One day to go and I'm off away from home for a month. The planning and the wrapping up stuff here has been driving me crazy, as I think I've already blogged.

Anyway, here is my schedule so far:

October 16 Saturday: fly to San Francisco.
October 17 Sunday: a friend's wedding.
October 21 Thursday: Screening the Bolivia videos at ATA.

Then on the 24th I hook up with the Juarez Caravan:
October 24 San Francisco, CA: 7-9PM, New College of California, Cultural
Center, 766 Valencia St, San Francisco
October 25 Santa Barbara, CA: 6PM, Event at La Casa de la Raza, 601 E.
Montecito, 805/965-8581
October 26 Los Angeles, CA: 6-9 pm, UCLA Public Policy Building, Room #1246,
Parking: Next to Lot 3, contact: ccjohnso@ucla.edu or 310-709-1864
October 27 San Diego, CA: 2PM: Protest at the Mexican Consulate, Downtown
San Diego, India Street.1549 India Street, SD 92101 619-231-8414. 7-10PM:
World Beat Center,2100 Park Blvd, 92101-4752
October 28 Phoenix, AZ: 7PM Phoenix College Theater in central Phoenix, 15th
ave and Thomas Rd, joseph2627@yahoo.com, 602/665-2450
October 29 Tucson, AZ: 6PM, Armory Park Senior Center, 220 S. 5th Ave,
520/770-1373, kat@derechoshumanosaz.net
October 30 Tucson, AZ: 8:30AM, St. John's Church Parking lot to San Xavier
Mission, Caravanistas will participate in Dia de los Muertos Border
Pilgramage with local human rights groups. Caravan then travels to El Paso.

October 31 - November 5 - Delegation to Juarez and Chihuahua City

Then my tour of the Bolivia videos starts:
nov 6 el paso -> santa fe
nov 7 or 8 show in santa fe???
nov 9 show in albuquerque at Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice.
nov 11 flagstaff show ??
nov 13 phoenix show?
nov 14 tucson show ??

Then I think I'll fly back to portland from Tucson. I was thinking about L.A. but decided I don't want to go to L.A. I'll be lucky if I get all these dates figured out.

I don't know why I make my life so hard. Well, no, I do, I just sometimes wish I didn't do it.

I've been spending a crazy amount of time trying to organize this tour of the southwest. calling people over and over and over, emailing, etc etc. this is why bands hire bookers, i guess. i've been thinking about calling off the whole damn thing.

the stress of this and all the other things i'm trying to get done before i leave in 2 days is likely the cause of my feeling sick tonite. like, fever and splitting headache sick. godammit. this always happens when i travel, i get sick either right before i leave or just at the start. it's gotta be because of the stress. i need to relax and get some sleep and just start lowering my ambitions.

For the last few days indyblogs has been down. They had a hard drive failure. It's odd because I sort of felt like people looking at indyblogs were my main audience. I don't know how many people look at this blog but I feel like most of them get here via indyblogs. So, it's weird.

Excellent article about the situation in Ju

Wow, I just discovered this great site,
WhiteHouseTapes.org . An online archive of speeches and other recorded conversations of 6 presidents, from Roosevelt up through Nixon. Wow. What a great resource for samplehounds and researchers.

Two different incidents have made me think "where the hell have you been?" today. Maybe I shouldn't go into it in too much detail, but in general I just am so surprised when people I thought were aware, politically, show themselves to be clueless. Stuff about free trade and neoliberalism that I just sort of take for granted in this little hippie radical bubble i'm in, and someone comes along and says, "oh wow, i hadn't heard of that, gosh, that's horrible." And I'm like.... "ummm... duh!"

On the other hand, I guess people who are against voting or who think there was never really a moon landing probably think that about me. But that's not a valid analogy, because you can point right to the thousands of pages of NAFTA, for example, and it's obvious that some of it is really really bad for humans. That's not theory, it's demonstrable fact. It's much harder to prove we never landed on the moon.

I just wish some people would spend as much time learning about oppression in its many forms as they spend learning new recipes to cook. If all the people who talk about that excellent salmon bisque they had at Chez Disposable Income spent that time and energy and money actually trying to make the fucking world a better place, we'd be a lot further along, I am sure.

In a way, the upcoming election is just a big big distraction, a spectacle that is taking up a lot of attention that would be directed elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those folks who is against voting. I've always voted and I think for this election it is even more important to vote, and I've talked to a lot of people who feel the same way, some who have never voted in a federal election who feel that they must this time. But voting is just the base level of involvement in civil society. You gotta do at least that, but you should do a lot more.

Lately it seems like the "a lot more" is eclipsed by watching debates and other election-related crap.

I've been involved with setting up and promoting 2 screenings of a film about the disappeared, murdered women in Juarez, Se

I wrote a few months back about my involvement in Collaborative Technologies. I was so hopeful back then.

Now, well, I'm not quite at "regret mode" yet, but I'm pretty disillusioned and disappointed. The project that was the proof of concept is STILL not done, just keeps stretching on and on. The project management has been dismal, and I have not been paid more than 10% of what I'm owed, in 5 months of work.

My travel plans were dependent on being paid for this by now. So I'm really upset. I'll write more about this later. I can't think straight enough to really analyze what went wrong and why.

I just discoverd this great site about subtitling and other international accessibility issues for radical video. It's called
SubVideo
Couldn't come at a better time, as I have finished adding spanish subtitles to a major video of mine, which makes it my first bi-lingual video. Exciting.

www.BloodForOil.org
is a great repository of anti-Bush, anti-war graphics, for signs, posters, stencils, etc. very cool.