OMG!
"The Arizona Senate passed a resolution on Friday that would create a civilian militia to hunt undocumented immigrants along the border. Senate Bill 1132 establishes a volunteer civilian security force under the direction of the Governor. Members would receive military and police training once a month."
(via Mexico Solidarity Network)

I designed this poster:


Just picked it up from the printers last night and it looks great. 11x17 inches. It should be a cool event, and I hope the posters help get a bunch of people to come to it. I'm also working on a video collage piece for the show. It's the first extensive non-documentary video piece I've done in years. It's fun to see other people in Pan Left working on more artistic and less carefully planned-out work too. I think we all need to excercise our spontaneous creativity a little more often.

Just a few weeks after yet another insanely racist and propagandistic cover story about illegal immigration by the ludicrously unskilled and racist Leo Banks, the Tucson Weekly is at it again.

I wouldn't make this much fuss about this normally except that this issue came out yesterday, on International Women's Day. They pretty much hardly ever put anything this extreme on their cover, but now of all days, they run this. And it's completely gratuitous, nothing to do with the story at all, except that the story is dead boring (about the state legislature) so they must have felt they had to jazz it up to get people to even pick up a copy.

Tucson Weekly, you are the most conservative, racist, sexist, classist entertainment weekly I have ever seen out of all the 8 or 9 cities i've lived in, including, believe it or not, Charleston, South Carolina. In fact, in everywhere else that I've lived, the weeklies have been at least somewhat consistently left-of-center - although the Portland Mercury is sometimes annoyingly too-hip-to-be-left (but this is because they feel the need to appear cooler and different than the older, more staid liberal Williammette Week. This may be a little of what's going on here in Tucson; although there's no other paper to compete with, they maybe just purposely printing shockingly clueless and controversial stories in order to boost circulation).

Tucson Weekly, you suck.

Just kidding!
Amazingly, this was the subject line of a piece of spam I recieved today. I've been marvelling at how one could almost take up reading spam folder subject lines instead of reading headlines and get a decent overview of the news, since this is a side effect of recent spammer strategy, it seems. Now you can also get your Onion-esque fake news from spam too.

Like cowbird eggs placed in the nests of other birds, there are many other examples of this kind of simulacra that seem to fulfill a function in life but are really largely just taking up space and fooling us. Writing software can seem like creativity, going to meetings can seem like a social life, but these are empty calories. There's no time like the present to keep remembering that.

Etymology is an amazing educational tool, an enlightening tool. Last Thursday's edition of Ze Frank's vlog was mostly about revenge and forgiveness and forgetting, and it reminded me that I've been wanting to blog also about forgiveness, for awhile now. Ze says, "it's a pity the word forget was tied to forgive, it's just not that practical." Forget is fairly easy to understand, but what is forgiveness, exactly? The dictionary says it's "to grant pardon to" a person, or "to cease to feel resentment against," but these seem like 2 separate acts to me.

There's a wrongful act that someone did to me that I will never forget, ever, I predict, though I conciously think about it less and less, lately maybe only once a week or less, where it used to be, 4 months ago, about once every hour, at least. Self-help websites and books on the subject of the offense always say "you must forgive for your own sake" and I used to blindly accept that, but lately I've realized that those 2 definitions divide into one kind of forgiveness that I must enact, indeed, for my own sake - yes, I will cease to feel resentment (maybe I already mostly have... the resentment lessens all the time) - and another kind of forgiveness that I may never enact, for I don't know if I will ever "grant pardon."

Or perhaps I will, because "pardon" simply means to stop seeking punishment or penalty for an offense. Are these, these 2 things, all that forgiveness is? Well then, fine, maybe it's easier than I thought. Hmm. All of my life I thought forgiveness also meant something like "deciding that something someone did wasn't wrong after all." And I will never ever do that in this case. Perhaps the word I'm looking for is "excuse", one meaning of which is "To serve as justification for." Because it might be debatable, and the wrongdoer and other people might argue with me till the end of time, but I will never admit that this thing that was done to me was not wrong, was unavoidable, was neccesary, or was justifiable, or even was done with an appropriate regard for me and my feelings.

No. Never. Nunca. So, the transgression, it's forgivable, but it's not forgettable, and it's not excusable, and it will never not be wrong, ever. And I feel okay saying that, that is healthy enough, for me. My heart and my karma will continue to flower and grow when I forgive, but I don't feel like it will hurt me to not excuse.

