This is the short film based on the music and themes from David Baerwald's 1992 album Triage. It was filmed over four days on location at the Kaiser Steel Mill in Fontana CA.
Executive produced by Anne-Marie Mackey, Jonathon Ker, and Robert Richards. Directors included Neil Abramson, John Bick, Brad Biggs, John Drake, Melodie McDaniel, Len Peltier, Nico Soultanakis, and Gore Verbinski.
Included in the film are live performances of Born For Love and Bitter Tree.
I cleaned up the original digital copy I made of the VHS from back in 2001. I think it looks even better than the version found on the DVD. I'm not sure what took me so long to get this on here. But it's here now. Enjoy.
This video is the stuff of legends. David mentioned it to me in the very first email chain I had with him when I was naively asking if he was indeed the David Baerwald of David + David. So early early days. The seed stuck and I always kept an eye out for the film - but thinking the odds of ever getting it were slim. I even traded emails back and forth with talent (a girl from The Postman scene) and Tony Shiff, the Head of Production who worked closely with Anne-Marie Mackey. Anne, from everything I could gather, was the force behind this film being made.
And then in early February, 2001 - a copy on VHS showed up on ebay. [message board posts about this] Message board regular "Jeff Dewester" won the auction and kindly gifted it to the DBIS to be shared. It was the highlight of a VHS collection of videos made available through the DBIS. And again - as the centerpiece of the Live @ Steamboat / Triage DVD .
[David posted an excellent summary of the film] -
I warn you guys. This is a very weird little movie. It was done in true anarcho-syndicalist fashion by a group of about ten video directors in this massive abandoned steel plant. This place was so toxic that all the security guards who worked there had sort-of Philip K.Dick-style mutations and skin lesions growing madly. The plant had been built to supply steel to the naval shipbuilders in San Pedro during WWII, and its passing took with it the local economy. See Mike Davis' book "City of Quartz" for the fascinating and tragic history of the Kaiser Steel Mill in Fontana CA. After the plant closed (I think in the 70's) the Army Corps of Engineers used it to test explosives. If anyone's ever wondered what several thousand tons of dynamite can do to a concrete structure (as I have), then mark Fontana on your travel calendar. Massive concrete and steel smokestacks, split in two, with the top half a good fifty yards from the base; aircraft hangar-size buildings cleaved as with some giant axe... A stunning (and sobering) display of almost geologic-size violence and destruction. This is not your tidy little staggered implosion-style building demolition. This is more like what parts of Chechnya must look like now.
The movie was never quite finished. There was meant to be a stock ticker running under the whole thing which we never laid in. The narrator is supposed to be a kind of put-upon bureaucrat detailing the necessity for population control via "ethnically rifled" bio weapons, much like they supposedly used in South Africa. The "Born For Love" sequence is pretty amazing, as well as "the Postman" sequence, in which a sweet-faced elderly Oriental man maintains a tragic serenity under an unending assault of water, as Jim Jones shrieks bloody murder on the soundtrack.
This is not your father's music promo vid, unless your father is William Burroughs, or, I guess, me.
