Well, Rod just called and he's on his way back from San Diego after attending a hearing on the government's motion to stay his release. The judge said no, why don't you prepare something more carefully.

so The govt is going to refile their motion and a hearing is set for 2 weeks from now, march 23, when he has to go back to San Diego again.

We got reporters from all over calling and emailing us to hear the news. It's pretty crazy.

okay. gotta go. other things call...

I went on an "adventure" to a "secret" part of southern arizona this weekend. I camped with a friend in a high desert valley, 2 miles from the Mexican border. Last night we got settled in and then saw lights and we knew it was the Border Patrol. We were all ready to be harassed by La Migra, though we knew we were doing nothing wrong that we knew of. We were on National Forest land, so it was fine to camp where we were. But there are countless anecdotes of Border Patrol agents giving shit to people, or at least bothering them with warnings of how dangerous it is so close to the border, that there are dangerous smugglers around, etc.

Anyway, we waited patiently for the truck to get to us. When it did it paused, lights blaring, then courteously pulled forward so the lights were no longer shining right at us. It was indeed border patrol. Then the driver said "how y'all doing?" we said hi and then he said "do y'all know which Forest Service road this is?" We didn't know, but offered to show him a map. He said no, that's okay, there's probably a sign around here somewhere.

He drove off and we laughed. A lost border patrol agent. hilarious.

The altitude was higher than we'd planned and so it was extremely cold. Probably in the 20s. So it was one of the least comfortable nights I can remember. It was not only really cold but my friend thrashed around in her sleep and pushed me off my sleeping pad halfway through the night. I got very little sleep. Finally dawn came and I watched Venus rise and then the sun rise, then I dozed a bit, woke up and couldnt sleep any more, though it was only about 7. We made oatmeal and tea and packed up and drove back to Tucson, stopping in Patagonia for coffee and bagels at the little cafe there.

I'd been asked to help drive Rod Coronado to San Diego for his appearance in federal court there tommorrow morning. I was willing to do it, but wasn't looking forward to it after getting so little sleep on the campout, but luckily when we got back Rod called and said he'd found others to go. whew. Driving all night from Tucson to San Diego on about 3 hours of sleep would not have been fun.

Plus, the other good thing is that now I can go see Awesome Ocealot tonight, a friend's band that I've been wanting to see. yay. i better go now, actually, before i fall asleep. heh.

Someone translated part of my film into German.

Hmm. Well, I guess if they do the whole thing and I have time, I'll put German subtitles on the DVD too. Except that would be a lot of extra work. Hmm.

I just listened to a radio program with John Perkins, the author of the hit book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man." Also on the show were 3 other guests with a wide range of positions about the claims Perkins makes in his book. The most last one is a guy from the World Bank who basically completely disagrees. His main point was, well, yeah, there's bad stories but there's good ones too, and of course projects and loans are going to fail a lot because these countries are risky environments. He also spewed out lots of statistics about how the world and its poor people are better off in the last few decades thanks to foreign aid and the IMF and the World Bank, etc. Perkins counters with other statistics that prove just the opposite.

The show's host sums it up by saying "the devil is in the details." Whenever anyone uses that maxim I like to quote Einstein who said the opposite: God is in the details.

But anyway, my point is, if the details are important, but the different sides are tossing around totally contradictory details, how do we decide? What numbers do we believe? How can we, the normal, everyday members of civil society, possibly know what the truth is? on one side are very smart people, even nice people, even a couple people I know personally, who say "capitalism has made the world better, here's the stats to prove it." And then on the other side are other very smart people saying the opposite, and they have convincing figures too.

What to believe? Is this just a matter of faith?

I made a new version of the trailer for my Juarez doc. It's basically the same as the old one, I just took out all the people titles, so viewers don't have to try to read them in such a short time, and changed the end title so it's not time-specific (it used to say "coming soon in fall 2005." hah..) A couple other little visual things are spruced up too.

I haven't had time to read it, but here's what looks like a really good report called Invisible Hands. Tracing the Connections Between the Policies of International Financial Institutions and Country Budget Policies (a PDF file). Written by Jim Schultz of the Democracy Center. It's the result of a conference where people trying to make budget processes more transparent in their countries met up with people who are working to make financial organizations like the World Bank more accountable. I've skimmed it, looks great, don't have time to read it. If you do, let me know what you think. [embarrassed shrug]

This evening KBOO, the cool community radio station in Portland, interviewed me over the phone about Rod Coronado's current situation. Not that I'm an expert, but I sort of got selected by the little group of supporters here in Tucson to do it. Maybe because I used to live in Portland. Maybe because no one else wanted to do it.

