[caption id="attachment_26522" align="alignnone" width="800"] self portrait on the first day of the festival[/caption] My memory is more metaphorical than factual. I had it in my head that my band Sleepyhead went on our first tour in the summer of 1991, our second year as a band, and that the tour ended in August in Chapel Hill (where I grew up). That...
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”- Upton Sinclair This quote is often bandied about when people who believe Dr John Sarno's story - that most back pain is caused by repressed emotions - want to make the point that he saw something that threatened his salary, bucked the...
The following definition of pain was established in 2017 by a taxonomy task force of the International Association for the Study of Pain: "Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience that is associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in such terms." If it is read carefully it is clear that pain is both a physical and...
Recently I saw a tweet from an editor seeking science/medicine pitches because he was taking over a new full-time role at a newspaper. I sent him a note with a link to our film "All The Rage," suggesting that he either allow me to write a first-person piece about our experience of making and distributing a film that focused on...
I will be 55 years old in a few weeks. White. Jewish. Grew up in Queens, then Long Island. Attended SUNY at Albany and received my J.D. from Fordham University School of Law. Moved to Westchester County, NY in 1994 with my husband, and I am a mother of two children; my daughter is almost 25 and my son is...
in 1990 I shot a photo project documenting the street market on Astor Place in NYC. This was an impromptu gathering spot for people selling mostly used, scavenged, collected, and sometimes stolen objects. Recently I have been posting a number of these images to a Facebook group focused on images taken before 1990 in Manhattan. I'm rescanning them all in...
Late last fall a small black cat - really more of a kitten - started to show up around my friend Caroline’s house. It was very skittish and wouldn’t allow itself to be pet, but it was very happy to get scraps from the house. Only then would she allow herself to be pet as she ate. Again, she was...
Yesterday I was scanning some photos that I shot on the shoot for our first film “Half-Cocked”. One of the rolls had a couple of strips of images of my father. My memory isn’t great but I think that shortly after the shoot we headed down to North Carolina, maybe to play a show with my band, but also to...
Prologue This post/rough draft of the beginnings of a book is focused on my efforts to deal with my mother's decline and ultimate passing, largely in real time. In her last year I did a lot of documenting and writing, and I shared that work with some immediacy. For me, doing this work helped me to process, and be with, some...
https://vimeo.com/477675786 Not from last night- but some recent music recorded the night Biden was called the victor. Despite the goddamn Pandemic, we had a really pleasant Thanksgiving with friends. We ate outside and while the food was awesome, the best part was sneaking down to the basement afterwards to make some joyful noise. Our band has been on hiatus for Covid, but...
Our film "All The Rage" begins with a voice over line stating, "The Stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves shape our sense of who we are." This line is never more profoundly apparent than on Thanksgiving. When we gather with family - especially after being apart - the stories that are told about us pull those embedded aspects of...
In 1989 when I drove across the country to shoot in malls with my friend Sebastian our car got broken into shortly after we arrived in San Francisco. Luckily, the night before, while camping on the side of the road on our way down from Oregon, I separated the film I'd shot from the film left to shoot. I'd stuck...