Here’s an exclusive, extended version of my process.
What’s Going On Now: A New Generation Answers (Extended Version) by Turnstyle News

“The protesters, including Arbuckle, were in the street blocking traffic, Officer Elisheba Vera testified. The police, on the sidewalk, had to move in to make arrests to allow blocked traffic to move. But there was a problem with the police account: it bore no resemblance to photographs and videos taken that night.”

In an ironic twist, Arbuckle was actually working on a New York University photojournalism project aimed at defending police officers working at Occupy protests when he was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

“I felt the police had been treated unfairly on [sic] the media,” he said to the Village Voice. “All the focus was on the conflict and the worst instances of brutality and aggression, where most of the police I met down there were really professional and restrained.”

Occupy videographer and indefatigable live-streamer Tim Pool‘s clip was used as evidence along with the NYPD’s own video footage in the trial. The video shows protesters clearly using the sidewalk like they were asked to. (Watch the arrest around minute 35 of Pool’s video.)

“What’s happening is very similar to what happened in 2004 with the Republican National Convention,” Arbuckle’s lawyer told the Voice. “It’s just a symptom of how the NYPD treats dissent. But what has changed is that there is more prevalence of video. It really makes our job a lot easier to have that video.”

Pool, who has used an iPhone, solar-powered backpack and even a drone to stream Occupy protests, has been central to the movement’s emphasis on transparency and constantly capturing the movement using new media tools. The Nation profiled the visibility efforts in March:

“By embracing transparency and pursuing maximum visibility, the protest on Wall Street provided, in the words of one activist, a ‘virtual template for occupation’ that inspired people around the world to follow suit. …

“But Occupy’s habit of obsessive self-documentation isn’t just pragmatic—it’s a matter of principle deeply woven into its DNA. ‘Without a doubt, a founding principle of OWS is transparency,’ says Carrie, a member of the Occupy Wall Street facilitation and minutes working groups (who asked that I not give her last name).”

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“Did you know Oreos are vegan?” One Brooklyn Brainery student chimed in. Which, somehow, led to a half hour student-led discussion on the raw milk movement.

“When you drink raw milk, you can actually taste what the cow ate. It’s amazing, you’re like, wow, this tastes like grass,” said one student with horn-rimmed glasses.

“Wow, can you imagine if factory farms made that sh*#? We’d all be dead,” said Jonathan Soma, co-founder of Brooklyn Brainery, and the only man in the room. In the classroom next door, fourteen women (and one man with a handlebar mustache) are taking a class called Into Home Canning.

It’s just a typical night at Brooklyn Brainery, if there is such a thing. The small school is hard to explain — even for its co-founders, Jennifer Messier and Jonathan Soma.

“We used to call it a book club on steroids, but that’s not really true anymore,” says Messier.

When Soma, 28, and Messier, 27, founded Brooklyn Brainery back in 2010, it was based on a crowdsourced education model. Which means what exactly?

“Let’s say we were teaching a class called ‘meat’. I wouldn’t actually teach it, it was more like administering,” says Soma. “So I’d say ‘You go research the T-bone, you research braising, you research meat in the microwave.’ And then everyone would come together and share.”

But that proved to be an unsustainable model. Even though Brooklyn Brainery only charged $25 for four weeks of class, students didn’t feel like they were getting their money’s worth.

“It quickly became apparent that even though that’s a very appealing model to pursue, we could just go down the street and find a butcher,” says Soma. “They would love to come into class and talk to us about their work, and it would do way more than having someone read Wikipedia in class.”

Which is the model Brooklyn Brainery runs on today. Not quite profitable, not quite co-op, the school is actually innovative in that it’s something in between.

“We were looking at other people who had interesting takes on education,” says Soma. “And everyone was like an anarchist collective, or they were saying ‘We’re going to destroy universities!’ And we were just like—look– we just want to learn some stuff! We like learning things, and we want it to be accessible.”

