IMDB: Out for a Kill (2003), one of the most incomprehensible films I've ever seen. Watched this last night as kind of a V-day joke.

Everyone reconizes that it's terrible, but no one I can see mentions that it was clearly made to be released internationally. Much of the dialogue occurs where we cannot see people's mouths moving. When plot details or exposition are shown with text, they are post-processed in like subtitiles, rather than placed into the film directly. This doesn't look as good, but it's easier to switch. All this points to the filmmakers consciously angling towards internationalization when making the movie.

The conventions of the film also track more closely with Hong Kong than Hollywood. Multiple subplots are hinted at without exploration. Visual styling includes a lone gravity-defying wire-fight. In what are meant to be emotionally-intense scenes, the principle actors have most of their faces shadowed, but with light around their eyes; it's a pretty distinctive effect.

And also, most of the crew is Bulgarian, and the eastern-european bits were recognizably filmed in Sofia, Bulgaria.

My guess is that the whole film was made overseas. Many other parts -- particularly the "American House" Segal and his wife are supposed to live in -- have the distinctive look of soundstage sets. Using a non-US (and non-union) crew, DV cams and digital post-production, the whole movie could have been produced for a comparative pittance. Segal was a producer -- meaning investor -- on the film, so this makes sense. With secondary sales in Hong Kong and around the globe, its entirely possible that this film turned a healthy profit.

And they use the word "Academician" in it. Academician!

Chairman Dean in action. Assuming (and I think it's moderately safe to assume) that someone's actually going to read the responses, this is a great idea.

So here's what we've got: an energetic Texas republican running a privately-held corporation promoting the conservative point of view, as well as an attached "news organization," places a reporter in Washington who gets clearance on a dialy basis to press briefings from the White House. This reporter/operative lobs obvious softballs and participates in the exposure of a CIA operative (a felony, fyi). He's a tough guy, an ex marine, maybe reminds the old hands of G. Gordon Liddy. Anyway, about a month ago when he gets called on by El Presidente himself, he asks a supendously loaded qustion and some interested parties started looking into who this character was.

Then the plot really takes a turn for the bizarre. Turns out he used to be (still is?) a male escort. It's something of a commentary on the state of the Conservative Movement that they either didn't realize this was the case, or knew it and assumed that this information wouldn't come to light. Kind of a fascinating study in power, really.

The Long Story:
There's this guy who's been lobbing softballs at White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan for the past couple of years, Jeff Gannon. Turns out, he's not really Jeff Gannon, or a journalist. In fact, his real name is James D. Gukert and in addition to "broadcast journalism training" from the leadership institute, he also has a background as a male prostitute.

His journalistic employ (and White House passes) come through "Talon News," a web-only publishing operation supported financially by GOPUSA, a "privately held corporation" run by an enterprising Texas Republican named Bobby Eberle. Bobby's bio recently went off the GOPUSA homepage, but google still has it in cache. It states "Bobby is a member of Texas Christian Coalition and Texas Right to Life, and he spends considerable time promoting these conservative ideals." Apparently that means arranging for a military-themed male hooker to get into White House press briefings (on repeated daily passes which don't require as much oversight as long-lasting "hard" passes) so he could "report" for Talon and offer a lifeline when questioning from real journalists needed some "balance."

Toping the pile of dirty tricks you probably shouldn't run via someone with such a questionable past, workin' girl Gannon was, along with other such luminaries as arch-conservative/ veteran operative Robert Novak, given a memo blowing CIA operative Valerie Plame's cover, an act of political retribution against her husband, diplomat Joe Wilson, who had refused to prop up part of the administration's rationale for war with Iraq by demonstrating that evidence suggesting Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase nuclear materials from Niger was forged.

Only people in a really big rush or in the throes of hubris (or both) would bother to use an agent so prone to compromise for these kinds of things. Oh man. Oh man, indeed.

