Live from NY!

(Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge)

Those of you who have been following my adventures for a while will know that I love New York City. (Thank you, Andrew WK, for putting an excellent tune to that sentiment!) Now, thanks to the aligning of stars and an open-minded husband, I can call this amazing city my home!!!

I am so excited to be here, and to be closer to my old friends and family, and to become part of the world’s most vibrant media community. I am cooking up a new documentary idea, which will be shot here, and I have been having all kinds of meetings with industry folks to figure out where I belong workwise within the local production scene.

Here are the best things so far (in no order):
1. Pizza and Ice Cream!
2. Walking over the Brooklyn Bridge
3. Reuniting with people who have known me for more than 10 years and still like me
4. Taking a tour of Coney Island with an old crazy guy named "Captain Bob"
5. Taking a graffiti tour of our neighborhood on bicycles
6. Having to look up the weather in the morning because it is different every day
7. Possibilities and Opportunities
8. Striking up conversations with strangers
9. Running into three female media personalities on the same day: Paula Zahn, Mary Snow, and Kelly Ripa. (Is it a sign?)
10. Running into new or old friends on the street almost every day, even though it’s the country’s busiest city and I only know a handful of people

SFIFF and an ode to Chris Wiggum

(Ocean Beach on the evening of our going-away bonfire)

After seven rollercoaster years, Seth and I are packing up and leaving the Bay Area. As these entries are mainly film related, I'll spare you my mushy goodbyes and just talk about getting to go out with a bang, as the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival happened to coincide with the weeks of our departure.

For the past 4 years, I have had the excellent task of sitting on the Documentary Selection panel for the festival’s Golden Gate Awards. That means that I get to help sort through and choose the top picks among the piles of excellent docs that get submitted to the festival each year. It’s cool being a part of SF’s biggest and the country’s oldest festival, and also getting a sneak peek at the top docs each year. Admittedly, it can get a little mind-numbing when you are in your eighth-straight hour of movie watching, but then some gem will sparkle you out of your stupor and you’ll be so glad you are there. We had one of those films in our panel group this year, where everyone in the group immediately agreed that it should be passed on to the fest, and it was, and now it looks like it is getting a theatrical release, so you should see it: Ghosts of Cite Soleil. It’s a haunting and colorful film about two brothers involved in dangerous politics, hip hop, and gang warfare in Haiti.

Another perk of doing this duty is that I usually get invites to the fest’s big ol’ parties, and there were some doozies this year. Opening night was in City Hall, and that was pretty amazing, but it was on my last day of work at Film Arts, and we had a little post-work-going-away-thing, and by the time I arrived at the massive dome, I was already a little woo-woo and so I pretty much didn’t have much steam left. Thank goodness for my dear colleague and friend, Simone, who gave me a lift home. The highlight of the festival for me was actually the Centerpiece party, which appropriately happens smack dab in the middle of the festival. This is the second year that Bay Area Women in Film & TV has sponsored the film & party, and as an outgoing board member I got to bask in some of that glory and also get the chance to say goodbye to so many of the AMAZING women that I have met and worked with in that organization over the years (Liza! Erica! Ondine! Simone!).

(SFIFF's Thanks to BAWIFT: Alison Lohman in Delirious)

One petite bone to pick...being that a professional women's media org is giving a whole pile of cash to sponsor this shin-dig, you'd think the festival would take into consideration some of its choices. For instance, in his little thank-you-sponsors speech before the film, the male festival director stated that BAWIFT is "an organization that we are happy to get into bed with." Huh? Somehow seems like an inappropriate choice of words, sort of like the inappropriate choice of film, which was the movie Delirious, starring two men and directed by, guess who? A man! I guess they tried to have estrogen representation by having the female lead come up with the director for the post-film Q & A...too bad she played a half-dressed, ditzy pop star in the movie and could barely form an intelligible sentence on stage!

But back to the party. As mentioned earlier, I loved that I got to use this event as my own little goodbye to the Bay Area film community. I went with my friend Carlton from Disposable Film Fest and The Tribe, and aside from my BAWIFT chicks, got to see a lot of my other favorite faces from the local film world, like Scarlett, the dynamo behind SF Women's Film Festival, and Malcolm from Shooting People. Best of all, though, was my film festival staple, Chris Wiggum. Chris is the right-hand man at Karen Larsen, the Bay Area PR firm that handles everything film-related worth noting.

