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Big news - my feature documentary Bush League is now streaming in several places. It’s available on Amazon Instant video and you can also watch it free (in its entirety) on the Bush League page. Or you can go directly to the film on Vimeo or Youtube. If you like it please share it, like it, tweet it and pin it. It’s a project I’ve put years of work into so I hope it resonates with you.
One of the most important details on the new Bush League page is a Creative Commons tab under the video. I decided to license the film with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) license. What it means is that anyone can download the film and remix it, reuse it and share it without my permission as long as it’s not-for-profit. Many films like Bush League get trapped in distribution channels because the makers have to get a financial return to recoup their costs but I’m not concerned about that. I made the film to be seen and shared. Licensing it in this way broadens the possibilities and expands the life and reach of the film. Or so I hope. If you use the material in something new or you’re a remix artist I’d love to see what you do with it. I hope there's value in the film that I haven't seen or can't draw out that perhaps you can.
The new Bush League page also uses HTML5 to make the viewing experience more dynamic. You can view the film straight through or click one of the Character or Theme buttons and the video will jump to those preselected sections. I use a lot of video when I teach film and photography and I wanted to make it possible for other teachers to use the material in a more convenient way. The running times of each section are:
Jacklyn - 9 minutes
Mlawa - 16 minutes
Chatwa - 12 minutes
Jake - 30 minutes
HIV/AIDS - 19 minutes
Agriculture - 9 minutes
Gender Inequality - 14 minutes
Peace Corps - 16 minutes
Soccer - 11 minutes
Clouds - 3 minutes
Finally, you’ll also notice the Audience Videos on the bottom left of the Bush League page. These are videos of different audiences greeting the people back in Malawi. No one in Malawi has seen Bush League yet and the people in the film have no idea who is seeing them so I started shooting these short clips of audiences at the film screenings. I will go back to Malawi (hopefully summer of 2013) to show them the finished film and I’ll also take the audience videos to show them where and to whom their stories are being told. If you watch the film I’d love to have a clip of you saying hello or yewo (thanks in Chitumbuka) back to the people you saw in the film. Upload your video - Vimeo is the easiest for me to download from but Youtube will work as well – then send a link to cysfilm@gmail.com and I’ll add your video.
Anyone looking for a solid perspective on the recent political events in Malawi should take a look at Dr. Kim Yi Dionne's blog. Her blog posts have been collected and reposted on the Democracy in Africa website as well.
INDENTURED, my doc short about labor abuse on U.S. military bases in Iraq will screen tomorrow at the Observer Research Foundation in Mumbai. The location and RSVP info:
NKM International House, 5thFloor, Behind LIC Headquarters
Yogakshema, Nariman Point, Mumbai 400020
In Chicano Park all day yesterday to work on a video for USD about low rider culture and thankfully remembered to bring a couple still cameras with me. The medium format color shots are with a Pentagon Six and the b+w 35mm are with a Contaflex w/Zeiss 35mm adapter.
Between developments on Mozilla's Popcorn platform, location based storytelling and some new apps to build content rich ebooks - there's a lot happening in transmedia but the most interesting development of late is not on the creative/technological side but on the critical/exhibition side. Variety ran a story this week about the New York Film Society's move into this new creative space. From Variety:
Film Society of Lincoln Center is expanding its transmedia programming with new initiatives and partnerships that will be part of the org's new-media-centric Convergence program....It's a form of storytelling that we feel needs a deeper critical dialogue," said Eugene Hernandez, FSLC's director of digital strategy. "It's very easy to focus on the technology, but as this type of storytelling matures, you need to develop a vocabulary for talking critically about it. That's where we feel we can contribute.
