News

The revolving door between government and industry doesn't just exist in the armed services and financial fields. A lot of the issues at play in our film, "Battle for Brooklyn" (click on link to see discussion of title) have to do with the revolving door between developers and the government and the government/developers and journalism. It's difficult to find a way...

There's a pretty amazing Gil Scott-Heron article in this weeks New Yorker. It's a rare piece of writing that reads like a well edited documentary film. So much of the time, even in good articles, the writing is almost as much about the writer as it is about the subject. It's kind of understandable that this would be the case, because...

As we get closer to having a finished film, we've started to focus increasingly on our plans for it. While strategizing about distribution, we are also thinking about presentation. The most important aspect of presentation is the name. For at least a year we have been working with the title "Battle of Brooklyn." However, we have become increasingly dissatisfied with...

DSLR video has had a tremendous impact on us over here at Rumur. The image quality is so much better than standard HD cameras that it has inspired a whole new wave of ideas. Before we made our first feature film, "Half-Cocked," Suki said to me, "If we can make it look anything like your photos, we'll be all right." At...

We were down by the river, the family and I, walking around in our river shoes like the summer people that we are. A shy looking boy with a fishing pole approached just as the wife and older girl were heading off to find a bathroom. The little girl and I stuck around to watch the fishing. The shy boy turned...

Yesterday would have been my father's 76th birthday. Four and half years ago he tried to cross a highway at night wearing all black. He didn't make it. I'm so much like him that it's hard for me not to be aware of him in some ways almost all the time. At dinner last night I was reminiscing about him and...

Last night, we were lucky enough to get a babysitter so that we could go see Richard Brody discuss his book, "Everything is Cinema" about Jean-luc Godard. We actually missed the majority of the discussion while grabbing dinner, but the dessert was getting to see "A Married Woman". It was inspiring in its simple complexity. In working on our current project,...

On the DSR list serve a person, recently referred to "donors," lurking on the edges of the discussion. Several donors wrote in response that they didn't appreciate the reference. Several other posters, including the list's admin, were quick to defend the use of the term. While I understood that the OP meant no harm it pointed to a bit of...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/health/13mind.html?8dpc This NY Times article touches on something I was discussing with my intern today as he set to work organizing materials for donor 67. Nature is a lot more powerful than people wanted to believe in the last couple of decades. The ascendant idea was that with good nurturing/parenting almost all obstacles could be overcome....

Father's Day. Last year at this point, I started working on my film, Donor 67 again. I had been doing a little research, and a little writing, but still mostly just thinking. A couple of weeks earlier I had posted an op-ed about the problems with anonymous donation. I had been corresponding with Alana Sveta Stewart, and planned on meeting her that afternoon. My wife shot a little video as I was woken up by my kids upstate with cards and pancakes. On the way back to Brooklyn we stopped at a parking lot amusement park, and when we got back to Brooklyn we found chaos as a building across the street had collapsed. Alana came by and ended up staying for a month. She was the first adult donor conceived person I had met. Our discussions helped me to better understand some of the issues that our culture needs to better understand.

Our 16 year old cat is sick. She hasn't eaten in almost a week and has been throwing up when she tries to drink. When I went to make an appointment with the vet yesterday and I asked the receptionist how we might handle things if she wasn't going to make it, she looked at me like I had just...

I have not had the opportunity to read the entire study discussed in my last post. However, I have looked over it, and think that it's a valuable tool for highlighting the needs and feelings of donor conceived people. It is clear as a bell that many dc people have suffered a great deal either from lack of connection to...