I'm sitting in a meeting of no border activists, about 40 of us, sitting, filling the main room of Dry River Infoshop and doing a roundrobin go-round of "visioning" for the No Border Camp that we're trying to organize for in November. This weekend of this Anti-Border Encuentro has been just as crazy as I expected, though of course the specific challenges and features of interpersonal dynamics have been impossible to predict or fully prepare for.

It has pretty much felt, for me, just like I do being the host of a party, a very big, 3-day long party. Whenever I host a party I get stressed and frustrated because I can't really relax and enjoy the party, I'm too busy running around making sure everyone is happy, comfortable, and entertained. Add to that being the default A/V tech nerd as usual, and you have my situation now.

(Someone just said "I don't want this to be Seattle in the Desert." )

Anyway. It's been hard also because I am someone who often needs some downtime to reflect and process and decompress. But there's so many people here, many of them very cool, very interesting people I want to spend time with, good time with. It's fascinating, just fascinating, seeing all these different people and learning about their concerns and personalities and how that relates to their activism, their involvement with this project, and the reasons for same. As I become more aware and mindful of my self and my mind in more and more of its light and dark recesses, in its fucked-up glory, I start to notice the little flickering shadows at the edges of other people's egos, behind their words and behavior. I'm not saying I'm now this hyper-enlightened wise being who's looking down at all the fucked-up damaged activists... just the opposite, I'm saying with great tenderness that I am excited and filled with awe that we are all fasincating, beautiful people with tender, broken bits, some assembly required.

I just posted another installment in the Me Encanta Los Sonidos podcast, a performance last weekend by Desert Rat of his song "Tucson, City That I Love." It's a wonderful anti-sprawl, anti-mall, anti-development, pro-nature ditty full of great lines like "this city will make a fine ruin when the Santa Cruz runs again." Desert Rat is a Tucson native, now living in Seattle, an antisocial nerd, a semi-famous activist folk singer, union longshoreman, and snarky anti-anarchist socialist (trotskyist maybe, even?). I recorded a lot of other great songs of his that night which I hope to put online a little later, though you may have to remember to check phonophilia to listen to them because i don't know if i'll post again here about it.

It's funny because Desert Rat left long 10-minute voicemails for 2 of my friends and fellow BLAC members yesterday, letting them know that he disapproved of our political agenda for the no-border camp but that he did want to attend some of the off-topic workshops this weekend... His objections seemed to be based on the misunderstanding that People's Global Action is directly connected somehow with the World Social Forum phenomenon, which is not true. He disapproves of the World Social Forum process and structure, which I and most of our collective do too, recognizing that it's been coopted and corrupted by NGOs, but the No Border Camp operating under PGA Hallmarks has nothing to do with the WSF or any other social forum.

Anyway enjoy the music, even if the man is kind of confused and hard to get along with.

This weekend is a big gathering here in Tucson of border activists from all over the place, organized by a collective I'm part of, BLAC (an acronym which has many meanings, including Border Line Anarchy Collective, Border Lands Action Committee, and Bunny Loving Animal Cuddlers). It's been keeping me very busy. A lot of yesterday I spent working on a booklet that includes the schedule, map, and other information, along with a packet of relevant articles. Then we were at the copy shop for a few hours making copies of all this stuff. People start arriving at midnight tonite and it will keep going till monday night. It's been crazy making it happen and will continue to be so, i'm sure, but it will be great. I'm excited about meeting all these people and organizing with them for the No Border Camp in November which is the main reason for having this gathering.

How to mix up a breakbeat in your kitchen. This is hilarious and totally rocks too.

"Do you think cell phones allow people to get laid more often?" I asked a friend late Friday night as we tried to contact a group of other friends who were out drinking somewhere. We were crouched on the sidewalk outside of The Buffet, one of Tucson's grottiest bars.

"Absolutely," she replied, "definitely makes booty calls easier. But it doesn't look like I'm getting laid tonite," she added as she closed her phone one last time.

None of the group were answering our (non-booty) calls. We'd been looking for them at a couple bars we thought they'd be at, but no luck. It turned out they had all turned in early when the birthday boy got too drunk to be served anywhere else, and we'd been ringing the mobiles of half a dozen already-sleeping pals. 15 years ago we would have given up an hour ago or more, and gone to our homes where our old-fashioned wired phones were, but once home we probably would have called it a night, too tired to make more plans and then venture back out again.

Computers and other modern communication technology make all sorts of new and impromptu interactions and ambitions possible. I'm overwhelmed and it's only 8am, doing 8 things at once as evidenced by the tabs open in my browser:

This is an entry about capitalism. But, I have to provide some background: So, I've been really into this great travel website called Kayak for the last couple months. It's basically a super-search engine for airfares. you put in where you want to go & when and it searches hundreds of airlines and other travel sites to find the best fares. And the best feature is the email alerts where it sends a message every day or week with the best fares under your certain price for your certain date range. Really useful.

However, this is about something really unuseful, unless you count relieving consumers of their cash useful. Which I guess it is if we want to keep the ol' economy pumpin', eh? So, ok, nevermind.

