November ’97

I got on my bicycle and headed into Golden Gate Park. Fog had come in; there was no moon, and no reflected light from the city. I ignored a strong sense of foreboding. When I regained consciousness I was lying belly down on a grassy patch of earth with my left arm twisted under my chest, reaching out beyond my right ear. I couldn't get up, and I realized that I was paralyzed from my neck down. It was like looking into the deepest pit I had ever encountered, accented by jolts of pain that seemed like high voltage electrical shock. I discovered the value of howling as a way of riding pain that seems impossible to bear. In the momentary respites between surges of pain I began to assess my new reality in a strangely lucid and thorough way. Participation in a sequence of documentary film projects was now impossible. I wouldn't be going to join Ray Telles in Texas five days later; I might not be able to meet Susana in Argentina in March; a series of trips with Toby McLeod to finish shooting his film about Native American sacred sites was probably lost. Months of challenging work were suddenly cancelled by something I hadn't seen.

Photo by Tanya Knoop

January, '98

I was awestruck by the bond that had been evolving with Karina Epperlein over the past six months as she taught me the principles of T'ai Chi. Most helpful was the standing meditation and the ‘catwalk’, a very slow walking exercise that began to teach my right leg to move without dragging the foot or rolling the hip so acutely as it had. In exchange I tutored her on doing her own camerawork on a film about an Armenian woman who survived the Ottoman massacres of 1915-18. My time with Karina became a meditation on friendship. It began as a gift from the depths of compassion when Karina realized that she might be able to help me on my healing journey.

I hadn't seen her since finishing the camerawork on her film Voices from Inside, two years earlier. Now, in our early meetings she taught my body how to begin communicating with its damaged parts again. She also began to help me sharpen my perception about the road ahead in the healing process, reminding me continually that I am moving to a new place in my life, not returning to where I came from, despite my constant determination to do so. Whenever she said she could come by to give me a lesson I planned that day so there would be no interference. I made sure the door at the bottom of my long stairway was unlocked at the hour I expected her. Our exchange grew more fascinating the more time we gave to each other.

Photo by John Knoop

November, '89

I’m working with Elizabeth Farnsworth on Thanh's War, which will take us to Vietnam early in 1990. When I realize how much I am going to spend on renting a video camera for that project I decide that I can no longer afford not to own one so I borrow a lot of money to buy a light one-piece Beta camcorder that Sony has just released, the 300. It weighs about the same as my ACL with a 400 foot magazine. Video tape is cheap; the cameras are expensive: both to buy or to rent. My peers charge nearly twice their 16mm rate when shooting video.

Photo by Toby McLeod

On the last day of 1992 I crossed the Sierras with my daughters Hennessey and Savannah on the tail of a storm that I confidently promised them would play out by the time we got to northern Nevada. As we ran up the highway east of Pyramid Lake at 100 mph the afternoon sky opened to create a chiaroscuro landscape with great ridges of dark cloud hanging over the mountains while the foreground blazed with bright desert. We pulled into the cottonwood grove northeast of Gerlach about four PM, made camp and built a fire as the clouds began to glow. Below us was the Black Rock Desert, a vast dry lakebed.

Hennessey chopped garlic while some potatoes boiled. We roasted the garlic in olive oil until it turned golden then I dropped a chunk of tuna on the grill. We poured the garlic and oil on the potatoes and the fish. As we ate, the sky and the landscape grew ever more beautiful. We shared a clear sense of exaltation at being here together for this celebration of light and color.

As the last light faded we walked down the rutted lane through the sagebrush and then over to the edge of the desert where a five fingered geyser spewed from a tufa rock formation. We stripped in the moonlight and got into a large pool fed by the scalding spring but soon—not warm enough—we moved to a small shallow pool closer to the geyser where we lay in primeval ooze close to body temperature. Then after a quick plunge in the cooler water we dried quickly in the cold wind and walked back to our camp to rekindle the fire and sit happily finishing the wine we had opened at dinner.

It's become an annual ritual to be as close to the elements as possible for a celebration of the equinox and the New Year without any funny hats or noisemakers.

