I drove all the way to San Diego yesterday. I'm starting a new project to visit some spots along the U.S./Mexico border, communities impacted by the wall and other militarization, in the final days of Bush and the first days of Obama.
I'll be blogging in detail as I go at a new site, http://newsontheline.tv/.

• 08:11 waking up and thinking about funding for future projects. #
• 10:22 marvelling at how fascinating it is when u can see 2 or more totally unrelated "friends" on Facebook posting the same video. viral, i guess #
• 13:53 really wanting to blurt some very strong opions here on twitter but would probably bite me in ass someday when i'm running for president. #
• 14:45 feeling very jaded. sigh. #
• 15:57 just spent 2 hours on a conf call. now going for a walk to clear head. not much work getting done. waaah. #

Still no time to blog so i am posting tweets again.
Lots going on but can't bring myself to blog about it. why? hmm.

• 09:23 reading a report about digital initiatives in indpendent filmmaking, www.itvs.org/producers/digitalinitiative/fieldreport/index.html #
• 10:04 feeling overwhelmed. #
• 13:40 more good news. short version of my border film, Wild Vs. Wall, has been accepted 2 Sedona Film Fest. arizona.sierraclub.org/border #
• 14:37 putting my 2008-in-review letters in envelopes... #
• 15:24 thinking i might be overcaffinated. #
• 16:06 just applied for health insurance. yay. #
• 16:36 hating twitter marketeers #
• 16:47 Wondering if "Trying to Pretend" by MGMT is ironic and how many fans realize it. it fucking must be. brilliant really. #

• 09:38 checking email, just walked dog. cold out, too cold. #
• 09:48 trying again to figure out why Firefox is still wanting to connect to my old computer, and hanging/crashing when it can't find it. so stupid #
• 10:35 talking with FF support person on IRC. annoying cuz he doesnt seem to get it. #
• 11:21 still talking to this Firefox support guy. we've tried everything. dammit. #
• 17:32 omg, i think i finally figured out my stupid firefox problem i've been dealing with for 6 hours today and many more over the last 2 weeks. #
• 17:35 oops, i spoke to soon. Firefox still fucked. dammit. #
• 20:06 feeling persecuted by technology. all day today. #

• 09:08 trying to figure out how to be more productive today than yesterday. and more productive next year than this. sigh. #
• 09:22 Listening to a hilarious mashup of Rick Astley and Nirvana (the 2 most famous songs of each) on WFMU.org.. ROTFL!!! #
• 11:40 editing editing, editing.... i think i need more coffee... #
• 15:29 reading mention of my border film in this week's Tucson Weakly: tinyurl.com/84vmr4 #

Yesterday was an important birthday for me. It was a quiet one, we pretty much just relaxed and tried to stay dry and warm, as it was a very un-Tucson-like rainy cold day. That evening after dinner Greta surprised me with a peppermint ice cream cake which she had secretly purchased and brought home and hid in the freezer earlier in the afternoon (cleverly waiting for me to make my usual afternoon espresso, for which I would need to get coffee out of the freezer - that woman is muy inteligente!!! Thank you Greta!!)

Anyway, we also went to see Gus Van Sant's new film "Milk," the docudrama biopic about Harvey Milk, first openly gay high-profile elected official ever, a San Francisco city supervisor elected in 1978, murdered by wacko conservative Dan White, another city supervisor. It was a really well-done and moving film and I highly recommend it. One of the saddest things about seeing it is knowing that we're now 30+ years after the time depicted in the film, and still LGBT people are being denied the same rights that straights have, because of powerful and bigoted people who have some nonsensical fear that letting queers marry will somehow ruin the institution of marriage. It's just ridiculous. But it's worth remembering that only a generation ago the same people were fighting for even more basic rights, like the right to even have certain jobs (like teaching). There are those who would turn back the progress made in that time.

Anyway, it was a good birthday yesterday.

