The Kid on the Beach (5 min. 2005) Directed and edited by Lester Alfonso, featuring The Kid, music by The Kid, an outtake from the unreleased film The Gold Rushes.
On the 40th Day of digging through the proverbial basement, I publish this for the first time ever. It’s a genuine “mood piece” — buoyed by haunting unfamiliar sounds. Some of the files I’m finding are like paintings in the basement, unseen by none other but the painter himself. Which picture do I bring up from the basement today? Which fragment of my life shall I frame? Which part will I mount and display? I will digitally hang it here; only sometimes will it have an explanation.
Yesterday, I said: I found something. “You keep finding something.” You’re in it. “Uh oh.” It’s called The Kid on the Beach. “Oh yeah! Doesn’t it have Warning Shadows on it?” Yes, it was your piano. What happened there? How did this come to exist? “It was a moment that you all believed in me.” The Kid said. He smiled. We were shooting The Gold Rushes at the time, I think. This famous (to me) unreleased film of mine. I want to finally show what happened there to the public. I want to honour the voice inside of myself that cries out to have a community screening. I need to have a movie theatre to call my own.
Is it enough to hang these paintings up from my digital prison? There’s a domain name here that’s a porthole to my soul. Can you believe that I remember shooting this video only so that it can be experienced today? I remember having a memory of the future, hyperlinks, video embeds, and artifacts. I can’t explain all the time-traveling, I do. It really just must mean that time is nonlinear.
I time-travel in my mind as I sit in my studio, another painter lost in thought; my body is frozen in a position but my thumb rolls the rollerball mouse and the eyes dart to check digital details. I’ve carried around my archives for years waiting for some kind of moment. If it has arrived, it’s come without much fanfare. — LA
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