To Soma and Messier, accessible means not charging more for classes than they would want to pay themselves. Classes range from as little as $10 for one class to $50 for three classes. Instructors are paid $30 an hour, which means they’re mostly teaching out of love for the subject matter.

Messier and Soma are uncomfortable with the idea of charging more money than they need to cover costs. Which makes you to wonder why they wouldn’t run Brooklyn Brainery as a nonprofit.

“Here’s what happened,” explains Soma. “When we started I was like, ‘Hey we should be a nonprofit because if you’re a nonprofit you get money for free! That’s how it works, right?’ And Jen and her boyfriend, who’ve both worked at nonprofits, were like ‘No! That’s not how it works.’ ”

“I couldn’t even imagine if I had to worry about fundraising, on top of everything else,” says Messier, who runs the busy day-to-day operations of Brooklyn Brainery. Messier often works over twelve hour days, but she says it’s worth it.

“Any time people bond enough that they go out after a class, that’s so rewarding,” says Messier. “We had a zombie makeup class once, which I loved because it was super weird and out there. And I was so happy because I know for a fact two people who did each other’s makeup totally became friends afterwards.”

Zombie makeup, raw milk debates and home canning? It’s easy to see why a recent New York Times profile of Brooklyn Brainery called it “A hipster schoolhouse started by a pair of underemployed polymaths, where students can learn abstruse subjects like the secret lives of bacteria, taught by teachers with few teaching credentials.”

Harsh. But Soma insists the school is made up of more than a bunch of artisan-cafe-dwelling-twenty-somethings.

“The people who come here aren’t really hipsters. When we first started we thought it would just be a bunch of people from Williamsburg, but it’s not,” says Soma. “People who are retired come in. It’s people with kids, people from Queens, all kinds of people.”

While that may very well be true, if three audited classes are any indication, Brooklyn Brainery’s students are mostly under thirty, white and women. But then again, that goes for a lot of Brooklyn clubs.

“We’ve talked to other people who run stuff like and basically anything that happens outside of the home and away from the TV seems to be dominated by women,” says Soma. “Women leave the house, and they do things that involve other people.”

Back in The History of Milk and Cookies, the instructor, Nicole Brownstein, has moved from factory farming to sexual politics.

“If you think about it, milk and cookies have historically been paired with the idea of the good mother,” says Brownstein. “She should have them waiting when the kids get home. But really, what mother has time for that? Mine sure didn’t.”

Brownstein passes out an article detailing how Hillary Clinton served cookies in the primaries in an effort to soften her image. As they read, students munch on the cardamom cookies Messier baked for the class. Next door in Intro to Canning, you can smell the anise-infused pears and carrots being boiled.

Hipster? Maybe. A school away from home? It would seem so.

The NY Times’ Bits blog reports that Glenn A. Britt said in a group interview that there’s no simple way to get web video onto TV screens.

“I’m not sure I know what AirPlay is,” he said, though he noted that he was an enthusiastic Apple customer. “Today we want to be on every screen.Today it’s a little bit clunky to get programming from the Internet onto the TV — not so hard to get it on your iPad. What’s hard is the plumbing, what wires do you connect, what device do you use. So the current Apple TV, the little thing, the hockey puck, really doesn’t do anything to help enable you to get Internet material on your TV.”

Apple pitches AirPlay as a way to make it easy to get Internet video from an iPad or iPhone onto a television, among other uses. A user can press a button while watching video to stream it wirelessly to an Apple TV box connected to a TV set.

Of course, this may also hint at a broader user awareness and adoption challenge for Apple, which apparently only sold about three million of the AirPlay devices last year.

[CONTENT ADVISORY: there is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot of someone's rear in this supercut. Depending on how uptight your work environment is this, along with the copious shots of drug use-- Hello, Aronofsky-- may make this video Not Safe For Work.]

Urban Dictionary defines “supercut” thusly:

A fast-paced montage of short video clips that obsessively isolates a single element from its source, usually a word, phrase, or cliché from film and TV.

