SUSHI
I was living in Seattle in my early twenties bouncing around different low paying jobs and money was usually scarce (OK, always). I caught wind from a friend that there was a bar at the bottom of one of the ritzy hotels downtown that served free sushi during happy hour on Tuesdays. My roommate Kenton and I decided to go investigate. We came in dressed in T-shirts and torn shorts, sat down at the bar awkwardly, and waited. After about ten minutes I built up the courage to ask the bartender if in fact sushi was going to be served to us at no cost. He told us that the rumors were true but it wasn't entirely free as there was a one drink minimum to partake. Just then a few workers from the kitchen started bringing out trays of not only sushi but pot stickers and noodles as well. We each ordered our over priced drinks deciding that it was clearly still worth it. After attending this event a few weeks in a row, the bar tender who was also in his early twenties confided to us his disdain for the gig and started hooking us up with free drinks. He explained to us that he hated that wealthy people were being treated with free gourmet food while the homeless people outside couldn't afford a granola bar or something vigilant like that. I really didn't care if he wanted to be the Robin hood of beer or our friend or both, I was just thankful that I got my buzz on and a delicious meal just for tipping the guy every Tuesday.
Kenton and I agreed that the first three rules of free sushi was that you don't talk about free sushi. We had the awareness from our first visit that as soon as a few more tools like us found out about it and started infiltrating the country club atmosphere, everything would come crashing to a halt. We both showed up every Tuesday for months like we were monks and the bar was our temple. It eventually got to the point where I would starve myself all day just to be able to gorge on more sushi during that wonderful happy hour. Sure enough, true to our predictions one by one the riff raff were wandering in and exploiting what we pioneered. One day we arrived ten minutes early as usual and not to our surprise, it was announced via a note on the door that the complimentary sushi happy hour had ceased.
FREE MUSEUMS IN CANADA
The longest job I ever had before I started filmmaking full time lasted nine months before I got canned. It was working as a Deck hand/Server/Bus tour salesman/Luggage attendant for the Victoria Clipper, a high speed ferry that went from Seattle to Victoria, Canada and back once daily. I have a lot of crazy stories from this job involving everything from Whales to a dumpster full of puke that I promise I'll devote an entire blog post to in the future but for now I'm going to explain how I used my employment there to get me free stuff in Victoria that helped me develop a skill for getting free things elsewhere as well.
One perk of the job was a four hour layover in the very touristy town of Victoria. All crew members were given ten dollars for lunch and a membership to an upscale gym in the harbor. Victoria is known for a plethora of museums that range greatly in price and size. A wax museum, a bug museum, and a museum of history were just a few that were all a few blocks from each other. They all charged anywhere from $8 to $30 to enter and with four hours to kill every day, I wanted to go to them all. Over the summer I managed to visit every single one including Miniature World for free.
I came up with a monologue that I delivered to whoever was selling the tickets that I honed a little better each time. I would begin by making small talk and being sure to include that I was an employee of the Clipper who tended to the passengers for two hours every day on the way up from Seattle. I would go on casually about how people were always asking me for recommendations for how they should spend their time (time is code word for money of course) in the harbor. Since all they had to do was wave me on and it was clear I wasn't going away, inevitably they all did. I even rented a moped for two hours this way.
The experience got me thinking about how if I was clever enough I could probably get into anything anywhere if I knew exactly what to say. Since then I've talked my way into a lot of places including several concerts over the years or gotten in for a fraction of the price at the very least. I've become so good at this skill that when I go to a large concert with friends, I instruct them to not buy tickets ahead of time and to give me a chance to score them for free or incredibly cheap once we got there. I've never failed.
THE FREE BOX
My love for free eventually crossed paths with my hobby for filmmaking when I moved to Portland and became addicted to the show "Arrested Development". I desperately wanted to make a clever comedy web series about zany people in Portland but as usual, I had no money. Furthermore I also lacked a camera, a cast, experience, and when I say no money I mean the $200 a month I got in food stamps was the only way I stayed alive and even that ran thin halfway through each month. For some reason I still thought I could pull off producing a web series and owe a lot of that determination to the encouragement of Drew Hicks who co-created it with me. I had met Drew only a month before through my first attempt at networking with actors around Portland and we quickly found that we shared similar unrealistic ambitions and a lack of a bank account.
