Sometimes things move more quickly than we expect. A few weeks ago Yvette found out that she had twin half-brothers. Friday morning was the first time in her life that Yvette had met a blood relative- her brother came to visit. On Saturday her brother set off for NJ to meet their father.
Yvette, her boyfriend Paul, and I waited and waited for him to return. At first there were a few text messages letting us know how things were going… at 5 “he’s heavy and a little taller than me”- and at 6 a quick one- and then nothing…. until midnight. A rush of short texts.
On the way
It was great
He wants to have lunch with you tomorrow.
Yvette nearly dropped dead. she was going to meet her father. As we waited for her brother to return from the meeting she nervously cleaned the kitchen and explained that she didn’t know if she was ready. For some time her life had been all about searching. Now the searching was coming to an end and she didn’t know how to deal with the emotions of that transition.
As a filmmaker I always try to stay out of the way. I keep my mouth shut as much as possible and hope the subjects forget about the camera. However, this is a different film for me. I’m a part of it. Yvette and her brother meeting- yvette meeting her father- these are part of the story of possibly meeting my own child- their reactions inform my own understanding of this complex mess of emotions.
So as I watched, listened and participated I constantly thought about the film that I’m making and how the shots I was making might fit into that story- and I felt compelled to insert myself.
As Yvette rushed around getting ready she and her brother discussed that she might might wear something that would make her look like one of their father’s younger daughters. Paul firmly stated that Yvette should dress like herself and I loudly agreed. I had been mostly watching the drama unfold. Both Yvette and her brother wanted to meet their father and were terrified of having things go awry. The were putting his needs in front of theirs in a powerful way and it struck me as wrong and i explained why. Her brother had a convincing response- especially given the fact that he had already met his father and felt deeply at peace about it all.
(the following is in quotes but i’m not basing it off the tape- just off the top of my head) “I’m not mad at him. I just wanted to meet him. To me it was a sales call, and i wanted to close the sale. So of course I tried to make it all comfortable for him… and I closed the sale. it was awesome. I got to learn so much about our family.”
He had a good point- he didn’t really want a relationship. He didn’t need to have another father. His social father is great, and he’s deeply connected to him- yet he had a deep desire to know to know meet his blood relative.
As we discussed all this Yvette and her brother brushed their teeth with electric toothbrushes. They are both worried about receeding gums- and have a lot of other things in common. They not only look alike, they talk alike, act alike…. are alike. It was odd to see them quickly become so comfortable with each other.
more to come….
Last week NY Times Local blogger (and friend of mine) Andy Newman inadvertently brought up some complex ethical issues when he wrote a story about a business that had decided to renovate in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The problem was that the deli that decided it needed a spiffy new facade was in an historic district and the owners hadn’t bothered to get any kind of permits whatsoever. As the blog is part of a ‘hyper-local” reporting experiment the journalist has become involved with the community he covers, in a way that he might not have in the past. In this case the commenters argued back and forth about the rights of the owner vs. the community as well as the role of the local journalist/blogger in creating a difficult situation for the owner. Andy wrote a longer story to discuss these ideas.
It all started when someone sent him a note asking him to look into the fact that the deli had taken down its historic sign. He put on his journalist hat and called the buildings department and left a message in reference to whether or not permits had been filed. Then he went to the site to ask questions. While he was there he got a call back from the buildings department letting him know that no permits had been filed but that someone had called in a complaint 6 days earlier. He was told that an inspector would be checking out the site in the near future.
Then as he writes, “After taking the call from Buildings, I returned to Jimmy [the owner's grandson] and asked, again, if I could see the sign, and take pictures of it. He agreed. As we were heading toward the basement, he said, ‘Make a nice story about us. You’re not going to get us in trouble, right?’ ”
You can guess what happened next. The buildings department showed up the next day and shut them down. The truth is that they should have known better. Directly across the street a business owner had tried to renovate without basic building permits or historic preservation permits and has remained closed and stymied by the process for over a year. Across the street from our house (on the other side of this same neighborhood) an owner was trying to fix the side of his building without permits and … it fell down… oops. Some people tagged the journalist as tattle tale despite the fact that others had lodged complaints before he called to inquire.
The question then becomes how can a journalist be an impartial observer of such a small community. As my dad used to like to point out- it’s not a good idea to sh*t where you eat. Will Andy be able to write any hard hitting stories if doing so might turn significant segments of the small community against him? These issues become increasingly important as we get more and more of our news from hyper local sources. At the same time we also get more of our information from hyper-specific sources.
