Finding poetry at subzero in the dead of night

It’s early, tick creeps past tock at 1am and minus one degrees, the backstreets are silent as I pack up steel clanging camera cranes and frosted lenses glistening in a thin layer of frost.

You might feel sorry for me as a lonely soul packing up equipment out the back of the cold unbeautiful and kept out of the way trades mans yard for the ICC. Why do I this Job I hear you ask.

Hidden behind this scene in the small details is the night air reverberating the body heat on my skin as the adrenalin still pumps through live wire veins electrified by having just filmed The Phat Cats perform on stage at the ICC.

A kind of side effect to the job of looking through lenses and moving cameras in time to music, to performers, to rythmns, to drumbeats looking for the poetry in the ever changing abstract motion of music artists and bands.

Kandinsky, who died today in 1944, said: “Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for color, and that you be a true poet.

I tend to agree and am inspired by his thoughts as I find film making to be very like painting and I am always looking for the poetry in life, in people who to me are great works of art and musicians for me , even more so.

Not everyone will agree, but all I know is that on this particular frosty morning lugging equipment around unaware of numb thumbs and frost forming on my sweat soaked hair is that all I can feel is the vocal pyrotechnics striking a match inside my chest, the sound of drums throbbing inside my skin. I can still see the lights pirouette as they hit the stage, the wide eyes of the guitarist with arms like a speedboat propeller striking chords, The Boom, Boom,Boom detonating on the end of the drummers sticks, Keys being resurrected like long forgotten pianissimos, stacks of amps breathing in and out at a million times a second to an audience that thunders like waves in a sea of music..

so don’t feel sorry for me if you see in the earl hours lugging equipment, I love my Job, I love finding poetry.

p.s if you do see me by the way, feel free to come over and help me carry some of my equipment back ;0)