This is a bird I recorded in the middle of the night.
It's the first sound I wanted to play for you.
When I recorded the bird, I was worried
that it was all in my head, that I'd return to the recording
and there was nothing there, just me breathing,
trying to hold still.
To my relief, the bird was there,
and now it's ours to share.
It makes me feel better knowing we have this.
What do you want me to do?
What should I be doing?
What do you want me to do?
What should I do?
What do you want me to be doing?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 5, 0, 6, 2.
Their houses surround my neighborhood.
I've lived in the same house on the same street for over 10
years.
During this period, I've convinced many,
including myself, that I'm a full-time artist.
I've made several films, taken countless photographs,
and recorded hundreds of sounds.
For the most part, it's the same idea,
the same image reworked or reimagined
for the purposes of a new project.
It's all the same, just like here.
Here's where I am.
Why am I telling you this?
I thought about calling this project "Landscapes
for Loneliness" or just "Landscapes" or just
"Home Video."
Did any of them make you groan?
That's the one I want to use.
Before this project truly began, I
found myself documenting any and all activity
in our neighborhood park.
The park is difficult to ignore.
Where my fence ends, the park begins.
According to the dozens of people
I interviewed in my head, the park
is the center of our neighborhood.
They would go on to tell me it's our destination that gives us
purpose, a well-rounded day.
I watch and I wait for these well-rounded days, anything
to keep me, anything to keep myself from everything else.
For weeks, I waited for something to happen.
Nothing did.
Still, I shot.
I waited.
What did I want to happen?
I guess I wanted to see if anyone could float.
Can they float?
Seeing people in slow motion, it makes
you want to know them better, don't you agree?
To know them at all?
It certainly works on me.
One night, I decided to photograph myself,
just alone standing in the park.
It's kind of a silly image.
I just wanted to see myself.
Oftentimes, I wonder if anyone can see me at all.
I watch them, and they don't seem to give a shit about me.
They don't even seem to see me until they do.
There they are.
And there I am.
They watch me watching them.
I'm caught.
Together, if only for a moment, we're fools.
One day, I decided to shoot my house
from the park-- it's a new angle-- secretly hoping,
through this test, to see nothing at all.
Here's a closer shot from the same position.
This is my bedroom window.
Though it's impossible to be at two places at once,
I imagine I'm both behind the camera shooting this image
and behind my window, staring at me, the camera.
I convince myself and I'm standing there,
yet I don't see myself.
It pleases me to see nothing at all.
Do they see me?
If the park is the center of our neighborhood,
the surrounding streets are like its limbs, afterthoughts maybe.
I had a strong connection to this particular house,
the blue house.
For years, I would see a young boy
waving a stick like some kind of magic right
here in the front of the yard in his house,
this house, the blue house.
I assumed the house was his.
I never understood how or why he found
this daily activity so stimulating,
but he did, and he did it a lot.
He was always there, didn't seem to be getting any older.
One day after I'd been away in other neighborhoods,
the boy disappeared.
The house was empty too.
Who caused what to change?
According to my computer, the boy
is still there, will always be there, will always be there.
I guess it doesn't matter.
The computer reminds me I don't need to remember anything.
Everything old, everything important
stays right here, ever so still.
I first met the pretender smoking a cigarette, bored,
just down the street from my house.
Hey!
Hey, in front of the blue house.
I asked him if he lived there.
He said he didn't.
I asked him what he was doing there.
Just living.
I groaned.
He said the house was being worked
on during the week, you know, fixed up,
but the weekends were all his.
Just a place to crash.
He said I shouldn't tell anyone, that it
was a secret, his secret, our secret.
He said he did things like this all the time.
I didn't know what to believe, so I gave him a name--
The Pretender.
Just down the street from the blue house,
blackberry bushes hold several different pairs
of men's underwear.
It's a very strange sight.
There's always a new pair every few weeks.
I asked The Pretender if he knew anything about it.
He pretended that he knew what I was talking about.
He told me that they were there for good luck.
Answers are easy.
I asked him if any of the underwear were his
and what he meant by good luck.
Suddenly, he was deflated.
His head fell.
His voice went soft.
I stared at the sky as he told me,
I don't know how to have a good time.
I asked The Pretender if we could look inside the house.
I told him I knew someone who lived there once,
and I wanted to see how it changed, if it changed at all.
I lied.
And he said sure, let me inside.
I pictured the inside of the blue house
in so many different ways, but never
like this, never this ordinary.
The Pretender picked up on this.
Don't you just hate being disappointed?
I do.
[EERIE MUSIC]
Two houses down live two brothers.
I call them Jonathan, his brother.
The boys play games in the street just
in front of their house, like, daily.
Whenever I pass them, either walking or on my bike,
they stop whatever it is they're doing and watch me.
They wait for me to leave to say something, their private world.
I'm the weirdo.
Do they call me that?
What do they call me?
It's such a strange silent moment.
For me, it never gets old.
I mean, really, who can you trust?
I don't blame them.
Some days, I hear Jonathan and his brother
playing the drums in their garage,
and I'm not sure which one it is that plays,
but they're not really great.
They don't really seem to be getting any better.