Earlier this week I answered some questions about our Atlantic Yards film, “The Battle of Brooklyn” for a NJ Nets fan blog, netsarescorching.com. Nets fans are interested in the Atlantic Yards story because if the project moves forward the Nets will move to Brooklyn. As the blog is focused on basketball one of the first questions was about whether or not we had interviewed anyone in the Nets front office. In this case, the point of view of the audience is basketball focused. However, our film has almost nothing to do with basketball beyond the fact that the real estate debacle we are following involves an arena. I took great pains to clarify the films point of view and our style of filmaking. What I was attempting to do was “manage audience expectations”. Our films tend to be a little different from what average people expect in a documentary. Either they expect a Michael Moore style hell ride, or standard PBS fodder. In our films we often raise questions that aren’t answered in an overly direct way. One problem that we consistently run into is that when an audience expects X and you give them Y they think that the film has failed in its goals. As such, we try to manage the expectation of the audience so that they go in knowing what to expect. In this case I explained that we aren’t activists and aren’t journalists in the traditional sense. I wanted to make sure that they didn’t expect a film with a lot of talking heads talking about facts, figures, and policy. Instead it’s a film that follows characters through a narrative structure. Like any Hollywood film we’ll take some liberties with time frame in the interest of the drama. In addition the film will largely be told by following a small number of people, so it will be from a very specific perspective.
As stories move through the world they often bubble from the real world; of people connected by place, family, and physical community, to the virtual world of community through connection. Another hyper focused blog (focused on the technical aspects of documentary), found the story (most likely through a google alert on “documentary”) and took issue with the idea that we could make a film about this complex story without it being a journalistic exercise. I wrote a comment clarifying our position and explained that I wasn’t trying to wriggle out of any kind of responsibility to the truth, but instead managing expectations as explained above. In this case, our very local story about real estate was discussed by a blog that focuses on professional basketball, and my comments were then critiqued on a documentary blog written by a journalist interested in the technical aspects of documentary. When context is a primary concern and it gets lost, ideas get knocked out of whack.
As much as my life is defined by my role as a father I will be the first person to admit that I am by no means a perfect one. In fact I’m a lot more imperfect than I’d like at times. Our older daughter is “spirited” beyond belief. Honestly she acts like a 13 year old more than a 7 year old and we struggle with maintaining balance when dealing with her. Unfortunately a lot of our strategies don’t work and we shift them more than we should. We are very aware of the idea that we want to have our daughter recognize that her behavior is unacceptable, not her when we are having issues, but that line often gets blurred.
One of the most important things that we work on is communication, but sometimes I know I don’t hold up my end. My daughter is a font of want. I’ll often point out to her that the only thing she’s discussed with me is the things that she wants. I understand that there are deeper forces at play with the intense sense of need she has, but I don’t always have the patience to calmly explain why she can’t have an ice cream at 10 am, or a donut, or new shoes, or a new backpack (this isn’t an exaggeration and all of the requests came with in minutes). As such we often slip into patterns of reward and punishment that we recognize probably aren’t the best strategy long term, but feel necessary to get a handle on our situation. There was an article in the NY Times yesterday that put these practices into troubling perspective.
After reading it, I did a bit better today. I just hope I can keep it up.
For the past two weeks my kids have had no camp or day care. My wife and i have swapped time mostly, so that one of us can get some work done. Last week we stayed in upstate NY. My wife typically gets up with the kids first and then wakes me after an hour or so and goes back to bed.
We are trying to move forward on our film about the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn so my goal was to give her as much time as possible to work. At the same time, I was trying to paint our house. I’ve found that when I’m just with my two kids, ages 3 and 7, they tend to really get on each others nerves. So I sought out some friends for them. One family that we hang out with has three kids and the mom was busy fighting mold that had creeped into her house. I ended up taking 5 kids to a river to swim. It was actually easier than bringing just my two- but it was still exhausting. My younger one is a bit needy and wants to be held all the time. By the end of those days I was exhausted.
I’ve also found that the kids respond really poorly to having no structure like camp or school to give them a focus. As much as i try to keep things scheduled I can’t seem to keep up a momentum.
“Hey, let’s get going to the river”
“NOOOO” they respond.
it always goes like that. At some point I lose my patience. I can stay calm for a long time. After a while my calmness and patience seems completely ineffective- and when I realize how ineffective it is I often just… explode
“All right let’s go go go- get in the goddam car- we’re leaving now!!!!”
unfortunately that’s often much more effective than calm gentle pleadings.
