I'm really getting into our garden this year.

It's nice at our new house because we have plenty of our own yard to do what we like in. I want to get more and more skilled and wise in the ways of growing plants, especially food, because that's a direction we all should be taking on the road to a sustainable society.

More photos of our garden are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/steev/archives/date-taken/2009/04/12/

An old friend I haven't heard from in about 18 years just asked me why I spell my name the way I do now.

It's a relatively simple story: In 1990 or so, I was in a band, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was a sort of punk/goth/noise/pop band called The Tao Puppies. The band had various problems which I won't detail here, but one of the quaint pretensions that the bass player had, being a big fan of the Ramones, was that everyone in the band should have a stage name. His was Clark Kent, if I recall correctly. I don't remember anyone else's stage name, but the point is that I thought this was a dumb idea. So to sort of purposely annoy and spite him I made my stage name something that's pronounced exactly the same, simply spelled differently: Steev.

I ended up liking that spelling quite a bit and as I continued an artistic career I kept using it, at first just for artistic purposes, but then gradually for everything in life short of legal documents.

It's gotten to the point that people who know me very very well sometimes misspell the names of other Steves that they know, because they're so used to spelling it my way. It's fun. And people think I'm Dutch or something foreign, which is also fun.

That's about it. Not much more to it.

The other day I went to our friendly neighborhood food coop here in Tucson, with a canvas re-usable bag full of used plastic bottles to re-use, for shampoo, conditioner, dish soap, etc. I dutifully weighed the empty bottles at the scale and went over to fill them up, feeling good that I was reducing my usage of nondegradable packaging materials.

But when I got home Greta noted, glancing at the receipt, the prices of the re-usably-contained liquid products: for example, about $4 going on $5 for the shampoo. You can buy a new bottle of shampoo at Trader Joe's for about 3 bucks. The same general story for all those bottles.

So, what incentive is there to re-use those bottles? Just the good fuzzy warm smug glow inside from being a happy smug green consumer? Maybe for some of us with overdeveloped senses of morality and responsibility - and even then, as our wallets get thinner in these dark days, it's harder and harder to be "responsible". Furthermore, for the vast majority of the populace, that will not do even in good times.

The sustainable/green/earth-friendly consumer "movement" will never really get going unless there's more reason to do it than just "do the right thing."

As of this day I have been keeping this blog for exactly 5 years. Wow, kind of amazing, no?

This is also the 1107th entry on this blog.

Not much else to say right now, busy Sunday- hiking, cleaning, going to a meeting, writing a screenplay ( Script Frenzy ). etcetera, etcetera.

I'm reprinting here an important story just out by Kent Paterson of Frontera NorteSur concerning the Juarez femicide. Frontera NorteSur, based at the University of New Mexico, is a great service for anyone wanting news and analysis of border-related issues. However, the only way to get their reports in a timely way is via email (information at the end about how to subscribe.) - I think they should also be posting to a blog, but they're about 7 years behind at getting stories onto their website.

March 30, 2009

Women

• steev's blog

Lots of stupid fear-mongering about "border violence" lately, even from Obama now.

I think it's important to keep in mind and include in any discussion of this that this whole topic is just another example of the fear-based society we live in. Chertoff started spinning this "border violence spillover" idea back in December and it's pure hype just to get people to be afraid and give in to the idea of even more militarization of the borderlands and more loss of civil liberties. The violence is worse in Mexico, yes, but the spillover is mostly a myth. The last thing the cartels have ever wanted to do was involve gringos in their gun battles. Here's an example of the fear-mongering: recently the statistic came out that Phoenix is the #1 city for kidnappings, but the counterstatistic is that most of those kidnappings are loads of migrants being smuggled by one smuggling cartel and getting "stolen" by another cartel. It's not mom and pop citizen getting yanked into a van at the mall parking lot or whatever.