While the supercut conceptually predates the advent of the Internet (see: Christian Marclay’s 1995 short “Telephones”, Chuck Workman’s 1986 “Precious Images” and even Lev Kuleshov’s infamous experiments from the early 20th century) it has become a staple of Web culture. What was once the work of mad editors working for months or years on end is now a digital playground for the masses. Go search the web for a supercut and you’ll find it for almost any facet of cinema. Often these experiments yield little to no results, but sometimes they can show us an aspect of the cinema we didn’t know was there, even though it had always been staring us in the face.

Which brings us to the work of Kogonada. The filmmaker has released four supercuts on Vimeo and YouTube this year, each one an exploration of one aspect of a filmmaker’s ouvre, with the one deviation being a supercut of POV shots on “Breaking Bad”. Previously the artist created “Wes Anderson // FROM ABOVE” and Tarantino // FROM BELOW, each one spanning the title filmmaker’s career and pulling out shots that adhere to the title’s suggestion. What is great about both of those choices, Anderson from above and Tarantino from below, is that in each case we actually learn something about the style of the filmmaker that we may not have noticed looking at their body of work on the micro (film by film) level. Better, these stylistic nuances are specific to the directors, not arbitrary choices for discovery. Any other filmmaker profiled “from above” wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as Wes Anderson’s use of that angle.

And now we have “Sounds of Aronofsky,” a 56-second mashup of sound effects used by Darren Aronofsky in all of his films. Don’t be fooled though, this is just as much a visual exploration as an aural one. Almost all of the shots are closeups of objects that accompanied by jarring sounds. And this is the fastest paced mashup from Kogonada yet.

Similar to the visual and narrative aspects of a film, the soundtrack has to ring emotionally true with the audience. Often the sounds we hear have no basis in reality, at least not in a literal sense. Sound designers don’t crash cars or crunch bones and call it a day. A good soundtrack focuses on the intensity of what we hear, not merely the loudness. Kogonada has pinpointed the intensity of mundane sounds in Aronofsky’s work. The small, everyday sounds we would hear and ignore get a starring role in his work.

Whether or not we, as viewers, consciously notice this while watching a Darren Aronofsky film is beside the point. These aural cues influence how we experience the film, and Kogonada nailed the execution in this supercut. Is there anything more “Aronofsky” than this? There are so many edits of other works blindly hacked together for the sake of, what? Often makers of supercuts shoot from the hip, executing an experiment for the sake of it but with no real goal or endgame. Kogonada, on the other hand, has shown remarkable restraint and brings a unique academic bent to the form. The art comes from expanding our view of the works being cut. I can’t wait to see what, or who, comes next.

And by this, we mean a new app that dozens of San Francisco bars will cooperate with by placing facial recognition cameras inside their establishments. Here’s the lowdown from SF Weekly, which points out that this follows a similarly alarming move that found bars enabling streaming video of their patrons:

SceneTap, the Austin-based nightlife startup, is officially launching its facial detection software at 25 bars in San Francisco on Friday, including Mr. Smith’s and Pete’s Tavern. Using a free iPhone or Android App, you can get a snapshot of the San Francisco bar scene, including male-to-female ratio, average age, and crowd size — all in real time. In short, you can find out if there are enough women to hit on before you bother getting decked out for the night.

Find the list of bars to avoid…or stalk…here.

Documentarians Daniel Junge (the Academy Award winning doc short Saving Face) and Bryan Storkel (Holy Rollers) are in the middle of production on a documentary about MMA practicing pastors called Fight Church, and judging from the trailer they cut together for their Kickstarter campaign, the film is a clinical look at the lives of this fighting preachers, moral ambiguity and all.

We talked with Storkel via email about the doc, and about why his team has turned to crowdfunding in the middle of production.

***

Turnstyle: Who are the pastors in Fight Church? Did they start as fighters who became ministers, or is it the other way around?

