This morning while biking my daughter to camp I passed an old friend who is a writer. He now works at a NY magazine that I used to subscribe to. It’s a weekly that’s filled with all kinds of fun things to do in the city. Instead of doing any of these things I ended up feeling bad that I was missing them all- and that was before having kids…. Since it was a thick weekly and I tend to not throw things out, they piled up everywhere. I also used to get the NY Times delivered. In addition to it piling up, I couldn’t keep myself from reading it cover to cover so I never had any time. He was a bit down on the job because it’s less writing than editing. At least he’s got a job….

Now I just get the New Yorker and The Sun. The Sun is a weird animal. It takes no ads, and is filled with vaguely uncomfortable writing that’s just a little too personal. I like it. One of my favorite writers, Sparrow, regularly publishes pieces in the Sun. They also run a lot of interesting photos, and in the past they ran some of mine. We’re both from Chapel Hill so i feel some kinship with it as well. I just thumbed through an over-thumbed bathroom copy and came across an article about the role of positive energy in our lives. Like a lot of articles in the Sun it helped me to do a little perspective taking.

For the past 5 and a half years we have been working on a documentary about a controversial development project in Brooklyn. So far we have kept a very low profile with this film, largely because we didn’t want the film to become part of the story itself. However, it seems that our process is wrapping up, so I feel a bit more comfortable talking about it.

In December 2003, I read an article in the NY Times about a major development that would bring the NJ Nets to Brooklyn. As I read the article, I immediately felt like it was more of a press release than a news piece. A few years earlier, we had been inspired to make a film about an underground publisher as he attempted to re-publish a biography of GW Bush. That book, “Fortunate Son,” had been pulled from the shelves when the author was revealed to be a convicted felon. We first read about the book being pulled in a short article in the International Herald Tribune(the link here is from the longer version from the NY Times). Both my film-making partner and I were a bit freaked out about how little information we could find about the story at the time. When we heard that someone else was going to re-publish the book we jumped at the opportunity to film and follow the story.

A similar process happened this time. Over then next couple of days after first reading about the Atlantic Yards, I brought up the project with my neighbors. No one seemed to know much about it, or really care. To all of them it seemed like a done deal and there wasn’t too much to be gained from wasting energy thinking about it. After about a week, I saw a flier that screamed, “Stop the Atlantic Yards Project!!!!” There was a number on the flier so I called to get more information.

Patti Hagan, from the Prospect Heights Action Coalition, picked up the phone and started talking my ear off. She had all of the information that I had been looking for and she sounded like a great person to follow the story through. I put down the phone, grabbed my camera, and headed over to Patti’s. Over the course of the next week I spent almost all day, every day, following Patti as she worked the streets like a modern day chicken little.

Patti confirmed my suspicions about the original articles about the project. I had read about a basketball arena and new neighborhood that would be built over rail yards. It turned out that the rail yards only made up about half of the project site. In all fairness if I were to go back and put in a great deal of effort to understand the details I would probably find a lot of them in there. However, I’m very interested in now we as a culture consume media. People come away from articles and news pieces with less facts than impressions. The impression created by the early articles was that an arena and a basketball team would be coming to downtown brooklyn. The reality of the situation was startlingly more complex. One of the things that we are struggling with as filmmakers is how to balance complexity with clarity while telling this story.

At the time I found out that the rest of the land needed for the project would be taken from the owners using eminent domain. Patti explained, to anyone that would listen, that according to the Bill of Rights, eminent domain is only to be used for a public use or purpose. For at least 150 years that was seen as a highway, hospital, library, or public building. While I only had a cursory knowledge of eminent domain at the time, this was what I assumed to be true as well. However, at some point public use started to mean public “benefit.” In this case, the government was stating that the area - actually gentrifying organically - was blighted, and it wouldn’t improve without direct government action. They further were arguing that a privately controlled arena would be a benefit to the public.

