Michelangelo’s relationship with the Medici family of Florence was complicated, subject to the lifelong push and pull of fated intertwinement. At sixty he completed Dusk and Dawn, two sculptures adorning the tomb of Lorenzo II de Medici — Dusk, a man laying down to sleep next to Dawn, a woman just having awoken — a permanent monument to strained love and life lost.
My father left behind miniature replicas of Dusk and Dawn when my parents got divorced. These two statuettes — repurposed from tomb plumage to decorative bookends — came into my possession by default, as did their wedding rings, their lamp, their old home videos, and a wondrous love for their union that is now, for them, a distant memory. This film project is a monument to that love in all its complexity and malformation.
“Two Statuettes” (the song) was written and recorded as part of a forthcoming album Dusk & Dawn, a work now two years in the making. This video project is a first endeavor. It seeks to personalize an already personal piece of music, and enhance it through the recombination of film media. The “loudness” of this resurrected, decades-old wedding tape is an ingrained part of the narrative. The interplay between loudness and a gentler touch in music reveals new lights and new darknesses in images that weren’t originally self-aware. This newfound self-awareness brings all these dualities to fruition, to a single point of contact: In two they went, in two they failed, and so, in two, they return.
I am my past—its lyric, its image, its progress, its potential. In writing music for film / In making film for music, this past inevitably returns. I am a songwriter and a wannabe filmmaker, a poet and a director, an artist of two media who understands that each can bring out the best in the other. I am, above all, a storyteller. I believe in the stories that built me, those tape-deck memories of a past I wasn’t present for, as well as in the ongoing struggle to make sense, in real time, of a present that will soon be past. I join the documentation of this past with the sound of this present. And where they converge, I can recognize home.
Dusk & Dawn 