500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
Just got back from a panel discussion tonight about the power of pro bono design and architecture, and I can tell you that the pro bono movement of designing for good is gathering power. Around this time last year, Emily Pilloton of Project H Design appeared on the Colbert Report to discuss the idea of designing something that wasn’t just good, but would have a good effect on the world. Colbert gave her hell, as he does most good people, and his treatment made her ideas seem a little bit on the fringe.
Ah, but that was then. This is now. John Peterson, Founder and Chair of Public Architecture, moderated the panel I attended. John makes a compelling argument for a simple idea.
Public Architecture asks architecture and design firms nationwide to pledge a minimum of 1% of their time to pro bono service.
Simple, right? But powerful. There is certainly dollar value there- some $25 million worth of donated services from Public Architecture’s 1% program alone. But there is also human value. John made the point tonight that architectural firms and their clients need to raise expectations about the value we all get back from pro bono work. Not all of it can be deposited in a bank.
As John said in a recent interview he did for our film SHELTER, “The movement that we’re seeing around design for the public good is really coming about because the design profession has a desire, sort of a pent up desire, to serve.”
This desire gives rise to projects that are not only imaginative, but necessary, too, like the Food Chain project by Robin Elmslie Osler and her architecture firm. The Food Chain project, which aims to play a role in eradicating hunger, is a series of ingenious vertical farming walls used for growing produce in urban areas. Other pro bono design stories are told in The Power of Pro Bono, a book about pro bono work from the perspective of both the architects and the clients. It’s published by Metropolis Books.
As architect Eric Corey Freed put it in an interview with me for SHELTER, “For centuries architecture was relegated to special buildings – cathedrals, office buildings, skyscrapers. Many people assume that that was architecture, everything else is building. And what we seen is that we can create designs for the masses, designs that inspire, delight and bring joy to uplift people and uplift the soul. All the power of architecture could be made to reach everybody.”
When you combine that uplifting power with the power of pro bono, you reveal a powerful force for positive change in the world. Design is unavoidable – it’s everywhere and in everything. Why not design for good?
photo credit: dbking via Creative Commons
They were played on Nixon. They were played on Senator Mary L. Landrieu. Sacha Baron Cohen used them in Borat. I’m talking about dirty tricks. In a citizen-journalist-famous-for-15-minutes way, they are back. They’ve even been called a legitimate tool of “investigation.” (“Honey, I was using this nanny cam to investigate the babysitter and it caught you with the pool boy. Care to comment?”)
Quick review. When Richard Nixon made a speech one time in LA’s Chinatown, a prankster named Dick Tuck arranged for adorable children to hold up signs saying “Welcome” in Chinese. Only the signs really said, “What About the Hughes Loan?”, a reference to a controversial loan Howard Hughes made to Nixon’s brother. Nixon was furious and reportedly tore up one of the signs. More recently, James O’Keefe III, a 25-year-old guerrilla videographer, was accused with three other men of seeking to tamper with the office phones of Democratic Senator Mary L. Landrieu. Apparently, the four impersonated repairmen to gain entry to the office of the Louisiana senator.
O’Keefe called his deception an “investigation.” You might argue that impersonating repairmen was gonzo journalism, an act of civil disobedience or a new way to dig for the truth. Digging for the truth – by lying about who you are. Give me a moment to think about that.
In this regard, I am not an angel. In Greece once, with one foot on the dock and another on a boat, I handed a police officer a dummy videotape so we could get the real one out of the country. When I worked for NBC and Fox I wore a wire a couple of times. We conferred with network lawyers before we tried anything like that. When I wore a wire I made a point of saying that everything spoken was on the record. We did those kinds of recordings in states where you didn’t need the consent of the other party, so it was legal. We also didn’t trespass where we didn’t belong. We followed the rules, and listened to the network lawyers, but we knew if we screwed up it would be our asses in a sling, not theirs.
Rougher game now. Fuzzier boundaries. You have Borat and O’Keefe. As a documentary guy I noticed a big change after Borat. People were suspicious about interviews. Was I going to hoax them like Borat, punk them like Ashton or trick them like Colbert? These days, people want to screen an interview before it airs. I feel that old slippery slope under my feet: If I show them the interview they will talk about their hair or why they hadn’t had that mole removed. Suddenly we’re not talking about the story, we’re talking about their performance. The interview becomes performance art.
Lady Gaga, Sacha Baron Cohen and James O’Keefe are all in the same game – entertainment.
In their brand of performance art you get to lie, impersonate people and wear funny outfits. I like entertainment, but if you’re wearing a funny outfit, the only people who consent to an interview with you are other entertainers. A closed-loop system. Get ready for Lady Gaga to anchor CNN.
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Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
photo credit: Sally_12 via Creative Commons license
The most challenging thing about writing this blog is not the deadline every week, nor is it generating the snappy content, nor putting an edge on the sharp wordplay. It’s the damn title. 500 words is a cruel master. (Thursday is OK, though.) Some readers have noted that this writer often fails to hit the 500 word mark. Not this time. The word count is on, the clock is ticking, and I’m writing about writing about 500 words. But not about 500 words. Exactly 500. So here goes.
