Starting today.

Pema Chodron says, "Start where you are." What I would add is, "Okay, now again. And again. And one more time."

I realized when I was in the long slog of logging and editing my film Life in a Box -- the first and only time in my adult life during which I was completely free of outside work -- that I did well with a strict schedule. I had the day, and the week, scheduled down to the hour. Two hours for coffee and the New York Times, one hour journaling, one hour for showering and meditation, six hours of logging, and so on. It worked.

I had always thought, before then, that I was a little lazy and certainly not a morning person. But suddenly, with no extraordinary effort, I was getting up at 7 a.m. (with no alarm clock!), working at one thing or another all day, and going to sleep at 11. It turns out I was not lazy, I just didn't want to do a bunch of shit other people wanted me to do. I stuck to that schedule, more or less, for two years, until the money ran out and the film was done.

Even though, for the past couple of years, I've had to do various jobs to pay the bills, I'm trying to live by a schedule when my time is my own. Sometimes it works better than others. I have trouble recovering from any disruption. I plug along on my schedule for a couple of weeks, but then I do one of these drug trials and get all out of whack.

The drug trials are better than having a job as far as giving me time and psychic space to write. I have blocks of free time while I'm in the trial, and there's not much to do in the facility but read and write. I just have to nudge myself to do less reading and more writing. But it's been two weeks since I ended the last trial, and I haven't been able yet to get back on a schedule. Today, I'm starting again. At noon, I shower.

Fasting.

I was thinking I would get to bed early, so I can get up at 6 and have breakfast. I have a 1 p.m. screening appointment for a drug trial, and I have to have been fasting for 8 hours before they take blood. The first thing they do at these things is read a long consent form which we have to sign, along with all sorts of other paperwork, so it'll be at least 2 before they take blood. If I don't get up early enough to eat something at 6, I'll for sure have a nasty headache by 3 or so when I get out of there.

But J. and I just got back from Quack's, where we each had a cherry Danish (half price on all pastries if you go late), and two cups of decaf, which I'm skeptical of the decaffeinatedness of, since I feel a little wired. Well, okay, maybe it's the cherry Danish. So I probably won't be going to sleep any too early.

Tonight for dinner, I made a big pot of beans & greens (from Nick and Michael's recipe: white beans, greens -- I used the chard, beet greens, and kohlrabi greens from the farm -- lots of garlic and pepper flakes, cooked until it's soupy, salt to taste). I also made foccacia from a really easy recipe my mom sent me. It only took an hour from pulling out the mixer to putting the bread on the table. I topped it with fresh rosemary that I clipped from the huge bush in our front yard. And J. made jasmine rice. Perfect.

Between dinner and dessert, we watched a little French & Saunders. Dawn French is the funniest woman alive. Period.

Stormy Weather.

I'm listening to iTunes on shuffle, which is how I usually listen to music. I have the Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall recording (remastered a few years ago for a new CD release) which, on vinyl, was one of my favorite records when I was a teenager. I listened to it over and over and over. I'm still fascinated and mystified by that fact. I had no exposure to gay culture back then, didn't even really know I was homosexual, yet from about 14 I was obsessed with Judy Garland. I scoured the Reader's Guide in the library and photocopied every article I could find about her. Bought every record I could find. Poured over the TV Guide every week to make sure I caught her movies on the late show that week.

Anyway, it's still pouring outside, and Judy comes on singing Stormy Weather. Her arrangement is over-the-top huge, of course, building up to a big, sobbing bridge, and you can just picture her on the floor, pounding the boards with her fists: "Rain pourin' down, over every hope I had, this pitterin' patterin' beatin' and splatterin' drives me mad! Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop!" Then she slows down and gets all quiet and pleading: "This misery is just too much for me." And she kicks back in again, transposing up a step: "Can't go on!" -- and a huge thunderbolt cracks outside, buckets of rain are falling -- "Everything I had is gone! Stormy weather..."

Oh, my!

Didn't it rain, little children?

It's been raining on and off all day, but now it's absolutely gushing. Big storm, dark sky, I love it.

