School SNAFUs

My immunization record

Look at how many times they jab a little baby with needles in modern times! I got two measles shots in my lifetime, once in May 1969 and then again in 1980. But because my first measles shot happened before my first birthday, I have to go in to CUNY health services and get another one today.

I’m taking two classes, Qualitative Methods of Sociological Research and Introduction to Immigration Law, which is an online course from another part of CUNY. But though I’m supposedly registered for the immigration course, it’s not appearing on my schedule and no one has been able to tell me why. If those credits aren’t there, that means I’m not a half-time student which means I don’t qualify for the Stafford Loan I applied for.

While I’m dealing with the measles thing I’m going to make one last attempt to find the administration person I’ve been told repeatedly to contact about my registration problem, who hasn’t been available the last two days, at the height of registration. Again, no one knows why.

Krapped

Saw my friend Michael Laurence’s brave, entrancing one-man show Krapp, 39 Tuesday. It’s Michael’s personal contemplation of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

Watching his theatrical unfolding of his life was like encountering a self that diverged from my college and post-college days of bohemian intensity. He put a lot of his genuine struggles in his piece, which overlapped with mine and I’m sure those of a lot of artists tallying their aspirations and failures as they confront middle age. Anyway, if you’re in New York, go see it.

Today I spent my second day trying to register for the two classes I’m taking at Brooklyn College, I’d say I’m about 70% registered now. The girl in the bursar’s office I was dealing with, who made an annoying process worthwhile by being pretty darn cute, alerted me to birdshit on my head. Must have happened on campus…in Japan it’s good luck! So I’m taking that as an auspicious omen for my studies.

Sawdust

A lot of drilling and screwing, even sawing, has been taking place here. On our New Jersey wolves trip we bought a few shelf/cabinet type things, which I was hoping to finish, but the weather hasn’t been suitable. They were sitting around and I finally found time to put them up, will finish them when weather and schedule cooperate.

And on Saturday I got the edit suite, so I’ve been doing some office renovation to accommodate that. I should have it up and running today. Going out in the snow to get some monitor adapters, and some shoes while I’m at it. Armed with my first respectable post-production machine I’m getting my doc in shape for submission to festivals in the spring.

Michelle and I make jokes every time we hear more of the repetitive “historic” verbiage flooding our media these days, but in our own low-key way we’re happy the day we fought for along with millions of people has arrived. Of course it’s exciting, but the one part of the coverage we wanted to see was the concert for Obama everyone kept mentioning without showing…Bono! Beyonce! Bruce!…um, can I see this concert? No, HBO controls the rights. I looked at the HBO website: it seems you can see the concert on their website or during a “free preview weekend.” But no further info is provided. Lame.

Catch-up

I didn’t get to post video from the Gaza demonstration, it seems the footage was screwed up somehow on my little Canon Optura. It occurred to me I hadn’t run a head cleaner thru it in a long time, so I did…won’t know if that was the problem until I shoot something else unfortunately. Darn, I liked that footage, I had an idea how I could cut a short little video out of it that would end with a little girl holding a white balloon with a bloody handprint on it.

Meanwhile, I’m starting to get a little banged up from my stepped up aikido training in preparation for my third kyu test February 28th. It’s a big test and I’m a slow learner whose class attendance was also sporadic much of 2008. So I’m showing up to class at least once every weekday which is a lot for me both from a time-management and a physical standpoint. My left hip bugs me; it’s the only part of my body that seems to particularly mind the extra thrashing around, but it’s pretty hard to ignore. Then again, it bothers me when I don’t work out enough too.

In the next day or two I’m getting a decent editing setup from a colleague who’s selling it to me cheap. Finally two screens and some CPU horsepower, along with Final Cut Studio 2! I’m not ga-ga over technology but my current suite is a tad ghetto.