The ARTS :: Artscene Radio Talk Show... Listen to this stuff. The content may be completely over your head, but listen to the quality, and realize that anyone can do this now and anyone can listen to it pretty easily, and costs almost nothing to do.

We will be posting audio (and hopefully video) updates from the road, as well as blogging and soliciting advice, gas money and places to shower along the way.

Logreport Team -- scroll down and check the photo back from my previous work-life. Those were the good old days:

I went back to the loft party hoping to see my friends, but the guys had already left (off for a nip at Grassroots, which I heard was a total fiasco involving bike malfunction and angry thuggish Jamaicans) and so I went with Melissa and a whole crowd to "the Bulgarian bar." I thought it was a joke, but no: down on Broadway and Canal is a Bulgarian establishment full of pumping dance music, strange and wonderful people, and large eastern-european beers. I think the people from the square party were in and out: too crowded, too stinky, too fucking weird. I stayed and spent my $20 on more beer, tasted a lot better than Bud, I'll tell you that much. Have vague recollections of bike trouble on the way home at around 5am -- plus the wounds to prove that the problem was the chain. The sky was light as I was going to bed.

That used to be my life.

Backed up, like a man. I feel fragile, raw, needy; like one of the people who can't hack it and end up moving back in with their parents.

In spite of this malase, things are looking up. I can pay the rent; I can find meaning in existence; I can get work done and get my theater booked in the world. Somewhere in the dirty and gritty there's a little seed of honest feeling. Needs protection and water, but maybe this softness, this ability to love can grow. Silly meloncholy guy I am, twirling away in this humid little room, feeling like an adolescent, wondering where the wildwoods woman to sooth my soul is right now.

Those used to be my worries.

Things have changed, but those used to be the days.

As promised, I've tried to get down more details as to my thoughts about Dean taking over at the DNC. I've written it up for MFA, though I'm fighting a little writerly-block and dearth of inspiration.

The main thing is that this is a huge opportunity to turn the Democratic Party into a meaningful institution again, which is something that I think has to happen in order for America not to go to the dogs. The only other option is to quicken the death of the dems in the hopes of creating some new party from its ashes. I think internal mutation is vastly more likely to work, not to mention much much faster. Let's get it on.

Howard Dean is now the chairman of the Democratic party. Two years from the day he gave the speech that got me involved. "What I wanna know... What I wanna know... What I wanna know, is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the president's unilateral intervention in Iraq!"

I'll be writing something big about this, probably to be posted over on Music For America as well. Will let you know when that happens. For the moment, people online are trying to make a statement by raising cash for the DNC to send the message that the people have Dean's back. He's going to take another round of shit from the media, that's for sure. But money talks, and bullshit walks. If you're well off kick some cash:

I'm done going to the office for a while. Last night I came back, locked my bike up in the loin, took a shower in some guys dorm room and then went to a law-school party for most of the evening. It was a good safari, as these things go.

I also dropped my bike off for shipping to NYC care of Frankypants. Luke is having Truck Trouble in Arizona, so I'm pushing back my flight a few days so we can still have a road-trip summit in Westhaven. That gives me more going-away time here in SF. Party tonight at my place.

I'm going to work more on my new website tech, as it's a good testbed for what I'm going to need in order to run MFA 2.0 as well as the road trip site. Maybe a technology preview this weekend!

A kos user called Cardinal96 writes his/her first ever diary: The Day I left the Republican Party was Today

I can no longer in good conscience defend this Administration to my friends and colleagues. I am convinced that this Administration is willing to say anything and manipulate data to get policies implemented which will be harmful to this nation.

I checked the user comments. They go back to last December and many of them are critical of other posters being over the top (e.g. wishing Cheney dies of a heart attack). Seems legit, and it jives with the way the zeitgeist seems to be trending.

