SAM FALLS
JAMIE
— Jamie and I were best friends, he was my god-brother growing up. We went on family vacations and had dinner together all the time. We grew up in Vermont in a town of about 6,000 people, so we knew everyone and everyone knew us. He was five years younger than me so when you’re a kid that’s a lot. When I moved to New York City for graduate school he started going to school at Sarah Lawrence. He’d come sleep on my floor in Brooklyn on the weekends now and then and we’d stay up all night making music. That’s when we decided we were just brothers. We became so close. I was very alone in New York for a long time and we were support systems. He encouraged me to pursue art and living with nothing and I tried to keep him healthy and in school, whatever that means. There were a few late nights I’d drive up to stay with him overnight when things were tough for him and sometimes he’d come stay with me. One time after Christmas break I drove him down to school and dropped him off on my way to Brooklyn. I found out that night I had to move out of my small room because there was an issue with the work space being discovered as a live space and I moved into my car for a week. I talked to Jamie everyday that week. He moved to New York after he finished school, the same year I moved to LA, about three years ago. Then he moved to LA almost a year ago and lived with his girlfriend. I’d become so busy I didn’t see him enough, but when we saw each other it was great every time. He had a job and seemed to be doing well. When he moved to New Orleans like nine months ago he said he had to go – that he knew it was the best place for him. Jamie was a poet and musician, he knew the world very intimately but it didn’t really know him too well. He wrote poems for all my books and recorded albums on his computer that we started to release. I’d send him pictures of projects I was working on and he’d write poems for the books. He’d send me all his music and I’d make album covers. He started a poetry blog—gaiatincture.com—that we both frequently wrote poems for, along with some other friends. Before he left we went on a road trip together to make a new body of work I had been planning, hanging wind-chimes I made all across the national forests of California. We’d hike way out into the woods and I’d climb a tree to hang the chime, it was so nice being together, working together. He was writing poems along the trip, we decide haikus would be perfect for this book. Here’s a couple of poems he wrote:
the feeling of you
being trapped in your body
a breath of fresh air
19.
i wonder what you
see through the window after
god closes the door
We talked a lot on the trip, listening to the radio he said, “Sometimes I hear a song and it reminds me of the past and I knew this song would be on the radio at the right time, like everything is connected.” We stopped at gas stations and I drank a lot of coffee – Jamie favored as always red bull and blue gatorade. Here’s Jamie with my dog George somewhere off the 5 freeway on our way north.
Jamie had never been to northern California and he really enjoyed it, he loved Big Sur:
and the Redwood forest was his favorite place of the trip I’d say.
We drove my car through a tree and everything. We drank Gnarly Head wine from California every night and watched TV in cheap hotels.
Soon after the trip Jamie moved to New Orleans, where he finished working on his new album, he wen’t under the name Oldd News as far as music was concerned. He went under the moniker September Spring when writing poems – here’s another good one:
when it all comes
down to it, its the
sound of the saw
in the woods when
you wake up
the feeling of drinking
too much at once; full
the feeling of falling
asleep too fast; loan
“there’s places that i
can take you that
the theater can’t”
i told them all,
crossing my legs
“it’s like, your soul
is a little paper
and where the
hole punches
the west rain
seeps through”
and no one
can never
really summit
that west rain
forever, and i
can’t help but
pour a lot of
gas in the fire
the new idea
is that people
keep having
visions, the end
has approached,
everyone is huffing,
but then one day
scientists realize
there is this giant
rock getting close
and then they realize
it’s a planet but that it
won’t collide with our
planet and when it gets
closer to us we see it is
another planet populated
by people very similar to
us who have built these
great civilizations, and they
start shooting rockets to our
earth, when they come they
tell us that is truly the end of
the world for them, sometimes
we can see the explosions on
their planet at night from earth.
this of course all is coinciding
with a child who discovers a
cave deep in the woods near
an old elegant tomb with many
stone statues that linger, cold.
in the cave there are four zones,
the first being a secret forest
where the light comes from the
bark of the beautiful white birch.
there are guardians of every
feeling, and they hold it in pure
mists, far away from humans
who could limp and yield from it.
Jamie was going to come out from New Orleans in October back to California for a while. He was going to meet me out here and we were going to go collect the wind chimes. He died at the end of September this year and I left the next day for a couple weeks to reclaim the windchimes we had hung. I repeated the exact same trip we did , stayed in the same places, and cried the whole time. It was the only thing I knew to do at the time. I left the windchime in the Redwoods to hang forever and sound as his memorial.
On the trip we did together, Jamie brought a disposable camera, per usual, and below are the pictures he took with it. Here’s a song from his last album, it’s nice visiting them together:
OLDD NEWS – GREEN WAVE
I miss him so much.
Sam Falls
February 4th, 2014
—
Sam Falls was born in 1984, in San Diego, CA and lives and works in Brooklyn. Selected solo exhibitions include; T293, Rome (2013); Balice Hertling, Paris (2013); Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich (2013); FINAL FOREVER, Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (2013), Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva (2013); Luce Gallery, Turin (2012); China Art Objects, Los Angeles (2012); Printed Matter, New York (2012); Marta Cervera, Madrid (2012); M+B, Los Angeles (2012); West Street Gallery, New York (2011); EVERYTHING KEEPS BEING NOTHING, Higher Pictures, New York (2011). Recent publications include; STUDIO SPACE PRINT TIME, published by Printed Matter; LATTICE, published by Gottlund Verlag; LIFE SIZE, published by Karma.
www.samfalls.com
www.hannahhoffmangallery.com
www.presenhuber.com
www.t293.it
www.balicehertling.com