Stumbling to Fall

So I have another job with the UN, basically I’m in charge of about ten short videos on how people are affected by the global economic crisis around the world. The last one turned out really well: (go to the Global Impact and Vulnerability Alert System box & click the video link)

And of course at the same time I’m making the final push to complete Enemy Alien. I got a $15K grant so I can put a solid six weeks into the film. I have a great web designer retooling my website. But I’m not going to be done with the UN Secretary General job until September so that pushes everything back a bit.

Plus school is starting again, like right now. I really should register this week. I thought I was going to do some leisurely academic reading over the summer and meditate on my thesis…but the second school was over was the first UN job and then there was a rough cut to finish for the screening and then the CA trip and…here we are.

I have to think hard about how much of a courseload to take on. In a sense I really would like to be full-time but that might be tough as I’m finishing my doc. On the other hand, I’ll have control over my schedule so maybe now would be the time to do it. But then, the fees are not negligible. Yet it’s going to be the same amount in the end, and I really don’t want to drag out getting this degree.

Navy blue hakama

Feeling a bit pressured now. My sensei recently told me to start wearing hakama which is a big step at my aikido dojo. So there’s that to maintain too. The training definitely helps my mental acuity for other purposes as well. But time is time.

The fabulous Mally

Oh yeah, on Monday I shot another fun set of product demos for Mally Beauty. Mally Roncal is a fabulous, beautiful, funny and warm Filipina makeup artist with her own line of products. I did two days of shooting last year for her website, and this was a one-day update.

Tonight I’m going to see The Bacchae at New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park. Joanne Akalaitis is directing, music by Philip Glass. I’m really eager to see what they do with it, I know the play pretty well because I was in it not long after NYU, played Dionysus in a blond wig and Mardi Gras beads on the Christopher Street pier.

With that mental break I hope to have a contemplative Sunday morning and reach some equanimity about how my next few months are going.

CA trip Part 1: Buena Vista UMC

Buena Vista United Methodist Church

Getting ready for the screening

Reverend Michael Yoshii and filmmaker Konrad Aderer

Post-screening discussion

It was an uncanny feeling to be screening Enemy Alien at Buena Vista Union Methodist Church, a site with deep historical roots in the Japanese American community and a congregation heavily involved in progressive social change both in the U.S. and abroad.

The meeting hall where the screening was held was built by Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrants to the U.S.) in 1926. Reverend Michael Yoshii has been their pastor the last 21 years, spearheading the church’s active engagement with a full range of human rights issues including affordable housing, LGBT Pride, halting violence and kidnappings by paramilitary groups in the Phillippines, and support for Palestinian communities in Gaza and the West Bank.

At the screening, Michael spoke of the meaningful chain of events that brought Enemy Alien to his attention.

A young Palestinian named Amer Shurrab was at my April 12 screening of Enemy Alien in Manhattan. Some time later he put me in touch with Michael, who happened to be making a trip to NYC. It was then that I learned Amer’s brothers had been killed by Israeli forces during last winter’s attacks on Gaza (Watch & read Amer’s story on Daily Kos and  Democracy Now!). Michael Yoshii had helped organize a public hearing in CA where Amer gave testimony about what happened to his family. At that hearing, Amer told Michael about my documentary Enemy Alien.

BVUMC also sends delegations to Gaza and the West Bank to help Palestinian communities overcome the economic isolation imposed by the Occupation. This was in effect the documentary’s debut for Japanese Americans. To find a JA community so engaged with the Palestinian struggle, and for them to receive the documentary with such enthusiasm was very inspiring.

Roots of the Uprooted

I was staying in Sausalito while out in CA for a screening of my documentary in Alameda. Got some amazing foggy nights.

Driving to Sausalito

And while I was in the Bay Area I went to a branch of the National Archives in San Bruno and looked up my grandparents’ files from when they were first interned at Tanforan. The site of Tanforan happened to be very close by.

Tanforan was originally a racetrack, and during WW2 when they decided to remove all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, Tanforan became an “Assembly Center” where the internees lived before being shipped off to the “evacuation” camps in the interior of the U.S. One of the many fucked up things the Japanese Americans had to endure was having to live in smelly horse stalls until they built barracks at Tanforan.

