Bleak Beauty Blog

born in Idaho, died in the Hudson Valley April 2012

born in Idaho, died in the Hudson Valley April 2012

The first time Jason came to me was  on my farm in the Hudson Valley. It was because I needed someone to help me with the Internet, with digital editing, with Photoshop, to bring me into the new world. Jason was the age of my children. He had just graduated from Bard.

We walked from my studio barn down through the fields and around our pond, while I asked Jason a few questions. After five minutes I said “I’d like to hire you.” Jason’s reaction was a smile and then the incredulous answer, “Really?”

Then at lunch, alone I told Nancy that I had just hired Jason.

“He is so handsome,” I said.

Nancy said, “What difference does that make?”

Jason Martin was incredibly handsome. He was also from the West, from Idaho, the first person in his family to graduate from college, charming in everything he did, absolutely brilliant with a computer mouse in his hands. Jason brought me into the new world, the world we now all live in.

He designed and created a website called BleakBeauty.com. He taught me how to use Photoshop, and for years and years afterwards I would telephone Jason, praying he would  answer, with some hysterical question about the command I needed to do spotting.

His very words are still hanging above my present computer twenty years later.

“Whatever changes you make, do them a little at a time.”

Then he helped me make my last true film, Two Fathers, doing the sound recording with my Nagra.

“It will be fun to do analogue.”  Said Jason.

I didn’t know what the word meant.

Jason changed my life forever.  The website  he made  finally gets the attention it deserved when he made it fifteen years ago. It has morphed into this blog, which gets a hundred hits a day, and on some gets a thousand.

Jason never took money from me, ever. Nor would he permit his name or any credit to appear on the site he created. Jason was a new person to me, not untypical of the “new man” that is rapidly changing our world for the better; a wonderful person.

Now it is I that is writing from the West, the country Jason came from.

I had great respect for Jason’s decision upon leaving Bard to live in and create a new world in the Hudson Valley, rather than rushing to make it in New York City.

I talk about Jason all the time. I think about him often. The words Jason used to teach me are a part of me, I speak them all the time. And despite this disaster, and because of it, I will do that forever.

Danny Lyon