no trespassing

Highway 395 hugs the eastern foot of the Sierras. Along the entire stretch of the Southern Sierras for hundreds of miles, it's just you and those giant mountains. Here and there a tiny one market town, here and there an abandoned trailer park. You never stop because the dust is flying and the semis flank your car. But maybe these ghosts deserve some attention. What life used to exist here?

anonymous

I am reminded why it is good to see documentaries in Los Angeles; half the time the filmmakers live here and are in the audience and half the audience is in the film or was working on it. Such was the case this weekend when we checked out this outstanding new doc,We Are Legion. Writer/directer, Brian Knappenberger was answering questions and we happened to be sitting next to the film's editor.  

If you are at all interested in anthropology, the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, politics, activism, or power to the people, or even cheap laughs, check it out, by nature of the content they have uploaded a version to youtube already.     

What's it about exactly? Well, the film chronicles the pretty incredible way disorganized internet users  coalesced into the political movement called Anonymous, which is closely tied to and overlaps with the Occupy Movement.

 < Computer Hacking + Activism = Hacktivism >

Documentaries like this are fascinating to watch because this is not ancient history, in fact the filmmaker was saying that he was literally updating the film as they were editing in the previous weeks. Major developments are happening, one of the Anonymous leaders admitted to being an FBI informant, some of the hackers are on trial, there is still civil unrest in the Middle East. This is an evolving movement that we are watching real time. To have a reflection on how this all started so early in the game is immediate gratification, like watching 100 hours of news feed condensed into one entertaining and important story.

tuesday

Hello, blog. How are you today? I'm doing fairly well, thank you. Just wondering where our second day of rain is. The weather man told us we would get two days of rain, which is a big deal for us parched Angelenos. Yesterday was perfect. I sat next to my big window and drew all day with the rain falling outside; it was magical.
I'm pretty happy that I get to draw my favorite things for this current project I'm working on. That would be Maps!

I had an "emergency" trip to NYC last week and started this incredible book on the plane - The Fourth Part of the World, by Toby Lester. All those pieces of Medieval history that seem so vague and were never really delved into in school (Marco Polo, Amerigo Vespucci, the Black Plague, Genghis Khan, etc), this book weaves them all together through the story of maps.

Lester started the investigation and book when a map from 1507 sold for more than the US Declaration of Independence at an auction. What was the map? The Waldseemuller Map, the first map of the entire world including the continents of North and South America, and the first map to name America (sorry Columbus, snooze you lose).

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