When I first began work on a documentary in 2002 about Los Angeles guitar genius Nels Cline (more recently exposed to larger audiences through his work in Wilco), and Zeena Parkins (who at the time was primarily engaged as Bjork's harp player and co-writer of the Vespertine album), I had no way of knowing I was beginning a journey that would find me conducting extensive research on the history of convicts in Australia, consulting with scientists near the arctic circle about geophysical activity throughout Alaska, and racing China's Minister of Culture to hunt down a man (actually he's two men and a woman in the same body...a story former First Lady Laura Bush can tell you) who has spent over a quarter of a century building a secret city hidden in the middle of 2,000 acres of barren desert he's acquired outside of El Paso, to enshrine multiple tons of pig bone and motor oil laden art he began making in the New York City junkyard he lived in while serving as a legal consultant to the United Nations.

Nor could I have imagined the journey would involve pursuing a chainsaw orchestra, a singing dog, a man who screams into (and chews on) amplified glass, a string quartet written for barbed wire fences performed by Kronos Quartet at the Sydney Opera House, a woman who makes rhythmic and melodic counterpoint from DOT Matrix printers, a chamber orchestra of bicycle-powered instruments, a woman making music from the "real-time" chemical activities of plants via electrodes (and blowing up trains using the same method), housesitting at the original headquarters of the Black Panthers, and making a pilgrimage to the appearance of Jesus Christ on a flour tortilla enshrined in New Mexico since the 1970s.

In between working as a private investigator, a "Venetian" gondolier, and a touring drummer in order to fund the project (hell, I even became ordained to perform wedding ceremonies), making this film has involved driving alone all the way across the United States in a Budget truck to obtain a camera (my payment for helping a friend move), living out of a car or tent in locations around the world for months at a time to film, and occasionally writing and performing music along the way to help pay for food and gas each day, which generally worked well, if you don't count the night the National Guard escorted me out of the subway in Times Square with M-16s after my performance with objects found around New York City. Or the night I was evicted from a home in North Dakota in the middle of a tornado because a woman who lived there believed I was performing a satanic ritual in her living room, where I was in fact sound asleep.

Somehow through it all, I've arrived at my original purpose: a film that, through the lives of four individuals, explores music not as a form of entertainment, career, or even self-expression, but as a tool to develop more deeply meaningful relationships with the people and circumstances around them. A film that investigates that active ingredient in music, and people, that has the mysterious power to gnaw at the roots of our shortcomings, and speak to the best of what we are. A film that puts a microscope on the many colors of communion.

This exhibition features 35mm photographs I took during my nomadic journeys throughout the film's production, providing a window into the larger world in which the film is rooted.

-Steve Elkins
July 2009

Title: Normandy, France
Date: February 2005
Medium: 35mm Film

This photograph was taken at the end of a European tour drumming for The Autumns with The Dears of Montreal as our tour mates. On my way to Amsterdam to film experimental cellist Francis-Marie Uitti and mystic Kaballah percussionist Z'EV, I took this photograph of Omaha Beach, the site of the Allied invasion of Normandy during World War II, known as D-Day. Living in a car through a European winter is an experience I hope to never relive, though moments like this provided another kind of warmth.

Title: Chimayo, New Mexico
Date: October 2008
Medium: 35mm Film

One of my favorite details about New Mexico landscapes is the common appearance of elaborate homemade religious shrines, often in the middle of nowhere, which straddle an uncertain aesthetic line between the Christianity of Spanish conquistadors and 20th century Americana...but always incorporating red chilis. This homemade shrine, which I came across in Chimayo, was also composed of Christmas lights, sporks, candy hearts, and polaroid fragments mixed with local flowers and prayer beads.

Title: California
Date: September 2008
Medium: 35mm Film

In September 2008, I drove to Big Sur to film guitarist Nels Cline (of Geraldine Fibbers, Destroy All Nels Cline, Wilco, etc) perform at the Henry Miller Memorial Library, perched on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific. My car chose to protest with engine meltdown knowing I had every intention to push it past its limits for this film. But if it hadn't broken down I may never have discovered this view of the California coast on my northward search for a mechanic.

