Eagle Pass, Texas is practically in Mexico. Most of the middle-school teachers in Gretchen Bernabei's seminar were of Mexican descent, probably at least a generation or two back.

The cafeteria at Eagle Pass Junior High School had an interesting sign on the wall: Parents may not eat food from their children's plates.

After I filmed the morning session, we met up with Barry, who was giving his Revision seminar at the elementary school down the road. On our way to lunch at Cactus we almost went to the border accidentally.

Barry made fun of modern-day relationships that fail because of false expectations: "I need to make a lot of changes in my life, and I want to start with you."

During the afternoon session I had one of those moments where I forgot to keep the camera steady because the talk was too interesting. Gretchen was telling the teachers about her Ba-Da-Bing exercise. The student can write more creatively about an event by describing it in three steps: 1) where he walked, 2) what he saw, 3) what he thought. She gave examples of sentences her students wrote about their real experiences. This one really moved me:

"I ran down the stairs to the front door and I saw my dad with a packed suitcase. I thought: our life as a family is over."

Moderno Restaurant at Piedras Negras has a 10-minute escort service that takes Americans across the border to eat there. The change of environment was immediate -- the temperature was the same dry 97 degrees; but from the narrow streets, arched windows and densely colorful shops we knew we were in a different country. I bought a wallet, a sheet of wool, and a carved wood box. We didn't need passports traveling either direction.

The best baked beans I have ever tasted were at this restaurant. The three of us tried to tell the waitor that we did not believe there were no ingredients in it other than pinto beans and manteca. Barry commented on the toothpicks placed neatly on the table after our meal: "Ooh, wood for dessert."

The change on the way back was also immediate, but the traffic was slower. Wider streets, larger houses, more billboards, more space. We were going from a town of a quarter-of-a-million back to Eagle Pass, population 40,000. Our driver talked to us proudly about his daughter. He pointed out her house to us on the way back to the hotel. His whole family was in Texas but he still lived back home. Today I lived in Mexico for two hours and a half.

The preview screening of Gravidad last night was the kind of screening I look forward to the most. Family and friends, aunts with curious interpretations to share that you hadn't even thought of before, and of course proud mothers. About 20 of us gathered around the TV of the Meccouri's living room after a delicious latin meal by Anise, plus Zahra's basmati rice and muffins. We watched the movie once, people asked all sorts of questions, I revealed the secret about the final shot, then we watched about 30 minutes of the histerical bloopers and alternate takes. Then per my mother's request we watched the movie again. Later at night Anise, Badi and I watched it again on Badi's good speakers, and pointed out continuity errors no one else would notice. All of this was helpful in figuring out what changes to make for the final cut that will be submitted to Harmony.

The title of the movie will probably end up being Gravity. We realized that the spelling of the word in Spanish is actually "gravedad". Then Linda pointed out wisely: "It looks like it spells Grave Dad - a kind of scary movie with dads in graveyards". I don't think I can post the movie online until after it has been screened at the festival, but perhaps I will put up a preview or a clip when I upload the remodeled website on the tentative date of August 12. I'm working little by little on it. The other day it took me about 4 hours of frustrating work to figure out how to make dotted lines appear under some words. Anyway, now I'm heading downstears because the premiere is actually not over yet, since I spent the night at the Meccouri's. Time for some vegan pancakes.

We finished filming Gravidad this weekend in a scalding hot New York City. There will be a premiere and a cookout at the Meccouri's home two weeks from now, then we send the submission to the Harmony Film Festival. We are really excited about what we got on tape, particularly the bloopers. Seriously, the rest is also really good.

The load of other video work is slowly being picked at in between reading, watching movies and eating Ben & Jerry's icecream down the street where my sister's friends work and offer us mathematically illogical discounts. For example, I was told they would give me 50% off my regular-sized Berry Berry Extraordinary and Chocolate Fudge Browny cone. After the employee punched in all the numbers and swiped his special card, I was asked to pay $0.88. I am pretty sure a regular cone costs between $3 and $4, not $1.76.

Anyway, The Wedding of Renugaa and Mark was completed and delivered on their 2 month anniversary. There is more time now for editing and meditating, since I will be starting my period of volunteer work at the end of October rather than mid-August.

Something Linda Meccouri said this weekend made me think: "You should always under-commit and over-deliver." I decided to post fewer promises and more surprises once I remodel this site the way I want it. First I'm going to change the news section, and make it less random. There will be a place for unrestrained musings about icecream cones and global warming, separate from updates on projects and other work. That place will probably be a BLOG on one of those sites with slick templates like blogger.com. Some friends of mine have pretty cool blogs and I would be ok with having one. Let me know if you have a good reason to strongly oppose this decision, other than the fact that it will make you jealous to read about how much icrecream I'm getting for free here in VT.

Soon there will be many changes made to luisdechtiar.net, to reflect many changes in general.

I'm on a train now, returning from a weekend trip to New York City, where Anise Meccouri and I were pre-producing our new short film Gravidad. Anise wrote the script and I will be directing.

In post-production now are some documentary projects, including the video I took of Mark and Nenu's wedding. Under Ayneh Films a big project will be under way soon about Lights of Unity, the dance workshop that toured around the UK performing on social issues. There were almost 30 hours of footage for this project by the time I left Northern Ireland this June. Discover Writing Videos is also working on finalizing two DVD releases.

Paradigm Shift: Involution will receive its DVD release by the end of this summer, with a new cut of the film and possibly a 5.1 sourround sound mix.

More soon.

Although I had become exceedingly good at the 10 previously mentioned pastime activities (see 11 May 2006), after about a week I decided it was time to move on and pursue more constructive patterns of behavior. Our world is, after all, this most precious and transient mass, whose oscillations both define and depend on our every motion, every detailed compulsion toward one or other notion of what we should be DOING here with this indefinitely granted time portion.