There’s only a few more days till school starts and both my wife and i are shot.
I had a really crazy second round dream this morning about my father. By second round i mean the kids had woken up at 6:30 and we had all gotten back to sleep for a little bit, so it was a thin sleep that didn’t feel like sleep.
In the dream I got a few letters from American Express that had to deal with fraud. There was some note in each one that detailed a complaint i had made. The dream didn’t start out having anything to do with my father. At some point though the letters began to reference my father and it turned out that two of the letters had to do with situations involving him.
one apparently took place when he was in graduate school in Ann Arbor michicgain- and somehow the letters included voice transcripts of recordings of the interviews. in this interview the officer of some sort was trying to explain that from the upper pennisula one could see russia- which isn’t true- but also had nothing to do with my father’s frustrating situatin so he got short with the guy. My father didn’t suffer fools gladly, but he usually enjoyed taking official discussions off course. This is a past time that I too enjoy when I’m in the right mood. However, when either of us aren’t in the right frame of mind we can get short with telemarketers, cashiers, sales people, and jehovah’s witnessess that knock at in opportune times.
I think that in the dream he was feeling inconvienced by the fraud so the further annoyance of the cop taking the subject off course set him off. The dream then morphed into a situation where my beareded 80’s father was in the back seat of my car asking me about the third letter which had to do with an accident he was involved with. There was something slightly infirm about him in this dream memory- which is odd because i don’t have any memories where he wasn’t in control of the situation. Even as his physical health deteriorated he was very much a leader.
i think that this part of the dream references a situation a few years before he passed away in which he got into a fender bender- where someone accelerated and then stopped at a highway entrance. there was no damage to either car but she tried to soak him for whiplash- which made him incensed. partly because he had hit her and partly because it was clearly ambulance chasing. but in the dream it was almost like he was a calm child or an althiemerzs patient.
what’s most interesting about all this is that he felt so present in the dream- and i have not been able to achieve that sense of presence in quite a long time. i think it’s because being at the beach in a motel reminds me of going to the beach with my parents when we were growing up.
as i write this i’m sitting in a motel chair fighting with my 7 year old daughter who is being a total jerk. we have a few hours left at the beach and she is just being contrary all the time. i’m at my witts end about it really. I wonder now how difficult i was. I know I wasn’t particularly easy, and i know that my dad exploded at me from time to time. But was i this annoying? So often now i feel torn between two place in time. As i observe my daughter and imagine myself i can also imagine myself as my father. i almost feel as if i am my father looking at me when i am my looking at my daughter, and through this process i get a better sense of myself then and now- and a sense of what my father must have been thinking and feeling. Because in truth we don’t reveal our full true selves to our children. We have to project maturity and adultness even when we feel like kids ourselves. Why? why can’t we just let them know that we are still children - because then the lines get too blurred- which is clearly already a problem in our family where our oldest thinks she’s in charge
The same is not true of our younger daughter and i do feel more comfortable acting childlike with her. go figure
When my father died 3 and a half years ago I was in a bit of emotional shock for quite some time. Despite taking on his role as the family leader during the turmoil that followed his death I managed to shoot a couple of short videos on my brother’s little photo camera.
A couple of weeks later as I started to get my self back together I thought of making a short film about his passing to help me process and focus on the information. I messed around with it a little bit- and when I went back to my hometown for a public service a month after he died I shot a few more videos with that same camera. I liked that the grainy videos felt almost like super 8, and that they had a home movie quality that made them feel intimate.
I got myself one of those same point and shoot cameras and began to use it liberally, documenting my new daughter’s birth, and my older daughter’s new songs.
Periodically i would sit down and try to work with some of the footage, trying to find some way to honor my father’s memory and connect with my sense of loss (which was something i was having a lot of trouble doing). A few months after my daughter’s birth I ran into my friend Lois who told me I had to go for a boy to round out my family. That’s when the little film morphed into a much bigger film about much larger and more complex issues. Still, i knew that it would begin with my father’s passing and explore the nature of family.
Since then i have thought about this film a great deal, and shot a little bit more. LIke this exercise in blogging, the trailer pretty much tumbled out fully formed since it had been gestating for years. But it’s only the jumping off point. This 4 minute trailer will probably spread out to about 15 minutes in the film.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the rest of the film but it will be some time before i pull it together. In the meantime i’ll continue to write about the process.
