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Godfrey Reggio |
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Photo by Lisa Law |
SANTE FE, N.M. -- Long before
he ever created the unique worlds within his films, Godfrey Reggio created a
world within the
Carrollton neighborhood of his childhood. Instead of images underscoring the
conflict of man and technology that are the hallmark of his trilogy Koyaanisqatsi,
Powwaqatsi,
and
now
Naqoyqatsi, Reggio's
childhood images are of treehouses, go-carts, commando raids on streetcars and
detective agencies.
"It was my universe," says Reggio, now 62.
"It wasn't a neighborhood; it's what I woke up to in the morning."
For Reggio, there was always something else
to be done, something else to get away with. Yet his childhood of capers
and
conning was also fraught with an inner struggle. Something wasn't quite right.
Maybe because he'd wrap himself in the love and affection of two African-American
housekeepers who helped raise him while his parents worked, only to witness
neighbors yelling "nigger!" at the young black boys making their way to the
streetcar on Carrollton Avenue. Or maybe because his popularity gained him
invitations
into the homes of the wealthy families near St. Charles Avenue, only to realize
he didn't belong there.
"I didn't know how to put my head around it,
let's say," Reggio says. "I wasn't a crusader or anything, but even when I
was a young kid, it would all seem kind of weird to me. It just didn't sink
well."
And so, at the age of 14, filled with uncertainty,
Reggio stunned his family and friends when he announced he would join the Christian
Brothers, a contemplative Catholic order with a school in Lafayette, and a college
in Santa Fe, N.M. That decision set Reggio on a journey that would change his
name and his life; it would take him through 14 years of prayer, fasting and
silence, and then on to social and political activism, and finally to becoming
one of the few commercially successful avant-garde filmmakers of the past 20
years. Along the way, he would associate with some of the most important cultural
figures of the past 50 years, including artist Georgia O'Keeffe; directors Francis
Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Soderbergh; and composer Philip Glass.
In Reggio's films, the Napoleonic notion that
a picture paints a thousand words is reversed, with a thousand pictures being
used to illustrate one word. His best-known film remains 1983's Koyaanisqatsi,
a movie so essential in independent film circles that many credit its blending
of music
and time-lapse cinematography as an early influence on everything from TV commercials
to MTV to IMAX films. It may well be the first classic feature-length music
video; its place in film history was cemented nearly two years ago when the
Library of Congress added the film to its elite National Film Registry to be
preserved in its archive system.
Koyaanisqatsi is
the first in Reggio's Qatsi trilogy (he calls them "freak shows"), which
continued with 1988's Powwaqatsi. Qatsi
is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life"; loosely translated, means "life out
of balance" and
Powwaqatsi means "life
in transformation." This weekend, Reggio returns home to present the
third and final installment, Naqoyqatsi "life as war" on Friday
at the New Orleans Film Festival.
The completion of Naqoyqatsi,
which opens nationally Oct. 18, is a story in itself, a culmination of more
than a decade-long struggle.
And yet it is also symbolic of Reggio's life; not just one of conflict, but
of what he calls the "angels" looking over him, helping him along his life's
path. Just when it has seemed that Reggio would be faced with disaster, someone
or something came along to save him. With Naqoyqatsi,
Reggio has finished what he started with his trilogy, to conjure with his
images the raging war of man and technology
-- and of images themselves.
The sun is setting over the Sangre de Cristo
Mountains bordering Santa Fe. This is the starting point for the Rocky Mountains,
and it's been Godfrey Reggio's home since leaving Louisiana 43 years ago as
a junior novitiate with the Christian Brothers.
On this warm, dry July evening, Reggio is
greeting old friends and well-wishers for a private screening of Naqoyqatsi.
He's an imposing
figure, his 6-foot-7 frame towering over everyone else milling outside The
Screen, the 160-seat adobe-style state-of-the-art theater on the College
of Santa Fe
campus -- formerly known as St. Michael's College, Reggio's alma mater.
Like so many other contradictions about Reggio,
he's imposing but unrelentingly serene, looking more like a priest greeting
parishioners outside church than a director offering his new film. Dressed in
baggy polyester slacks and an untucked black T-shirt, he speaks in a thick baritone
with an unmistakable New Orleans accent that, nearly a half-century removed
from his hometown, remains defiantly intact. Flecks of gray have avoided his
thinning brown hair and settled on his neatly trimmed beard.