To make a long story short, we found a guy to lend us a camera and got all our props for free including a sixty dollar bong just by explaining to businesses what we were up to. We put a very official looking casting call on craigslist and scheduled auditions in a room we checked out for free at the public library. We called it "The Free Box" in reference to the popular Portland pastime of putting free boxes on every corner of the city during months of good weather. Of course The name of the show meant a lot more to Drew and I. We made the show for three years totaling 27 episodes and never spent more than ten dollars on any installment. It was rough around the edges but I learned a ton and each episode contained at least a few moments that were actually funny. It never got any sponsorship or picked up by a network but we did get a few great write ups from the local press and the five main actors would always get recognized around town.
Producing The Free Box week after week while paychecks were non existant really enforced my belief in the notion that anything is possible. Drew and I would show up to film industry networking events like celebrities and people would grill us with questions about where we got our funding. After explaining it to people without embellishing anything the response was usually negative as I could tell they just thought we were being jack asses and lying to them. Looking back, it was pretty unbelievable given what I now know about the industry but that's just the reason we were able to do it. We didn't know anything so we just figured it out as we went along our way instead of the way they tell you how to do it. The money saving lessons I learned while making The Free Box are applied in some way to almost every project I work on to this day and those episodes will always remind me of good times. I'll leave you with episode thirteen; "Free Beer". If this is the first episode you've seen, I'll catch you up a little. Lisa/Moonshadow is a twenty year old girl who accidentally turned herself into a Genie a few episodes back and is played by a man in his forties. You can watch them all in better quality than the Youtube uploads here: vimeo.com/user4781378/videos/sort:alphabetical/format:thumbnail
-1st Timothy 6:10
Money sucks. Some people think that it only sucks when you don't have any, but I say it sucks all the time. I'm not advocating Communism, that sucks too. I'm just saying that Money dictates far more of our lives than it should. Money starts wars and then sustains them. Money rips families apart and creates classism. Money breeds jealousy, greed, and depression. That's why I love when things are free, not because I'm a cheapskate or even "thrifty", but because free is just that; it's freedom. A transaction, or should I say an acquiring of something that does not involve money is a temporary release from the binds of the financial system we're so caught up in day after day weather we like it or not.
My uncle once told me there is a great power in giving something away for free. He was speaking from a marketing standpoint within the context of our conversation but I'm sure he would agree with me that the statement can be applied to an idea larger in scope as well. For me, and this is all intertwined with the van life, it's a philosophy. Maybe it's because I've struggled considerably with money over the course of my life but I absolutely hate being nickel and dimed for petty things. I can't stand getting ripped off on any scale. I could get a bad deal on a car or a sandwich and I'll probably be just as pissed. I am always on the hunt for a way not to pay. Over the years of getting into concerts for free, free haircuts, free dental work, and countless things large and small I've realized that there really is a power in "free" that super cedes the notion of simply getting a good deal.
One of the powers of getting something for free is it completely eliminates the chance of getting ripped off. You can't get mad if your sandals fall apart after a month if you found them on the street corner. Even though managing my finances hasn't been a strong point for me, I feel that it doesn't really matter if you're rich or poor when your wallet is being taken advantage of. It's the principal of getting what you paid for that matters. If I were a millionaire, I'd still get angry over an eight dollar beer at a music festival served to me in a plastic cup that's mostly foam. Someone at the same festival tosses me a warm PBR because I sat near him -highlight of my day (Free beer = new friend).
Which brings me to another power of free, you never forget the things you get for free (well not as easily at least). It's always special to get free stuff and a lot of my best memories are when I didn't have to pay the fee. The cost of something doesn't just set an arbitrary expectation (usually too high) for what you paid for, it sets a negative precedent from the get go that must be then turned positive if what you paid for delivers. Let's say you ride a roller coaster that cost fifteen dollars then another one that's thirty and you decided you had more fun on the fifteen dollar one. Most likely, you'll find yourself frustrated that you paid too much for the second one instead of relishing the fact that you had a lot of fun on the first. If you just rode two roller coasters without forking over any dough you probably wouldn't even be comparing them. The memory would play out in your brain as two rad roller coasters, and maybe if you were being really analytical that day, one ever radder than the other. Which makes the day the raddist! (sorry I couldn't help myself once I got to "radder" there was no going back).
At this point in my speech I can almost hear the nay sayers thinking to themselves in a condescending internal brain tone "well Jon, you can't just get everything for free, we live in a capitalist society, people need to make a living, how do you think they built that roller-....bla bla bla". Guess what? You're wrong! If you are an optimistic opportunist who believes in yourself you can get just about anything you want without paying for it. You've heard it before, Oprah has her vision boards, there's that cheesy DVD "The Secret" stacked on a spool underneath your soon to be outdated DVD player but the message is true; you are the master of your own destiny. If you want something bad enough, remain positive, and always assume you will get what you want, somehow it will come to be. Don't dwell on the question of "how" too hard but still consider it. The universe will conspire to make your dreams a reality. Now it's time for some great stories about free stuff.