From my desk, through the screen door, I can see from the back of the house, where my room is, along the side of the house to the street. J. moved here a couple months before I did, and I guess the side yard was kind of a mess. The wooden stoop at my door was rotted and collapsing because the kitchen sink drained right out to the side of the house under it. Nice, huh?

J. paved a narrow path with bricks along the side of the house from the front porch to my door, and he asked a friend to build a new set of steps. When I got here, we bought some plastic tubing and diverted the grey water past my stoop and farther out into the yard. (It's probably illegal for gray water to drain into the yard, but we don't want our rent to go up if we ask the landlord to fix the plumbing.)

There are no gutters on the house, so when it rains water pours over the edge of the roof into the side yard. J. and I have talked about rigging something up to catch rainwater for the garden, but there's only so much you want to put into a rental house.

That brick path still breaks my heart, reminding me that J. put so much effort into making a nice home for me to come to. We'd been apart for several years when we decided to live together again.

Um ... ?

Z. called me "sweetheart."

At Whole Foods yesterday, when we were buying food to take up to the roof for a picnic brunch, he said something like, "the half and half is right over there, sweetheart," or "I'm gonna pick up some yogurt, sweetheart," I don't remember the exact sentence. But it hit me like a tap on the shoulder. Or a poke in the ribs. I felt an urge to make a dry comment about it, but thankfully my wit failed me at the moment. We don't know each other well enough, I don't think, for dry comments about the progress of our relationship. (I use the word relationship in its less fraught sense.)

The word "sweetheart" makes me think of my friend Larry, who I used to proofread with on the graveyard shift at Weil Gotshal & Manges in the eighties in New York. There was a group of us who were temps working through an agency, but we were permanently assigned to this one firm and this one shift. This was in the heyday of big corporate mergers and junk bonds and all that stuff (remember?), when law firms were cleaning up big time, and they hired boatloads of temps who did a few hours of work a week and spent the rest of their time on the clock smoking cigarettes and reading magazines.

Larry was this sort of regular straight guy from Brooklyn. For some reason we became buddies. He used to call the women we worked with sweetheart, and a couple of them really bristled at that. They felt it was demeaning. It seemed affectionate to me, and charming. He never called me, or any man, sweetheart.

But neither am I in the habit of calling a man sweetheart, unless he is "my" sweetheart. Not even my dear friends. Is this deeply ingrained sexism? Or just a natural gender differentiation? My friendship with Larry was the beginning of my consciousness that all these issues of bias and discrimination are more complex than I had imagined. This was around the peak of my ACT UP and Queer Nation days, and probably the beginning of my disillusionment with those circles.

Larry pushed more than one button there. Near the end of my proofreading career, Larry and I hatched a scheme whereby the two of us would jump to a different agency, take our regular gig, and ask for a huge raise in our hourly rate in return for delivering several of our co-workers to the new agency. It worked, but a few weeks later, the economy tanked and all the big New York law firms cut way back on temps.

The scheme didn't seem unethical, just a little cutthroat, but still several people we worked with took a dim view of it. I still believe that those people judged the situation negatively because Larry was Jewish and he was driving a hard bargain.

Anyway. Z. called me sweetheart.

Damn.

I went to my screening appointment for the drug study, but found out when I got there that it's too soon after the last study for me to be eligible for this one. The waiting period is different for every study. I thought I had given it enough time, and I thought that the recruiter who signed me up would have told me if it was too soon, but I guess she missed it.

So ... damn. That $7000 was going to make life a lot easier for the next few months. Let's hope they post another big-money study soon.

The upside is that today will not be so frantic. I won't have to do laundry, prep and freeze vegetables, mail a package, pack, and go to the library to get books for a week-long stay in the study clinic which would have started tomorrow morning. Well, I need to do some of those things, but not all of them. And I can have coffee.

Farm produce.

Our box from the CSA farm this week contained collards, chard, kohlrabi, cabbage, a bunch of parsley, beets, broccoli, lettuce, and asparagus.

Z. is going out of town for a week, so we had breakfast together this morning. We wanted to eat at Kerbey Lane, but there was an hour wait for a table, so we went to Whole Foods and got a muffin and scone and ate on the roof.

