Ken Burns on filmmaking

If you wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or a feature film I could tell you the steps to take to do that, but every working documentary filmmaker I know has gotten there through their own unique path. There is no career path.

Asleep

This is just the fat trimmed off a project I’m working on: a multimedia installation about people asleep in public spaces called, appropriately, “Asleep”:

10secondfilms.org

Some think content will keep getting longer and longer until movies are 3 and 4 hours long. That’s fine. OK with us. We also like the idea of not spending 3 or 4 hours to get something out of it. Like music, there is a time and place for a long song and a short…

Coldcuts: Reuben Palmer in Barcelona

I’ve met some cool musicians while living in Barcelona and traveling elsewhere. Why not shoot some vids, have some fun and help them spread the word? In that vein, Coldcuts was just created to showcase these pals’ work. This weekend, we shot some tunes with Reuben Palmer in my flat here in the Born:

On Generosity

One thing keeps coming into my mind now that I’ve been back in Spain from Senegal for a couple of weeks: grace and generosity are a completely different sport there, as shown to us by our hosts. It was astonishingly unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. Anywhere. Generosity is the habit of giving freely without…

Here, Now

Easy to take this all for granted. Breathing. Walking. Seeing. Feeling. Any sense. Pick one. And it’s even easier to stroll through this whole thing blind to the possibility that this may just very well all be some dream. We know nothing about what any of us are doing here. In the meantime, we find…

Education at its Finest

BFIS and Habitat for Humanity in Senegal A small window into the experience of students from the Benjamin Franklin International School in Barcelona who spent a week near Dakar, Senegal in Keur Mbaye Fall, working in collaboration with Habitat for Humanity. “If we wish to teach fish to swim, it helps if we put them…

Senegal 2010

The Senegalese are among the friendliest people in the world. Given the challenges they face as a people, this is magnified ten-fold when considering the grace with which they shared their homes and hearts with us this past week. Below is a rather large sampling of still images from our week-long visit to work with…

Dakar

View Larger Map As I write this, I am taking meds to fight off malaria. I am leaving for Dakar this morning for a week and the meds are a final, though ongoing, step in a series of vaccines administered to me en masse (The first of two rounds knocked me for a loop for…

The Irony of Beauty

This is an astounding metaphor for our culture and the gravity of our situation as lifeforms on a planet we know next-to-nothing about: enveloped by the inelegance of our current technology, with wires and all kinds of ugly schwack running up and down the walls surrounding and protecting him, Ed Lu is aboard the International…

Herskovits and the Heart of Blackness

A compelling examination of the career and controversy surrounding Melville J. Herskovits, the pioneering American anthropologist of African Studies and controversial intellectual who established the first African Studies Center at an American university and authored, “The Myth of the Negro Past.”:

Rules

Bruno Faidutti has written his thoughts about the merits of designing rules simply and with particular clarity: The essence of a game is in its rulebook – the rules of the game are autonomous, complete, finite and known by all players. This may even be what makes games different from most other human activities, whose…

The Perfect City

David Byrne is spot on with his thoughts for a perfect city: A Talking Head Dreams of a Perfect City The Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2009 By David Byrne There’s an old joke that you know you’re in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it’s the other way…