I met the fabulous Mr. Wiggum when I was working at Mill Valley Film Festival a few years ago, and have seen him at just about every festival I’ve been to since. He even helped Jericho’s Echo get some great press when we were in the SF Jewish Film Fest. Chris embodies what I love about the SF (as opposed to the LA) film scene: he works hard without being a stress case, he always looks great without overdoing or fake-tanning it, and he is sincerely nice without always wanting something from you. Kudos, Chris, and thanks for helping me say goodbye to SF in style.

PS, If you are going to be in SF in June, make sure to check out the youth films at Frameline…There are some real gems that were created by LGBT teens and “elders” while I was running TILT earlier this year!

Children of Men

Children of Men, the new movie by Alfonso Cuaron. Go see it. I will be trying to interview the brilliant Cuaron for Death + Taxes this year, as he is also doing the movie of my new favorite book, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. I have never used this blog to make recommendations for you all, but here it is. A new year. Check it all out as soon as possible: Children of Men, Alfonse Cuaron, and A History of Love. Enjoy.

12.17.06: Hardcore Hanukkah

Happy Hanukkah, Hipsters!

This looks to be one of the best Chanukahs ever...thanks to the Hardcore Hanukkah tour!

(Brooklyn's Golem Makin Chanukah Look Good)

The lead up to the tour was pretty good in and of itself...with the Film Arts holiday party at a pub where my team kicked arse at pub-wide trivia and won ourselves each a whopping $5! That was Wednesday night, and Thursday rocked even harder at the "Vodka Latka" party where punk-klezmer band Golem blew me away (I never knew the accordion could be so foxy!), following a set by Conspiracy of Beards (I kid you not--a men's choir that covers Leonard Cohen tunes), at the great evening put on by some of my favorite Jewish entities: Reboot, JDub Records and the Progressive Jewish Alliance.



But Jewish Subculture Junkies, Listen Up, Cuz You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet! Friday and Saturday were the first two days of the first Hardcore Hanukkah tour, seriously one of the coolest, funnest, rock-the-dreidel events ever! As part of the Workmen's Circle's Hanukkah Tour, we were lucky enough to screen Jericho's Echo clips amidst the Hebrew hijinks of Australia's Yidcore, New Orleans's Zydepunks and the Bay's very own Jewdriver.

What these bands may lack in mainstream appeal, they make up for in originality and Jew-tasticness. We all know that Jews formed the backbone of punk rock in the US (See The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's if you don't) but Jewdriver and Yidcore just come out and shout it, albeit in the silliest ways possible. Yidcore dresses up shtetl-fabulous and does fast and furious punk rock Fiddler on the Roof covers, Bette Midler tunes, traditional Jewish songs, and my personal favorite, the Arabic-Hebrew peacenik number, "Od Yavo Shalom." Jewdriver, a spin off on the neo-Nazi skinhead band Skrewdriver, does Jewish pride songs taking the piss out of their fascist counterparts. Sporting kilts, Fred Perry shirts, yarmulkes and pais, they chug Manischewitz and dodge the audience pelting bagels during their sets.

(Bram Yidcore and Ian Jewdriver Lighting the First Candle)

We had planned to have a little Chanukah party at our place after the first night's show at Balazo, but our travelers were far to weary so we ended up with only the lovely Bram, Rory and Myki from Yidcore who we were putting up for the night and somehow we managed to eat 15-persons worth of latkes between the five of us the next morning! What can I say? Growing boys and a Yiddishe Mama are a natural combination. Anyway, we didn't get too much time for sightseeing with our guests, what with their priorities being laundry and shopping for sleeping bags (someone forgot to tell them they might need those on tour--woops!) but we did spend lots of quality time. I think they are my favorites of the gajillions of bands we've hosted over the years, and not just because of those adorable accents. They really are awesome dudes who have more going on than just the band (Myki runs Vice Magazine in Australia and Bram is a law professor and book critic, for example) and I hope we can visit them down under one day.

So the second night's show was at 924 Gilman Street. This legendary place gave rise to so many bands, including most famously Green Day and Operation Ivy. (Did I mention that one of the members of Jewdriver was IN Operation Ivy?!?! Seriously.) As Bram described in his blog about the tour, "924 Gilman Street is the home of the whole independent California punk scene. It is to the West Coast what CBGB's was to the East, except Gilman is a collectively run, non-profit community centre run by kids for kids." I have witnessed a bunch of bands playing their first show at Gilman, including one of Seth's old bands, Breaker Breaker, and it is always really exciting to feel their energy in a house of legends. I guess it's sort of like a Catholic praying at the Vatican, but then, what does a Jew know of such things?

