When I was working on the Transitions book with my father he referenced Erikson’s 8 stages of life in his version of the introduction. We struggled with the tone of the tome, and I feared that his reliance on long standing studies and references to phsychologic fact would take away from the directness that I sought. It wasn’t that I didn’t find the information valuable, but instead that I was trying, as I’m wont to do, to look at it from a completely different perspective.

In some sense, the reason we were compelled to write the book was because no one had really done any work on the main issue that we were discussing; the transition from a parent child relationship to a more peer based one. However, it now looks as if our line of reasoning was in lock step with the thoughts of Jeffery Jensen Arnett, a psychology professor who has begun advocating for an addition to Erikson’s list. He wants to add a section called emerging adulthood.

Erikson saw life as a series of transitions between stages, and further that a central conflict drives the transition between each of these stages. If the conflict isn’t successfully overcome then the person has a tendency to become somewhat stuck in the earlier stages. In this series of progressions, successful transition between the earlier stages relies a good deal on decent parenting.

For example, in the first stage, infancy (birth to 18 months) the central conflict is trust vs. mistrust. Feeding is the driver of this conflict. If the infant doesn’t get reliable care such as food when needed, they might develop an overriding sense of mistrust. In early childhood (2 to 3 years) the main conflict is between the individual’s ability to do things for themselves vs. a sense of shame and doubt. Again, if the parenting isn’t somewhat supportive in a process like potty training it’s possible that the individual might develop a sense of shame at their lack of ability. I believe that his focus on the caregiver’s behavior as a determinant of the cared for’s well being laid the foundation for the ascendency of Nurture over Nature as the overriding factor in terms of an individual’s success.

As I have continued to work on my film about the nature of family, I have become increasingly aware of how ascendent the concept of nurture was when my generation were children. This evolving understanding has enormous hidden implications. As an example, when I considered being a sperm donor I recall thinking that my “nature” was fairly unimportant because my unconscious understanding was that it was really “nurture” that was important. As the son of a psychologist (and a social worker) who came of age intellectually just as Erikson’s theory’s were coming to the fore it makes perfect sense to me that the idea that well intentioned parenting was much more important than the genes we are born with . The flip side of that coin is that it places enormous pressure on the parents. It creates a foundational belief that as parents we are responsible for our children’s success or failure. This in turn leads parents to become increasingly involved in their children’s lives.

Arnett’s argument for this expanded list has come under criticism by some in the academic establishment because Erikson’s list is meant to be seen as a universal, a series of stages that cuts across culture. There are others who argue that culture affects this process so it makes sense that different cultures would have different stages. This seems to make even more sense in the later stages as evolution likely tends to wield a less powerful brush as we get older. I was discussing this idea with my brother, who is a social psychologist, and it struck me that it might possibly be Erikson’s list itself which was one of the greatest contributing factors towards this need to define a new stage.

One of the main points of the book that my father and I were working on was that in our modern world, parents and children have become more entangled in each others lives. These increasingly complex relationships also have less clearly worn pathways and rituals to define them. We’ve all heard the term helicopter parenting in reference to the way in which modern parents hover over their children. While there are positive and supportive aspects of this behavior it creates issues that must be resolved. The more entangled we become, the more difficult it is for us to redefine our relationships as we grow and change.

