In response to the great public outcry over the proposed rules for filming permits, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting has agreed to re-write the rules!

by Maggie Bowman and Katy Chevigny

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate announced the week before last that they are slowing down their push to implement electoral reform before the 2008 election, preferring to wait until 2012. Their logic of “let’s wait until we’ve got it just right before we change it at all” serves as a reminder that waiting for politicians to reform our election system is going to be a long wait.

Although there are legitimate issues complicating the debate — the question of adequate access to ballots for voters with disabilities, for example — the electorate has waited far too long for the serious overhaul of the system that the troubled elections of 2000 and 2004 made clear were necessary.

Recently, Neal Rosenstein from NYPIRG, with whom we were on a panel discussion following a screening of our film Election Day at the Culture Project, made the point that the public and politicians pay attention to election reform after a close election. With not only one, but two, extremely close presidential elections in the last decade, public awareness of the problems with our electoral system and a desire to fix them are at an all-time high. However, if the presidential election in 2008 is not a close one, the problems won’t have disappeared, but the public and political will to fix them might have.

In his book, Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression, Spencer Overton, an advisor to our film, makes the point that neither Republicans nor Democrats are truly invested in electoral reform. It’s a question of the fox guarding the henhouse — the status quo benefits incumbents. With highly partisan administration of elections on both the state and local level, implementing even the most sensible of reforms becomes a monumental struggle.

“Despite their perpetual smiles and perfect sound bites, pragmatic politicians and their agents use rules to shape the electorate and win elections. Most would rather have election rules and practices that benefit themselves and their political party rather than their opponents,” writes Overton.

Why can’t federal, state and local officials get it in place? As Overton noted recently in regards to the slowdown of the House bill, some of the delay is due to partisanship, and some is due to bureaucracy. Entrenched bureaucracy, at every level of government, is difficult to change when there is no clear leadership to prod it along.

“There is some pushback that is local state election officials, county clerks who feel like, ‘We’ve had all this change with HAVA. We don’t want more change.’ Precinct captains are calling the Hill, pissed off at the possibility of change. There is some of that that should be challenged, But there is no political will on either side of the aisle to get it done,” said Overton.

Repeal of felon disenfranchisement laws and implementation of election day registration (as already practiced in seven states) are two examples of substantive reforms that would increase access to voting for millions of Americans. Overton gives an example of the political thinking that would surround such a reform: “[Politicians will think], ‘More people will vote against us [for passing the reform] than former felons we’ll pick up who will vote for us.’ We can’t rely on politicians to protect voting rights,” says Overton. “They’re making political calculations about these things instead of what’s in the best interest of voters.”

Serious election reform is clearly a daunting task and it requires the buy-in of a huge range of federal, state and local officials. It’s not surprising that there have been serious bumps along the way on the road to true reform, but the latest delay is just a reminder of the kind of pressure and grassroots movement it will take to get this done.

——-

Election Day will be screened at the Yearly Kos Convention on Thursday, August 2nd at 9:30am at McCormick Place in Chicago. Spencer Overton will also be speaking at Yearly Kos on Friday, August 3rd at 4:15pm, on a panel called “Ensuring Every Vote is Counted.”

For information about future screenings, go to www.electiondaythemovie.com to sign up for the mailing list.

This entry was originally published on the Huffington Post.

Lately I have been feeling a bit frustrated by the lack of real life, human interaction I have been experiencing. Though I love the power of the Internet, getting someone to actually call you is an event! Sometimes when I meet people, I just want to hear the sound of their voice! (I just had to have my little rant. Thanks for reading.)

The verdict is still out for me about Second Life but this article entitled, “A House That’s Just Unreal” in The New York Times intrigued me nonetheless. The house displayed in this piece is far beyond any home that most non-celebrities can afford, in this life anyway. In Second Life, things are a whole lot more affordable. Still, do you really need a house in Second Life? Some interesting (and humorous) observations this article provides are as follows:

Since you don’t eat in Second Life, do you need a kitchen? Is a bathroom really necessary? Since you can teleport, do you need stairs? Since you don’t sleep, do you need a bedroom? Answers vary, but most opt for at least a bedroom (although not for sleeping).

I just heard that Kiri Davis has been selected as the first filmmaker ever to receive the Extraordinary Service Award from the Minority Media & Telecommunications Council for her film A Girl Like Me which was a part of the sixth annual Media That Matters Film Festival. Congrats Kiri!

What happened with the film after the festival makes a great story, so for those who don’t know…

One of the great things about the Media That Matters Film Festival is the way that web streaming of the films allows the word about them to spread farther than most documentary films can reach — and the shining example of this effect is Kiri’s film A Girl Like Me. In her film, she recreated Kenneth Clark’s landmark “Doll Choice Experiment,” in which a group of African American children were asked how they felt about two identically dressed dolls: one black and the other white. Back in the 50s, nearly every African American child in the study chose the white doll for all things positive and identified the black doll with those that were negative. But sadly, the experiment in a Harlem day care center in 2005 produced nearly the same results.

