Michael Morgenstern

The beggars on the street are my age now.

As I grow old I travel through the crowd That girl with guitar open, she could be me. That boy with a nintendo and gum in his hair That's who I could used to be And the bankers with ties and suits and hollow stares aren't

Scan the Tee!

Good morning to all! I’m excited to take the wraps off a project I’ve been working on for the past several weeks. Even if you don’t know what they are, you are probably familiar with QR codes, 2D barcodes that can be scanned using your cell phone.

Focus

“When you throw a rock into the water, it will speed on the fastest course to the bottom of the water. This is how it is when Siddhartha has a goal, a resolution. Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he passes through the things of the

Ryoji Ikeda, The Transfinite

As I alluded to in my last post, I’m spending June at NYU’s ITP grad program. It’s a hard thing to describe, but it’s kind of like an inventing camp for nerds. We learn how to make things (check out my MTA sign beta I made

1 in 1 at ITP Camp liveblog!

8:27pm – check out my day’s work! http://everythingiseverything.com/mta/ – very proud!   I’m in my first week of ITP Camp, a NYU grad program that combines creativity with multiple disciplines – basically, making shit. Today we are doing 1 in 1, one project in one day. I eventually

Dadaab

The Refugee - newsletter from Dadaab

The folk at FilmAid in Dadaab have made two issues of The Refugee newsletter recently. It’s amazing to read the stories of what people go through day in and day out in their own words. This is what we try to do with film, but with the slow speed

The question is central in non-linear drama

I was speaking to a friend yesterday about a web concept he had that was going to consist of video and other multimedia. It had a main character and a number of concepts and ideas. I started to think: in a usual narrative, the drama comes from the interaction between

commericals

FilmAid trailer

New FilmAid trailer directed by yours truly. What an experience. Thanks to everyone involved, especially Jessica Brunetto, Mandi Corso, Wendy Finster, Kevin Hyman, Ryan Jones, Liz Manne, Mary Soan, and Anthony Weintraub.

Rest in peace, grandma

My honored grandmother, a beloved mother and wife, Mary Clemens, died March 29, 2011 after 97 long, happy, and graceful years. You will be remembered for your smile and your generosity, your unique perspective, and the quiet patience and strength you applied to every challenge you ever faced. You will

Making plans in NYC

Things have been a little crazy which is why no updates. Intense at FilmAid including a few weeks down in Haiti screening the presidential debates. Intense personally – I’ve been trying and failing to focus on a screenplay for an application that’s due in a few days, and instead

filmaid

Day one in Kakuma

Our new Executive Director and board just took a trip to Kenya, and it brought me back to the first time I visited Kakuma. I hear that some of the refugees recorded a video message for me and am excited to see it. “It will make you go kkkkk,” they

Towards a post-skills economy

I’ve been meaning to write these thoughts down for a few months now, but since today some of my ideas friends have called crazy and unrealistic are in the New York Times, I’ll get it out. Now many of us can agree that Ray Kurzweil is a nut,

Francis Ford Coppola on film

Thanks to Ted, and thanks to Francis for this interview. One of the greats gives us a lesson in film you’d be unlikely to forget. His speech shows the same honest grace that his movies do, and that he claims to strive for at the end of the interview.

Aldous Huxley

A silver lining on war

A silver lining of a cloud riddled with bullets – it’s still silver. When I arrived at the refugee camp in Dadaab I was bowled over the head with the monstrosity of what I saw. The millions of lives shattered in the name of meaningless political conflict had me losing

Foli Rhythm

Sent to me by Mark, it is very beautiful and mesmerizing. Is it representative of Malian culture? Respectful? Nativist? Are we watching as a participant or an observer? What does an American notice as we watch? What would a Malian notice? Either way it is a beautiful film.

Guest Post: Sex for Survival by Liban Rashid

I have asked some friends of mine from the Dadaab and Ifo camps to to write guest posts on my blog about their lives and experiences in the camps. This post is from Liban Rashid, a young Somali man who came to Dadaab as a child about 18 years ago

Reverse shock

Jet engines rocketing for hours on end. Flexing my privilege. London UK and a hostel filled with drunken teenagers traveling around the world and partying every night. Most of them are “broke” and that word means too many things. Cold weather. Hedonism, toasted bagels with the inside cut out and

Lose our own soul

I feel that our generation is destined to gain the world but lose our own soul. We will have perfect vision, perfect hearing, perfect lifespan as the world falls to ruin at our feet.

Sorrow and Joy we live and we love

Places have a way of blossoming open right as one is about to leave them. Three days before I am to depart Nairobi it has revealed itself to me in the glory of a thorny rose. I just came back from a two hour cab ride with a lovely man

Teaching film in Dadaab

After editing a film in Dadaab, I spent two and a half weeks teaching film as part of FilmAid’s Participatory Video Project. Ordinarily the PVP curriculum consists of individual units focused on different aspects of filmmaking, to form about a year’s curriculum. Our class was a general one,

Planning on traveling to Mogadishu?

The awful war in Somalia is no laughing matter, but wikitravel’s attempt to describe Mogadishu, the capital city, is comical. It’s an earnest attempt to function as a travel guide and at the same time inform readers that they would have to be clinically insane to want to

Thoughts on us existing as a computer simulation

Many a scientist has hypothesized that we are living in a computer simulation (especially Nick Bostrom who says it’s almost definite.) If a computer were simulating the rules of physics, our molecules would be virtualized bits of data. There’d be no way to tell. It’s hard to

They sent out links to my blog hilarious

A few weeks ago I DJ’d at the Pumzika club – it was an epic failure of international music that I blogged about here. I thought it was pretty hilarious, if a bit frustrating at the time. I was pretty sure that the clientele would not appreciate my non-reggae&

Would you fight in the US Army?

I had a fascinating conversation with a Somali refugee – let’s call him Mohamed. I suggest you first watch the video below, which was blurred for his security: Mohamed first discusses his issues with the Somali and Kenyan governments, both of which are indifferent to the plight of the refugee.

We learn on PRO APPS

When working with a beginner, it’s not better to go simple. It’s worse–far worse. I’m on lunch break from teaching a PVP class how to edit. Some of them have barely used computers before, and none have touched an editing program. Conventional wisdom would be to