Gordon Ball
2021Farm Diary
Gordon Ball
The Farm's first ten months. Cleaning the well, reading the paper, chanting Prajna Paramitra Sutra, tilling the earth, sipping coffee, picniking, the sun setting, the sun rising, mist settling, motoring through the countryside, building the woodshed, digging for the hidden well, the morning walk, bathing, horseshoing, caressing the cow, cutting wood, the annual parade, the sun yellowing leaves, the leaves wrinkling, the leaves fallen and blown, the snow, sledding, bearing water through the snow, 17 below, the blizzard. the end. Gordon Ball spent long patient seasons milking Bessie, tilling the earth, and squinting through 8mm lenses at home nature on mountain top farm filled with ghostly strangers and so documents and archetypal first year back to the land. – Allen Ginsburg
Farm Diary
Mexican Jail Footage
Gordon Ball
Paranoid surreptitious in-jail camera held in this prisoner's hands documents daily events and posturings of 25 gringos (and Mexican jailmates) arrested at Puerto Vallarta 1968 without charge. Was there Mexico, DF - Washington, DC collusion behind this round-up from Yelapa ferry boats, private town houses and palm-roofed wall-less jungle huts? It took place during national polarization (of youth culture, official culture) in US; older US tourists were shocked to find more new generation they thought they'd left behind, and official Mexico was already paranoid in the face of coming Olympics (police would shoot 108 people) six months later. Narration's a dense web of comedy, horror and Kafkaesque grotesque behind a succession of raw sunlit images of comely youths imprisoned, male and female.
Mexican Jail Footage
