Quartz Joins My Civil Resistance
Call it syndication, or call it the sharing economy. It feels good to see your hard work spread across the spectrum. So thanks to Quartz for picking up my Civil Eats explainer on the Farm Bill’s doom.
CLI-FI
Say It Loud and Proud: Animation Is Film
As the political and entertainment establishment continues to reject toxic masculinity and industry, the mounting movement to place our attention and investment on productions and issues truly worth the global public’s time and money is reaching critical mass
Farmers Markets Come Under Presidential Fire
My latest investigation for Civil Eats is not so much alarming as predictable. The current presidential administration, already an international laughingstock, has targeted farmers markets for elimination. The punishment? Death by pointless cuts.
Animation Is Film, Said The Festival
It may not seem like we need to have a three-day festival in Hollywood celebrating animation as cinema with a capital C. But if that was the case, I would not have spent the weekend with my girls in Hollywood at the Animation Is Film festival.
Feeding The Resistance
In a globally warming, warring world where Americans throw away half the food they grow, nourishing activism with a heart and mind in service of renewable peace is paramount. Enter author Julia Turshen, who I profiled for Civil Eats.
What Is Organic? Depends On Who’s Asking
This investigation for Civil Eats is about the terminology we take for granted so that billions of dollars can exchange hands in the organic market, as we throw away over a third of the food we ask our burning Earth to provide us.
Cli-Fi: 75 Years Later, Bambi Terrorizes
Written by an immigrant Jew hounded by Hitler, and envisioned by a Chinese immigrant dreaming of America, Walt Disney’s Bambi remains an unheeded warning of terror and terraformation, sadly forgotten by a burning world careening into an exponential apocalypse.
Animating Hiroshima: An Interview With Sunao Katabuchi
This expressive war epic from the assistant director of Kiki’s Delivery Service handles the toughest of topics with art, skill and grace. I spoke with director Sunao Katabuchi for Cartoon Brew.
Gulf Dead Zone Grows, Larger Than Ever
Stephen King’s horror novel never saw this real-time nightmare coming. A state-sized dead zone at the bottom of the South, which is so deprived of oxygen it might as well be deep space — which is, recalling Alien, where no one can hear you scream.
Chasing Ice And Coral, Running Out of Time
It is my honor to be writing for the Center for Biological Diversity’s shiny new publication, The Revelator. My first piece is an interview with the fearless Jeff Orlowski, director of Chasing Ice, and now, Chasing Coral.
Nuclear Cinema: Hiroshima’s War-Torn World
An assistant director on Hayao Miyazaki’s sublime, stunning Kiki’s Delivery Service, Sunao Katabuchi has since made his name well-known in anime film and television. But his impressive new film, the award-winning Hiroshima epic, In This Corner of the World, might make him a household name worldwide.
Cli-Fi: Soundgarden’s Fourth of July
For me, there’s only one song that explains the United States of America falling apart in the 21st century, and it is probably no cosmological accident that it is written by the late, great Chris Cornell and Soundgarden.
Bong Joon Ho’s Okja Animates Cli-Fi
Revolutionary filmmakers are shaping the future of cinema by analyzing our destabilized planet. Snowpiercer director Bong Joon Ho’s new vision Okja, out today from Netflix, was inspired by biodiversity at the mercy of capitalization and extinction.
Cornell’s Promise Works to Protect Human Rights
Few artists have soundtracked my life like Chris Cornell. Now, from beyond an early, tragic grave, he warns Earth to rid itself of war before it is too late.
Cli-Fi: Coral Vs. Ice, We Lose
We are slaves to fossil fuels, Chasing Ice director Jeff Orlowski once told me. His new film, Chasing Coral, may find that we have also broken our (food) chains.
It’s Hard To Be Utopian: Director Matthew Rankin On The Tesla World Light
When I first learned that Matthew Rankin was crafting a surreal short about Nikola Tesla, I knew I soon would be picking his fertile brain about free energy, bird love, and why dystopians are marching to the sixth mass extinction.
Ron Finley Rewilds South Central
My latest piece for Civil Eats chronicles the victory of sanity over nonsense, Earth over concrete, regeneration over regression. It was an honor to write, and even more brilliant to witness in person.
Cli-Fi: The Breadwinner Patiently Arrives
An international collaboration directed by Cartoon Saloon’s Nora Twomey, and co-produced by Angelina Jolie, whom you may have heard of
Cli-Fi: Tesla, Reanimated
The National Film Board of Canada is responsible for some of the finest animation the world has ever seen. It has also created world-changing documentaries exploring and analyzing how and why our world changes as it does, for better and worse.
GreenBiz Gets My Solar Farming
Another great perk writing for the conscientious Civil Eats? Greens from across the sociocultural spectrum sharing my data.
Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth to Power
Al Gore once famously asked, “Well, what can you do?”
Here’s what.
Capitalizing, Commemorating Wonder Woman
In our world of perpetual war, creator William Moulton Marston’s subversive, aspirational Amazonian intertext has returned to the battlefront, with mainstream audiences and Wall Street earnings in mind.
Solar Farming For Everyone!
One of the great things about writing for Civil Eats is that I get a chance to explore several existential concerns at once. For my second piece, I was lucky enough to analyze and evangelize solarization, decarbonization and an agricultural infrastructure with a future.
Cartoon Saloon Schools St. Patrick’s Day
From director Tomm Moore’s Oscar-nominated masterpieces The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, to director Nora Twomey’s The Breadwinner and beyond into the great unknown, the indie studio that was once international animation’s best-kept secret is a secret no longer.
Seed Takes Root In The Sixth Mass Extinction
Earth seeds itself. Then we get involved. Then you get what we have, right now: An extinction. From the makers of Queen of the Sun: What are the Bees Telling Us?, another exploration of an apocalypse we manufactured with our own hearts and minds.