Category: Essays

Growing up, my family was firmly upper-middle class. My dad is a lawyer, but up until my college years, he was a public interest lawyer — in other words, not the rich kind. My mother was a teacher, which, again, is a nice, stable job, but not so much a wealth-generator. Still, since they both were children of poor immigrants (my mother grew up in the projects on the Lower East Side and my father’s family were mostly garment workers), and were the first ones in their families to go to college, being white-collar with two incomes was pretty nifty for them. They were able to move their two kids to a nice house in the suburbs, go out to dinner every weekend (my grandmother babysat me and my brother most Saturday nights, which helped), and travel.

Despite this, I think my parents’ childhoods still had a lot to do with how my family spent money. For one thing, once my brother and I were old enough to do road trips, we spent a lot of our summers traveling in Canada — we even made our first cross-country trip across Canada, from Toronto to Vancouver. I’m sure part of this had to do with how great Canada is and how nice it was to be able to travel to another country just a short drive from home, but it also had something to do with the American dollar’s strength against the Canadian: Canada was a bargain. On the other hand, we, like many Americans, spent a large part of our vacations, and recreational time in general, shopping. My father, in particular, is the king of the tchotchke. Any trip into the city would not be complete for him without a stop at the Odd Job Lot and Trading Company, which we all referred to as the Junk Shop, because everything there looked like it had fallen off a truck (and it sort of had). My dad collects lots of things he could look for at the Junk Shop — chess sets, art, kaleidoscopes, unusual musical instruments, lamps — and he loved to discover additional stuff there that one could potentially collect — cast-iron replicas of old banks, ceramics of dubious origin, semi-functional electronics with blinking lights — then figure out somebody to give them to. The key was that, unlike when they were kids, my parents could spend money on stuff that they, or their kids (theoretically), just wanted rather than needed. I say “theoretically” because, even today, as craft fairs, markets, souks and eBay have supplanted the Junk Shop, my folks’ house still has closets filled with “gifts” that are waiting to be given or re-given. Nearly every time I see my dad, he’ll say, “Hey, I have something for you,” at which point he’ll pull out something like a global warming mug on which the continents disappear when you pour in hot water, or a cow keychain that moos and lights up, or a giant piece of folk art designed to take up the better part of a wall. “I thought it was cool,” he’ll say, and if I say thanks but we already have a thousand mugs or we don’t have the wall space, he’ll say, “You sure you don’t want it? Well, maybe your brother/nephew/sister-in-law will like it.”

This idea that money is something you spend on stuff you don’t need had a huge impact on my relationship with it growing up. For a long time, I, too, collected things for the sake of collecting: glass animals, stuffed animals, stickers, books, Intellivision cartridges. Granted, these last two things had value beyond the ability to be collected and in turn collect dust, but the collecting mentality dictated that I acquire all of a given item — every species of animal in stuffed form (armadillo, coati mundi, a watermelon with removable seeds – okay, some of them were really amazing) 

every Doonesbury, Garfield, Peanuts, Bloom County, and Calvin & Hobbes collection, every Intellivision game they made. I came to value acquisition, without paying much attention to what things cost. Even when I got an allowance, which I used, like every kid, to buy candy, it didn’t really mean much to me because candy was never in short supply at my house, and my father’s love of shopping meant I could pretty much persuade him to get me anything I wanted. Most of those things were inexpensive when I was little (even newly-released Intellivision games retailed at $39.95 each and quickly dropped in price), so this only started to be problematic when I became a teenager and started wanting things that actually added up to real money, starting with clothes. Buying expensive clothes was a new concept to my parents, for whom appearances in general had never been very important. Clothes, in their minds, were a need, not a want, so why spend money on them? So they initially balked at how much I wanted to spend on my growing collection of sweaters, but since they weren’t used to saying no to me, I eventually got what I wanted.

(Still have a lot of sweaters. Mind you, this doesn’t include the ones in storage.)

Thus, I arrived at college effectively still not really understanding what things cost. My first student bank account was full of money that my parents put into it when I asked, but I rarely needed to ask because I slept and ate in a dormitory and my main source of recreation was parties on campus – a lifestyle for which my parents paid along with my tuition (or so I thought) without my having to think about it. This changed when I began to venture off campus a little more as a sophomore, and so I also, accordingly, acquired my first part-time job at the library for pocket money (which didn’t have to cover the money I spent on clothes at the Stanford Shopping Center, those credit card bills also got paid by my folks). Plus, dorm life in California in the 80s was a great leveler, partly because the uniform of shorts, t-shirts and the occasional sweatshirt could pretty much be worn by everyone year-round, so I wasn’t really aware of who did or did not have money. The hashers who served food in the dining hall were generally work-study, but other clues went right over my head. There was one guy from my sophomore dorm whose class status started to dawn on me when we got into a discussion while party planning about egg nog — he insisted it had to be made with cognac, as anything else would be a crime — and then it all fell into place when I eventually saw his sportscar with tinted windows (although, to be fair, he was from Texas, where tinted windows are much more common than they are in New Jersey). There was another guy who it only became clear that he was from a wealthy family if you visited his dorm room, which was filled with an insane amount of computer hardware for 1988.

My overall obliviousness on the subject of money finally began to erode when I moved to NYC for graduate school. My parents were still paying my rent and most of my expenses, but I had to ask them to send me checks — and while they were happy to do it, I began to realize, thanks to the discussions that would inevitably ensue when the topic came up, that the chunk of change that they sent every month was not nothing. At film school, I also came to know obviously rich people, in the form of classmates whose parents were CEOs or former heads of state. Their money became obvious first in their apartments, which ranged from normal two-bedroom at a stellar address in the Village right near school (which might not seem expensive if you didn’t know New York City real estate) to insane Soho duplex loft space with built-in art installation. Also, while these rich classmates were nice people and I was friends with several of them, it gradually dawned on me that we were not the same. Going out to eat with them, for example, was always hazardous, because many of the places they wanted to go were way out of my league, they never seemed to be aware of how much they spent, and then they’d either want to split the bill, or their guesstimates of how much they owed would be woefully low, or they’d just forget tax and/or tip, or all of the above. I realized, after this happened a few times, that it wasn’t that they were cheap or jerks or cheap jerks, they just literally didn’t understand the concept of money actually mattering. My true rude monetary awakening, however, was receiving my first collection agency notices, from the loan associations in New Jersey, California and Pennsylvania, the three states my parents lived in before and during my college years. My folks had moved twice and hadn’t done a great job of keeping in touch with those agencies, and they’d also never really talked to me about the fact that I’d taken out loans, which someone would eventually have to pay back. So when I started to get nasty letters IN ALL TYPEWRITTEN CAPS telling me that my credit would be ruined forever if I didn’t start sending them money ASAP, I completely freaked out. My parents told me that this was hyperbole and that it would all be fine, and it was (I was able to defer nearly everything until after graduate school), but having to deal with these agencies and consolidate my debt — two truly novel concepts: 1) having debt, and 2) having it be so large that it needed consolidating — was my true initiation into managing my own finances, and into the concept that finances had to be managed, and that mine would have to be managed by me. 

As I started working in the film business and paying all my own bills, I evolved into the cheap bastard that I am today, bringing my childhood issues with me. My love of acquisition combined with my inability to resist a bargain made me, for years, helpless in the face of a sample sale, which led to the crazy amount of party clothes I still have in my closet that I never wear and (along with buying a boom pole) my one $4000 credit card bill. On the other hand, thanks to the trauma of my student loan collection agency experiences, I pay my bills in full and on time as a rule (yes, even that one). I also tip well, but have a really hard time doing anything extravagantly. I have friends who have no problem spending large amounts of money on what they deem quality, and I totally understand that, but am physically unable to do it.  And just throwing money at a problem to make it go away? I can’t imagine doing that, ever. Paying for something just has to seem worth it to me; the worst epithet that I can throw at something is that it’s OVERPRICED. 

Now, when you shack up, your issues with money have to mesh with the money issues of your significant other. For one of my exes, his issues with money involved having the MO of a starving artist while also insisting on being the guy in the relationship, i.e. the one who paid when we went out. As a semi-starving artist myself, I was totally cool with going to divey restaurants, having a cheap apartment even if the walls and ceiling leaked, and acquiring all of our furniture off the street or at flea markets (this was the pre-bedbug era). But the fact that even if I was making a decent amount of money that month he was uncomfortable going out for a nice meal or a weekend away because I was paying for it, that was a problem – as was the fact that he had gotten behind on paying his taxes, another thing I could not fathom ever doing, ever. While those things didn’t break us up exactly, they the reflected larger issues that eventually did: basically, in terms of life goals, I wanted stability, and he wanted to be rich and famous. The relationship that my husband and I each have with money is much more compatible. He doesn’t have the neuroses that I do; he will sometimes tip someone $7 for delivery, and he doesn’t even know if his credit card has an annual fee. I mean, how is that possible? But my slightly neurotic fiscal responsibility is good for him, and his more laid-back generousness is good for me, and if there are still things we have trouble resisting (him: Apple products and synthesizers, me: books and sometimes clothes), neither of us is interested in spending money for the sake of spending money. 

(Damon has a lot of iDevices “for testing.”) 

Which is good, because what I’d like is to be able to raise our potential future child(ren) money-healthy — as in they don’t worry about it, or slave for it, or think it’s the most important thing in the world, but they also aren’t oblivious to or ignorant about it and what it can do. I’m not sure if that’s possible to do here in Brooklyn, where you can pay more to buy a studio apartment than it costs to retire, happily, in many parts of the world; in a country where a bargain shopping day (Black Friday) is threatening to wipe out a national holiday (Thanksgiving) and where money has been equated with free speech by the Supreme Court; and in a globalized economy where companies can track every move we make in order to advertise to us individually in everything we read or see or watch or play about the things we MUST MUST MUST BUY BUY BUY. 