At any rate, it didn't really hit me until the projector started flickering that *I* was now having my 15 minutes to shine at this place. It was really amazing to see a bunch of punks, in the middle of a show, quiet down and gather around to watch some clips of Jericho's Echo. I think some of the guys in the movie would have been really proud...after all, this was sort of like their chance to play at Gilman! Also, I have screened the film at so many festivals in front of a "certain crowd," while the kids at Gilman are really the intended audience. I actually had one skinny little dude in a huge leather jacket come up to me and say that he saw the whole movie in Berkeley last year and has since gone to Israel and hung out with some of the guys in Dizengoff Square. Fucking awesome!!

Oy, I still have more to tell but the last candle just burned out and I seriously have to go to bed. I promise I'll finish this post eventually!!

11.30.06 Happy Birthday, Film Arts!

I promised I'd write about the Film Arts 30th Anniversary bash from the last post, but next thing you know, I was too full of turkey and stuffing to get anything down on virtual paper...

The gist of it is that the event was a smashing success...and made me feel quite proud to be part of such a venerable institution that has aided so many truly independent filmmakers, in a city where Hollywood renegades come to forge their own paths. (Sorry for the melodrama--just watched Lord of the Rings.)

The theme of the evening was Past, Present, Future and the programming reflected this. Past was represented by OffOn, an experimental short from 1972 by one of the Film Arts founding members. Present gave us the "Best of Film Arts Members One-Minute Films" that I mentioned, of which my little movie "ericka" was one. The one-minute films were fantastic, and spanned genres from comedy to animation to doc to experimental. I had an ongoing battle with my friend Shane King (from the Girls Rock! movie) about whose one-minute film was going to mop the floor with whose...and I have to admit his was pretty awesome, but neither of us won the audience choice award, which was clearly fixed ;)

The Future section presented two works-in-progress. The first was clips from an upcoming documentary--Strange Culture--about the messy world of art and politics and a bizarre government conspiracy to squash artists' rights. One of the producers is the dynamic Lise Swenson, who founded TILT, the organization I am now running. The film just got into Sundance--congratulations!!!

The main feature of the evening was a rough cut screening of a new doc about the bustling Nigerian film scene (Who knew?). This isn't Hollywood, or even Bollywood...This is Nollywood, baby, and it is pure inspiration. For someone who considers herself a guerrilla filmmaker, this really put me in my place. These West Africans churn out hundreds of movies with extremely limited resources and have made themselves a massive homegrown entertainment industry. I think everyone in the audience was impressed and energized by the film. I can't wait to see the final cut!

So I didn't even *get* to the who's who of the guest list, which included such local luminaries as former Film Arts diva Gail Silva, Oscar-nominated doc director Sam Green, film publicist extraordinnaire Karen Larsen and about 800 others, but now that my Thanksgiving has digested, it's already time to grate my latke potatoes. See you on Chanukah!

11.3.06 Sacto, Film Arts and other updates

Hello, my long lost friends!
My, it *has* been a while. And Lizzie has been busy!

The foremost occupier of my time has been a fabulous new job as the Youth Coordinator at the Ninth Street Independent Film Center, home of Frameline (SF LGBT Film Festival), SF Jewish Film Festival, Center for Asian American Media (Asian American Film Festival) and the venerable Film Arts Foundation. It is at this nexus of the local independent film community that I am running a program called TILT (Teaching Intermedia Literacy Tools), which teaches media literacy through hands-on production. In other words, we do awesome, soup-to-nuts filmmaking workshops with underserved youth all over the Bay Area. Woo-hoo! Youth voice represent!

On that note, A one-minute film that I made about one of TILT's youth filmmakers is screening at the not-to-be-missed film event of the season, the FILM ARTS FOUNDATION 30th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION, next Wednesday at the incredible Castro Theatre. The evening features an eclectic mix of films for film-lovers, and the one-minute films section is an audience choice awards, so if you're in town please come and vote for my lil' movie, "ericka"! It is going to be an outstanding night, and I'll be sure to write about it here. if you can make it, tix are available at www.filmarts.org/30years

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the Sacramento screening. This blog is supposed to be chronicling Jericho's Echo adventures, after all. So there have been some incredible screenings recently, in places as varied as Prague, Mexico City and the Turks & Caicos islands. Due to the aforementioned new job, however, I have slowed down on the galavanting around the world a bit. That's one reason it was so nice to have a local-ish screening in California's capitol, Sacramento, last night. The other reason it was so nice is that it was hosted in a new Microcinema that is starting up thanks to the fine folks at Shiny Object Digital Media, who also happen to be the Video-on-Demand (VOD) distributors for Jericho's Echo.

