Bloggin’ Bisbee

This was the view on the commute from Santa Cruz to Gilroy at 10 am Thursday….It’s been a crazy day, worrying about friends and their homes in harm’s way.

Tonight things are seemingly less urgent, though the fires still burn, my throat still hurts and Alec and other friends are complaining of the same.

I had some interesting emotions come up today, working in a different community than the one where I live, as my home was struck by a natural disaster. A new experience for me. I had a hard time focusing on my work and felt sentimental about home. I have always thought of Maine as home, but I think today I realized that Santa Cruz is indeed my home and always will be.

The Gov declared it a CA state of emergency and the fires still burn. I just hope that our friends near the fireline are safe tonight and that the flames stop before reaching Corralitos below the canyon.

Talking about filmmaking to audience members

Q & A after the films


Val, chair of CMAP’s board of directors, with me after the film. What a supportive chair!

More pictures from tonight here: http://picasaweb.google.com/katfyssh/SCFF?authkey=MRb3wDoueqg

Tonight my film, “Well-Oiled Machine,” screened at the Santa Cruz Film Festival.

The short documentary about the veggie-powered tour bus driven by Hot Buttered Rum was paired “Fields of Fuel,” a feature-length movie about the possibilities of biodiesel. It tours the world demonstrating our lack of progressive moment forward on long term environmental solutions in the U.S.

The film won the audience award at Sundance this year. I can see why. Fantastic film!

Thanks for everyone who came out for the film and to support me!

Click here to read about the Santa Cruz Film Festival; May 9th-17th!

I’ve set up a page here about my recent film screenings. I’m submitting to a few other festivals, while working on my next project!

More later. Hope to see you at the Film Festival!

-K

A beautiful Earth Day tribute in Golden Gate Park…

Today I am working on an intense story of a survivor of 9.11 that I’ll upload soon. You can check out some of my other work on shorts and docs at blip.tv here.
I don’t put files on YouTube anymore, since they then own your content, but I’ve had trouble in Word Press using the embed tags of both. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.
In the meantime the doc about the band (Hot Buttered Rum) is now at blip, on the band’s web site, and will be featured in two upcoming film festivals. I hope to launch it at other film festivals as well, but enjoy it in its tiniest form for now on blip.tv!

I’m finalizing the television version of this 10:25 minute video I did for Hot Buttered Rum. It feels like I’ve worked on it forever, but it’s really only been about a year.

“A Well-Oiled Machine”

HBR actually mostly only uses biodiesel these days and dumpster diving for veggie fuel is a rarity.
I think it’s still a very relevant piece about their experience and why it’s important to consider alternative fuel sources, now more than ever.

-Kathy

Me in Havana, Cuba in December of 2003 at the Martin Luther King Center

I’ve been lamenting about the lack of certain features on travel sites. I have wanted a site that allows me to just see where I could go in the world…for a small amount of money, to any location from my home airport, at any date…Travelocity doesn’t allow you to do flexible dates outside the U.S., and every time I find a good fare, their system tells me it’s no longer available and the price has jumped up by several hundred dollars.

I’ll admit, I am somewhat obsessed with traveling, even though I don’t have tons of time nor money to galavant around the world. I dream about different cultures, traditions, the land, people, music and languages I could learn or improve my skill at and every year I get to venture out to a new city or two, or three, and sometimes a new country too.

I am grateful that my lifestyle so far in this life has afforded me this luxury more than most people in my family and millions of others in the world. I consider my activism a penance for this privilege and try to find ways to support the places I go and people I meet, and learn realities of their lives and community. I gain so much perspective, compassion, humility, hope, trust, energy and wisdom from interacting with people who see and experience the world differently than I do.

This new travel site finds a way to get me there. When you click on the logo on their top left corner, something very cool happens! Not to mention it aggregates nearly 200 other travel sites to give you the best price from the perspective of where you could travel from your “home” city. Imagine the possibilities!

http://www.kayak.com

Where? To my top five areas I want to travel, of course!
(current list)

-Peru
-China/Nepal
-Ireland
-Argentina
-Prague/Budapest

U.S. destinations (I’ve travelled through most of the U.S. & Europe)
-Utah’s desert rock formations
-New Orleans
-Alaska
-Kauai and Maui

And, of course there are some return visits to make to places I loved the first time around….

The rest of this year has me already planning and dreaming of travel possibilites, though all fairly short trips, a high school reunion and island hopping in Maine, a family visit to the lakes region of Iowa, a possible trip to the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta, a weekend or two of potential music-related trips to B.C and Seattle and the chance to consider another trip to my favorite country, Cuba.

Happy Trails!

I think this is a cool project by MoveOn.org to get a story out about the experience of soldiers in Iraq who haven’t previously been heard.

The main VideoVets.org website is:
http://www.videovets.org