Via Mexico Solidarity Network: Ciudad Juarez registered 81 femicides so far in 2008, more than doubling the worst years of 1996 and 2001 in which the city recorded 37 women murdered. El Diario de Juarez provided the following accounting of femicides since 1993, when Esther Chavez Cano, a local human rights activist, first called attention to problem:

Year                       Femicides
1993                                19
1994                                19
1995                                36
1996                                37
1997                                32
1998                                36
1999                                18
2000                                32
2001                                37
2002                                36
2003                                28
2004                                19
2005                                33
2006                                20
2007                                25
2008                                81               

Of the 81 cases so far this year, 55 deaths resulted from organized crime, while the Special Investigator for Deaths of Women (FEIHM) is handling the other 26 cases. Sixteen of these 26 cases remain under investigation while the other ten cases have been declared resolved. Two twelve-year-old girls are among the victims.

In other news, I am in the middle of reading Roberto Bola

I am frantically, desperately, sadly, still editing "Death and Taxes," the documentary about war tax resistance that I've been working on for a year, if we count it from funding acquisition, or over 5 years, if we count from first conception and footage shot. Even though there's so much footage, and I've been doing this for so long, I've still learned so much as I edit these last 7 months or so. Every time I edit I learn or re-learn more about how to shoot. Here is a selection of key or not-so-key shooting tips:

- during interview, keep zooming in and out slowly, so that when you edit you can cut it up and the jump cuts won't be so jarring.
- don't be afraid to reshoot something, and to order people around (this is the hardest and probably the most important in documentary making).
- better to get it right during the shoot than try to fix it in post.
- you never have too much b-roll.
- if you have time and a camera that can do it, iterate the hour on the camera's time code as you shoot through tapes. That way when you capture, all your footage from a certain shoot will have unique timecode, makes it slightly easier to organize.
- watch as much footage as possible between shoots. Mistakes made or holes in coverage can be fixed if you know what you got or didn't get last time. If you wait till post to look, it's too late, probably.

There's probably more I could go into but it's late. very late.

I just can't get over how perfect this song is for an aging jaded wannabe hipster like myself at this moment in history: "Losing My Edge", by LCD Soundsystem. It's so hilarious and cynical and sad and clever and stinging and brilliant. Just check out some of the lyrics, my fav lines:

I was there in Jamaica during the great sound clashes.
I woke up naked on the beach in Ibiza in 1988.

But I'm losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent.
And they're actually really, really nice.

I'm losing my edge.

I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody. Every great song by the Beach Boys. All the underground hits. All the Modern Lovers tracks. I heard you have a vinyl of every Niagra record on German import. I heard that you have a white label of every seminal Detroit techno hit - 1985, '86, '87. I heard that you have a CD compilation of every good '60s cut and another box set from the '70s.

I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record.

I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.
I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.

I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know.

In other words, for those who miss all the allusions (cuz you're so uncool), "I hear that you care way too much and struggle too hard about completely useless bullshit that I now finally understand is absolutely unimportant."

Just found out about this new Tucson art blog called TuScene. Interesting. I've been thinking how few people I know in this town are really the "wired" type, that hardly anybody I know or work with creatively has a blog here, other than using Facebook or Myspace (bleah!) and most of my online friends are far away, in SF or PDX or NYC or London or wherever. I've also been thinking some lately how sometimes the Tucson "scene" feels a little small. Compared to some places I've lived I'm a little.... nostalgic. I especially feel this way when I read the "Goings On About Town" pages of The New Yorker... of course nowhere will ever live up to NYC, and noplace should try to, it's just embarrassing when a city does that.

But anyway, maybe that new blog and some other networking efforts will help me feel more "dialed in" to what's going on in this town and more satisfied with it. Ya think?

And I should stop reading that part of the New Yorker. And the Arts pages of the Times.

Sigh.

In other news, a short video of mine will evidently screen at the All Souls Procession Film Fest this week. And they waived the app fee for me.