More Deaths, More Demos

Children in NYC protesting the murder of children in Gaza

Death toll of Palestinians has passed 900, including more than 300 civilians. 13 Israelis dead, including 2 civilians. You’ve seen the pictures of the children dead in piles of rubble. The strange thing about a protest this massive is how high-spirited it is. Gathering by the thousands to protest horror beyond most of our experience, somehow elevates and energizes. I didn’t see bitterness or hatred there. There were some middle fingers raised against the chanting group of young guys waving an Israeli flag across the street, but that’s a pretty mild reaction considering what this is about.

Protester above the crowd at NYC demonstration for Gaza

My friend John Ko (who was the “official” photographer of Michelle’s & my wedding) took these pics. I shot a bit of video, will post a short edit tonight.

A woman leading chants at NYC demonstration against attacks on Gaza

Eve’s Mixed Sentiments

If it wasn’t for the Gaza attacks, I could point to the Obama election as cause for hope and celebration this New Year. I’m not saying my personal involvement with what’s happening there now is so deep, but right now it eclipses whatever I would have otherwise remarked about the meaning of this New Year’s Eve.

These pics are from the demonstration for Gaza that took place yesterday near the Israeli consulate. It occurs to me that it’s the first time I was at a Palestinian demonstration, even though the Farouk demos were also about that cause.

It was significant today to hear a radio host reference the period of April 2002 as the last time people in the U.S. were so angry and engaged on both sides about what was going on in Palestine, and that we still have very little U.S. media presence in Gaza. In April 2002 that the IDF’s Operation Defensive Shield was destroying homes and eventually killing 500 people, Farouk started piping in voices from Palestine live on WBAI, and was arrested.

Tonight is a break in my usual New Year’s festivities with Michelle and our friends. This year I decided for the first time to go to my Aikido dojo’s celebration. The schedule will keep me from feeling too decadent and carefree:

10:00 p.m. – 10:30 p.m. – Misogi chanting
10:40- 11:20 p.m. – zazen meditation
11:30 p.m.- 12:10 a.m. – Aikido

After which there’ll be partying and even karaoke. It’ll be my first New Year’s apart from Michelle since I met her, but our seven-year (meeting) anniversary is on January fifth, so we’ll have our own celebration soon enough.

Gotta run…I have about three hours to sautee a lot of brussels sprouts for the potluck and have dinner with Michelle. Have a happy and/or meaningful New Year’s all!!!

Appealing for the Release of Farouk’s Full FBI File

Last week, with some further coaching from Michael Kuzma (member of Leonard Peltier’s defense team), I wrote and faxed in my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) appeal asking a judge to order the FBI to release the 893 pages of Farouk’s file it’s withholding.

As one might expect, many pages were withheld on the pretext of United States Code, Section 552(b)(1):

(A) specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and (B) are in fact properly classified to such Executive order;

A lot of the pages withheld under (b)(1) seem to be from after Farouk’s arrest, when the FBI unleashed brilliant counterterrorism techniques like asking Farouk to snitch on other Palestinians, interrogating him about “nuclear briefcases” and other half-baked allegations cooked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, using detainee informants trying to save their own skin.

So as to the (b)(1) exemption: that dog don’t hunt, unless Bush ordered the suppression of any evidence that shows our domestic counterterrorism policies to be overwhelmingly abusive, wasteful and misguided. Which, alas, he probably has. But with luck the judge who rules on this appeal won’t feel compelled to reaffirm the played-out excuse of “national security” as a bulwark against any accountability or transparency in our government.

That Was a Dream?

Michelle dreamed last night that we were in the Jay Street Borough Hall station, she playing with her iPhone, I reading something. She got on the F train and realized I wasn’t with her. Then she met up with our friends Tony and Christine and told them she hoped I’d remember or figure out where they were.