FREE SNOWBOARD
I grew up in a house with a modest income, my parents weren't broke but because of the neighborhood we lived in, I was the poor kid by comparison. It hardly ever bothered me, I was always happy with what I had for the most part but certain things came up now and then that made me feel pretty left out because my family just couldn't afford it. The biggest one of those things was certainly snowboarding. In seventh grade, I did everything with my group of best buddies. Weekends were especially good hang out days except when the bike riding and swimming bliss days of summer turned to winter, I was alone. I would reunite with my friends on Monday at school where I had to hear about all the fun stuff that happened on the mountain during lunch. Sure I wanted to fit in but even more so it just sounded like a blast. I wanted to snowboard with my friends very badly but with all the gear and lift ticket prices, it was way out of range for my parents to just foot the bill and I understood that.
My wonderful mom was aware of my longing and one day she told me she heard on the radio that a local snowboard manufacturer was looking for kids to demo their new boards. The ad went on to say that they would also provide a ride from the factory to the mountain with a lift ticket voucher. She bought me some cheap gloves and goggles and drove me down to the warehouse to see what it was all about. The radio message reached a handful of kids but shockingly, there wasn't an overwhelming response so I called up my buddies and instructed them to join me as fast as possible. The people running the program immediately took a liking to me and my eight or so buddies because the rest of the kids were horribly disrespectful and acted very entitled to their free stuff. A few of them were caught stealing boards almost right away and almost caused a shut down of the whole thing before it even launched.
Once I was hooked up with a board to demo I asked them if I could borrow some snowboarding pants, and possibly boots as well. They informed me that it was just a board demo and that I should have brought my own. It was then that I informed them that I was not actually a snowboarder...yet, but that was all about to change. The timing was perfect as I was already their golden boy for bringing the cool kids. One of the guys disappeared for a moment and returned with pants, a jacket, boots and even gloves as mine were clearly not adequate. I found out later that he was the official brand photographer and regularly snapped shots for posters and magazines of all the famous snowboarders of that time. I just remember his first name was Pat.
We all piled on to a school bus with a driver named Butch who wore a huge cowboy hat and blasted AC/DC from a boom box he had duck-taped to the dash. Once on the mountain Pat gave me a two hour lesson which I appreciated greatly. I learned quick and was flying off jumps within the day (I didn't say I landed them). The mountain was pretty empty and was magnificent all lit up at night. I was captivated from my first day. Even from the top of the chair we could see Butch doing donuts in the empty parking lot with the school bus. The revving diesel engine echoed loudly across the whole mountain. Pat and the rest of the brand reps hung out and took pictures of us sporting the new boards for their catalogue. I was the hero among my friends the next day at lunch and we continued night boarding with Butch, Pat and the whole crew every Wednesday night for the duration of the two month program. At the end of each night I thanked them profusely and returned all the borrowed gear. On the last day after everyone piled into cars to go home, one of them motioned for me to come back in to the warehouse. I opened the door to see everyone who worked there standing in a half circle around a snowboard and a pile of gear. They told me it was mine and that they had a great time hangen with me over the last two months.
I continued snowboarding for years barely paying for anything, always finding a way around the fee. For lift tickets, Shell gas stations had a great promotion they ran all winter for a few years. The deal was if you spent more than $30 to fill your tank they would give you a voucher for a buy one-get one free lift ticket. I would pick up a voucher on my way up then find someone in line to purchase a lift ticket and ask them to use the voucher to help me get one since they were going to buy one anyway. It never took me more than five minutes as people in the mountain sports community tend to look out for each other and are generally in a pretty good mood once they're about to get on the lift.
Snowboarding had become an important part of my life and it never cost me more that what it would have to have taken up tennis instead.
