what do you mean

on monday, i bopped down to newmarket in the middle of the day, on an extended lunch break, to help my friends jay and sarah film some “standups” for a series they do called HOUSING: FACT OR FICTION.

have you ever seen a TV show where the host is walking down the street talking and the camera is moving with them? do you ever wonder how the camera guy never falls over or crashes into anything? it’s because there’s another guy behind him tapping his shoulders to steer him around obstacles. that’s what i was doing—plus i kept an eye on the script, and occasionally picked up a second angle shot with my own camera, an alternate take to help with the editing—if you ever need to delete a phrase or speed someone up a little you can hide the edits with a cut to a wider angle.

it’s particularly easy to hide the cut when you can edit on a gesture — a movement of the hands or head. i pointed out to sarah that she’s a great “hand talker” which is a real gift to editors. you hide the real move behind some other business.

see also: close-up magic.

see also: national politics.

then last night, jay and i hosted a screening of his documentary, Communities and Consequences II, for the current class of leadership seacoast, the class of 2025. (jay and i are both on the board for leadership seacoast, and are both alumni, and so is sarah, which is why we told her about the screening when we saw her on monday, and why she offered to tag along, to share her expertise as a longtime housing advocate. also, she’s in the documentary.)

we held it at the new hampshire theatre project in the west end in portsmouth, one of my favorite places. its founder, genevieve, was there with us for the night. i love hanging out at the NHTP, and moderating discussions there — genevieve is the first person who clocked that i had a knack for it, and put me to work. i’m grateful for that. after the film i talked to jay and sarah onstage and fielded questions from the class. i said i always felt very comfortable there and genevieve said, “zac, i think you’re comfortable in every room you walk into,” which is a nice thing to say. i suppose it might be true.

events like these, they’re just a little thing — a little thing i am lucky to get to do pretty often — but it’s very energizing, especially during these sorts of draining weeks with the weather and the shoveling and the gradual collapse of the federal government. jay’s documentary—and the discussion we held after—was about the little points of light against the darkness — the little fixes we find while trying to fix the big problems. there are so many of them, all the time, even now. and you can always find more, just kicking around in the dust, here’s another one.

which is why the doomed, despairing mindset of many people, maybe most especially establishment democrats but also just people i know, is kind of shocking to me. the surrender on DEI is particularly bleak. i mean, it doesn’t take a brilliant linguist to decode what trump & his allies mean when they say “DEI.” his followers on social media often make the implicit explicit anyway, mixing the old slurs with the new. i don’t know how you see that and feel anything but a renewed dedication to your values. i don’t know why you don’t come out swinging with a full-throated defense of any and every DEI training ever conceived, even the bad ones. i don’t understand why you’d ever consider even ceding an inch.