I'm in perhaps the most exciting yet frustrating stage in my work on the documentary about war tax resistance that I'm making. I'm basically trying to make sense of all the footage and figure out how to present it in a compelling way - the big question is: what is the story? I've been struggling with this for about 4 years, ever since I started thinking about the challenges of making a film about this subject - Put another way, how do I tell the story of war tax resistance in a way that's interesting and exciting?

I decided to go all the way back to Michael Rabiger's excellent, wise, super book, Directing the Documentary, which I originally read in 2003 and which helped me enormously to first learn the art and craft of non-fiction filmmaking - actually, I'm really still learning, of course, but this book was my early training, my film school. I returned to it this week to re-read the chapters on the beginnings of post-production and the first assembly.

The advice I keep coming back to that he gives is: start organizing the material with the action, and then layer on the interviews, because if you start with the interviews, you will have talking heads as the primary spine of the film. Of course most of what I've ever done, and a lot of documentarians have done, has been reluctantly not following this advice - because most of almost any documentary film's central material is in fact people telling their stories. It's very rare that you can capture the actual stuff of life that you're talking about, or at least all of it - I've been acutely aware of this since I was doing the paper edit of my Juarez film 3 years ago.

Yet I tried to find a way out of that conundrum with an experiment in narrative that I had not tried before, which I thought of in very early pre-production and which I tried to follow during shooting: follow real people as THEY learn about the subject and meet people that do war tax resistance.

How sad is it when you have something like 50 hours of footage shot over 5 years and you still don't feel like it's enough "coverage"? [i need more "action" material that is relevant to the topic - demonstrations, press conferences, protests, street theater, tax day rallies, even stuff like relevant signs or banners being held up (or t-shirts being worn, etc) at more general anti-war events. Have you shot anything like this over the years anywhere? Do you know anyone who has? If so, please get in touch.]

However, I might have the seed of a narrative that focuses on action, on movement through space and time, and I want to try to make that into the backbone of the film. Perhaps it will need to be augmented with judicious narration, and animation, but i think it's there, basically... Almost every other film longer than 10 minutes that I've made has instead been organized by subject section - can this finally be a film that is a chronology? Is there hope that the story can really be based on a classic, time-based model of story? I'm going to try.

Yesterday's Twitter tweets:

• 10:01 putting together the august indymedia newsreal. it's like a jigsaw puzzles, with pieces from different puzzles #
• 15:35 trying to switch gears from the sierra club film (which is 99.9% done) to the war tax resistance doc #
• 16:49 logging wtr footage from nyc #
• 18:13 reading about the RED Scarlet camera. hmm. #

It was a Mexican gunfighter western movie kind of dream, mixed with an old dream i always used to have in college, that i had
forgotten to go to a class all semester and suddenly realized i had a final exam. At the end of the dream I was in
a math class taking the test I wasn't prepared for, didn't expect, but I did okay on it. but then we students were complaining about the teachers, who were like 3 quiet dorky Mexican men, and as we were complaining lunch arrived, a giant pizza like 10 feet in diameter. the toppings on the pizza were not evenly spread out but instead were like a pie chart, with relative proportions of toppings indicated by the width of a wedge of that topping on the pie. I suddenly stood up and exclaimed, "this society will always be regimented as long as pizzas are made like that!" and i stepped up and started re-arranging the toppings, scattering lettuce and everything else evenly around the pizza. In a few seconds a bunch of other students got the idea and joined me. in a few minutes the toppings were all spread out like on a normal pizza and we stepped back to admire our work.

I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.

I happened upon an article in Wired, I think it might be last month's coverstory(?), about how working with huge amounts of data (their big buzzword they keep repeating is Petabytes) and clusters of computers to crunch the data with statistical methods have qualitatively changed the way science will be done. The lead is basically "the end of the scientific method."

Of course the comments on the page after the article are full of people arguing and protesting that of course the writer is wrong and of course he knows nothing about science and this isn't fundamentally changing science.... blah blah blah.

