The border vigilantes known as The Minutemen got into trouble trespassing on private property during their operations looking for undocumented border crossers near Three Points, Arizona. ACLU observers shot this video of the property owner getting angry at them.

I've been in a bit of a flamewar with some aquaintances in Portland because I dared to tell them that I might have a different, less naive notion of what's going on with the border and immigration after living in the borderlands for awhile and spending 18 months making a film about what is at least partially a border issue (the femicide in Juárez). In a place like southern Arizona one is just surrounded, soaking, in "the border" and all its cultural and political ramifications. But people a thousand+ miles from Mexico desparately want to believe that if they just read enough liberal articles on the web while they sit in their cubicle at work that they have a firm grasp on reality and a good idea of what's going on and then have a right to spout their half-formed theories.

Not that I'm an expert or trying to be holier-than-tho. I'm really just starting to work on this stuff; but my point is that just by being here, in the borderlands, you can't help but be exposed to a greater complexity of notions about immigration and the border.

Another place where immigration is a huge issue is Australia. I remember when I was there in 2001 how ever-present the issue of refugees and detainment camps was in the media and in the discussions of intelligent people.

Addressing this is a really great video I was just told about that spoofs a recent flashy tourism ad for Australia called "Where the Bloody Hell Are You?"

One thing I think they should have done something with in the spoof is taken advantage of the incredibly ripe-for-detourning part of the original where they say "and Bill's on his way down to open the front gate." Open the front gate for who? Sometimes just letting portions of a text simply hang itself is the best satire of all.

I threw together, literally in about 6 hours of editing, a short 11-minute video (47 meg download) about what happened here in Tucson on Monday with the immigrant rights marches and rally. It's a bit sloppy but still something I'm proud of, and it was a nice example of a collaborative effort with Pan Left Productions, the video collective I'm a member of. Four of us shot footage, then everyone got their tapes to the studio right after and I started capturing. Finished up cutting yesterday afternoon and then encoded it this morning and uploaded it. Hopefully I will soon have it encoded into some other formats too for maximum compatibility.

It covers a lot of ground - the student marches, the main march, the rally, some debate with some counterprotesters, some tension in the park over the counterprotesters, and the sad ending to the day.

I hope you like it.

Interesting article about how the 2 hollywood cheesefest films about the Juarez situation have been competing, and the one starring Minnie Driver has apparently been forced to go straight to DVD because everyone is choosing the one starring Jennifer Lopez instead. J-Lo is a bigger draw to theaters, of course. Her film is more realistic, but I think it's extremely bad that there won't be 2 films out there in the wide public eye. Having only one will make it more likely that audiences will not realize that there's a true situation behind the film.

Apparently even the J-lo film is having trouble finding a distributor. We'll see how long it takes for it to finally come up. One person I talked to said it would be late summer or fall, after the summer blockbuster season.

I'm sitting in on a No More Deaths meeting at Epic cafe at 7:30 am. The core organizers meet every single weekday morning here!

I'm here because I couldn't sleep, and the internet was down at my house, and I wanted to work on my indymedia story about yesterday. I'm not getting a lot done because I'm in the meeting, half-listening.

Anyway, these people do so much. It's incredible.

This has been a crazy day. Huge marches and rallies here in Tucson that I was at from 8:30 am to now. I'm too fried to write an indymedia article with any pretension of journalistic rigor so i'm blogging about it first.

I started with 200 students who'd walked out of Tucson High School. Marched with them downtown to the federal building. Met other students from other schools. about 600 in total, we then marched to Armory Park to meet the main march coming from South Tucson. The rally started before the main march had reached the park and there were about 2000 already there by the time the main march arrived, and it was HUGE. it's hard to estimate, some were saying 5,000, some 10, some 20,000. it went on for blocks and blocks and blocks, taking up all lanes of 6th ave.

People packed into the little park and the whole time while the rally went on, off to one side was a little knot of about 6-8 anti-immigrant protesters and vigilanted types, holding offensive signs and just standing there trying to provoke a reaction and ruin things. And it ended up that they did.

For 3 hours, peacekeepers ringed these assholes with arms locked, making sure no one fucked with them and started a full-fledged riot. The cops SHOULD have done something, should have removed them, because the park had actually been RENTED by the Immigrant Rights groups. But the cops just stood there and let whatever happen.

At the end of the rally, a teenage girl finally had had enough and she tried to splash some water on the anti-immigrants. She didn't even succeed, she ended up splashing the peacekeepers. but the cops swooped in and arrested her, things went crazy, pepperspray started flying. it sucked, and i'm sure the mainstream media will latch onto that as the one thing to report about the day.

sigh.

It's only early April and it's already super hot. Must be like 85-90 today. Wow. Really an omen for this summer. Everybody's been warning me, every time I say how I like Tucson, about the summer. Hmm.

In other news, last night was a super awesome art auction at the Dry River space, to benefit a political prisoner, Harold Thompson, an anarchist organizer who was jailed 26 ago for life+, for killing a guy who was going to kill his son. We had Patrick do the auctioneering and he was great. I guess he learned it from his Aunt who worked in a carnival in Texas or something. He was really entertaining.

