Valpurnis: Saturan2017

My friendship with the star and composer of "Valpurnis: Saturan" goes back to when we were 9-year-old school mates at a Catholic Grammar School. We became best friends and shared ridicule from the other children for being considered different and strange from our classmates. One external difference: he was the child of mineralogists and had many pets at his house, including multiple dogs and reptiles. He identified more with animals than with people, and was the first person I met who used critical thinking and questioned authority – especially that of the nuns who dominated us children. I was frightened of the scenarios he presented of malevolent adults who take advantage of and lie to children to manipulate them. He hurled a lemon at a security guard when we were "trespassing" on a university lawn, and I realized he thrived on turmoil. We gradually grew apart, but through adulthood, had several pivotal encounters where he assisted me both with my filmmaking (he appeared as a UFO zealot in my VHS queer cult hit, 'Suroh: Alien Hitchhiker') and music (he performed in a transvestite punk rock band in Las Vegas for a time). It was during this time that he revealed to me that he was intersex, and had dealt with years of confusion being raised as a boy when he was neither male or female. Always on the edge, he got on the wrong side of the law and was unhoused for several years, with great financial difficulty befalling him. It was during this time that he told me he'd spent years composing a "Rock Opera" about Judas ("Judas Christ Superstar" was his working title). I offered to make some music videos for some of the songs he'd composed. As we continued this process, I wanted to make a grand gesture and complete all of his song cycle with accompanying music video footage, and "responses" to his bombastic music with alternate musicians. It was a form of celebration of the many years of our outsider friendship and kindred mischief, the results of which he enjoyed, until the last year of his life, living unhoused in the Arizona desert, post-pandemic. He identified with Judas as an outcast, as he himself had been.