So be comforted by the idea that, no matter how weird you and I may be about money, the issues we have are nothing compared to the ones our kids are going to have. Yay!

Like most filmmakers who’ve seen it, I’ve been thinking a lot about The Jinx. I watched all six parts of the HBO series, and was, for the most part, duly riveted.

But since the airing of the final episode, there’s been a lot of discussion about it, mostly with regard to filmmaking ethics and timing. That started with the arrest of its subject, Robert Durst, by authorities in New Orleans the day before the final episode aired. The filmmakers claimed it was purely coincidental, but one couldn’t help but feel that everything seemed to come perfectly to a head all at once, both from a storytelling perspective and from a “How do we best generate a ratings extravaganza?” kind of perspective. There has been a lot of coverage in the New York Times, which interviewed Director Eugene Jarecki and Producer Marc Smerling as a follow-up that was printed the day after the episode aired, before the two declined to give more interviews that same day, saying that, because they would likely be witnesses in any case against Durst, that it “it is not appropriate for us to comment further on these pending matters.” I found Joe Berlinger’s comments discussion of how the pressures on documentary filmmakers today can affect ethical decisions insightful, and I also found thought this BFI piece made some interesting points about “where journalism ends and moviemaking begins” even while I largely didn’t agree with it (it’s just ridiculous to call The Jinx “terrible filmmaking,” and as someone who has actually never seen all of the footage from my last film, I think not reviewing all of the material you’ve recorded right away is about how you use limited time and resources, not being “sloppy”). But nobody has really mentioned one of the main problems I have with the film: that the filmmakers chose to make it, in the end, too much about themselves.

Let me back up a bit and say that filmmakers putting themselves in their own documentaries without good reason has long been a pet peeve of mine. For one thing, using putting yourself in the film as a character can be a crutch for how to tell a story you’re not sure how to tell. First person gives you a basic structure and style based around your voice and how events unfolded from your perspective, and it creates an instant connection between yourself, your film, and the audience. Why make your audience do any more intellectual work — figuring out the journey the film is taking or how to feel about it — than they have to, when handing them your point of view will easily tell them that right off the bat? Putting yourself in your own film is also at least somewhat narcissistic. You’re deciding that you are compelling and watchable (or listenable) enough to be the person that everyone wants to follow into the story – a much sought-after quality that has consecrated celebrities since, oh, film, theater, storytelling around the campfire, take your pick, began – regardless of whether you really have any connection to it or whether you’re even someone I’d like to hang out with for 60 to 120-odd minutes.

Now, putting yourself in the movie in the way I’m talking about is not the same as setting out to make a movie that tells your own story, or one in which you are a central character – in other words, a narrative that needs you. Plenty of people have stories to tell, and many of those are ones in which they are direct participants, and which are best told from their point of view. Ross McElwee, Macky Alston, Sarah Polley, these are all first-person filmmakers who I admire and who I think have made excellent work by seeing the interesting tales in their own lives and figuring out how to tell them.

It’s also not the same as casting yourself as the “host” of a film or tv show, as filmmakers like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock do. When Moore was the narrator of Roger & Me, it was an organic choice because he was from Flint, Michigan and he was making a film about what was happening to his hometown. When Spurlock made Supersize Me, he used himself as the subject of the experiment that was at the center of the film — maybe a stunt, but again, an organic choice that works. In subsequent projects, however, both filmmakers have chosen to use their new status as media personalities as a tool to investigate topics that interest them, casting themselves, essentially, as the viewer’s surrogate. Since the success of their first films proved that they each had a unique perspective and personality to which people responded, that makes some sense — although it doesn’t necessarily help the topics on which they choose to focus. A large part of whether you’ll watch Michael Moore’s movies and give the issues in them a hearing ends up being about whether or not you like Michael Moore, regardless of how you feel about those issues. Since Moore has gotten more people to see his documentaries than most of his contemporaries combined, I’d say this tactic has largely worked out for him. Post-Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911, however, I seriously doubt people on the right are going to give any cause Moore takes on a fair shake, and critics and commentators on his films spend as much time complaining about or lauding his obstinate voice as they do discussing the subjects his films cover. This is the biggest risk of making yourself the visible “host” of the journey that takes place in a documentary film: people can choose to avoid your film, and the issues it covers, if they don’t want to spend time with you.

What I’m really talking about, however, are the endless variations on these two options, in which people insert themselves in some way into films that aren’t about them or clearly following them. We hear Rachel Boynton’s voice asking interview questions in Our Brand is Crisis because…why, exactly? She could have cut it out like every other filmmaker does — but whatever, it takes me out of the film a bit but overall it’s not very intrusive, since we only hear it a handful of times throughout. Then there’s Davis Guggenheim, who makes himself the occasionally-appearing narrator of Waiting For Superman, despite the fact that, as he admits early in the film, his own children are in private school (and, uh, he’s a Guggenheim, so we can be fairly sure he himself didn’t go to public school), and his connection to public schools basically consists of driving past them — which is just as both boring and elitist as it sounds when we see him do in the film. Again, I ask, because why?? Why would I want to follow this guy through this world? It not only doesn’t draw me into the film, it takes me out of it. Then, on the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s Laura Poitras’ presence in Citizen Four, a presence which, to me, seems not only earned, but necessary. Poitras was contacted by Edward Snowden, and she was contacted by him for reasons that seem important to disclose and that tell us a lot about both her and Snowden, and which underlie the film and its very existence. And while Poitras includes their email correspondence, and her own voice reading it, as well as glimpses of herself setting up the camera and bits of her voice interacting with Snowden, she keeps herself in the background, almost like a framing device. I guess it could be because she’s camera-shy, but to me, it seems more clearly that it’s because she doesn’t want to take anything away from the people who the film is really about: Snowden and the other political activists who choose to speak out against government surveillance. Poitras is only in the film because it seems like the most honest way to tell their story. She doesn’t want to dilute the film’s focus by making it, in essence, My Encounter with Edward Snowden — as I could very easily see a lesser filmmaker doing.

The far end of the spectrum, to me, of putting-yourself-in-the-story storytelling is reality TV — which I think both spawned this trend and further warped it into an even scarier trend: story-generating. In reality TV, everyone is a character fighting for screen time in order to make the show their own. If the real story is not about them, they find a way to make it about them, and if there is not enough drama in their own story, they manufacture it. If it wasn’t from the beginning (and I don’t think it was in the first Real Worlds and Big Brothers, I think it evolved), this is now the central ethos of pretty much all reality television, from Keeping Up With the Kardashians to The Real Housewives series to even the competition shows like Top Chef and Project Runway, which, despite the fact that they have drama built into their premises as competitions (which they already inflate to an absurd degree), seem to feel the need to manufacture more drama out of soap opera-y personal conflicts and catfights (“All Stars” versions of these shows seem to be most prone to this, because they tend to deliberately bring back characters who were the most “interesting,” aka likely to scream/cry/make trouble). Not only that, but this way of “telling” stories by creating them has come to seem completely normal and natural. It’s YouTube, it’s Vine, it’s Meerkat and Periscope, and it’s becoming what we expect in our news (in featuring our newscasters more and more as personalities, or interviews with people “on the scene” of a news event who might have a tenuous connection to those events at best, but who are encouraged to make themselves part of the story) and our documentary. It’s starting to feel like everything in media is supposed to be one big selfie.

Now The Jinx, in the first five episodes, is clearly about Durst, his twisted story, and the people around him who’ve been affected by it. Whatever else he may be, he is a fascinating character, one supremely messed-up dude regardless of whether or not he’s a murderer. He tells us forthrightly about the terrible events in his life — witnessing his mother’s suicide (or at least its preamble and aftermath); his cold relationship with his father and brothers, including being passed over to run his father’s multi-billion-dollar company; the violent and abusive fights he had with his wife, Kathleen Durst and her mysterious disappearance; the death of his good friend Susan Berman; and the killing of his supposed friend Morris Black, for which he was acquitted of murder, but who he admits to dismembering. He does so with virtually no affect, with the only emotion displayed perhaps annoyance at having to spell out his own actions, thoughts and feelings, that he thinks should be obvious. He comes across as frank and straightforward, but also kind of psychopathic, because it’s like he’s describing things that happened to someone else. And the story that Jarecki builds around this, through other interviews and stylized re-enactments to illustrate how events may have transpired — in a dreamlike way that allows you to keep them separate from reality — is terrific. The style borrows heavily from Errol Morris, as Jarecki admitted in interviews, but it works. And there are so many interesting characters — Durst’s family; the family and friends of Kathleen Durst, several of whom are convinced that Durst is her murderer and become at times almost obsessed with trying to prove it; the family and friends of Susan Berman, including her stepson, who was very close to her but remains close to Durst and has been supported by him financially; and the jurors, judge and lawyers from Durst’s trail — all of whom have great things to say, allowing us to see the story from an incredible multiplicity of angles. When I started The Jinx, I wasn’t sure how this one man’s story had earned a mini-series. At episode five, I was enthralled and couldn’t see it being any shorter.