Scott has been talking for a couple of years about a Film Arts Society, an organization that will advance and support those of us who try to survive outside the marketplace, while treating film as an art form, rather than a commercial medium. He's been obsessed with the idea. The initial concept, while appealing, seems to me somewhat flowery, and I suggest that we might focus on pooling our resources to buy a flatbed-editing machine, something none of us can afford alone.

Since few of us are making verite' documentaries, none of us has really needed one, but I rented one to finish World's Fastest Hippie, and I know that I am moving towards shooting and editing sync sound material. We have some boring meetings, usually enlivened by a bottle of wine and a joint, as Scott pushes the idea of Film Arts around. It is a small group: Scott, Michael Wiese, Howard Rheingold, Michael Lytle, Kent Hodgetts and me. We are all friends and don't mind having an excuse to get together, though it begins to seem like a hopeless dream that will never come to anything. I want it to happen primarily to help us buy a Steenbeck editing machine, so I put the first fifty dollars in the till to buy envelopes and postage.

Scott keeps it alive from a cardboard box of files in his space. At some point the Society became a Foundation. I think when we realize that with a tax exempt status we can ask individuals and corporations for money, offering the inducement that if they fund us as generously as possible they can pat themselves on the back with a tax deduction. When lawyer, Richard Lee, succeeds in getting the exempt status the ball is rolling. Stephanie Rick, and then Julienne Bair, do some very effective organizing. Then Gail Silva takes on the burden and the FAF is growing rapidly under her skilled guidance.

My old friend David Boatwright started a production company in Charleston, South Carolina called ‘Lucky Boy Films' with actor/producer O'Neal Compton, who also had an advertising agency and amazing talents as a performer, writer and entrepreneur. David and O'Neal hired me to shoot a series of TV commercials they were doing for Ford dealers and the South Carolina Credit Union League. I had always avoided commercials and even refused to shoot them, but working with David and O'Neal was different: a special kind of entertaining and lucrative work. Along with soundman Jonathan Gaynor and gaffer Les Stringer we quickly formed a high-energy team with unusual rapport. I was soon dubbed the ‘Human Steadicam' by O‘Neal who loved the efficiency of my hand held, boom-like moves which allowed us to shoot a record number of polished commercials in a day without a dolly. And, because the work came through O'Neal's agency, he made sure we never had a client on the set, which meant there were no conflicts about aesthetic or directing decisions. As often as we could, we shot these spots outdoors with available light, using silks or foliage overhead and a couple of large reflectors I had started using in Bali. O'Neal's character Justin Thyme was locally famous as the droll pitchman selling Fords, and soon expanded to dozens of markets and products all over the Southeast from Florida to Tennessee. There were Bojangles Chicken spots that aired all over the country. For the award winning Credit Union series David and O'Neal wrote clever human-foible sketches which we then shot documentary-style and cast with great local talent to play along with O'Neal and David. O'Neal later went on to have a busy run of supporting roles in films like Life, Nixon, Nell, Made in America and Primary Colors; before long he moved to a house near the beach in Venice, California. David returned to his career painting murals, writing scripts and designing houses.

In the spring of '69, I met Freude Bartlett at Diner Labs. I was impressed by her vivacious good humor and tornado-like energy. She was the most striking redhead I'd ever seen, with a full-blown, flame-red Afro. Freude introduced me to her husband Scott, a well-known avantgarde filmmaker. He had a blonde Afro and the bearing of a rock star. They were living in the Reno Hotel, an abandoned building in our neighborhood once known as the place where low ranking prizefighters stayed. Scott had made an agreement with the owner, allowing him to take over the former lobby and a large part of the first floor of this old four-story hotel. He turned it into a palatial studio. The most admired feature was the sauna, built out of salvage lumber and railroad ties, next to a very large kitchen.

I first met Eric Orr when he came out with Tom McEvilley to the Townsley farm when Judy and I lived there. He came on the white BMW R-50 that he had spent that summer riding around Spain and Morocco. We went for the first of many brisk runs on the winding back roads of hilly southern Ohio. Images of Eric laughing and talking in that intense way he had of holding forth. Eric on the houseboat he had on the Ohio River with a raccoon caught in the ceiling. Eric in my back yard building the Okie style trailer to move to California. Eric laughing and jiving and poking at reality. Always ready to get close and to go deep.