So, I say to this person - and if you still read this blog you know who you are and what I'm talking about - you've done me wrong, but I no longer seek to punish you for it, and I no longer am angry, or very soon will not be; nevertheless it will always, forever, have been wrong, what you did to me.

Whew. well, shit. There's something else to talk to my therapist about tommorrow. heh.

I think I'm mostly just blogging because I haven't for quite a few days, and I'm tired of the last entry, that geek-gripe entry, sitting there festering, and I just want to go on record as saying, things are good. Really good. I'm pretty damn happy lately. Although I have been saddened by other people's sadnesses in the last little while. It seems to be hitting me harder than usual, or maybe they are of a different degree than ever before, to hear about the misfortunes and past ordeals endured by friends, especially those caused by people close to them. It just sucks that people mistreat each other so much. Especially men mistreating women. It really really sucks.

A friend sent me an interesting list of essentials for the ex-mac user switching to linux.

Yeah. ok. Whatever. I already did that, and then went back. I was an everyday desktop user of linux, had a linux laptop, blah blah, from like 98 to 2001, and felt all ideologically proud and all, I even wrote my own live audio manipulation software for music peformance using a tangled thicket of perl, sql, and csound code.... but in retrospect all of that was a pain. I switched back to the Mac when I wanted to start doing desktop video stuff again and Final Cut was the killer app and still is. Not only that, but OS X gave me the unix command line anyway. And I never looked back. Despite my rant from the other day here, the mac is still so much more a pleasure to use than anything else, and I'm just done being an ubergeek. I don't even have development tools installed on my powerbook. If I have to compile something to use a piece of software on my personal worskstation, fuck it, there must be something else.

Really, even for me, user experience and interface are king now, and Apple just kicks ass at that. I recently switched from using the free, open source Audacity to using a pirated copy of Soundtrack Pro. Stupidly, Soundtrack Pro doesn't even do an important step in my podcasting workflow that Audacity does (exporting to MP3 - i use iTunes to do the conversion now), but it's worth it because Soundtrack Pro just has the easier to use and more beautiful interface. It has the standard key shortcuts that every soundeditor i've loved for the last 12 years (soundtools, protools, peak) has had, not to mention others that it shares with Final Cut. It feels good to use it. Audacity feels like I'm building a house with half-built, ugly tools that cut my hands when I hold them. The feel and look of the interface is what matters, even if one has to sacrifice a bit (just a bit) of power.

And I don't believe that "replacement" linux apps would even be that much more reliable than their Apple counterparts. Shit goes wrong all the time on linux boxen, tho not as often as on widoze, of course.. They may be a little better than 6 years ago, but not that much. It's just that so many geeks simply love to fuck around on computers for their own sake, so it seems okay to them. Well, I just want to get work done, I don't want to feel like an amateur mechanic fiddling under the hood of my hotrodded Mustang GT all day just because I can. I'd rather have that fucker on the road, taking me real places, even if it's just a Honda Civic.

As my friend Mykle once said, "Unix is like a Rubik's Cube, you can mess around with it all day and feel really good for solving it but you still haven't gotten any work done."

No, I want to, as the redneck pickup truck bumpersticker says, "Get R Done"...

Legendary (?) and oh-so-popular with the kids punk band Defiance, Ohio played about a week ago at Dry River. I recorded some of it and just posted a little bit of the recording, their first song, with some introductory banter. Note that they even thanked us border activists who'd been in the space all evening before the show, probably keeping them from getting a proper soundcheck. They also warn people to be considerate when they dance, which is so cool. So many shows I've been to where kids just flail around and end up hurting each other. I still can hardly believe they actually played at our little space, they even requested to play at our space.

Yesterday while making a pair of mix CDs for a new lover (a favorite thing of mine to do for a new or potential lover) I accidentally deleted one of the 2 playlists from iTunes. A result of confusion over the interface (i was trying to delete some tracks from the playlist, but didnt know that other pane was active, the pane with the list of playlists, in which i had selected that playlist), the mistake was itself annoying that it could happen so easily, but, I believed at first, not a big deal - until I noticed that iTunes was not allowing me the opportunity to undo that. WTF?!!!? I got really mad. Why should that sort of thing NOT be undoable? Upon further examination i have found that a lot of things are non-undoable in iTunes. Why? Since when did Apple decide that something so easy and constant and expectable would be impossible?

