For the last 2 days I've been in Las Cruces, New Mexico for a conference on the murdered women of Juarez. It's been a crazy, dizzying blur of panel discussions and networking. I sold or gave away many copies of my film. I talked to many people about my film, about screening it, about how to get it, open sourcing it, and other things. It's been so exciting and so intense too. I will post photos soon but for now check out this post on San Diego Indymedia from DJ Pepperbox, who is also here, she posted a good photo of the "redressing justice" exhibit.

Tommorrow we're going to Juarez. Then I'm heading up to Albuquerque that night.

I'm too frazzled to write more detail. It's just been incredible.

Well, this Saturday, April 1, The Minutemen are revving up their operations again in Arizona. They're having a rally/press conference in Altar Valley, which is pretty near to Tucson, south. I wish I could be there but I'll be in Juárez. It looks like the ACLU will have legal observers out there again. I haven't heard of any other progressive, pro-immigrant response planned yet.

Well, things are coming together in many ways right now, some that I can't really talk about or even totally fathom right now.

It seems that for others this is true as well lately.
What's going on, is there some cosmic strange attractor making stuff happen, making stuff and people fall together in positive ways?

Anyway, details of some things for me: I have sort of a preliminary batch of the final DVDs of my film ready for my little mini-tour of New Mexico. A friend and I assembled cases and inserts till late last night. Today I have to send 20 copies to Mexico Solidarity Network. Tommorrow at least 2 Dry River compañeras and I are taking off at 5am to get to Las Cruces in time for the Justice for Women Symposium. My film will show there at 2:30pm. After the Symposium we plan to go to Juárez for the day and visit with some activists there. Then they head back to Tucson and I head up to Albuquerque, and do a screening there on Monday night at 7:30. Then tuesday morning I fly back to Tucson, and my friend Lenara, an internet artist/researcher from Brazil, is flying in to Tucson at practically the same time.

So that's my next week in a nutshell.

A hilarious diagram from a Pasadena newspaper shows the telltale signs for parents of whether their kid does graffiti. It's so silly but it's a disturbing example of the kind of indoctrination that the media engages in all the time. And what it's teaching: that here's another thing to fear in your children; that it's okay to invade your child's privacy, and if he or she appears to be artistic and also wear a hooded sweatshirt, he must be a criminal; that all graffiti is a "problem" and a sign of gang activity; and a host of other assumptions.

Right now I'm at a meeting - there are usually like 6 people and tonight there's 18. It's incredible.

Umm. I don't know why I'm posting this other than that I'm sort of bored. There are lots of meetings in my life these days. It can be kind of frustrating.

Life is kind of crazy. I'm spending almost all my time getting ready for my trip to show my film in Las Cruces and Albuquerque.
This involves getting copies of the DVD ready to have available at these screenings.

And of course while I've been buying DVD cases and blanks and designing covers and all sorts of other related tasks, the rest of life goes on. All the other groups and meetings and stuff keep moving. And of course money hemorages out of my bank account too.

It's like juggling.

sigh.

Nice article in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Bush has presided during one of the most significant political re-alignments in the history of the Western Hemisphere. By this summer, every major Latin American nation but Colombia is likely to be run by elected leaders with stronger backgrounds in Marx than free markets. If Cold War-era domino theory has been a bust elsewhere, it's working in Latin America.

I just love this photo.
From the march for immigrant rights in LA yesterday. Somewhere between half a million and a million, or maybe more, people marched there to protest the Sensenbrenner bill. Is mainstream America hearing about this? On the front page of the LA Times site this morning it's the top story but the eye is distracted immediately to the big picture and blurb about the Bruins winning a basketball game. WTF? And you have to scroll down 2 screenfuls to see a tiny link on the New York Times site. suspira.

I like what Jacob said in his blog yesterday about all this, the idea that the Senate bill is really just a tactic to frame the debate a particular way, to shift everything over to the right. They never expected it to pass, they just wanted the possibility of the extreme to lower everyone's expectations. Oh you'll let us stay if we wear shackles? Ok! Please!?

There are some, maybe many, people for whom it seems almost everything they do is a form of therapy. everything is about themselves, perhaps even about improving themselves, but always themselves. Turned inward. A self-focus. Always.

That's all I'm at liberty to say right now.

An interesting article about Kurdish gasoline smugglers in Iraq and the popularity of reggaetón there.

It would be a stretch to say that the enthusiasm for Gasolina has to do with its subject matter, especially when considering its aggressive rhythm and near-pornographic video. But Daddy Yankee's signature track is a sexually-explicit ode to what gasolina can provide - and here "gasoline" can mean, as Sasha Frere-Jones [says] in the New Yorker, speed, rum, semen or gasoline - and that, of course, is unadulterated pleasure. And at the moment, as Iraq disintegrates, the Kurds are betting quite heavily on what gasoline can do for them.

Mi amigo Patrick provides a little slice of life, describing his commute through Caracas and musings about class and neighborhoods. Muy interesante.