In his most excellent science fiction novel Foundation, as early as 1951, Isaac Asimov wrote an allegory for the current world situation, with all its conflicts and complications, outlining the need for the building of a foundation by which the most valued and essential aspects of this ever-changing civilization were to be preserved, or even redesigned, to serve one ultimate purpose: recovering after a temporary downfall.

A. [Hari Seldon]: I am aware of both the present status and the past history of the [Galactic] Empire...
Q. [Advocate]: And you predict its ruin?
A. It is a prediction that is made by mathematics. I pass no moral judgements. Personally, I regret the prospect. Even if the Empire were admitted to be a bad thing (an admission I do not make), the state of anarchy which would follow its fall would be worse. It is that state of anarchy which my project is pledged to fight. The fall of Empire, gentelment, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity - a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.
Q. Is it not ovbious to anyone that the Empire is as strong as it ever was?
A. The appearance of strength is all about you. It would seem to last forever. However, Mr. Advocate, the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had. The strom-blast whistles through the branches of the Empire even now. Listen with the ears of psychohistory, and you will hear the creaking.

The most excellent X-Men Trilogy, now brought to completion with The Last Stand, calls to mind with its metaphorical mutants the hugely undiscovered capacities that we have to leap forward in our thinking, in our behavior and organization - emerging from an era of ignorance and injustice, and with concerted efforts, carry forward the fulfilment of our purpose as a species. What I like most about the X-Men is that there is no one real villain, other than the misuse of power itself, a corruption of essence to which anyone is susceptible.

Misused power, it seems, is what perpetrates major injustices against the majority of the world's people, because it results from negligence of a commonly agreeable standard for the fair, beneficial and constructive application of available resource. "Common agreement" at an international level might sound naive at this point, but one must remember that it is attained through a slow process. Furthermore, the alternative has never worked before, and neither will it work under the increasingly globalized conditions that we inevitably live in. The precept that the sum of all power on Earth can be satisfactorily subdivided according to the dictates of each individualistic, isolated, and self-interested part, if you think about it, is mathematically unsustainable and illogical - an equation doomed to exponential imbalance - comparable to a house with 10 residents where everyone is confined to their bedrooms and no system has been established for doing the chores.

This absolutely fundamental, essential and unavoidable systematization of the world's efforts is also the only way to deal with the seemingly insurmountable problem brought up in An Inconvenient Truth - the Environment. As Al Gore points out (during this uber-power-point presentation he has toured internationally, and which now has expanded into a documentary film) America (a powerful nation with huge responsibilities) has led other nations before in the beginning stages of phasing out the pollutants that are causing the hole in the ozone layer (a problem which was considered before to be impossible to solve). There is hope that this superpower would use its influence positively again for its socio-economic and political unification with the rest of the world's nations. Such a revolutionary order of things would not necessitate, however, the undermining or subversion of the existing foundations of society, as Shoghi Effendi points out, but rather it would seek to "broaden its basis, to remold its institutions in a manner consonant with the needs of an ever-changing world."

It seems this process cannot be fully realized at an institutional level unless it is supported at its foundation, at the level of the community. At dinner tables and porches and college campuses it would be defined by a shift of identity, from narrowed perspectives to all-encompassing visions, culminating with the creation of a "world community in which the fury of a capricious and militant nationalism will have been transmuted into an abiding consciousness of world citizenship." We cannot underestimate the tremendous effect that this would have in the way communities function. Even Western intellectuals have conceded, in a way, that this is the shape of future change. Near the conclusion of the 2:45 hour epic documentary Manufacturing Consent, its subject Noam Chomsky (considered by the New York Times the most important mind today) said that the only thing that will solve the world's problems is a "spiritual transformation of society."

The purpose of such basic re-ordering of civilization would neither be to extinguish a healthy and intelligent patriotism in people's hearts, nor to abolish the system of national autonomy that effectively prevents an excessive centralization of government. For guidance in terms of how humanity would benefit from a world-embracing vision, Baha'is turn to the writings of Baha'u'llah, and of the interpreter of the Baha'i Faith, Shoghi Effendi, who wrote many volumes on the influence of spiritual movements in the development of society. Shoghi Effendi wrote that the World Order that Baha'u'llah envisioned "does not ignore, nor does it attempt to suppress, the diversity of ethnical origins, of climate, of history, of language and tradition, of thought and habit, that differentiate the peoples and nations of the world. It calls for a wider loyalty, for a larger aspiration than any that has animated the human race. It insists upon the subordination of national impulses and interests to the imperative claims of a unified world. It repudiates excessive centralization on one hand, and disclaims all attempts at uniformity on the other. Its watchword is unity in diversity..."

In any case, connecting the dots in this humungous subject matter has been quite inspiring to me, and I'm glad to be able to express it here so freely. I hope you (whose patience has led you reading this far) may have gained something from it, or that interesting discussion can be generated, at least. Many more thoughts may be coming soon. But sooner, photography and video updates. Check back...

I'm a College Graduate, now what?

Top 10 things I've been doing since classes ended:

10. Reawakening childhood psychic powers.

9. Testing the malleability of my epidermis.

8. Protesting small injustices unnecessarily.

7. Imagining life as a Hollywood producer.

6. Following the little bubbles that float on the surface of my eyeballs.

5. Testing the stretchability of my neck.

4. Immitating ridiculous Saturday morning cartoons.

3. Auditioning for "The Goonies" prequel.

2. Impersonating overly-competitive cannibal Siamese twins. (Note human finger in their mouth.)

1. Sitting around, bored.