My friend Lenara who was visiting from Brazil then took me over to this party, the closing night party for the Towards a Science of Conciousness Conference. That's why she was in town. It was a nice little party and I got a taste of the diversity of people in the field. Everyone from really starched neurobiologists to wacky extropians and new age freakazoids. Today Lenara headed off to the airport to catch her flight back to Sao Paulo and then Porto Alegre, and now I have another guest rolling in from San Diego, a member of the Organic Collective who is on a little Southwest roadtrip.

Tommorrow is what looks to be a massive student walkout and march here in Tucson, part of a national day of action against the anti-immigration legislation in congress. I'll be there shooting video, I think.

Last night at the Dry River space we had a dance party and I DJed. It was pretty fun. I've never really actually DJed at a party before - I've been a radio DJ, and obviously I've manned the stereo at parties, but its never been DJing in the sense of like mixing and beat-matching and stuff. I used a cool piece of software called Traktor, by Native Instruments, which auto-calculates BPMs and lets you sync 2 tracks by adjusting BPM of one or both, and you can loop, skip around, scratch, filter. I didn't do too much fancy stuff, just tried to keep the beat going and stick to a few conceptual themes, not paying much attention to genre. The latter made for a pretty weird set, lots of stylistic variety. It was fun. So below is the playlist, roughly, but at some point during the set I hit the button that sorts the list by beats per minute, so this isn't chronological, its roughly in order of fastest to slowest.

Awe by League of Infinite Justice
Vamos Con San Pedro (Son Times) by Los Sampler's
Rockstar by Z-Trip
Virus by Deltron
Life In The Greenhouse Effect by Steroid Maximus
Skelechairs (Venetian Snares Remix) by Doormouse
Evil by Paris
DJ Peron by Tango Crash
Give The Anarchist A Cigarette by Chumbawamba
Electrolatino by Se

• steev's blog

Believe it or not I woke up basically at sunrise again. Not because anyone txted me, unfortunately. Just because I did. Taoists say one should rise with the sun. I've always kind of liked that idea. Though they say one should retire with the sun too and that seems pretty unrealistic.

Anyway, I laid there thinking for a while, then wrote in my journal. made tea. Then I checked my email, checked some blogs i read, checked Flickr - I'm sort of a Flickr addict - and decided to take someone off my contacts list there. He's someone I know from a long time ago, from an old circle of friends and aquaintances that I no longer keep in touch with, and he posts photos constantly but they're never interesting to me. They're just in a completely different plane of existence than where I'm at now, dabbling with video games, technology for its own sake, and disposable income lifestyle porn, what I just called in my journal the "digital dilletante" world.

But then, clicking onward from his contact list, I started trying to find other people from that social circle, way back when. It's now been 9 and a half years since I first started getting to know them. All caught up in the internet boom in San Francisco, a clique of cyber-hipsters bent on changing the world with HTML and chemicals. As one old friend from that time said "They watched way too many movies, took way too many drugs, and they made way too much money."

I dipped into that scene for a few years, really only because of work, when you get down to it. (I fell out with that wise friend who said the above quote - ironically because of a copyright/cash dispute - and never saw him again. I wish we were still friends.)

After a few years I climbed back out of that pool, shedding bad vibes and bad karma but also with some really valuable wisdom gained, lessons learned, and a few really great, wise people known. Perhaps it should be no surprise that some of the neatest and wisest of those people are the hardest to locate and learn about using the new digital socialising tools like Flickr, and blogs and stuff.

One of the top 5 songs to be stuck in my head for the last 5 or so years is a song by Death Cab For Cutie. Literally at least once a week since I heard it first, I find myself singing it to myself. Jay still never lets me sing it when I'm around her. It's a really sad song. The core of this sadness comes in the second stanza:

And this is the chance I never got
To make a move
But we just talk about
The people we've met in the last 5 years
And will we still remember them in 10 more?

For some reason some people like sad songs. I like sad songs. Someone newly very special to me likes sad songs. But others don't. Jay doesn't. She always said it was because some people have had sad, troubled, hard lives, and so don't need or want sad songs, and others have happy, priveleged lives and so sad songs are just sort of like slumming, dipping into an exotic world you never had to live yourself. I'm actually putting words into her mouth, but the concept is hers. I don't know if I totally agree. But I have had a pretty easy life, so I'm not one who should say.

Pues si, I'm meandering. But that song popped into my head when I was looking at all those bland photos by all those old digerati from a past time. A swirl of brief and mostly superficial friendships fluttering around a bright light of hope and money, like moths.

I'm getting so personal. I guess because there's been important personal stuff happening lately for me. Nothing bad. really good, actually. I better stop now.

I let you bum a smoke,
you quit, this winter past.
I tried twice before
But like this, it just would not last.

I just woke up to sound of my cellphone vibrating in silent mode. I reached over and there was a new text message from a friend. It said

Good Morning! a thunderstorm is colliding with the sunrise! You should go look from your deck! the storm is coming in from the north!

And in indeed it was a pretty spectacular sight. It was worth being woken up for, por cierto.