Just kidding. What I'm talking about is how capitalists, or 'the market', are constantly seeping into every possible crevice and nook of life, like vomit that gets into the cracks between tiles in your bathroom when you puke and miss the toilet. The example I have today is an email from Kayak, exhorting everyone to go on a trip: for chocolate. They proceed to provide a list of exotic or not-so-exotic destinations with no reasons listed to go other than their relation to chocolate: Belgium, New York, Hershey Pennsylvania, Oaxaca... ("No discussion of chocolate is complete without mentioning a trip to Mexico where it all began. ")
...Ignoring of course the brutal colonial history of Belgium's chocolate supremacy or the current human rights abuses taking place in Oaxaca, and other such bothersome facts, and I will skip over the details of these too for now, because what I'm talking about is how ridiculous it is to try to sell someone a flight to Oaxaca or Pennsylvania or Brussels for chocolate. But hey, it's Valentine's Day coming up and you're supposed to eat chocolate and why not be really cool and buy an $800 plane ticket instead of an $8 box of chocolate? Every little excuse will be tried by marketeers, because as Dennis the Menace once said, "All I need is one sucker." (image: Dennis behind a lemonade stand, sign announcing: lemonade, $10 a glass)

While the greenhouse gases choke the planet to death we're being told to blow our "disposable income" to jet around the globe with no more excuse for it than looking for cacao products and their traces, in the form of museums and theme parks. And meanwhile there are hundreds of millions who will never, ever, ever be able to afford to set foot on a plane, who in fact will never leave the tiny circle of land around the village they were born in, unless it's to migrate (rather than starve), to the nearest metropolis to work in a factory assembling plastic gadgets for gringos to buy at Wal-Mart...

thanx but no thanx, Kayak.com.

In the society of the spectacle, "Spectators do not find what they desire: they desire what they find." - Guy Debord

(Don't get me wrong, since this is the first time in a few years that I've been seeing someone at this time of year, I will probably ask that someone to do something special with me in honor of the fabricated holiday. But we won't be flying to Brussels.)

A couple weeks ago I saw this crazy german techno-pop band called Porsches on the Autobahn. They were a lot of fun. I got to the show really late and only saw their last few songs, but here I posted an mp3 of what they sounded like playing their last song, and what it sounded like as a I made my way out of the venue, Plush, and onto the sidewalk.

I've been really getting interested in sound and music again, and thinking about doing live performance again. But I've been hesitating because it's yet one more thing, and I don't know if I have time for one more thing. Life is pretty pleasantly busy and just on the balancing point before getting "too busy." I've been trying to be very careful lately to keep from going past that point.

And yet making music again feels really important to me right now, so maybe there's eomthing else i can lay aside for now. The other balance I want to strike though is that it not be something that sucks more soul out of me. Messing around with some music software last night I started feeling like I was being stupid, immersing myself in yet another thing that required staring at a computer screen. What am I doing? Maybe I should think more about this. Maybe I should be doing some sort of music less computer-intensive? hmm.

UPDATE: here's another new sound file, of snow melting off my roof 2 weeks ago and into our water harvesting tank.

A very extensive review of my film appeared the other day in the webzine Pop Matters. I like reviews like this in which the author actually has obviously researched the topic of the Juarez femicides beyond just watching the film and reading the promo material. Cynthia Fuchs even cites some website sources that I hadn't even seen. Of course it's not a super glowing review of the film itself, but that's pretty much beside the point. It's getting people to write about the issue, and that (not pop) is what matters.

hey. pendejo.
you with the tight ride with the shiny grill.
how wack is that. that you spend so much on, go into debt for,
something to get you around
something to compensate
when i already am where you want to be.
it took me 7 minutes to get home from where you drove an hour to get to
from your fancy splitlevel in the foothills or the eastside.
just pedalling.
and i dont pay a cent to any gym, like you go to, to get my legs ripped
(to the point where women compliment me on them)
more than yours will ever be sitting in a cube 9 to 5
that you also have to drive that ride an hour to every single fucking day.
and they told you that is all there is
in this world
for you
and they got you to believe it, somehow
that somehow out in the foothills
with your shiny grill
you'd be happy
but every friday you drive an hour down
to the cool part of town
where i and mine live 24-7
and you buy a slice of hip
like you buy everything else
(cuz they told you everything has to be bought)
after you sell your time all day all week
the only commodity you can never buy back.
ever. ever. ever.
never...

saw an amazing film at dry river tonite. it's ecuadorian, called 'Cronicas'. it's about a tv news crew from miami covering a serial killer in ecuador, and they fuck everything up trying to get the story. it's an amazing look at journalistic ethics and integrity. and the person i want to be, professionally at least, is one of the characters. the cameraman/editor. i want to travel the world with a powerbook and a camera phoning in investigative news videos via satellite, sweating my ass off editing footage in a jungle hotel and smoking and drinking quetzalteco or chicha or pisco or cachaca or whatever the local rotgut is. and get paid for it. Of course I'd prefer to work for a show that was less cheesy than the one depicted in the film, which was called "Una Hora Con La Verdad" (One Hour With The Truth)