Saturday Night.

George and Catherine invited me to the annual Martian Mardi Gras party at URBAN-15. This is when they get together with the members of the drum and dance ensembles and friends and family and watch the big Carnival parades in Sao Paulo. I assume “Martian” is because the television signal is delivered by satellite. Catherine’s shorthand for anything from space is that it’s Martian.

Last year was the first time I’d seen the parades from Brazil. They’re massively elaborate competitions. Sadly, it’s a far cry from Black Orpheus. Although I do hope that that sort of decadent and orgiastic fandango is spilling out into the streets of humble neighborhoods as I write this.

Before watching the parades from Brazil, George put in a DVD of the presidential inauguration parade. Someone had packaged the footage of the parade passing in front of the Obamas into a highlights reel. Maybe three minutes of each act. We watched about half an hour, but once the basement space had begun to fill up and once sufficient pizza, sangria, and assorted b.y.o.booze had loosened up the crowd, they began shouting to fast forward to the section where URBAN-15 dances and drums for the president. I think we watched it about three times. Much colorful commentary. About sixty people were lounging in adirondack chairs watching the action on a large rear projection screen.

After an hour of watching one of the lavish Brazilian samba competitions (or whatever it was I was watching — Brazilians are fucking nuts in their breathless rush to be more over-the-top than one would think humanly possible), I quietly slipped out the door and drove home. A little of that sort of thing goes a long way. Well, for me.

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I’m sitting here uninspired. It’s one a.m. and I could just go to bed but I’m simply not feeling the calling.

I pulled some recent iPhone photos onto my computer. Phone as a camera. It’s an incredibly convenient idea. But the iPhone camera sucks. My cheapy Nikon digital is miles ahead of the iPhone. But I don’t carry it around as much as I used to. I mean, when I post on Twitter, it’s seamless using the camera on my phone and the Twitter app on my phone.

Anyway, as I was grumbling about the shortcomings of what’s become my current default camera, I noticed a couple of shit shots I apparently never got around to deleting off my phone. Some of these mistakes (or failed experiments) have a nice abstract expressionistic feel to them.

Below are three. I’ve done little more to tart them up more than amp them up in iPhoto with it’s very limited parameters.

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While I’m posting images, here’s an old house on the HemisFair Park grounds which will be used as a surface to project the work of one of the video artists. We’ll be using another side, which is more uniform.

We’ll have two video installations which will be visible in HemisFair from S. Alamo Street. And once you walk in a bit, you’ll be able to see a screen hanging from the side of the Instituto Cultural de Mexico. And as you walk deeper into HemisFair toward the Instituto, you soon find that another outdoor screen is hanging off the wall of the convention center in the Plaza de Mexico. A thirty foot wide screen. It’ll be very impressive. And if you turn around and walk into the back door of the Instituto, and head to the Frida Kahlo gallery, you’ll be able to watch even more films, in our indoor setting. The auditorium of the Instituto with be showcasing music and dance events. I know that SOLI (San Antonio’s answer to the Kronos Quartet) will be doing a set. Hell yeah I’ll be stepping over for that.

The countdown is upon us. 21 days.

It’s a hell of a thing. A massive one day event which will shut down much of downtown. More than 1,100 artists will be represented. Half a dozen stages scattered along Alamo Street. Lighting schemes. Fireworks. Allocated parking lots. Shuttle buses. Food and drink vendors. Stage managers. Lighting grids. Generator trucks. Marketing. Branding. T-shirt sales. It goes on and on and on.

The humbling realization is when someone like, say, Malena Gonzalez-Cid brings us all back down to earth. “It’s just a one-day arts event,” she’ll say in her playful dismissive way, because, you know, she’s done events like this before. But it’s more than that. Luminaria is one of at least a dozen of similar events in San Antonio that happen each year … hell, even several times a year. In the King William neighborhood, First Friday has become a massive event, and it happens 12 times a year. Fiesta is our yearly city-wide week-long booze-up with several parades, festivals, and massive parties. We have the nation’s largest MLK Day march. A major César Chávez march. About ten significant annual film festivals. A big-ass annual jazz event at Travis Park. We have some sort of rodeo bullshit happening right now. Yeah, it’s a big deal. We also have parades on boats and barges on the San Antonio river. And we have shitloads of music and sports events. Event planning is something imprinted into each and every San Antonian. If you’re not born with this skill, it quickly gets under your skin once you move here. Even I, a small fish in this city, have found myself in the event promotional realm on about ten occasions.

Luminaria might be smaller fish than some sports play-offs, but it’s still a big deal.

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Sunday night.

I keep forgetting tonight’s the Academy Awards. Maybe that’s why it was a ghost town at the supermarket earlier.

I don’t believe I’ve seen the Oscars in ten years. And, now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever willingly watched the televised ceremony. Awards shows are inherently vapid exercises of self-congratulation elevated into a ghastly carnival of bad taste and high irrelevancy. An aesthetic eyesore. I cannot fathom how anyone can sit through such excessive mutual wankery without needing a shower by the time the credits are rolling.

It’s feasible that if I had seen more than two films nominated (a documentary, and a short film), I might feel more interested in the outcome. But I haven’t. And I don’t. However, there have been years where I’ve seen every film up for the major awards.

Strange. There are some years when I’m always heading out to take in this or that weekday matinee (the best way to watch a movie on a big screen). But while living here in San Antonio, I just don’t see many major Hollywood offerings. I blame the local cinemas. They’re horrible. The Alamo Draft House and the Bijou both bring in some interesting movies, but I don’t care for these pub movie houses that serve buffalo wings and shrimp quesadillas. All I want is a gigantic screen, a comfortable seat, and to be left the hell alone so I can become swallowed up by the movie experience. Also, I’d like a theater that’s nearby.

Probably the best multiplex showing art-house films is up at I-10 and Huebner. Well, if I balk at dragging my carcass up to the Bijou or the multiplex at the Quarry, I’m not likely to motor all the way north to Huebner.

If only the multiplex at downtown’s River Center Mall showed anything more cerebral than the usual fare of fratboy comedies and bad Hollywood remakes and bad Japanese and Korean horror films, I might be there all the time. It’s just a twenty minute walk. Or, better. If we could return our great surviving downtown palace theaters into the incredible cinemas they once were. Once the renovation of the Alameda is completed, we will have four classic downtown movie houses (the Alameda, the Majestic, the Empire, and the Aztec), and not a one of them (that I know of) has a 35mm projector on premise. The Aztec sold their screen and projector last year. That was sad. How many cities in this country can claim to have renovated so many grand movies palaces? And we can’t even have one repurposed for film screening? I should point out that the Guadalupe Theater still has a 35mm projector. But the seating sucks. Movable chairs. And with the low-slung screen, the head of the person in front of you obscures the lower third of the picture.

Let’s try and get one movie house downtown with great picture, sound, seating … and stellar programing. How can this happen? Drew? Janet? Phil? Mary Alice? How hard can it be. (I’m thinking it’s pretty hard.)

I probably made one or two visits to a first-run movie theater to see a film in the last year, but damned if I can recall what I might have seen.

That’s not to say I’m not out watching movies. In the last year I’ve been to several local film festivals which show non-local feature films. The European Film Festival, the San Antonio Film Festival, Cine Festival, and Cine Mujer. I probably watched an average of five feature films at each event. Add to that about five local produced feature films at special screenings, and I’d have to say that in the last year I saw about 25 feature films on the big screen. Add to that the half dozen other local festivals I attended which screen short pieces, local work, and the work of young filmmakers.

So don’t get up in my business all high and mighty, you hear? You know, about how I’ve not seen Benjamin Buttons, that comic book film, Robert Downey, Jr. in blackface, and Sean Penn in gayface.

Whoops. I have seen Tropic Thunder. On DVD. Also, now that I Google the info about nominees, I see that I’ve seen another film with a nomination. From NetFlix. In Bruges. Original screenplay. Ah, but now I’m conflicted. Though I did love In Bruges (killer script), it’s up against Mike Leigh, who I adore. However, I’ve not seen this particular film of his. But wait. I think I made mention of my staunch ambivalence. Whatever. Fuck the Oscars!

Yeah. Fuck ’em.

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The biggest problem I have with the Oscars is that almost everyone who I’m following on Twitter is posting chingos of Oscar comments in real time. A tsunami of chatter from the peanut gallery. And so tomorrow, as I try to catch up, I’ll have to sift through all this crap about what Angelina was wearing. Or that Hugh Jackman was picking his nose when he thought the camera was on Don fucking Rickles. Or, wait wait wait, did Anne Hathaway just put her hand on Olympia Dukakis’ ass?!?! People, I don’t care. Were that hand on my ass, well, then we could talk. But it wasn’t. So let’s not.

Sure, I could just ignore those older postings and plunge ahead. But, dammit, I need to see what’s going on with those folks who I follow on Twitter who are not so caught up in the Oscars. What’s happening with Tim Gerber? Is he still being dragged around by Anne to all the clothing stores in San Antonio with maternity sections — as he posts photos of his wife (one of the best actresses in town), who looks like she’s ready to pop? And then there’s Sam Lerma, and his current vacation down to his hometown in the Rio Grande Valley (which I had never before heard referred to as “RGV”), where he’s sharing with the world his squirmy culture shock trying to maintain a smile in this simple world, this small hometown from which he escaped. Sam, you never escape from la familia and their stomping grounds. Oh, yeah, there’s also Brit writer and actor Stephen Fry, down on the Baja peninsula kayaking with whales and sampling tequila, and I can’t imagine this combo will end well. And dammit, I want to be there when it doesn’t. If only I could find some sort of Twitter application called an “Oscar Filter.”

