After going on my traditional California holiday trek with my better half to the beaches of Monterey and down our favorite drive through Big Sur on the Pacific Coast Highway and down to Hearst Castle and Pismo Beach, I’ve embraced the new year.
Carlene Carter, John Wesley Harding, Nick Lowe, and Robyn Hitchcock made our drive down Route One all the better. Nouvelle Vague is still my favorite band, and I’ve rediscovered Joe Strummer for the millionth time, this time via the cool soundtrack to Julien Temple’s "The Future is Unwritten."
I’ve also been digging Jaco Pastorius, and still can’t get enough of Miles Davis, Grant Green, Tal Farlow, Joe Pass, Larry Coryell, Kenny Burrell, Jimmy Bruno and Barney Kessel.
I’ve heard secondhand that Sean Penn will head the Jury at this year’s Cannes Film Festival–cool.
I’m in the market for a couple of back-up videographers with Panasonic P2 cameras for my video blog and am preparing to add my Film Editor title to a couple of international and national publications.
All in all, I’m just as angry, happy and inspired as I’ve ever been. The promise of an OFCS book, for which I’m writing essays on "1900" and "Come and See," has me scratching notes on napkins just like my longtime writer friend Charles McQuigan used to do down at the Dobbs House on Grace street in Richmond, Virginia.
John Edwards has all my support for the Democratic nomination and to be the first President in my lifetime, other than JFK, that I believe in. When the neocons steal the election in ‘08, Edwards strikes me as a man who will not back down the way Gore and Kerry did. Democracy and freedom might be gone, but we can reclaim them.