In July ‘73, I decided to build a yurt up on Redwood Creek, northwest of Ukiah, on a piece of land that we bought with the money Sharon's father gave us as a wedding present. Hennessey and I spend several days at Pier 16, on the Embarcadero, salvaging cheap lumber before the wrecking crews move in. Sharon is in L.A. working with her friend Susan Vogel on a piece of sculpture and hanging out with the art crowd in Venice. It's a chance for me to take a turn at childcare and allow Sharon her freedom. Hennessey watches me pull pine planks and redwood tongue-and groove from the pier walls. Then, at Cindy Norton's shop in the Reno Hotel's former garage, on Harriet Street, using the plans I've sent for, I carefully table-saw everything into pre-formed pieces for assembly at the site. When the yurt is built just above Redwood Creek beneath two towering old growth redwoods it becomes a favorite camp site for the whole family, with Geoffrey and Hennessey building dams to improve the swimming hole and Tanya and Michelle hitchhiking up on weekends. I brag proudly to my peers that the total cost of the yurt was only $165—fifteen dollars for the plans and $150 for the materials.

I'm part of a group of friends who constantly check with the National Park Service for the cancellation of permits to run the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. We luck out this year and secure one of these hard-to-get permits for July. Sixteen of us commit and make sure we are ready on the designated date. This is an oar trip of five rafts, with an experienced oarsman in command of each one. I have a new hypelon raft made in Taiwan. It's very maneuverable, though not as classy as an Avon, but much cheaper. I built a wooden frame and bought four expensive, high quality ash oars. We all carry a spare set of oars. After Phantom Ranch we do a two-night stop at Tapeats Creek, so that we can spend a day there. Ron, Jody, Sharon and I hike several miles up to a magical place called Thunder Falls, where a twin underground torrent comes pouring from the face of the red-wall more than two thousand feet above the Colorado River. Ron and I climb 100 feet up the treacherous cliff next to the waterfall and then manage to reach one of the two points where the water pours out of the red-wall. From there we enter the bowels of the earth; straddling the flow and bracing against the wall on either side as we inch into a cool and darkening cavern with the water rushing between our legs.

Photo by Ron Cooper

In September ‘67 I stopped at the Art Institute to see my friend Kent and while I was there a friend of his, a painter named Sharon, caught my eye. She was a sexy 23-year old with bobbed hair and a mischievously alluring look. She told me she was interested in making an animated film. She seemed like an exotic flower and I immediately decided it would be nice to have her somehow blooming in my life to spur me on. I was leaving in a few days to shoot the wheat harvest in the northwest, so I asked her if she'd like to come along to record sound while I was filming. To my surprise and delight she said yes. When I rang the bell at her apartment near the Art Institute two days later she let me in and continued talking on the phone with her father. I was amazed by how serenely she answered his questions and how tenderly she defended her younger brother about something he had done that annoyed their father. I decided that she was more than just a pretty young artist; maybe a woman with grace and substance and a hint of noble purpose. Her apartment was large and funky but well set up for the two young artists who shared it, with a separate room for each to work in and a bedroom for each. When I asked Sharon about her painting I found that she had already been recognized as a promising young artist in Manhattan and had sold a couple of paintings before deciding to enroll at the S.F. Art Institute, where she hoped to further refine her style.

I ride my bike the 52 miles to the loft and back every day and love it. When the El Nino storms create landslides above Sausalito and close highway 101, I am able to ride across the middle of the empty Golden Gate Bridge as though I am the last person still on wheels.

I had learned about Deya, Majorca through a chance encounter with a composer back in Ohio. He had been there and met Robert Graves, and he gave me a letter of introduction. It seemed worth checking out, since the mainland was so unappealing. We headed back north to Valencia, where we caught a ferry to Palma. We drove straight off the ferry to cross a fertile plain through blossoming almond orchards, then climbed into the mountains, through the village of Valdemosa and on to Deya, where we checked into a pension on the main street. The place was immediately appealing. Built on a hill, with a small plaza and church at the top, the village is a series of terraced gardens and stone houses and is notched with narrow streets, some so steep they are broken by steps. At the bottom of the village, known as the Clot, a ravine leads to a cove on the Mediterranean. Fifteen hundred feet above the village is an imposing crescent of cliff-faced mountain called the Teix, with several torrents pouring from it during the winter months.

