I was involved with a radio interview on community station KXCI regarding the big multimedia extravaganza that Pan Left is doing tommorrow night. I recorded it. It went pretty well, though I sort of feel like the large number of us in the studio did not improve the quality of the interview. Pan Left is full of strong egos who love to talk, myself included. I tried to stay aware of that and not talk to much. (Yesterday I had a chance to talk about the show on the radio again, but I passed and let someone else do it.)

A lot of people who are good friends tend to dress and coiff themselves the same. Amazing still to me, but it's just the way it is. Nevertheless, it's often really hilarious. Of course the most ridiculous and obvious example are the tourist couples that you see wearing matching tourist outfits, like identical "San Francisco" t-shirts and identical sweatpants. Or the bikenazi couples that wear the same flashy lycra biking bodysuits.

Another such phenomenon that I've been noticing a lot lately, maybe because a lot of them have been coming through town lately on the way to and from South by Southwest, is the group of guys that are obviously all in a band. It's so funny, I have never been wrong when I say the above question to a group of dudes walking into a cafe or something. I don't even neccesarily need to see them al piling out of rental van. Not like it's a uniform, per se, like the early Beatles or something, no. It's just, a look. And it's not to say that all musicians look the same - it's totally a function of what kind of band they're in. This morning I saw a group of tousle-haired, mopey-dopey dorkboys and I was like, yup, emo band from the northwest. Last night at Hotel Congress I ran into a few matching hippy-dreaded-tiedyed kids and it turned out they were in Icy Core of Jupiter, a band from Phoenix that plays sort of freaked-out Stoogesesque psychedelic punk-garage jams.

They were on their way to Dry River to play a show and I gave them directions. Saw them later at the show. Their appearance definitely matched each other and their music in some kind of metaphporical way, although when the bass player sprayed chocolate syrup all over his bare chest during one song, the other members did not follow suit. That would have been truly too much. :-)

I and some comrades will be on the radio today at 3pm (Pacific time), on KXCI, talking about Synaesthesia, the multimedia video and performance event we (Pan Left) are doing next Saturday.

no time to blog much more than that. hungover. lots to do. sigh.

I have to remember that things are still really great. I'm mentioning a little bit of multiple bad luck events that kind of converged, and realizing that i tend to blog or journal more about misfortunes than good things. It will leave a wrong impression, I'm sure...

But anyway, yesterday I both lost my hat and my bike became unridable. Not at the same time, but now I have the unpleasantness of needing to walk somewhere sort of far, in the super bright sun without a hat to shield my eyes. Yeah anyway, it was crazy about my bike, I was setting off to cross a busy street and soon as I put weight on the left pedal the whole crank just broke off. just snapped. It was lucky I wasn't right in front of speeding traffic.

Anyway, at least I have a friend who i can borrow an extra bike from.
I better get going.

I'm feeling really overwhelmed. million things i want to do, said i would do, or feel like i should be doing.

just found this thing called Twitter. it's like a tiny tiny mini micro nano blog. you just type one line describing what you're doing right now. people can follow that like a blog or follow all their friends.

it's kinda neat and maybe i'll keep using it, but i cant help thinking.... the easier it is to "twitter" (what a great name), isn't that just making it easier to not get anything REAL done? if i spend 5 seconds every 120 seconds submitting something to twitter, that adds up and means i dont have that time to do something more meaninful and longterm.... kind of like when you try to get work done while sitting in a cafe with a bunch of chatty friends. not gonna happen.

I guess that's the kind of mood i'm in...

other stuff: an "unconference" in san diego that protests O'Reilly's insanely expensive conferences; a film about Michale Moore and hard it was to make a movie about him and how inaccessibile he is; I lost a great essay I wrote about 5 years ago about "Freebles", it's digital dust now, i guess...; i really should blog about a bunch of Juarez-related links and news but i don't have time.... or do i? argh.

Lately I've been making lots of espresso with my stove-top espresso pot. It's really good coffee, even though it's decaf (whatever, man, I saw that sneer - i'm taking care of myself the best way for me, ok?). Anyway, I tried a neat experiment recently that turned out pretty good - I put a few cloves and a few cardomom pods in with the coffee grounds. Of course the trick with cardomom, always, whether in tea or whatever, is to crush the pods with the flat of a knife, so the seeds inside are exposed.

The results, something chai-like but also very much espresso. Delicious. There's all sorts of other possibilities for other spices to put in too, maybe even making tea that way (like, no coffee, just steamed spices). hmm. I'll report back on future successes. The power of steam... btw, I just talked to the proprietor of my favorite cafe in town, Shot in the Dark, and was complimenting her on how they always have liquid sugar to put in your cold drinks so it dissolves easier. A lot of cafes just are not that thoughtful. She said it's because they dont know the easy way to make it - with the steam spigot on the espresso machine! I don't know quite what that means but it sounds promising. yay, steam.

OMG!
"The Arizona Senate passed a resolution on Friday that would create a civilian militia to hunt undocumented immigrants along the border. Senate Bill 1132 establishes a volunteer civilian security force under the direction of the Governor. Members would receive military and police training once a month."
(via Mexico Solidarity Network)

I designed this poster:


Just picked it up from the printers last night and it looks great. 11x17 inches. It should be a cool event, and I hope the posters help get a bunch of people to come to it. I'm also working on a video collage piece for the show. It's the first extensive non-documentary video piece I've done in years. It's fun to see other people in Pan Left working on more artistic and less carefully planned-out work too. I think we all need to excercise our spontaneous creativity a little more often.

Just a few weeks after yet another insanely racist and propagandistic cover story about illegal immigration by the ludicrously unskilled and racist Leo Banks, the Tucson Weekly is at it again.

I wouldn't make this much fuss about this normally except that this issue came out yesterday, on International Women's Day. They pretty much hardly ever put anything this extreme on their cover, but now of all days, they run this. And it's completely gratuitous, nothing to do with the story at all, except that the story is dead boring (about the state legislature) so they must have felt they had to jazz it up to get people to even pick up a copy.

Tucson Weekly, you are the most conservative, racist, sexist, classist entertainment weekly I have ever seen out of all the 8 or 9 cities i've lived in, including, believe it or not, Charleston, South Carolina. In fact, in everywhere else that I've lived, the weeklies have been at least somewhat consistently left-of-center - although the Portland Mercury is sometimes annoyingly too-hip-to-be-left (but this is because they feel the need to appear cooler and different than the older, more staid liberal Williammette Week. This may be a little of what's going on here in Tucson; although there's no other paper to compete with, they maybe just purposely printing shockingly clueless and controversial stories in order to boost circulation).

Tucson Weekly, you suck.

Just kidding!
Amazingly, this was the subject line of a piece of spam I recieved today. I've been marvelling at how one could almost take up reading spam folder subject lines instead of reading headlines and get a decent overview of the news, since this is a side effect of recent spammer strategy, it seems. Now you can also get your Onion-esque fake news from spam too.

Like cowbird eggs placed in the nests of other birds, there are many other examples of this kind of simulacra that seem to fulfill a function in life but are really largely just taking up space and fooling us. Writing software can seem like creativity, going to meetings can seem like a social life, but these are empty calories. There's no time like the present to keep remembering that.