Here is a link to the Variety article and a few other sites I've been watching. It's developing very quickly:
On March 24th of this year there was a hearing in Congress (video above) to address labor abuse and human trafficking on our bases in the war zones. The witnesses included State Dept. and Pentagon officials who described their respective agency's measures to deal with the crimes perpetrated against hundreds of thousands of laborers who worked on our bases. If you listen closely what you'll also hear, with the exception of a few speakers, is an illustration of the total impotence these leaders actually have in addressing a crime that our government, through a lack of oversight, aided and abetted against hundreds of thousands of impoverished men and women. In 2009 there were 90,000 people (categorized as TCNs: Third Country Nationals) working on base support for us in Afghanistan and Iraq. In everyday language, that means there were 90,000 foreigners (mostly men, mostly south Asian) doing things like cooking, cleaning and construction on our bases in 09'. When you consider the unbelievable length of these wars and that there is a high turnover rate of workers - that's a whole bunch of people who lived and worked as modern-day-slaves on our bases. They weren't bound in chains; they were bound with debt. Pardon me, they are bound in debt – it’s still happening - 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Here is a picture of the numbers for Iraq on 09’, the lion's share of the base support number are TCNs. That's just one year in Iraq alone.
The hubris of the people who designed these wars is beyond me. In addition to the violation of the revolutionary legal principles championed by American attorneys at the Military Tribunals at Nuremberg after WWII (The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." It’s during the tribunal that the term Act of Aggression was developed – a war without the justification of self-defense. This work was led by American military attorneys and it’s a great big feather in our foreign policy hat. (I mean was) the Bush admin also used the wars as a free market experiment. You know what a free market military base in a war zone looks like? From a distance it looks like a normal military base but it’s flanked on all sides by little company towns (see: slums), which are dirt lots boxed in barbwire where impoverished men from impoverished nations live in trailers stacked like cordwood – these are the stateless, rightless, faceless bodies that do a house wife’s work, that is to say: they do everything. They cook, they clean, they make the coffee in the morning, they lift the bricks, dig the holes, clean the latrines, wash the clothes – they are the worker drones, the underclass and the untouchables of the war zone society and there are tens of thousands of them in little pens huddling the flanks of the bases. The destinies of these men are defined by their manyness, which in the context of free market makes them valueless. And that is just one reason why a free market war is a really terrible idea.
It’s appropriate that today is Easter. I’m not religious but I have lived through a few Lithuanian winters and experienced the total euphoria of spring at that latitude and with that a lesson – resurrection is a real event in our everyday lives but it always comes later than we want it. It feels late, like the wars are well over but we’ve just got to fix this stuff before we can move forward as a society. They weren't bound in chains; they were bound with debt. Pardon me, they are bound in debt – it’s still happening on our bases in Iraq and Afghanistan - 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Please send the link to INDENTURED to your representation with a short note. They do read your mail.
I've been trying to wreck the preferences algorithms on my Netflix and Pandora accounts for about a year now by colliding the highest culture with the lowest. I also like both, so it's not just to wreck the data set they collect on me. There really is so much to be said and loved about both ends of our cultural spectrum. Here are two great monologues, one high one low:
http://youtu.be/FwvjZXfHUbY
INDENTURED, my short doc film about labor abuse on US bases in Baghdad, now has a web page. Please take a look and send the page link on to your representation in D.C. Reform is a slow process, so even though the war is technically over, this has to be held up to the light for years to come if it's ever going to be addressed.
I took this photo in 2008 inside the US State Dept facility in Baghdad where I worked for two years. These men all paid four thousand dollars to illegal labor brokers in Nepal to get their jobs on the base. They made about $1.50 an hour and they worked 12 hours a day 7 days a week. That means they worked about a year to pay their loans off (their loans all have usury interest rates). Basically everything about their status is illegal in America. The bitter part for me was that I was working at a facility run by the State Dept and shared by the DOJ. These are the two agencies that write and enforce the rules on human trafficking, yet guess who was inside EVERYDAY cleaning the office and the bathrooms? It's the absolute height of hypocrisy. The cherry on top is that every year the State Dept writes a report in which it makes recommendations to other countries to identify and address human smuggling and human trafficking problems in those nations - because we are the gold standard.
We had/have 70,000 of these laborers in our war zones at any one time. To put that in perspective, in 2009 we had a total of 30,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. The New Yorker was right to call it an Invisible Army. Please do send the web page URL to your reps (there's a button on the page that will take you there) because they really do care about the opinions of their constituents.
I just got home from the theater - I saw A Separation. It's the best film I've seen this year, when it was over I actually kissed my fingers and looked toward the sky to acknowledge the film gods. I know being over earnest is a shortcoming but this is for real, the finger kissing I mean. The trailer makes it look more like a melodrama than it is. Behold a giant of a director: Asghar Farhari. A GIANT I say.
