There were 2 things about Obama's speech here in Tucson the other night that I wanted to discuss. Before I start I should say that for the most part I was impressed and satisfied with his performance. Indeed it was one of the best speeches he's ever delivered, I think, and it was, realistically, about the best thing anyone could have wanted.
But one thing really struck me the moment he said it, and another thing he said got me thinking about it a day later. The first was also wisely noticed and commented on yesterday by Michael Chabon in The Atlantic:

as he moved from an invocation of the innocence and immanence of the dead little girl to a call, part admission, part admonishment, part fatherly exhortation, for Americans "to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations," the speech found its true importance, its profundity. To attempt to live up to your children's expectations—to hew to the ideals you espouse and the morals that you lay down for them—is to guarantee a life of constant failure....

When I heard Obama give that part of the speech I was almost outraged Read more>>>

cider experiment tonite: I wanted to solve the problem of how to get hard cider that's not too dry - it's too dry because the yeast eats up pretty much all the sugar and turns it to alcohol, right? My theory is, what if I stop the fermentation early by heating the stuff, hot enough to kill the yeast, but not hot enough to boil off the ethanol (boiling point 178 degrees F). So I tried it. I kept aside about a cup of yeasty cider. heated the rest to about 135 for 30 minutes. let it cool down, then before bottling i mixed it back in with the cup of yeasty stuff so that when i bottled, there'd still be a little fermenting to provide carbonation. but hopefully not *too* much, resulting in exploding bottles... i'll let you know what happens... Read more>>>

As Steinbeck wrote: “How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only
in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children?
You can’t scare him—he has known a fear beyond every other.”

From an article in a recent issue of The Economist about immigration. This is why undocumented migrants will keep coming, no matter how high the walls are. The author makes a skillful comparison between the Okies in "Grapes of Wrath" and the latin american immigrants who risk everything to make it the U.S.

Along the same lines, a newish documentary called The Other Side of Immigration that also looks at particular and personal close-ups of people immigrating and why seems to be something I want to watch and encourage.  These kinds of explanations of individual experience and motivation are what need to be seen by as many gringos as possible. Read more>>>

detritus posted a photo:

this is on the approach down Toole toward the intersection with Congress/4th Ave. this area is already insanely unsafe for bicycles, and now with the ongoing construction of the new insane parking garage right there they've filled the bike lane with traffic cones and sand bags. thanks tucson. fuck you very much.

This afternoon i've expended (not wasted, but, used, when I should have been working) a bunch of time reading tweets and blog posts and news articles all about the case of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks and alleged rapist of 2 Swedish women, and the larger meta-issue of the people standing up to defend Assange and attack his accusers, like filmmaker Michael Moore and MSNBC personality Keith Olbermann. There have been so many great feminist blog posts about this, and tons of backlash on Twitter against Moore using the hashtag #MooreandMe. I won't go into the details myself but will just link to this excellent and concise little summary on the Feminist Frequency blog, which has links to a bunch of other blogs and stories that you can delve into.  The last link there is to another blog that deftly explains at the end where we're at now, specifically for Olbermann and Moore (and I've sort of written the same on Facebook, though not as well), but also in general for anyone who screws up with these kinds of tricky issues that involve opression and power and social conditioning:

They have the opportunity to apologize. Because being a good progressive? Is all about fucking up.
If we’re ever to break the myth of the flawless progressive hero — a myth that is unproductive, a myth that breaks hearts — we need to start learning how to recover from mistakes. Because they happen; casual racism, sexism, rape apologism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, ageism, classism… Those things happen because we were taught to make them happen. Now we need to teach ourselves to stop them. Sure, we need to expect more. But expecting more doesn’t mean expecting perfection, the first time, every time. Expecting more is about making mistakes, being called out, engaging and learning from them. We learned that shit in pre-school.

So Moore and Olbermann should just fess up and say they're sorry. They didn't think it through quite enough. I don't think they went into it wanting to apologize for rapists. They were blinded a little bit by a focus on other issues, and on the fact that they're white men in a patriarchal rape culture society. They made a mistake. They should have said that yesterday. But they can still say it now. I hope they do. I hope when I make more stupid boneheaded white male mistakes, as i surely will at some point, I'll recognize it fast and apologise right away like they should have. Read more>>>

In the last issue of Filmmaker Magazine, there's a section (print edition only) called "Letters To A Young Producer." I'm not a producer, exactly, nor do I want to specialize in that, but there are lots of good bits of advice and stories by several working "indie" producers. The last one, Noah Harlan, says an interesting thing:  basically, if you're producing films with budgets of at least 2 million dollars, that's enough to make a living as a producer, from your fees.  But, in today's funding/investing climate in the filmmaking world, he's unable to pull himself into that bracket.  There are no films being made in that bracket. "The mid-budgeted indie is gone."

Wow.

Is that true? If so it's probably true of directors as well. Possibly it's not true of other roles that are less involved, because they can work on several films a year - grips, camera operators, actors, etc. But producers and directors are kind of sucked into one film at a time for a year or more. Read more>>>

A letter to the editor I just sent to the Tucson Weekly:

 In your November 25th issue you allow Leo Banks to tilt at his same old windmill again. How many more times do we have to be subjected to the same old hyperbolic sob story?  Every one of Banks' articles, which you insist on putting on your cover several times a year, can be summarized quite easily and uniformly: "poor, poor, yet noble, rancher-folk, their lives made so hard and dangerous by the nasty brown people coming over the border and the feds who let them! oh let's wring our hands and shed a tear for the once-beautiful and now ruined cowboy borderlands!"  But these people aren't real cowboys (Ask Chilton, for instance, what his day job is and if he doesn't lie to you, he'll admit he's a banker), and the land has already been largely ruined by the emaciated animals that they insist on grazing there despite the unprofitability of such a hobby.  

Furthermore, ask TPD to draw a map of assaults in the Tucson city limits and you'll no doubt get a bloodier and longer list than you provide for this latest Banks tirade.  And never a mention of the root causes of the phenomenon, that the smugglers and undocumented immigrants (or "illegals" as you so hatefully call them) are out there in the deadly desert and mountains because right-wing politicians put them there with border policies that started in the mid-90s, and with trade policies that started in the 50s or earlier. 

Does it ever occur to you that the credibility of your paper drops every time you print one of Banks' one-sided rants?  The only people that take him seriously are the ignorant, right-wing nutjobs that already believe the alarmist narrative he's pedalling, and i would think that your readership is surely slanted more toward the opposite side of the spectrum.  The young and hip club-goers and artsy folk who actually use your rag (admittedly only to check movie times and read the comics) know that Leo Banks is a racist blowhard, not a real journalist. So why bother with him? I guess because he's a friend of yours, part of the TW old boys' club? And nobody else will give him a job? Oh yes, and because that's a way to get people like me to pick up a copy, get annoyed, and contribute our eyeballs to your theoretical ad impressions count. That's the name of the game, I guess: Controversy, hate, and sensationalism sells.  But take heed - I and all the smart people I know in town are less and less likely to frequent your pages, with every Banks screed we see. Read more>>>