Like Rain it sounded till it curved
And then I knew 'twas Wind-
It walked as wet as any Wave
But swept as dry as sand-
When it had pushed itself away
To some remotest Plain
A coming as of Hosts was heard
That was indeed the Rain-
It filled the Wells, it pleased the Pools
It warbled in the Road-
It pulled the spigot from the Hills
And let the Floods abroad-
It loosened acres, lifted seas
The sites of Centres stirred
Then like Elijah rode away
Upon a Wheel of Cloud.
(Emily Dickinson, Like Rain it Sounded Till it Curved)

Rainy day, rain all day
Ain't no use in gettin uptight
Just let it groove its own way
Let it drain your worries away yeah
Lay back and groove on a rainy day hey
Lay back and dream on a rainy day
Lay back and groove on a rainy day
Lay back
Oh yeah !
(Jimi Hendrix, Still Raining, Still Dreaming)

"Mark LaPore always professed his dream to do a re-make of Basil Wright's great ethnographic essay film, Song of Ceylon. Still Raining, Still Dreaming, the final film of the In Memoriam series, is my homage to that dream, dedicated to his memory." (Phil Solomon)

Mark LaPore filmed in rural Sudan, Sri Lanka, India, and New York City while living in these places for extended periods of time, looking for unique defining elements, practices in peril and reciprocal correspondences. His early work elegantly comprised of unedited but carefully selected camera rolls strove for transparent documentation. The later 16mm films were highly edited with scrupulous integrity creating constellations from disparate elements, unreconciled puzzle pieces of telling evidence with the admission of incomplete knowledge.
LaPore's intended version of Song of Ceylon was abandoned. A long term project 100 Views of New York (after Hokusai's 100 Views of Mount Fuji and the first 100 films of the Lumiere brothers) was dismantled. Some material migrated into other films including the unreleased Shop Windows project.
LaPore's work often made incongruous leaps including New York's Chinatown as an orbital point of reference. He found elements of India displaced in New York and a notion of lost New York in Kolkata.

"I was listening, listening to the rain/ I was hearing, hearing something else" -
Tom Verlaine from Marquee Moon

Still Raining...takes place in a phantasmal New York where light is not light and substance is not substance. Solomon pays tribute to LaPore's forgotten projects bringing the oneric disembodied mobility of the trilogy to a stirring apotheosis. (Mark McElhatten)