As you might have guessed, the one choice I didn’t particularly like was Jarecki’s physical presence in the film. There was no question that Jarecki had to be part of the story. Durst had reached out to him personally after he directed a fiction film about Durst, All Good Things. Not only was that the genesis of the documentary, but it says a lot about what this central interview is: Durst’s opportunity to tell his side of things for the first time, to someone who he felt would be sympathetic or at least have some understanding of him as a person. Knowing this also enables us to somewhat put ourselves in Jarecki’s shoes, as the fascinated observer who spends a lot of time talking to this enigmatic potential horror show of a human being, who…confides in him? Lies to him? Manipulates him? You get to judge for yourself, and think about what it might have been like had Durst reached out to you. And yet, I wasn’t sure why we were seeing Jarecki — interviewing Durst, or walking with him on the street in b-roll, sometimes with a camera. We know that Jarecki is there as the director, but it’s a very distinctive choice to be physically present in the film, nodding and listening or asking questions — questions that, again, we generally don’t hear in documentaries, because we usually only hear the subjects giving their answers, keeping the focus on them. I think such a choice, because it is not the norm, and because, as such, it has the potential to take us out of the film and take our attention away from the main subject, has to really be both necessary and earned in the same way that all choices in the making of a documentary film should be necessary and earned: because they are integral to the story being told. So if Jarecki was visually in The Jinx, I didn’t necessarily think this was the wrong choice, but I wanted there to be a good reason.

Well, the reason came out in Episode Six, in which The Jinx in essence turns into, My Encounter With Bob Durst, And What I Did To Get the Gotcha Moment. In Episode Five, we find out that Susan Berman’s stepson, Sareb Kauffman, has gone through her things and found some damning evidence: a letter that Durst wrote to her, enclosing a $50K check (which may have kind of been hush money to keep her from telling what she knew, as his close friend and spokesperson, about Kathleen Durst’s murder). The envelope is addressed to her and spells “Beverly Hills” as “Beverley,” a misspelling of the name of the town that matches the misspelling on an anonymous postcard sent to police, which led them to find her body after the murder. Not only that, but the block-written, all-caps handwriting on the two missives looks identical. At the end of Episode Five, Jarecki is in possession of the letter, and we hear him say, “I’d like to take a month…Nothing’s bringing Susan back” – in essence, conspiring to withhold evidence from the police until they’re able to have their final interview with Durst and show him the letter themselves. So now, in Episode Six, we’re no longer watching that gripping documentary series about who Durst is and did he do it, because we now are pretty sure he did it. Instead, we’re in a reality TV show about Andrew Jarecki, trying to milk as much drama as possible out of 40 minutes of television that basically only exists to get us to Durst’s final interview and its postscript at the very end, where Durst says some damning things, possibly even admitting his guilt, while talking to himself in the bathroom.

In my mind, that story, the drama of Jarecki’s dilemma, was the wrong story to tell, and I think it’s hard to separate the other wrong choices that were made, both ethical and artistic, from the choice to make The Jinx into that. I mean, I’m a filmmaker, so the ethical and creative choices of documentary filmmaking are very interesting to me. But I’d tuned in to watch a series about murderer deciding to kill three people and lie about it, how he became who he was, and how he got away with the crimes. As difficult as the filmmakers’ decisions might have been, did they think that their discussions about how long to withhold evidence — a discussion that I don’t think should really have been a discussion at all since that evidence clearly convinced them that they were talking about a three-time murderer who was still at large (and it’s being speculated that they may have withheld that evidence, allowing him to stay at large, for as long as two to three years) — or frustrations of trying to get a final interview with Durst really compared with the drama of Durst’s story that they’d been telling for five episodes already? Did they really think it belonged in the same league, the same movie? Was holding up Jarecki’s anguished “desire for justice” next to that of Kathleen Durst’s friends and family really even appropriate? To me the answer is clearly “no,” but it seems that their desire to legitimize this new storyline, to beef up the drama to take it to that level, led them further into bad choices. First, it led them to withhold evidence. Second, they messed with the timeline of events, making it look like Durst’s final interview only happened after he was arrested for stalking his own brother, which made him come to Jarecki for help him in that case — which actually happened two years after the final interview. Why? Because it builds suspense as we see the filmmakers close in on “getting” Durst, and it also conveniently collapses time, so that it seems like Jarecki didn’t withhold the evidence from the police for very long. And third, a purely filmmaking crime: they made the series an episode longer than it needed to be and dragged out the ending.

Not only do I believe, as I said, that the ethical questions of filmmakers and the choices they make are interesting, but I think that the world should know about them. It’s educational for all consumers of media — which is basically nearly everybody on the planet at this point — to know and think about how the sausage is made, especially now that everyone can start making their own sausage, because everyone has a camera. I think the sooner that we realize that all of the media we consume is manipulated and constructed, the better it will be for the world. Nobody will ever again confuse Fox News with fact, or CNN for that matter. Just because one is motivated to manipulate by ideology and one is motivated by money doesn’t mean either is more manipulative or more likely to skew than the other. Money as an influence on media can be just as poisonous as any dogma.

Speaking of which, we have to ask, what role did HBO play? Six-part documentary mini-series don’t just happen without funding and a broadcaster, so somebody at HBO decided to finance this project and at least approved the film in this form. And I know, based on stories from other filmmakers, that HBO gets involved creatively when they think it’s necessary. I went to a film festival in the early aughts where I saw a documentary that had been picked up for broadcast by HBO. It was a good film, but something that didn’t jibe with me — yes, again. I told you it was a pet peeve — was the first-person narration by the filmmaker of a story that didn’t really involve him. (It was about someone who’d gone to his high school, but who he had never met until he decided to make the film). I asked the filmmaker during the Q&A why he’d made the choice to tell the story that way, and he replied that, when he was looking for finishing funds, he’d showed something to HBO that didn’t have that first-person point of view. And the people at HBO had said, essentially, We’d be interested in your film if you put yourself in there. It wasn’t a demand or a requirement, but…basically, yeah, it was, if he wanted HBO to consider funding the film. It’s no secret that this the type of negotiation over the shape of the final product goes on between filmmakers and the people who fund and distribute their work, but I’m not sure people realize, since they assume documentaries are “factual,” that it happens in documentary. When there’s money involved, the people with the money often want to have a say — as we even saw recently with PBS and its decision not to fund the completion of, or broadcast, the documentary “Citizen Koch.” And that’s especially true when they stand to gain financially from the film’s success. So, I’m not saying HBO convinced Jarecki and Smerling to withhold evidence, or convinced them to make specific changes to the film, but I absolutely believe that they influenced the decisions that went into making the final episode the way it was. To me, it was such a milk-the-drama, pander-to-the-obvious, reality TV-type move, exactly the kind of idea that some executive who cares more about ratings than about anything else would come up with.

Because, as necessary as I think it is to make audiences aware of the process and raise all of these questions, the finale of The Jinx should not have been about that. Jarecki and Smerling have absolutely done something heroic by doggedly pursuing this story until they found the truth. Like many great filmmakers before them, including Morris and Berlinger (and his directing partner Bruce Sinofsky who recently passed away), their work has put pressure on the legal system and seems to be pushing justice forward. But the fact that their desire to win at television got in the way of their desire to see justice done, and might even have caused more harm had Durst killed again (and we’re assuming he didn’t, but now that another potential murder he may have committed in 1971 has come to light, who knows what bodies might be buried out there?), is hard to overlook. And it didn’t even make the series better, it made it worse.

Filmmakers are human beings who get to play God. We get to determine what stories are told and how they’re told. That’s a lot of power and responsibility. We have to make calls all the time about what the right thing is to do, often on the fly, often under the duress of many competing pressures — ethical, financial, personal. When we become part of the stories we’re trying to tell, that makes it all that much more complicated. That may be still the right decision, the inevitable decision, the only decision, but it has to be integral to doing justice to your topic and making the best film you can. Contrary to what the industry may tell us, that does not just mean the one that everyone else is making or the one that gets the most eyeballs. Call me naive, but I think one of the great things about documentary filmmaking is that making a really good, truthful film and doing the right thing generally line up. That only happens, however, when we’re brutally honest with ourselves about what our own role is and what it should be, and how that’s influencing our choices every step of the way.

These days, I feel like I’m tired all the time. Too many responsibilities, too many jobs and non-jobs that are kind of like jobs. I have trouble falling asleep, or I wake up early and can’t go back to sleep because I’m thinking about everything I have to do. Or if I do manage to be asleep, I’m dreaming about it. In my current dreamscape, I’m always trying to leave on a trip, get on a plane or a train, but my luggage is missing, or not even packed yet, or I’m stuck in the airport, or I’m trying to find somebody or something before I can go to the airport, or I haven’t even made my reservations yet and now I’m supposed to be leaving in a week. I really do want to be in Italy or Argentina or wherever, but I can’t get there, and nothing seems to exist beyond the endless stress of trying to get there as one thing after another gets in the way. And that feeling of not being able to get anywhere is basically the permanent hangover that I have when I’m awake — because, while it can be confusing what comes from where when you’re as tired as I am, of course the dream comes from my real life, not the other way around. When I wake up, I feel relieved that I’m no longer lost and stuck and going in circles, and I then I go back to my everyday existential angst of not getting everything done, which feels like not getting anything done, and I think, Huh, well, this feels familiar.