FREE SUSHI
I was living in Seattle in my early twenties bouncing around different low paying jobs and money was usually scarce (OK, always). I caught wind from a friend that there was a bar at the bottom of one of the ritzy hotels downtown that served free sushi during happy hour on Tuesdays. My roommate Kenton and I decided to go investigate. We came in dressed in T-shirts and torn shorts, sat down at the bar awkwardly, and waited. After about ten minutes I built up the courage to ask the bartender if in fact sushi was going to be served to us at no cost. He told us that the rumors were true but it wasn't entirely free as there was a one drink minimum to partake. Just then a few workers from the kitchen started bringing out trays of not only sushi but pot stickers and noodles as well. We each ordered our over priced drinks deciding that it was clearly still worth it. After attending this event a few weeks in a row, the bar tender who was also in his early twenties confided to us his disdain for the gig and started hooking us up with free drinks. He explained to us that he hated that wealthy people were being treated with free gourmet food while the homeless people outside couldn't afford a granola bar or something vigilant like that. I really didn't care if he wanted to be the Robin hood of beer or our friend or both, I was just thankful that I got my buzz on and a delicious meal just for tipping the guy every Tuesday.
Kenton and I agreed that the first three rules of free sushi was that you don't talk about free sushi. We had the awareness from our first visit that as soon as a few more tools like us found out about it and started infiltrating the country club atmosphere, everything would come crashing to a halt. We both showed up every Tuesday for months like we were monks and the bar was our temple. It eventually got to the point where I would starve myself all day just to be able to gorge on more sushi during that wonderful happy hour. Sure enough, true to our predictions one by one the riff raff were wandering in and exploiting what we pioneered. One day we arrived ten minutes early as usual and not to our surprise, it was announced via a note on the door that the complimentary sushi happy hour had ceased.
FREE MUSEUMS IN CANADA
The longest job I ever had before I started filmmaking full time lasted nine months before I got canned. It was working as a Deck hand/Server/Bus tour salesman/Luggage attendant for the Victoria Clipper, a high speed ferry that went from Seattle to Victoria, Canada and back once daily. I have a lot of crazy stories from this job involving everything from Whales to a dumpster full of puke that I promise I'll devote an entire blog post to in the future but for now I'm going to explain how I used my employment there to get me free stuff in Victoria that helped me develop a skill for getting free things elsewhere as well.
One perk of the job was a four hour layover in the very touristy town of Victoria. All crew members were given ten dollars for lunch and a membership to an upscale gym in the harbor. Victoria is known for a plethora of museums that range greatly in price and size. A wax museum, a bug museum, and a museum of history were just a few that were all a few blocks from each other. They all charged anywhere from $8 to $30 to enter and with four hours to kill every day, I wanted to go to them all. Over the summer I managed to visit every single one including Miniature World for free.
I came up with a monologue that I delivered to whoever was selling the tickets that I honed a little better each time. I would begin by making small talk and being sure to include that I was an employee of the Clipper who tended to the passengers for two hours every day on the way up from Seattle. I would go on casually about how people were always asking me for recommendations for how they should spend their time (time is code word for money of course) in the harbor. Since all they had to do was wave me on and it was clear I wasn't going away, inevitably they all did. I even rented a moped for two hours this way.
The experience got me thinking about how if I was clever enough I could probably get into anything anywhere if I knew exactly what to say. Since then I've talked my way into a lot of places including several concerts over the years or gotten in for a fraction of the price at the very least. I've become so good at this skill that when I go to a large concert with friends, I instruct them to not buy tickets ahead of time and to give me a chance to score them for free or incredibly cheap once we got there. I've never failed.
THE FREE BOX
My love for free eventually crossed paths with my hobby for filmmaking when I moved to Portland and became addicted to the show "Arrested Development". I desperately wanted to make a clever comedy web series about zany people in Portland but as usual, I had no money. Furthermore I also lacked a camera, a cast, experience, and when I say no money I mean the $200 a month I got in food stamps was the only way I stayed alive and even that ran thin halfway through each month. For some reason I still thought I could pull off producing a web series and owe a lot of that determination to the encouragement of Drew Hicks who co-created it with me. I had met Drew only a month before through my first attempt at networking with actors around Portland and we quickly found that we shared similar unrealistic ambitions and a lack of a bank account.
To make a long story short, we found a guy to lend us a camera and got all our props for free including a sixty dollar bong just by explaining to businesses what we were up to. We put a very official looking casting call on craigslist and scheduled auditions in a room we checked out for free at the public library. We called it "The Free Box" in reference to the popular Portland pastime of putting free boxes on every corner of the city during months of good weather. Of course The name of the show meant a lot more to Drew and I. We made the show for three years totaling 27 episodes and never spent more than ten dollars on any installment. It was rough around the edges but I learned a ton and each episode contained at least a few moments that were actually funny. It never got any sponsorship or picked up by a network but we did get a few great write ups from the local press and the five main actors would always get recognized around town.