As i write this I have been looking over a chart of Erikson’s 8 stages. What strikes me most about them is that they are “coded” with a progressive’s sense of supportive parenting/teaching. In stages 1-4 the successful transition seems to demand a nurturing environment created by, and supported by, adults. These descriptions appear to be re-defining the relationship between adults and youth and in essence paving the way for they youth culture progressivism of the 60’s and 70’s. I’m not an academic and I’m not basing this on studies or established literature. Instead, I’m basing this on intuition, as well as the work that I have done to understand my own generation’s rocky path towards adulthood. When I refer to my generation I am speaking less generally - and more specifically- about a community of artists, writers, and musicians that I belong to. I’m also looking towards the sense of child/adult relationships that we glean from media as we grow up. Holden Caulfield, for instance, seems like he would fit right into today’s generation whereas in his own he was completely out of step. I remember reading books that were set in the 40’s and 50’s and adults always talked down to children in a way that would seem “disempowering” if one were to follow the ethos of the progressivism of the 8 stages. When I was growing up afternoon TV would often be things like “The Brady Bunch” followed by “My Three Sons”. These are shows of slightly different eras and I recall understanding that there was a dissonance between the ways in which adults treated children in the different shows. These cultural cues/clues both reflect the subtleties of time, and influence the understanding of social relationships and more in young children.

I am pleased to see the concept being discussed in the way that it is. One of the greatest difficulties that my father and I had was that I had chosen to follow a path that he and I had no blueprint for. I didn’t know what I wanted to do exactly, but I did know what I didn’t want to do. i felt extremely stifled by convention, and I knew that while I might find a certain level of comfort in the safety of an academic pathway, I knew in my bones that it wasn’t for me. Why that’s the case is a completely different discussion, but knowing it forced me to seek out a different path. Had my father been a more direct colleague of Dr. Arnett’s I can assume that we would have had a much less rocky path ourselves.

One thing that the NY Times article points out is that an acceptance of these ideas by the establishment would call for a whole new set of social policies. Frankly, I’m less interested in the concept of the government codifying these ideas, than parents and children having the means and tools to work through them.

Last week I posted a couple of hundred old photos of the early 90’s NYC music scene on our facebook fan page. A lot of the photos had been seen before, and many of them were from my book, “Scraps”, but only a handful of people had gotten a chance to really look through them as a group. The response was overwhelmingly positive. The internet is a powerful engine, and having the ability to share them so easily was exciting.

I’ve always felt that photos need a chance to age in order for them to develop their full power. While William Eggleston’s images of the south were likely shocking in their simplicity at the time they were taken, the passage of years gives them exponentially more power. A portion of this power comes from nostalgia, but it is also due to the forward thinking eye of the image- maker; the ability to see important details where most people see the mundane. Some of the reaction to my images was based on a sense of nostalgia (we’re all getting old), but I’d like to think that as a group, they capture a sense of the time and place that becomes even more apparent as we move away from it.

When I started to get interested in photography during high school there was no internet to provide a window onto the world of images.  Instead I was limited to the photo books in the local library.  These consisted mostly of how-to books and a few art survey books.  My parents also had a couple of photo books laying around as well- like a huge Avedon book from the 60’s. I remember being drawn towards images of people. I connected with the images that weren’t about the camera person but instead about the situation.  I was moved by images that told simple stories. Avedon’s grainy blurry images struck a chord with me as well. I never liked things that seemed too perfect. Over time I discovered Friedlander, Frank, and Winnogrand. In high school I got to take a photography class and spent endless hours in the darkroom. I was that kid that took most of the photos for the yearbook and school paper. I loved seeing my photos in print, it gave me a sense of power to be able to kind of force people to see things as I had seen them.

By the time I was ready for college I knew that I wanted to be a photographer, but I didn’t want to go to art school. Somehow I intuited that the work that I was drawn to couldn’t be taught- or that if it was taught it would screw it up. My work would become somebody else’s… or some such nonsense. In college I ended up with a BA in Religious studies because by the time I had to declare a major I realized I’d already completed one in religious studies. In addition I took one photo class a year and happily I did learn a lot about image-making, but also about trying to get to the bottom of what I was doing. I think the most important thing that I learned in class was how to look at my work, as well as the work of others, for what it is, and not what I want it to be.