Title: New York City
Date: April 2005
Medium: 35mm Film

I needed a camera and a ticket to New York City to do early work on my film. The solution came from my friend Ben Edlund, the ever-fascinating creator of the Saturday morning cartoon "The Tick," who offered to give me his camera if I drove his belongings in a Budget truck from New York to Los Angeles, and spend time researching shipwrecks and ghost stories around Lake Michigan on the way for a television show he was developing. Prior to the journey, I was allowed to use his loft on Bleecker Street as a base to film in New York City for over a month.

My subsequent journey across the U.S. to earn my camera turned out to be full of its own adventures, including arriving in Chicago to unexpectedly become Dustin Hoffman's chauffeur on the set of Mark Forster's film "Stranger Than Fiction," where I witnessed firsthand Hoffman's zealous addiction to the music of Snoop Dogg. Despite interest from Vice Magazine to purchase Ben's apartment for use as an office and party pad, last I heard it was never sold, though all of its gutted contents completed their odyssey from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Title: Montana
Date: June 2003
Medium: 35mm Film

This was one of the many moments in the making of this film where I had to ask myself, "How the hell did I get here?" In this case, I basically climbed up a mountain in Montana on my way home from filming in New York, because I really wanted to see mountain goats up close. The camera I used to take this photograph was not equipped with a zoom, so this image reflects precisely how close I got.

Title: Seattle, Washington
Date: November 2003
Medium: 35mm Film

I drove from Los Angeles to Seattle in November 2003 to film guitarist/composer Fred Frith. Frith is known for constantly re-inventing how guitars can be played; no two concerts are ever alike, though you may expect to find him strumming his guitar with paint brushes, dropping bags of rice on the strings, and pulling balls of yarn across his pickups.

Frith's numerous compositions include ensembles performing his photographs as musical scores, a piece composed for a "walking" orchestra which performs as it wanders through French towns, a symphonic piece based on the writings of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, an opera for the Theatre du Point Aveugle and "15 unemployed rock musicians," and the score for Rivers and Tides (Thomas Riedelsheimer's documentary film about Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy). Frith's international nomadic encounters are the subject of Werner Penzel and Nicolas Humbert's award-winning film "Step Across The Border."

Title: Wyoming
Date: June 2003
Medium: 35mm Film

Driving through central Wyoming on my way to film in New York, I came across a lone house in an eternity of wilderness, where a man in a blood-smeared butcher's apron and rain boots invited me inside to see his collection of bison skulls. Recognizing this as a scenario from a slasher film (or at least a prelude to a Cormac McCarthy inspired massacre), I declined his invitation, but before making my discreetly hasty escape, I managed to capture this shot of a mound of bones piled on his lawn, with the occasional garnish of barbed wire wrapped like crowns of thorns. It was of staggering proportions...this photograph was taken from standing height looking up.

Title: Paris, France
Date: March 2009
Medium: 35mm Film

During March of this year, I spent time editing my film in Paris. I was lucky to have my camera with me in the Montmartre district one day to capture one particularly inspired resident's view of his city. He scaled the post freehand in about 10 seconds, while balancing a spinning basketball on a rod protruding from his teeth.

Title: New Mexico
Date: October 2008
Medium: 35mm Film

Shot near Taos, New Mexico, within sight of several "earthships," a community of self-sufficient biotecture dwellings which appear to be the bastard children of Antonio Gaudi and spaceships, sprawled across 347 acres of rolling mesa between the Sangre de Cristo mountains. This is just one of the stunning landscapes I passed through on my way to film at the Ft. Worth Museum of Modern Art in Texas, where San Francisco sound artist Bob Ostertag and Quebecois animator Pierre Hebert (who makes films by scratching on negatives with a knife) were making live cinema about the 2006 Beirut bombings out of toys and garbage.