Sometimes, though, I cross a line that’s even worse, into being really low on sleep. In case you’ve never experienced that (and I bet most of you parents and film production personnel out there have), it’s like you’re constantly between the worlds of being asleep and awake, but never fully in one or the other. It’s harder to stop thinking about your dreams because you have less control of your mind, and because, since you’re never fully awake, it seems like you’re never far enough away from them to truly leave them behind. This can be good if your dreams are fun — sex dreams leave you feeling sexy all day, for example — but still off-putting. Nothing feels quite real. And on top of that, your body feels like lead, and your head feels like a rock on top of a pile of lead, as if that could possibly be a thing. Parts of you hurt that don’t usually hurt, or maybe they do usually hurt (with me, something usually hurts — knees, hip, feet, stomach, shoulder), they just hurt more and you’re less able to put the pain out of your mind. You hate everyone, because they’re either in your way, or they actually want to interact with you, or they won’t interact with you when you need them to — when you’re supertired, people are just the worst. And nothing works the way it’s supposed to, from your shoelaces to your feet to doors and faucets, which, on these days, only seem to open in the direction opposite to the one you’re trying to move them in. It feels like the entire world is against you, conspiring to make you move and speak, in words, when all you want to do is go back to bed. You’re like a sitcom character, the grumpy straight man who’s the butt of all the jokes. You’re Mr. Roper.

But some days, you get so little sleep that your grip on reality loosens. Just barely tied to the world, hardly there at all, you’re coasting along on a cushion of “I don’t give a shit.” Now it’s like you’re watching the sitcom, so everything is a little bit funny (there’s no laugh track, but that just makes it better. I always feel rather oppressed by the laugh track: the nerve of it, telling me when to laugh). And because you feel like you’re outside the world, spectating, you see the details that you don’t normally see, almost like you’re seeing only with your peripheral vision. Because you’re observing everything from a comfortable distance, it all feels very zen – or like being drunk or high, especially because a large percentage of your judgment and coordination tends to be off on these days too. You walk into more stuff, you make bad choices on obvious decisions, even post-caffeine. But it doesn’t seem to matter, and once you get into the rhythm of it, because you have to focus so hard on everything and you’re also uninhibited, you actually do certain things better. These are good days to take photos and write first drafts, to bowl or ski, because you can’t overthink and you don’t have the space for self-doubt. It makes for quite a day, or few hours, or however long you can hold on to the feeling without falling over or nodding off.

I hate being tired all the time, and I don’t want this to go on any longer than it has to. But if I could just bring a little more of this second kind of tired to my everyday life, that might be worthwhile. If I could just look at things from the edges more often and laugh, that would be something.

My breasts have gotten larger recently because I’ve put on some weight. I’ve put on weight elsewhere too, which stinks generally, but, probably because my chest is literally kind of under my nose, this is the most noticeable place. Now I’m sure some of you, are thinking, “Oh, poor you! People pay good money for that and you got it for free,” but I’ve never been one of those people who wanted to have larger breasts. There were times in my life when my appearance was more important to me than it is now — basically, when I was single and in my 20s and 30s and wanting to be noticed by good-looking jerks at parties — and even then, while I wanted to be attractive, the idea of wanting that area of my body to be bigger made no sense to me. I mean, why would I want to draw attention there? Yes, I’ll admit to having worn my fair share of low-cut dresses, but I’ve generally bought them because I thought they looked good in other ways, and pretty much always ended up wishing they weren’t so damned cleavage-y. I just do not like having conversations with men in which they address my chest instead of my face, or even occasionally glance there, reminding me that they’re not really listening to me. At least if someone is attracted to me because of my face instead of my mind, they’re looking at my face. But I mean, seriously, how much can you think somebody likes and respects you for you if they’d clearly rather be talking to your ass?

Even more unfortunately, my breasts haven’t increased in size evenly. For quite a while now, I’ve been aware that they are not the same. I think this is pretty common, actually. We tend to assume, as humans, that because we have two of so many things — eyes, ears, hands, arms, legs, breasts — that we are symmetrical, but that isn’t true. If you need to be reminded of this, just look at yourself in a mirror reflecting another mirror, so that you see your reflection backwards: it’s fucking weird. You may not be able to tell exactly why – is it my eyebrow that’s drooping or the cowlick that’s backwards or that mole…? – but you know that you look completely wrong. Similarly, it’s not unusual for women’s breasts to be differently shaped and sized. In fact, there’s a term for it, which is, duh, breast asymmetry. Of course, they came up with a term that sounds like a condition, because, one, as with any issue that seems too personal/shameful, like anorexia or infertility or depression, even though it’s fairly common, we don’t all know it is, because nobody talks about it; and, two, the fashion industry needs to keep that old trope going that all women can aspire to be perfect in every way. This is why it made the news when Jennifer Lawrence mentioned a couple of years ago on Jimmy Kimmel that she’d discovered that her apparently perfect breasts were uneven. Hopefully now, thanks to Jennifer Lawrence not having a filter, fewer women will feel like freaks about this stuff.

So anyway, it seems that as my bust has gotten bigger, one side has gotten bigger faster. Sometimes I think it’s all the booming, since my right arm is the one that does most of the control work and that’s the side with the smaller breast, presumably because it gets a better regular workout? Whatever the reason, this makes having larger breasts even more annoying, because my bras still fit on one side, just not really on the other, and that makes bras even more annoying than bras are to begin with. The result is that, these days, I end up a lot of the time with what my husband and I now refer to as “boob pillows,” though really it’s just “boob pillow”: when the one side that’s too large can’t seen to stay contained where it’s supposed to be, and makes an additional lump in my shirt. Of course, everything seems fine when I put the bra on in the morning, the issue only surfaces after I’ve been moving around for a while, or had to bend over and do something, and everything shifts. This happens a lot now, but no matter how many times it happens, I just don’t want to believe it’s a problem that’s going to keep happening. I don’t want to believe that I’ve gotten heavier, or that I have to replace all of my bras — with other bras that won’t fit either, mind you, because, of course, you don’t find bras with asymmetrical cup sizes at your local department store, so I’ll have to get bigger ones and just deal with the fact that they’re baggy-ish on one side. Knowing this, along with the fact that I’m going to have to go into dressing rooms and try on bras, enables the busy and cheap side of me to keep putting off this errand, basically forever. But I’m quite cognizant, in the meantime, that since I’m always worrying about boob pillows, I’m always looking down at my breasts and checking for them, and trying to adjust things, which is probably way worse. Because there’s nothing that draws attention to your breasts like you looking at your own breasts.

And then there’s the idea that’s dawned on me recently, that this is somehow representative of what my life is like in general now: a struggle to keep things in balance that just refuse to stay that way. I have a day job of working on sets as a sound grunt that I do for money. Then Damon and I are developing and trying to promote our Rustle Works games. Then I’m trying to finish a video I’m making for the Code Liberation Foundation, and developing (read: thinking about a lot) an interactive documentary. And I’m also teaching undergraduates how to do sound one day a week. And I’m writing this blog, which actually does take some time, believe it or not. Plus I want to see and enjoy time with my husband, family and friends and have a life, occasionally, and I want to have some time for myself to do things like exercise and sleep…Oh, and I also do still want to have kids, ha ha, which people tell me does take up a little bit of one’s time (and that’s after going through the process of having them, which for me probably means the not-at-all-simple process of adoption at this point). So how the hell does a person make it all work?

I feel like this is the challenge that the modern woman faces. In the same way that I should either decide to cut out carbs or dessert or alcohol or all of the above for a while if I want my breasts to get smaller, I know that I should make a conscious decision to cut something out of my life, to choose which parts of social and personal and career I really want to make a priority. Or, I should accept the fact that this is how it is, I’m stuck with some jobs and commitments I don’t want in addition to the ones I do, schedule things from week to week, know what’s going to get done when and disappoint some people (and maybe myself) in the process because I can’t be superwoman — which is sort of the equivalent of giving in and buying all new bras. Otherwise, it’s going to keep going the way it is now, where I put off the things I can and do the ones I can’t at the last possible minute as stuff just falls by the wayside and I’m trying to shove it back in there and then inevitably…boob pillows. Why, you ask, can’t I just make the conscious choice to cut out carbs? Because I like carbs, because I feel like I deserve and should be capable of having them, because life is not meant to be an egg white omelette. And on some level, carbs (and no, we’re not really talking about carbs any more) are part of my identity, or at least my possible identity. I don’t want to close any of these doors, or at least the ones I could close, because I feel like they’re all me — the filmmaker, the writer, the game designer, the professor, the loving daughter, the supportive friend, the fun aunt — either something I like or something I want or something I feel like I should or could be, if only I don’t give up.

And so I keep trying to impossibly juggle it all, even as I get older and heavier and slower and less capable of doing it. And like with the boob pillows, the more time I spend trying to keep it all in place, the more obvious it becomes, maybe not just to me but to everyone else, that I’m failing. Was I ever capable of doing it all? Probably not, but I think I used to be able to handle it better when I was younger, I think I worked and played harder and slept and exercised and recuperated less. But until I can reconcile myself to the idea that I’m not the person I was (or thought I was), and likely am never going to be some of the people I thought I would be, I’m going to be stuck feeling asymmetrical.

One of these days I really am going to go buy new bras…just as soon as I find the time.