The mall that now occupies Tanforan

And of course today Tanforan’s a shopping mall. They even had a Japanese fast food franchise in the food court. Ah, the irony.

an interesting tower at Tanforan

Sundazed

Been a hectic week. Today Michelle had to run off to a reading and rehearsal that would last into the night, but she left me with some buckwheat pancakes which we’d accessorized with bananas, walnuts and dried cranberries.

A street fair took me out of the house a bit. As people around here know, there’s been rain nearly every day this month. There were some showers today, but the feeling I got from people was, “nah, sorry, we’re not having it!” And after the crowd dispersed a little to shelter the rain would stop so we could take back the streets again.

I’m supposed to write something for my Aikido dojo’s blog, but I’ve been really blocked. So here I am, writing random stuff instead.

Last night I had a dream that I was in some foreign country, it felt like it could be Eastern Europe, the people there were white, but there was the sense that the government was a little heavy-handed. I was there as a documentary shooter, the first thing I remember was shooting a lobby of a big building where there was a screen showing some important news broadcast.

I wanted to take some footage of the street, but suddenly I had to get into this van and head out with the people who were our guides or possibly employers in this country. LP, the producer who I’ve been working with on a job for the UN in real life, was there. When I got in I wanted to take some out-the-window shots at least since these people were rushing me before I could get any decent footage, but now my camera looked like a silvery plastic M-16 and when I raised it to the window a woman told me to keep it out of sight or we’d get in trouble.

This week was hectic. It’s mostly been about chasing down the kind of footage we need for this video we’re producing for the UN, but being slowed down by the complications of the bureaucracies of all the different agencies therein. After much delay I was finally able to get some footage from the UN library. Had to venture into the vast basement which kind of tripped me out, it was the kind of basement you’d expect in a vast building built in the 1950s. I would have like to take more pictures but I don’t want to be seen as compromising security there so I just took the ones you see.

As soon as this job is over I have to get my brain back into my own documentary, plan how I’m going to use this $15K, and write a budget so the foundation can cut me a check. Then the day after my birthday I’m heading out to CA to have a screening of my rough cut and meet with somebody who works for a major public TV funder. And hopefully accomplish some other things I’ll hopefully figure out this week.

It’s definitely cool that there is cash flow now in theory, but it will be a while before I have the actual cash so I’m still in a pretty austere mode like I’ve been since the beginning of the year. I’ve been fronting some credit for tech-type stuff I need for my work, but I need to buy some shoes, some clothes even!

Anniversary in Montauk

It’s our first year anniversary today…we’re on a little trip to Montauk. I’ll have a pic or two soon.

Windy, sunny, a bit chilly. We had eggs, bacon, granola and grapefruit sliced in half with the little compartments sliced like both our moms used to make.

Yes, we wished our moms happy Mother’s Day. I had dinner with my mom Wednesday. Today she’s down in D.C. at an annual Mother’s Day antiwar protest. Did you know the woman who created Mother’s Day was a powerful antiwar activist? Yeah, that gets left out of the national sentiment somehow.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Snippets

Sorry about the empty post before, I spent an hour writing, pressed “publish” and instead my writing all disappeared. WordPress is perpetually autosaving, don’t know why it didn’t that time.

Showtime

Last Friday was the follow up to my third kyu test of a week before, which I passed provisionally if I taught a class in this technique I didn’t do right in the test. It was a huge class, about thirty people. I was nervous but kept my focus & composure and I passed.

It was an interesting night at the dojo. There’s been a big influx of new students in the last year.  After three years of thinking of myself as a junior student, suddenly I’ve become one of the more senior students, and leading that class was like making that official. Anyway, Sensei was satisfied and people came up and said some really nice & thoughtful observations about my teaching afterwards.

Watching the Watchmen

It was twenty years ago that I read the graphic novel, and I was really eager to see the movie (for my friend Barbara’s birthday night). I’d restricted my reading of reviews but had read that Alan More wasn’t happy with the graphic novel-to-movie assembly line.  While I respect that feeling, I’m still going to appreciate such movies when they’re good.

