Patricia Sauthoff

CapitolHillSeattle.com: Hyperlocal news for the city’s core of cool

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by CJR.

Densely populated and filled with restaurants, nightspots, and shops, Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood is one of the city’s hubs of cool. Even those who don’t live in the area keep tabs on the neighborhood’s comings and goings to see what hot spot will arrive next.

Not a bad home for a news website. EnterCapitolHillSeattle.com, a hyperlocal community news outlet founded in 2006 that tracks development, crime, and culture. Started by Justin Carder in his spare time while working in web analytics for Microsoft, Capitol Hill Seattle slowly grew into a business as Carder reached out to residents and gathered information and sources within the neighborhood. Shortly after founding the site, Carder left Microsoft to work on his community news venture full-time.

While Carder admits that digital neighborhood news is a tough business, he points to key features that allow the medium to thrive. “You have to have environments that have strong businesses, highways, and strong educational institutions,” he says. Strong businesses are not only potential advertisers but also make for interesting news items. Educational institutions are also newsworthy, and their presence means a neighborhood is more likely demographically to get its news online. Highways and other transportation factors mean the neighborhood is accessible and frequented by people who don’t live in the area. Capitol Hill has approximately 75,000 residents, says Carder, but the site usually sees upwards of 100,000 unique visitors monthly—proof that the site is gaining attention both within the neighborhood and beyond. (More detailed traffic information can be found on the site’sQuantcast page.)

It’s easy to see why locals would turn to Capitol Hill Seattle for coverage. Where a daily or weekly paper might only devote a few column inches for a story in a given neighborhood, Capitol Hill Seattle includes maps, blueprints, artist’s renderings, photographs, and full documents in its coverage. Carder says as much time is spent deciding how to approach a story as is spent reporting it. As the site’s only full-time employee, he acts as reporter, editor, and art director for most of the stories on the site. (The rest are written by volunteer community contributors.)

He says the work requires more desk time than he’d like, and he balances working alone by spending time in two separate office shares. He commutes via bicycle.

“It can be hard to motivate to ride to the office,” he says, “but when I get there I’m always glad I went.”

So far, the site could not exist without Carder’s own sweat, but he believes there is money to be made in the neighborhood news business and is trying to find ways to better collaborate with other Seattle-area news sites.

“We like to say that we don’t compete now,” Carder says of the news startup community, “but that’s not exactly true. Local chains do want to advertise on local sites and we compete for that attention.”

In 2010, Carder set up the Seattle Independent Advertising Network, which brings together a dozen neighborhood sites and five citywide news and information sites that work together to attract advertisers with their combined traffic and reach. Carder says the model is unique in that members of the network are allowed to participate in the collective effort while continuing to sell advertising on their own.

Most participating sites in the network keep a slot dedicated to running network ads but keep control of the remainder of their slots. The goal is to create a steady flow of premium ads for sites so that they can worry less about the comparatively small rates offered by remnant ads and Google AdSense. Carder says that most of the advertisers on the network approach him directly. He devotes little time to cold calls.

“The best advertisers want to reach these kinds of sites and find us there,” he says. One of the biggest difficulties facing independent news sites is the effort a single person often has to put in day after day to build and maintain the enterprise.

“I’m up at 5 am every day,” Carder says. “If I stop working hard tomorrow it will decay quickly. None of us have figured out a way to keep it going permanently. There are too many barriers as far as building anything more permanent.”

He sees his work with the ad network as one way to strengthen independent news sites both financially and through collaboration that helps ease the collective workload, bringing permanence more within reach.

“I have no idea how long it will last and I hope everybody enjoys it while it’s here,” Carder says in a video posted on the site’s about page. “I hope it lasts forever. I’d love to find a way to make that happen.”

Portland drops at the South Pole

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published by the Willamette Week.

In late October, Mikey Kampmann left Southeast Portland’s Clinton Street neighborhood for a summer vacation of sorts. Kampmann, a 25-year-old comic and occasional Portlandia cast member, is spending four months working as a cook at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. An American scientific research center that focuses on meteorology, astronomy and astrophysics, it employs approximately 200 people in the summer and 50 in the winter. WWinterviewed Kampmann by email and phone (it’s a 21-hour time difference) about Antarctic cuisine, retro fashion and the relatively enviable weather. “It’s not as cloudy,” he says, “and the sun is bigger than I’ve ever seen. It just does circles in the sky. It’s trippy.” Kampmann also blogs about his adventure at mikeygoingdown.tumblr.com.