There are all sorts of other problems with iTunes that I've been meaning to blog about for months. Really stupid obvious functional features that just aren't there. For instance, almost every day I use it, which is almost every day, I have the following interaction/desire: I'm listening to a track that played because I was in shuffle mode, or because it was in a playlist, and I want to easily call up all the other tracks on the album that it appears on, or by that same artist. It seems like such a common thing that people would want to do, why isn't it there? It would be so great and easy to just have that be a choice in the contextual menu when you ctl-click or right-click on a track. Oh, this song is great, i feel like listening to the whole album, right-click... oh shit... i guess i have to type the album name into the search bar or else scroll through the list of artists or albums.

And speaking of the fucking search bar, why in fucking HELL do they start the search as soon as you start typing? do they ever test this shit with a really truly huge library (I have over 6500 songs in mine), or a machine that isnt a million MHz or isn't doing other things with its CPU? because what happens is, you type the first letter or 2 and then have to sit and wait for it to start searching and giving me results WAY too huge, before i can continue typing... why the FUCK can't I at least have a setting in the preferences where i can choose to only start searches after i press return? It's just ridiculous.

Another ridiculously stupid and scary and enraging thing happened with an apple product a couple days ago too: all of a sudden, the last 7 months of my photos in iPhoto just .... weren't there. gone. just like that. no warning, no error message, nothing. Now the good thing is that the image files are still there on my hard drive, but when i try to re-import them into iPhoto it says they are an unreadable format! Even though I can open them just fine with other programs like Preview or Photoshop. WTF??!!!!?? And we're talking about more than just photos, there's lots of metadata i have lost too, titles and ratings and descriptions. Ludicrous. It's like it's July again, and I really don't want it to be July 2006 again. I'm happy with Feburary 2007

And I realized what is so devastating about both of these cases is that this is the Mac OS we're talking about. If it were Windoze, well, hell, everyone is used to Windoze just sucking, all the time, period. Most of the world, because most of the computer-using world uses Windoze, just assumes that computers are going to suck, and you can't trust them, and they'll cause you unending hellish hassles every single day of your life, so just get used to and that's that, tough luck, life sucks.

But this is Apple. Most of the time Apple products just work, unlike Microsoft shit, and not only do they work but they work well, and you get things done, and you feel good about it.

So it makes times like this feel like even more of a betrayal, when I realize that even Apple sucks. That even Apple, the "think different" company, will let you down, and cannot be trusted, and at any moment you will lose hours or weeks or months of time and effort and ... life. You can't trust these things either, you can't have faith in them.

I'm not saying everything should be perfect and nothing should go wrong ever. I'm just saying, when you set up the expectation that things will be good, and it would be easy to just finish the job, then finish the fucking job, Steve Jobs. I feel like going to your house in Sausalito or whereever and kicking you in the iPods.

Time for me to set up a daily backup scheme, I guess. I've lost the faith.

Buzz is starting to pick up again about "Bordertown", the Hollywood thriller directed by Gregory Nava and starring Jennifer Lopez that is based on the real-life femicides in Ciudad Juárez. Stories are coming out about death threats and stolen eqiupment during shoots (but production was 2 years ago for this film, why is this news only being told now... hmm, oh wait, maybe because the premiere was last week?)

Last week the film had its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Amnesty International gave Lopez an "Artists for Amnesty" award at the festival, but according to some reports, the premiere was met with boos and laughter at how bad and disrespectful the film is.

A user comment on IMDB says

If you regard this as a drama - zero points for bad script, bad actors (except Banderas, who's just great as always), bad directing, bad music, bad...etc.

But if you regard this as a comedy - 10 points. The whole cinema was laughing. This movie contains a very subtle humor. Especially in its dialogs. The whole script seems as if it was written in 10 minutes - as a product of boredom.

Nevertheless the film is creating further press attention about the situation, with Lopez getting interviewed and saying how important it is to tell the story.

But they still have no distribution deal, and Nava says it might not even be till after this summer, and that "Hollywood is just not interested in movies about social drama and social situations... They are more interested in making movies about super heroes -- escapist entertainment. And so we had to do this independently and it's going to be distributed independently." But if this is the case, why are films like "The Constant Gardener," "Blood Diamond," and "Children of Men" coming out on the big screen, and in high profile? Maybe because they're just better films that treat their subjects with more respect?

Another IMDB commenter makes the interesting (and debatable?) assertion that

Obviously the movie was so important to Nava he failed in the end. A good journalist should never be too involved with the topic he is working on. A good filmmaker neither, it seems. Still: If this movies actually helps changing things in Juarez, if it makes same movie-goers research a bit more - thumbs up to 'Bordertown'. I personally would recommend reading about the killings though.

Meanwhile J-Lo's first all-Spanish language music album is about to be released.