Last week I had a three-day job during which I spent a lot of time walking backwards. This is something that I have to do from time to time. When you’re booming someone (or more than one someones) who’s walking, often the only way to keep the mic in a good spot directly above their heads but just out of frame while they’re doing it is to walk backwards in front of them, so that you can watch them while you boom. It’s not actually that hard to do, provided that you know you have a clear path behind you so you won’t walk into anything, and, if you’re using a cable (which I happened to be on this job even though these days we work mostly wireless boom), someone reliable to pull it to keep it from getting under foot and tripping you up. Sometimes, if the path you’re walking is particularly hazardous, and requires, say, avoiding a lamppost or turning a corner, you may also need a spotter to guide you (generally just by giving you a helpful push or tug in the right direction). This is especially true if you’re walking/running at high speed, as you often are, because you have to match the speed of the actors, and they’re not thinking about you, they’re thinking about their motivation. A lot of the time, you’re also joining in a parade of people who are walking in front of the actors at the same time you are — camera/steadicam operator, grip spotting him or her, focus puller, an electrician holding a light, people pulling cables for the camera and the light, etc etc. It can be quite a herd, all jockeying for the best position from which to do their jobs and not get squashed against a wall or trip. On this particular job camera was on a dolly so the herd was minimal, which was lucky because I had to do all of the walking backwards without my shoes to avoid hearing my feet on a carpet of Astroturf that sounded not so much like grass underfoot as like breakfast cereal. Going shoeless in a gaggle of backwards-walking people is basically asking to get your toes stomped.

It took me a fair amount of tripping and getting stomped and walking into things to figure all this out. Some of the things I have walked into include trees, street signs, walls, furniture, lights, light stands, other kinds of stands, other people, and the camera. As a result of walking into such things, I have acquired many bruises and scrapes and burns, fallen on my ass, fallen on other people who have then fallen on other people, hit crew members with the pole or my elbow, and hit actors in the face with the mic. And of course, I’ve stuck the mic or the pole or my armpit in the frame while doing this more times than I can count. I don’t think I’ve caused any permanent damage to myself, others, or equipment, but that was probably more luck than anything else. Because it’s not like walking backwards is necessarily something that you get appreciatively better at. Every situation is different and has new pitfalls and obstacles, so you’re always likely to make mistakes. You just learn the rules and your cues and try to apply them as best you can, knowing that sometimes you’re still likely to fuck it up.

But especially now that I’ve been doing it for 20+ years, I actually find walking backwards kind of fun. It’s just not something you generally have license to do, at least not without people thinking that you’re either crazy or irresponsible or both. And there’s something exhilarating about moving quickly and confidently in a direction you can’t see, especially while accomplishing something else at the same time. It makes you feel simultaneously skilled and reckless when you succeed at something that improbable, which is pretty empowering.

If you haven’t already (and why would you?), I highly recommend trying walking backwards some time, or, better yet, finding something in life that makes you feel the same way. Then, when you find yourself having to do something else that seems challenging to mere mortals, like, say, starting conversations with strangers about yourself and your work at a conference, you can think back and remember, “Oh right, I did that last week, so how hard could this be?”

 

 

(Note: this title is a reference to the title of the A.A. Milne book of children’s poetry and its title poem Now We Are Six – not just me referring to myself with the royal “we.”)

46. There really doesn’t seem to be anything good about turning 46. It’s on the bad side of the 40s, aka the side closer to 50. You’re still in your mid 40s – which would be bad enough – but not by much. I mean, it feels like you’re barely clinging to them, by your fingernails.

How does the internet think I should I feel about turning 46, since that was so helpful last year?

First, in terms of what Google suggests for searches when you type in “age 46”…See that image at the top? That’s what comes up if you’re me. Seriously Google? Is this all you think I care about? It’s somewhat comforting that when Damon does this search, he gets the same top three — what year born, menopause and irregular periods — but then that also means that women and people who can’t subtract are the only people who care enough about turning 46 to search for it.

Then, what comes up when you go ahead and do the search is:

1) Images of famous, hot celebrities who are 46, of course. Except that they are Courtney Cox, who is 50, and Brooke Shields who is 49 – they just were pictured in pieces that appeared when they were 46 (“Famous Actresses Then and Now,” from 2010, and “Ten Celebrity Moms Who Have Crows Feet and Age Gracefully,” from 2011). It’s a reminder that we are all aging faster that the internet can keep up, and that Courtney Cox will always look better than me, even if she’s four years older.

2) Yet another article about how men let themselves go at age 46 (apparently this study was big news in the UK).

3) That list of celebrities my age that I wrote about last year (you can read what I wrote about it here if you’re curious).

4) An article from The Economist called “The U-bend of life: Why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older.” Lest you think the news is all good, though, the quotable line from this article, highlighted as an inset, is, “People are least happy in their 40s and early 50s. They reach a nadir at a global average of 46.” So, overall forecast: it’s going to get better, but current mental state = nadir.

5) Daily News piece, whose headline literally tells the whole story: “Halle Berry opens up about ‘geriatric pregnancy’ at age 46, says she was ‘premenopausal.’” So, gorgeous star Halle Berry gets to have a baby at 46, and calls it geriatric. It’s like getting punched in the face twice.

6) A bunch of articles about people who died at 46: Utah lawmaker Becky Lockhart, Philip Seymour Hoffman, CNBC contributor and trader Rich Ilczyszyn.

Since the search for “age 46” is so much fun, what about a search for just the number 46?

Well, first, of course, the Wikipedia entry. In mathematics, “Forty-six is a Wedderburn-Etherington number, an enneagonal number and a centered triangular number,” which makes me feel extra stupid when I click on those links, read what they say, and then still don’t get what any of those those terms mean. In science, it’s the atomic number of palladium, the number of human chromosomes, and the approximate molar mass of ethanol — which is the first interesting thing I’ve read so far that doesn’t hurt my feelings. And other random facts: 46 is the number of books in the Old Testament if the Book of Lamentations is counted separate from the Book of Jeremiah; the number of peaks in the Adirondack Mountain Range (not counting the unofficial 47th peak); the international calling code for Sweden; the number of Samurai who carried out the attack in the historical Ako vendetta in the 17th century and then committed seppuku (one of the 47 Ronin turned back); the number that unlocks the Destiny spaceship in Stargate Universe; and the number depicted on the first flag of Oklahoma, the 46th state to join the union. And that’s…kind of it, which is unusual. Apparently, even to Wikipedia, 46 is lame.

Returning to the Google search, the next couple of entries for “46” are Maker’s 46 (the bourbon), a handful of establishments with 46 in the name (because they are all on 46th St), and P.S. 46 in Brooklyn. Then there’s New York City Council Member Alan Maisel of District 46, which encompasses a large swath of South Brooklyn that includes Mill Basin, Bergen Beach and Canarsie; and New York State Assembly District 46, led by Alec Brook-Krasny, which includes Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights. Then there’s U.S. Code Title 46, which has to do with shipping; California Proposition 46, otherwise known as the Medical Malpractice Lawsuits Cap and Drug Testing of Doctors; and the Federalist Papers: #46, in which James Madison seeks “to inquire whether the federal government or the State governments will have the advantage with regard to the predilection and support of the people.“ Then there is a DJ duo called Project 46, which “has made an undeniable impact on the progressive house scene this year” according to their Facebook page.; a 46” Samsung LED television on sale Best Buy; the latest breaking news in Atlanta on CBS 46; and “46 Questions Every Twentysomething Still Asks Their Mom” on Buzzfeed, which include How the fuck do I cook rice?, Can you look at a picture of my throat?, and What’s that place I always used to get my haircut? Once we’re on page four of the search, we get a story on how Obama’s approval rating is up to 46%; and the site of UA Local 46, whose motto is, “Superior piping skills since 1890.”

But then, on search page five, I found this post on Reddit from a 46-year-old banker in Australia who’s having a major midlife crisis, with the headline, “TIFU. More my whole life really.” He details how he’s spent the past 25 years working 10 hours a day, six days a week, and now he doesn’t know his son and his wife is cheating on him, and he’s never done anything that he’s wanted to do. Then there are the comments: “You can change. I am 50 now and I was like you…”; “Hear hear! A year ago, I was a 39 year old corporate lawyer, overweight and depressed…”; and best of all, “I haven’t been being me, at least not the person I used to be or desired to become, since I was about 15. Now I’m 23. I feel like I wasted my teenage years.” A reminder that anyone at any age can have a midlife crisis.

Or not. In spite of all this, the day just felt…kind of like a normal day, for once. I didn’t have a major case of the midlife blues. There are things that I wish I’d done and things I wish I’d done better, but I definitely am not looking back on a life wasted doing nothing. I’ve done a lot of stuff. And I’d like to have some things I don’t have, but I’m not really looking back and saying “Where did it all go?” I know where it all went, for the most part, and I’ve got some pretty good memories about it. Overall, I’d rather just ignore the birthday, but I think that’s better than how I usually feel, which is that I have to celebrate it to avoid feeling pathetic. This year? Eh, whatevs.

Sometimes a birthday is just a day. Or maybe that only happens when you turn 46.

Today, my husband and I went to open a business bank account at a bank in our neighborhood. What follows is an edited version (the whole transaction took about two hours) of what occurred there.

Bank Lady #1: (in heavy Brooklyn accent) Hello can I help you?

Me: We’re here to open a business account.

Bank Lady #1: Do you have all the paperwork?

Bank Lady #2 (comes over): (in heavy Russian accent) Do they have all the paperwork?

Me (handing them the folder): I think so.

Bank Lady #2 (examining the documents): Okay, good good, this looks good.

Bank Guy (coming over): Do they have all the paperwork?

He and Bank Lady #2 hunker over our documents.

Bank Lady #2: Articles of Organization…

Bank Guy: Articles of Organization…

Bank Lady #2: This is the filing receipt…

Bank Guy: Filing receipt…Do they have the tax ID number?

Bank Lady #2: Yes, it’s right here. See, IRS?

Bank Guy: Good. (To us) She’s going to help you. 

Bank Lady #2 (to Bank Lady #1): It’s almost lunchtime, so you can open the account. I have to go pick up the pizza. You know how to do it?