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Godfrey Reggio, 13, in his Carrollton neighborhood. 'You
could smell the city,' he recalls of a childhood filled
with fun, trouble and doubt. |
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Courtesy of Godfrey Reggio
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"Look at all these people!" a friend yells
up at Reggio, who returns the remark with a benign grin. "You only know intellectuals,
don't you?" Reggio blushes down at him. "That's not true," he says, almost defensively.
"There are a lot of artists and all kinds of people here."
Indeed, despite the age range of the audience,
the bulk appear to be retired hippies, baby boomers decked out in suede vests,
Asian print blouses or Southwestern patterns. An air of New Age hangs over the
crowd. A woman in her 40s passes out green leaflets for a rally against genetically
altered meat.
Reggio pulls on his black jacket, and introduces
the film to the packed house -- the first of two standing-room-only screenings
this evening. He takes time to count a litany of collaborators, some of whom
have been working with him for three decades, including co-producers Lawrence
Taub and Mel Lawrence. Lawrence, himself an accomplished filmmaker, is best
known for producing the original Woodstock Festival in 1969.
"These are like lightning bolts, they're
like freak shows for the industry because there's no actors, there's no
characterization,
there's no plot," Reggio says in his throaty voice. "So success is not a box
office. I think you're going to find that this film, Naqoyqatsi,
is a vastly different experience than the other two. This film is much more
abstract. If there's
any
beauty in this film, it's tortured beauty. This film is very demanding. It's
not shot in the real world. In fact, the locations of this film are themselves
images. So it's a complex endeavor.
"It's like when you're painting many layers
of paint," Reggio continues. "We're using of course the New Divine, the computer,
as that which is at once the subject matter of this film and the production
tool. But it's one that myself and my colleagues have freely embraced. This
film has been, what, 14 years in the preparation, I'm embarrassed to say. Miramax
is going to shoot this baby into the vascular structure of the beast. So I
can
feel only very, very fortunate for that.
"Thank you very much for coming," he says
in conclusion. "I feel it's a special privilege to show this to my peers, a
critical pit, as it were, so let's begin the film."
Reggio is right. Naqoyqatsi features
some of the ideas that fueled Koyaanisqatsi and Powwaqatsi: wordless images
of man's ongoing struggle with technology
and industrialization, set to Philip Glass' hypnotic music. (The first two
films
were released on DVD last month.) But from there, the new work departs greatly.
In Naqoyqatsi, Reggio used almost all archival or "found" images instead of shooting
locations -- taking images and "degrading" them by digitally manipulating
them to make a commentary about how man appears to be losing the war. Man,
as he puts it,
is no longer a master of technology; he has become technology, and nowhere
is that more clear than in the power of the image.
"The image itself is the location," Reggio
says. "The task of this film was to deal with the evil demon of images."
They come hurtling at the viewer sometimes
at lightning speed, sometimes camped out, staring back at the viewer, challenging.
Reggio breaks the film down into three "movements": "Numerica.com," a series
of metamorphoses including the natural to the supernatural; "Circus Maximus,"
in which life becomes one big game; and "Rocketship 20th Century," where the
film's theme of civilized violence suggests a world so advanced that language
can no longer explain it.
Many of the images are consciously familiar
-- the jettisoning of a booster rocket from outer space, cultural icons like
Marilyn Monroe, newsreel imagery. But Reggio treats them like Silly Putty, bending,
shaping, ultimately distorting them through digital technique to take something
old and make it disturbingly new.
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Angels on his shoulder: Directors George Lucas and Steven
Soderbergh (pictured) are just a few of the people who have
been drawn to, and encouraged, Godfrey Reggio's work.
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"I wanted to do something I hadn't done, and
I wanted very much to deal with the 'venerated familiar,' of which cliche
is very much a part of," Reggio explains. "But as my late friend (beat poet)
Gregory Corso told me, a cliche is a cliche because it has an element
of profundity. If you can find that element, then it's worth doing."
While his ideas have been shaped by a wide
range of philosophers, artists and intellectuals, Reggio drew particular
inspiration
for this project from Ivan Illich, a persistent critic of the impact of technology
on such crucial resources as education, energy consumption, and medical treatment.
Illich's writings are summed up in one particular quote from the film's press
release: "To the degree that he masters his tools, [man] can invest the world
with his meaning; to the degree he is mastered by his tools, the shape of
the
tool determines his own self-image."
In fact, Reggio gladly acknowledges the perceived
hypocrisy of using technology to criticize technology, calling himself a Trojan
horse sent in to disrupt the enemy.
Naqoyqatsi yet again features Philip Glass' music, but
in a completely different way from their previous collaborations. Gone are the
trademark arpeggios that have become the composer's trademark; in their place
is an acoustic, more traditionally symphonic work highlighted by the cello solos
of the legendary classical musician Yo-Yo Ma.
"I wanted to make sure the human dimension
of the work, maybe lost in the technology, came through in the music," Glass
explains. "We knew we were entering into very, let's say dangerous territory
in that we were exploiting the images in a very extreme way. On the other hand,
we were going to the limit and work on those kinds of borders where things
that were interesting to all of us. The score would be a bridge, from the
heart
to
the movie, not the head. It was important for the viewer to relate to images
emotionally or they won't work."
Glass' work, then, becomes a Greek chorus
of sorts, commenting on this losing war between man and machine. Taking it
one
step further is Yo-Yo Ma's cello pieces, which at times sound like a wailing
mourner at a funeral.
"The piece is meant to be a tragedy," Reggio
says. "The piece is about tragedy -- not the truth that this is a tragedy,
but from a point of view that this is a tragedy. The truth, that's a whole
other
subject."
That Reggio has been able to present this
tragedy is actually a triumph. Following Koyaanisqatsi, 1988's Powwaqatsi was a commercial flop and
received mixed reviews. For more than a decade, Reggio shopped around the idea
for the planned final piece of his trilogy. He found no angels. He kept
himself
busy making smaller works, including two with Glass: 1991's 30-minute Anima
Mundi, for the World Wildlife Fund's Biological Diversity Campaign; and
1995's Evidence, an eight-minute piece on the effect of television
on children, as part of a Benetton-sponsored project in Italy. Along the
way, he
taught, lectured and kept looking for investors for his film.
It wasn't until the spring of 2000 that he
finally caught a major break. Glass, who continually tours the country including
Reggio's work in his performances, was unveiling his "Philip on Film" compilation
of film scores at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Reggio convinced The New
York Times to feature his struggle to finance as a way to advance the show;
Ty Burr, the editor of Entertainment Weekly and a Reggio fan, took the
assignment and wrote a glowing portrait of Reggio's efforts. Among those who
read the article was director Steven Soderbergh, who got in touch with Reggio
and said he wanted to help.
By then, Soderbergh had earned a little windfall
from Erin Brockovich's profits, so he was willing to put up some of his
own money to help Reggio finish his project -- and even get him an audience
with Miramax co-founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein, Soderbergh's sometime producers
all the way back to sex, lies, and videotape.
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Philip Glass composed his first film score with Koyaanisqatsi: 'Godfrey has something to say, and he wants people to hear it.'
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"I was incredulous at first," Reggio says
after meeting with Soderbergh in Los Angeles. "I had to severely question him
-- I felt really weird questioning a person that's trying to give you something
-- but if something's too good to be true, usually it's not true. But he said,
'Look, I don't know what else to tell you, what do you want me to do? I mean,
I'm telling you, I want do this for you. I think it's important, and I'm there
for you.' And I was very moved.
"He put in his own money to this film, to
the point of his friends questioning the probity of his generosity," Reggio
says. "And he said to me, 'Don't worry, just stay with me, I'm with you.' I
said, 'But Steven, you're not going to be able to afford the whole nine yards
here,' which he knew. But he said the way to get a movie started is to start
it, and then let him worry about it." Soderbergh receives executive-producer
credit on the film.
During this same period, he lost three of
his closest friends: beat poet Gregory Corso, "Atomic Artist" Tony Price (who
used scraps from the nearby Los Alamos nuclear test site in his works) and photographer
Walter Chappell. "It was a very intense time for me," he says.
The Weinsteins signed on to help finish and
distribute the film, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Oct. 18
and
will expand to other cities the following weeks. In Soderbergh, Reggio had
found another angel, just as he had years earlier when famed artist Georgia
O'Keeffe
screened some early work on Koyaanisqatsi and cut Reggio a check
for $25,000. He convinced cinematographer Ron Fricke to work the camera. Philip
Glass
signed
onto
that
project after Reggio somehow convinced him to take a look at some early footage
set to Glass' music that Reggio had tacked on. Glass had never scored a
feature
film before, but something in Reggio's work caught his eye.
"I was interested with what he showed me,"
recalls Glass, now Reggio's most consistent champion. "I said I could do this.
We'd work on it as money would appear. To be honest, I thought he'd never get
the money. I thought it would be an art project that would never get finished.
"What's interesting about Godfrey is, even
though he's been working in that independent-artist way, he also has the drive
and ambition to make the work known," says Glass. "He's willing to take it
out of the context of the underground-film world and into a general public.