Loving Big Brother

The more interesting shit have to write about , the more impossible it is to get it in this blog. So here’s a scattered recap of November:

Canvassing for Destiny

On the spur of the moment Saturday morning, November 1, Michelle & I took a trip to Pennsylvania which like many of our excursions had at least 3 agendas:

1. shooting some footage relating to Farouk’s two-year, five-prison journey through the immigrant detention system.
2. doing some Philadelphia canvassing for the Obama campaign (He won, by the way).
3. getting out of the house, out of town…what some people call a vacation.

Domestic Abu Ghraibs

How do you make a documentary about immigrant detention when the jails where they’re detained won’t allow pictures? I dunno…how did my grandfather take a picture of a guard tower even though Japanese Americans were forbidden to have cameras in the camps? Let’s just say there was some stealth involved, and my wife was surprisingly game for it.

That Sly FBI

Days before the Enemy Alien rough cut screening (November 12) I got two boxes of paper comprising the FBI’s response to my FOIA request. Eleven hundred pages released, out of a total of 1800 in his file ( since 1993). And of course the pages that were released were liberally redacted.

But what’s there shows heavy surveillance of Farouk from 1993 to 1995. There’s reports from someone close to him who was acting as an informant. And what looks like a bunch of surveillance pictures with all the people’s faces blanked out.

I’ve been corresponding again with Michael Kuzma, a lawyer who’s been working on the Leonard Peltier case for years. He’s giving me pointers on my appeal. One interesting tip was that it’s better to communicate with the government by fax or FedEx than by USPS because ever since the 2001 anthrax attacks regular mail to the government is massively delayed (or rather, in Kuzma’s view, the government has been using that story as an excuse for massive delays since then).

Enemy Alien rough cut screening
…went well. I passed out a survey. Getting that first 70 minute cut done and having a public screening was a huge step. I was pleased with the audience reaction and heartened that my choices are working on the whole. Weaving together a case like Farouk’s with your own point of view and family history has been a daunting task to take on largely on my own, so it was crucial to know I’m on the right track in how I’m telling the story.

ACCEPTED

A serious dude needs a serious degree

It was amusing yesterday to see the ads for this movie just as I got the news I was accepted to the Masters in Sociology program at Brooklyn College.

I first got the idea from my friend Geoffrey Blank, who I was shooting a documentary on in 2006-7 as he was facing trumped-up charges for leading speakouts against the Iraq war. (watch him lead a demo outside District Attorney Morgenthau’s office)

He was heading into the Grad Sociology program (once he managed to avoid prison) and for some reason that got me thinking about it myself.

Part of it is I just feel like I should have a Master’s Degree, kind of like the Scarecrow’s diploma in the Wizard of Oz. I feel I’ve been a practicing social scientist of a sort on my own through my documentary work, and I want to be able to do more.

I’m not in a substantive mood right now, so here’s an excerpt from my personal essay:

In recent years, a massive expansion of immigration raids under “Operation Endgame” and other Homeland Security initiatives seeks to fulfill a draconian fantasy of arresting and deporting all of the estimated 10 million out-of-status aliens now in the United States. The total number of aliens deported in 2001 was about 206,000; by 2007 it had grown to 319,382.[1] The average number of immigration detainees in prison on a given day has gone from 20,441 to 30,295 in the same period. These alarming numbers say nothing about the prevalence of the kinds of abuse inflicted on subjects of my documentaries: beatings left uninvestigated or the unchecked use of destructive measures like solitary confinement for months and years. In fact, very little systematic research on these topics exists, a problem that I intend to address.

By learning the tools of sociology I want to make my involvement in these issues more comprehensive and sustainable, enhancing my personal value as a proponent of immigration reform that protects the human rights of immigrants. My long-term vision is to oversee a nonprofit project which uses media like short documentaries and timely video journalism, integrated with outreach and educational materials, to help educate the public, to mobilize and assist a broad-based immigrant rights movement, and to participate in developing viable strategies for influencing policy.

Whole statement

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[1] United States. Department of Homeland Security. Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: 2007. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics, 2008.

So I start in January. I’m stoked!