Battle for Brooklyn airs on TV in Australia next week and should be hitting the US airwaves this fall. It's been over a year since the film was first run on screen and as such it’s a good time to write an update about where things stand with the Atlantic Yards project and the film. After launching it at Hot...
About six months ago, I happened upon a Jonah Lehrer article in Wired. The article starts out with a couple of paragraphs about a drug company whose stock shot up because they had developed a drug that stopped the body from producing the "bad fat". This was pretty important to the drug company as their drug Lipitor (which stopped the...
Recently, an ode to video stores went somewhat viral on facebook. Kim's video was an amazing resource for finding out about films in the late 80's and early 90's. For me though, it was the record stores and book stores that had a greater impact. When I moved to NY, I mostly cared about music and photography. I hit the record...
On Thursday at Brooklyn Technical HS, the Panel for Educational Policy planned to close 23 public schools citywide. I had just returned from a trip on Thursday and didn't feel that I had the energy to go; I had been to several last year and found that they were a sham public meeting like so many I had been to...
This morning I woke to a voice message from a friend in Prague. He was terrified that something terrible had happened at Occupy Wall Street because all of the live streams he had followed the day before, during the massive protests, were shut down. He thought that either everyone had been arrested, or that all of the cell service had...
Last week on buzzflash I wrote about the connection between our film "Battle for Brooklyn" and OWS. Last year, as we completed Battle, we started to make a film about education in NY. We saw intense similarities between the way in which parents were shut out of the education process and the way in which communities were shut out of...
If one were to judge the Occupy Wall Street movement based on my friends' facebook feeds, it would be clear that the revolution was over and that we had won. Creative people would forever be free to be creative and the tyranny and corruption of "efficency" would be banished from the land. As such I might have an irrationally exuberant...
I stayed up late last night looking at footage from the occupy wall street protest. For the most part it’s pretty mild stuff. There are very few truncheons swinging. Yet the tone of dismissal and power is overwhelming. There’s a palpable anger among the officers even as the protesters remain non-violent. What’s even more disturbing is that the white shirts...
I haven’t been down to Wall Street yet. I almost went today with my 5 year old after we biked to Chinatown, but it felt wrong. I am in full support of raising questions and I am appalled by both the press and the police brutality. Part of the reason I haven’t gone is that I have a very hard time...
Pain. We all have our relationships with, and definitions of, pain. There are certain kinds of pain that I don't mind, that I even like a little. The soreness in my muscles from a long run the day before is a reminder of something accomplished. A little bit of emotional pain can lead to cathartic art. However, right now I'm dealing...
In the age of the internet, to a disturbing degree, snark is much more important than fact. “Reputable” news gathering organizations seem to be devoid of fact checkers and editors are loathe to issue corrections even when the stated facts are clearly wrong. Snark is employed to tell the story the “reporter” sets out to tell, rather than having to...
At Rumur we tend to make films that focus on people who go against the grain of the system. As we have matured, our characters have matured, but they are still outsiders who have difficulty going with the flow when the flow is going in a different direction than they think it should. Our very first film, "Half-Cocked" (1993), isn't a...