I've been keeping a journal for 21 years. This blog for 3 and a half years (and almost 1000 entries).

I can't tell you how I found this (wink) but there's an interesting piece in the New Yorker about diaries. In this text the writer, Louis Menand, makes it clear that there's a difference between a journal, a blog, and a diary, and I of course agree, though the lines blur at times. I have always called my journal a journal. Diary smacks of something more pedestrian and tacky, a slavish record of exactly what happens each day, something to be disciplined about - like being on a diet, or trying to be, Menand says - something teen girls write in and fight to keep their little brothers from reading. Journals are more literary, more discriminating. And yet Menand drifts in his examples between diaries and what seem more like journals even in his estimation.

Lately it's been a cloudy, dreary, watery gloomworld here in Tucson. It reminds me of Portland. It reminds me of the weather I came here 2 years ago to get away from. It sucks. It makes me glum and melancholy and I know it's good for the plants and if you're from here or have been here for longer than me you can cheer but it just makes me feel down, and makes it easier for anything else that goes wrong to have a much heavier, soul-crushing import than normally. I really need the sun to come back.

Rain rain go away.

(To match the weather, by coincidence I'm currently listening to a song by the Flaming Lips called "Jesus Shooting Heroin.")

Until this spring, my mp3 collection was consisted of something like 25 GB of diskspace. It was manageable and I sort of had a handle on what I had and what I liked. It had been growing slowly, maybe 5% a year for the last 8 years or so, as I gradually converted my physical musical collection to digital files, or acquired stuff from friends.

However, starting this spring, my collection exploded in size, dramatically. It's now up to about 80 gigs! I did some trading with a friend, and then when I went to Europe I got tons of new stuff from my brother, friends in Berlin and Prague and Rostock, and then recently a harddrive was donated to Dry River that had about 30 gigs of great stuff on it (in fact, the collection on there was so great that I wish I knew who's it was because he/she might just be a really cool person) that I copied. I've been gradually importing all this new stuff into iTunes because I want to somehow keep it sort of sane, this glob of new stuff I haven't heard yet (or stuff I know but have never had a copy of)....

It's an odd experience... how does one deal with so much new culture just sitting in one huge pile?

Well, I've set up a smart playlist in iTunes that plays only stuff I've recently added, never played, and that hasn't been rated as only 1 star and has never been skipped. I'm still not quite done importing it all, but right now in this playlist I have 6 days, 19 hours and 34 minutes of this new music to listen to.

Yikes.

Anyway, I set it on shuffle and listen in the background all day while I work and it's great, mostly, and when I hate something I rate it 1-star or just skip it, and it varies from Alice Cooper to Thelonius Monk to Kyrgistani folk music to Wir Sind Helden and everything in between.

Here's a hilarious clip that demonstrates 1) again, how stupid Bush is and 2) how useless border barriers are.

And here's a pretty cool little video about local sentiment against the border wall in a small Texas town:

This short video about the No Borders Camp is the best general overview of the camp that I've seen so far. It's by Jeffrey Berringer, also known as the electopop bilingual musician Mono Mono. The video is unfortunately all in Spanish, but it's really good and I hope he makes a subtitled english version. I really like how it doesn't focus on the Border Patrol beatdown, it fairly and humanistically presents all the little successful inspiring times at the camp. It's great.

There's an online petition set up by the No Borders Camp legal defense team, asking the District Attorney to drop the charges against Juan Ruiz, the only No Borders Camper still facing charges - charges that he assaulted Border Patrol agents during the closing rally in Calexico Sunday November 11.

Please sign it. The video, which I've linked to before from this blog, shows pretty clearly that Juan was no danger to any federal agent present there. At the most, he was dancing a bit too enthusiastically for their unfunky souls.

And in other news, a lawyer in San Diego is starting to lay the groundwork for a civil suit against the Border Patrol on behalf of all the protesters they beat up that night.

It's too bad he can't file a class-action suit against the BP for all the migrants that get beat up, starved, denied water and medical attention, drugged, unfairly locked up, shot in the back, and other abuses all along the border all the time.

Because it's actually really chilly here in Tucson it's hard for me to think about mojitos right now, even though they're my favorite cocktail and I really enjoy making them for others. But as my friend Mykle said when telling me about this, I'm being replaced by a mojito -making robot. The video doesn't really show whether I can be satisfied with the robot's mixing methods, and the criteria are exacting with a mojito, so, we'll see, but it is pretty cool to watch all the pipes and tubes and limes rolling around and stuff.

So if you're somewhere that's still warm, have a mojito to celebrate. Me, I'm boiling water for green tea.

I just finished a short video piece that I'm pretty proud of about the border wall being built down at the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area.

A lot of people around here in Tucson love the San Pedro. It's really a special place. More than that, now it's a symbol of how little the Department of Homeland Security cares about anything but it's own powermad ambitions and empty gestures of pretending to secure our "homeland".
Watch the video here:

Or download it. And read more about the video, and the situation.

Another related bit of media is the audio recording I made of an ecology walk/talk given at the No Borders Camp, with lots of interesting information about the history of the Calexico/Mexicali area as it relates to water use, irrigation, Colorado River diversion, and the implications of the border and nationalism on the ecology and agriculture there.

I got back from Calexico late Sunday night, but in a way the No Borders Camp is still going on for me and many others. Myself, I spent a large part of the following 3 days working on media tasks related to getting the news out about the camp and the Border Patrol brutality on Sunday night. I worked with some other folks in Tucson to write a press release and compile a clip montage for mainstream TV stations, showing scenes from the camp all week in order to show that Sunday night's police riot was a surprising event compared to the calm and respectful negotiating and dealings that the migra had with us.

As it stands now, 2 of the 3 arrestees have been released with no charges. Guess which one is still in custody, sitting in a jail in Imperial County? That's right, the brown one. The non-U.S. citizen. He's a legal permanent resident, but any little crime is a good enough reason for the stormtroopers to throw your ass out.

It's lucky citizenship isn't revokable. Yet.

Meanwhile, other projects and aspects of life go on and I'm juggling a crazy schedule and trying to figure out how to get some kind of break. I - O and I - really need a vacation... and Turkey Day doesn't look like it's going to count...

Another morning in Calexico, Day 4 of the No Borders Camp, and I'm up early again, of course. This time I went to bed early, but I feel just about as crappy as I did when I went to sleep.

But enough about me. The camp is still a big success. Yesterday was a bit intense in the morning when la migra objected to gringo campers giving breakfast to the mexican side, but eventually things got worked out.

I've been shooting lots of video and I've edited a couple things: from the first day and a statement by a fellow camper and performance artist. This morning I hope to edit more.