One day, to my surprise, the brothers
stopped me and asked me the following question--
do you like video games?
I told them I wasn't sure.
Why did they need to know?
We make games.
Oh, yeah?
What kind of games?
They smiled.
Adventure games.
Like I was a friend, someone they knew.
The brothers invited me inside their house
and showed me what they called a work in progress.
OK.
So in the game, a young boy sits on a yellow inflatable raft
as it floats down a familiar suburban street.
Girls in bikinis, they stand along the roadside
waiting for something.
Magically, just as he's about to pass each girl,
they appear at his side on his raft.
It becomes their raft.
I'm not sure if I understand the game
or if it's still being developed,
but it seems kind of pointless, hardly challenging.
Only when the raft approaches a familiar large blue house
do I find myself re-engaged.
Again, like magic, just as the raft turns to face the house,
the house melts underwater like a stream.
Like dimensions, Jonathan and his brother tell me.
I ask them, where does it take you?
The brother shrugged.
Then I smiled.
I asked the brothers if they knew
about the secret passageway between the park and my house.
They looked at me like I was crazy.
How could they not know?
I thought it might be something they'd
want to include in their game--
another way out.
They gave each other a high five and reset the game.
I excused myself and walked through the front door
and found myself in their backyard.
A few days later, I ran into a boy without a raft.
I asked him if I could take his photograph.
His eyes were everywhere at once,
and then he asked me, well, what should I be doing?
What do you want me to do?
Rodeo Gulch, which stretches for miles
well beyond the streets of my neighborhood,
is like my own personal next-door jungle.
One day, I imagine it will suck us all in,
and we'll have to live there in trees and shrubs.
The gulch, as far as I can tell, is the only true center
to our neighborhood.
One day, a boy sees me watching him
and invites me down at his side into the gulch.
Up close, he's short and unpredictable.
I tell him he's short, and then he tells me
he's as tall as Billy the Kid.
I tell him, I don't know what you mean.
There is this weird silence, and then he buried his hands.
I pretended to try and read something
that was written on a tree.
Eventually, he asked me something,
and it made me laugh.
It was like everyone was laughing, actually,
even the birds.
I smiled and I told him, I don't know how to have a good time.
Sometimes if I stare to the stream for long enough,
I swear I can see letters and words.
Can-- can you read it?
It's a funny passage from the stream, don't you think?
You may soon know me for this--
capturing the world's tiniest unidentified flying saucer.
[EERIE MUSIC]
At night while everyone lies still, I wonder.
The trees look so magnificent at night.
It's like they're underwater.
I wonder if everyone sees them this way.
Everyone does?
[EERIE MUSIC]
At night while I lay still, the coyotes
howl and whine from the bottom of the gulch.
It's their gulch.
It's something you have to get used to,
though I'm almost certain for years and years and years
and years, they never made a sound.
What is it they say about a coyote that goes unheard?
Well, we'll just have to make something up.
So often, I think about how they live
and if they want a better life.
Well, recently, several neighborhood cats disappeared.
Their owners, with their shoulders seemingly
permanently shrugged, didn't even bother to post flyers.
They kept saying the same thing.
Something's got 'em.
The Pretender once told me that he used to sleep in the gulch.
He said for the most part, that the coyotes would leave him
alone, but then several mornings in a row,
he woke up with scratches and marks all over his body.
He said it was a warning.
I think this was the first time he told anyone,
so I believed him.
Recently, I ran into The Pretender,
and he acted like we never met.
I caught him staring at his own reflection and dirty car
windows and rain puddles.
He wanted to know why I had a camera, if I
wanted to take his photograph.
I pretended I didn't know what to say.
I just started shooting.
He kept asking me the same question.
What-- like, what should I be doing?
What-- what do you want-- what do you want me to do?
He showed me a new mark, new lines.
His body seemed softer than before.
He looked into my eyes and asked, do you--
did you know that we all have the same story?
Did you know that we all have the same story?
Convinced that I was now officially making
a film about my neighborhood, I captured nearly everything.
[SOFT AMBIENT MUSIC]
There's this one cat in particular
that I know doesn't like me.
If this cat was a person, I would call the police.
It's just the way he stares at me.
My neighbor has been selling his jet skis for, like,
the last several years.
They're overpriced, and I think he knows it.
I take comfort in one thing--
knowing these jet skis will always
have a sunset, their sunset, just as they would in the wild.
I keep coming back to the park.
Everything I see feels new, youth spiraling, colliding.
Must be the time of year.
Did you know that it could hang you up the most?
I find myself just outside the mall,
which is not far from my house.
Every other shop seems to be abandoned
or in some way shut down.
I'm straining to see inside.
Maybe, just maybe, I'll see what failure looks like
or what I might have looked like just inside of it.
And along the roofs of the mall, seagulls loiter
like disgruntled customers.
What, they haven't heard no one wants to be here?
Back home, their feathers litter my roof.
It almost makes me feel like I live close to the beach,
but then I realize I just live close to the mall.
My neighbors have really beautiful roses
which I've been stealing, practically all the time.
I keep the roses hidden in my house
away from the windows where people, their owners,
might see them.