Producing The Free Box week after week while paychecks were non existant really enforced my belief in the notion that anything is possible. Drew and I would show up to film industry networking events like celebrities and people would grill us with questions about where we got our funding. After explaining it to people without embellishing anything the response was usually negative as I could tell they just thought we were being jack asses and lying to them. Looking back, it was pretty unbelievable given what I now know about the industry but that's just the reason we were able to do it. We didn't know anything so we just figured it out as we went along our way instead of the way they tell you how to do it. The money saving lessons I learned while making The Free Box are applied in some way to almost every project I work on to this day and those episodes will always remind me of good times. I'll leave you with episode thirteen; "Free Beer". If this is the first episode you've seen, I'll catch you up a little. Lisa/Moonshadow is a twenty year old girl who accidentally turned herself into a Genie a few episodes back and is played by a man in his forties. You can watch them all in better quality than the Youtube uploads here: vimeo.com/user4781378/videos/sort:alphabetical/format:thumbnail
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Living in the Now.
Over the thirty-one years I've been rotating around on this giant ball suspended in space I've been given the suggestion by various types of individuals I've encountered to "live in the now". They all had their own unique take to what that statement meant to them, from career advice to a spiritual and/or philosophic approach to life. However, the theme that seemed to unify all points of view was simply because; the present moment is in fact all that exists at any given moment. The past is always the past, it can't be altered, and the future is always unknown no matter what educated predictions one might make. Even simpler yet; Neither the past or the future exists, ever. By definition the present moment is the only thing that is actually there since the words "past" and "future" are words created within our language to reference something that no longer exists or has yet to become real.
The concept of "living in the now" is an extremely important goal to me, possibly the most important of all goals. Furthermore, it's one that I have come to accept; that constantly getting a little bit closer to understanding it is the most I can ever hope for. The way our brain is designed to function doesn't allow an utterly complete understanding of the now, and that's a good thing. Not only does that allow us to progress in life but it makes it a little easier to deal with. The ongoing mortal quest for the now doesn't bother me, for now. It used to, but that's the past, you see where I'm going with this? I'll divert for a few paragraphs with some stories pertaining to this matter that are mildly relevant at best because of course, they are now just stories of the past after all.
When I first moved to Portland I saw a sticker that caught my attention. Well, maybe it didn't catch my attention the first time but I remember the moment it finally did very well because there were about twenty of the same sticker all over a bus stop and I realized that I had seen it a few times before. It was the simplest sticker in design and message I had ever seen. It was black with white text using a bold but unassuming font and in all caps read: NOW IS ALL YOU HAVE. Whatever the motivation was for whoever put the stickers all over town was irrelevant to me at the time. I did not try and guess what type of organization it was trying to promote within Portland or elsewhere. It did cause me to pause and consider what the phrase meant to me at that moment -which I found out later was the first and foremost motivation for the stickers. The second motivation was in fact band promotion for the Portland based psych rock group "NIAYH" (N-eye-yah). I was in a band-with-a-message myself at the time called "The Repair". It was a three piece all vocal group comprised of two female singers one being my sister and me doing human beat box. About a month after my moment with the stickers, The Repair was invited to perform at a small music festival called "The One Family Gathering" located in the desert about a seven hour drive from Portland. It was there that I first met the guys from NIAYH. I was quite impressed by their show and later sat down at a community fire pit where the band was relaxing at and after introducing myself I suggested we make some videos together when we got back to Portland. A week later I went to a show of theirs that happened to be at a venue only a few blocks from my house and filmed it. The only camera I had access to at the time was a cheap little digital handy-cam I got off Craigslist for fifty dollars. I wanted to impress them so I turned the footage into a psychedelic music video comprised of some home made effects using multiple televisions feed-backing light into each other. The result was a huge success given the limited tools I had to work with and subsequently started an artistic collaboration with the band that lasted over the next several years.
It was apparent from the start that this group including the bigger circle of friends and friends of friends that partied together with the band were not my typical type to be associated with. In fact, is was quite awkward at times. In the beginning, besides having a mutual love for music and anything that pertains to expressing one's self (art in general), we shared very little in common. I didn't dress like them, I didn't talk like them, I really didn't even behave like them for the most part. I stuck around for two reasons.
The first is that despite our clashing cultures, the group accepted me instantly which is very unique in a divided youth scene in a city that prides itself on being particularly hip. I hung around a group in Seattle briefly years before that appeared similar in style on the surface but I quickly found out that I was not welcome at their exclusive social gatherings.