When I was a sophomore I took on a major project, documenting the street vendors of Astor Place. At the time, the late 80’s, the gentrification of Manhattan was starting to shift into high gear, and this daily street market was under threat. I loved the market because one could find almost anything there. One blanket would hold spahgetti and an electric guitar. Another vendor might have porn videos laid out next to the bible, Marx, and a portrait of JFK. On one visit I found a book called “Invisible City”. The seller wanted a lot of money for it, 7 dollars. Most books were 1 or 2, and I was broke. I walked away but quickly ran back when I realized I had to have it. The photographer, Ken Schles, had documented the changing East Village a few years earlier, and in the book I saw a past that was still almost present. It painted a romantic picture of a bohemian life that I longed to live, and it had a huge impact on my photography at the time. The contrasty, night vision rendering of community would shape my work for the next few years. In the spring of 1990 I spent several hours a day at the market, and watched as the police made more and more of an effort to sweep the vendors off the street. Eventually they scattered and the city continued its march towards prosperity.

At the same time music was more important to me than school and I went to shows at least 3 nights a week, often with my camera around my neck. I photographed bands I liked, and then, when my I started a band with friends, I photographed the bands we played with. I had a cheap Nikon and even cheaper lenses. The only time my images looked sharp was when they were over developed because the high contrast deadened the blur. In a way, this worked out to my advantage. They gave the images a distinct look that hold them together. I liked blurry, and it worked for these images that recall a blurry sort of time.

About the time that I was getting out of college, gentrification was in full swing and rents in the East Village were pretty much doubling each year. I first ended up in a cramped apartment with college roommate that was cheaper than most at 800 bucks a month. However, with my messenger job, and a few other side jobs, I wasn’t able to spend as much money or time on photography as I liked. A few months later I went to a party at a friend’s apartment and immediately fell in love with it. It was a grungy, tiny, apartment on Ave B, which was still pretty rough. It had a nostaligic charm, though, as it was unrenovated, with a 1950’s fridge still chugging away, and a bathtub that would have been in the kitchen if someone hadn’t thrown a wall around it. When I professed my love for the place my friend told me I could have his room, and the 150 dollar a month rent that went with it. A few months after I’d moved in, a friend asked me if I knew the photographer Ken Schles, as he lived in the building. It sounded familiar and then I realized that the book, “Invisible City” that had shaped my psyche was mostly shot in the building.

The cheap rent allowed me to concentrate even more on my photography, my band, and my art. It was a time of peak creativity for me and I loved it. Time and responsibility caught up with me a little bit. I fell in love, we bought a house, I had to get a job, had kids… The job wasn’t oppressive by normal standards, but it felt like my time of wild creativity was coming to an end. Having to get up and go to work each day, then come home and work on the house wore me down. Then the kids…. forget about it. I’ve had the ability to continue being creative since then, but not with the reckless abandon of my youth. Looking back at these images has been really inspiring to me. I want to find a way to get back to that feeling that anything is possible, and forcing myself to reflect on that time is helping.

This has been a very intense, but positive, week on a number of fronts.

For the past couple of years we have been struggling with our direction as filmmakers. We’ve spent a lot of energy developing TV projects, not out of a love for TV, but instead because it is nearly impossible to raise funds for the kind of films that we really want to make. While continuing to work on the films we love, we have come very close to getting a few of the TV projects sold. However, in the end, each one of these has fallen apart. Our efforts on the film front, however, have been paying off and we are almost done with a film that we think will be explosively good.

On Monday at rumur we had a long productive discussion about how to move forward with our work. One thing that was clear to us is that we haven’t been very effective at capturing our own audience. Several film blogs have picked up on a recent article that discusses the idea that if a filmmaker develops a base of 1000 true fans, he can survive making his work. While I don’t know if 1000 true fans is enough, it has become increasingly clear that if we want to create the work we care about, we need to move past gatekeepers and build our own audience.

The good news is that we have a strong foundation to start from. We’ve developed a robust body of work that we are extremely proud of (Half-Cocked, Radiation, Horns and Halos, Code 33, August in the Empire State, etc etc). We just haven’t done a good enough job of letting people know about it. What we have to figure out is why we haven’t, and what we can do about it going forward.

