• 08:54 Getting dressed and watching obama?s limo on tv #
• 10:15 Heading 2 Calexico 2 do interviews #
• 11:04 Waiting at the port in calexico 4 my interviewee 2 come thru frm Mexicali #
• 13:24 Back from Mexicali #
• 14:37 At Imperial Dunes Rec Area #
• 21:42 feeling happy to be back in Tucson. #

I drove all the way to San Diego yesterday. I'm starting a new project to visit some spots along the U.S./Mexico border, communities impacted by the wall and other militarization, in the final days of Bush and the first days of Obama.
I'll be blogging in detail as I go at a new site, http://newsontheline.tv/.

• 08:11 waking up and thinking about funding for future projects. #
• 10:22 marvelling at how fascinating it is when u can see 2 or more totally unrelated "friends" on Facebook posting the same video. viral, i guess #
• 13:53 really wanting to blurt some very strong opions here on twitter but would probably bite me in ass someday when i'm running for president. #
• 14:45 feeling very jaded. sigh. #
• 15:57 just spent 2 hours on a conf call. now going for a walk to clear head. not much work getting done. waaah. #

Still no time to blog so i am posting tweets again.
Lots going on but can't bring myself to blog about it. why? hmm.

• 09:23 reading a report about digital initiatives in indpendent filmmaking, www.itvs.org/producers/digitalinitiative/fieldreport/index.html #
• 10:04 feeling overwhelmed. #
• 13:40 more good news. short version of my border film, Wild Vs. Wall, has been accepted 2 Sedona Film Fest. arizona.sierraclub.org/border #
• 14:37 putting my 2008-in-review letters in envelopes... #
• 15:24 thinking i might be overcaffinated. #
• 16:06 just applied for health insurance. yay. #
• 16:36 hating twitter marketeers #
• 16:47 Wondering if "Trying to Pretend" by MGMT is ironic and how many fans realize it. it fucking must be. brilliant really. #

• 09:38 checking email, just walked dog. cold out, too cold. #
• 09:48 trying again to figure out why Firefox is still wanting to connect to my old computer, and hanging/crashing when it can't find it. so stupid #
• 10:35 talking with FF support person on IRC. annoying cuz he doesnt seem to get it. #
• 11:21 still talking to this Firefox support guy. we've tried everything. dammit. #
• 17:32 omg, i think i finally figured out my stupid firefox problem i've been dealing with for 6 hours today and many more over the last 2 weeks. #
• 17:35 oops, i spoke to soon. Firefox still fucked. dammit. #
• 20:06 feeling persecuted by technology. all day today. #

• 09:08 trying to figure out how to be more productive today than yesterday. and more productive next year than this. sigh. #
• 09:22 Listening to a hilarious mashup of Rick Astley and Nirvana (the 2 most famous songs of each) on WFMU.org.. ROTFL!!! #
• 11:40 editing editing, editing.... i think i need more coffee... #
• 15:29 reading mention of my border film in this week's Tucson Weakly: tinyurl.com/84vmr4 #

Yesterday was an important birthday for me. It was a quiet one, we pretty much just relaxed and tried to stay dry and warm, as it was a very un-Tucson-like rainy cold day. That evening after dinner Greta surprised me with a peppermint ice cream cake which she had secretly purchased and brought home and hid in the freezer earlier in the afternoon (cleverly waiting for me to make my usual afternoon espresso, for which I would need to get coffee out of the freezer - that woman is muy inteligente!!! Thank you Greta!!)

Anyway, we also went to see Gus Van Sant's new film "Milk," the docudrama biopic about Harvey Milk, first openly gay high-profile elected official ever, a San Francisco city supervisor elected in 1978, murdered by wacko conservative Dan White, another city supervisor. It was a really well-done and moving film and I highly recommend it. One of the saddest things about seeing it is knowing that we're now 30+ years after the time depicted in the film, and still LGBT people are being denied the same rights that straights have, because of powerful and bigoted people who have some nonsensical fear that letting queers marry will somehow ruin the institution of marriage. It's just ridiculous. But it's worth remembering that only a generation ago the same people were fighting for even more basic rights, like the right to even have certain jobs (like teaching). There are those who would turn back the progress made in that time.

Anyway, it was a good birthday yesterday.

Via Mexico Solidarity Network: Ciudad Juarez registered 81 femicides so far in 2008, more than doubling the worst years of 1996 and 2001 in which the city recorded 37 women murdered. El Diario de Juarez provided the following accounting of femicides since 1993, when Esther Chavez Cano, a local human rights activist, first called attention to problem:

Year                       Femicides
1993                                19
1994                                19
1995                                36
1996                                37
1997                                32
1998                                36
1999                                18
2000                                32
2001                                37
2002                                36
2003                                28
2004                                19
2005                                33
2006                                20
2007                                25
2008                                81               

Of the 81 cases so far this year, 55 deaths resulted from organized crime, while the Special Investigator for Deaths of Women (FEIHM) is handling the other 26 cases. Sixteen of these 26 cases remain under investigation while the other ten cases have been declared resolved. Two twelve-year-old girls are among the victims.

In other news, I am in the middle of reading Roberto Bola

I am frantically, desperately, sadly, still editing "Death and Taxes," the documentary about war tax resistance that I've been working on for a year, if we count it from funding acquisition, or over 5 years, if we count from first conception and footage shot. Even though there's so much footage, and I've been doing this for so long, I've still learned so much as I edit these last 7 months or so. Every time I edit I learn or re-learn more about how to shoot. Here is a selection of key or not-so-key shooting tips:

- during interview, keep zooming in and out slowly, so that when you edit you can cut it up and the jump cuts won't be so jarring.
- don't be afraid to reshoot something, and to order people around (this is the hardest and probably the most important in documentary making).
- better to get it right during the shoot than try to fix it in post.
- you never have too much b-roll.
- if you have time and a camera that can do it, iterate the hour on the camera's time code as you shoot through tapes. That way when you capture, all your footage from a certain shoot will have unique timecode, makes it slightly easier to organize.
- watch as much footage as possible between shoots. Mistakes made or holes in coverage can be fixed if you know what you got or didn't get last time. If you wait till post to look, it's too late, probably.

There's probably more I could go into but it's late. very late.