The second is over time we learned from each other that underneath all the perceived social laws that often times seem to govern, we shared an attitude of progress and striving to become better at our art. It was the idea of not settling for anything less than the best you can be and within that taking specific effort to appreciate the process and not just the result.
Over many parties that included everything from 50+ person jam sessions to a human cake, one by one I asked each member of NIAYH what "Now Is All You Have" meant, each time acting like I never had asked anyone before. Instead of a common mission statement delivered as if it were rehearsed like one of their songs I got five different insightful answers from unique perspectives. I'm not going to try and recall those five accounts of what was said to me, rather I'm going to take this next paragraph and try to explain what it means to me currently.
To live in the now isn't just about appreciating the present moment for what it is. It's much more than that. It's about dealing with anxiety and depression. it's about achieving happiness through being content. It's feeling a sense of belonging, a sensation of oneness to the Earth including everyone and everything on it. When broken down, meditation is basically deciding to take a moment and relish the now. All the other benefits of meditation will be learned naturally if you do this. I have to admit that for years I struggled with the concept arguing that if I ignored the past and the future then my life would be in shambles. What I've come to realize is that living in the now is not about ignoring the past and future it's about appreciating the present moment no matter what it is and thus you can appreciate the past and future as wonderful moments you appreciated and will appreciate. If you didn't appreciate them when you had them they wouldn't be remembered as moments you appreciated. The same goes for the future; if you don't anticipate that you will appreciate the coming moment, you probably wont when it arrives. You don't have time to decide to appreciate a moment, you just do or you don't. The present has nothing to do with time; time doesn't exist in the present. Time doesn't freeze or slow down when you reach this level of understanding, it quite simply just doesn't apply. If time were a factor in the present, it wouldn't be the present at all it would be somewhere before or after it.
I've learned a very simple way to remind myself to feel the present moment throughout my day without causing my head to spin with the physics and philosophy behind it. It's simply to breathe, and not just any old breathing but taking a long controlled deep breath and exhale slowly. While doing this I think about nothing else but how wonderful it is to be a human being on planet Earth taking in air provided for me to be alive. On the inhale I concentrate on the feeling of all my organs including my heart and brain responding subtly to the new oxygen and how dependent they are on that single breath. The small increase in heart rate. The feeling of being slightly more awake and clear in my thoughts. Even the muscles in my back doing their small but necessary job in assisting to the expansion of my torso in just the right way to allow my lungs to inflate. Then I exhale and leave all those thoughts behind and just be.
Another thing I often think about to raise my awareness of the present is time travel. I find that thinking about something impossible helps me have a better grip on the possible. Also, taking myself intentionally out of the present helps me realize it's there in the first place. The way my little mental exercise works is instead of thinking about what it would be like to travel into the future or past, what I would encounter, and how I would deal with it; I pretend that I am from the past and just traveled to here and now. That way it's much more real. Everything I see and hear around me is from the future and is absolutely stunning -good and bad. I see a coffee shop absolutely full of people glued to their laptops and smart phones and wonder what a person (me at the moment) would say if he just zapped here from the seventeen hundreds. There are positive and negative reactions that conjure up. For instance I think about how much less connective conversation we have when electronic devices are with us at all times and what effect that has on society. At the same time I think about how much more valuable information the technology is allowing us to receive and how it's rapidly expanding our knowledge and overall interconnectedness across the internet. At least I think that's what seventeen hundreds Jon would think. That's just one small example of course. Most importantly and amazingly, playing this silly little mind game allows me to feel everything around me easier. Think for a moment how different it would be to actually travel through time and be in another era as opposed to watching a movie about it. I can guarantee you that if we could travel into the future, as soon as we arrived and stepped out of the time machine we would instantly have a whole new feeling and meaning of what it is to exist in that very moment. Everything from the air we breathe, to the speed people walk and talk, to the collective human consciousness frequency would be different. If I concentrate hard enough I can almost feel the unique sensation of right now, right now -and it's absolutely incredible. Which brings me to one final example of why time is meaningless and a flimsy framework for us to exist in at best.
The speed at which we live at can often times be overwhelming. As I said before, time doesn't really exist like we commonly think of it. It's all relative to what you're comparing it to. A year to a five year old seems longer because it actually is. It's one fifth of his or her entire perception of time. A year to an eighty year old is one of eighty others by comparison and thus is actually shorter, not according to simple math but according to that individual's perception (more complex mathematics can account for this). I believe the same is true for the Earth and even the universe. As time passes it essentially creates more of it and by comparison seems to travel faster and faster. Instead of panicking that I'm not using this precious ever increasing time wisely, I think of it as more evidence that we are infinite beings that aren't actually bound by the laws of time at all, and that makes me happy to be here right now.