Bank Lady #1: Sure, sure, I can do it.

Bank Lady #2: Then I’ll come back and finish it. 

Bank Lady #1: Okay. Have a seat.

Bank Lady #2 leaves. We sit, Bank Lady #1 starts working on the computer, hands us papers to fill out.

Bank Lady #1: So what kind of business is it?

Me: Software development. 

Damon: And also film and music production.

Bank Lady #1: Oh yes, it says here you’re a filmmaker. You need any actresses? A lady in her 70s? I’m just kidding, but yes, I was born in 1940, I’m 74 years old. (To Damon) And what do you do?

Damon: I’m a developer and a musician.

Bank Lady #1: Oh, my boyfriend’s a musician! He plays at a bunch of places around here. I like to go watch him, any excuse to go dancing…

Bank Lady #3 (approaching): Are you helping them? 

Bank Lady #1: I’m just making conversation, keeping them amused. 

Bank Lady #3: Okay, but there’s no need tell them all this, just take care of them. (Walks away)

Bank Lady #1 (sotto voce): You see, they’re all managers, I’m the only employee. And I’m a part-timer. So they like to check up on me. She keeps telling me my face is red, but I just put on a little blush. It’s not too red, is it?

Me: No, I don’t think so.

Bank Lady #1: Okay. (Typing on the computer) So. Did you see the People’s Choice Awards last night? 

Me: No, I missed it.

Bank Lady #1: Betty White won! They had her up on stage, and she’s 92. Isn’t that wonderful? Oh, and so many beautiful actresses. It’s too bad you didn’t see it. Oh!

She goes up to get the door for Bank Lady #2, who enters, carrying two pizzas, walks into the back, then comes back out.

Bank Lady #2: Somebody ordered us that pizza from Di Fara’s. You know Di Fara’s?

Me: Oh yeah, it’s supposed to be some of the best pizza in the city.

Bank Lady #2: Yes, he’s a customer. I don’t usually eat pizza, but this pizza I eat because it’s very good. With the real tomatoes…

Bank Lady #1: The tomatoes…

Damon: Yes, everything’s fresh.

Bank Lady #2: …and the cheese, yes, it’s all fresh. I’m going to have some.

Bank Lady #1: It’s going to be cold.

Bank Lady #2: I’ll reheat it.

Bank Lady #1: Do you have tin foil for the toaster oven?

Bank Lady #2: I don’t think so.

Bank Lady #1: Well you can’t just put it in the toaster oven. (To us) It’ll drip all over and make a mess, with the cheese. (To Bank Lady #2) You have to go get some tin foil.

Bank Lady #2: (leaning over the computer) Let me see here…Okay, so you did that, good. No, just fill it in like this…good. (To us) Okay, would you  mind moving over to my desk to finish this? Because I have some things that I need over there. Is it okay?

Bank Lady #1: And I’m just going to tag along.

Us: Sure, no problem.

We all move a couple of desks back. Bank Guy comes out again.

Bank Guy: So you’re just going to finish up, and then they have to have the form signed…

Bank Lady #2: Yes. (To us) We’ll just have to have you take care of some things and bring them back to us, then we have to go take a picture of your business. Like this. (Shows us some photographs printed out in black and white of a building). You see, I take this with my phone, then I send it to myself.

Bank Guy: I know, it’s annoying, these are new rules. Everyone has to do it. Can we get you some water or something while you’re waiting?

Bank Lady #1: How about some coffee?

Me: No, that’s okay. 

Bank Lady #1: You sure?

Me: Really, we’re fine, thank you.

Bank Guy goes away again.

Bank Lady #2: He just came back from vacation in Hawaii. He loves it there.

Me: Oh yes, it’s very nice. A long flight though.

Bank Lady #2: Yes, I think 11 hours. It’s too long, I don’t like the long flights. I have this friend, she lives in New Zealand. She wants me to come visit, bring my children. But it’s a 24-hour flight. 24 hours! This is too long for me. Four hours, that’s the most.

Me: Well, you’d have to take a long vacation, two or three weeks.

Bank Lady #2: Well, I could, I do get four weeks of vacation time, I could take it. Though they’d have a heart attack here if I did. When I was pregnant, I worked right up until the day. I worked on Friday, had the baby on Sunday. We say he’s a bank baby. He was the first baby born to someone working here. There was a girl who had one after me, but I was the first.

Bank Lady #1: So you sure you don’t need an actress? A little tap dancing? (Starts tap dancing) No, I’m just kidding. (To Bank Lady #2) Is my face red? She was telling me my face is red but I said I just put on a little blush.

Bank Lady #2: Yeah, just a little blush. (To us) So what type of business is it?

Damon: Software development and film and music production.

Bank Lady #2: You know, I’m just going to say “software development,” because you don’t want to make it too complicated. Though they don’t have that here, but…(to Bank Lady #1, pointing at the computer screen) See, they have all these things, “gambling,” “pawn shop” — I can’t believe that’s a legitimate business.

Bank Lady #1: Sure, we had a pawn shop around the corner when I was growing up. My mother used to hock her wedding ring.

Bank Lady #2: She’d hock it then buy it back?

Bank Lady #1: Yeah. (To us) Times were tough.

Bank Lady #2: I could never hock my ring. Because I found out how much they pay for it. When I got divorced I wanted to sell it. $10,000 ring, they wanted to give me $3000 for it. So I said I’ll keep it. Give it to my daughters in law. If they’re nice. Hope I have nice daughters in law, I don’t have any daughters. My ex-husband, he works in a jewelry store on 47th street, so you know, I have some nice stuff. Okay, so what else do we have to fill out? Oh yes, this…

Bank Lady #1: Oh and don’t forget the W-9.

Bank Lady #2: Right, yes, the W-9.  Good thinking! (To us) She has a good memory, even though she’s older. Sign here and here.

Bank Lady #1: We’ve been working together ten years. 

Bank Lady #2 (taking signed forms): All right, yes, I think we’re done. So you just come back with this signed and then we can start everything.

Us: Great, thank you.

Bank Lady #1: Okay, so I’m going to go get the tin foil.

It’s New Years’ Eve in NYC. Again. Yeah, surprise, it happens every year, so we should all be used to it. And yet, there’s always the struggle to find the right thing to do. This is fraught because not only is New Years the biggest party night of the year, it also functions as a celebration of both a beginning and an end, so it has the responsibility of summing up the year that’s ending and setting you up for a good year to come. That is really just too much for one holiday to handle. Plus, it generally follows on the trauma of the concentrated dose of family that comes every year at holiday time, bringing up all sorts of issues that now you really just want to drown in a night of debauchery or at least heavy drinking. 

The lead up: You start tentatively asking your friends what they’re doing in early December, but you have to be careful. The thing is, A) You don’t want to sound desperate or pathetic because you don’t already have incredible plans and B) You have to find that right thing to do. If your friend has an idea that sounds interesting, you have to be intrigued but non-committal, because what if you get a better offer? What if the best party/event/last-minute dream trip comes along and then you’ve already committed to a small dinner at a restaurant, or going to see some band you don’t even really like all that much, or at least, not New Years much? On any other day, this kind of conversation would be incredibly rude — to ask someone what they’re doing and then not make plans with them — but because it’s New Years, all bets are off, because everyone is playing the same game. 

And because you’re playing it, inevitably, a week before the holiday, you still don’t know what you’re going to do, so, now in a panic, you just pick something — or, as I often have, three, four or five things that you have to travel between, on the worst night of the year to try to get a cab, to avoid your FOMO. Now, even though you’re terrified that you’ve picked the wrong thing(s), you think that maybe if you wear the right outfit, drink the right amount of alcohol, and act like you’re having the time of your life, you can still make it happen. This inevitably leads to regrets of all sorts — spending too much money, eating and drinking too much, giving your number to or kissing someone you wish you hadn’t or don’t even remember, and then having to stumble home, freezing, at some ungodly hour, perhaps waiting forever in a subway station or train that smells like vomit, avoiding people who are even more drunk and stupid than you. You recover on New Years Day, try to make a good story out of it so at least it’s not a total loss, and swear that you’ll do better next year.

The best New Years I’ve ever had, at least on paper, was one of those nights when everything actually happened like it would be scripted to in the rom com version of my life that has yet to be made. I had three parties to go to, and the second one was a big bash that friends of mine who owned a post-production house held with everyone in their large shared office/studio space in the Meat Packing District (in the 90s, so before it really was the Meat Packing District, so that makes it even cooler, right?). I’d come from a family vacation in the Caribbean, so I was as tan as I’d ever be, and wearing the perfect short, velvet party dress — so check, and check. Then at maybe around 11:30, who did I run into but this guy who I’d always thought was really attractive, who also seemed, on this night, to think I was really attractive, and who I got to kiss at midnight and give my phone number to. Then I got to flit off to meet the friends I’d promised hook up with at my third party, to which I invited him to go, but he declined, looking sadly after me as I departed. When I got home, sure enough, he’d called and left his number with my roommate (this was the pre-cell phone era), with the message, “I should have gotten on the elevator.” He was so drunk that my roommate had trouble making it out, but yes, he actually said that. Of course, the coda to this story is that, true to real life not being like the movie version, about a week later, he and I had the most awkward date possible. He was late, so we missed the movie we were supposed to see (it was, of course, Titanic), then either he was so good-looking he’d never learned how to make conversation, or he just was so uninterested in me now that he was sober and I was no longer tan that he didn’t want to bother. Whatever the reason, we wandered around for two or three hours, managing to get through dinner and drinks with me basically babbling just for the sake of having it not be entirely silent. It was such a relief when we finally said goodnight that I was able to not be too disappointed that I didn’t get another kiss (I honestly didn’t remember the New Years one). 