The article is actually interesting, a bit, but it's mostly hype, and the conclusion that's most important is that Wired magazine is still up to the same old tricks: throw a bunch of smoke and mirrors up around a certain pop-tech idea and watch as all the outraged and/or excited geeks scurry around buying copies of the magazine and/or hitting the web site. It doesn't matter what's true, as long as it sells.

It's the same way with most papers and magazines, like the local arts/culture rag here in Tucson, the Tucson Weekly. Full of bullshit written by either imbeciles or racists (or both), spewing hate, nonsense, borderline softcore porn, and/or silliness that the editors may or may not agree with - but it doesn't matter because the outrage inflates circulation, which inflates advertiser revenue. I'm so sick of it but what to do? A letter to the editor would just be proof that one more chump reads the paper. Ka-ching! In fact, you probably shouldn't click on those links in this paragraph. doh!

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency
Hilarious, as usual, from the Onion (via Demarcated Landscapes).

I wasn't going to say anything about George Carlin shuffling off this mortal coil, but when I saw some very topical for our times quotes of his I just had to re-cite them. This is from a bit he was doing in the late 90s:

As far as I

Yesterday's Twitter tweets:

• 09:34 dreading the afternoon cuz my swamp cooler is busted and my landlord is out of town. ugh. #
• 14:37 blogging about a clever video concerning McCain calling his wife a cunt. detritus.net/steev/mt/archives/001018.html #
• 20:36 working on animating maps of the u.s.-mexico border while listening to this cool palestinian electronic band called Checkpoint 303 #

Via a blog called Feministe I found out about a gaff that Senator McCain committed 16 years ago that should by rights cost him at least all of his female voters, all but his most piggish male voters, and certainly the election. He called his wife a cunt - in front of reporters. Absolutely inexcusable.

It's interesting that one story on the incident concentrates on it as an example of McCain's bad temper - yes, this is a problem, but the way I see it, the bigger problem is that it's a sign of a basic disrespect or even hate for women.

What an asshole. He doesn't deserve to have a wife, much less be president or a senator.

Wonderfully, when you google the word, you get the story as the 3rd entry, right after the wikipedia and wiktionary entries. Let's try and make it the first! Keep linking to the story and any other stories about it.

And now for your further entertainment, here's this humorous little video about the incident by The Public Service Administration, an LA-based comedy group. It had me LOL:

Tonight at about 2am the sun gets as close as it can to us. yay.
Also tonight, we're having a half-birthday party for me... 6 months from monday is my birthday, but it always gets overshadowed by xmas. This is a better time.

Yesterday's Twitter tweets:

• 09:45 Shit, rode all the way down 2 the studio and forgot my keys #
• 11:20 omg i hate when people stick their delicious feed into their blog. like i need to see someone's every bookmark.... #
• 17:18 reading a Time article about how the border wall might not work. surprise, surprise! tinyurl.com/6ask66 #
• 18:14 wow. cool. moby is giving away music for sountracks. #
• 21:03 listening to train rattling house's front windows. #

Many projects are all happening at once. It's pretty exciting, though a bit stressful, with accompanying deadlines.

I finally got the narration finalized and recorded (with my new large-diaphragm condenser mic - sounds great!) for the Sierra Club border impacts video I'm doing, which means I can finally finish it, probably over the next week. But, I'm also trying to make a trailer for the war tax resistance doc, and this is the time of the month to edit Indymedia Newsreal too. whew. And there's a more banal but well-paying video job I should get to as well that I won't go into.

Yesterday's Twitter tweets:

• 08:13 dealnig w larger-than-usual drift of spam, and huge amounts of 'backscatter' - bounce messages resulting frm spammers pretending to b me.. #
• 09:15 thinking how interesting it is that twitter 4 many people is just a chat room. they just blurt whtvr they want rthr than answer the Question #
• 10:32 @jennycool I guess I view Twitter as a sort of thought experiment, and with thought experiments, or all experiments, I'm a purist. #
• 10:41 I do agree, @jennycool - as William Gibson once wrote, "The street finds its own uses for things." but we had Spacebar >12 yrs ago. #
• 14:20 editing trailer for WTR doc.. it's looking good! #