I could write about this subject for many more pages but I fear my tangents would start to loose focus fairly quickly. I'll leave you with a short video I shot a while ago of the band NIAYH. It documents when they drove their bus to the County fair in Eugene to put on a renegade show in the campground. It was supposed to serve as just a teaser for a feature length film about the band and the meaning behind the statement "Now is All You Have" but because of lacking funds the project got put on hold and then the band dissolved over the next year. The good thing is, it isn't cut like a teaser and the piece stands on it's own quite well. Here's the link:
The concept of "living in the now" is an extremely important goal to me, possibly the most important of all goals. Furthermore, it's one that I have come to accept; that constantly getting a little bit closer to understanding it is the most I can ever hope for. The way our brain is designed to function doesn't allow an utterly complete understanding of the now, and that's a good thing. Not only does that allow us to progress in life but it makes it a little easier to deal with. The ongoing mortal quest for the now doesn't bother me, for now. It used to, but that's the past, you see where I'm going with this? I'll divert for a few paragraphs with some stories pertaining to this matter that are mildly relevant at best because of course, they are now just stories of the past after all.
When I first moved to Portland I saw a sticker that caught my attention. Well, maybe it didn't catch my attention the first time but I remember the moment it finally did very well because there were about twenty of the same sticker all over a bus stop and I realized that I had seen it a few times before. It was the simplest sticker in design and message I had ever seen. It was black with white text using a bold but unassuming font and in all caps read: NOW IS ALL YOU HAVE. Whatever the motivation was for whoever put the stickers all over town was irrelevant to me at the time. I did not try and guess what type of organization it was trying to promote within Portland or elsewhere. It did cause me to pause and consider what the phrase meant to me at that moment -which I found out later was the first and foremost motivation for the stickers. The second motivation was in fact band promotion for the Portland based psych rock group "NIAYH" (N-eye-yah). I was in a band-with-a-message myself at the time called "The Repair". It was a three piece all vocal group comprised of two female singers one being my sister and me doing human beat box. About a month after my moment with the stickers, The Repair was invited to perform at a small music festival called "The One Family Gathering" located in the desert about a seven hour drive from Portland. It was there that I first met the guys from NIAYH. I was quite impressed by their show and later sat down at a community fire pit where the band was relaxing at and after introducing myself I suggested we make some videos together when we got back to Portland. A week later I went to a show of theirs that happened to be at a venue only a few blocks from my house and filmed it. The only camera I had access to at the time was a cheap little digital handy-cam I got off Craigslist for fifty dollars. I wanted to impress them so I turned the footage into a psychedelic music video comprised of some home made effects using multiple televisions feed-backing light into each other. The result was a huge success given the limited tools I had to work with and subsequently started an artistic collaboration with the band that lasted over the next several years.
It was apparent from the start that this group including the bigger circle of friends and friends of friends that partied together with the band were not my typical type to be associated with. In fact, is was quite awkward at times. In the beginning, besides having a mutual love for music and anything that pertains to expressing one's self (art in general), we shared very little in common. I didn't dress like them, I didn't talk like them, I really didn't even behave like them for the most part. I stuck around for two reasons.
The first is that despite our clashing cultures, the group accepted me instantly which is very unique in a divided youth scene in a city that prides itself on being particularly hip. I hung around a group in Seattle briefly years before that appeared similar in style on the surface but I quickly found out that I was not welcome at their exclusive social gatherings.
The second is over time we learned from each other that underneath all the perceived social laws that often times seem to govern, we shared an attitude of progress and striving to become better at our art. It was the idea of not settling for anything less than the best you can be and within that taking specific effort to appreciate the process and not just the result.
Over many parties that included everything from 50+ person jam sessions to a human cake, one by one I asked each member of NIAYH what "Now Is All You Have" meant, each time acting like I never had asked anyone before. Instead of a common mission statement delivered as if it were rehearsed like one of their songs I got five different insightful answers from unique perspectives. I'm not going to try and recall those five accounts of what was said to me, rather I'm going to take this next paragraph and try to explain what it means to me currently.
