Daryl Hannah has made a crucial beautiful film. In the potent eco-system of Neil Young and the Promise of the Real she weaves a tale, and plants some non-GMO seeds in the soul! It is poetry, It’s magic. Earthalujah!
Her magical film – lots of sumptuousness and cleverness and wonderful eccentrics and of course the music – but the beauty of where they live is what got to me. Of course they live there, if you have a choice of where you might live! Live in those mountains.
Daryl did a sophisticated thing in setting the mood, creating a sort of whispering mood, of the film. She created a middle-distance point of view, that is constant, between the camera and the horizon, with the tree and the deer shots especially. After a while there was a general mountain being that was watching the guys, and we viewers too – and you know it made the craggy mens’ long silences more meaningful.
In the west, people are used to those silences and there’s no hurry, its the personality of being quiet in the big quiet of the west. But a lot of fans who stream Paradox will be from the chatterbox cities and what Daryl does with the Mountain Mind is sort slow the viewer down to the western pace and we start feeling the colors inside the slow-moving parts. At least I hope that’s the effect – that’s what it did to me.
We are just back from our Athens adventure. Savi (the reverend’s co founder and partner) and I were there 3 weeks, the first week teaching our songs to the Greek part of the choir – ten natives joined 15 New Yorkers. Then after a week we all got together and prepared the performances, 3 of our Fabulous Worships and then 2 parades across Athens under our big banner #TOURISTS AGAINST TRUMP.
The shows were great but with the marching through the old city something outrageous happened – we got tourists and refugees to march together, dance together, rally together. We came away thinking that yes, thats what it will take to back the fascism down, completely unlikely new communities… Tourists are pulled/enticed across borders so they’ll spend money and the migrants are shot, drowned, and jailed… but they are both registering the the image of children in cages in the Texas jails, which has roared around the world like the hoses and dogs in Birmingham in 1958, the girl looking up from her dead friend at Kent State, the Flower Man at Tianannmen… the kids in the cages is changing everyone…
Reverend Billy