Title: Prague, Czech Republic
Date: April 2009
Medium: 35mm Film

One of the most unusual experiences in the entire production of this film was a trip to the remote rural farming village of Violin in Slovakia, in search of a museum devoted to the Rosenberg dynasty, a family of violin geniuses and perverts...who don't actually exist. They were invented by one of the artists in my film, Jon Rose, himself a creator of mutated violin instruments of such encyclopedic varieties of madness that no one believed one person could make them. So Jon invented a fictional dynasty and claimed they were the real inventors, knowing people would be more inclined to believe fiction over reality (which in this case turned out to be true), then released most of his CDs under their family name, published a detailed two volume history about them, and even founded the Rosenberg Museum in rural Slovakia, where locals expecting an inauguration concert of Mozart were treated to performances such as Fluxus artist Ben Patterson sawing his violin case into pieces and placing them in a blender to make marmalade.

As Rose claims, "I had to plagiarize my own work in order to support it. There's no word in English for what I've done." Exhibitions of the Rosenberg dynasty have taken place around the world, from Paris to Tokyo, and after filming a recent Rosenberg festival in Brno, Czech Republic, I came to Prague inevitably pondering Kafka-esque questions about identity, perception, and the ways in which history is formed and remembered, which may explain my choices of content and layering within this photo.

Title: Pursuit (Sydney, Australia)
Date: February 2009
Medium: 35mm Film

In addition to spending the last quarter century playing fences around the world as musical instruments, Jon Rose has designed and built countless new instruments of his own. In February 2009, I filmed him creating a chamber orchestra of bicycle powered instruments in Australia, which debuted in an abandoned train factory, with the audience standing in the middle while the bicyclists rode around them. The man in the white pants just behind the bike was actually the singer of Violent Femmes (who lives in Tasmania), whom I filmed testing out the DJ-Turntable-Cycle during our week of preparations.

In an interesting coincidence, the streets outside the factory were simultaneously filled with bicyclists riding (with touch screen computers on their bikes) through a city-wide interactive game produced by UK urban gamers known as Blast Theory, whose other works include "Kidnap" (1998), in which two members of the public were kidnapped as part of a lottery with the resulting event streamed online, a mixed reality game called "Uncle Roy All Around You" (2003) in which players search through the streets for Uncle Roy using handheld computers and a virtual city, and "Day Of The Figurines" (2006), where the audience themselves populate an imaginary town and guide its outcomes.

Title: New York City
Date: April 2005
Medium: 35mm Film

Title: Hida, Japan
Date: October 2004
Medium: 35mm Film

I stumbled upon the Zen monastery during one of many train rides into the central mountains of Japan, which I insisted on taking to find some preservation of an older country, removed from the cornucopia of neon pink, J-pop, neo-Harajuku hipsters, and coffin hotels. Fall leaves were everywhere, and bullet trains were nowhere to be found. Here, the much older trains had to take the difficult mountain passes at a more leisurely pace, as we passed spectacular valleys, rivers, and rice farms. Late one night, I stepped off the train into a village shrouded in the perfect mist of a Japanese landscape painting, to find the air imbued with the sound of children humming local folk music as they were carried through the streets in pagodas resting on the shoulders of farmers. As I walked down cobbled streets and across red bridges spanning rivers that cut labyrinthine paths through the village, I found myself weaving between slow processions of villagers, who emerged from the mist swinging red Japanese lanterns that bathed the two-hundred year old wood of the surrounding merchant houses in a luminescent glow.

An elderly Zen monk allowed me to sleep in his monastery in exchange for some small chores around his shrine and garden. But he insisted it was mandatory that I meet with him regularly for tea and miso paste infused with maple leaf burning on a candle. The monk explained that the process of serving tea in Zen Buddhism was so important, that the entire design of Zen monasteries was intended to be an active part of the experience. "The rooms are bare," he explained, "because drinking tea is a celebration of poverty. It is learning to be sufficient within the insufficiency of things. In Zen, the reality of a room is not to be found in its four walls, but in the empty space between them. Only by focusing on what is not in the room, will you realize that you actually possess something in your poverty."

Whenever the room was emptied of his voice, it was obvious what the room did contain. The light crackle of the burning log. The smell of maple leaf. Moonlight. The sound of raindrops dripping off the leaves outside. The faint taste of tea in my mouth. Liquid simmering in the suspended pot. In this room, where nothing was happening and almost nothing was contained, every sensation became a well of gratitude. "When you have nothing," the monk said, "everything becomes a treasure. No room is empty when the mind is full."