In June of last year, A Girl Like Me began streaming online on our website. Pretty soon word started to spread as people like Tayari Jones (of TayariJones.com) started blogging about the film. She wrote:

Go right now to the Media that Matters Film Festival and watch “A Girl Like Me,” a short film by a Kiri Davis. (It’s about 10 minutes to watch). There are lots of terrific short films on this site by teenaged film makers, but make sure you check out “A Girl Like Me.”… watch it and let’s all meet back here to talk about it.

Word online continued to spread, and in early August the New York Daily News found the film through a Google search and wrote a story about Kiri. This in turn drew the attention of CNN, ABC World News, Good Morning America and a host of major European news outlets, touching off an international debate on the progress (or lack thereof) that Americans have made since Brown vs. Board of Education. Op Eds, including one by Stanley Crouch, appeared in newspapers from New York to Florida, Arizona and California. Hundreds of thousands of people heard about Kiri’s film and tens of thousands of people watched it online, sent it to their friends and made comments on it. This year, Kiri was contacted by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund so they could interview her and use the film for a video podcast, she appeared on Oprah in May, and was the winner of the Cosmo Girl Take Action Hollywood Contest. And most recently we got the news about this award from the Minority Media & Television Council, which they give to recognize “the person who, in the past year, contributed more than anyone else in the nation to the cause of diversity and inclusion in the nation’s media and telecom industries.”

So big congratulations to Kiri, and yay for the Media That Matters Film Festival, and to all the filmmakers who want to make a difference –- it’s happening! Keep up the good work!

One of our interns asked me an interesting question a while back: “If I download an image from say Amazon.com and then videotape that image, does that fall under fair use?” Suffice to say, we were stumped.

Luckily, we’re not alone. American University’s Center for Social Media and Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property are working on a project to establish a “best practices” guide to user-generated content on the web to clear up these ambiguities.

It’s August and I’ve just about wrapped my internship here at Arts Engine. As I sit and reflect upon what this summer has been for me, two obvious answers come to mind: tons of movies and lots of sun. Actually, I was very careful and only got burnt maybe a total of three times, but the movie thing is no exaggeration. I went to the theater at least twice a week and enjoyed many a free outdoor screening. This in addition to working at a film production company, specifically for the film Election Day, and on the set of our Little Pim project.

But as the summer’s end nears and my days at Arts Engine dwindle, I have begun to seek out new and different experiences. I sort of found some. There are six film screenings at Solar1 in the coming weeks. Although I am unable to attend, I strongly recommend them to everyone. Why? Because watching movies outside is amazing (see above) and solar power is neat. Energy conservation and Albert Maysles anyone? He’s going to hold a Q & A after the August 23rd screening!!

Program
All films start at 9pm. Admission is FREE.

Wednesday, August 15
Everything’s Cool

Thursday, August 16
Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Friday, August 17
After Hours

Wednesday, August 22
The Day the Earth Stood Still

Thursday, August 23
What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.

Friday, August 24
Young Frankenstein

After hearing about this series, my interest was piqued and I looked for more solar powered things. I found a solar powered restaurant in Fort Greene called Habana Outpost.

Mmm. Cuban food. I’ve passed by this colorful outdoor ECO-eatery and “community gathering space” several times, but never knew anything about it. They have movie screenings on Sunday nights! MORE movies!

Sadly I found some disheartening information about solar energy too, like, how it isn’t developed (or developing) into something that can fully sustain the world’s energy demands.

But hey, movies and food and drinks— there are some hip night clubs now powered by the sun, ironically enough (I didn’t look into it because I can’t dance)— are fine by me for this summer at least. Solar1 and Habana Outpost may not be able to solve the world’s environmental troubles, but they can set a good and positive example. Maybe I can’t afford solar panels for my home (my future home,) but I can ride my bike instead of driving my car (my FUTURE car) and I can avoid food waste by eating all of my arroz con pollo!

Adios!
posted by Casey

Ahh. The Ocean. Huge, limitless, mysterious, perhaps even unknowable-or so I used to think. But the intense focus on the sea in recent years and the growing currency of phrases like “the domestication of the seas” have created in me a very different view. The Pacific, the Atlantic, the Arctic and the Indian, it seems, are becoming big, liquid farms. What can that possibly mean for us, for fisheries and for all the creatures who live in the deep, deep blue?

One More Dead Fish, a Media That Matters: Good Food film, looks at the controversy between handliners (fishermen who fish with poles and lines) and industrial fishing in Nova Scotia. One of the facts that struck me is that industrial ships use nets large enough to fit several jumbo jets. It may seem obvious, but these nets do not discriminate. In the process, they pick up many creatures and plants that the fisheries can’t use, or that are illegal to keep. The industry’s solution is to dump tons of dead animals and waste back into the sea.

Paul Greenberg, a frequent writer on fish and such, has recently written a couple of articles that I dug, both appeared in the New York Times. “Spawn Fish” tells of the great differences in salmon species in Alaska’s Yukon River. It’s not all just “wild.” Then there’s Greenberg’s fun and odd-ball calculation of the impact of Ernest Hemingway’s fishing expeditions on today’s fish count ocean-wide. Could 250 marlin and 65 bluefish tuna caught at the hands of Hemingway really affect the current and long-term prospects of these fish? Read the article and find out.

