Seattle Met: Battle of the Buskers

I created this video series for Seattle Met with cinematographer Brody Willis. My goal was to capture the relationship between musicians and people walking by and to convey a sense of being in the market. Do you think I succeeded?



The first video in the series is Reggie Miles singing Gentrification Blues. He also plays a mean saw. I wish I had some footage of that!

Then Morrison Boomer sings their song, Eyes Open Wide. There is a fourth member of the band not featured in the video here.

Squirrel Butter is a banjo playing tap-dancing duet and here they are performing an original arrangement of traditional song If I Fall.

I first came across Emery Carl in conjunction with my Tommy Dean movies but only now have I made the opportunity to film him. I honestly don't know if his songs have names. He's more of a spontaneous "in the moment" kind of performer. Refreshing, I think.

Then, Carly Calbero sings Beat It. You know, the Micheal Jackson song? She's got a surprisingly big voice.

Howlin' Hobbit is one charming dude with a thing for ukelele adaptations of the classic standards. I follow him on twitter.

And finally Yaacov Reuven sings In Your Eyes. I'm a Peter Gabriel fan so filming this video made me pretty happy.

EDIT: Oh! Seattle Met is holding a poll so you can vote for your favorite busker!

Thoughts and Questions about Social Media, Communications and Networks

I want to make a series of personality profiles about people who have jobs in social media. The trick, as always, will be to look past the standard cliches and search for the meaningful story that has yet to be told.

Its the internet. I get it. Technology connects people from around the world and builds new communities based on interest and curiosity rather than region. Culture now breaks geographical boundaries. I'm actually kind of over it. The Global Village is a rehearsed concept. It's lost its charm.

I want to know about your personal village. I want to put aside technical aspects of media and look at how we communicate. Are you an especially communicative person? Where you outgoing as a child or were you relatively shy? Did you have many friends or did you tend to build few but meaningful friendships? What are the big factors?

For example, I grew up with a deaf brother. How did that shape the way I think about communication? How did that shape the way I think about language as shaping reality? Or reality as shaping language? And ultimately, how did that change my relationship to the community? These are things that I'd like to talk about in person.

If I had been raised in a different family background, I might have developed a different curiosity about the social functions of communication. Such as, if I had non-English speaking parents, seeing them as isolated from their environment and relying on me to conduct even mundane interactions, I might be inclined to see communication as building community. If I had grown up in a more intellectually stimulating environment, discussing over dinner such topics as personal preferences for either Indian or African elephans, I might see communication as expressing curiosity. If I had been raised in the old world or without mass-communication outlets, relying on verbal conversation to pass the time, I might view communication as entertainment.

Building on the foundations of communications, how have you assembled your personal social network? Do you prioritize familial relationships over friendships? Do you rely heavily on your professional networks to satisfy your personal life? Are you close to your neighbors? Or do you immerse yourself into intellectual pursuits and build friendships exclusively on interest, bridging generational gaps, overcome geographical limitations and surpassing political boundaries? More and more, these preferences are chosen rather than implied.

And finally, how does all of this change the way you engage in the business of buying selling or participate in serving humanity?

Sucker Punch. Not for critics.

As a filmmaker, I am constantly disappointed by my peers and their failure to appreciate the fullness of their craft. Sucker Punch is a great example. It's a movie about a girl on lobotomy row. It's about a girl sold into sexual slavery. It's about a special forces unit of steam punk chicks that fight against hoards of Nazi zombies. Its all the above. Its shallow. And its awesome.

Ignore all piffy reviews. They're dumb.



There is no plot but In The Mood For Love has even less plot. There is no character development, but that didn't stop Goddard in Breathless. The literary criticisms are not only empty, they show a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium. Film is shallow and superficial but that does not imply that it is without beauty.

This film a high-octane parable of Jungian psychology. The Hero has five faces: Baby Doll (Emily Browning), Sweat Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung). If you read Sybil or seen the 1976 film you know that the five aspects of the single personality represent the tools for overcoming a traumatic experience.

Sucker Punch has a lot in common with Inception. It's not only a film about alternate reality but ventures into the meta-dream space. To escape the mental institution, Baby Doll enters a brothel. To escape the brothel, she enters the steam punk comic book action adventure sequence. Each sub-reality is more glitzy and less dangerous than the last and, like Inception, the dream-space action offers some psychic tools to overcome real life problems. The difference is, Abbie Cornish didn't fancy herself taking part in this generation's version of 8 1/2.

Much like the characters, even the story locations are just psychological constructs. The mental institution is no more real than the prisons Johnny Cash sang about. Enter the dark blue color palate of the theater, where the girls fight over checkerboards and the psychologist's couch is casually replaced by a bed on a stage. This is also the scene where Babay-doll's father bribes the abusive orderly to falsify the lobotomy paperwork. It would be frightening if it wasn't so surreal.

The brothel is not only an escape from trauma but it also rationalization of the absurd. Baby Doll's father figure is replaced by a Catholic priest, a villain we are much more emotionally prepared to deal with just as we are more prepared to deal with abusive sexual situations in the brothel than we are in the mental ward. Its to be expected. And there is a layer of magic to it that separates it from reality. The five girls are presented as prostitutes in the same way Audry Hepburn's character in Breakfast At Tiffany's is a prostitute - cute, charming and not a bit dirty.



Sucker Punch is secretly smart. It might not get strait A's from the critics. It's thesis is nebulous. The narrative introduction and conclusion are not intended to explain the story but simply add color to the visuals. It doesn't call upon Fellini for inspiration or offer you any such serious bylines as Christopher Nolan or Wally Pfister. The film doesn't feature a Laurence Fishborne character to spell out the existentialism. It disguises itself as the 420-friendly version of Beowulf and doesn't let on that it has anything going on between the scenes, that everything should be accepted for face value.

Most importantly, Sucker Punch doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is. This film is not literary art. No film is literary art. It's a sequence of visceral experiences aimed to illicit an irrational emotional response. There is no message except for the one you bring with you. And after the film, we reflect upon those emotional responses and supplemental messages over cocktails. But its not literature. Its fun.

Indie Band Street Show

I am a huge fan of Wild Nothing. I feel like videos like this have been popping up all over the internet since the accessibility to low-cost HD cameras and high bandwidth internet connections.



I saw Wild Nothing play at Vera Project last weekend. It was an amazing show! I wonder why Paris and Vienna must have all the fun, shooting indie bands on street sidewalks? Why can't Seattle share in the street performance indie documentary fun?



Maybe they're worried about swarms of hipsters? Or night life hating cops?

Hermes Festival of Crafts

This is my first published fashion video. I hope it to be the first of many. I shot it with William Brody as my cinematographer at The Bravern in Bellevue for Seattle Met Magazine.



It was important for me to get good audio. I wanted to hear the man scraping the dye from the screen, for example. In my other video you can hear stretching leather and folding canvas and such.

There is a lost clip where the silk printers tell the crowd that after the event, they will throw away their labors of the day. The reason being, the silk was not printed in the preferred conditions, at the workshop in France. I think that was amazing. Too bad I left it back on the cutting room floor!