Since we were there, I picked up some lemons and bulgur, and, when I got home, I made tabbouli. I also braised the collards with garlic and chipotle peppers (spicy and smoky like the traditional way, but meatless). And finally cooked a couple of those sweet potatoes that we had bought to root and plant in the garden. They never did root. My new favorite way to prepare any sort of root vegetable is to cube them, toss them in olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper, and roast them on a sheet pan in a very hot oven. The roasting brings out the sweet in sweet potatoes which contrasts nicely with the garlic.

I found a great new way to make cole slaw too, in The Best Recipe, my favorite new cookbook. You shred the cabbage and salt it, put it in a colander over a big bowl, and let the salt pull out the moisture for several hours before you dress it. The cabbage wilts but it's still very crisp. It's easier to eat, absorbs more of the flavor of the dressing, and you don't end up with a pool of water at the bottom of the bowl.

Obsessed.

Reviews of Reign Over Me appeared in the Statesman and the Times this morning. The Statesman didn't hate it, which made me angry. The Times gave it a pretty bad review, which was only slightly satisfying.

I'm worried about how obsessed I am with this movie. It's out of proportion. Just thinking about it makes my heart race.

Yes, it was homophobic and misogynistic, but no more so than the average overheard conversation among straight men who don't think any women or homosexuals are listening. Maybe it's the fact that the hatefulness is wrapped up in what is supposed to pass for sensitivity. It's supposed to be a meditation on how difficult male friendships can be. Difficult because men are shallow assholes, is what the film says, I doubt intentionally.

The other issue, besides the politics, is the fact that the film is just bad. Bad writing, bad idea, bad, bad. Nothing in it rings true. This is where I get most frustrated. It's the same feeling I get about Clint Eastwood movies. Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby are two of the most get-in-your-face-and-make-you-want-to-throw-things bad movies I've ever seen. They are maudlin, heavy-handed, simple-minded, and just plain ridiculous. Not only is Clint Eastwood an awful director, he's the worst actor ever. And yet, people rave about his movies.

If these are not bad movies, then I'm an idiot. So all the talk about how great he is and how great these films are, makes me feel like I'm either insane, stupid and out of touch, or living in a nightmare upside-down universe.

Bad dreams.

A couple days ago, J. and I watched Stay, an intensely disturbing movie. Since ruining movies is on my short list of Deadly Sins, I won't write much about it, except to say that it's really, really good. I'm sure it accounted for my creepy dreams that night. But I can't blame it for the awful dreams I had this morning. Awful in the sense of upsetting, but also awful in the sense of "can't you do better than that?"

In one, I was moving out of a big, dark house. My parents were there; in the dream this was their house, but it wasn't their actual house. I and a group of friends were carrying boxes out to a car, which was parked on the other side of a strange, uneven landscape of lawn and pavement, trash and shrubs. As I was making my final trip to the car, ready to jump in with my friends and drive away, I saw that whoever had carried out a tray of seedlings for the garden had, instead of loading them into the car, planted them in a crack in the asphalt. I shouted to my friends in the car that they would have to wait until I dug up the plants and re-potted the.

Can you say heavy-handed?

In another -- this one woke me up -- I was in a big, dark house (many of my dreams take place in this big, dark house), doing something sedate and domestic like watching TV. J. was there. It was dusk (many of my dreams take place at dusk in a big, dark house), and someone knocked at the door. Through the screen door, I could see that it was some people we didn't want to deal with, so I discreetly pushed the latch closed -- in the dream, I thought I was being discreet, but, now that I think about it, these people were standing right there watching me do it -- and walked away. I looked out a window on the side of the house and saw that these people were rigging up a floodlight and two huge speakers aimed at the house. They looked like bikers, men and women in black jeans and cutoff t-shirts.

I'm struggling so hard with this screenplay lately, trying to tell a complex story with some subtlety. And I'm not getting it; it feels either completely obscure or, on the other hand, clunky and maudlin. So it's disheartening that not even my dreams are subtle or complex.

Steamed.