The worst New Years Eve I ever had was when three friends and I decided to pay to go to a big party thrown by these “name party-planners.” For a set fee, they promised top shelf open bar, food, and famous DJs at a very cool space on the Lower East Side. We paid, dressed (again, of course, I remember what I wore: a tight black skirt, tall boots and a shiny, slinky shirt — it felt like it was made out of petroleum — that I had bought but never worn) and got on line in at the venue around 10:30. And after that things went downhill. We were still on line at midnight. Then when we did get inside, it was a disorganized mess of more lines for coat check and a fast-dwindling supply of well liquor in tiny plastic cups. Two of my friends were so frustrated that they left soon after, but one friend and I stuck it out and danced to the unexciting DJ, wanting to make the night worth something. By the time we did try to leave, there were huge lines again for coats, which became a free-for-all when it turned out none of the checkers knew where anyone’s coat was, with people jumping over the check tables to grab anything they could get. When I fought my way in (after a the table I climbed over collapsed under me), my coat was nowhere to be found, and of course there were no cabs, so, coatless, I walked way too many blocks through snow drifts to the F train, waited forever, then dragged myself the several more blocks home, where I had never been happier to experience my overheated Brooklyn apartment. The coda to that story was that we got our money back from Amex (plus I actually somehow got the number of one of said “name party-planners” from one of the coat-check people and so was able to scream at him personally before he turned his phone off), and, in the end, it made for a great cautionary tale for the four of us to tell at parties, where we could pretty much top any bad New Years story (except for maybe the one one of my friends has about being trapped in an elevator).

In truth, most of the truly good New Years Eves that I’ve had have been ones where I fought these instincts, settled into low or no expectations, and just did something with my friends/partner that was fun: dinner at a nice restaurant, a small party, watching the fireworks in Grand Army Plaza, seeing a band that just knew how to have a good time, dancing the night away at a lesbian club (kind of the height no expectations if you’re a single heterosexual, which is what made it fun). A close second has been coming home on New Years Eve from a trip so late that I couldn’t make plans, and then had license to just fall asleep on the couch before midnight. One reason I look forward to having children, honestly, is that your partying years can officially be over, so that nobody, including you, has any expectations about what New Years should be.

Because every year, I think I have finally gotten to a point where I really and truly don’t care, and will just do whatever, now that I’m married and not looking to meet a guy, or really anyone, since I’ve gotten less gregarious as I’ve gotten older and feel like I have enough friends. But then inevitably, when the time comes, and everyone starts talking about it, I have to fight the urge to question whatever my plans are and keep looking and looking for the right thing. Even though I know there is no right thing. 

Happy New Year!

 

 

(photo by Matthew Israel)

 

Recently, my husband was distressed about a video he came across of Louis CK being interviewed at the Paley Center. During the Q&A at the end (around 48:45), CK responds to a question about the best attitude to have in production by saying that people should just be nice human beings, respect everyone else on set, and do the best job they can. He gives an example of a female boom operator on the movie Pootie Tang who was an inexperienced student, who was only on set for a day, and who had brought negativity by being “belligerent,” when she said “Wait a minute, I’m not ready” (which he imitates, comedian style, in an entitled/whiny/let’s-make-fun-of-the-girl voice) when they were trying to roll because “she didn’t like how she had the boom.” This was meant to be an example to all of the students in his audience of what not to do, and Damon was worried that the person at whose expense this snide, cautionary tale was told, was me. 

Was it? I don’t actually know. I did work on Pootie Tang, though for a week, not a day, and I do remember running afoul of CK. Once, between takes, I mentioned to him that Jennifer Coolidge, who played the femme fatale, was banging around during a seduction/sex scene with the main character (whose name, yes, was Pootie Tang) in a boiler room, making loud noises over both their dialogue that I thought would be a problem in the edit. Giving these types of notes is something that boom operators are supposed to do, since they are the sound department’s representative on set, and often the fact that there’s a problem like this has to be conveyed quickly, before they roll on the next take. However, I gave him the note in front of Coolidge, and apparently this was a no-no. Often, directors may not judge a technical suggestion about sound important enough to consider when weighed against how applying it might alter an actor’s performance (like asking them to speak up in an intense scene where they are supposed to be whispering), and because some actors are sensitive to any sort of note on their acting, directors can be very protective about what those actors overhear. The sound mixer, as well as the boom operator who had worked on the film before me (I was replacing someone else toward the end of the job), had been informed that this was a rule — not talking about the actors in front of them — but the sound mixer had failed to inform me. I guess my error was bad enough that CK not only came over and told me himself that I should not have done this, but then he also complained to the sound mixer about it — who, rather than defending me by saying, “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell her that you didn’t want us to do that,” basically hung me out to dry by saying, “Well, Friday’s her last day.” (That was the real dick move of that scenario in my opinion, but anyway). 

So, I did boom on the job, and CK was clearly aware of my presence on it, and not in a good way. Still, it doesn’t sound like the person he’s describing was me: I wasn’t a student at the time, I was a union boom operator, and I wasn’t only working on the film for one day. However, a student actually couldn’t have boomed on Pootie Tang because it was a union film, so that’s just a red herring, something I guess CK either thought erroneously or thought made the story better, when giving advice to a film student. Plus, if you look at the list of credits at IMDb, you’ll see that there aren’t any women listed in the sound department (there’s a Kelly, but I know him and he’s a guy), which is pretty standard for that time. So it’s kind of unlikely that there were any other female boom ops on the job.  

And while I don’t remember the interaction he describes, it’s the kind of thing that has happened to me plenty of times, especially on low-budget movies with first-time directors like Pootie Tang, which tend to be a bit disorganized. For the record, here’s how it’s supposed to work: when the AD calls “Roll sound” on set, everyone is supposed to wait for the sound mixer to roll and tell the boom operator he/she has rolled, at which point the boom op calls out “Speed,” or “Sound speed” (because back in the day, analog, reel-to-reel recorders had to actually come up to speed, or else you’d end up with the first words of the scene sounding chipmunky when you played them back, which generally was not the goal). This has always traditionally happened first, before rolling camera, because rolling camera used to mean, until recently, rolling film, and you didn’t want to start burning the expensive stuff until the last possible second. So the “Speed” call became the cue for the camera assistant to call the slate, at which point camera rolls, slate is clapped, and the director calls “Action.” When people don’t wait for “Speed,” everything can go to hell in a handbasket real fast, because somebody isn’t going to be ready.

Now, part of what sucks about being a sound person is that, because you are the bastard stepchild of set — aka not camera — people don’t bother to check if you’re ready. Not that they should ask necessarily (nobody ever does so we’re used to that), but a good AD should know, because it’s his or her job to be paying attention and observing when everyone on set is ready to go, and only then call “Roll sound.” ADs who are new or overwhelmed, as they often are on low-budget stuff, are not so good at this. That’s why, even if the sound person is rolling, if I’m booming and I’m not ready, I don’t call “Speed” — that’s my (and every other boom operator’s) little secret for how to get just a few extra seconds to get my shit together if necessary. And when you’re working with a low-budge sound mixer, particularly one who is just filling in for someone else, you might need that extra moment because you’re using their equipment, which is often not ready for primetime. The ones I used to work with had boom poles that were used, old, broken or sticky, and they often had no duplex cable – the cable that boom ops used to lay (before almost everyone went wireless boom) from the sound cart to the set every time we went in to boom a shot, to connect the boom mic to the mixing board (you can’t leave the cable in there between set-ups or it gets buried/trampled/destroyed when the camera and lights move). Without it, something kludgy generally had to be rigged, which meant it was harder to put together and put on and get over to set in a hurry. Plus there are the billion other things one might be called on to do right before roll, like adjust a plant mic, or fix an actor’s wire. So, not that I’m making excuses, but…okay, maybe I am making excuses for the fact that when the AD calls roll sound, or the 2^nd AC slates, or even when the director calls “Action,” I’m not always ready — and that truly sucks because then I can’t do my job, which is my whole reason for being there, since, you know, it’s my job.

Now these days, when that happens, I’ve been through it so many times that I know how to handle it, and I typically yell out “Stand by for speed,” in my most professional voice, to let people know that I am not ready, and speed has not been called. But back in 2000 when Pootie Tang was filmed, when I had only been booming professionally for six years and in the union for two, when I was struggling to get all of the mixer’s substandard equipment hooked up and over to set, it’s quite possible that I might have responded by instead saying irritatedly, “Wait a minute, I’m not ready.” Because seriously, what the fuck? No matter how I might feel about the material or how disorganized a set is, believe it or not, I still want to do a good job, and not being able to do that makes me feel downright shitty. It may not be my place to show it — in fact, it definitely isn’t — so these days, I generally don’t. But I’m human, and even now, when I’m saying “Stand by for speed,” what I really would like to say is, “I’m not ready!”, or, more precisely, “Hello, morons, can’t you see I’m not fucking ready?!” Which, I’d like to point out, the woman in the story did not say, and I have never said — much as, oh yes, I have been tempted. Because aren’t we all supposed to be on the same team, working toward the same goal, of making this film as good as it can be? And if my job doesn’t matter toward that goal, to the point that you think it’s okay to go on ahead and shoot when I’m not ready, then why the heck am I here?