I steal very little in my life.
I wonder about the people who steal like all the time.
How do they hold the things that don't belong to them and where?
I started photographing each stolen flower
under the best light.
Sometimes I would even add a little mist.
I'm Robert Mapplethorpe, I would tell myself.
Yeah, right, just like him.
[DOG BARKING]
I've been leaving messages on my windows
for no one in particular--
well, for one in particular.
It doesn't seem to be working.
Now I just leave marks.
Sometimes at night, I stop worrying and go for walks
and walk for no reason.
I'll go anywhere as long as it feels like I
have some sort of destination.
The streets are empty and quiet.
Each light is like music, and sometimes I sing along.
It carries me.
Are you laughing?
Jonathan and his brother, they lived so close to me.
Jonathan and his brother--
I can't say I'm in love with one more than the other.
Jonathan and his brother--
can't say I'm in love with one more than the other.
It was on these streets, on this street,
that I first thought to myself, I just
want to keep walking home.
A friend asked me, do the people who draw lines in the sky
think about what they're doing?
Do they ever see what we see?
I didn't know what to tell him.
I just said, no one makes us look at anything.
The day my mother left her home of nearly 40 years,
she invited me over to take photographs.
The home was also my childhood home,
and so the idea of creating one image or even one set of images
was exciting, scary too.
I didn't know what to shoot, so I
focused on the ordinary things like windows, doorknobs,
secret slots in the floor.
Before we left the house, my mother
asked me to take a photograph of her
lying on the ground of her empty bedroom.
So I did it.
My brother was also with us, and he
asked me to take a photo of him jumping into the pool fully
dressed, so I did it.
So he did it.
I didn't know what my final image should be.
I didn't know if it was something
you were supposed to think about or if it was just-- just
came to you.
Recently, about 20 miles from my house,
a dead whale washed up on the beach.
It's something I've wanted to see,
something that sounded like a final image.
To my horror, a group of men and women, so-called experts,
insisted on cutting the whale open right
in front of everyone.
We have to know how she died, they told the crowd.
I didn't understand.
It didn't seem necessary.
I heard one man tell his friend as he treaded clumsily
around the whale's carcass, I didn't really
wear the right shoes.
When I look at the images now, I re-imagine the event.
Funny how a photograph can give you a different, new narrative.
It makes you feel better, you know?
Maybe this is what my mother and brother were hoping for.
Did I tell you about the birds?
They crash into my windows like they're possessed.
It's a horrible thing to watch.
And not all of them fully recover.
I'm-- I'm really terrible about disposing their bodies.
I feel like they don't belong in any sort of dumpster or trash
can, so I leave them in the park.
This particular bird, I was certain he was going to die.
(WHISPERING) These will be my final images.
I was certain he was going to die.
These will be his final images, I told myself.
Then he flew away, as if to say, shit, no such thing.
Last fall, I started collecting and then photographing
dead leaves.
That's hardly the series I thought it would be.
Well, what did I think it would be?
These dead, dying things--
[CHUCKLES] I think I need to lighten up.
OK.
I call this one "Dancing Man."
I call this one "Dancing Man Number 2."
This one's a self-portrait.
Not long ago, I left my shirt in a tree.
Here's the proof.
It reminded me of the underwear, which
made me feel kind of lame-- like a thief, really.
I felt like bad art, poor imitation.
I took the shirt down and washed it.
You're a coward, I told myself.
OK.
Your household has been selected to receive
a free all-inclusive luxury cruise.
Press 1 for more information.
Press 2 to be removed from the list.
OK.
[EERIE MUSIC]
The other day, I found a patch of wet cement
just along the perimeter of my house.
I wrote two words.
[EERIE MUSIC]
When I think about my neighborhood,
I see the same image over and over and over.
Like on a loop?
Yeah, yes, yes.
How are they the same?
I mean, why?
(ECHOING) How are they the same?
I mean, why?
How are they the same?
I mean, why?
7, 3, 7, 5, 0, 0, 7, 7, 3, 7, 5, 0, 7, 3, 7, 5, 7, 7, 4, 0.
They are available.
Please press 1 to be connected to a live operator.
[EERIE MUSIC]
I once had a light just above my head.
I thought it was dead, like beyond repair.
One day long ago, you told me the light was fine
and that it just needed new bulbs.
That night, together, we replaced the bulbs.
You were right.
But then the light was too bright.
Even now, I'm reluctant to use it.
I don't know what I'll do or how I'll react
when one of the bulbs goes out.
It'll mean too much.
So I sit in the dark for now.
I sit in the dark and pretend there's no light.
No light?
No light, all right?
So all right.
A lyric once came to me late one night walking home.
It went, (SINGING) all the lights, they gather for you.
All the lights, they gather for you.
[DISTANT FIRECRACKERS POPPING]
Now you know where you could have found me, OK?
I have to say, you could have found me.
OK?
The last time I saw Jonathan, he was ducking inside his house
like he hated the light.
The last time I saw his brother, I
heard him shout, yeah, I don't give a fuck.
I don't give a fuck about anyone except my brother.
I just don't give a fuck about anyone except my brother.