I'm still absorbing it so I don't really think I should write about it but I do have one thought to share: If Italian Neo-Realism was born out of the collapse of Fascist Italy during the Italian Spring in the mid 1940's than maybe there's reason to hope much more work like A Separation will emerge (and be recognized) from the Middle East in the next decade? I really hope so.
There’s a great photo project that’s on display at USD right now. The (IN)VISIBLE PROJECT is a self-contained gallery space for a photo project shot by Bear Guerra. It combines beautiful black+white portraits of local homeless people with audio recordings of the subjects telling their stories.
This kind of thing done poorly would be a one-note bummerfest/exploitation but Bear’s take weaves a diverse set of stories together in a way that’s illuminating and like any good art - provokes recognition. In my case - a recognition that the homeless population is extremely diverse in itself as are the causes of homelessness. Like many people, my interactions with homeless people are limited to fleeting moments of uncomfortable eye contact at intersections and little more. The show was a nice opportunity for me to think a little deeper.
I helped Bear set the show up last Sunday. Toward the end of the day I found my inner voice chattering non-stop about homelessness – something I’m personally very afraid of. So much of it seems to be just bad luck. One man in the exhibit, a ship worker, tells his story – he was transferred to SD by his company then laid off six months later without enough money to get home. He didn’t have family that could help him. It took so little?
I’ve had the idea for a while now that life is much more like Plinko than I would like to admit and listening to these stories partly confirmed that. The randomness, the unexpected intervention of bad luck into these people’s lives is frightening. If the world really is that random, and I believe it is – then we need a great deal of help from one another. And that unfortunately is an idea we individualistic Americans are not well invested in.
On the surface the (IN)VISIBLE PROJECT is a meditation of one city’s homeless population but beneath that I think it’s also a look at the downside of a core American value – that we are individuals responsible only for ourselves. The up side is that we’re allowed to claim all of our successes as self manifested – but if we fail, we fail alone. There are reams of American artists who’ve studied the loneliness implicit in these values but Edward Hopper comes to my mind first (you could argue that his figurative paintings are not studies of people but the spaces between people). If you’ve never been alone or lonely then you’ve never been American.
Check out the show, it’s free and will be up for another week.
It's weird how the mind/body thing works. I got a cold yesterday and as it was bearing down I made the mistake of looking at the Feltron blog. His design work is so trick it sent my brain on the same journey my body was on. Inspiration sometimes feels like a sickness - damn you Feltron for making me want to learn code! The video is an in/out bump that I used processor to generate the lines for, so the work flow goes: processor - photoshop - final cut. I wanted to freshen up my little end bump at the end of videos, which is weird because I haven't made anything new to park this on. Maybe this is a first step. The picture below it is my mouse path(s) while I made it, which also kinda looks like a sickness. I'm going outside for the rest of the day!
If you want to record your mousepath like this here's the ap: http://iographica.com/
Just back from Columbia, Missouri where Bush League headlined the Third Goal Int Film Fest at the University of Missouri. What a community of the people we met there - no joke, Columbia has got something really special going on. Let me say thanks one more time to the Third Goal Int Film Fest, The Central Missouri RPCV group and Columbia Access Television for bringing Jake, the film and myself out to be part of it.Here's Jake and I with a few of the RPCVs who organized the festival:
And the audience greeting the people back in Malawi in Chitumbuka:
From a scorching hot San Diego (it's January?) I'm happy to report that Bush League will headline this year's Third Goal Int. Film Fest in Columbia, MO. Jake Wilson who is featured in the film and myself will join the Central Missouri Returned Peace Corps Volunteers group who put the fest together for the screening Feb 4th.
It will be my first time in Missouri and I will be doing everything I can to summon the spirit of my all time fave - Mark Twain. Is anyone in San Diego free on Feb 4th? I have a picket fence that needs some paint.
I've been teaching still photo at Irvine Valley College for a year now and wanted to share a few of the student shots from last semester. As the new semester begins, it's nice to take a sec to look back at last semester's work. There's a lot of talent out there.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/66703208@N06/6500420145/
A heads up to the creative community. New Media Rights is raising funds to continue their remarkable mission:
