early work

a meditation on the 1991 kuwait oil well fires, jarhead, whitney houston, werner herzog, the climate crisis, the covid-19 pandemic, petroleum, the aestheticization of war, and the impending technocracy lead by eric schmidt, all the result of asking one questions: does oil have a sound?there's a lot of stuff in here that i do NOT own.originally produced in May 2020.

“When a person is carrying a child, only one of those living entities has a soul. It is the person carrying the child. Jewish teaching is unambiguous about that.” Dania Rajendra is a writer and organizer who fights the political right, from neonazis to neoliberals.  She’s Jewish, and the way she relates to her Judaism has changed over the years. This is a story about how Dania fumbled her way towards observance after several tragic events, but it’s also a story about political alliances, Jewish teaching, and where those come together. Thank you again to Dania, and thank you to David Zinman and Sam Elliot of the Treyf podcast who originally worked with me on this story. You can find Dania’s brilliant writing on her website: https://daniarajendra.net/dani/

a circuitous history of the Statue of Liberty, or Liberty Enlightening the World! featuring Brennan McDaniel, Esther Farmer, Regina Coyle, Himie Freeman, and clips of Schoolhouse Rock, Etel Adnan, and Emma Lazarus.

Regina Catherine O'Connor Coyle interviewed her mother, Eileen O'Connor, in a Market Basket parking lot in 2019. The resulting tape tells the story of how Eileen went from a tug boat rodeo to an oil tanker in Valdez, Alaska in the early 1980s.  thanks to regina, eileen, and epidemic sounds