WW: Have you seen any penguins?
Mikey Kampmann: No. 1 most annoying question we get. I haven’t seen any penguins. Apparently a skua [seabird] flew past the station one day and they announced it over the PA, but I missed it. Other than that, the only life we’ve seen is a slug that came here on a head of cabbage. We tried keeping it as a pet until it died.

I assume you have some everyday luxuries, like a bar. What IPAs are on tap?
The South Pole doesn’t have a proper bar. We can buy booze at the store and drink wherever. I like to drink Speight’s Old Dark, a New Zealand beer we get here. That or whiskey. Or both.

What about the coffee?
Before I left, I decided to exclusively drink Legare’s coffee—my favorite coffee in Portland. Jonathan [Legare] insisted I take 10 pounds of his coffee with me so I could trade with Russians while I was here. In return for 1 pound of beans, I received a bottle of vodka and a pistol. It’s been really important to me having that coffee here. I look forward to my bowl of coffee everyday, and it reminds me that one day soon I’ll be back in Portland.

Where does the food you eat come from? We presume it’s all local.
The South Pole has about a two-year supply of frozen food in an underground food arch. About once a week during the summer we get freshies (fruit, veggies and eggs) from New Zealand, depending on weather. Back in Portland, I work for Groundwork Organics, an organic farm, and I thought I appreciated fresh fruit and veggies at the farmers market, but now when I see freshies I’m even more thankful. It’s remarkable that you can eat a fresh avocado at the South Pole, or even just an apple. Part of the space-stationlike vibe [here] is the greenhouse, which does grow a nice amount of greens, including kale! Also, alien meat is pretty good.

How do you entertain yourselves?
There are some fun nights here: some big dance parties, Scrabble and cribbage are huge, watching movies, and of course looking for aliens. My favorite thing is to walk away from the station and sit in the sun in the flat, white nothing. I recently found a spot I call “The Beach” because the ice looks like the ocean, and where I like to sit sorta looks like the beach. I brought my boombox, too, so I’ll play music and just sit and enjoy that nothingness. I’ve enjoyed making some absurd videos. Also, checking out the science happening here has been fascinating, even if I can’t understand any of it.

What’s the dating scene like?
There are free condoms in every bathroom. That said, I think a lot of people just take the condoms ’cause they’re feeling overconfident. People are definitely hooking up.

South Pole fashion. Portlandy?
Everybody is mostly wearing the same thing, a “Big Red” parka, Carhartt overalls, bunny boots, gloves and goggles. Definitely lots of gross beards. Not nearly enough cutoff denim as Portland, which is too bad, and thankfully not as much flannel. For parties, people wear some outrageous clothes, most of which have been left here over the years. The ’80s are definitely still going on here at the South Pole.

How did you end up there, anyway?
I’m following in the footsteps of my friend who worked in Antarctica. I thought about doing this for three years and finally realized that if I didn’t do it now then I never would. So I applied, and a week later I had the job.

Is the South Pole everything you thought it would be?
It doesn’t seem to belong to any place or any time. Until you land here, you can’t feel how strange it is. It’s fucking strange. I’ve completely fallen in love with the landscape and find it fun to walk out into minus-25 degrees and think it actually feels pretty warm. It’s definitely been harder than I thought it would be, and it’s made me a tougher person. Life in Portland is so fucking easy.

Cecile Richards: Planned Parenthood’s president on Congress, the HPV vaccine and why men use her group’s clinics

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by the Willamette Week.

When WW compares Oregon and Texas, Cecile Richards gets a little defensive. “Why does everybody always pick on Texas? I’m from Texas,” she declares with a slight drawl.

Richards isn’t just from Texas, she’s the daughter of late Texas Gov. Ann Richards, giving her just the political pedigree she needs in her position as national president of Planned Parenthood.

Her perpetually newsmaking organization runs more than 800 clinics, providing family planning and sexual health services to more than 3 million people a year.

Richards, 53, worked for House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as deputy chief of staff, and she founded and ran America Votes, a coalition of voter registration groups.

Richards, who became president in 2006, is currently touring Planned Parenthood centers in the Pacific Northwest. We talked to her about the recent fight in Congress over birth control, her hefty salary, and why Planned Parenthood does more for men’s health than most people know.

WW: Every Planned Parenthood location in Oregon offers men’s health services. What services are offered, not just here but nationwide?

Cecile Richards: Ten percent of our patients now are young men, and that’s increasing every year. They’re the fastest-growing population now coming to us, and I’d say a lot of folks come to us now for STD testing and treatment because we’re a confidential, affordable provider. They do vasectomies in Bend, and a fair number of them.