Earlier in the week I posted on Twitter that I was sipping my morning coffee, awaiting a phone call from a reporter with the San Antonio Express-News. The phone call never came. And when I posted on Twitter about that, another writer from the same newspaper inquired of me (via Twitter), who it was who stood me up. She offered to intercede. I demurred with some vague comment that I’m sure I’d eventually receive a phone call.

As I’m still waiting, perhaps I should have agreed.

It’s getting rather weird on Twitter, what with all these reporters and news people horning in. When I noticed Sam Lerma and Tim Gerber posting short updates from their KSAT news vans (often with grainy video off their Jailbroken iPhones), I was intrigued. Hell, I was hooked. Was what they were doing even legal? I mean, really, you guys are on company time. But Joe Ruiz, KSAT web editor, gave a presentation to the monthly San Antonio Social Media Breakfast. He cleared a few things up. (I wasn’t able to attend, but thankfully the whole thing was posted as an online video file (and, jeeze, someone needs to get thee to B&H for a tripod with a fluid head asap!)) Ruiz mentioned that KSAT, as a policy, had their news crews out in the field with Jailbroken iPhones, and encouraged them to Twitter and engage in other social media activity. All in the service of flying the KSAT flag.

And, so, after watching four or five members of the local media giving presentations at the Social Media Breakfast, I added them all to my Twitter list.

There’s a weird scene going on in the corporate media with all this. Many of these media Twitterites are just vomiting forth endless streams of blather, trying to drive traffic to the web sites of their newspapers, tv channels, or radio stations where they work.

Greg Harman, who does work for the San Antonio Current, is one of the good guys. Not only does his environmental beat strike close to my heart, but he also inserts his personality. I like that. And I’m furthered enamored in that he posts links to on-line articles that he finds meaningful — articles which more often than not are published by sources he does not work for.

One of the conflict zones in cyberspace which often goes under-reported is happening between professional journalists and the whole pile of bloggers, hobbyists, “citizen journalists,” and all flavors of folks generating, free of charge, their own content.

The downside to all this is that the the paid professionals (or, more to the point, the companies they work for) are in a panic to emulate this immediate and ephemeral reportage.

Oh, great. If quality in journalism wasn’t already in the toilet. Myself, I’m well aware that I’m not running some sort of “blog of record.” I, of course, am talking out my ass most of the time. But do we want paid journalists behaving in this sort of half-assed manner?

I’m curious, is this experimentation with pushing journalists to play around with social media (blogs and Twitter and such) possibly burdening already over-worked professionals with greater stress more deadlines? How many writers in the local papers whose bylines I recognize are truly staff writers, you know, with full benefits? Does such a critter even exist anymore? Is it any wonder that news editors are so willing to a print press release as is … with little more editing than trimming up from the bottom, as space allows? That’s about as cost effective as it gets. Additionally, many journalism students are on a fast track to public relations firms where they can get paid chingos of dosh to write toxic and biased propaganda, which, once emailed to news sources as tidy press releases, often get printed in newspapers virtually unchanged. Only a minute trade off. They’ve sold their souls and don’t even get a byline.

This is a very interesting period for journalism. The committed folks are still in the thick of it. And I don’t think anyone would argue with the fact that some of the greatest journalists who have ever lived are alive and writing right now. The real giants of American literature are currently engaged in nonfiction. But, at the same time, our high-profile media sources (newspapers, magazines, television networks, radio) have never been more irrelevant and conspicuously manipulated so as to pander to the sponsors, the advertisers.

Maybe what we need is to shut down all these money-making media sources, and replace them with citizen journalists. These reporters would be fresh out of journalism school. And they would, as their national service, spend four years or more writing on whatever they wanted to while feeding off the public teat. Sounds a damn sight better than putting a full automatic weapon in the hands of an American teenager and paying him to slaughter a family cowering in the rubble of Fallujah.

But I digress.

What was I talking about?

Oh, yeah. I’m still waiting by this phone for the Express-News to call me up. Maybe I should just write it up myself, and email it over. If nothing else, I’m pretty sure my name would be spelled right.

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I forget what website or blog I was on. But I found a link to this page.

http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/2008/12/30/alejandro-escovedo-sex-beat-gun-club-cover/

One of the great albums of my miss-spent youth was Fire of Love by the band The Gun Club. It’s a near-perfect album of post-punk psychobilly. One of the rewarding tracks is “Sex Beat.” Love that reverb. Anyway, the link to the web page above will allow you to play (nay, play and download) mp3 files of The Gun Club’s original version, as well as this crazy slowed down version by the wonderful son of San Antonio, Alejandro Escovedo. The lyrics are, at turns, punk-dumb, and to hear this heart-felt interpretation by Escovedo brought to mind those American Recordings by Johnny Cash where he’s, on occasion, covering songs with lyrics not quite in keeping with his idiom, such as Trent Reznor’s “Hurt.”

Cruise over and give them a spin. Start with The Gun Club. I love both. In fact, I finally tracked down the Escovedo version. And now that it’s on my iPhone, I was listening to it the other night as I walked to the Jump-Start Performance Company to see a play.

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The play was “Fabulation; or, the Re-Education of Undine,” by Lynn Nottage, The Renaissance Guild presented the piece. They’ve been headquartered at Jump-Start for at least four years. The Renaissance Guild is “San Antonio’s Premiere Black Theater Company.” Actually, they’re one of the best companies in town. Expect a real grass roots community theater experience from their shows. Yes, they choose great material. But because they’re open to anyone who wants to work their way up in the company, the individual performances might not always be the most polished. But I’ve never regretted going to one their performances. And they always pull a crowd. The Renaissance Guild has collected a serious following over the years. And deservedly so.

The piece is a picaresque tale of a series of miss-adventures along the lines of Voltaire’s Candide. Here we have, as our protagonist, a high-powered entertainment agent, whose life falls apart. She crawls back to her low-income family living in the projects. Along the way on her descent back to the ghetto, she meets an assortment of colorful characters. Except for the protagonist (play by Jenelva Carter), all the other actors play multiple characters. Even though the production I saw was rather uneven, the totality of the piece amazed me. Each of the nine actors who played multiple charters gave their share of lackluster performances. But, dammit, each actor gave at least one insanely brilliant performance. And some of them, gave two or three high-level performances.

Jenelva Carter, who plays Undine, the lead, has confounded me over the years. She’s very personable. But she seems to play basically just one character: the very interesting and very watchable and very personable Jenelva Carter. There is, in her stage work, a very notable theatrical presentation. But I guess I can’t hold that against her. I mean, this is the stage. Anyway, I was somewhat dubious about her in the role for the first ten minutes or so. But once I picked up on her rhythm of delivery and her take on the character, she was it, she became Undine. Actually, I love it when I fight against an actor’s interpretation of a character (for whatever reason) and eventually become won over. It’s the theater nerd in me. And Jenelva completely won me over early enough in the play so I could enjoy how she decided to play with her character’s reversal of fortune.

But the real reason I was there was because of Angela Bennett. Since her involvement with me and Pete’s shelved digital feature (“Vaya Con Dios, Asshole”), I knew that Angela was a truly gifted performer. Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to see her on the stage several times. It was a sad day for San Antonio theater when she left for Los Angeles. But the clouds have lifted, and Angela is back in town. As beautiful and talented as I remember. In this play she portrays half a dozen characters. She shines as both the grandmother and as the whore. Just those two roles should be video-taped and added to her acting reel. From a tear-jerking moment with a junky grandmother in a wheelchair to a hilarious turn at the stereotype in-your-face trash-talking voluptuous bombshell of a prostitute … well, what can you say? I’ll see Angela in anything. Welcome back Angela. We missed you.

The Renaissance Guild’s production of “Fabulation,” at the Jump-Start Performance space until March 1st, kicks serious ass. Check it out. Worth every penny.

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With two versions of Sex Beat on my iPhone, not to forget the newest freebie collection from the London Apartments (the Windsor, Ontario band — the grooviest sound north of the 36th parallel) I headed out for a bike ride down the mission trail. It was about 70 degrees, but with the heavy wind, it seemed a bit chilly.

As I approached Mission San Juan I noticed some public art on the levee top across the river from me. I know nothing about this project. It’s not a guerilla project. There are three sculptures. And each has a cement foundation and an iron armature. These are large pieces. Cartoonish field workers tending what I’ll assume is an alfalfa field. While I was strolling about these installation, walking my bike and snapping photos with my iPhone, I was happy to see people pulling off the road and coming out to join me to see the cool sculptures up close. This is art I can get behind. If anyone knows who did this, please let me know.

(The last time I saw something like this, Edward Woodward was sacrificed in a pagan ceremony on some spooky Scottish island. Let’s not see a repeat here.)

Maybe it has something to do with the annual Basura Bash, when volunteers descend on the San Antonio River and those creeks which feed it, and do some spring cleaning, pulling out tons of old tires, miscellaneous junk, and assorted crap.

