The Observatory

After months of solid work, finishing OPENING and premiering at the Kansas City Filmmaker´s Jubilee, shooting PRESQUE ISLE and finishing PAN, 9 @ Night film #8 in time for the Mill Valley Fest, then attending sold out houses for both PAN and OPENING, I was ready to breathe free and forget about the digits for awhile. Even Chikara Motomura, the hardest working collaborator I´ve been lucky to know, didn´t complain when I told him it was time for me to go.

The Yucatan has been my primary escape hatch for the last 30 years or so, and it was to be again. Got a cheap flight to Cancun, still recovering from last year´s Hurricane Wilma, a shuttle bus to Puerto Juarez, and a ferry boat out to Isla Mujeres. Five years since I´ve been to this small island with its narrow, tiled streets, ubiquitous motor scooters and golf carts doubling as cars, its small coffee houses and sidewalk cafes, its northern beach which every night features the most spectacular sunsets on the Caribbean.

I went immediately to the Rocamar, a small hotel right on the surf on the Eastern edge of town. The room I had five years ago, on the second floor with a veranda right over the sea wall fronting the surf, hadn´t changed. Two platform beds with deep blue serape style bedsteads, a crude wooden dresser and an equally crude bedside table, bathroom and shower, no TV, no radio, only the incessant sound of the sea, amplified somehow by the configuration of the veranda to a constant roar. This is perfect for me... listening only to the water Gods now for 9 days, thinking, reading Dante´s INFERNO, the exact wrong book for this trip, THE CODE OF KINGS about seven major Mayan sites including Copan, Seibal, Chich`en Itza, Uxmal, etc., organizing a book of my poetry, writing a framing device for FRANK, the Direct Action film Chikara Motomura and I shot in South Africa, and a treatment for a film where a contemporary disillusioned New York painter meets a 7th Century Mayan temple painter on an isolated beach after a hurricane.

And everyday an hour or two lying in the sun absorbing the heat, the sun, the wind and even, a couple of times, the rain.

At night, my veranda becomes my Observatory where I watch the stars move slowly across the skies, monitor the shooting stars, Orion directly overhead, the satellites, and the late night flights pushing towards unknown destinations, and ponder the next steps in the development of Citizen Cinema. Floodgates opening. The rush of inspiration, the mind wandering free, the slipstream providing a malestrom of impulse, almost too much to absorb. But this is what happens when I jump off the moving train for awhile, roll down an unknown hillside in the middle of nowhere and live for awhile by my wits, fueled by instinct and listening only to the elements.