The crowd was funny and a bit surly, but mostly appreciative. The first question was a drunkenly blurted, "Are you single?!", which I ignored, and later I got a brand new one:

Audience member: "I am pen pals with someone in the movie."
Me: "Oh, really? Who?"
Audience member: "His name is Barak."
Me: "Hmmm. I'm not sure there *is* someone named Barak in the movie."
Audience member: "Oh yeah. He's at one of the shows. He hates you."
Me: "Uhhhhhhh, ok?"

I later remembered that the person he was referring to is a disgruntled member of one of the bands who was pissed about not being interviewed (even though I never met him when I was there shooting). He approached me at the Tel Aviv screening, screaming until he was red in the face and demanding a free DVD. I even gave him one! But apparently he's still holding a grudge. Wow.

In other news, I have been writing some more film articles (Look out for my year-end music doc roundup in the winter Death + Taxes and my coverage of Good Vibrations Erotic Films Compeition in the next Release Print!) and teaching a class at FAF for filmmakers called "Building Buzz Around Your Film."

Like I said, Busy Lizzie! I promise not to wait so long til the next entry, and in the meantime, I hope to see you next Wednesday, November 8 at the Castro!!

PS The Henry Rollins article mentioned in my last post is out on the shelves in the current Oct/Nov ish of Death + Taxes!

07.22.06 My Morning with Henry

A few months back, the up and coming indie music magazine, Death + Taxes, featured a piece about Jericho's Echo. During the interview, I was shooting the breeze with Managing Editor Stephen Blackwell, and I suggested that the new mag add an indie film column to its well-rounded music coverage. "Great idea," he replied, "Why don't you write it?"

So that's how I ended up in Henry Rollins' Hollywood office earlier this month. I know. You're thinking,"Office?! I would expect Henry Rollins to have some sort of lair or batcave where he broods and comes up with elaborate plans to save the world!" Me, too.

In fact, I was downright nervous to meet him, and not just because he was the lead singer of Black Flag, has produced a whole boatload of interesting work in his lifetime, and is best friends with one of my heroes, Ian MacKaye. It was sheer intimidation. After all, one of the most iconic images of Henry features him painted Satan-red and screaming, "LIAR!" straight into a TV camera (in a Rollins Band video ca. 1995).

My fears were squashed the minute Henry answered the door. I had arrived way early in anticipation of LA traffic and made the mistake of walking to get some coffee. Mistake because A) LA is not very pedestrian friendly and B) It was hot as balls. By the time I approached the office, I'm afraid I was a bit of a mess. The first thing he said, kindly, was, "Can I get you a glass of water?" I have to admit that I immediately thought,"Wow! You sound just like Henry Rollins!"

The office was in a modest, residential-style house filled with media--tapes, CDs, videos, plus Henry's desk, a sound editing station and, much to my delight, a single framed photograph of Henry and Ian. A CD of tuvan throat singing greeted me along with Henry's water-offer, so we started with that and didn't have a lull in conversation for the next 2 hours.

Henry was charming and entertaining and not any less intense than I expected. I mostly aimed to focus on movies, due to the nature of my column and the fact that he currently hosts a show on the Independent Film Channel. We covered a lot more ground than that, though...from the "War on Terror" to what its like to present at an award show to what a twisted city Los Angeles is to how he'd rather read quality literature than eat. I even got a show-and-tell session that included such gems as listening to a voice message from Iggy Pop ("Hey Henry, this is James Osterburg..."), and previewing the incredible jazzy-spoken-word-collaboration between Henry and the one and only WIlliam Shattner (of Star Trek fame).

I really wanted to give Henry a hug at the end but I settled for the above photograph. He was even kind enough to let us try it again when my face got cut off in this one, but the next one came out even weirder. After the interview, he was off with the director of his latest film to check out Clerks2 since he was going to interview director Kevin Smith for his show, and later that night he was introducing a new Ramones movie to the group assembling to watch it in a Hollywood graveyard. Ah, the life of a punk rock media mogul.

Thanks, Henry, for a lovely morning. The rest of you can read Henry's insights into the movie biz in Death + Taxes issue no. 3, due out this fall.

What John Cusak Movie Are You?

OK, so I never post these online quizzes, but since I am still recovering from the Germany trip, I wanted to at least say Hello to you all...and hey, it's movie related!

I just took this quiz this morning and found it amazingly accurate (unlike the "FInd Your Inner Rock Star" quiz which assured me I was Britney Spears!!). I saw High Fidelity and CRIED, even though it was sposed to be a comedy...guess it hit a little too close to home.

So what's yours?

Your Life is Like

High Fidelity

What John Cusack movie are you?