Hmm? I’ll have to investigate. And by that, I mean wait for Greg Harman to bring me the story.

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On my return ride, I stopped to snap a photo of a clear sign of spring. The catclaws along the river were decidedly in bloom. Catclaw (and I assume were I incline Google would give me a proper name) is a woody shrub found in hot and dry climes, usually along stream beds or in arroyos. The name comes from the thorns on the branches which grab on to you like a cat’s claw.

It would seem that they are an early indicator of spring. Not only are the putting forth their little spheroid fluffy flowers, but they’re budding with new leaves. I love catclaw. It’s a scrappy and feisty shrub. I have an early memory of the Big Bend. In a a lonely gas station was a little display of local honey. The sign said: “Mesquite and Catclaw Honey.” So, you see, that catclaw, it’s pulling it’s own weight.

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I’m still nursing a cold. Or, well, that’s my excuse for being such a layabout yesterday. Until the evening the high-point of my day was heading to the drive-through at Eddie’s Taco House for a number three combo lunch special. (They always want me to pay an extra 40 cents to upgrade to the extra large tea. Don’t they understand, I don’t even want the regular sized tea. But, hell, it comes with the lunch special.)

Mostly I lounged on the sofa reading Arthur Machen and some of the essays from Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler,

Around six in the evening I headed over to HemisFair Park to meet up with a few fellow committee members running this up-coming Luminaria Arts Night in San Antonio. We were trying to tie up a couple of loose ends. There were two artists with site specific proposals who had not yet been assigned a location to display their work.

It’s all coming together nicely. These last two artists are both incredibly talented and, thankfully, have no ego or diva issues. I hope everyone who reads this blog can make it out March 14. And make sure to spread the word. It’s free. And if it’s anything like last year, you can expect an incredibly laid-back scene where crowds — but not densely packed crowds — wander a significant chunk of downtown San Antonio, stumbling on all sorts of wonderful experiences. Music, theater, poetry, painting, sculpture, film, dance, fire-eaters, fireworks, and god knows what else. Last year was beautiful, sublime. I’m hoping for an even better Luminaria 2009.

Keep an eye on the website.

http://www.luminariasa.org/

On Jennifer Saylor’s blog, dated Feb. 14, she lists a sample of alternate names for Valentine’s Day. Most are a bit longish to be embraced by Madison Avenue, but I rather like the “Jeez, I’ve Grown Up Since This Day Used to Bother Me So Much Day.” Not only does it not bother me so much anymore, but I generally forget all about it. Were it not for Carlos knocking on my door Saturday night I might have remained oblivious. I was slugging back a jigger of NyQuil whilst listening to the Skepticality podcast (man, they can be smug mofos, but they do have cool guests), when I hear a tentative tapping on the door off my kitchen. There are two doors on my front porch. And I guess Carlos could hear that I was sitting at my desk, at the kitchen door, listening to a podcast on my computer and no doubt muttered back, in a NyQuil fugue state, “you smug, self-righteous mofos!” All he wanted to do was explain that he was leaving his Camaro parked in front of my house while he went out and painted the town a decided Valentine’s Day red with the wife. “Oh, right,” I muttered, standing on my porch in my socks. “Valentine’s Day.” Carlos said something about how he’d tried to wriggle out of it, but I wasn’t buying his machismo front. He likes special nights out on the town as much as the next guy — more, I believe. At that moment Shelly pulled up in their second car. She’d just gotten off work. I bid them a pleasant night out, and played out the podcast before calling it a night.

That I’ve spent many more Valentine’s Days alone than with this or that girlfriend in my adult years doesn’t hit me so hard as it might … were Valentine’s Day not five days after my birthday. See, by February 14th I’m still reeling from the ghastly realization that I’ve squandered another year of this short and unspecified time I have on this planet, and continue to come up short, having done little of which I can be proud. A romantic I may be (and a failed one at that), but for me the sting of mortality trumps the sting of the love-lorn. And, well hell, they’re both kind of wrapped up together at times.

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Because I never use my TV to watch television (and with this impeding digital transition, I soon won’t be able to even if I want), I fulfill most of my TV diet via Hulu.com. I might have to wait a day or a week after other people see these shows, but I’m in no hurry. Thus I keep up with the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, 30 Rock, The Office, House, Fringe, and Bones; I also could do the same with Heroes and Battlestar Galactica, but because they don’t archive these shows, I’m completely lost in the bloated soap opera plots. Hulu also has quite a few free feature films. Hulu is “free” in so far as you have to watch the occasional short commercial.

There’s is one documentary on Hulu which played at the Cine Festival. It’s called Crawford. The filmmakers made periodic visits to the town of Crawford, Texas over the course of about five years to talk to the residents about their most famous neighbor. Head over to Hulu and check it out. It’s filled with quite a few interesting local characters with a wide range of opinions. And some of these opinions change, as they watch their town turn into a media circus.

Another documentary I recently watched on Hulu is titled Abel Raises Cain. It about Alan Abel, the great media hoaxer. I’d explain some of his great gags played on the media, but why bother. His daughter’s excellent documentary does it all. Alan, and his wife Jeanne, had a background in entertainment and comedy writing, but it’s the world of hoaxing in which they excelled. Because they were trying to promulgate a message (even if that message was only for people to be more aware) they would clearly be called culture jammers were they of a more modern generation. However, this documentary, released in 2005, makes it clear that Alan and Jeanne Abel continue to be trouble-makers, even as impoverished septuagenarians. As I was watching the documentary, mention was made several times of a mockumentary directed and written by Alan and Jeanne Abel. Is There Sex After Death? It came out in 1971. I was intrigued. And when I check IMDB and saw that the film included cameos by, not just the Abels, but Buck Henry, Robert Downey, Sr., Holly Woodlawn, Mink Stole, and James Randi (as a seance medium, no less), I knew I had to track this down.

It arrived from NetFlix Saturday. It’s well worth watching. Playful, funny, rude, quaintly racy, and filled with priceless cameos of the cream of this country’s swinging ’60s odd balls. I swear, I was hitting the pause button all the time and toggling over to Google trying to figure out just who was this or that weird performer.

This film needs to be seen by more people. It’s true art wrapped in kooky comedy and vague prurience. Alan Abel gives the perfect deadpan delivery as our narrator and chief interviewer. And Buck Henry gives the performance of his life. And, man oh man, Holly Woodlawn is a scream, especially in the interview where she switching back and forth between a joint and a cigarette — she’s brilliant, insane, and totally adorable. So, take a walk on the wild side. Get ahold of Is There Sex After Death? Alan Abel will become your newest hero.

I felt this cold coming on Thursday morning. By the evening it was sliding into the background. I thought I’d trounced the little microscopic bastards. But by Friday morning, I knew they’d got the upper hand, or, should I say flagella, crystallized protein shell, or … well, whatever? I must admit I surprised myself that morning by hopping on the bike and riding to the convenience store for milk for my coffee. The sore throat and generally seedy feeling was mitigated by it being a truly beautiful morning. And I was not in the mood for coffee without milk

I leaned my bike against the plate glass window of the little shop and gas station. As I entered, I held the door open for a delivery man bringing in several bins of chips and such. It only took me a few seconds to snag a pint of milk from one of the coolers. And it only took a few seconds for the severe middle-aged German woman who works there to begin laying into the smilingly placid delivery man.

“This isn’t the full order,” the woman grumbled, as she adjusted her glasses to better read the invoice. “I need forty Grab Bags of Sun Chips. I don’t see them?”

“¡Mira, mira! ¿No es suficientemente?” he asked, moving his arm over the bounty of chips. “Every chip of the rainbow. ¿Pues aquí … todo — Funyuns y Cheetos, sí?”

“No fucking Sun Chips?”

“¡Mira, mira! Chicharrónes. Muy sabroso. These taste like shrimp. ¡Pinche camarónes! Pig skins that taste of sea food! ¡Qué cosa!”

“Lichten mein asch!” she hissed, moving in on him. He did not break eye contact, nor did his playful smile waver. “I want those Sun Chips.”

“Mira, mira! Chingas of jerky! Spiced meat sticks … spiced meat sticks con queso. Mira, look at it!” The delivery man paused to take in his breath in mid rhapsody. “They inject the cheese, from the tips down to los culeros.”

But she wasn’t listening. She pulled away and walked around the counter.

“By closing time, arschgesicht,” she said over her shoulder. “I want those Sun Chips!”

“Just this,” I muttered, putting down my milk.

“So nice to see you,” she said, suddenly changing gears, flashing me a flirty and slightly predatory smile. “You don’t come here so often anymore.”

I muttered something about a busy schedule and walked out. As I left, I again held the door open for the chip man. He smiled and nodded — one of those shared “mercy, what a guy has to do” moments.

I rode home and had a couple cups of coffee and ate some banana oat cakes while watching a NetFlix DVD which had been languishing on my desk for weeks. Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses. Classic Loach. I love his big old socialistic heart. He makes these films that feel so raw and naturalistic. Seemingly more reportage and documentarian than controlled narratives. But there were times when I had to hit pause and inch back frame by frame to see what he was doing. His films are actually tightly structured. He works with brilliant cinematographers with incredible eyes. What seems like a throw-away shot is actually masterfully composed. For people interested in his work, this is a great start. Very nice pace. Accessible. And it co-stars Adrien Brody. It’s about a group of LA janitors trying to form a union. ¡Si se puede!