In the independent music world (I was in an indie band for a decade) a band often works with a record label to build up a larger audience with each record. The same model has never really existed in a robust way in the film world. While music and film are both components of youth culture there are a number of reasons that kids have a different relationship to musicians than filmmakers. In simple distribution terms, film has nothing like college radio to get out the message about new work. In the past especially, college radio was one of the biggest parts of a band’s climb up the ladder of success. A band would go on tour, play shows, visit college radio stations and spread their gospel. Now they also have myspace and pitchfork and facebook.

In reality, we should have a strong network of fans. Our films have gotten out in the world and have been seen by millions of people via TV, movie theaters, rock clubs, and the internet. At least once a month when I meet someone new I find that they have seen our films, but don’t know much about us or how they got made. Clearly we haven’t been good about building up a “brand” in the way that a band does. I think that part of this comes from a reticence to be self-promotional. I come from a music scene that was extremely disdainful of consumerist culture. Our first film, “Half-Cocked” was largely about a group of people/musicians who existed outside of the larger culture. They were interested in art and expression, not fame. So were we. However, in the era of “The Long Tail”, if the artist is not interested in fame on some level, it becomes nearly impossible to exist as a working artist.

I have been thinking about this issue of “fame” a lot recently. A few months ago I started a kickstarter project with my daughter. We first used kickstarter about 8 months ago to raise funds for the film that we are now finishing. Until now, we hadn’t made great use of social media. Over the last week we’ve been thinking about it a lot, both in relation to our own work, but also in relation to Fiona’s project.

Ever since she was a year old it was clear that Fiona had a certain connection to music. When she was two years old and we got the first Arcade Fire album, she immediately picked out the three best songs and would only listen to them (her “hot ear” was confirmed when I watched their live concert stream on Thursday and they played all three of these original songs). By the time she was three she was making up songs. Now that she’s a little older, her tastes have become a lot more mainstream, and her songs have started to sound like Taylor Swift or whatever else she’s listening to on the pop music station. A few years ago she was focused on music, now she’s focused on popular music and “famous” singers.

I was ambivalent about starting a kickstarter campaign with her because I didn’t want her to focus too much on the money or the “fame” aspect. I saw the kickstarter campaign as a fun, goal-oriented, productive way to get her to focus her thoughts and her talents. When we set out to do the kickstarter campaign I was very clear (especially to myself) that we wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. I never sent out and email to friends or family, but I did occasionally post her updates to facebook. I encouraged her to make up songs with me, but I made sure that I didn’t pressure her. While a few people that we knew pledged to her project, the vast majority of people simply found her on kickstarter. It’s been exciting for us to make connections with new people through her work, and it’s been especially interesting to me to think about how people connect with each other.

Again, when we started, it was a totally different universe. We shot our first movies on film, edited without a computer, and almost no one had email or cell phones. Now, in order for us to stay relevant, we need to re-think how we make and promote/distribute our work. In some ways, the kickstarter project for Fiona was about encouraging her to follow her passion. It was also about giving her an opportunity to explore new media. If she is going to be a musician, I want to help her to understand the different aspects of fame, friendship, and artistic support.

The revolving door between government and industry doesn’t just exist in the armed services and financial fields. A lot of the issues at play in our film, “A Battle in Brooklyn” (click on link to see discussion of title) have to do with the revolving door between developers and the government and the government/developers and journalism.

It’s difficult to find a way to get these facts into our film- because they are really the subtext of our story and not the “text”. As our story is a character driven narrative that follows several people as they fight the project it’s difficult for us to get this information in unless they talk about it.

We were just going through the footage on one scene and spotted a journalist who was asking the locals some questions outside a press conference about some of the purported benefits of the project. The locals had been kept out. A year later that journalist was working as a PR person for the Empire State Development Corporation - the quasi governmental agency that pushed through the project.

