The Song of the Last Place (There is nowhere else to go.)

The summit of Mt. Tamalpais, sentinel mountain of San Francisco Bay, was considered sacred ground by the Coast Miwok Indians. In 1950 it was decapitated by the Army Corps of Engineers and, although decommissioned in 1980, it's still a junkyard full of acres of asphalt, concrete slabs of barracks, a sewage plant, utility poles, a filled-in swimming pool, rusting pipes and bent and broken chain link fences — the remnants of a military installation that once housed 300 people.

I have spent the last five years raising awareness of the need for restoration with two films "The Invisible Peak" and "Mountains Made of Chalk Fall Into the Sea, Eventually," Both those films accomplished my goals for them, but neither truly captured the eerie feeling of the ghosts I felt up at the top of the mountain.

In many ways, capturing the most ephemeral quality of the place was my most ambitious project yet. My goal was to evoke a direct emotional experience of the sacred and melancholy feeling of being on Tam’s true summit in the ruins of the old Air Force station. Feel free to tell me in the comments if you think I achieved that goal.

With the wind singing its own mournful song as background music, cellist Katy Boyd and guitarist Jimmy Dillon play a variation on a sarabande (dance) from the Bach 5th cello suite among the junkyard that scars a place long considered the spiritual heart of Marin County.

I envisioned a call-and-response between the cello and guitar while being surrounded by the spirits there. The film was inspired by one of our great beat poets, Lew Welch, who wrote the poem ‘The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings’ in 1969. My technique of using a motion-controlled camera to accomplish match moves of the musicians playing the same piece of music together, but not at the same time, was quite complex because of the critical timing necessary to maintain musical rhythmic integrity. But we pulled it off.

You only see the musicians fully together at the very end, in split screen as they walk away.

---

---

Please read this poem before watching.

THE SONG MT. TAMALPAIS SINGS, by Lew Welch

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

Human movements,
but for a few,
are Westerly.
Man follows the Sun.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

Or follows what he thinks to be the
movement of the Sun.
It is hard to feel it, as a rider,
on a spinning ball.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

Centuries and hordes of us,
from every quarter of the earth,
now piling up,
and each wave going back
to get some more.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

“My face is the map of the Steppes,”
she said, on this mountain, looking West.
My blood set singing by it,
to the old tunes,
Irish, still,
among these Oaks.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

This is why
Once again we celebrate
the great Spring Tides.
Beaches are strewn again with Jasper,
Agate, and Jade.
The Mussel-rock stands clear.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

This is why
Once again we celebrate the
Headland’s huge, cairn-studded, fall
into the Sea.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

For we have walked the jeweled beaches
at the feet of the final cliffs
of all Man’s wanderings.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else we need to go.

---

---

Thanks for watching.

I have a long history of inventing tools for animators and also making films and photographs. My wife, daughter and I live at the foot of beautiful Mt. Tamalpais on the San Francisco Bay and I've been using technology to tell complex stories for a long time. My biggest claim to fame? Leading the team that created Autodesk 3ds Max... the most popular 3D animation tool of all time. When I sold the Yost Group to Autodesk at the end of the last century I jumped headfirst into pursing my original love... photography and filmmaking. Now I spend all of my time exploring the mysteries of my world with my cameras, and revealing what I find in my images and films.

You can find my verification post here.