{"id":1456,"date":"2010-05-27T12:47:40","date_gmt":"2010-05-27T17:47:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fredhatt.com\/blog\/?p=1456"},"modified":"2014-12-14T22:23:57","modified_gmt":"2014-12-15T03:23:57","slug":"okie-troglodytes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fredhatt.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/27\/okie-troglodytes\/","title":{"rendered":"Okie Troglodytes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Still from "The Silo", 1988, video by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

In the mid-1980’s I was living in my home town of Enid, Oklahoma<\/a>, working as a video producer for a local ad agency.\u00a0 I had access to industrial video gear (a Sony DXC-M3<\/a> camera and portable U-matic deck), a romantic identification with stone age cave painters<\/a>, and some unembarrassable friends, one of whom lived on a farm with an abandoned grain silo.\u00a0 So naturally we decided to do some cave painting in the silo and make a video about it.<\/p>\n

The young guy seen playing saxophone and recorder is my younger brother Frank, previously seen on this blog in another old video, Subway Sax<\/a>.\u00a0 Frank is now living in Western Massachusetts, where he still practices improvisational\u00a0 music and dance.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Frank, still from "The Silo", 1988, video by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

The guy who’s driving the pickup truck at the beginning of the video is our friend John, one of my favorite people from my Enid days.\u00a0 He was from a well-to-do family who owned local office supply and farm implement businesses.\u00a0 John was a naturalist and an adventurer in the Victorian tradition, and an out gay man long before it was common in Oklahoma.\u00a0 He had traveled the world, making a living writing adventure journalism about drug smugglers and the like for Hustler<\/em> and other men’s magazines.\u00a0 He’d been living in California with a partner who was the leading expert on the California condor<\/a>.\u00a0 After John’s partner died of AIDS, and John knew he was positive himself, he’d returned to Enid.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

John, still from "The Silo", 1988, video by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

I got to know John because he was in the local writers’ club with my wife and me.\u00a0 John was writing a hilarious, sexually graphic and scathingly satirical account of a gay coming of age in Oklahoma.\u00a0 John lived in a little stone outbuilding on a farm outside town.\u00a0 His place was a regular natural history museum, with an amazing collection of specimens and artifacts including a giant anaconda skin and a Tibetan ritual cup made from a real human skull.\u00a0 Sitting on a coffee table was an elegant curved bone that everyone who entered his home felt attracted to pick up and caress.\u00a0 It was a walrus’s penis bone<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Outside the stone house, John had built a large pen and coop to keep his pet exotic chickens.\u00a0 I never knew chickens had been bred into as many variations as dogs!\u00a0 John used to take us on nature walks, where he’d make us wade through waist-deep swamps and crawl through brambles.\u00a0 He could spot all sorts of things I’d never have noticed, including dry owl vomit containing mouse skulls, ancient bison bones in the banks of creeks, and the nests of packrats and possums.<\/p>\n

John was an inspiration to me because coming from a small, conservative city never made him think he couldn’t live large.\u00a0 He gave me courage.\u00a0 A year after I shot this video, I was living in New York City, working at the media arts center Film\/Video Arts<\/a>, where I edited the piece.\u00a0 On one of my first visits back to Enid, I was devastated to see John wasting away in the hospital.\u00a0 I present this video to the world in tribute to John, because, slightly silly though the video may be, it’s all I have.\u00a0 And after all, isn’t it kind of fun, and doesn’t it have moments of beauty?
\n<\/object><\/p>\n

The Silo<\/a> from Fred Hatt<\/a> on Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some of the fragments of music in the video are what was playing on our boom box during the event.\u00a0 I believe the breathy brass is from Jon Hassell’s Earthquake Island<\/em><\/a>, and the polyrhythms are from Rhythm Devils Play River Music<\/em><\/a>, by Mickey Hart, Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, and others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the mid-1980’s I was living in my home town of Enid, Oklahoma, working as a video producer for a local ad agency.\u00a0 I had access to industrial video gear (a Sony DXC-M3 camera and portable U-matic deck), a romantic identification with stone age cave painters, and some unembarrassable friends, one of whom lived on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[223,240],"tags":[40,269,47,79,99,35],"class_list":["post-1456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-video-dance","category-video-image-processing","tag-collaborations","tag-dance","tag-experimental-performance","tag-frank-hatt","tag-john-vater","tag-music"],"yoast_head":"\nOkie Troglodytes - 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