About 8 months ago my good friend Bob Ray sent me a cut of his documentary "Total Badass". The cut was a bit of a mess but it was clear that there was a pretty amazing tale unfolding. Tonight i saw the final cut at a screening in Brooklyn and I was shocked at how much he had been able...
I have been extremely busy with finishing the Battle of Brooklyn- as well as taking care of my kids, so I haven't had much time to focus on Donor 67. However, today an old friend, who i hadn't seen in years stopped by. He was a donor in college and introduced me to the lab. A couple of years ago...
Last week, on the virtual pages of The Local, a battle was raging over the direction of our district 13 schools. It's clear that everyone in the debate wants what's best for their kids. Some people are fighting for an expansion of "progressive" schools. Others are arguing for supporting the schools that we have like PS 11 and PS 20,...
About a decade ago I had an idea for a script called New Well Being. The film was very similar in some ways to the new Mark Romanek film based on the novel by Kazuo Ishaguro, Never Let Me Go. My friend Alana just blogged about it and the trailer is INTENSE. In my story two football stars- one the quarterback...
About 15 years ago, when I was in a band driving around the country for long stretches, I would often think of grand art projects. Unfortunately, I didn’t always have the means or connections to really pull them off. Some of them I completed in part, and others have recently started to float back into my consciousness. In many cases...
In 2010 it is time for us, as a society, to take a hard look at the role of the news media in our political and financial systems. After 7 years of following the Atlantic Yards development project I am troubled by both the print and TV media's inability or unwillingness to engage in any level of real reporting on...
We are trying to finish our film "Battle of Brooklyn", and since my wife is the editor it has fallen to me to watch the brood. It's always a bit of a struggle to get my older daughter to leave the house. She's had some anxiety issues for a couple of years. Things had improved last spring when we unfortunately...
***this post is a bit unfinished- but I wanted to get it up before going out of town*** I have been writing in general about the stages that we all go through in life. The stages of my adult life have been clearly demarcated for me through my artwork. I can visually track the transitions through my photographs. I was a...
When I was working on the Transitions book with my father he referenced Erikson's 8 stages of life in his version of the introduction. We struggled with the tone of the tome, and I feared that his reliance on long standing studies and references to phsychologic fact would take away from the directness that I sought. It wasn't that I...
About 15 years ago, when I was transitioning from being a "musician" to being a filmmaker, I was having a very difficult time with my father. I loved my father deeply and in general we communicated really well. I was a passionate young man; passionate about music, about art, about opposition. I'm not exactly sure why, but I always despised...
Last week I posted a couple of hundred old photos of the early 90's NYC music scene on our facebook fan page. A lot of the photos had been seen before, and many of them were from my book, "Scraps", but only a handful of people had gotten a chance to really look through them as a group. The response...
I often think of that Talking Heads song that goes, "You may ask yourself, where did I get this beautiful car, where did I get this beautiful wife, how did I get here?" The older I get the more prophetic it is. Simple decisions, such as what neighborhood to live in have such profound impacts on our lives, who we...