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George Cisneros called me up Thursday afternoon. One of his early and important drum teachers was in town for a music and education conference. George was setting up a little gathering at URBAN-15 to honor his old mentor. Would I like to come? Sounded good.

And so, after a short bike ride down to some of the missions, I headed over to the courtyard at URBAN-15 for an evening of tacos and sangria.

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Lisa McWilliams is one of the lead folks running the Mobile Film School. This is an Austin-based youth educational non-profit. I believe that this is their third year. They offer their services to high schools that don’t have film or video programs. They are able to travel anywhere and teach a group of kids how to make a film. By the end of the program there is a complete work.

Their first project, a short documentary, was extraordinary. It won first prize at the Josiah Youth Media Festival. It’s also done well at other festivals and screenings.

Check out their website:

http://www.mobilefilmschool.org/

They’ve got a cute donation campaign for an up-coming project. Donate one dollar to pay for one second of a completed short. Help out a little, or help out a lot. I couldn’t help myself. I had to make a donation. However, I couldn’t figure out the Google Checkout system they were using as the main payment option. And, dammit, for some reason, the MFS website blocked me as spam when I tried to email. So I just phoned up and gave Lisa my credit card info. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking — she’s probably in Aruba by now sipping a fruity rum drink and winking at the front man of a rumba band. But you gotta have faith, man. It’s what got me where I am today.

The Mobile Film School does wonderful work. Give them money. A little or a lot. It’s a good cause. They do outstanding work.

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I’m thinking of dumping MySpace. No one seems to be creating any content. It’s dead. No new blogs from the folks I subscribe to (well, there are maybe three still posting regularly). Has everyone moved to Facebook? Facebook has a piss poor interface. Not that MySpace is much better. But Facebook’s interface is thin, anemic, and goddamn counterintuitive. Besides, it’s not set up for people who want to blog, post video, or basically create substantial content. Facebook is for the dilettante with ephemeral content. MySpace is more geared towards the windbag.

I’ve noticed that I’m still getting loads of hits on MySpace. More than ever before. It used to be that each new blog would be read by about 100 to 150 people. Now I find myself looking at the hits for a new blog, and it’s in the 200 to 300 range. I can prove nothing, but I think MySpace is feeding me bogus information. Who are these people? I don’t have new subscribers to my blog. And MySpace isn’t really Google-searchable. And most telling, those people who blogs I subscribed to are not writing new blogs. It’s almost completely dead. It seems that everyone is moving away. Could it be that MySpace, in a panic mode, it cheating — letting people think that their page is becoming more and more popular so they won’t notice that MySpace has been taking on water for some time and jump ship for good?

But because Facebook’s bullshit platform and environment (seemingly created by and for ADHD meth-heads), I’ve found myself sliding towards the darkest of the dark side when it comes to ephemeral social media — I’m talking of the mico-blogging world of Twitter.

True, I think a good blog entry should clock in at around 25,000 words, you know, a good solid novella; but, dammit, if we are running scared from sweet fat content, let’s just go wild and cook it down to the essentials. Convey your idea in 140 characters.

Sure, there are those who see this sort of nonsense as fundamentally narcissistic. More so than blogging. It’s a constant feed of people’s truncated yammerings. So, yeah, absolutely narcissistic. But, in all condor, there are indeed some narcissists who I want to know all about. For instance, Stephen Fry Twitters. Don’t you want to take a peek into Stephen Fry’s world? This last week he’s been in Hollywood on set for an up-coming episode of the TV drama Bones (one of my guilty pleasures). He’s funny, erudite, and rude. In 140 characters. Just what we all want from the brilliant Stephen Fry … while we’re standing on an elevator trying to ignore people standing close and invading our space. Speaking of space, I also follow Phil Plait, astronomy author and blogger extraordinaire. And then there’s all the clever insights and puerile bullshit from friends and colleagues and those people who barely know me, which comes straight to me — people like Sam Lerma, Annele Spector, Sam Bayless, Michael Verdi, Evie Barnes, Mary Robinson, Bryan Ramirez, Ben Judson, and Jennifer Saylor. There are also theater companies, coffee shops, film festivals, and other organizations and institutions which can keep one updated about events. Although it’s this marketing aspect which I find at times rather intrusive. And there are folks, like Phil Plait, who make significant ad revenue off their blogs, and Twitter is as much a tool for them to send traffic to their blogs as well as giving them an opportunity to crack wise to the wold at large, in an ad lib and off the cuff manner. Of course, if you get sick of someone I suppose you just cut them loose. Haven’t tried that. Would that be rude?

Hm, I wonder what the fuck Letitia Baldrige would say on that matter?

My current blogging apathy has reached an all-time low. The last entry had loads of typos. This isn’t too unusual for me. But in the past I make it a point to reread my posting the following morning. That’s when I shamefacedly move quickly to fix the dumb little errors (and those greater and more embarrassing mega errors). But lately, on these rare occasions when I even bother to post something, I just hit the “publish” button and walk away from it.

Sorry. That last one was a horror.

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It was a good day Friday. I’m happy that the weather is warming. It looks like we’ve got a few days of warm afternoons and mild nights coming this way.

The second annual Luminaria Arts Night in San Antonio is coming up fast. And me and Veronica Hernandez, as co-chairs of the film committee, are trying to firm up the venues for film screenings. The current idea is for all the films (except for several site-specific installations) to be screened at the Instituto Cultural de Mexico at Hemisfair Park. Thursday we met with the directors of both the Instituto as well as the San Antonio Office of Cultural Affairs. Also in attendance was a high honcha from the CE Group, the marketing firm who are, once again, wrangling the infrastructure needs as well as providing the advertising campaign.

And again, at nine Friday morning, we had another meeting with the addition of representatives of the Slab Cinema and the Luminaria Logistical committee. We’re locked with all the needs for the indoor screenings. And now we’re working the kinks out of the outdoor screenings. There are a few wrinkles, but everyone involved so far has been enthusiastic and very accommodating.

We have a location in the Plaza de Mexico, behind the Instituto, where we want to hang a huge screen. But there is a second wall I want to hang another screen for works not needing a sound system. Ms Franco-Palafox, the director of the Instituto, told me that they had a screen in storage. If I wanted to come back at three in the afternoon they’d let me have a look at it.

This gave me time to pick up sweet potato empanadas and marranitos (Mexican pig-shaped gingerbread cakes) and have a late breakfast with some coffee before taking in a bike ride down to Mission Espada. Windy as hell — a bitch on the ride out, but a pure joy on the return leg.

When I returned to the Instituto, we took the screen out to the plaza and unrolled it. It’s a bit wrinkled and has some minor staining. They can fix it. The screen is 22 by 11 feet. (Later in the day while watching a film at the Guadalupe for Cine Festival, I realized that their screen is about the same dimensions.) It will accommodate the most extreme of Hollywood aspect ratio. More radical than 16:9 (what we pretty much get with HD TV), I assume it will handle Cinemascope. And now I’m thinking if we can find two projectors, we can give an artist (or more) a chance to present a two channel presentation — essentially a diptych.

We’re still working all this out. But it’s great fun to find unexpected resources.

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An empanada and a marranito proved insufficient. What I really wanted were enchiladas at Titos. I’d forgotten its was First Friday, and food and craft vendors were already setting up on Alamo Street in the King William neighborhood for the crowds later that night.

I walked by a young couple setting up their hot dog cart. A gaunt middle aged man on a bicycle was talking with them. “Yeah,” bike guy said. “I run my own stand near Travis Park.” The young guy wanted to know what was selling best downtown. “I do all beef dogs,” bike guy replied. The young man nodded. “We sell Nathan’s here.” The bike guy stroked his beard. “Nathan makes a good dog,” he finally said with a certain sense of gravity. “A good dog.”

Hot dogs were the last thing in my mind. I sidestepped the frankfurter conversation and hurried across the street to Titos. When I took a seat in an empty booth I placed my order without even checking the menu.

When my food arrived, I snapped a picture with my iPhone and posted the image to a Twitter update, informing those who cared (and many who surely did not) that I was about to tuck into Tex-Mex heaven.

And here we have one of those wonderful San Antonio moments. You know, when you realize that the seventh largest city in the United States is really a small town.

Midway through my meal Russ returned a call I made earlier. I asked if he intended to make any of the screenings of Cine Festival. He said that he was given a free pass, but he would be out of town for the weekend. However, he’d given his pass to one of his animation students who had a piece screening at Cine Festival in a group block of student work. And speaking of student filmmakers, who should walk in the door of Titos but the accomplished teenage filmmaker Sterling Abrigo with a friend in tow. Sterling has made films with at least three student filmmaking groups. We had a short chat about his recent projects. And on my walk home, I checked my Twitter account via my iPhone. Fellow Twitterer Sam Lerma (a former resident of my neighborhood as well as one of the best local filmmakers) had responded to my Twitter photo post by correctly identifying my lunch as Titos Enchiladas Tejanas.

That’s my Friday San Antonio Film Community Special Moment. The only thing missing was Ray Santisteban, San Antonio filmmaker extraordinaire, who can often be found chowing down at Titos.

