Yesterday I wrote on Facebook that, "writing is inherently narcissistic". The post inspired quite a bit of commenting- some in agreement as well as some pushback declaring that instead, “writing is inherently empathetic”. I made a second post that declared, "writing is inherently empathetic… and narcissistic". The post was inspired by my work on a film about mind-body medicine. We are...
Last week we went to Iceland for a few days for the Reykjavik Film Festival. We had a couple of great screenings and we saw a few films. Mostly though I walked around and took pictures. ...
[caption id="attachment_18948" align="aligncenter" width="720"] Yo La Tengo at CBGB 1990[/caption] It's hard for me to fathom that it's been almost 30 years since my friend Gene took me to Hoboken to see Yo La Tengo at Maxwells. Last night my wife Suki and I went to the Carolina Theater in Durham to see them on their current acoustic tour. As we...
We made a couple of narrative feature films in the 90's that documented the underground music scene. They were shot on film and they were hellaciously hard to shoot. In 1999 digital video cameras began to get produced, and the quality was great for documentaries, and freed us up from the necessity of working with a crew. We...
Last night my family and I heard an NPR marketplace piece about “The Fat Jewish”, a “comedian” who has become famous on instagram by stealing other people’s work and presenting it, without attribution or context, as if it were his own. I have been hearing about him and his re-posts of other comedians' work in the last few days...
A decade ago I got a painful sore on my side. When my intern saw it, she showed me a similar sore on her leg that she had gone to the doctor about. He told her that it was a Brown Recluse bite because there was a lot of tissue necrosis (i.e. dead tissue). It turns out...
Last night, I was looking for a trailer for one of our projects and I stumbled on a video that i put together for a song off of Sleepyhead's first Homestead album "Starduster". It's a super nostalgic video made from photos I shot in the early 90's when we were touring a lot in the US. Solid...
I am not good at vacations. I just don't know how to turn off. I travel a fair bit, almost always for "work" (traveling to shoot or show films at festivals) but except for the occasional trip to the beach with my kids, or a trip to visit family, I don't think I have ever taken a "vacation"- which is...
Sometimes the answer to a question is staring us in the face and we can’t see it simply because it doesn't fit neatly within our limited belief system. However, once that answer has been revealed to us, evidence of its validity seems to pour out of the woodwork; often times to such a degree that it becomes infuriating that...
A few weeks ago, just after arriving at the beach for the 4th of July, I took a walk with my wife. My feet were hurting and I was feeling kind of achy so I stopped to rest a couple of times. I had just returned from a shoot in Detroit with Dr. Howard Schubiner who deals with mind-body illness....
Anyone who has made a movie knows what a Herculean task it is to get it shot and edited. However, getting it the attention you think it deserves can often make one feel more like Prometheus than Hercules. My partners at Rumur and I have been making films for over two decades. We have 6 features under...
In the winter of 1994, we made a road trip down to Louisville to shoot "Half-Cocked". My girlfriend, Suki, had studied film in college and dropped out of graduate film school at NYU to make the film. I shot it, with the help of David Ford who rented us his 16mm camera. Peter Schneider came to record dialog and was...