I read the Austin daily, The Austin American-Statesman every morning. It's not a bad paper. Their editorial page leans ever so slightly leftward (in the current sense of "left," meaning any acknowledgment, however tepid, that there may be a point of view other than Tony Snow's). I miss the New York Times, but it's important to me to know about local issues. One thing I like is that I can read it in half the time I used to spend on the Times. (I scan nytimes.com and slate.com to fill in the gaps on national and international news, so maybe I'm not saving any time at all. Whatever.)

Another advantage to a smaller paper in a smaller city is that when I don't agree with their editorial decisions I can write a letter and stand some chance of it being printed. My most recent letter, though, they did not print, and I'm mad about it. My letter was about the way they covered the Ann Coulter "faggot" remark. There was no coverage of the actual incident, but they printed a small story a week later about Edwards' response to it.

Here's my letter:

Dear editor:

I am offended by your article on Senator Edwards' response to Ann Coulter's calling him a faggot.

First, Coulter made this remark a week ago. This was a well-known political commentator using an extremely offensive slur in front of an audience of applauding Republican presidential candidates. If she'd called Barak Obama a nigger or Hillary Clinton a bitch, would you have taken a week to report it?

Second, you won't print the word "nigger" (or "bitch") in the Statesman, but you will print "faggot," which is just as degrading to a whole class of people. Why the inconsistency?

Third, and worst, is the paragraph about Edwards' wife and children, as if to reassure us that Edwards is not a faggot. Do I really have to point out to you that the point of the story is not that Coulter was mistaken?!


Two weeks later, I wrote and said that, if they were not going to print the letter, I would at least appreciate a response to my question about the inconsistency regarding which slurs they print in their pages. An editor emailed me to say, "In a highly publicized remark about a presidential candidate or potential candidate, we would use those words you held out as an example. In fact, we have used those words when news judgment dictated that it best serves the reader to do so."

A search of the Statesman's web site returned no hits for "nigger" and one hit for "bitch."

I'm still mad that they get away with trotting out the wife and kids to verify Edwards' heterosexuality. It just feels so sadly backward. It reminds of my freshman year at Miami University (1979!), when I wrote a paper about the play, Tea and Sympathy, objecting to what seemed to me to be the message that the taunting of the boy -- I don't remember what names the other boys called him, but the essence of the teasing was to question his heterosexuality -- was reprehensible only because the boy was not gay, which was revealed by his having some kind of sexual encounter with the female teacher.

My professor told me I was overreacting. Twenty-five years later, I'm still overreacting.

Another year older and deeper in debt.

Today, I signed up to screen for another drug trial. This one is bigger, longer, and pays $7000. It'll tie me up on and off until the end of May, but $7000 should be enough for me to make a big payment on my credit cards to offset what I'll have to borrow for May rent and bills and have enough left to get me through the summer.

Today is my 46th birthday. J. made heart-shaped pancakes with strawberries for breakfast.

Spring blah.

I haven't felt like doing much of anything this week. Maybe I'm still wiped out from the film festival. I haven't worked on my screenplay, haven't even done much reading. I'm about 100 pages into Moby Dick. Great book. (Duh, you say. But for some reason I never read it before.)

I haven't been sleeping well. I toss and turn and by 6 o'clock, I'm wide awake. Sometimes I'll fall asleep again at 8 or so, but I've been making myself get up because I don't want to sleep all day. I've actually been getting bored sometimes during the day, which is rare for me. Usually I feel like there's too much to do. But, since I haven't been able to make myself write much and don't feel interested in reading, there's a lot of time to fill. The last few days, I've been filling it with either reading blogs or browsing the gay hookup posts on craigslist. I haven't been interested in meeting anyone, I just get mesmerized by the often very strange pictures.

Oh, and gardening. I've been doing that. And that's satisfying.

I got out of the routine of meditating during the film festival, and when I'm not doing that, everything becomes more difficult.

Yesterday I had an appointment at the STD clinic to get screened for everything. They have test results for HIV and syphilis is about 20 minutes, which was nice. HIV tests have previously caused me so much anxiety that I've avoided them, or even a couple times, when I've gone to have blood drawn, I haven't been able to bring myself to call for results. Anyway, my tests were all negative.

