Stephen Franklin and I teamed up this summer to produce a multi-part series on gun violence in Chicago for MSNBC.com. We spent most of July and part of August exploring the areas of Chicago most affected by guns. We met the families of gun victims, paralyzed survivors of shootings, law enforcement working to curb the …
Ricochet – The reverberating effects of gun violence in Chicago Read More »
A triptych from my last night at Burning Man 2014.
It seems counter-intuitive, but what I’ve discovered since I met the very good people at the Chicago Youth Boxing Club is that teaching kids the discipline of boxing changes their attitudes about fighting. The CYBC is a scrappy non-profit, in the basement of La Villita Community Church in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood. And it’s about much …
Wait a minute, teaching kids to fight helps combat street violence? Read More »
The Chicago Youth Boxing Club (CYBC) is tucked in a church basement in the Windy City’s Little Village neighborhood, providing one of the area’s few after-school activities. Since it was founded in 2006, the gym has become much more than a place for kids to hang out. “It isn’t enough to get kids off the street,” says Ana Patricia Juarez, programming …
When my friend Carolyn suggested I join her and her family and a couple of other friends at Grand Tetons National Park to give her a proper sendoff as she takes a new job in Washington state, I started looking for a place to stay. The lodges at the park were filled up, and since …
Last week, I produced this segment for MSNBC.com about Ms. Gwendolyn Baxter and the young people she works with at the Greater Roseland Community Committee’s Youth Voices Against Violence program. I witnessed one of their circles, where they open up and share about the toughest issues facing them in their neighborhoods. The topic of the day was gun …
Youth Voices Against Violence in the Roseland neighorhood of Chicago Read More »
Last week, Ira Glass, the host of This American Life on public radio, saw John Lithgow command the role of King Lear on the stage of the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park. [Read portions of Lithgow’s blog on preparing for the role here.] Afterwards Glass lauded the performance, but took a swipe at the …
I’ve seen 34 of his 37 plays: Shakespeare doesn’t suck. Read More »
Decades before there was reality TV, there was reality filmmaking, and they are nearly polar opposites. The style of filmmaking Robert Drew pioneered was known as Direct Cinema in its early days, though now it is interchangeably referred to as American cinéma vérité. It was the purest form of documentary storytelling — letting life play out in …
Final frame of the life story of Direct Cinema’s father Read More »
Franz Welser-Möst recently told me he doesn’t understand classical music. That’s very surprising coming from the music director of one of America’s best orchestras and one of Europe’s great opera companies. But the maestro was talking about something bigger than just comprehending notes on a page. He was talking about the indescribable beauty that can …
It’s a classical concert thing; you wouldn’t understand Read More »
A friend sent me a note the other day saying that she was researching D-Day and came across a piece I created in 2009 — on the 65th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy — about the intrepid photographer Robert Capa and the iconic images he made that day. Much of his film was lost …
Seventy years ago: iconic images, gathered under fire, nearly lost Read More »