Momentshowing

My friend Ferd Eggan died last week. He was such a good guy. Actually he was a revolutionary in every sense of the word. Here’s his obit in the LA Times.

Described by colleagues as brash, articulate and charismatic, Eggan
championed public housing assistance for homeless people with HIV and
AIDS and guided efforts to include women and minorities in AIDS
policy-making roles. He also led the city to fund important research,
including the first major study to demonstrate the link between crystal
methamphetamine use and HIV risk in gay and bisexual men.

Ferd drove up to San Francisco to basically say good bye to all his friends here. I got the chance to set down and talk with him about death. He looked like he was going to die, and he wasn’t afraid to talk about it. In the early 70′s, he was in a movie/documentary about his life called "The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd". You can see an excerpt here. This was really groundbreaking stuff before anyone had thought about "reality TV".

So Ferd was no stranger to self-documentation. He spoke about many "uncomfortable" topics on his videoblog, "The Cranky PWA". I met Ferd when he started sending me questions about how to post video online. He was totally fearless about using new artforms to express himself. No preciousness. (He was posting up till his last week…and the blog got kind of messy.)

Click To Play

Here’s a funny moment with Ferd. Be aware that he had a morphine pump attached to him for the pain. He died 3 days after this video. I was very lucky to have known him. I’m going to make sure my life kicks ass as well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 23:04 and is filed under MY VIDEOS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.