Sarah Jacobson’s films will be screening in NYC on July 13 and SF on July 15-16. If you’ve never seen Sarah’s work, she was a indomitable force in underground film in the 1990s – a fierce and totally radical feminist voice in cinema and culture years before Girls. Come see Sarah’s masterwork feature Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore and a selection of her fantastic shorts, including a film that Sarah and I made about the making of cult film Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains. (the photo is of us with Fee Waybill from the Tubes who starred in The Stains).

SG and Sarah J

I was thinking I’m too busy this year to do the film grant honoring the late great Sarah Jacobson, but then Katie Bradshaw, who has helped out with the grant for several years now, said “Hell no! The grant is more important now than it’s ever been!” And it’s true. So we’re doing it!

Apply Now – Deadline is May 21.

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Had the great honor and pleasure recently of filming Terry Riley at his ranch in Northern California for the Untiled Kronos Project.

DOMES montreal

I made a new VR piece with Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Urbanized) about Buckminster Fuller and his signature creation – the geodesic dome. We shot “This is What the Future Looked Like” at some of the great extant domes in North America, including the Montreal Expo 67 dome and the dome that Fuller built and lived in in Carbondale, Illinois. The piece is a meditation on design, the utopian impulse, and the virtual reality form itself.

Original music by Yo La Tengo and additional music by Todd Griffin.

“This is What the Future Looked Like” premiered at the True/False Film Fest in March and will screen all over the place this year.

tanyat
We interviewed Tanya Tagaq this week for my Kronos Quartet live cinema project.

Wow!

If you don’t know Tanya’s work, she is an Innuit throat singer who has collaborated with the Kronos Quartet many times over the years. She is an absolutely mesmerizing and stunning performer and, on top of that, she is righteous in her politics and a fascinating thinker about music and life. Thrilled to have her presence and voice in this film.

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Here’s a great photo of legendary composer, Steve Reich, and me. Last week, I interviewed him for my upcoming Untitled Kronos Project collaboration with the Kronos Quartet.

wonder

I wrote an essay for the catalog of “Explode Every Day,” a new exhibit about wonder at MASS MoCA. The exhibit was curated by MASS MoCA’s Denise Markonish and artist Sean Foley. Wonder is something I’m quite interested in and they asked me to write about anything I wanted to on the topic. I ended up writing an essay on the photos of The Guinness Book of Records, which have always struck me as celebrations of the sense of wonder.