He has
something to say, and he wants people to hear it."
It was through film historian/producer Tom
Luddy, whom he'd learned about from a Christian Brother back in New Orleans,
that Reggio first met director Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola loved what he
saw
in Reggio's footage, and agreed to put "Francis Ford Coppola Presents" atop
the title to enhance its marketability. Another angel, whom Reggio refuses
to name, helped put up most of the financing for Koyaanisqatsi.
"To this day," Coppola told Burr in
the Times, "images and sequences from the film remain with me."
For Powwaqatsi, which Reggio made five years
later, he and a crew shot film in 13 countries in the Southern Hemisphere
to show
how
developing countries struggled with the transition into an industrialized society.
(The cost: $4.2 million, nearly double the cost of its predecessor.) By
then,
Coppola had introduced Reggio to fellow Californian George Lucas of Star
Wars fame, and Lucas added his name to Coppola's for the film and allowed
Reggio to do some of his post-production work at what would later become Lucas'
Industrial Light & Magic facilities.
Another movie, another angel. What is it
about Reggio that draws so many talented and influential people to him?
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Koyaanisqatsi, released in 1983, has been credited for influencing everything from TV commercials to MTV to IMAX films.
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"I don't think it's about me, if I can be
so clear," Reggio insists. "I wanted to say that with all honesty. I have no
self-deprivation here. It's the project that they responded to. They responded
to an idea which was something that kindled some enthusiasm either by what
they
saw, in the case of Francis or George, or what they heard, in the case of Philip
and Steven. None of these people knew me at that time personally. It was purely
the perseverance at presenting this idea to them -- something that was different.
And I had a lot of help from my friends, I must say."
Glass agrees that Reggio's work inspires
people to join in: "What is interesting about Godfrey is he seems to be go back to
the time when film was an art form." Or maybe, Glass suggests, even former monks
are inspiring. "I still call him Brother Godfrey. It's more than a joke; he
even wears the part. The black shirt doesn't have buttons. The only thing missing
is the collar. There's an ecclesiastical aroma to Godfrey, and he'll vehemently
deny it."
Before Koyaanisqatsi, Godfrey Reggio's
film knowledge was mostly limited to the horror flicks he watched when he
was
Charles Reggio, a spunky pre-teen growing up in Carrollton with "heavy-hang" buddies
like Bobby Da Silva.
"Charlie was very imaginative and passionate,"
says Da Silva. "And clever. Charlie was clever. He could invent something out
of nothing."
Charles Reggio also had a passion for the
fantastic. "Charlie loved wrestling," Da Silva recalls. "Wrestlers like Gorgeous
George, the Swedish Angel. He didn't believe it was fake, and I'd be beside
myself. We'd watch wrestling on Tuesday night, and he loved horror movies.
Charlie and I watched The Thing at the Poplar Theater, and I was petrified.
I walked out on it, and he thought it was the funniest thing. He enjoyed the
macabre, the shocking stuff. He fed on that."
Actually, Charles Reggio fed on anything
that could fuel his imagination. He was constantly getting into something,
anything
-- often trouble -- that he could find outside his home at 1819 Dublin St.
While both his parents worked -- his father was a traveling salesman,
his mother a stenographer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers -- Charles
was left to
his own devices.
"But I can remember a very happy childhood
of a lot of activity, running around eating Japanese plums, building treehouses,
riding my bike, using lawn mower motors to make little motors on the go-cart
and that kind of stuff," Reggio says. "There was a doctor on Carrollton Avenue
who had a garage with a flat above it that nobody used, with a trap door to
get into it, so of course he never knew what was happening. We'd go sneaking
in through the trap door all the time, and made our detective agency. I mean,
it's like what kids do, you know? Getting the dope on everybody.
"And you could smell the city.
You never noticed it then, because it was part of your terra firma."
Though his family was lower middle class,
Reggio's bloodlines sport a bit of Louisiana royalty a relative uncovered years
later. The family is descended from Francois Marie De Reggio, an Italian who
after coming to Louisiana on a commission from the King of France in 1751 helped
negotiate the sale of the Louisiana Territory to the Spanish. He later became
a representative for the Spanish king.
While these bloodlines didn't do him much
good in Carrollton, Charles Reggio slowly started making friends with some
of
the richer kids in Uptown, to the point where he was allowed to pledge, and
join, the young-teen fraternity Phi Lambda Epsilon with the help of a buddy, "and that was kind of La Dolce Vita," he
says.