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Thursday the Cine Festival kicked off. Four days of great films. One of the films I’ve previewed as a judge that impressed me was the feature documentary released in 2008 titled “The Garden.” It’s by Scott Hamilton Kennedy and concerns a 14-acre community garden in the heart of inner city Los Angeles, where the mostly poor Latino neighborhood has to fight developers who want to bulldoze their patchwork of allotments. You already know they’re doomed because the filmmaker says it up front. Some of the most impressive shots are in the beginning with the helicopter footage of flying over these two square blocks that look like some of the more fertile back country of interior Mexico which has been tilled and cared for by generations of campesinos. Then we pull back and see the hideous sprawl of industrial warehouses and scrap yards. And in the smog-chocked distance, we see the high-rise buildings of downtown LA, with the mountains beyond. Next we cut to a quick tour of the plots, worked by over three hundred families. We see patches of squash, lettuce, and beans. There are fruit-bearing banana and papaya trees. Corn fields. Little plots with herbs, culinary and medicinal. As they continue their struggle, winning battle after legal battle, you begin to wonder how the families working this community garden will eventually lose. And towards the end, when the support grows national, what with Dennis Kucinich and Maxine Waters making obligatory press stops at the beleaguered community farm; and then we have the Hollywood contingent of Martin Sheen, Daryl Hannah, Danny Glover, Joan Baez, and Willie Nelson; we have to begin to wonder how could they fail with all this powerful support? It’s a beautiful documentary. Heart-wrenching, yet ultimately empowering. Smart and cleverly edited. It’s screening this Sunday afternoon at 1:00. If you can’t make it, make sure to place it in your NetFlix queue.

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Lately I’ve been lucky to work a temp gig out of town at an auction house where I can take advantage of my decades of expertise in the world of collectable books. I’m paid well to write copy describing rare first editions and such.

Because of the plummeting economy, I’m a bit troubled if this job will continue. I do hope so.

But it’s not just books. Another department on the same floor is the entertainment division. One of the more striking items I’ve seen over on their side of the building is a prop for the movie 300. It’s a foam and latex dummy who is clearly dead. The poor bastard has an iron-age style spear sticking out of his mouth. Not stuck in his mouth. Out. Through some implausible series of misadventures this fellow has been stabbed somewhere on his back or, um, backside, and the spear has made its way out of his mouth either by happenstance or by design.

It’s incredibly cool. Whoever made this prop put hours into the design. It’s uncannily realistic. I took several photos with my phone. And later in the night, while pondering one of my pictures, my sister stumbled on a photograph on the internet of Frank Miller (who created the graphic novel from which the movie was adapted). There can be no doubt. This dead man prop IS Miller. A cameo, of sorts.

Maybe I need to actually watch this film. I assume that it is a tedious journey into over-produced CG-driven bullshit. But, you know, I’m kind of curious now. Is this life-like dummy based on a real-life character? Does Miller actually act in the film?

On a related note, several days ago my friend, filmmaker Carlos Pina, was hanging out at my place. I explained the 300 dummy. And when I showed him the photo he had to agree with my sister. It was Frank Miller. Carlos’ little girl, Rockie, was looking over my shoulder when I showed Carlos the grizzly photo. She thought it pretty cool. And while Carlos was using my computer to send a couple of important emails, Rockie had me take a picture of her as if a big iron-age spear was sticking out of her throat.

That girl cracks me up.

A new album by the Windsor-based band London Apartments has recently been released. And it’s available as a free downloadable zip file of mp3s and even the cover art. Double click to unzip, and then just toss all the files into the ol’ iTunes, and you’re set. I’m listening right now. Soothing, even when scratchy and atonal layers float through. I dig it.

http://thelondonapartments.com/

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Monday I thought I’d get some important things done. Mondays are good for paying bills and going to the bank and all those sorts of things I tend to procrastinate from doing the previous week.

But after pissing away the morning drinking a pot of coffee and staring at the walls, I received a phone call reminding me about the Luminaria steering committee meeting. What? In an hour? Shit. Put a spanner in my plans. But on a plus side, the meeting offered some sweet drama. Some mild shouting, probably a couple of tears, and and all followed, of course, by the tedious making up … all that “let’s never fight again.” If they’re not going to pay me anything, at least let there be entertainment. Finally, some action. And even though everyone made nice by the end, I suspect that I now know of a few buttons I can press (sota voce, of course) if things start getting dull in the future.

Also, there was a great gallery opening at Centro Cultural Aztlan. Monday might seem an odd choice for a show to open, but this is an annual thing, always set on February the second, to commemorate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The theme was Soy Illegal, No Criminal. It was a group show, wonderfully curated by Deborah Keller-Rihn. The usual cool art on the walls, of course, by some of the best established and emerging Chicano artists in the area. But clearly the most striking piece was a chain link fence topped with razor wire which ran through the middle of the space. There was a cut in the links where you could squeeze through to look at the work on the other side.

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Today I felt a need to catch up on some important errands. So, I dragged myself out of bed. Lugged a basket of laundry around to the washing machine on the back porch. And I started up the coffee pot while perched on the edge of my sink directly in front of my open stove. Trying. To warm. The fuck. Up.

Halfway through my first cup of coffee I saw, from the corner of my eye, a blue car moving down my street. It was Catherine on her way to work. I don’t always see her driving by, but most mornings I’ll hear her tap the horn in polite greeting as she motors past. But this time I saw her and waved. She must have seen me in the window, because couple of minutes later, she phoned me up. We chatted a bit as she finished the final mile or two drive to work. We talked about some of the personality clashes involved in the making of the second annual Luminaria festival. I suspect the San Antonio art community behaves much as they do in other cities — as a somewhat dysfunctional family. And as we all commiserate with one another, one on one or in small groups, colorful stories and untoward behavior gets around surely as fast as do those stories of who got this grant or who received that award. I try and explain to people that San Antonio is a small town at heart. And especially if you make waves in the tiny arts community, your actions will be known. As my father once said of his world, the antiquarian book-selling community: “Not a sparrow falls in bookdom that isn’t heard.”

After I moved my clothes from washer to dryer (I usually hang them on the line to dry, but I was behind schedule and, dammit, I was out of clean socks), I returned to my perch on the sink and began my second cup of coffee. That’s when I got a call from Pocha. Her and hubby Payan are running Cine Festival again this year. Pocha wanted to know if I could pick up some DVD screeners from the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center this afternoon. I’m one of the judges. I let her know It’d be no problem.

Cine Festival is the oldest Chicano film festival in America. This will be its 31st year. Sandra Pena Sarmiento and her husband Victor Payan (AKA Pocha Pena y Payan) did a kick-ass job running the festival last year. It’s my favorite local film festival. Ooops. I don’t want to offend my good friend Dar, whose SAL (San Antonio Local) Film Festival is also my favorite local film festival. Let me put it thusly: Cine Festival is my favorite San Antonio international film festival. (SAL is my favorite festival for San Antonio filmmakers.)

My advice: spend the paltry 30 bucks, or whatever, and get a full pass. There will be chingos of movies playing at two different venues at the historical theater near downtown. The Guadalupe is great because there’s lots of free parking. Great cheap Mexican restaurants within walking distance. The best pizza in town — Giovanni’s — is a block away. And two coffee shops across the street from the Guadalupe theater. There’s always something to do when you want to take a breather from all the films.

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After picking up the DVDs, I headed over to the Radius Center to meet with Veronica Hernandez, the prez of our San Antonio chapter of NALIP (National Association of Independent Latino Producers). She’s wrangled NALIP-SA to share an office at Radius with a couple of other non-profits. We can now have office hours, a mailing address, a meeting space, and a swanky conference room that members can use if they need to pitch their project to investors, et al.

Nice space. René Guerrero has opened a second location of his iconic Madhatters Tea House and Cafe in the front part of Radius. There is free WiFi. And it seems like a nice fit. The San Antonio chapter of NALIP has been floating around without a secure home for too many years.

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And it looks like, after working a couple of weeks on a lucrative freelance writing gig in Dallas, I’m back to my pro bono grind of volunteerism and committee work.

There’s a wonderful video clip from The Onion about the launch of the revolutionary MacBook Wheel, a keyboard-less laptop with a “sleek, touch-sensitive click wheel.” The deadpan demonstration is spot-on. “Everything is just a few hundred clicks away.”

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary

The faux news anchor signs off with this gem: “It remains to be seen if the Wheel will catch on in the business world, where people use computers for actual work, and not just dicking around.”

This, sadly, sums up a recent trend in my life, threatening to follow me deeper into 2009. You know, just dicking around.

What could be a better example than me setting up a Twitter account. I’ve not reached the point of one the folks I “follow” who churns out dozens of these ephemeral announcements per sitting. I’ll not name names, but, mercy, after the kids have been sent off to school and once that second (or is it the fifteenth?) cup of coffee kicks in, look out!