I am excited to announce that we recently finalized Arts Engine’s partnership with Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) for the Tribeca Youth Screening Series!

TFI and Arts Engine decided to team up to present Media That Matters Festival films with selected feature-length films that will be taken into public high-school classrooms and Tribeca Cinemas, free of charge, across New York City.

Lisa Lucas, who runs the Program for TFI, could be one of the most relentlessly energetic and passionate people I have met so far in my work here at Arts Engine. She has taken on this huge project (amongst others) out of pure excitement for the idea, so we were happy to share some of the workload by curating and providing the Media That Matters component to the series.

The basic idea behind TFI is to supplement media with educational training and dialog; an idea which is fully embraced by Media That Matters. I was also really impressed with Lisa’s choice of difficult and quite rare films, selecting them out of a desire to expose youth audiences to films they wouldn’t generally be inclined, or expected, to go and see. Knowing how often films are “dumbed down” to young people, having faith in their ability to watch and appreciate difficult films was an attitude that really appealed to me, and something that we strive for with our Festival films.

And so the first season of Arts Engine & TFI’s joint Tribeca Youth Screening Series will open with a Teacher Training Course in mid-September to assist teachers on how to effectively use the films and materials provided. We will be there to provide information about Arts Engine’s work, and assistance on how to bring Media That Matters into the classroom.

Selected Media That Matters shorts will then be sent into the classrooms along with guides to assist in facilitating discussion, as well as information on ways in which students can become active on the issues covered in the film. The students will then attend feature screenings at Tribeca Cinema locations that cover a topic related to the MTM film. We will be in attendance for the Q&A and discussion following each featured screening, along with available filmmakers and affiliated organizations.

The Fall series starts in September with a screening of Arctic Son, a Big Mouth Films production that glimpses into the generational and culture gap that is affecting livelihoods in the disappearing Arctic Circle. This will be accompanied by Sixth annual Media That Matter’s film, The Rules of the Game. October will be a screening of War / Dance, a film following a dance festival in Uganda during the 20-year civil war which Seventh annual Media That Matters film Rapping at Fear will accompany. November will be a screening of the classic Black Orpheus; an award winning film that innovatively retells the mythological story of Orpheus and Eurydice by setting it in the midst of Carnival in Rio, Brazil. Accompanying this film will be Fourth annual Media That Matters film, Novela, Novela. December will be a collection of International Youth short films; GlobalEYES, presented by Listen Up! This will be supplemented by Seventh annual Media That Matters film, Garbage Dreams.

Please check back for more information on next season’s collection, and to view the official website, please visit the Tribeca Film Institute.

During a discussion about the power of the media and its ability to create new and diverse audiences (and yes, I was actually having this conversation), a friend spoke to me about a new short PSA that has spread throughout the Internet called Read A Book (Warning! Contains explicit language.). When I told her that I had not seen it, she immediately pulled out her laptop and made me watch it.

After its premiere in July, “Read A Book”, directed by Tyree Dillihay, has gotten over 761,000 hits on YouTube alone and let’s be honest. It is hysterical! It is so shocking that at some point while watching you must have laughed out loud (whether you felt comfortable about it or not.) Several websites are writing about the debate that has evolved around this piece. Some are all in favor it, quoting its brilliance. I too must admit that I cannot stop singing the part that goes: “Not A Sports Page. Not A Magazine …” Some think it’s racist and reprimands BET for putting it on the air at all.

The open of the piece is so specific, so on target and so funny. The girls with the booty pants made me scream out loud. The message of the first few verses is clear. Just read a book! But when the song gets into raising your kids, drinking water and finally wearing deodorant, it starts to just feel like an episode of MTV’s Yo Momma. Sure, Yo Momma is funny but it has no real impact. (Nor does it really want to.) This piece clearly wants to leave an impact.

As a black person, videos like these are always conflicting. Yes, it taps into some realities that exist within my community. It points out our “bad behavior” but a part of me just wants this piece to be passed around the way I experienced it, from one black person to another. Do I really want to sit next to a white person on the subway humming “Raise your kids. Raise your kids. Raise your god damn kids?” No, not really. Still, I know that is not the best way for this piece to have any impact so I have to swallow my pride and let the discourse flow.

The debate around this piece reminded me of the controversy around Cosby’s infamous “Pound Cake Speech”. Here he “reprimanded” urban (aka poor) blacks and their “bad behavior”. Michael Eric Dyson responded to Cosby’s rant with an entire book calling Cosby’s rant just one stop on Cosby’s “Blame The Poor Tour”. The debate sparked was a big wake up call about the enormous class division that exists within the black community. The reaction to Read A Book seems another good example as well.

Denys Cowan, senior vice president of animation for BET, said in an interview with the LA Times, “The magic of animation is that it can take complex ideas and present them in an entertaining and clear way. And this is a positive message.” It is a positive message but it is also a mixed message.

I’ve been working on the discussion guide for the Media That Matters: Good Food collection (to be released in September), and it got me thinking about the Farm Bill, which has become the focal point of the battle between big business and food justice activists. Check out this clever video by Free Range Graphics and take action!