A video I made of NYC’s East Village in 2010, set to my song “Corporate Lullaby”.

It’s interesting looking back on this one, since I grew up in a totally different part of NYC, but the East Village became a bit like my second home a couple years after I made this video, because I became really active in the antifolk scene and other cultural scenes that were connected with that neighborhood.

The East Village has a rich cultural history that’s still alive today (because people in that area fought for affordable rents and other human rights, unlike the neighborhood I grew up in, which has become a playground for ultra-rich war criminals and a circle of Hell for anyone else).

This is where the original punk scene was in the 1970s, where antifolk was born in the 1980s, where the Tompkins Square Riots happened, where Ray’s Candy Store still is, where C-Squat lives on as the “Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space”, where the Art Star scene and any number of other really incredible things came to be, and still are. Someone told me the East Village has the highest population of witches in the world, and I have no idea if this is true, but it probably is.

And the East Village is also where I was performing practically every night for awhile, from around the end of 2012 until I left NYC in mid-2016.

It was really my spiritual home for awhile, and a lot of people in NYC back then were noticably confused and troubled by my decision to spend so much time in that scene, because North Brooklyn was the “trendy” place to play at the time, and the East Village was like “career suicide” as some put it.

To me, though, the East Village was a place that had serious longevity and was where NYC culture was actually happening; overall, though I also had some good gigs in North Brooklyn and there were plenty of good things happening there, the “trendy” side of it felt more like a scene for rich kids from the Midwest who wanted to capitalize on the multi-racial working class communities they were pushing out of the city, and it never felt like home in the same way, or like anything sustainable or anything I had a human connection with.

And I can give a lot of credit to the East Village scene of that time for the fact that I’m still here and making music, instead of having become a washed-up hipster who makes frequent appearances on the right-wing podcast circuits that are “trendy” for people in my age group nowadays.

I didn’t know the East Village at all when I made this video, though, so it feels like I’m approaching it as an outsider here.

This was part of a series of short videos I made in this vein throughout the year 2010, with various happenings in NYC set to some of the music I was making at the time. The first one was Blizzard, which I shot at the end of 2009 and released in 2010.

Cannonball Statman: Selected Filmography (2004-’23)
1. The Scarf (2004)
2. Band Of The Land Cooking Hour Episode 2 (2004)
3. Unhappy Holidays (2007)
4. Coney Island: The Last Stop (2008)
5. The Manual Polar Goes For A Ride (2010)
6. An Old VHS Tape of Bobby (2011)
7. An Old VHS Tape of Ian (2011)
8. An Old VHS Tape of The World We Live In Part 1 (2011)
9. An Old VHS Tape of The World We Live In Part 2 (2011)
10. Family Band (2011)
11. Walk After the Snow (2011)
12. Cannonballfest! 2013 Promo Video (2013)
13. Dogs vs. Cats Tour Promo Video (2013)
14. Love Letters (2014)
15. A Band with 3 Hands (2019)
16. Cackles: Live in Berlin (2017)
17. Quarantine Songs (2020)
18. Live at Cuicacallí (2022)
19. Live at the Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue Release Party (2022)
20. Live at his 29th Birthday (2022)
21. Live in NYC (2023)
22. Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue UK/EU Tour (2023)
23. Science Fiction (2005)
24. Blizzard (2010)
25. Fireworks (2010)
26. Gowanus (2010)
27. Nearing the Edge (2010)
28. Evening Library (2010)
29. Skyline (2010)
30. Desert Dream (2010)
31. Branch (2010)
32. Cycle (2010)
33. Pizza Carbonara (2010)
34. Boulder City, NV (2010)
35. Tree (2010)
36. F Train Over Brooklyn (2011)
37. Concussions (2011)
38. As Clear As Rain Pt.2 (2011)
39. Painting With You (2011)
40. Until 19 (2011)
41. Woods of Mount Guardian (2011)
42. The Great Outdoors (2011)
43. Sun (2012)
44. Cannonball Becomes the One Armed Man (2013)
45. Frostbite (2014)
46. Wormwood Toxicity (2014)
47. Manhattan, I am a Sheep (2015)
& Bonus Videos!