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Powaqqatsi (1988) surveyed the struggle of underdeveloped Southern Hemisphere societies dealing with the onslaught of industrialization.
Film images courtesy Institute for Regional Education.
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"It was called a nouveau riche fraternity,"
he recalls, chuckling. "I remember, it was for the kids whose families were
not part of the old structure there, but somehow ... ." How did he do it? "By
force of will, I guess," he says, still seemingly unsure. "Just being a kid,
being out there."
"Being a kid" while attending Mater De La
Rosa wasn't all La Dolce Vita, though. Charles was a horrible student, and could
never sit still and pay attention. ("I was always discontent," he says.) He
concedes that, in a more contemporary time, he probably might've been classified
with Attention Deficit Disorder. Charles got into so many fights that others
started calling the gangly kid "Battling Bones." Did he ever win? "Oh, well,
you know," he says, smiling. "You get the shit kicked out of you a lot."
Reggio pins some of the childhood fighting
on the racism and class consciousness he noticed growing up. And then there
was his seemingly incongruous social status while running with the rich kids. "I felt like I guess something inside of me said if I stayed there, I was gonna
go under. It was too much pressure. It was too competitive. Too class-oriented." Then,
in the seventh grade, Mater De La Rosa decided to bring in male instructors
for the boys -- which included the infusion of the Christian Brothers, a contemplative
order of French Catholic monks who adhere to an ascetic lifestyle of fasting,
meditation and prayer. It was founded in 1680 by St. John Baptist De La Salle.
This was the way out for Charles Reggio. "These
brothers inspired me," he recalls. "They still do to this day. They were living
their life for other people. Young people identify who they want to be, not
conceptually, but with the personality of an older person. And I found for
the
first time somebody that I wanted to be like. And that motivated me. I wanted
to be like him. It happens to every young kid. It's called role models. It's
not a lot of hogwash. It's so important."
His decision to leave New Orleans after eighth
grade, at the age of 14, for the De La Salle Christian Brothers School in Lafayette,
stunned his family.
"At that point in time, it was a total surprise
to me because he liked everything in life, the partying, the dances, the girls,"
says his older brother, Godfrey O. Reggio Jr., who was already out of the house
and married by then. "I was flabbergasted. I didn't think he would make that
grade."
"When I got there, it made boot camp look
like a holiday," Reggio says of his arrival in Lafayette. "This was serious
business, man. You couldn't talk at certain times, you had to stand up and
eat,
you had to eat in silence. Silence was not important; it was the most
important thing. Going to prayer. Not messing around. Modesty of the eyes. Controlling
your eyes.
"And women are gone, dead, over with.
I was working like I've never worked before. Manual labor every day. And
not being
able to write home. Not being able to go home and see your family. They could
come up once every six weeks to visit, and I think my family came up to
visit
every six weeks. Boy, but it was tough, man. I was shocked."
That's how Charles Reggio began his life studying
to be a Christian Brother in 1954, and despite some impressive rebounds, over
14 years he was never really quite happy. He likes to talk of his experiences
in Lafayette as if he'd stepped into the Middle Ages, and sometimes speaks fondly
of those days, but really, his life in the order was rife with conflict both
within and without. Within, mainly because he grappled with the emergence of
sexuality. Without, because he was still a horrible student.
His inner turmoil was so great, he says,
that he couldn't even fulfill the requirement of establishing "predominant defect,"
whereby students find one major defect in them in order to chart their life's
plan. "I felt I had them all," he says. "I was totally distraught, full of
all of this anxiety. I couldn't make a perfect act of contrition, I was afraid
I
was going to hell."
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Godfrey Reggio's latest film, Naqoyatsi, features manipulates images of everything from Pieter Bruegel's Tower of Babel to the Statue of Liberty.
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He still maintained his sense of humor, he
says, and even retained a penchant for getting into trouble: While at home one
summer, he wrecked his father's car while joy riding with Bobby Da Silva, only
to wreck his dad's new car a few weeks later.
Somehow, Charles gutted out his time in Lafayette,
thereby earning a trip in 1959 to St. Michael's College in Santa Fe. Before
he left, he had to renounce his birth name and take another, that of a saint.
As a favor to his mother -- who was always miffed neither her son Godfrey Jr.
nor her grandson, Godfrey III, used their real first name -- he took the name
Godfrey. By then, his father had passed away, and he wanted to both honor him
and please his mother.