I first became intrigued with Twitter when Jennifer Saylor, an Asheville blogger I always read, mentioned she’d begun to use Twitter. I’d read her “tweets” (as they’re called), and understood the appeal. With a tiny window of 140 characters people post little snippets of whatever. A movie you just got out of and hated. You want to tell the world that you’ve just hit upon a way to prove the The Riemann Hypothesis. Or maybe you just want to let people know you’re watching the most beautiful sunset you’ve ever seen. With my iPhone I’ve learned to send web links, map locations, and photos. If this sounds like an enormous waste of time (yep), and way too warm and fuzzy (lord-o-mercy, it can be), let me remind you that people like Sam Lerma Twitter. He’s a news shooter (video), and I get these great postings to my iPhone about police stand-offs, SWAT teams lobbying gas grenades, and all that manner of human drama — sometimes with a photo (from his iPhone) or a GPS-generated link via Google maps to the site of the excitement. Local journalist and activist Greg Harman sends out links to his most recently published stories. Also, Michael Verdi used his Twitter feed to update what was happening on his 24 Artists in 24 Hours live video podcast he was running in conjunction with the Jump-Start Performance Company’s annual Performance Party.

Speaking of which, congratulations, Michael. I was tuning in off and on during the day. I mean it was unseasonably warm Saturday, and really I had to dust off my bike and hit the Mission Trail for a couple of hours. But I was glad I got to see work by Wreck & Salvage, Michelle Ellsworth, Ryanne Hodson & Jay Dedman, Luis Carlos Barragán Castro, and so many others. I only wish more people in the San Antonio art world as well as the film community were tuned into the live feed.

Actually, I believe Verdi is working on uploading the archived video material to the site.

http://www.24hours24artists.com/

For those who couldn’t be bothered to join me, you missed a great show. Well, half great, and half kind of lame. But it’s a variety show. 24 performances. Not all are going to grab you. But where else can you go in San Antonio where, for a suggested 5 dollar donation, you can see over four hours of some of the best theater, music, dance, and performance art this city has to offer?

What you missed?

Local boy made good, Jesse Borrego. You’ve seen him in ER, 24, Con Air, Blood in Blood Out, and Dexter. I don’t believe I’ve seen him dance since I was a kid watching the TV show Fame. But he came out and got back in touch with his dance roots and gave us a fluid run of stylized tai chi movements while a Gil Scott-Heron (“the first thing I want to say is, mandate, my ass!”) song played.

Later in the evening, Dos Generaciones hit the stage. They are associated with the Conjunto Heritage Taller, a nonprofit organization committed to roots conjunto music. Rudy Lopez, the older gent, played guitar. And Robert Casillas, who’s finally getting too old to be called a child prodigy, accompanied on accordion. As Robert was wrestling with an uncooperative microphone, Jesse Borrego leaped out from the wings and did some fast roadie work adjusting the microphone. San Antonians know that the whole Borrego clan are no strangers to performing music on stage — Conjunto Borrego is dad, Jesse, brother James, and sister Gloria.

And, of course, there were the URBAN-15 dance and drum ensemble. They closed down the second act. One of the three pieces from Saturday night they’ll be performing in Washington DC for the Obama Inauguration (more on that later).

There was also a work in progress by the brilliant writer / performance artist Doyle Avant. Aerial dance by Shimi. Annele and Monessa reprising the Methane Sisters. Joel Settles giving us a performance of a meth-head who had just wandered in from a long walk up from Las Palmas mall on the west-side. The fabulous Jade Esteban Estrada hit the boards in heavy adrenaline in an all white Nancy Sinatra drag ensemble (white, from wig down to go-go boots). Marisela Barrera and Anna de Luna, brilliant as always, delved into a skit where a vato lothario is romancing the current Miss Southtown (a drag queen beauty contest). What could be sweeter than watching the climax — the perplexing ambiguity of simulated sex between a woman playing a man and a woman playing a man dressed as a woman!

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URBAN-15.

George and Catherine Cisneros are two of my favorite people. They create art (photography, prints, video, dance, music, sculpture, multi-media, and on and on), both as individuals and as a collaborative couple. But they also run one of the more interesting and innovative non-profit arts and cultural centers around. URBAN-15 is best known for their Brazilian Carnival-styled celebratory dance and drum ensembles. They rock — even in sequins and whilst carrying plastic pink flamingos. And they have been selected by the in-coming Obama administration to perform at the inauguration. George and Catherine and their drummers and dancers are no strangers to performing for US presidential inaugurations. But what make this year different is that because, during the campaign, Obama refused corporate sponsorships, the funding is tight for inaugural entertainment. In short, Urban-15 needs to pay their way.

(Click for larger image.)

They are going. That’s a given. The bus has been chartered, rooms booked. But because the San Antonio city coffers are apparently also depleted, they are asking for direct funding. I’m a huge fan of URBAN-15, but my poverty keeps me from donating more than the paltry minimum 25 bucks via their web site.

Help, if you can.

http://www.urban15.org/

I only wish there was room on the bus for me. Oh, well. They will be performing a dance which Catherine describes as a blessing, a hybrid of ancient non-denominational gestures. Fairly secular, as blessings go, but most important, it ain’t Rick Warren.

Give money to URBAN-15. They kick ass. They promote artistic, ethnic, gender, and cultural diversity. And, again, they are not Rick Warren.

Donate now, it’s tax deducible.

I’m sure before the end of this paragraph I’ll come up with a local male video artist of importance. But the ones who seem to get most of the attention are women. In fact, a show opened Thursday night at the UTSA Satellite Gallery over at the Blue Star Art Complex. All Ladies Video Review. It’s a group show featuring works by Guillermina “Gisha” Zabala, Anne Wallace, Julia Barbosa Landois, Michele Monseau, and Joey Fauerso — curated by Leslie Raymond and Cornelia White Swann. It continues until Jan. 25th.

Oh, of course, George Cisneros. And Luis Valderas seems well on his way to expanding out into the realm of video art. The y chromosomes seem sadly under represented locally in this field.

Check it out. It’s a good show. Gisha has an older piece — a three channel installation — and I had only seen a third of it before. I was glad to see the whole piece. Julia continues to work with Catholic themes seen through a feminist’s eyes with a close up study of her own feet with just a hint of the stigmata, or are they symmetrically occurring mosquito bites? A hand enters the frame to dab at them with a cotton ball, perhaps soaked with Phisohex. Michele’s piece, a large diptych, resembles another piece of hers I’d seen before. The camera pans up a building and then back down. At the sidewalk level is a person laying on the ground. The two projectors are rotated into portrait layout and the pans are out of sync. What I liked best was when one channel (projector) pans up, while the other pans down. Creates a nice sense of vertigo. Anne has two pieces. One plays on a small flat screen on the wall with headphones to use. It’s a piece she did while in residence at ArtsPace. She mentioned it to me before, but I’d never seen it. There was another work from Anne, in a room off the main gallery. The video was projected on the wall. Footage of domestic locations superimposed with underwater footage. We occasionally saw a scuba diver swimming about. But the audio of mechanical assisted breathing wasn’t air passing through the mouthpiece of diving tanks as I first thought. Rather it was the clinically cold cycling compressor of a hospital (or, more likely, hospice) breathing device. A sad intersection of nostalgia and the managed care of a terminal patient.

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I’m not a fan of the News Year’s Resolution. I’ve savaged so many in past years, five to six weeks out of the gate. Actually, the one thing I most need to do in 2009 is to develop a plan and stick with it. I have a horrible habit of following the path of least resistance, never saying no to other people, and generally drifting about wherever the wind might blow.

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I thought I might toss a couple of my videos onto my iPhone. It’s letting me down. I look a QuickTime file and squeezed it through iMovie, compressing it as the iPod setting. I stuck the new file into my iTunes, and was able to watch the movie through its player. But damned if I can figure out how to drop the file into a folder which my iPhone will upload. So much of the information on the internet concerns accessing TV shows onto the iPhone through iTunes. I’m not trying to put seasons one through whatever of Lost on my phone. I want to stick on it a file of content I created. If anyone has any tips, drop me a line.

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Tonight is the 24th annual anniversary performance party of the Jump-Start Performance Company. Jump-Start is by far the most vital and innovative theater company in San Antonio. Come out and show your support. This will be, I believe, the fourth year in a row I’ll have attended. It’s a blast, shockingly affordable, but come early to be sure to get a seat. Check out the website to see when the box-office opens.

http://jump-start.org/

These yearly events are variety shows which give a quick insight into the incredible talent among San Antonio’s performance community. You’ll be sure to see vignettes of current and upcoming shows of local theater, dance (traditional and modern), performance art, experimental sketch comedy, all manner of music, and, the perplexingly uncategorizable.

Michael Verdi is doing a 24 hour video podcast in conjunction with Jump-Start. He’s curated live video feeds with 24 artists from all over.

http://www.24hours24artists.com/

I feel a cold coming on.  Not a very auspicious beginning for 2009.  Where, I wonder, could I have caught this?  I don’t recall interacting with another human (well, face to face) in the last three days or so.  Well, maybe at a convenience store or a drive through taqueria.  Oh well, I’ll try and ride it out.

The holidays are almost over, and that’s something to cheer for.  It seems that I never plan my way around these special days.  Invariably I run  out of groceries on the eve of some big event.  Tonight, New Year’s Eve, was a case in point.  In a half-ass attempt to get a jump on the clean slate of a new year, I gathered up all the plastic grocery bags I’ve accumulated over the months and headed off to HEB.  Not my favorite choice for shopping, but I knew that the HEB on Nogalitos has a drop-off bin for plastic bags – you know, so that you can pretend they will be sent off to some sort of plastics recycling center.