There’s another writer who shows up in the early footage who went on to work for another development agnency. The Borough President’s assistant left his position after helping to push through the Downtown Brooklyn Plan. This plan called for eminent domain to be used to take a row of houses that were used as part of the underground railroad. They were to be torn down to make way for a park (to cover underground parking) and a hotel. This gentleman is now helping to develop the hotel.

Bruce Ratner, the developer started his “career” working in the housing department under Mayor Koch in the 70’s. He left after a few years to start working for his family’s development company….. The vice president of Forest City Ratner also worked in government before joining the developer.

We’re trying to work on a way to get some of this information into the film, but it’s hard. We don’t have any talking heads, and cards that give this kind of info are too strong. In the end though, the film will hopefully shine more light on these issues and inspire a great deal of discussion about them.

There’s a pretty amazing Gil Scott-Heron article in this weeks New Yorker. It’s a rare piece of writing that reads like a well edited documentary film.

So much of the time, even in good articles, the writing is almost as much about the writer as it is about the subject. It’s kind of understandable that this would be the case, because without the ability to control the pace of reading, the sound, and the visuals, the writer feels a need to put his or her stamp on things. How else do they compete with other writers for gigs? In this case we feel the presence of the writer not as a spy but as a kind of an accepting friend. There’s clearly a bit of distance, but also a sense of trust built up that pays off. I think it’s more typical in this kind of writing to have a feeling that the reader is the secret friend of the writer and the writer has kind of seriptitiously slipped us into the room to gawk at the person they are covering in. In this case I wouldn’t say that the writer, Alec Wilkinson is “voiceless”, but the writing is non-judgmental in way that is rarely seen.

A recent thread on the dreaded non-elitist facebook was a back and forth about whether or not the New Yorker is elitist. I happen to love the New Yorker and I argued that it isn’t, that it’s just good. When the thread popped back up again today I countered with the fact that this week features the Gil article and a talk of the town about Iggy Pop. The Iggy article is actually a little bit elitist- but the GS-H article is not. The fact that it almost feels a little bit out of place in the New Yorker brings forth a few little cracks in my argument. The truth is, the magazine is mildly elitist, but it’s really the cartoons that push it in that direction the farthest. Here is what I pecked away to my friend on my phone.

“The Gil Scott article is pretty amazing
I just thought about it though. It’s the cartoons that are elitist- painfully so
The illustrations aren’t always - sometimes yes- but they can also be amazing- it’s the nature of the cartoons to be extremely elitist. Since we are such visual creatures and the new yorker gives us so few images compared to other mags we give the stupid businessman jokes way too much. … Power??”

The article isn’t online but they do have this nice slideshow. The pictures and words are all by Monique de Latour- and in true elitist fashion somehow the cads that slapped it together took full credit for it- and gave her an “images courtesy of” credit.

As we get closer to having a finished film, we’ve started to focus increasingly on our plans for it. While strategizing about distribution, we are also thinking about presentation. The most important aspect of presentation is the name. For at least a year we have been working with the title “Battle of Brooklyn.” However, we have become increasingly dissatisfied with this title for a number of reasons.

We want a title that keys in on the themes of the film, but one that is open enough to allow people to have a broad set of expectations. The idea of “home” is important, but so is the idea of standing up for principles. Here are a few that we have tossed around:

No Place Like Home
Home Game
Home
A Home
We Live Here

In terms of distribution, we have to think of a broader set of problems. Films with names that begin with “A” do much better on VOD than others because they are the first ones that people scroll through. We also have to think of other projects with similar names; “Home Movie\” might have been a great title if there wasn’t an awesome doc with this title already. Web site availability is another big factor. As we brainstormed this morning we got a very rude awakening after typing in weliverhere.com - WARNING- it’s a porn site without a splash page. This actually makes it hard for us to consider this name. It would be terrible if the film began to get some press and people started searching for it and ended up on this page.

We look forward to your ideas and votes on the ones that we have come up with- as well as those that you suggest.