Maria Montessori

In 1896, Maria Montessori gave a lecture at the Educational Congress in Torino about the training of the disabled. The Italian Minister of Education was in attendance, and was impressed by her arguments sufficiently to appoint her the same year as director of the Scuola Ortofrenica, an institution devoted to the care and education of…

The Music of Conrad Praetzel and Clothesline Revival

The best music you may not have heard of comes from the imagination and inspiration of Conrad Praetzel, an archaeologist-turned-musician living in Northern California, who makes soulful music under the moniker Clothesline Revival. Collaborating with great musical forces in the world, including Charlie Musselwhite, Sukhawat Ali Khan, Robert Powell, Rounder Records, the field recordings of…

Plastic Bag

Ramin Bahrani-written-directed-and-edited, Werner Herzog-narrated and original soundtrack by Kjartan Sveinsson of Sigur Rós?

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…

Best. Worst. April. Fools’. Prank. Evah.

This prank was so good I had to remove it to help put certain parties at ease (hi, mom and dad). Don’t blame them, I prolly shouldn’t have included them in the first place – my poor judgement. The responses are still up, however, and can be viewed here. Thanks to all who responded and…

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:

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…

slowly, very well

These were the words spoken by one of my young, student directors as she attempted to motivate her 3rd grade counterparts appropriately during one of our practice shoots:

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…

Plaça de Catalunya: Baila!

This evening, I was heading to dinner in Sarrià when, to my surprise, upon entering the metro station @ Plaça de Catalunya, I found myself in the middle of a impromptu performance by some Cuban musicians – baila!!!

Number Stations

Our dear pal, Alec (aka Catigator), contributed a track to this compilation, titled cooly-enough: Number Stations File under experimental and have a listen:

The Graffiti

in Barcelona is colorful, artful, so expressive and anything but:

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…