Your Own Gear & An Independent Drive
Jason Summers on making art everyday and the outsider's journey
Perhaps everyone’s twenties and thirties are epic from the distance of a later age. Those decades are when we tend to do our darnedest to be wild and extravagant, expansive and exploratory. We invent things, discover things, get married, have kids, or not, but whatever we do, for the vast majority of us, most of our lives, with all the unknowns and possibilities, are ahead of us, which frees us up to be bold before many (most?) settle into a narrower groove.
Some of us, however, never really outgrow or move beyond that spirit, even while we find different and deeper ways to dig into the exploratory groove. We continue to live large in the land of epic. This land is populated thickly by artists, not exclusively, of course, but wow, it’s a lot like the Lower East Side in the 90s, before Whole Foods moved in, a lot like when Jason and I met there. He’s been living in epic-land ever since, (though both of us long ago moved and traveled far afield of the LES).
I asked Jason to write me a letter this week for FED about what he’s been up to for the past thirty years. Letters are a wonderful thing, and the epistolary tradition gets short shrift in the days of texting and email.
Although this one arrives electronically, imagine the post has just dropped through an actual slot in your door or been placed in the mailbox at the end of your drive. Imagine that you sift through the pile, and among the bills, grocery circulars, and junk mail, an envelope peaks through. There, in the upper left hand corner, is the familiar handwriting of a dear friend, an address you don’t recognize, but unmistakably familiar nonetheless.
Tear open the beautiful surprise and an old friend, from afar, drops now into your kitchen, den, or living room along with a pile of photos and a tape. Pull up a chair, and relish this unexpected and epic company as you sip your tea on a rainy late summer day.
Big love, Ashley
Hey Ashley!
It’s been so good to reconnect after all of these years - what’s it been? Thirty years, I think almost, but not quite. You had your special hideout apartment on the Lower East Side where you used to host various film tech weirdos and ne’er do wells to crash and eat your amazing cooking. Remember New Year’s Day and eating black-eyed peas for good luck? ...something we both learned growing up in the South, but I always thought I turned you on to it.
You cooked us such great meals in that little apartment, and we had some outlandishly amazing rooftop parties! Everyone was so excited about life’s possibilities and about all our pals there with us. You were such a warm and fun host and a beacon of light for us itinerate workers couch-surfing their way to fame and glory from the trenches of low-budget feature films and the like. What a wild ride the mid-1990’s were!
Cut to 2024… My wife, Kate Fix, our daughter, and I try to approach life by entwining art into just about everything we do and every idea we play with. We’ve done all of this from our resurrected farm in the North Carolina country just outside of Chapel Hill.
I still work freelance doing camera and lighting on all kinds of jobs, which sharpens my art skills as I collaborate with clients and other technicians. It also means I’ve assembled a working camera and lighting package, which allows me the ultimate freedom of creating whatever I want, with the only real expense being time and effort.
I’ve found this to be utterly liberating, and even though these little films we’ve done have not had huge nationwide or worldwide exposure, we have found our very particular audiences each time. We’ve screened at film festivals around the world, and then, found people seeking us out to do further screenings all over. Our films continue to sell and be referenced in more of a cult-type paradigm. Sharing this with others has made us so many friends and collaborators over the years.
In our documentaries and other film projects, I’ve focused on exploring outsiders. I’ve always been drawn to people who compulsively, obsessively, or by choice work around and outside the structures of normal artistic systems.
Our new film, which we started shooting more than twenty years ago, focuses on an iconoclast working outside the system. I Should Have Been Dead Years Ago: The Raw Life Of StuArt Gray is hitting film festivals around the world in the coming months, and the subject—Stuart Gray—offers a lesson in perseverance and making no compromises with artistic vision. Here’s the trailer:
A legend, Stuart was notorious in 1988 for performing completely nude with his band LUBRICATED GOAT on national television in Australia. This performance created a huge controversy, with the usual conservative talk radio and newspaper backlash. Highly influential, especially to many of the heavier musicians of the grunge and noise era such as Mudhoney and Cop Shoot Cop, not to mention Kurt Cobain, Stuart is still at it and hilarious in his devilish humor. A true Dada warrior monk.
Other info here, including articles and radio interviews.
For our long-format pieces, we’ve looked to musicians who are lesser known, those who, like Stuart, choose to favor their own visionary approach to the work, often to the detriment of commercializing it and finding both financial success and wider audiences. The different approach they take to their work, we like to think, is mirrored by our aim at telling their story with less resources on our end than most documentaries.
We shot Unknown Passage: The Dead Moon Story in 2001 and released it in 2004 about the underground cult band DEAD MOON. Husband and wife, grandparents, and musicians trying for decades to find success, while building small businesses by hand, including their own homes. Here’s the trailer:
We’ve used this angle—our own gear and an independent drive—to apply to other film and photo projects, and I’d like to encourage everyone to consider using self-imposed “artistic assignments” as a way to do more art, for whatever reason that makes them happy!
For example, in 1999, Kate and I began making goofy Christmas cards while living in NYC—our stint on Manhattan’s Lower East Side went from 1997-2005. We’ve kept it up most years, and our daughter has seamlessly integrated into the project. It’s something we like to do as a weird family unit operating outside the bounds of commercial artists and the normal channels of presentation for artwork…
Here’s another real photo, shot in a snowstorm at the famous Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon, wearing the wardrobe and wigs Kate put together for us…
Most people will think our photos are photoshopped, but part of our fun is to do as much in-camera hard work as possible. We try to create these photos without using photoshop to engage the viewer. In this next one, though, we did cheat, and used photoshop to combine two photos of our daughter to create The Shining’s twins.
Here’s another real photo, nodding to the hilarious Coen Brothers film Raising Arizona.
We built a replica of the Black Lodge in our barn for a Twin Peaks spin to honor David Lynch:
Pandemic times inspired us to make a Jimi Hendrix album cover:
With our Christmas Vacation, we also riffed off the state of the world:
Road Warrior kind of speaks for itself:
Here are a couple links to more cards and the methods behind our madness.
On Thursday, I’ll tell you more about our relationship to our place in North Carolina—its history and ecology. It’s where a lot of this work happens.
Plus, I’ll share our favorite persimmon recipe with you…
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All are welcome at the table, and together, we co-create and sustain community.
For more goodies…
Learn more about Jason and FED’s entire Summer 2024 global crew of musicians, artists, writers, growers, gleaners, cooks, and craftspeople, and be sure to check out all the tasty morsels we're serving up this season including Jason’s Persimmon Pudding recipe, which drops Thursday, 22 August.
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