The Human Host Movie premiere was a heck of alotta fun; Brian Yankou and Alex Rubin wowed the crowd with their shorts and the audience ate up The HH Movie weirdness, cleaned the proverbial plate even(!) The ‘Ye Ol’ Curiosity Shoppe’ atomsphere at Goodbye Blue Monday was perfect and the staff there were very helpful and cool. Special thanks go out to Joe Galaragga, The Yankou Bros, Kira Sissano, and Alex Rubin for helping to spread the word and promote up in NYC in the months/weeks that led up to the big day. Also, big special thanks to Vinnie’s Pizza of Williamsburg and thanks to Amy Beth Eisenberg for ‘booking’ some great entertainment for the THHM premiere *after party*; yo, Harvey Sid Fisher(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6_VAiznSTc), yo, “Jed’s Barmitzvah”(Hi-Lites Entertainment 1994; White Plains, NY) thanks to u both!…. details on the *Maryland* premiere of THHM is coming together as I’m writing this….stayed tuned here for full details on that….

* Here’s the poster for “The Human Host Movie” *

Hey everybody, the time has come to unveil this thing:

*The Human Host Movie will make its official world premiere sunday December 9th at 8 pm @ the Goodbye Blue Monday coffeehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY*. Poster art coming soon…. that night a few short subjects made by some of the NYC folks who helped out with THHM will also get some screen time prior to The HH Movie. 

 A Maryland screening of The Human Host Movie has *not* been scheduled at all yet, so don’t even ask. Whenever that does go down, it will be a long time after this premiere. So yeah, if you need to see this soon c’mon up to Bushwick, Goodbye Blue Monday is a rad venue, this is gonna rule!

It still seems a bit unreal…..I put more than 5 years of work into a project….some people have put more than 20 years into their projects (see the documentary film ‘When We Were Kings’ for a great example of a truly awesome time consuming project), but still, ’The Human Host Movie’ is the first time I put more than 2 years into any given piece of art that I have been responsible for creating. I had a’lotta help on ‘THHM’, especially from the ever patient editor Lorraine Degraffenreidt and the editor/cinematographer/creative force Nicky “N.O.” Smith, and the venerable one-of-a-kind multi-media artist Ann Everton.  There were about a trillion other people who helped out with this project who all will get due credit via the movie’s actual credits….still, it feels like a massive weight has been lifted off my shoulders knowing that the final cut is coming into reality as I write this….I sure wish I could think of a way less cliched description of how GREAT I feel right now about having the ‘THHM’ rough copy in my possession….also ecstatically satisfying is the fact that I’ve watched it like 10 times already with the knowledge that, despite how time consuming this was, it was incredibly easy and organic to make something like ’THHM’. I guess making live performance art and assisting on other people’s short film projects for nearly two decades prior to ‘THHM’s completion may have something to do with how painless the process of making the picture really was….it’s tough to say, as there also was a couple pretty massive lifestyle changes that occurred for me personally a little less than halfway through completing this movie. The biggest change came around 2009: in order to pay for the many expenses incurred by even the lowest budgeted kind of movie making, I knew before I even started shooting ‘The Human Host Movie’ in 2007 that in the absence of support from a major studio or financial backer I would probably need to have a much more steady income than what was provided for me by Human Host’s live gigs throughout the d.i.y. arts underground of the Recession-era U.S., so consequently, after 5 years of touring the U.S. 2-3 months out of the year from 2004 to March 2009, I took a hiatus from doing the extensive domestic tours of the U.S. showing HH’s work and picked up a full time day job as a groundskeeper. With an American tour shedule almost totally wiped off my calendar indefinitely, I freed up a’lot more time and energy and redirected all that into producing & directing ‘The Human Host Movie’ …..by the way, let me stop here for a minute in order to get some of you up to speed: in case you dont know who or what Human Host is you can get a detailed overview of that group’s chronology and purpose by going to www.humanhostmusic.com  ….essentially, Human Host is a multi media arts collective that I have led for the past ten years. It uses elements of performance art, folklore, comedy, improvisational theatre, dance, visual art, and many other aesthetic concepts to create a context for a form of music we invented to express a wide variety of feelings and to pay tribute to a theraputic confusion inspired by the totalities of our own personal emotional experiences. Human Host’s focus on music came from the fact that most members of the group entered the art world specifically via participation in musical groups and solo music projects of various stripes, though the intention from the absolute very beginning of HH’s existence was to branch out far beyond the limitations of music as we all loved many other mediums just as much as music. This often was achieved at live shows,  but, even though we’ve worked in various kinds of media over the years, all the diverse strands that combined to form Human Host had rarely been corralled together in any kind of intellectually chaotic context.  Eventually I deducted that the only way to do this would be to make a movie: something that could mesh together all the various mediums that formed the Human Host perspective while eschewing the narrow parameters of both live performance, conventional live performance venues, and the audience/performer relationship, the latter of which often creates a sense of distractingly pure security in the minds of patrons  -  the sense that a physical presence often exists as a polarizing force in one’s perception of art and the identity of an artist. This has been a problem for Human Host since the beginning of the group’s career and has only served to create a layer of context within the work purely generated by the patrons themselves. Anytime artists decide to share their work with the public the possibility of such things is not only inevitable but expected, so I’m not going to say were neccesarily pissed off that this did happen. Nonetheless, the element of a “cult of personality” surrounding our group and our individual members *subtley* emerged rather quickly and it is this specific concept that I have made a conscious effort to remove in order to maintain the integrity of Human Host’s work as a kind of art feeling, something akin to an extra sense. If ‘The Human Host Movie’ is a success artistically that new sense could become part of the consciousness of the picture’s viewers while still maintaining it’s status as an actual form of art regardless of how close it may resemble some hitherto unknown natural phenomenon….in other words, no matter how weird it seems, ‘The Human Host Movie’ is mean’t to be entertaining by also being a kind of art puzzle or by presenting art as an infinite-part question constantly evolving until the end of time…..so yeah, thats a tall order…. and honestly I expect there will be very few people that like this movie as most fans of movies see filmaking as part of the greater folk tradition of storytelling (which is something this movie and any piece by Human Host has NEVER done /will NEVER do, at least not intentionally….), but I also expect there to be a handful of people out there who don’t need art’s meaning handed to them on silver platter, and I’m pretty sure those same people will truly love this movie with all their hearts, just like I do…..because ‘The Human Host Movie’ is also in many ways the visual equivalent of my own essay about Human Host’s purpose I have chosen to keep this very first post here in TheHumanHostMovie tumblr to be made up of all text. Soon I will post images from the movie, a trailer, announcements about the movie’s premiere and subsequent screenings, and all the other stuff a cinema buff would expect from your average individual-movie related blog….til then, feel free to email me with any questions about ‘The Human Host Movie’….thanks for your time folks,

                                          Mike Apichella, Maryland USA