That was the easy part. The hard part was
trying, once again, to make the grade this time in college. After some
initial academic struggles, "Brother Godfrey" became inspired by a philosophy
class taught by a Dominican friar. By the end of his stay at St. Michael's,
Brother Godfrey won a medal for philosophy.
But there was catch even then: His "Che Guevara," as
he calls him, was Pope John XXIII -- considered by many to be one of the
most progressive and radical popes ever.
Pope John XXIII believed in
opening up the church, in Reggio's eyes, and honoring its mission
to live simply
and help others -- especially the poor. In Santa Fe, there
was plenty of poverty, focused mainly in the Latino street gangs
who were consistently at war. After breaking up a fight at the
college's high school gym one night, Brother Godfrey went to
work.
"He came out of a dark corner, kind of like
the Lone Ranger, you might say, and try to intervene and try to get the guys
to get to stop from fighting and get us to communicate with each other," recalls
Juan Valdez, a gang member who now works with fellow alcoholics on the road
to recovery in Santa Fe's barrios. "Being that he was dressed in a black Christian
Brother outfit, we respected him. Plus, he was 6-foot-7, you know. That gives
you something to think about.
"You couldn't hit him. It would've
been like hitting God."
(Reggio even had a little help from director
Luis Bunuel, whose 1950 film Los Olvidados -- "the young and
the damned" -- about juvenile delinquents in Mexico City was shown to Reggio
by one of the Brothers.)
Over the next few years, Brother Godfrey
helped establish several support groups for the gangs: the Young Citizens
for Action,
La Clinica De La Gente ("the clinic of the people"), so on. He was thrown in
jail several times for his activism -- often while monitoring police brutality
-- and even recalls having a nightstick rammed up his rectum. The more radical
he became, the more concerned his Brothers became. Eventually, they agreed
to
part ways, and in 1968, for the first time in his life, Godfrey Reggio was
completely on his own.
He busied himself with more activism, working
with labor unions up in Chicago before returning to Santa Fe to pick up his
many causes there. In 1973, with a handful of others, he founded the Institute
for Regional Education as an alternative method of informing people in ways
the mainstream media was failing them. Through sponsorship from the American
Civil Liberties Union, Reggio helped develop a series of nonverbal public-service
announcements exposing invasion-of-privacy issues as well as the use of technology
to control behavior.
The campaign, which hit TV, newspapers, billboards
and radio, raised public awareness substantially, and Godfrey Reggio's career
as a filmmaker was awkwardly up and running. Brother Godfrey had found his
true calling. Two years later, he began working on Koyaanisqatsi, and started
working out his
many conflicts.
"Certainly the confrontations that appear
in his work are not dissimilar to the way he's lived his own life," Glass says.
"There's a Gordian knot that holds them together."
The sun is setting over the Jemez Mountains
that surround the eastern reaches of Santa Fe on another July evening. Reggio's
wife, Marti Lovell, and stepdaughter Vella are doing their own thing while
he
attends a party being held by John Allen, a renaissance man whose work includes
the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona. "John's a controversial dude," Godfrey
says after arriving at Allen's Synergia compound, a 225-acre spread 20 miles
outside
of town that includes a geodesic dome. Like Reggio's late friend, Gregory Corso,
Allen ran with the beat writers of the 1950s, and even sees a little bit
of
them in Reggio's latest work.
Allen greets Reggio with a warm embrace and
dancing eyes. "I loved the movie!" Allen gushes with a smile as he pulls away
from their hug. "I loved what you did with the images; it's sort of like the
way (William S.) Burroughs tore apart words! You tore apart images!" Reggio
returns Allen's smile.
The party is populated with people with names
like Lazer, Tango, Abdul, Cosma and Flash. Admiring the beginning of the
sunset,
Allen points to a mountain range in the distance. "You see that one?" he says.
"That's the northern-most point of the old Aztec empire. And you know this
area here? It's where Lew Wallace wrote Ben-Hur."
Throughout the evening, Reggio tours the
facilities, chats with friends, munches on tahini. He slips away for huge
chunks of time,
leaving many wondering if he'd left. "There he is!" a woman says from
outside, pointing to a lanky silhouette inside the darkened living room.
It's Reggio, alone in the room, dancing to
a swirl of music fueled by the didgeridoo, an ancient instrument of the Aborigines
of northern Australia. Eyes closed, he's lost within himself as he creates this
bizarre interpretive dance, his body gawking back and forth like a nervous flagpole
in the wind, teetering but never falling. He's smiling, doing this little dance
of life. He seems utterly at peace in this, a little private world of his own
creation.
And he didn't have to say a word.