The other thing to realize is that drug trafficking isn't going down or being restricted, counter to what the migra says. The increased violence in Mexico is because the Calderon administration's "Mano Duro" has upset the delicate balance of power between cartels. But there's still plenty of drugs flowing north, and there always will be till we deal with the demand that us gringos have for the stuff. The problem is not only the demand for the drugs themselves but the flow of money from the drug trade and the drug war that flows to U.S. banks, prisons, private prison companies, rehab centers, therapists, guns, fancy cars and yachts and stuff that the narcos buy for themselves, hospitals, etc etc etc. Sorry to sound negative but the drug war CAN'T be won, ever, or all those industries will crash and burn, not to mention Mexico's economy, since the drug trade is the 2nd largest industry after their oil. All that will ever happen is posturing and faking.

But the real question is: why do gringos like their drugs so much? Why do their lives seem to suck so bad that they have to medicate themselves so much? Is there some other way to make gringos' lives happier, so they don't need the blood-drenched dope?

This week I began an experiment in online, DIY, grassroots fundraising. I need to raise funds for completion of a documentary I've been working on for the last 15 months or so called "Death and Taxes: Refusing to Pay for War." If you follow this blog you have seen me writing about the film before. It's been a long process, and a subject I've cared about for many years.

Basically, this doc has been one of the major parts of my life for awhile, and it's one of the most ambitious, if not the most ambitious, film projects I've ever tried. As such, some mistakes were made, and some of them were in planning and budgeting. One difficulty is that I am now, for close to the last 2 years, trying to make a living from making films and doing other freelance motion picture work. It's a hard existence, I've discovered, especially in a place like Tucson where the industry is pretty stunted. So this is the first big project I've done where I needed to make it pay, personally, as in, I had to make a living - not a killing, just a modest living.

To make a long story short, I miscalculated, some mishaps happened, and the film took much longer than I thought, we ran out of money last November, and I'm broke. I have a few other videography gigs that are bringing in a little, but this kind of thing keeps me busy, and I have to do them to survive. So I can't continue work on the WTR film, in any timely way, unless it's funded.

For my last full-length film, On The Edge, well, it was my first film, and I made even more mistakes, and I was willing to make them because I had passion and compassion for the subject, and I'd never done a big project like that before. I spent all my savings, I interrupted my life to go live cheaply in rural Iowa while I edited, and after a total of 18 months it was done. But I can't do that with every film. That's not sustainable.

So, this is a long-winded way of saying, I need some financial help, bad. You can help. I know about the economy and I know everyone is hurting. But any little bit counts. Maybe you still have a steady job. I don't. I have this film.

And not only that, it's a film about something really important. I'm not asking people to fund my silly zombie slasher flick. This project is about getting the word out about a unique and inspiring way to work for peace and change the world. Maybe that's worth a few bucks?

There's information about multiple ways you can donate here: http://detritus.net/steev/vid/death-and-taxes/

Thanx so much for your support.

Day before yesterday:

• 10:00 looking at documentation about Jack Trip - ccrma.stanford.edu/groups/soundwire/software/jacktrip/ #
• 10:16 Just watched the intro section of the new film about copyright and mashups and stuff, "RIP": tinyurl.com/76hhpo #
• 11:42 wondering what the pollen count is today. maybe pretty low, or maybe the herbal stuff i've been taking actual works...? #
• 14:19 creating an online fundraising infrastructure for my war tax film. #
• 15:05 polishing up my grassroots DIY fundraising page for my documentary. tinyurl.com/dx7wyl #
• 17:39 doing a tech rehearsal for Sonic Bridge, a telematic performance that will happen next week.. #
• 20:44 looking for a good free ID3 editor for the Mac. ridiculous how hard it is to find one. #

Yesterday:

• 08:21 reading about "internet 2"... reminded of the jokes we used to tell about "Internet Plus"... #
• 08:32 thinking i must remember this for next xmas: www.vimeo.com/2344860 #
• 10:54 switching gears, from fundraising, to editing... #
• 15:30 getting creeped out by the idea of "pokens".... ( doyoupoken.com ) #
• 15:56 wondering why "iTunes DJ" has replaced "party shuffle" #
• 17:12 thinking about how the border patrol wants to defoliate the banks of the entire Rio Grande River... makes me sick.. #