GENERATIONS

George W Bush was all things television loved: personable, friendly. Despite a spotty track record of success at his early endeavors, he had the makings of a candidate, at least as far as Karl Rove was concerned, who when they first met described Bush as having “huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, […]

I was at home in San Francisco when my mother called. “Are you watching TV” she asked? I replied “no” and switched it on. I imagined that whatever she was calling about would be no big deal. She was elderly. But the first thing I saw was not a talking head but the event itself: […]

I finally left Los Angeles to return to San Francisco. I made my last movie, another homage to the singer songwriter, based on the work of Rickie Lee Jones, and then I devoted myself entirely to interactive media. My mother turned 70, and I wanted to be with her in the last years of her […]

Cable news was all over it. Soon we started to see the footage of laser guided smart bombs and cruise missiles fired from destroyers. There were concerns about Iraqi use of chemical weapons and the heat. A little over five weeks later the war was over. For years people complained that Bush stopped short of […]

In 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and George Bush went on television and announced, “This will not stand.” Sanctioned by the United Nations, George Bush organized a real coalition, like a man of his generation, like the Allies of World War II. Unlike some of my peers, I was more sanguine about this war. Of […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWo6Fti8Tdc&feature=youtube_gdata_player Meanwhile Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s Vice-president and mouthpiece for political attack (with his atrocious alliterations, ”nattering nabobs of negativism”) became the first Vice-president in American history forced to resign for criminal charges while in office. Nixon resigned in disgrace as well. Surely the cynicism and hypocrisy was obvious, even to the ”moral majority.” FROM AN […]

While Pat Brown recited a list of his accomplishments, Ronald Reagan spoke of “LSD parties” and conjured up images of their children in orgiastic abandon. While the facts were that Brown ordered the largest arrest ever of demonstrators at Berkeley’s Sproul Hall, Reagan will act as if Brown caused it. And Reagan’s parental disapproval – […]

For two years I continued. I photographed Deniece Williams. I photographed the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Every picture had its story, didn’t it? For Earth, Wind & Fire truckloads of sand were spread across a sound stage floor. Forty thousand watts of light were used, arcing and firing mysteriously. I pretended I was Field Marshal Rommel. […]

This video is a link from You Tube. All copyrights remain with the original copyright holders. It was a somewhat surreal undertaking, as we raced through Tom’s locations in Southern California, wiring stuffed buzzards on weathered tree trunks at Big Bear Lake, tossing stuffed alligators into fire-ravaged canyons in Ojai, until finally, speeding on some […]

The importance of this ability for an album to deliver a crafted, dramatic experience cannot be overemphasized. Music was the platform, the glue that held my generation together, that spoke to us, inspired us. Even when the promise within the music, whatever it really was, seemed to fall apart, and some distanced themselves and others […]