On the YouTube page for the trailer to my Juarez film, someone named NissanSkylineFreak left the following comment:

i have a samurai sword a black trench coat and i'm a black belt in tai quando[sic]..i swear to god that i'll handle those basterds[sic] for killing women and destroying peoples families

Ok. Good luck with that, dude...

You know you're doing something right, I think, when your own mother tells you, on the basis of your current facial hair configuration, that you look like Lucifer. Especially when she's pretty religious. That's really something.

Today I read this notebook i found in my old journals that i'd forgotten about. it was a group journal that me and my housemates kept in this cool house i lived in in Ann Arbor in 1990-1991. 1001 South State Street. it was such a cool group of guys and we did lots of, uh, chemical mental enhancements all the time and jammed all the time and painted and wrote poetry and talked talked talked and we were all 4 of us really reaching for truth, or wisdom, or something. and this notebook is full of us just going back and forth about all this deep stuff, trying to figure stuff out. and also just stoned ramblings. but it's kind of amazing to read. a lot of it is just silly pretentious bullshit but some of it is really good, and all of it is just touching, to see how we were really trying so hard, in our own naive way, to enlighten ourselves or whatever.
It makes me want to find all those guys and send them photocopies of the whole thing. i've lost touch with them all. Mike Alter, Eric Burkehalter, and Dave Tomsic. I wonder where they all are now and what they're doing. I guess I'll probably google them in a minute, these friends I knew 9 years before Google existed.3 years before the Web existed. Sigh.

"...but we just talked about.. the people we've met in the last 5 years, and will we remember them in 10 more...." (Death Cab For Cutie)

Wow. Former Dictator of Chile Augusto Pinochet has finally shuffled off his mortal coil. Of course I should wait a bit before getting too excited, since there was talk that he'd died a week ago and then he apparently had not. But this time it looks real. It's just too bad he was not brought to justice before kicking the bucket.

Here it is. So, if you have a video-capable phone or iPod, you can throw this on there and show people wherever you go. yeah. yay.

Saturday night was incredible for many reasons, not the least of which was that I finally saw Calexico play. They're an incredible 'border band' from Tucson that packs a huge hall every year with an annual holiday show.
They're about to go on tour, so if they come to your town I strongly suggest going to see them.

Here's a photo I took with my new phone. It doesn't do too bad, especially compared with my old new phone, which died on me 2 months in because it was a blackmarket ebay scam. grr.

The new phone also takes pretty good video, for a phone (wouldn't this sound insane 20 years ago? Your phone is a video camera? what?!). This is a clip i shot out the window of my plane landing in Denver, on my way to Iowa (which is where I'm at now).

All my flights were late except the last one, which meant I had to run through 4 concourses at O'Hare to catch it. But I made it and other than that the day was without incident. As soon as I got to Iowa we had traditional Iowan cuisine, Thai food. It was great.

Speaking of video on phones, in the wake of bluetoothing that above video over to my powerbook I decided to encode my "steev live gig promo video" to the right format so i could play it on my phone. y'know, like an icebreaker at parties. "hi, i'm steev, this is what i do as an artist." (flips open phone, presses play)

I so hate the paradigm in web sites, and now even cellphones and other devices, where everything is "my". "my stuff" is the name of one of the items in the main menu of my cellphone. And as you know, all sorts of sites have "my account", "my shopping cart", "my profile" - am i rare, or wrong, even, in thinking about my experience with a website as a communication with that website? or at least a story? And we all know that you should never write a story in 2nd person, unless you're writing those Choose Your Own Adventure books, which of course were a huge hit and still everywhere. NOT.

not that i exactly think that the site or device is another human, but it is a sort of presence, and a representation of its makers, who are human beings. as such, when the website "talks" to me, it should use the correct pronouns. when it talks to me about "my" things, it should say "your things". When I talk about my things, I can say "my things". When the website "talks" to me, it's not ME talking, it's the website, it's SOMEONE ELSE.

It baffles me and really disturbs me that a conception so basic as this is so backwards for all these interfaces. It's like putting the handle on the wrong end of a gun.

I guess that's another reason why I hate MySpace. It should be called YourSpace. Or maybe it should just be called, "FuckYou, we're tricking you and all your friends and taking over the internet, eat shit and die."

Just saw a really nice review of my film.

The reviewer obviously was very effected by watching it, which is really gratifying to see.

In addition to putting together a presentation about an important problem that simply isn

I keep stumbling on these songs i've been listening to for months but suddenly their lyrics just are clear and almost perfectly apropro for me right now, like this one by Cake:

To me, coming from you,
Friend is a four letter word.
End is the only part of the word
That I heard.
Call me morbid or absurd.
But to me, coming from you,
Friend is a four letter word.

When I go fishing for the words
I am wishing you would say to me,
I'm really only praying
That the words you'll soon be saying
Might betray the way you feel about me.

But to me, coming from you,
Friend is a four letter word.

Well, damn. I never really read Clamor Magazine until the latest issue, which has multiple muckraking articles about American Apparel and how the feel-good t-shirt company of choice for so many socially concious t-shirt wearers is actually not that great at all.

I've been meaning to blog about that every since I read that issue a month ago. Now I see that Clamor actually is folding due to financial problems. Sad. It seems like a really great publication.

(via Josh Breitbart's blog)