Bryan Storkel: There are several pastors featured in the film. Paul Burress (one of our main characters) was a pastor’s son. He was raised in the church and was also taught martial arts at an early age. He grew up in an environment that involved Christianity and fighting. Some of the other characters in the film were professional fighters first, and then became Christians, and some are the other way around. We are also planning to film with several UFC fighters that are Christians including Benson Henderson and Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson.

TS: How did you find these guys in the first place? What was your initial reaction?

BS: Our producers, Eben Kostbar and Joe McKelheer recently produced a film called The Hammer. It’s the biopic of deaf UFC fighter Matt Hamill. During the filming, they met a guy named Paul Burress who helped out on the project. Paul told them about his “Fight Church” and they were instantly attracted to the story. As they spent more time with Paul, they realized that he was a very likable, sincere guy and would make a great subject for a documentary. They brought the project to Daniel Junge, who agreed to direct it.

When I was asked to co-direct this film, I didn’t really know what to think about the topic. At first thought, it seemed wrong. How could fighting and Christians go together? If you think about the basis of the Christian faith, it is love; love your neighbor and love God. I thought it was pretty wild that someone could be a pastor and a fighter. I definitely wanted to find out more, and making a film about it sounded like a good way to do that.

TS: How has your opinion of them changed as you’ve been making this doc?

BS: After meeting Paul and spending time with him, I realized that he really was sincere in his faith. He loves God and he loves people. I’m still not sure what I personally believe about the moral aspects of it all. Honestly, I’m not really sure if God has a stance on organized fighting. I think He has bigger/more important things to deal with. It may not even be a moral issue. That’s what I like about the topic though…as I spend more time with the subjects, I’m sure I’ll learn more and probably develop a stronger personal stance.

TS: How much time did you spend with the fighters already?

BS:We’ve been filming off-and-on with them for the last year or so. I became involved with the project about six months ago, so I haven’t spent as much time with them as Daniel Junge, my co-director.

TS: How much is left to shoot and pull together?

BS: We hope to spend another six to nine months filming with the main characters in the film. With documentaries, you are often waiting for your story to develop, so it’s hard to guess an exact finish date. We are eager to finish it as quickly as possible and have quite a bit edited already. Our goal is to finish by next summer.

TS: Why did you turn to Kickstarter?

BS: Kickstarter seems like the perfect venue for this project. Documentaries are growing in popularity and so is MMA fighting. Plus, I figures a lot of Christians would be intrigued by the topic. I love the idea of being able to spread the word about your project to the people that are actually interested in it. I’ve found out about a ton of projects on Kickstarter and backed quite a few. With Kickstarter, you can draw attention to your project in addition to raising the funds. Plus, I love the idea of getting your funding from the audience. They are the ones who you are making the film for, and why not get them involved. We have put a lot of money into the project on our own, and we are a little wary of getting distributors or studios involved at this stage. We want to make sure we maintain creative control on our project and we don’t want to give it away to a studio that wants to tell us how to edit the film because they invested in it. We turned to Kickstarter because our personal accounts have run dry. We need help finishing the film and love the idea of raising the money this way.

***

Fight Church [Kickstarter, Facebook] closes funding on June 5th and has a long road ahead of them. If they can galvanize both Christians and MMA fans around the project, they’ll be able to keep control of the work they’ve done so far. MMA is particularly hot these days, but there are a lot of doc makers till that field. Can Fight Church’s twist on the genre be the difference between success and obscurity?

Which pretty much guarantees a weird, anything goes end product. The finished film is a hybrid between the work the troupe created and a documentary detailing their process.

Comedy fans in Los Angeles will get a chance to find out for themselves how it all turned out when the film debuts at the Dances With Films festival on June 2nd.

Viola Morse, a lifelong Vermonter, died last year. After living in the same town for ninety-nine years, she must have left quite an imprint.  State of the Re:Union set up a voice-mail box so Viola’s friends, family, and admirers could share their memories in their own words.  This first piece in our new audio obituary series was produced by SOTRU intern extraordinaire Sara Brooke Curtis.

Head over to the State of the Re:Union website to hear the podcast episode.

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