I thought each of the characters were about exactly as absorbing and compelling as they were in the graphic novel. I was especially psyched to see the characters of Rorschach  and Dr. Manhattan brought to life and thought they were cast and executed brilliantly.

But Zack Snyder’s directorial tics and fixations were annoying & distracting, like his apparent belief that shots of blood spurting, dripping and puddling are inherently compelling and meaningful. And the transitions with blasting high-priced soundtrack selections were really awkward. I think Snyder was trying to add some cultural relevancy with the historical figures and WTC. In the Imax theatre the expanded picture sometimes enhanced the epic imagery but more often was an education in how careful even major motion pictures need to be with makeup.

Stress Cubed

KAderer photoshop assignment

Up to this past Friday I was flipping out from all my agendas, especially my aikido (third kyu) test that evening. This self-portrait I did as an assignment for my Photoshop class (Baruch CAPS) at least succeeds in conveying the vertically stacked chaos of my mental state in recent weeks.
I provisionally made third kyu – I had a mental block on a technique called nikkyo, so my sensei gave me the assignment of teaching a class on nikkyo this next Friday as a condition of passing.
And my two digital design courses also concluded this past week, while my Intro to Immigration Law class started up. So I’m still plenty busy, but the aikido test being done with is a huge load off my psyche.
This coming week I’m getting back into my documentary. The fifth anniversary of Farouk’s release is coming up this April 12, I’m targeting a new cut for a possible event that day.

My Right Leg

…is the only optimally functioning limb I’ve got right now. Left wrist is just getting over some earlier tweakiness, right thumb got yanked backward Monday night (this is all aikido-related of course). And my left hip joint is getting steadily more insistent that it’s going to require some focused attention someday. Intense use leads to lingering aches and stiffness. It doesn’t like to be bent for long periods of time, so sitting in a chair has to be relieved by hanging my left thigh straight down.

My third kyu test is two weeks from this Friday, if I don’t fall apart before then I’m promising to get some professional attention for this gimpiness afterwards.

The Beast with Two Bellies

There’s a diagonal-mesh grate on our living-room window that squirrels have been routinely climbing on starting a few months ago. It’s a little freaky to be startled by a claws-on-steel sound and see the underside of a squirrel clambering across your backyard view but I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve also been amused at how they’re so oblivious to my presence; evidently they can’t see me because they don’t normally look down.

A few days ago, though, I became aware of a squirrel while I was focused on something else. The novelty of squirrels on my window having worn off, I didn’t look at it directly at first. But after a few moments I noticed something wasn’t right about it. I looked over at it and it was looking back at me.

As it dawned on me that this was perhaps the first time a window-squirrel had looked at me, a sense of something disturbing about the way it looked crept into my mind. It looked sort of spidery or ragged somehow, and it was breathing hard. And why was it still there, when it was looking right at me, its eyes seeming to go wide with fear?

This whole scene took probably a few seconds. The instant I realized that this was not one but two squirrels there was a startlingly fast burst of movement. The squirrel I was making eye contact with tore away out of sight, and I was left staring at the squirrel who’d been on top of (behind?) her, hapless, his pink tubular dork exposed. Then after a brief “what the fuck?” look around, he was gone.

Michelle walked in the room having just missed all this, so I retold the scene with dialogue:

“C’mon, it’ll be hot, we’ll do it right here hanging on this grate.”
“Baby…? There’s…Oh my god, there’s a man right there!“
Zip!

On Course

Getting the measles shot took a little while…I thought I was going to get jabbed in the shoulder and have a sore arm for aikido class but it was just the tiniest poke above the elbow. I guess the thought of how unnecessary it was plus the prolonged anticipation of the needle bothered me (big baby!), but the shot itself was nothing. Long novocaine needle up my cheek or in the joint of my jaw, dentist swizzling it around, now, that’s a shot.

So now it looks like I can finally focus on, y’know, like, taking these classes. I’m also starting two digital design courses from Baruch this week..so it’s going to be kind of intense for a month or so.