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…

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…

Temple Grandin: The World Needs all kinds of Minds

Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works — sharing her ability to “think in pictures,” which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of…

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…

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…

Kicking the Habits of Double-Glazing

The first week of living in a new place is somewhere up pretty high on the list of things that don’t get any easier with practice. Like a new anything, after the initial infatuation wears off, what’s left is this: the realization that what worked before is no longer valid here. Here, in a new…

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…

Sycamore Review: Zach Falcon

ZACH FALCON was born and raised in Alaska. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Quiddity, the 2009 Bridport Prize Anthology, and the Bear Deluxe Magazine. He lives in Iowa City where he is working on a novel.