In July, after picking up a marriage license from city hall in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, Judy and I have a wedding ceremony in a cornfield, performed by our friend, Joel Wittstein, who is studying to become a rabbi. It has more to do with performance art than with religion. The leaves of corn are not high enough to form a hoopa, but it turns out they represent fertility even so. My parents and brothers Roddy and Tony are there; Judy's mother and sister are not. Her family boycott the marriage and a few days later they try, unsuccessfully, to have it annulled. Judy's mother says they will sit Shiva for her. We expected this reaction, so despite the unpleasantness, Judy and I are happy together in the nest I built. Judy finishes her sophomore year and is ready to trade her academic career and dull life with her mother for a marriage that promises excitement. We begin planning our escape. I want to live in Spain and Judy is eager to see the world; wherever we go is okay with her. Meanwhile we work together in the orchard. Judy drives the tractor pulling the sprayer and I circle the trees wielding the hose and applying the spray. When Judy told me she was pregnant we became even more determined to escape to Europe. It seemed amazing that we had gotten away with the rhythm method until we had a marriage license. We joked about it being a blessing from the corn god.

Photo by Fred Knoop

One day we were approached by Captain Ed Powers of the Gloria, a beautiful 64-foot schooner anchored in the inner harbor. We had talked to him when we first scouted the scene and he had told us he was heading south and through the canal to the Caribbean. But he was waiting for someone to charter the schooner. No charter clients had showed up. Now he was willing to take us, if we would help him repair the damage he had suffered in a squall off Nicaragua. We moved on board that same day, loading the cycle in his skiff and then winching it on board the schooner. We went to work on the damaged rigging, replacing broken stays, realigning cables, patching the mainsail and getting ready for the voyage to Panama. Both of us had experience sailing. Naren had crewed with an uncle in Argentina and was quite well versed in nautical lore. He even knew how to use a sextant. While we did the repairs the captain laid in supplies: mostly cheap canned goods and what turned out to be our staple, a full stalk of still green but ripening bananas. Over the next three weeks I heard his story, which struck me as the tale of a classic American hustler.

Photo by Naren Bali

Paoli, Indiana, June 27, 1958.
Thank god, we’re on the road at last. Our BMW R-69 is parked outside a Main Street café, leaning against the curb, resting on the crash bar that protects its two horizontally opposed cylinders. It’s a bizarre looking load: a surplus duffel bag on each side of the rear wheel and another on the rear luggage carrier with a spare tire draped around it. People slow down to stare as they pass. There are three boys circling it right now with their chins out, pointing at the engine. Who knows? It could be the first of its kind ever seen in these parts. It’s not a Harley or an Indian, so what is it? Naren Bali and I are having a sandwich. This is the first entry in my “Concise Rambling Journal.” I’m developing my own version of shorthand, using keywords and initials so I can jot ideas fast. Sitting with us at the counter are four bib-overhauled farmers talking about anhydrous ammonia prices and their corn crops. Down at the end of the room there’s a plump woman in a wicker chair facing the window. Her body is shaking with soundless laughter. One of the farmers turns and asks where we’re going on that machine, nodding at our bike. “California,’ Naren says. “And after that, we’re headed to Argentina.” “That’s quite a trip.” The man whistles, “It’s so far away I’m not sure where it is.” “Bottom of South America,” his friend says. Naren is from Buenos Aires. He’s been studying and working recently at Columbia as a computer programmer and now he’s going home and I’m dropping out of Columbia and going with him. We left New York three days ago and pulled away from my parent’s farm east of Cincinnati this morning, after a heartwarming send off. Who knows where we’ll be tonight. Sleeping next to a wheat field in Kansas I hope.

Photo by Fred Knoop

At our graduation ceremony, I traded places with my friend Marvin Friedenn so that the ruse I had cooked up to date Judy Mayersohn could continue. Her family were orthodox Jews and she was forbidden to go out with gentiles, so I had been dating her all that winter and spring as Marv. Judy was a good student and headed for medical school, very alert and witty about the way the world worked. Her biting sense of humor counter-balanced any lingering cynicism I felt about her having been elected Prom Queen a few days earlier. I knew this wasn't something she campaigned for. It happened because she was the most beautiful girl in the class. She and I were sure we deserved each other, regardless of orthodox traditions. I could tell that her mother was suspicious whenever I picked Judy up, but we had gotten away with it, and the graduation gave me an opportunity to seal the arrangement in public and confound those in the know with what seemed a meaningless prank. The vice principal, Mr. Leudeke, was startled when I walked to the stage for Marv's diploma, but he handed it to me without pause. When my name was called and Marv walked up, there were some titters in the bleachers.

