FIRST week over

Yesterday.. this morning actually. We drove back from one of our first 12 hours day on the shoot. Most of the others were 14+. I was tired but not completely falling asleep like almost all the other days we had worked. Me and Mike, the sound mixer, had been talking about The Festival in the Desert or Le Festival au Desert that is held in Mali every year. Apparently, Mike had just spent a lot of his recent working life with a band from Morocco.. touring and recording for them. It was cool to hear another voice exciting about this music. All I really have heard of Toureg and Northwestern African music is a band Tinariwen that I discovered in my sojourning with Led Zeppelin.. who by far are my favorite people in the world. 

((Led Zeppelin was how I found God. Haha.. that's another story, but when I heard something as amazing as the guitar stylings of Jimmy Page, I knew that there had to be a God somewhere. Sometimes the spiritual is not in the things we expect.. even sometimes in accused sellers of souls to the devil))

Anyways, Mike handed me his Ipod and let me listen to one of his favorite Toureg bands. The sun  was starting to rise.. We had worked from 7 pm the previous night to 6:30 am. The crew van started to drive us from the suburban town of Mt. Vernon towards Manhattan. The Toureg rhythms and Arabic influenced guitar sounds made age crumbled buildings easy to imagine being the outskirts of somewhere more third world. People are people, no matter where they live. I imagined places I had scene in Hong Kong or Colombo, Sri Lanka and they didn't seem to look that much more different, or made America look any more promising.

The sun illuminated the city immersed in smog and melted its towering peaks into the sky. It had been a long time sense I felt so much contentment and so much of the sense of wonder.. and here I had found it in a concrete jungle.. not in the wilderness, where I was used to finding it. Maybe the sense of scale of a city like New York City was still enough to stun and amaze. So many people. But whatever the reason I was grateful. So grateful. To finally be happy. I am working a kick ass job in the industry I want, even though it is extremely hard and my boss swears me out every other moment. Its the sense of contentment you get with being where you want. The people around me are interesting.. interested in things like Toureg bands.. friendly and accepting. The filmmaking industry has a funny way of soldering people together.. because you all go through 30 days of hell together and when you get out on the other side you become best friends. You forever have the bond of this horrendous beast we call filmmaking your past.

Fiume Night 12 _ Tinariwen, part1 _ Manhattan, april 2009 from vincent moon / temporary areas on Vimeo.