I’m honored to be part of the upcoming 2016 BAM Next Wave Festival. This December, Brent Green and I will be presenting our Live Cinema performance for four nights at the BAM Fisher Fishman Space. Tickets and more information available here.
This is a short video from a recent performance I did at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, part of my Live Cinema show with Brent Green. Above is an excerpt from Love Letter to the Fog.
A great photo from my recent performance of “The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller” at the Teatro de la Ciudad, Mexico City, April 15, 2016.
Brent Green and I are continuing to tour with a joint program of our short live cinema pieces. In May we’ll be at the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto and the Exploratorium in San Francisco. With this show, Brent and I take turns narrating short films and share a fantastic band featuring Brendan Canty (Fugazi), James Canty (Nation of Ulysses), Becky Foon (Thee Silver Mt. Zion), and Kate Ryan. The program is a lot looser than my normal work and fun to perform.
Stay tuned for details – we’ll be doing several nights at an illustrious NYC performance venue at the end of this year.
Four years after the premiere of The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, Yo La Tengo and I continue to screen the piece. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the continued interest in it. We recently did a terrific screening at SUNY Oswego and in a few weeks will screen the piece at one of my favorite venues in the world: Teatro de la Ciudad in Mexico City.
That’s the theater where I saw Guy Madden do a live version of his fantastic film Brand Upon the Brain way back in 2005 – the show included live narration by Isabella Rosellini, live soundtrack, and live foley and was a huge inspiration for me in developing my own form of live cinema. Looks like we’ll finally be screening LSRBF in Los Angeles in the fall. Stay tuned for details.
I was interviewed recently for WNYC’s podcast Only Human. The episode is called Bacon, Booze and the Search for theFountain of Youth and is about Supercentennarians (people over the age of 110). I spoke with the reporter Kenny Malone about the current oldest person in the world Susannah Jones and her 116th birthday party in Brooklyn last summer, which I filmed for my new project The Oldest Person in the World. I’m always a bit wary of being interviewed by other filmmakers or media people (being familiar myself with how the sausage gets made), but this piece is actually really good. My section starts at 19:00. Take a listen here.
I’ve been working on an exciting new project for a while now but have not been public about it. I recently got a grant from the Sundance Documentary Fund, so it’s now out there on the internet. I guess it’s official. The new project is a live documentary about the Kronos Quartet and the group’s 40-year history. Kronos will play a live score for the piece, and I’m especially excited about this odd, meta form. Ultimately the piece, which is currently called Untitled Kronos Project, will be a meditation on music itself – the act of listening closely to music, the experience of feeling music deeply, and the power of music to change people and change the world. This new project came out of the great experience I had making a short documentary about Kronos for the ensemble’s 40th anniversary. Find that full video here.
Had a great time on the road with Pop-Up Magazine in September and October. This was the most ambitious project yet from Pop-Up. In the old days, it was just a one-night event in San Francisco. Then a while back we did three cities. This time it was a full-on, seven city cross country tour. A big pleasure to share the stage w/ people like Davy Rothbart from Found Magazine, podcasters Tracy Clayton and Heben Nigatu, John Mooallem, NYTimes writer Jenna Wortham, the mind-blowing Manuel Cinema, and many others. My piece was about Susannah Mushatt Jones who is currently the oldest person in the world. She’s 116 years-old, lives in Brooklyn, and I filmed for a couple of days with her over the summer. This piece is part of a much larger and ongoing project documenting all the people who become the oldest person alive. Stay tuned for more details. Was very excited to wrap up the Pop-Up Magazine tour at BAM, where I’d never performed. A big thrill to be on stage at the Harvey.