In the area directly affected by the project, there was a lot of confusion and fear. Patti spent days on the streets talking to rent-controlled tenants, business owners, journalists, and new condo owners. No one really knew what was going on. Directly across the street from and within the proposed site, several industrial buildings had been recently converted to condos. One building, 636 Pacific St, had only opened to residents 6 months before the announcement of the project.. Patti had her doubts about the new condos. In some ways these owners had the most to lose financially, and they had the shallowest roots in the community. However, she told me that there was one owner who she thought had some fight in him. His name was Daniel Goldstein.

She was right, and it turned out that he was an old friend of mine. I called up Dan and came by with my camera. He was flabbergasted by the situation. Having looked for a home for 5 years he had finally found the perfect place. He couldn’t believe that the government would take it from him to give to a private developer. As the shock of the situation began to wear off, he started to actively fight the project and we followed him with our cameras.

Over the course of these five years the world has changed a great deal and the project is now in serious doubt. Dan is still fighting.

We have put together a trailer that gives a sense of what the film will feel like. As I mentioned earlier, there is no way that a single 90-120 minute film could do justice to the complex issues that have been raised by this project and this story. We’ll leave that task to Norman Oder and his blog, The Atlantic Yards Report.

Instead of working on an all encompassing journalist tour de force- we have narrowed our focus to a few of the characters who are fighting the project, and how it has affected them personally. At the same time we are trying to create a story that does deal with some of these complex issues in more than a cursory way. So far we have already been editing for over a year. As time goes on we will likely post different versions of the trailer as well as selected scenes. In addition I will continue to write about the process of shooting this film and turning mountains of footage into a story that can be watched in one sitting.

Today I’m a stage dad. My daughter has started to shake off her anxiety and has agreed to be in a film that some friends are making. Because she was so hesitant to do it for a while she is actually just a body double for someone who is supposed to have a twin sister. She’s having a blast.

It’s most exciting because for the last 6 months we have been dealing with severe defiance and anxiety issues. They have been rapidly improving over the last couple of months. Perhaps it’s the exercises that we’ve been doing - and perhaps it’s just that she’s not in school anymore. In any case it’s incredible to see her reacting “normally” to mildly stressful situations.

Yesterday we went on a hike with some friends. She insisted on wearing crappy shoes and then got upset when they got soaked and muddy. She was having a fit but pulled herself out of it and ended up having a wild adventurous time. Unfortunately her freak out led to a freak out by her younger sister.

She also dealt well with getting glass in her foot. She cried etc but she allowed us to get it out.

In any case we are getting a sense of calm back that is pretty incredible.

When most people see a documentary film they don’t realize that the 90 minutes that they are watching is usually culled from literally hundreds of hours of film. That hundreds of hours of film means that thousands upon thousands of decisions had to be made about what went into the film and in what order.

I’ve been looking through some of my family footage to get a handle on how to move forward and i now feel like i have a huge weight on my chest. I’m feeling incredibly emotional and i’m not sure if it’s because of the loss of my father, seeing my children change, or the pressure to figure out how to move forward on this project.

I think it’s all of them but right now i am feeling overwhelmed by not only the possibilities but also the responsibilities of the project. I’m also struggling with how to use myself. I don’t like being on camera, and i don’t really like the sound of my own voice- yet i feel like it needs voice over to pull together all of the disperate ideas that i want to tie together. so i am diving in and throwing things at the wall.

the footage that i was just looking at was when my mother, brother, sister, and i put my father’s ashes in the ocean a year and a half after his death. It was a really emotional moment (which is probably why i am feeling so emotional) - one thing i rememberd that probably won’t find a way in to the film is what happened the following day.

We were loading up the car at the hotel to go back to my mom’s house. My wife, suki was bringing some things to the car when she noticed a sheet of paper scooting along the parking lot, blown about by the wind. She put a few things in the car and then noticed that it had landed near her foot. She picked it up and found that it was my father’s cremation certificate. We had thrown out the box of ashes in a trashcan on the beach the night before.

back to work

Pussy Galore in all of their transgressive glory called a song “you look like a jew”. it was a great song actually- off of a great record. There’s this squirrely guitar line with “primative” (ie heavy simple and awesome) drumming with some mumbled lyrics that end with a shout of “you look like a jew”.

i was thinking about that song today- while pondering the whole nature of rock vs. art vs. commerce vs being truly “punk rock”/ anti materialist / anti-establishment. Frankly there’s nothing anti about selling a painting for 500,000 except anti-poverty. Pussy galore never sold a lot of records- but some of their records became kind of valuable for a time in that collectors mentality.

I was also thinking about that line because I am a jew. i’m a jew who grew up in the south with parents who came from the north. It was only after i came to ny to go to college that i understood what that meant. I had an a-ha moment out of the blue. After living in NY for about 3 months I was walking down the street and it struck me that my parents were so different from most of the people i knew growing up because they were from somewhere else- from a different culture really.

it occurred to me at that time that i too - looked like a jew- and acted like one- and sounded like one- and on one level i understood that and on another i hid it- so a part of me felt hidden. i don’t think that i ever experienced much outright racism due to my status as a jew. i say this without irony- but my friends made fun of me for being cheap- carrying coupons (i did carry coupons), and yes they called me a jew. I didn’t take it all that seriously- because it wasn’t said all that seriously. however, i knew that as someone who was “different” i had to simply take the ribbing because to take offense would be offensive.

When i came to NY though i felt out of place because i was southern. i nodded to people on the street and said thank you to people at the cafeteria. I was a soul lost at sea- neither fish nor fowl- and i am still lost.

I just saw a post on the NY Times about 27 year old artist named Dash Snow dying of an overdose. One commenter mentioned that a dash of snow does a lot of damage to the body- and another praised his polaroids. Both commenters were dead on.

I had never seen his work, nor heard of him- partly because as a father who rarely leaves the house I just don’t know what’s going on anymore. 15 years ago i probably would have- and in some ways i miss that connection to the world- and in some ways i don’t. All right- i do- but i can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It really was a transcendent group of photos, and I don’t think I viewed them that way because of his death. Frankly i pretty much forgot about that and just looked at the photos. It would be an oversimplification to lump his work in with other youthfully “transgressive” photographers like terry richardson or ryan mcginley. (I just ended up reading the big New York mag article that cemented mr. snow’s fame- and it seems he’s a subject of a lot of mr. mcginley’s work) There are a bunch of images of young people naked playing around with each other and with drugs. I think that the reason that a lot of images like this have powererfulness is because they aren’t exploitative but instead somehow empowering. Instead of an outsider documenting a social group the group is documenting itself in a way. At the same time, the very fact of that documentation becomes in some ways an instigation device in itself. Is the artist and his/her friends taking drugs in order to take pictures or taking pictures in order to take drugs/ because of the drugs.

Some of the ones I saw were simply exuberantly juvenile(warning: nakedness and drugs)- images seemingly egged on by - and staged for the camera.

Others however were much more politically charged. It was these images that transcend the adrenaline fueled emptiness of the more raucous sex and drugs images. I guess for me it’s the one-upsmanship of this latter work that gets old- as I get older. When i was 21 i might have been impressed by the idea that these were bad kids doing bad things which look like a lot of fun. At some point though the empty posturing of this kind of bart simpsonesque (jumping on the couch yelling pay attention to me) art just depresses me- especially now that I have kids. On some level there’s a connection between this kind of work and the world of music as subculture- both of which have an uncomfortable relationship with money and marketing- the work thumbs it’s nose at the culture at large- but doing so in such a way that the transgression is in itself marketing. the moral/cultural/emotional complexities of which make me want to be a farmer.

Which brings the subject back to the subject at hand. As i look at work that celebrates the traditionally uncelebrateable I think again about how we all go through stages in our lives. At 40 we aren’t who we were at 20… fully… yet we still have a lot of who we were within us. How then do we transition from uncontrolled hedonist to loving parent- or adult that anyone can count on or trust. Is it even possible? I guess that’s what kind of bums me out about work like this. There’s something exciting about this kind of behavior at 20 that’s incredibly depressing at 40…or 45.

Perhaps I’m just projecting my own middle class values onto work that isn’t about that- yet it is- it’s about challenging those values.

In the end though, how does the hedonist stay happy?