Wednesday, April 26, 2006

More Cross-Country Symmetry

Here is just a series of insane connections.

I'm doing a documentary project on the never built Mt. Hood Freeway in Oregon. There's almost no information about it anywhere on the web save this this nice entry in Wikipedia.

One of the folks I interviewed in Portland urged me to contact a guy named Blaine, who did his senior design thesis on the Mt. Hood Freeway. In his research, he unearthed tons of old documents I might be able to use. He recently moved to Berkeley! "Cool," I figured I could interview him the next time I visited the Bay Area to be with Elizabeth.

I call when I get back to Brooklyn. What luck! He happens to be in Brooklyn and he has his laptop which still has the documents on it!

Great! It gets greater.

Blaine also happens to be a member of the Rebar Group who did this great installation showing how to reclaim a parking space back for open green space. Transportation Alternatives was planning on doing something similar called Parking Spot Squat so I interviewed him about Mount Hood and that, two stories for one!

Even better! It gets betterer.

A few weeks later, I email Blaine to tell him that I am heading to the Bay Area to do a similar highway piece on the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco and I ask if there is anyone he can recommend I interview. He says his close friend Suzhana is great pals with a Mr. Jacobs who would be considered the Bay Area's expert to talk with and if I send an email to him he would forward it to her to send on to this gentleman.

Moments later, I get a wonderful email back from this Suzhana elated to hear from me. You see Suzhana is Suzie (to me!), a gal I volunteered and hung out with at Transportation Alternatives in NYC many, many years back. The last I had heard from her was by email about a year ago and she was working in a European country which had just undergone a government overthrow. Rioting in the streets.

Scary stuff. Almost as scary as some of these coincidences I run into.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

"Sweetness"

Been a while. I have lots of good stuff to post up I have saved over the past few weeks. Here is a good one to start off..



Yup, that's my photo at the top of page 17 in Friday, April 21st Metro edition - the free Metro Newspaper they hand out at subway stations! "Ear Check" is a regular feature they run.

I recently added (and re-discovered) the song "Sweetness" (by Jimmy Eat World) and put it in my iPod. I had already listened to it a half dozen times that day saying to myself, "Everyone should really hear this song, it's awesome"....and then suddenly an energetic college-aged girl with a camera and notepad bolts right up to me on the street, stops me and asks me what I am listening to.

I had forgotten about it until today when a friend emailed and said...

"That wasn't you in the Metro, Friday was it? I just previewed that song on iTunes. It's a good song."

Well, I got at least one person to listen. By the way, I really like this cause it says on the page: Clarence Eckerson, 39, Videographer. Now I'm a famous filmmaker.