Anyway, it was a pretty by-the-numbers set of questions and I provided some pretty boring and almost awkward answers. I guess I was nervous. I'm usually not nervous talking in public or even on the radio or TV, but the fact that I'm supposed to be saying the right thing, that you can't just spout off and be irronsponsible when talking about someone in trouble with the law - that made me nervous. You can kind of hear that I'm choosing my words very carefully. Despite that I still screwed up, and said that Rod had given his lecture in San Diego last August when it was actually August 2003. drat.

I hate how they called him an "indigenous eco-anarchist" on the KBOO news archive page. KBOO of course means that as a compliment, but it sounds bad to me. Maybe I wouldn't mind if the mainstream media hadn't made "anarchist" into a dirty word. I dunno. I kind of wish they could just say "person who cares more about nature and wildlife than about property and money." But there always has to be these labels used all the time.

I've finished posting to the Indymedia Translation Tool all the english transcriptions of my film. If you're a native speaker of latin american spanish and would like to help translate, please click the link, and then pick a section.

If you've never used the Translation Tool before, you may want to read the instructions. The TT is a really wonderful thing - many people, when they hear about it first, think it is another crappy machine translator like babelfish or google translations, but it's really a web application that handles online collaboration, enabling the management of little translation projects - allowing those with texts needing translation to propose them, and volunteer translators to agree to do them and post their finished translations, as well as revise translations.

The wonderful Jenoun, who also helped me translate the spanish interviews into english, has already done the first section. I'm hoping I can get the rest done in the next couple weeks, in time for me to add the subtitles, have the DVD replicated, and take the DVDs on my little screening tour of Las Cruces, Albuquerque and San Diego, March 30 through April 5. Anybody who helps will of course get a copy or two.

Gracias!

argh.

i spent about 3 hours today covering the latest on Rod Coronado's situation. went to the hearing, then went home and wrote a feature for AZ IMC.

now i just screwed up cuz of one misclick and lost the first try at this post. grr.

so much stuff to do. schedule thrown off on multiple days because of this stupid indictment of a friend and member of my community. and of course this is why the govt does this sort of thing. to wear down and sabotage of the efforts of hundreds of related activists and supporters. It effects more than just the people held in jail, it disrupts whole communities and projects. of course this is not to minimize the experience of the prisoners, whose lives are infinitely more disrupted than their friends and supporters.

really the thing i should be doing is continuing to post the rest of the transcription of my film, so that people can translate it into spanish. that's my priority, but... other things get in the way.

suspira....

I just found out about a new documentary called "Living Room" that is touring around and that's about infoshops. I wish it were playing at our infoshop here in Tucson. The closest the tour will come is The Catalyst in Prescott.

Anyway it looks like it could be a good film, and they cover the Back to Back Cafe in Portland, a space I'm very familiar with, so I'm interested.

But a particularly interesting thing about it is that on their website there's a thoughtful essay about the process they went through to get funding and approval from their school. At the beginning of the essay I read that they received a grant for $2100 and I thought ooh, lucky. Then I read on about the hoops they had to jump through to get that money and decided it's not worth it and it was not lucky.

Apart from the problems they mention in the essay, it just amazes me that interviewing someone for a film is even considered "research" and that if you do that under the auspices of a University, you need to get approval from a "human subjects research committee." I just talked to someone else doing work on the Juarez situation as a thesis and she has to get the same kind of permission.

It's just a bit ridiculous to me. We're not talking about injecting chemicals into your arms, this is talking and either writing down or videorecording your answers. you're not a "human subject," you're a person.

I guess it's another case of a few bad apples spoiling everything. Because in the past some "researchers" abused their relationship with their interviewees somewhere, now poor well-meaning students have to subject themselves to this bullshit.

(I guess it's kind of ironic, too, that these people are making a film essentially about an alternative, DIY way of looking at information and information distribution (infoshops), and yet they do it from the auspices of a big university and spend months waiting for someone to give them the go-ahead and write them a check.)

The same kind of thing is going on in a completely different arena, or shall I say rink. In 2 different cities that I know of, Tucson and Portland, and maybe more, filmmakers are running into problems making documentary work about roller derby participants, largely due to (I believe) the recent debut of a new "reality" show on A&E called Rollergirls.

Bad apples ruining it for everybody.