There was a long line of cars to get into the parking-lot.  So I bailed, turned on Malone, and headed east to Flores to my La Fiesta.  Crowded there, too, but no so insanely and densely packed.  Needless to say, I’ll be driving around with two fat bags of bags rolling on my floorboards for who knows how long.

In a similarly proactive move towards a New Year’s clean slate, I decided to finally come to terms with the pile of emails clogging up my in-box – circa twenty-five hundred.  There were emails dating back to 2005.  Some probably very important.  If an email contains something crucial, I’ll leave it in the in-box.  Maybe it’s someone’s email address I never got around to entering into my contacts folder.  Some, of course, are spam I never got around to deleting.  Or, well, who knows.  In the back of my mind I guess I assumed I’d hunker down one week and deal with it.  Or maybe chip away, several pages per day.

Today I just hunted around, found the Empty Folder button, and consigned it all to the digital dump.

Rather exhilarating.  And so today I’ve been like a madman.  I’ll see, on my new iPhone, a fresh email.  Those pesky spams for boner pills and notices that a warrantee on a car I don’t own is about to expire don’t stand a chance.  I click on that icon of a trash can without a second thought.  Gotta keep my new pristine email box clean.

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Ah, my new iPhone.  It’s only 200 clams.  What a bargain for one of the best toys I own.  The downside, of course, is that AT&T has increased my monthly cell phone rate by about 30 bucks.  The rational is because I now have unlimited access to the internet via the phone’s WiFi feature as well as this 3G network thing that I don’t pretend to understand beyond the fact that it allows me fairly fast internet access where there is no WiFi signal.

Since I had my iPod stolen back in the summer, I’d planned on getting a new one.  In fact, my sister, for Christmas, transferred the needed funds into my account.  And as an iPhone is also an iPod, I went ahead and got it.  I haven’t yet loaded up any video.  However, I do suppose I should at least put my video reel on the phone.

But, as one of my sister’s co-workers said in high praise of his iPhone, “It’s all about the Apps.”  To be sure, iTunes has already made a mint selling the iFart application (something like that), and at only two or three bucks a throw, that must be quite a lot of adolescent tedium being spread around.

One of the free iPhone apps that intrigued me is “The Bike Computer.”  It’s a GPS application that can track your route, speed, mileage, top speed, average speed.  It interfaces with www.everytrail.com.  This is a website geared mainly for serious hikers and geocachers (the high nerds of the GPS subculture).  A quick perusal of the folks posting to the Every Trail forums led me to the conclusion that their GPS devices of choice were exotic items I have never heard of.  No one was praising the iPhone.  And so, I suspect that this iPhone app is pretty new.

The application however proved rather clunky.  True, as a GPS device, the iPhone is far from the cutting edge.  But I finally dumped the Bike Computer and switched to the EveryTrail GPS app.  The bike computer was created to ape the stand alone devices you can buy at bike shops, but those are weather proof and meant to be attached to you handlebars with a readout screen easy to see in direct sunlight.  This isn’t a good description of an iPhone.

What makes the EveryTrail app so cool is that not only does it mark your journey and allow you to upload it to their website so that other hikers, cyclists, and such can discover new routes (often with a written commentary), but you can use the digital camera on the iPhone to take a phone (without shutting down the GPS tracking app), and that photo is geo-tagged and will be uploaded along with the traveled route, so that people can know what to expect.  For instance, if you follow the link below, you can see a bike ride I took Monday along the Mission Trail.  There are photos of all four missions and other scenes.  Maybe I’ll get around to writing a little bit of commentary.  The photos, certainly, need contextualization.  Only three-quarters of the ride was recorded.  Someone called me, and apparently when you answer the phone, you need to reset the EveryTrail app.

http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php?trip_id=96525

On the day I bought my iPhone I had a Luminaria steering committee meeting over at the Witte Museum. Most of the other folks who sit around that chunky wooden board room table are comfortably employed in tony positions within the local arts and cultural industrial complex. In fact, one of my co-committee members had just bought a Mercedes SUV because another person at the table was so happy with hers. I took a seat in a deep padded and armed swivel chair and I looked around the table,  I saw half a dozen iPhones readied at people’s elbows, like stacks of chips for a serious night of poker. I slipped mine from my pocket and laid it on the table. “Deal me in,” I said to the room, and I gave a wink to the first perplexed woman in a pants suit who looked my way.

I have something of a love / hate relationship with technology. When it works, I just love it to death. But because there is such a significant price tag for the cutting-edge machines and software, I always seem to be about two years behind the technological curve. Early adopter, sadly I am not.  That’s a rich person’s game. I do believe that if I were financially flush, I would be scarfing up quite a collection of techno toys as they hit the market. Having said that, I also know too well just how much time I squander fucking around with these ephemeral contraptions and applications, culminating in the very antithesis of a life full of purpose and meaning.

Putting aside its inherent vapidness, the iPhone (and all these current crop of hand-held devices) represents the new information frontier. Computers will migrate from their perch on our desk and laps, and settle in the virtual realm of the internet. What we will physically own will be a device that allows us to access the net, where all of our processing and storage needs will reside. Visual displays — whether they be TVs, hand-held, or something resembling eyeglasses — will be connected wirelessly to the ubiquitous hand-held machine. The keyboard will have to be significantly revamped. Soon we will all be wirelessly interconnected. The internet will become our collective consciousness. We will spend even more time in there than we do now.

See you on the inside, chums!

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I haven’t been posting to this blog in ages.  But I’ve been writing.  So, here we go.  I’ll shave down nine thousand words of unpublished drivel into some highlights of the tail end of my 2008.

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(On spending two weeks in the Big Bend and three weeks in Dallas.)

In the last five weeks, I have only spent two nights in my house. Funny how my rootlessness of those weeks has resulted in fewer phone calls and emails. Sometimes we get so caught up in our lives that we actually believe that what we do is crucial and were we to disappear, it would all go to shit. So, when we realize that this is almost always nonsense, our ego recoils, feeling slighted, down-grade to traveling through life down in the steerage section with the superfluous of humanity, those day players and non-featured extras.  But then it hits. That sense of liberation. “Oh, so they don’t really need me!” And then you know that you can chill out, slack off, run away to some godforsaken corner of the Chihuahua desert, and all guilt free.

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(On a recent occasional gig working for an auction house in Dallas.)

I’m still in a bit of a shock that I can wrangle temp work  for the rare book department of a major auction house and get a wage that translates to a solid day rate I’d get were I working in film production in San Antonio. I sometimes forget that I have decades of experience in a rather obscure and occasionally bankable industry, the antiquarian book world.

Here is a photo of some nifty skeleton chairs apparently waiting to go under the hammer.

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(On the 2008 SA Film Commission holiday party.)

Drew and Janet brought together another outrageously successful annual San Antonio Film Commission holiday party. The Depot at Sunset Station was packed. I think we had about two hundred and fifty people. Some of my favorite people were in attendance.

At one point I was standing in the center of the room (the old train depot, refitted for swanky events, such as this) and I was talking to Travis Thomsen. And I looked over to the sign-in table. Wow, I thought, that sure looks like Angela Bennett, one of the more accomplished actors I’ve had the pleasure of working with. She played a tiny role in me and Pete’s feature, “Vaya Con Dios, Asshole,” and I swore I’d cast her, one day, in a major role.  But she eventually moved to LA.  However, some minutes later, I looked up to see the woman closer.  I had not been mistaken.  I walked up and asked if she was back in town for good.  She is. I asked if she’s still acting. Yes, she said. In fact she’s in a play that the Renaissance Guild will be putting on at the Jump-Start in February.  I know I’ll be there.  Welcome home Angela!

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(On the 2008 NALIP Christmas party.)

Two celebrations rolled into one at Pocha y Payan’s place.  The the annual San Antonio NALIP (National Association of Latino Independent Producers) holiday party … and, for those hanging around until midnight, glasses were lifted to celebrate Victor Payan’s fortieth birthday.

The place was abuzz with some of the best of the local film community (and only a couple of irritating blowhards).  Even though the evite gave the party a run time of 7:30 until 11, I knew I should stay to at least midnight.  And at the point, Victor’s wife Sandra Sarmiento (AKA Pocha Peña) came from their kitchen with a lighted birthday cake.  We all fell to snapping pictures.  And after a cursory round of “happy birthday,” we all began eating cake.  At about 12:20 local icon David Zamora Casas showed up with his entourage and a bunch of beer to revitalize the shindig.

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(On finally dragging my ass out to the AtticRep.)

Roberto Prestigacomo is the Producing Artistic Director of the Attic Rep theatre.  I met him earlier in the year for the 2008 San Antonio Creative Capital weekend retreat.  I’m a bit embarrassed that I’ve never been to see a play at the Attic Rep.  But the last production of the year was Sam Shepard’s True West.  The piece is known to most by the filmed version staring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.  In this local production Rick Frederick plays one of the two leads.  I worked with Rick as a fellow crew member on Anne Wallace’s film we shot down on the Rio Grande, but with all the praise Rick’s been getting from his performances in the San Antonio theater scene, I had never managed to see him do his thing.  So, I headed off to the final matinee performance of True West.  As I climbed the stairs to the Attic Rep, I saw the sign.  “Performance Sold Out.”  I signed up on the waiting list, but Roberto kindly found me a seat.  It’s a small and intimate theater.  I found myself on the front row.  I looked around at the audience.  There were my next door neighbors, the artist Marlys Dietrick and her husband Michael Looney.  Sitting next to them was teacher, author, and filmmaker Frances Treviño and her husband the author John Philip Santos.

