The Land of Gal

I wrote this song for my daughter who recently turned 2, and recorded it with the remote help of producers /  multi-instrumentalists Timo Ellis and Charlie Klarsfeld (each an endless pool of musical talent, please check out their music.)  I made 700 drawings to create this music video. Animation is daunting because after ten hours of work you’ve barely got 2 seconds of video to  show for it. But it became a sort of meditation— every morning before Noelle woke, in the darkness of the dawn, tracing her outline from my  lap top, frame by frame. Then I had this crazy idea for viewers to own a  piece of it. You can pause the video on your favorite image, send a screen shot to [email protected] and use this link to purchase the original drawing for $10, which will go towards Noelle’s future funds (https://www.jordangalland.com/shop/she-looks-just-like-you-animation-drawings)

I  woke up early one Saturday morning in 1992, grabbed my minolta camera and headed downtown on foot. I ate breakfast at Lucky Strike and   continued on to the World Trade Center, where I took this picture. I was  twelve and thrilled to be wandering through lower Manhattan alone   taking photographs. I wasn’t that much smaller than I am now, but I felt  really tiny among the big buildings. Saturday mornings used to feel   sort of empty and eerie. The city has changed in unbelievable ways since  then. Some stretches are so unrecognizable that it’s almost impossible  to feel nostalgic when walking around a street I frequented as a kid. Only photographs can show us the past sometimes. I normally don’t post on September 11. Maybe because it’s too sad. Maybe because I feel lucky I  didn’t suffer any personal loss, even though we were so close to the  towers. But 2020 stands out, perhaps more so than any year since 2001.  (Arguably 2016 gets a prize for the trauma of losing David Bowie,   Prince, Leonard Cohen, Umberto Eco and giving us this unprecedented   lunatic reality-TV President.) But 2020 has been surreal and hard on   everyone. New Yorkers all get the same familiar shivers when walking   around. Even if some outdoor dining crowds have filled up sidewalks and spilled into parks and avenues, an emptiness and eeriness has returned.  It’s not lack of life. It’s not the death of New York. In that space   carved out from the events of the last six months, the timeless vitality  of this town is more palpable than ever. It’s still my favorite place on earth.

It’s easy and impossible... like stealing from yourself.

Scorsese, stealing from himself.

“We’re going in circles.”

I know you always liked me, darling. And I can’t believe how far we’ve fallen You know I wasn’t always like this, baby Sometimes it feels like I did a 180 Maybe there’s still time, there’s still time to save me.

There is a sad seduction and mythic magic in the idea that civilization as we know it will be destroyed by zombies, or that monsters and demons hide among us, and when confronted with this threat one’s courage is all one has. Zombie-horror and demonic-thrillers with their government secrets, revenge of nature on the selfishness of humans, and tragic love, reproduces that feeling of the gathering storm in one’s heart – the feeling that we must live in the moment. That is something that most spiritual teachings and high art tries to convey. The horror genre of cinema exaggerates with a delicious display of wide angles and ketchup blood the capacity of strangers to bond in a time of crisis and undergo profound changes, accompanied by extreme personal growth. There’s always a motley crew of strangers who come together in a barricaded cafeteria to fight the indifference of evil, which has taken all of their loved ones. They have to deal with real sociological problems to overcome a collective threat…as fun as the action is, it also moves us. From a poetic standpoint, the moment that the  ‘loved one’ becomes a zombie, or a vampire, can resonate in a profound way, because if there is one sorrow that everyone knows, it is the sorrow of recognizing someone you love but not recognizing them; seeing the love that once filled their eyes drain away as though all the stars were falling from a cloudless sky, having to let them go because they are already gone, because they are not the person we once knew, and smashing in their heads with a big shovel is all we can do to save ourselves.

Video evidence that I pitched season 3 of Twin Peaks back in 2012 (while I was supposed to be promoting my film Alter Egos at Fantasia International Film Festival

Loving the alien (A.K.A The Church of E.T.)

On the seat belt sign is. Return to your seat, you must.

All the girls come out the girls come out. In the springtime its all about to begin again.

Debutante.

Strings attached.

Stormy mistress.

End of Summer.