As Mark Twain once said, “If I had more time, I would have made it shorter.” Brevity is not only the soul of wit, it’s damned hard and it’s slow work.
Ernest Hemingway once became known for writing a six word epitaph:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Sad, even brutal, but surely effective and short. And nobody really knows if he actually wrote it, but I’m buying it for now. So did the editors of a book called “Not Quite What I was Planning,” a collection of six-word memoirs. Yes, just six words to capture an entire life. That’s worse than Twitter’s 140 characters and it has to be meaningful. Here are a few who had a go at a six-word memoir:
“Nobody cared, then they did. Why?” - journalist Chuck Klosterman
“Well, I thought it was funny.” – Stephen Colbert
“Brought it to a boil, often.” - chef Mario Batali
“Fix a toilet, get paid crap.” – from a plumber
“Cursed with cancer. Blessed by friends.” - nine-year-old Hannah Davies
“Yes, you can edit this biography.” - from Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia.
If I had to write my six-word biography on a nametag, I would write, “I’m not really a nametag guy.”
If you want to get fancy, you can look at six-word memoirs that contain palindromes, that is, words that read the same way forward as they do backward. Racecar. Deed. Radar. Madam.
One of the most famous is, “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.” It describes Theodore Roosevelt, the driving force behind the Panama Canal and it reads the same to the front as to the back. Sadly, it’s seven words. No good.
We could look to Demetri Martin, comedian and palindrome constructor, who wrote a poem that is a palindrome, and is titled with a palindrome. It’s called, “Dammit, I’m mad.” (Check it out – same way backward as forward.) Alas, that’s only three words, unless you say it twice, “Dammit, I’m mad, dammit, I’m mad,” and that’s getting a little emphatic.
Creating a palindromic six-word memoir is too hard, and anyway I can feel my 500 word limitation breathing hard behind me, as though we’re running a 10K together and I’m the pacer. I see the finish line ahead, so I will leave you with my six-word memoir for the year.
Enough of 2009, bring on 2010.
500 Words will be on vacation next week. See you in 2010. Happy New Year everyone.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
Last night we finished watching “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan” the great documentary directed by Martin Scorsese that aired on PBS in 2005. Watching this film has been a multi-year project. I started watching it with my wife before she was my wife. Finishing it last night closed the circle because we were married this past weekend. The film looks back at Bob Dylan’s life but it got me thinking about looking forward.
There’s an expression often heard in edit rooms: “See apple, say apple.” It refers to the practice of having the narrator talk about something and then showing that very thing. If the narrator is talking about apples, then we have to show some apples. When you extend that “see apple” concept to the whole film, your work loses depth. Example: You do a show about Donald Trump firing people and all you get is a treatise about a gigantic, throbbing ego.
Entertaining for some, superficial for all.
Then you have Bob Dylan and Scorsese. Scorsese begins his documentary with two wonderful and borderline cryptic sound bites from Dylan:
“I had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey, going home somewhere, set out, I set out to find this home I had a while back and couldn’t exactly remember where it was, but I was on my way there and encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I really didn’t have any ambition at all … I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be so I’m on my way home.”
That makes me want to keep watching, just to hear Dylan’s tangled poetry. The more he weaves words, the bigger the tapestry surrounding him, the less he reveals about himself. The mystery only grows.
“No Direction Home” is traditional, but also strange, and it takes risks. Risk is important, because in documentaries, the world we once knew is over. Distribution channels have changed. Who can draw a line anymore between reality TV and documentaries? As Dylan says, we’re all on an odyssey now.
While there’s no doubt that reality TV has created greater acceptance for true stories, there’s also a flip side. The influence of reality TV has made doc filmmaking too cautious and literal.
I say we need films that are moving, unexpected and bold. I miss seeing heroic films like Errol Morris’s “The Fog of War.” I’m glad “Food, Inc.” opens on Friday. I argue for going deep. Content matters.
Some might counter-argue that going deep doesn’t monetize well. “Truth is so depressing and people want entertainment.” Well, two words: Stephen Colbert. When you enter the meta-reality of Colbert you aren’t sure if he’s a liberal playing a conservative or a conservative pretending to be liberal. This ambiguity has helped make him enormously popular. Colbert is a hybrid – and I think hybrid is where the documentaries of the future are going.
Richard Propper was a distributor on my documentary about Route 66. Now, along with filmmaker Chuck Braverman, he’s looking to the future by bringing together documentary and reality TV producers and broadcasters. The event is called the WESTDOC conference. It happens this September in Santa Monica. Want to see what the future might be like? Richard is offering a limited time discount to readers of “500 Words on Thursday.” Go to http:// www.THEWESTDOC.com and use promo code MTGWEST2009.
