In the early months of 2018 I announced to my colleagues at CUNY that I would be stepping down from my position as Associate Professor and return to graduate school. The goal was to get my PhD while exploring my interests in futurism and its potential role in higher ed. On February 16th, 2021 I presented the following video at my comprehensive exam, which was warmly received along with the literature review and mini-study which accompanied it. I was accepted as a PhD candidate as a result, and I share here the film, which explains my motivations, my research, and my findings to date.
January 2019 Session with the Convo Combo (Rob Kovacs, Pat Perkinson, & myself) covering Ornette Coleman’s ‘Turnaround.’ Here’s a little video I threw together using Rubin Henriquez’s wonderful photographs from that afternoon.
In 1994, after the loss of my adopted parents, I stumbled into a discovery that would change my life forever. Within two days of making an exploratory phone call to an adoptee hotline, I discovered my birth family. In them I found answers to questions I had never really dared to ask, and I was soon discovering commonalities that I had never expected to exist.
Ten years later, armed only with a small hobbyist’s video camera, I began recording interviews with family members from both my adopted and birth families. I stitched together these interviews into a stirring exploration of family, a modern-day quilt, which tells this story, the story of my birt parents, and the subsequent reunion that has taken place.
Butch Roxas and Rees Shad discussing their album project Half A World Away
My son Dylan and I packed up a trunk load of recording gear and headed over to the Philippines to reunite with my childhood friend Butch Roxas and record a record called Half a World Away. Here’s a little documentary about the experience…
