This is what I’ll be able to say to my grandchildren.

It will not simply be idle yarns spun by a crotchety miser; the history books will confirm it. Brooklynites will define this century!

Don’t believe me? You dare doubt the collective power of the Millennial Generation’s bottom up, Do-it-Yourself Awesomeness.

We are making our food from scratch: Brooklyn’s New Culinary Movement

Mast Brother Chocolate – These guys use old-school bartering with chocolate bars to expand their operations.

McClure’s Pickles - They make one spicy delicious pickled cucumber.

How about a desktop 3D Printer, kinda like a Startrek replicator? Makerbot

Started by the crazy DIY dudes at NYC RESISTOR

Oh your not impressed, you jaded SOB!  I outta box your ears, whippersnapper! (ok, so I’m already crotchety)  Put this in your pipe and smoke it:

Brooklyn Based Open Source Fusion Project (read: Clean, Cheap, fossil-free Energy, based on the Sun)

That’s right, Big Oil is dead, it’s time to make good on the promised of the Nuclear Age.

Kiss our glowing purple reactor!

Now accepting donations.

It will come to fruition, as long those meddling hipsters don’t mess it up!

Check out the highlights from the last indie Social Event!

Fifteen Years ago, Kevin Costner was drinking his own pee.  Filtered pee, of course, for his epic 1995 film “Water World“, which is best know for being an epic flop.

But wait!  Could there be some benefit from this bleak look into a future without dryland?

It seems that when Kevin was in the aqua-survivalist mood he invested in a developing a pump technology which separates oil from water.  Costner, an adamant environmentalist, may have only wanted to clean up the water from the myriad of gasoline explosions that took place on the open water set when he gave $20 million to his scientist brother.

Just another example of how the movies are advancing the human race!

Filmmakers Get Social: Prepping your Doc with funding:

Navigating non-profits, fiscal sponsorship, and raising

funds using social media

Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 7:30 PM (ET) @ The Roger Smith Hotel

This Creature, “little dog”, is the less scary (and noisy) version of Big Dog, the DARPA four-legged robot from Boston Dynamics.
It is almost… dare I say: cute. You be the judge.

Technology envisioned for “Minority Report” will soon come to fruition.

I don’t vote in Ohio, but I did work on the motion graphics for these video spots.

Check them out here:

http://www.youtube.com/FisherForOhio

In the spirit of the holiday, here is a short we made last year.

It features the newly restored Jesus!

Since humans began the practice of leaving the firepit to squat behind the bushes, we have been trying to get away from our own waste. The process is now fully industrialized and, thanks to the flush, we almost never even have to see the evil that our body must purge daily. Out of sight, out of mind.

Is this progress? Do we really benefit from the denial of self?

The truth is that our waste never really goes away. It goes down a gravity fed eight inch pipe, connects to a sewer pipe which leads to a waste water treatment plant, which is generally at a geological low point in the region.

When filming Transposition at the Municipal Utility District in Trophy Club, Texas, I was able to see the entire operation first hand.

Two products are exported from the plant: reclaimed (non-potable) water and biosolids. Various mechanical processes separate the solids from the liquids. The water is sifted and treated with bacteria and travels under a UV light to kill the bacteria and finally pours into a lake. This water is almost safe to drink. After spending a few months in the lake it is pumped into a water treatment plant. The water goes through the same processes as in the waste water plant, but the digesters and purifiers are all enclosed. It gets sent up a pipe, back into your house, or to a factory to be put into a bottle and sold to you.

Jeff Richey sums it up nicely in Transposition “We clean it up and you’re drinking it again.”

The solids are laid out to dry, out of direct sunlight. If the solids are laid in an enclosed building, they are eligible to become fertilizer and resold. In the case of Trophy club M.U.D. they simply truck the stuff out to a dump.

 

While looking at the piles of solids, a Trophy Club City Council member remarked, "Who planted these tomatoes?" Jeff answered, "Everybody".

When early man noticed that his favorite edible plants began growing from his latrine, it sparked a revolution called farming.  The bushes that we were squatting behind, actually grew out of our waste.  Civilization as we know can from this very simple observation of a natural processes, of which we are all a part.

We have systematically removed ourselves from bodily knowledge, like a reversion into the utopia garden of eden. We don’t want to know that 91% of the cells in our body are microorganisms and that 85% of the DNA we can call human is identical to mouse DNA. We want to feel special and self sufficient. The fact that we need to evacuate smelly brown stuff from our bodies is a secret we want to keep from others and even ourselves, but it is the truth.

Jeff Richey on Jazz: “I think it should sound pretty… and sometimes it sounds darn, right ugly!”

Good morning from SXSW! I’ve got just over a full day left at the fest, and I’m starting it with screenings of two IFP films in competition – Miao Wang’s Beijing Taxi and Cameron Yates’ The Canal Street Madam.

Both have had outstanding marketing schemes at the fest. At the Beijing Taxi party – Beijinger 80s-style punkrock bands playing in a Mexican bar – Miao (with her parents as assistant marketers) sold t-shirts and one-of-a-kind flipbooks showing scenes from the film. The Canal Street Madam branded condoms, including their screening times, were a huge hit at all the parties. Looking forward to seeing both films at the Alamo Lamar today. I am in love with that theater chain (thou I am certainly not their only suitor) – there’s nothing quite like being served pizza, beer, and a chocolate peanut butter milkshake during a film.

SXSW has have commissioned a series of 30-second intro reels, magical realism hazards of filmmaking, from filmmaker David Lowery (his St. Nick is a Narrative Lab alum and premiered at SXSW 09). SXSW’s originality has made the filmmakers here step up their game. Life 2.0 had a Q&A via Second Life, the Happy Poet team parked the vegetarian food cart that is the center of the film in front of the theater (I’m pressing them to put recipes on their website), and to my glee, everyone seems to have clever 1/2″ buttons with images from their films.