I first met director Travis Blue in a Chinatown bar in 2015. Casually sauntering from the street, he reinforced a long-standing skepticism I’d held against the notion that you only have one chance to make a first impression; unassuming, standing about 5’9”, dressed cleanly, but in that gray area between what the youth would call “hipster” and “skater,” Travis projected a warm ease that made me feel immediately his equal. We sat down, procured whiskeys on the rocks and embarked on a deep drive through semiotics and cinema on a level I hadn’t enjoyed since film school. I liked him immediately.

For the previous five years I had been immersed in freelance agency work, finding it odd, even unsettling, that few of my colleagues seemed to talk about film or design theory. In fact, few of them seemed to even like movies much at all. To have a 20 minute long mutual ode to the lush Kodachrome stylistics of Sirkian melodramas, the austere poise of Sven Nyquist’s cinematography, gushing over Fassbender character collisions and the colour palettes of Caspar David Friedrich and Melville. By our second round of drinks, we had journeyed there and back again through a tontine of lost aesthetic realms.

A Seattle native, Travis had worked with David lynch on the iconic television series Twin Peaks which, as he elaborated, opened the door to a captivation with cinema and visual art that harbored him through a tumultuous early adulthood.  Our respective early years set us up perfectly for a lifetime as black sheep, over which we bonded as the Sun achieved its zenith and arced back. I felt a kinship in biographical parallels; for me cameras had been a conduit to an everyday world I never felt truly a part of moving place-to-place as the introverted only-child of high-achieving jet-setting parents; a barrier through which I could peer into the machinery behind the world while remaining safely unseen. Art school was inevitable, predicated by a sort of terminal uniqueness out of the ordinary in our Yuppie Generation X umwelt.

As emissaries of that lost generation–the last truly analog generation–shoved into the cracks between the Baby Boomers and Millennials, our love story with ephemera felt timely in an era wherein even our medium was in the throes of an identity crisis. I had trained in filmmaking on S16mm and S35mm, every shot manual, every edit, an act of cutting and splicing. We had both grown up with the celluloid fever dreams of David Lynch, sharing a fascination with lost-era American kitsch as the residual spiritual image of a culture checkmated by globalisation. Cinema and Television presented semiotic haunts, wherein the masses sifted through a detritus of fading archetypes and gunfights for the quintessential capitalist soul; Hollywood’s corner stone is economic, not philosophical. The silver screen a golden path to reckoning the human condition either an accident, or baggage brought to the drive-ins by a public starved of meaning.

Underwriting it all was a certain fascination with the duality of celebrity; elevating the stars to demigod status while the public popped popcorn awaiting the fall. As America’s sense of itself wavered in the waning decades of The Cold War, a new generation of nihilistic archetypes deposed The Duke and Moses. The anti-hero. The vigilante. The washed-up ex-somebody with a heart-of-gold; glamourising a state in which one lived fast and died young.

What Travis pitched to me next in the audile spaces between the metastasising irreverence of the bar mainlined into the very heart of why I wanted to be in the movie business in the first place; and it drank deep.