Photo by Fred Knoop

As an interim escape from the sweaty work in the apple orchard Judy and I take a surprisingly convivial trip with my father and mother down to Flat Rock, North Carolina to visit the Sandburgs. Judy and I slip away for hikes up the mountain behind their farm. There is no tension with my parents and I feel we have been welcomed into the adult world. I get advice about being a writer from Carl Sandburg.

“Don’t count on making a living right away,” he said. “Not if you want to write your own material.”

Photo by Fred Knoop

In the early 50's my father graded an l800 foot landing strip into one of the ridge-top fields and put up a windsock. It was a proud moment he had dreamed of for years. Before long there was a four-place Cessna l70 tied down by the side of the strip. I continued learning to fly in that plane and soloed on my sixteenth birthday after one hour of flight time with a licensed instructor. I bragged about how he laughed and said he was turning me loose to solo after simply taking a ride with me. Later that day I took my driving test, a formality that seemed ludicrous, since I had been driving on and near the farm since I was seven. A week later I found a Piper Vagabond in Trade-a-Plane at the nearby Blue Ash Airport. It cost me 800 dollars, money I had made working on the farm over the years. My father dropped me at Blue Ash and I flew out to circle the farmstead, calling down to my waving brothers, "come out and see it", then did a long swoop over the river, ending in a chandelle, after which I landed and parked next to the windsock. They came out on their bikes, Kit in the lead, then Rick and Roddy. My mother drove out with two year old Tony. I could see pride and a little awe in their faces. They crowded around the plane and I put Roddy and Tony in the cockpit and showed them how to move the joystick and watch the ailerons go up and down. I was glad I hadn't bought a car, which some of my classmates were doing as they turned sixteen, primarily so they'd have more freedom to pick up girls. I was content to be the only junior at Walnut Hills High School with his own airplane and a license to escape the mundane world of my peers any time I wanted. I was elated by a calm certainty that I could be strong enough to chart my own course.

Photo by Fred Knoop

My father built my mother a small brick goat barn below the springhouse. It had a hayloft, a set of wooden stanchions and a milking stand that folded down from the door, all designed and carefully crafted by my father from finished pine. The goats were given several acres of pasture on which to roam and feed. It was my task by the time I was seven to milk the six or eight does before school each morning and again each evening. If there was any daylight left, I spent it in the woods; building forts, racing through the creek beds or hunting squirrels with a four/ten shotgun, which I rarely fired but carried proudly. I explored the ruins of the farmsteads that I found buried in the woods, and I fantasized about those who had lived on them. One had a well nearly twenty feet deep of un-mortared stone, which I discovered I could easily descend by straddling the diameter and wedging my boots into the gaps of the stones. Once at the debris-cluttered bottom I could lean back and watch the sky. It was a kind of telescopic meditation space.

Photo by Fred Knoop

Due to his skills as an award-winning photographer my father was posted in Hollywood to direct training films during World War II. My mother sadly sold off her herd, many of the prize animals going to another goat fancier, Paula Sandburg, the wife of Lincoln's biographer, poet Carl Sandburg.

On their honeymoon, driving south from Cincinnati through Kentucky to the Smoky Mountains, my parents stopped to watch a pair of Nubian goats gamboling in a pasture along the highway. Ten days later, on the way home, they stopped again and bought a young doe. Back on their hilltop farm above the Ohio River, they realized that the goat was not happy. It must be lonely, they decided, and the solution was to go and get another, a young buck. So it was that my mother started her herd and her family at the same time. Within a couple of years, she had a daughter and the first of five sons. In 1939 her Nubian doe, named Midnight, set the world record for milk and butterfat production. When I was growing up I heard about this triumph often enough to know how proud she was of the achievement and to realize how much it shaped her life.