Oof, I have let this languish. Somehow words have fallen away completely, and in their place there has been music. Drums, guitars, pianos, synths, vocals, mixing, mastering, MUSIC.
Here,
like this:
All music, photography, and artwork are my own.
So the bindle is two years old today. How about that? When it was born I was living on wasabi peas, drinking myself to sleep every night on a mattress on the floor of a bare room. These words and sounds and images were a desperate attempt to communicate with a world that didn’t particularly care.
But life is a wild thing. Perpetually shifting and uncertain, each fading sunset could be replaced by literally anything. It’s so god damn beautiful — casually, constantly, like it’s nothing. Whenever I remember to pick my head up out of myself, there it is: so vivid, so bright, so saturated with light and sound and sensation.
Sandwiched between billions of years of darkness and endless nothing, this tiny riot of existence is unbelievable. Some days it’s so much I can’t stand it.
Some days it’s hard to be a cynic.
Joshua Clark Orkin
As I was filming this I remember thinking two things with absolute clarity: she would hate the way she looked here, and watching it would someday break my heart.
Filmed on Cayuga Lake, on the cusp of winter, in a beautiful purgatory — where I had grown sick of words, and life felt a little less real each day.
This video is a tiny slice of hundreds of hours, back and forth between Dar es Salaam and Vikindu. We made this trip over, and over, and over, and over again, the soundtrack to Drive on heavy rotation via headphones for a good chunk of it. As substance abuse and my relationship spiraled simultaneously out of control, existence in Tanzania took on an increasingly surreal and cinematic aspect. You’re getting an authentic taste here: Me and Philipo, coming back from work. We only ever spent time together like this, in transit for money, me speaking to the back of his nervous head. In hindsight he was one of my best friends.
Filmed off a dock on Cayuga Lake, then edited in my bedroom. For a while my computer was just a machine for playing this on repeat.
Joshua Clark Orkin
handkerchief tied to stick 