In case you haven't been paying attention, Bush's second term is starting out with the distinct odor of political runiation. Many of the scandals and issues kept at bay (read: out of the public eye) by the longest election ever are still there, and his initial proposals -- Social Security Reform, Perminant Tax Cuts For The Already-Wealty, Massive Budget Cuts -- are falling flat, even with republicans.

It's an ill wind over there. Their operation seems to be coming apart at the seams and their coalition of traditional conservatives, imperialist neo-cons, the moral minority and Big Business is starting to crack. Bush could become a lame duck by the end of his first year in office.

I have to say; I didn't see that coming. But there it is. Power reveals.

Last night I helped organize one of 74 screenings of the first two episodes of Eyes On The Prize, the seminal documentary on the American Civil Rights Movement. It was great. I got my friends at Station 40 to host the screening with their giant living room and projector, and through our combined efforts, and a little help from the chron, we got about 30 people to show up.

I haven't organized an event in a while, and it was a welcome thing. Nothing like talking in front of people and getting a few claps to tickle the actor in me. The past part of all was that the crowd included a couple bona-fide Civil Rights veterans. It was really something to be thanked by someone who'd demonstrated with Dr. King (and lost his professorship over it). Gave me the good feelings all over, though I didn't much know what to say response.

Anyway, it was a big success. I also thought I should post my take on why this is important.

Here's the story:
Eyes on the Prize was made in the 1980s, and rightly hailed as a masterpiece at that time. It was regularly broadcast on PBS and the video series became an important part of civil rights and documentary film education nationwide. In spite of this critical acclaim and widespread appreciation, and in spite of the importance of the events documented, the film had not been broadcast, sold, or publicly screened in more than 10 years.

Why?

The filmmaker, Henry Hampton, died unexpectedly at the age of 58, without securing extended rights to the archival footage and other materials used Eyes. Even though the footage, audio and photos used in the documentary are 40 to 50 years old, contemporary copyright regulations require licenses and permissions to make even the smallest use in any subsequent production. This is a big moneymaker for entites which have consolodated legal control over a lot of cultural work. For instance AOL/Time-Warner now owns the rights to "Happy Birthday," which rakes in nearly $2 Million annually in spite of the fact that the song was published 80 years ago, and has its roots in the 1880s.

While there's wide regard for the utility and usefulness for the protection of intellectual property, the present legal environment places virtually all modern records of human events and creation in amounts in real terms to the complete commodification of culture and history. This is unacceptable in a free society.

That's right: unacceptable in a free society. Late 20th-Century America's market-based approach to things works well in many cases, but placing the values of a society -- primarily represented through History, Culture and Law -- at the mercy of the highest bidder runs counter to the principles of Democracy. We're not supposed to sell the law to the highest bidder, but with more than 50 lobbiests for every member of congress, in effect we often do. It should come as little surprise then that although copyright started out modestly to support authors but also serve the public good, since publishing and media have become Big Business, the terms of the deal have changed.

Over the latter half of the 20th Century, Copyright has expanded enormously. Whereas in times past, works needed to be registered to be copyrighted, copyright is now legally assumed unless explicity forsaken. Whereas there used to be a healthy body of contemporary work in the Public Domain -- work that was free for anyone to use as part of their own creation -- and a comprehensive registry of copyrights which allowed creators to track down copyright holdes in search of permission to excerpt/re-use work, today there is very little published in the last 75 years in the public domain, and no registry or record of who has the rights to what.

Furthermore, the term of copyright has been extended several times in the past 50 years. Sharp observers note that these extensions seem to issue forth from Congress whenever Mickey Mouse's age (now pushing 80) puts him close to the line of the public domain.

While copyright reform and Free Culture advocates are consistantly mischaracterized as pirates, anarchists, communists and worse, the reality is that we are standing up for the essential right of a society to retain the rights to its own culture. The commodification of history, culture and knowledge is not only detremental from an educational perspective, it is dangerously undemocratic.

To learn more, and to get involved:
http://www.downhilbattle.com
http://www.freeculture.org
http://www.lessig.com