The production was tight.  Nice art design.  Rick and his co-star, Andy Thornton, were perfect as the mismatched brothers.  Andy played the character of Lee.  The wayward brother.  The character is almost always drunk, and prone to unexpected turns of violent outbursts.  A perfect and intense performance.  Rick’s character, Austin, is more complex, and his is the character who undergoes something of a transformation.  Fucking amazing job.  From nebbish to muthafucker in two acts.  Brings to mind Dustin Hoffman as the mathematician pushed too far in Straw Dogs … but with funnier dialog.

Great play. Wonderful production.  And congrats Rick and Andy for giving the audience no other choice but to rise from our seats to give that well-deserved standing ovation.

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So, Happy New Year’s.  May 2009 be a damn sight better than 2008.

It’s 1:30 in the a.m. on the first of January.

I’d planned a night of sitting here grousing at my keyboard in a high state of self-pity.  Around nine I was pleasantly surprised to receive a call from Deborah.  She was sitting at Ric-Ron Taco House, a delightfully cheerless 24 hour dive on Roosevelt.  She had opted out of the parties to which she had been invited and was prepared to drown her sorrows in a late night plate of huevos rancheros.  She asked if I was doing anything?  I told her I’d be right over.

We had dinner, loads of watery coffee, and then, around eleven-thirty, I suggested we head downtown to watch the fireworks.  We parked in the old Handy Andy parking-lot.  There were families setting up tailgate celebrations with folding camp chairs.  We heard several bottles of champaign popping.  It’s a nice spot to watch the fireworks.  Last year, as I was walking my neighborhood New Year’s eve, I stopped here to admire the fireworks shooting up around the Tower of the Americas.

Deborah and I walked down to South Alamo and followed the crowds to Hemisfair Park.  It was a bit chilly, but no too bad.  As we cut across the park we gave wide berth to a goth girl in thigh-high boots and a leather mini skirt as she leaned against a live oak and vomited like a champ.  She chose her wardrobe wisely — those splashes will hose right off.

San Antonio has a ritual along the lines of Times Square.  But instead of a lighted ball dropping, we have a lighted elevator car climbing up the Tower of the Americas.  When it reaches the top, a big sign flashed from 2008 to 2009.  And then the orgy of fireworks began.  Deborah laughed and pointed out all the cellphones lifted high, snapping shots of the light show.  I would have taken a picture of the people taking pictures.  But because the iPhone’s camera has no flash (and, well, as a camera, it’s pretty lame) I went with the flow and took some low resolution smeary firework phone photos of my own.

A truly nice way to welcome in a new year.  A spontaneous low-key adventure with one of my favorite people.

Thanks for calling me out, Deborah!  And let’s make 2009 the best year yet.

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After returning Deborah to her car at Ric-Ron I headed home to pick up the thread of this blog.  I plugged my Sony headphones (the ones I edit video with) into my iPhone, switched on the Pandora app, and tapped over to my Cockney Rejects “channel.”  I was deep into the Ramones’ version of “Chinese Rocks” (a heroin song rendered so poppy and inoffensive it could have come from the Archies) when my phone began ringing.

It was Carlos Piña.  He and Shelley had just come from Bonds 007 where they’d welcomed in 2009 with Cindy Osborne and her band, When Words Attack.  Carlos could see through my window a silvery glow off my computer monitor.  He’d planned to leave a Christmas gift on my porch, but he didn’t want me over-reacting and diving for a pistol once I heard boots on my porch.  This is Texas, and Carlos knows the score.  Thanks Carlos and Shelley for the big bag of produce from the Rio Grande Valley (and no, it isn’t not that kind of produce).

Thanks guys.

Friday night I hit town, coming in from the west on I-10, right at rush hour.  I had been driving straight for seven hours, fueled by a huge can of Monster brand energy drink and (quite inexplicably) a couple bags of chicharrones.  For the three hundred miles from Fort Stockton to Kerrville the speed limit is eighty miles per hour.  And so, as I neared home and encountered the slower speed limits, things seemed suddenly sluggish, and, because of the hour, congested, what with the  commuters.  I was listening to Smog “Dongs of Sevotion” at high volume.  The songs are tragic set-pieces all about impoverished desperation and senseless murder on the open road.  You know, classic Americana.  The sun, which drops so early these cold afternoons, angled low before slipping behind an endless bank of clouds.  As I was pulled along with the rip tide of commuters on the elevated section of the highway nearby the downtown cathedral, I looked up and marveled at the line of blackbirds perched on the signs overhead.  They were shoulder to claw, watching the surge of humanity below.  And then, from the west-side public housing district, several dark and thick clouds of more birds plowed up and over the cars.  They took a sharp tack down, looking for more cozy roosts closer to the tourist traps like Mi Tierra and The Museo Alameda.  And all the while I’m listening to Bill Callahan matter-of-factly intoning the lyrics to “Cold Discovery.”  Oh, good god, what a mess.  As I took the South Alamo exit, I turned off the CD player and took a deep breath.

I stopped at the Pik-Nik convenience store for a batch of 65-cent tacos.  Back home I ate those tacos.  And I unloaded the truck.  Next, I walked two doors down to collect my mail from Phil.  My $300 economic stimulus package check had arrived!  Halle-fucking-lujah!  Looks like I can now pay my rent.  Thanks so much, Geo. W., and try not to let the door hit your ass on the way out!  Chinga usted, hijo de puta!

But I digress….

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I spent the last ten days or so visiting friends down in Redford, Texas.   I hadn’t been out to that part of the world since early summer of last year, when I brought Enrique and Roberto to San Antonio to represent the Jumano Apaches of the La Junta region during a screening of Alan Govenar’s “The Devil’s Swing.”

My Redford hosts, dear friends Enrique and Ruby Madrid, put me up in one of the apartments behind their home.  They had recently been through an ordeal.  The worst flooding of the Rio Grande in recorded history had hit Presidio and Redford.  The people of Redford had been cut off for a couple of weeks.  Helicopters brought in mail and food.  And even though the waters had pretty much receded by the time of my visit, a two mile stretch of the only road to town, FM 170, was shut down because the river had undercut the highway and the pavement is now cracked and seems on a slow and steady slump into the river.  There is access, though.  Highway workers have been busy smoothing out a dirt jeep trail, which can now accommodate just about any car, if driven slow enough.

I had about a day and a half catching up on the local news and gossip before Enrique took ill.  That’s when my 2008 Big Bend Excursion took a u-turn.  I received a front row seat into the appalling inequities of health care in southern Presidio county, one of the poorest regions in Texas.  If you’re lucky, you make it to Ojinaga, the Mexican sister city to Presidio, Texas, where health care is dependable, efficient, and affordable.  But if you’re unlucky, you get so sick so quickly that you have to phone up an ambulance (such as what happened with Enrique), and you get driven three hours away to the nearest clinic in Alpine.  And once they discover you have no insurance, they boot you out … well, once you’ve become stable enough to not croak in the parking-lot.  And, again, this is what happened to Enrique, after five days in the Alpine clinic.  They cut him loose before making more than a half-assed and uncertain diagnosis (pneumonia or TB are the top contenders).

The health care system in this country is a fucking vile joke.  We wince when reading about those sick chapters of human history where, say, Nazi researchers set about to advance medical knowledge through human vivisection.  And rightly so.  This is not to be allowed.  Let’s take it forward, yeah?  In the future, folks will gasp and grind their teeth in frustration to read how people (especially highly educated individuals who took an oath to do no harm) made a living by forcing sick people to pay them money to make them better … and if these people had no money, they were pushed aside, and allowed to die.

Everyone, repeat after me — Free Health Care Is A Right.  Enrique and Ruby are now saddled with yet a new crop of medical bills they can’t afford to pay.  Enrique had also suffered from an earlier, unrelated health problem.  As Ruby explained it: “We’ve always been poor, but never in debt.  We now owe more money to doctors than me and Enrique have ever made in our lives.”

I’m depressed, and a bit exhausted.  But it’s nothing compared to the people of the border regions in Texas.  Their lives are spent dealing with the indignities of being an occupied people.  We are talking about Occupied Texas.  This is where you have to show your papers.  And if some asshole in a badge asks your nationality, you had better say, “US Citizen,” ’cause otherwise, they’ll mess you up!

Fuck you, la chota!

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There is a contingent of the Meixcanos living in southern Presidio County who have decided to look to their roots.  They are retrieving the threads of their Jumano Apache ancestry.  These people have been living in the La Junta region for over 1200 years and they’re getting more than a bit pissed the way they’ve been treated.  Young Ezequiel Hernandez (RIP) was the most egregious and the most recent injustice.

I hope that Enrique gets better soon.  The battle continues.  And he’s needed.  Also, I guess,  it’s time for me to make myself available.

In fact, let’s all get off of our asses and work to make this a better country … a better world.