Overall, the clinic experience was top-notch here in Austin. Since I've been without insurance most of my life, I've relied on free and low-cost clinics for most of my health care. And I've been to some extremely unpleasant clinics. But yesterday, I was in and out in an hour, the place was clean and cheery, and the phlebotomist and nurse were both pleasant and efficient.

In the evening, Z. and I went for a walk around Town Lake then had dinner at Marakesh. (Finally a Middle Eastern restaurant that stands up to the high standard of my old Jersey City haunts.)

Gay Bi Gay Gay.

J. and I sang in an event yesterday called Gay Bi Gay Gay, in a backyard here in Austin. (There are lots of real and imaginary events riffing on the South By Southwest theme this time of year. My favorite is Fuck By Fuck Y'all.)

We sort of fell into it. A few weeks ago, J. was talking with a new friend who mentioned the event and J. I think mentioned that he used to perform; the next thing we knew we were on the bill. I didn't know what to expect, but what I did not expect was something so big and fun and great. We were early in the lineup -- I think we went on at about 3:30 -- but there were already dozens of people there. By the time we left (at about 8, halfway through a lineup of about 15-20 bands) there were at least a couple hundred people packed into that yard.

We sang very cheesy arrangements of old gospel songs: Are You Washed in the Blood?, When the Roll in Called Up Yonder, etc. Songs we love, and love to sing. But the arrangements were a little bizarre. J. just got a new keyboard, the kind that plays itself. But it sounds great. The piano and organ and drum sounds are actually fairly convincing. If you need it to (and we do), the keyboard will do the bass chords and rhythms, drums, fills, intros and endings. But you have to push the buttons at the right time. If you don't, you may just end the song after the first verse, for example. I like to think of the keyboard as a very enthusiastic but unpredictable new band member.

I wore a powder blue suit, and J. wore all black. I don't think the audience knew what to make of us, but for some reason that added to my enjoyment of the experience.

The revelation of the day was a solo performer called Dynasty Handbag. She was crazy-freaky and hysterically funny. Picture a cross between Laurie Anderson, Lucille Ball, and a schizophrenic homeless woman. She sang, danced, spoke and muttered to prerecorded tracks, often having otherworldly conversations with her own recorded voice. After her set, she emerged from the backstage area, just an unassuming, very sweet young woman selling her CDs, and for some reason that made it all the more remarkable. That it wasn't actually a crazy person but a real live artist. She's from New York and was here for SXSW.

There were a whole bunch of great bands and acts on the bill. It's been a long time since I've been in the midst of so much creativity and such a big supportive audience for it. This same crowd does a once-a-month open stage performance night called Camp Camp. I've never been, but J. and I plan to sing in the next one. I've heard that it's just as popular and just as wildly creative as Gay Bi Gay Gay.

Back to the Garden.

There's a critter visiting our garden at night, and it's starting to make my blood boil. I never saw myself as one of those people at war with the squirrels or whatever, in fact I always thought those people were a little ridiculous. I took the stance that it's humans who have created all the habitat problems so it's we who need to take it in stride when the animals wreak havoc in our yards.

But two out of three of my goddamn tomato seedlings and one of my chilies have been chewed off and left there. Whatever it is is not even eating them, just destroying them. And we have a three-foot fence around the garden, so it's something that can jump or climb pretty high.

My dad has some kind of a gun and he shoots and kills raccoons in my parents' backyard. And they poison the chipmunks. Dozens of them. It goes on all summer long. My mom and dad are not gun people, but they have no mercy when it comes to the garden. Now, to me that looks more like a massacre than gardening. But I'm starting to understand.

Two more days.

Both J. and I slowed down on the movie madness yesterday, probably mostly due to our bad experience with Reign Over Me, but just as much because we were plain weary. My eyes are throbbing. J. stayed home all day. I went to see 368 Ways to Kill Castro, which I liked very much.

Our garden grows.

Someone's been enjoying our garden produce a little early. When I went out to the porch this morning with my coffee and newspaper, I noticed that one of the tomato plants had been chomped off down to the root. Whatever chewed it off didn't even eat it, just left it there limp and dead. And the one, single peanut that sprouted was gone too. There were canine footprints in the bed where it was planted, but I think it's more likely a bird ate it.