To live in the now isn't just about appreciating the present moment for what it is. It's much more than that. It's about dealing with anxiety and depression. it's about achieving happiness through being content. It's feeling a sense of belonging, a sensation of oneness to the Earth including everyone and everything on it. When broken down, meditation is basically deciding to take a moment and relish the now. All the other benefits of meditation will be learned naturally if you do this. I have to admit that for years I struggled with the concept arguing that if I ignored the past and the future then my life would be in shambles. What I've come to realize is that living in the now is not about ignoring the past and future it's about appreciating the present moment no matter what it is and thus you can appreciate the past and future as wonderful moments you appreciated and will appreciate. If you didn't appreciate them when you had them they wouldn't be remembered as moments you appreciated. The same goes for the future; if you don't anticipate that you will appreciate the coming moment, you probably wont when it arrives. You don't have time to decide to appreciate a moment, you just do or you don't. The present has nothing to do with time; time doesn't exist in the present. Time doesn't freeze or slow down when you reach this level of understanding, it quite simply just doesn't apply. If time were a factor in the present, it wouldn't be the present at all it would be somewhere before or after it.
I've learned a very simple way to remind myself to feel the present moment throughout my day without causing my head to spin with the physics and philosophy behind it. It's simply to breathe, and not just any old breathing but taking a long controlled deep breath and exhale slowly. While doing this I think about nothing else but how wonderful it is to be a human being on planet Earth taking in air provided for me to be alive. On the inhale I concentrate on the feeling of all my organs including my heart and brain responding subtly to the new oxygen and how dependent they are on that single breath. The small increase in heart rate. The feeling of being slightly more awake and clear in my thoughts. Even the muscles in my back doing their small but necessary job in assisting to the expansion of my torso in just the right way to allow my lungs to inflate. Then I exhale and leave all those thoughts behind and just be.
Another thing I often think about to raise my awareness of the present is time travel. I find that thinking about something impossible helps me have a better grip on the possible. Also, taking myself intentionally out of the present helps me realize it's there in the first place. The way my little mental exercise works is instead of thinking about what it would be like to travel into the future or past, what I would encounter, and how I would deal with it; I pretend that I am from the past and just traveled to here and now. That way it's much more real. Everything I see and hear around me is from the future and is absolutely stunning -good and bad. I see a coffee shop absolutely full of people glued to their laptops and smart phones and wonder what a person (me at the moment) would say if he just zapped here from the seventeen hundreds. There are positive and negative reactions that conjure up. For instance I think about how much less connective conversation we have when electronic devices are with us at all times and what effect that has on society. At the same time I think about how much more valuable information the technology is allowing us to receive and how it's rapidly expanding our knowledge and overall interconnectedness across the internet. At least I think that's what seventeen hundreds Jon would think. That's just one small example of course. Most importantly and amazingly, playing this silly little mind game allows me to feel everything around me easier. Think for a moment how different it would be to actually travel through time and be in another era as opposed to watching a movie about it. I can guarantee you that if we could travel into the future, as soon as we arrived and stepped out of the time machine we would instantly have a whole new feeling and meaning of what it is to exist in that very moment. Everything from the air we breathe, to the speed people walk and talk, to the collective human consciousness frequency would be different. If I concentrate hard enough I can almost feel the unique sensation of right now, right now -and it's absolutely incredible. Which brings me to one final example of why time is meaningless and a flimsy framework for us to exist in at best.
The speed at which we live at can often times be overwhelming. As I said before, time doesn't really exist like we commonly think of it. It's all relative to what you're comparing it to. A year to a five year old seems longer because it actually is. It's one fifth of his or her entire perception of time. A year to an eighty year old is one of eighty others by comparison and thus is actually shorter, not according to simple math but according to that individual's perception (more complex mathematics can account for this). I believe the same is true for the Earth and even the universe. As time passes it essentially creates more of it and by comparison seems to travel faster and faster. Instead of panicking that I'm not using this precious ever increasing time wisely, I think of it as more evidence that we are infinite beings that aren't actually bound by the laws of time at all, and that makes me happy to be here right now.
I could write about this subject for many more pages but I fear my tangents would start to loose focus fairly quickly. I'll leave you with a short video I shot a while ago of the band NIAYH. It documents when they drove their bus to the County fair in Eugene to put on a renegade show in the campground. It was supposed to serve as just a teaser for a feature length film about the band and the meaning behind the statement "Now is All You Have" but because of lacking funds the project got put on hold and then the band dissolved over the next year. The good thing is, it isn't cut like a teaser and the piece stands on it's own quite well. Here's the link:
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