We are transferring and editing footage full time in Buenos Aires. It is a lengthy process because we have so many hours of raw filmed material on multiple projects, including 10 months worth of footage shot in 15 nations on the Rodando Cine project. We are happy to report that progress is steady. We should soon have trailers ready for our aboriginal cooking show, La Comida Aborigen, and for parts of our El Norte project. An initial trailer for Rodando Cine will follow shortly after.

I attended a charity event last night that was co-hosted by my dear friend Patti for a non-profit group called BookEnds, a Los Angeles based organization that engages children in book drives for less fortunate kids in the community. A sizable team of volunteers such as Patti had poured untold hours into organizing this event for the past two months. It was held at the Beverly Hills Country Club, and there was a very large crowd of about 100 people in attendance, perhaps more, for a cocktail mixer followed by dinner, a Scrabble contest and a silent auction.

Many of the items at the auction were going for sums approaching $1,000. At the end of the evening, as I sat nibbling dessert and chatting with a very nice lady dripping with expensive jewelry, I watched her casually sign off an itemized voucher on her credit card for more than 10 items for which she had placed the highest bid.

Earlier in the day, I'd had an extended Skype call with Alex of Rodando Cine discussing the editing of his project in Buenos Aires and some upcoming Pan American Dreams journal contributions from his partner Ine and him. Alex and Ine had traveled from Argentina to Mexico for 10 months in 2008 showing movies in remote villages. I mentioned to Alex the lasting impression that their visit to Chuqui Chuqui, Bolivia had made upon me, and he shared more details from their projection there last March, almost a year ago.

It will soon be six months since I returned to Los Angeles from Argentina. It was initially sad coming back here from South America to a nascent economic depression, but I was soon so busy after an unplanned absence of nine months that I have not written much during this period. It has been a productive interlude nonetheless, both personally and for Pan American Dreams, and a few new entries bringing the project plan up to date will follow over the next few weeks.

In the interim, L.A. continues to impress itself vividly upon anyone living here. For example, although I am not a habitué of Starbucks, I walked to one of their nearby stores this afternoon during a short break, and a foamy blast of L.A.'s unique cultural brew greeted me the minute I stepped in the door. The fellow manning the cappuccino machine was talking to a customer as he mixed up his mocha java something or other. It seems he had just finished filming six episodes of a project of some kind with his friends acting as his cast and crew, and the customer had done something similar, so they were loudly talking shop over the coffee machine noise - distribution, financing, rights, etc.

It is Academy Awards season, and many of my friends here in Los Angeles have a small list of movies they want to watch before the Oscar ceremony on February 22. I am no exception, and one of the films I saw this weekend was The Wrestler. I did not expect much, but critically acclaimed movies in any country in America often tell us important truths about ourselves, sometimes unintentionally. And the unusually intense buzz about Mickey Rourke's performance, even if over-hyped, also made me want to see the movie. In the interest of balancing the emotional ledger, I also saw the current box office hit Mall Cop with comedian Paul Blart.

Mickey Rourke is excellent as an aging, washed up professional wrestler now on the B circuit, but I am quite surprised that no one seems to be talking about the movie itself, perhaps because it cuts too close to the bone. It is incredibly thought provoking.