Title: Thar Desert, India
Date: January 2006
Medium: 35mm Film

Shot in India's Thar Desert, near the border of Pakistan.

Title: Mahakala Caves, Bihar, India
Date: January 2006
Medium: 35mm Film

From all over the world, Buddhist monks are gravitating right now to Bihar, mostly on foot, and prostrating themselves flat on the ground after every step as a prayer to reduce suffering and violence in the world. Many have walked for three and a half years, having made several million full body prostrations and worn all fingerprints off their hands to achieve this goal. And here we are, presumably at the final destination of their good karma, only to find that the actual inhabitants in the geographical heart of their beliefs are setting off bombs to express that the annihilation of suffering is a luxury they cannot afford. Contrary to the centuries of non-violence embraced by the monks, the Biharis have concluded that their only hope of annihilating suffering will not be found in reducing it to an intellectual abstraction to peel from the kernel of their souls, but by actually becoming suffering's mouthpiece. And fire has proven to be its most universal language. Or at least the only translator they can afford to hire.

Wendy and I return to Bodhgaya, where we learn that we have just missed the Dalai Lama and the Karmapa, who made a procession down the main dirt road of the village only moments ago. They have left their footprints of peace in the same soil where children, only a few turns down the same road, compensated for their less consequential imprints on the earth with those of the fallen rocks they threw at our heads. And connecting them all like hyphens, are the indentations left in the dirt by bodies of Tibetan monks that have prostrated their way past the village life around them, to reach the tree where the Buddha found enlightenment. The surface of the road is inscribed with more words than libraries, and the story it suggests is that of mankind's varied responses to suffering. Unfortunately, no journalists or camera crews have appeared to lend some permanence to the traces of Bihari suffering along these roads. As usual, even the wind will reveal its bias to the Buddhist view of life, when it carries these delicate outlines of their struggles to an audience of thin air.

I am interested to find that the outer border separating the "real" world from the spiritual world within Buddhist mandalas, is always a ring of fire. Fire is placed around the perimeter to incinerate "coarse matter," because entry is denied to the uninitiated. Just beyond this wall of fire, kalachakra deities are supposed to reduce suffering and violence in the world. The only thing standing between this more ideal world and the real world around us is this barrier of fire.

But as I look up from the mandalas to the landscape around me, I see fires telling conflicting stories. Butter lamps burning in the hands of the monks say that the only cause of suffering is ourselves, and that the divine prays for that suffering to end. Meanwhile fires rising from heaps of cow shit and corpses in the surrounding villages say that a divine plan itself has caused our suffering, and although suffering will not end, meaning will remain as present in it as God is. Meanwhile, bombs are sending up their own fires to contradict the first two, saying that it is neither ourselves, nor a divine plan, but other people who cause our suffering, and all the prayers in the world have not been enough to stop them.

It strikes me how sharply the inhabitants of this parched landscape are defined by their relationship to fire. Each soul is shaped by the belief that the borders of their own fire contains the meeting point between God and man, and that the border of the next man's fire marks the precise point at which God is separated from man. If the history of Bihar is the forked path of fire's touch, then even the air is not exempt from communion. With every breath, history descends from its perch on the breeze to inscribe its words on the pages of my lungs.

Title: Catalonia, Spain
Date: August 2006
Medium: 35mm Film

In May 2006, I began walking in France, and didn't stop until I had walked all the way across Spain. Unfortunately, the 500 miles I tread from the Basque region to Galicia did not pass through Catalonia, where I had long dreamed of going to admire the architecture of Antonio Gaudi. Later that summer, the opportunity arrived: I went on tour drumming at music festivals from Buenos Aires to Vienna, which got me back into Europe, and afforded me a cheap flight to Barcelona. Developing the 70 rolls of film I took cost me far more than all of my flights across the Atlantic combined, and this is just one shot that I think captures something of my delirious state during those five trigger happy days.