Page 126
Well, anyway, all these critical personal issues were hitting me. Where was all this going? How long could I keep it up? I don't know when I first got a grant, but I remember I couldn't go another inch. I'd got myself way in debt. No income. I didn't have any equipment, and I had all this work to do. And then my friend Ramon Sender from the San Francisco Tape Music Center told me a fellow from the Rockefeller Foundation was coming out to find western artists, possibly to give them grants. I got to talk to him, and he looked at my work.
A little while later, I was on my way to Eugene, Oregon, to give a show, and the Volkswagen broke down. I put a pin in it somewhere and got a little further down the road to a phone, and I called this Rockefeller guy and said, "What about the grant? Can you do it or not, because I'm either going to quit right now or push ahead; it depends on what you say right now, because my car's broken down, I'm in debt, I can't go any further." And he said, "Yeah, we're going to give you a grant." And I said, "Well, can I pay my debts off?" He said, "No, you can't use a grant that way. You have to spend it on your films." And I thought for a minute and said, "Well, that's OK.'' Because when it came, that's what I did: I paid all my debts, and bought a little equipment. So I was able to push ahead through the middle sixties and get
All My Life
finished and
Still Life, Castro Street, Valentin,
and
Tung
some of my very nicest films.
But
Quixote
was before all this, when poverty was really facing me. The first phase was the Southwest. I went with a friend of mine from Kowloon, named Tseng Ching. She was a wonderful girl who'd finished college, and her visa was almost up. She gave me two hundred dollars that her uncle had given her. I've never gotten over that. I told her "Absolutely not!" when she offered it; I couldn't believe it, and as time went on, I couldn't raise a penny. So I took her money and she came with me, and my dogMama Doga big shepherd. I was reading
Don Quixote
as I went. I was aware of the structure of Cervantes's work; the transitions, in particular, were important to me. Also, I'd studied some of John Cage's notes and his music and some of Stan Brakhage's films and writings, and some e.e. cummings. But especially, Cervantes. I liked how he would get out of one chapter and into the next. There'd be the name of a chapter and then a subtitle would say, "Of what was said when on the road to. . . ." Then there'd be submaterial indented with space around it where, say, the shepherd's song would be. I liked that shape. I knew I was going to have very unique, disparate materials that had to fit together, and it was going to be quite an assignment. I felt up to it 'cause I had made quite a few films now, and I wanted to make a long film with an interesting form. I wanted to show how in the conquest of our environment in the New World, Americans have isolated themselves from