The sweet potatoes that I'm trying to root in a bowl of water are not doing much. I may give up on them and just let the watermelon vines take over the space I planned for sweet potatoes. The lima beans have not sprouted, which is perplexing. Maybe they just take a while. The watermelons may get that space too.

Everything else is thriving. The beans and snap peas are growing inches every day, the watermelons, cucumbers, and soybeans have sprouted. The herbs are a little tentative. They all look healthy and happy, but no new growth yet, except for the cilantro and parsley. And the flowers are all starting to come up. And we planted a little meyer lemon tree!

Blech.

I can't wait to see another movie today to get the foul taste out of my mouth left by Reign Over Me, the Mike Binder film with Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle. We saw the premiere last night at the Paramount. Yuck! Not only was it a terrible movie, it was misogynistic and homophobic and stupid. What an ugly, ugly film. Every frame had the writer's smudgy, hamfisted fingerprints on it.

For the first 20 minutes or so, I was right there with it. I love Don Cheadle and I've liked Adam Sandler. The photography was beautiful. A lot of it is downtown New York exteriors, and the city looked great. But once the setup was established and characters introduced, there wasn't one moment that didn't feel forced and false. And a great deal of it was completely implausible, especially Liv Tyler as the psychotherapist. And why did they make Adam Sandler up to look like Bob Dylan?

What really put me over the edge was an exchange between the two main characters. Don Cheadle is feeling dominated by his wife who is a control freak. Adam Sandler calls him a "faggot." Cheadle tells him not to use that word, that it's offensive. Sandler says something like, "To a gay guy it's offensive, but to you it's just a funny word." And they both laugh, and Sandler says faggot two or three more times. And later, the Cheadler character refers to a comic book character's costume as "faggoty." I understand that they are characters speaking lines, but they are the central sympathetic characters in the story. We're obviously meant to identify with them.

I know there are people who agree with the Sandler character's linguistic analysis. But, and this seems so obvious that I feel silly having to point it out, the word faggot is hurtful even though the person you call faggot is not homosexual. Of course it's not hurtful to that person; it's hurtful to everyone who has been made to feel less than worthy because of his or her sexual orientation or gender identification. When you call someone faggot, you're saying, "You're no better than a homosexual." How do you think that makes us feel?

I was in a bad mood the rest of the night.

J. and I were hungry after the movie, so we went to Starseeds, an open-all-night hipster greasy spoon near us. The crowd is entertaining, the staff super-cool, but the food is marginal. If you order right and get lucky, you'll get something edible and satisfying. But it's risky. We did okay -- we only had to move a couple of things that were put on the wrong plate and wait for one pancake that the cook forgot.

I forgot to shut my bedroom door while I was brushing my teeth. Suddenly I got a strong whiff of poop. I looked over my shoulder to see if there was fresh pile in the litter box, but it was clean. I knew right away what was up. J. has adopted one of our neighbors cats, Timmy, because he wasn't getting along with the other cats in their house. He was shitting in their bed, so they put him outside. This was when it got very cold in February. So J. took him in. He's a great cat, very sweet and easy-going. But the few times I've forgotten to shut my bedroom door, he's left me a present.

I was steaming mad. After I cleaned up, instead of going to bed, I sat on the porch and drank a beer. Then I read a chapter of Moby Dick before I finally went to sleep.

Movie blur.

I've seen so many movies in the last two days I don't even remember what I've seen. I think we saw three on Monday, but the only one I can recall right now is Smiley Face, the new Gregg Araki film. J. and I both loved it. It's about a woman who accidentally eats a dozen marijuana cupcakes and how she gets through her day. Really, really funny. Especially if you get stoned first.

Oh yeah, also Monday we saw two programs of shorts. One narrative, one experimental. I'm a little confused about what exactly constitutes experimental in this day and age, but I enjoyed most of the films and some of them a lot. One standout in the experimental program was The Lonely Nights, The Color of Lemons, which told a sweet, touching story with a traditional narrative arc.