Again, we don’t know if CK is talking about me, but he is talking about some female boom operator, who he’s making out to be an incompetent student with a bad attitude and a whiny voice, and that’s bad enough. Because as far as I can tell, she’s trying to do her job well – which is exactly what he’s is telling everyone in that audience to do: to care. Maybe, in the heat of the moment, she’s speaking out of frustration, and not in the most professional way, at all. But if you’re saying that everyone should want to work together to do the best job possible, wouldn’t you, as the director, want her to care enough about the fact that she’s not ready to say something, so that she could actually be ready and do her job properly? And shouldn’t you respect her and her work enough to allow her to do that? And, last but not certainly least, isn’t talking about her in a public forum in a disparaging way, using her to make a point and, perhaps more importantly to a comedian, get a laugh, kind of the opposite of treating a person with respect – particularly a woman in a job/industry that already doesn’t treat women with a heck of a lot of it? Because the implication of your story is then really that she should have just shut the fuck up, because yours is the only job, or the only voice, that really matters here. Which is kind of the opposite of the point that you said you started off trying to make. 

Sure. Louis CK, like any other director, has his side of things and I have mine, and I can tell mine too. I have this blog that reaches all of, like, twelve people, and even if I didn’t, crew people talk amongst themselves. The stories of a director who is incompetent or an asshole will spread, and likely much more quickly than the stories of the ones who are nice and excel at their jobs, because let’s face it, many of us crew people are aspiring directors and we love to tell tales of the folks who we could be doing it better than, if only we could be doing it. But if you are the director, and have that job that is more important than everyone else’s, the one that everyone wants, and you then become famous for it and get access to a big mic (much bigger than the one I get to hold) with which to tell your story, is this really the story that you want to tell? Does this story make you look like you were in the right, or does it make you look like an ungracious jerk, because you are the fucking director, the person with the power, poking fun at and making an example out of someone who worked for a relative pittance on your movie, and who just, unfortunately for her, cared. 

Or maybe that’s just me. Even if it wasn’t.

 

 

I live in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. It’s a sub-neighborhood of Flatbush where you find large Victorian houses on some streets mixed in with apartment buildings and small businesses on the avenues, all a short bike ride from Prospect Park. It’s diverse, first off, by income. Some of the people who own those houses are obviously well-off (you can see by the expensive construction jobs some are undergoing), but many others have been homes for generations, from a time before the real estate boom/crisis pushed people outward from Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens to farther and farther parts of Brooklyn and Queens (we are around 20 to 30 minutes from Manhattan by train at an express stop, so not as desirable as many more popular neighborhoods). Plus, many of the large homes here are subdivided and shared to make them more affordable, and the apartments are still reasonably priced — at least for New York — and unfancy. Ours has a roach problem, an often-in-need-of-repair elevator, and one part-time doorman who works from 4 to 10 pm and never actually opens the door, but does greet me with a nice “Hello, Dear” whenever I enter. Most people in the building say “hello,” in fact, and our maintenance is low, so it works for us and people like us, for whom owning an apartment is about having a pleasant and affordable place to live, rather than an investment or status.

The variety of housing that leads to economic diversity is also part of the reason behind the neighborhood’s ethnic and racial diversity. Our building is predominantly white, African American and Caribbean, with a smattering of Asian folks. That’s kind of reflective of the neighborhood, but it changes, depending literally on which corner you stand and which direction you face. Go two blocks west, and you might think it’s mainly Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Middle Eastern— many different types of head scarves and kameezes. Continue west or go four blocks south, and you end up very obviously, thanks to the black suits, hats, long skirts and wigs, in a Hassidic/Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Go east to Flatbush Avenue and the neighborhood is mostly black, including African American, West Indian and Haitian. And mixed in all around you find Latino and East Asian families and businesses. At my local grocery, as you can imagine, you find an interesting mix of staples from all over the world – including probably fifty different kinds of hot sauce.

As a result, the neighborhood sometimes confounds people. Some folks who have visited us here are primed to think it’s a ritzy enclave because of the big houses, but then are thrown by the diversity/lack of white people that they see on the streets. Other people think it’s hipsterville because of the cool restaurants and bars on Cortelyou Road, the one really gentrified strip in the neighborhood, but then you can turn right off of that on to Coney Island Avenue and find yourself surrounded by car washes, cell phone stores, and steam table storefronts. To me, this is what makes it quintessentially New Yorkish, and a pretty great place to live. Like most people, I would like to live closer to the city, but aside from that, we’re pretty fortunate in terms of what we have here.

I was a little worried a couple of years ago when we noticed on our bike rides that cars in one part of the neighborhood seemed to be getting broken into a lot. On certain blocks, we’d find ourselves trying to avoid several pools of broken glass where car windows had clearly been smashed the night before, one after another. Friends said they heard it was about identity theft, so I took my registration out of the car for a while, but they thefts never came closer to us, so I eventually put it back. As New Yorkers, we are used to this sort of thing. That’s why I don’t leave anything that looks like it might even remotely be of value in view inside my car. I even take my E-Z Pass off the windshield. I know that’s probably overkill, but since I moved here in the ‘90s, this just seems like common sense to me. Why risk it?

Then just in these past couple of months, there was a new development: a series of armed robberies. Two restaurants and one café have been held up by one or more men with guns, and they’ve taken not just whatever was in the cash register but the possessions of the patrons — cash, computers, jewelry. In one case, which has been tied to the robberies maybe only by its proximity, an older man was killed in a home invasion. This has everyone on edge. Two of the restaurants that got hit are places that my husband and I go to literally all the time, and we take our computers to a different local café to work on a regular basis. The fact that we weren’t the ones robbed makes us feel like it was just the luck of the draw. One local business owner even said he felt like he was “‘in line just waiting for something to happen.’”

But something else the same guy said was, “‘Worst-case scenario, the robberies are a pushback against the new people in the neighborhood.’” I thought maybe this dude was an exaggerating drama queen, but it turns out he’s not the only one talking about this. Back in May, there was a lot of talk about anti-gentrification graffiti that showed up at the Church Avenue subway station, one express stop away from us. Then, at the town hall meeting about the robberies, it came up again. At least people in my part of Brooklyn are talking about these things, and hopefully listening and learning something. (That may not be happening in other transitional neighborhoods, like Gowanus, where, rather than a discussion about the new Brooklyn probation office that’s been slated to open there and its role in and effect on the community, there’s a lawsuit). But I realized, after reading that article about the town hall, that while I love my neighborhood, I have to wonder whether we are really one community — to the degree that not only are we having trouble finding a solution to what currently ails us, we’re even having trouble agreeing on what the problem is. Yes, everyone deplores the crime, but for some, it’s the only issue, while for others, it’s part of a larger picture: lack of jobs, lack of opportunity and lack of affordable housing, which are growing as the neighborhood gentrifies, driving poor and minority residents out. You can see the culture clash in how some are talking about things like how to prevent recidivism while others are talking about putting more cops on the street and putting up more cameras. And it underscores the fact that in my own community, not just in Ferguson or on Staten Island, the police don’t make us all feel safer, certainly not equally. (These days, when Damon and I see cops pulling over a car or talking to someone on the street, our first thought is not, “There’s the NYPD doing it’s job keeping us safe,” it’s, “Should we take out our phones and start filming?”)

It’s when crises like this happen that people’s assumptions about what’s “good,” “a problem,” and “inevitable” come to the fore, and yes, they have a lot to do with race. You might somehow think, in a neighborhood as diverse as mine, that race becomes less of a factor, but in fact, that diversity only makes it patently obvious to anyone who lives here how much it still matters. I’ve been on both sides of gentrification, as both the gentrifier and the person pushed out by it, but there’s a big difference between seeing both sides and having people place you on one permanently, because of the color of your skin. So while plenty of white people think gentrification is “good,” and others think it’s “a problem,” many still call it an “inevitable” problem, one which they accept since they hope to end up on the happy side of it one day. But acceptance is a little harder when the establishment — white landlords, co-op boards, local business owners, cops, and often some of your neighbors — tends to look at you as the before picture, the ‘hood, the “broken windows.” You can try to tell me it’s not that way — that you don’t think that way — and maybe you don’t. I like to think that I don’t. But when I talked about the robberies, who did you picture perpetrating the crime, and who did you see as the victims? (The answer: the robbers wore masks and gloves so we don’t know, and the victims were racially mixed). These are embedded assumptions about gentrification and crime — thanks in no small part to the film and television industry that I work in. Don’t believe me? Go to IMDb and look up your favorite black actors and see the ratio of cops and criminals they’ve played compared to anything else. And the few positive representations we’ve seen in the media that break from this, from The Cosby Show to Blackish to every Shonda Rhimes series to the one black/minority friend who now is a staple of sitcoms (and hey, New Girl has two!), cannot counter the literally centuries of negatives that have buried themselves in our collective cultural psyche. And this is not even getting into the root fact that this relationship between gentrification and race and poverty and crime exists because the history of this country is inseparable from slavery and Jim Crow and separate-but-equal and redlining and predatory lending and white flight. (Details? Read this — it’s long but worth it).

The sad thing about the broken windows theory is that one of its original ideas was that people had to take pride and invest in their communities to make them better. Now, it’s become a way of looking at policing and gentrification that treats the poor and minorities as the broken windows that need to be fixed to make our city better — basically, the opposite. I think that we have the possibility here in Ditmas Park, as much as anywhere, to understand our city’s povertygentrificationcrimeracism problem, and find real solutions — like affordable housing and protection of tenant rights, support services for the poor like job training and day care, better public schools, more community involvement, better rather than more policing…I don’t know what all the answers are, but I think we need to find them together.