Yesterday we saw Billy the Kid, nearly impossible to describe but my favorite so far, Zoo, a documentary about a group of men in Seattle who had sexual relationships with horses. Very highly aestheticized, sort of like Erroll Morris. Interesting, disorienting, beautiful, not exactly edifying. Most of the scenes were reenactments, which was fairly obvious, but I still had questions throughout the film about what I was actually watching. I felt in the end that to create so much confusion was irresponsible. J. I think disagreed.

And last night we saw Monkey Warfare, about a couple of former activists living underground, and a young radical they meet who shakes up their lives. I think it's what they would call a "small film." I liked it a lot.

What Would Jesus Buy?

We saw the premiere of What Would Jesus Buy?, a documentary produced by Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me), directed by Rob VanAlkemade, about Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. We almost didn't.

I had suggested early on that we might pass on the big buzz films: why fight the crowds when those films will get distribution deals and we can see them when everyone else sees them? But we didn't get in to Little Bitty Titty Comittee at Alamo Downtown. We were near the front of the passholders line, but the badgeholders filled up the theater.

We drove over to Waterloo Icehouse for catfish, looked at the schedule, and decided that What Would Jesus Buy? was the only thing we really wanted to see in the 9:30-ish slot. When we got to the Paramount about an hour and half before the screening, the line was already fairly long, and we entertained ourselves with people-watching. Austin is always good for people-watching, but SXSW is a bonanza.

The documentary follows the tour of Rev. Billy and his choir, their performances in venues across the country as well as their guerrilla performances in malls, Wal-Marts, and Starbucks stores. The story counts down the shopping days to Christmas and climaxes with the holiday season. Along the way they have various setbacks, including getting rear-ended by an 18-wheeler. Their mission is to get people to think about what they're buying. To "Stop Shopping!" and they do it by means of full-on gospel preaching and singing. Rev. Billy in his bleach-blond pompadour and the choir in their red robes baptize a baby in a mall parking lot and perform an exorcism in front of Wal-Mart headquarters. Their guerrilla performances usually culminate with cops and security guards escorting them away, but they don't stop singing.

It was thrilling. I've never been so excited watching a movie. Seeing these talented performers doing political theater, often in front of surprised if not hostile audiences, with humor and total commitment was an inspiration.

Interspersed with the performances are talking head-style interviews with various experts and documentary footage illustrating factory conditions where American products are made, as well as interviews and footage of American families and their shopping habits. But this stuff is never dry. In fact it's very affecting, giving urgency to Rev. Billy's crusade.

Rev. Billy and the choir were in the house and, after the film and the long standing ovation, they performed their signature song, "Stop Shopping."

I hope this film is a huge hit. I can't think of a more urgent message, and this movie, just like Rev. Billy's performances, gets it across by disarming the audience with humor. People wonder what they can do to make a difference when there's so much suffering and injustice in the world, and this film says simply, "Stop shopping." Rampant, insane, American consumerism either causes or exacerbates all the big problems in the world.

I know it's impossible to be a completely clean consumer if you want to live in the modern world and interact with the culture. But that shouldn't be an excuse to ignore the whole thing. Be aware of what you buy, where it was made, who made it, and what it took to get it to you.

Earlier we saw Does Your Soul Have a Cold?, a documentary by the director of Thumbsucker. It was a verite-style doc about 5 Japanese people taking anti-depressants. I didn't feel like I ever got to know the people. It was beautifully shot, and I did get a very strong sense of the numbness of these people's lives, but the pace was slow and even throughout, not so much depressing as just dull.

Food!

Our box from Johnson's Farm contained two beautiful small heads of romaine lettuce, spinach, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, 3 big beets with their greens, chard, mustard greens, 3 sweet potatoes, daikon and various other radishes.

This morning I scrambled eggs with some of the spinach, one of my favorite breakfasts. I set out to make spring rolls for lunch, but I realized I had the wrong type of wrappers -- I had the thick wheat ones instead of the very thin rice paper. I thought I could use them anyway, but I couldn't work with them, so we ate the filling as a salad and it was delicious: lettuce, cilantro, ginger, garlic, grated carrots and radishes, sesame oil, tamari, peanut butter, chopped peanuts, lime juice, rice vinegar, Sambal chili paste.