Is it because more couples seek services together?

It’s that. Young men are not only our patients but our educators. That translates into activism. Now so many of the next generation of activists for Planned Parenthood and reproductive health care in general are young men.

How is Planned Parenthood changing so that it’s inclusive for men and women?

With this Congress that’s so far to the right—it was really going after ending basic access to birth control and access to cancer screenings and STD testing and treatment—thousands of young men got involved to stand for Planned Parenthood. Men have just as vested an interest in birth control as women.

Do you believe laws requiring women to receive sonograms prior to abortions affect their decisions to have an abortion?

We always counsel women on all their options if they have an unintended pregnancy. What we have found historically is that women make incredibly responsible decisions. The thing that is really disturbing about most of these laws is that they basically assume women are incapable of making their own personal, responsible decisions about their health care.

But these laws push women to get more information before making a decision.

Legislators, most of whom will never be pregnant, [are] writing their own ideas about what doctors should be telling their patients. It assumes doctors aren’t responsible, that they have to be led by the legislature to tell women what to think. Most legislation being passed contains erroneous information. It’s not even medically accurate. It assumes that women won’t have the wherewithal to actually talk to their doctor about keeping a pregnancy or whatever alternatives there are.

Bill Clinton spoke about keeping abortion legal and rare. Are we closer to his vision?

That’s actually the most disturbing thing about what’s happened this year. What the House of Representatives tried to do was essentially say that [women] could no longer go to Planned Parenthood for basic birth control, cancer screenings, STD testing and treatment. They were going after the kinds of services that women depend on to not have an unintended pregnancy.

Planned Parenthood is at the center of the abortion fight but has been pretty quiet when debate about the HPV vaccine came up recently. Why is that?

We provide the HPV vaccine, and we have ever since it was approved by the FDA. We’re very enthusiastic supporters of this vaccine. It’s unbelievable how it’s been politicized. As a mother of two daughters, for me it’s fantastic that there’s a vaccination they could get to try to prevent HPV and cervical cancer.

The whole point got lost in that debate. My concern was that some of the statements that Congresswoman [Michele] Bachmann made were just completely unmedically founded. I’m worried that it has given people a total misimpression about the importance of this vaccination for young people.

In the efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, a lot was made of your salary—close to $400,000 per year. Planned Parenthood declined to comment on it. Why?

It’s public record. It always has been. I work hard for my salary, and I think that’s a red herring. Planned Parenthood is the most cost-effective provider of family planning services in this country. The far right has done everything they can to undermine us and to create non-issues, which I think that is.

The Taj to the Tuk-Tuk. Language in the Indian Wikiworld

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Lets just cut to the chase. Yes, the Taj Mahal is every bit as amazing as it’s supposed to be. It’s huge, it changes colors with the rays of the sun and its intricate carvings truly are breathtaking. It is worth putting up with the hassle of Agra’s touts and what may be the worst weather on the entire planet. Really, even in winter it’s pushing 90•, though at least without the sticky humidity that makes the air feel like a sponge the rest of the year. All the misery, though, doesn’t make a bit of difference when you’re in front of the gardens, surrounded by Indians dressed in their finest, everyone gasping as the Taj comes into view.

Clearly, this building is a source of pride for both humanity and the people who live in the nation in which it was built. As I wandered the grounds I was exposed to one of the most unexpected bits of local custom I would find throughout my trip. Foreigners at the Taj Mahal, who pay about 37 times more than Indians to see the site (not an exaggeration), are part of the local attraction. I was approached by dozens of people, some of whom simply handed me their children without warning, so they could take pictures. This would continue to happen at all the major historical sites, but nowhere was it more prevalent than at the Taj. I’d come halfway around the world to see their history, and that, apparently, needed to be documented.

This pride made me curious. What gems of information would I find in the Hindi Wikipedia’s entry on the Taj Mahal that weren’t present in the English Wikipedia entry? It was exciting to think that with this tool at my disposal I would learn something special, something to get me on the inside. When I excitedly looked up the entry I found … a translation of the English page. Bummer.

Surely the monsoon, a season so tied to the Indian collective consciousness it’s not just a season, it’s the inspiration for festivals and literature, has a page that explains all this, adding poetry and national identity to a scientifically leaning article. Negative. The page appears to be an early translation of the English page.

But perhaps I’m looking in the wrong place. Just because I, as a visitor, find these places and things to be fascinating and what I think define India, doesn’t mean that the local population feels the same. It makes sense that even though the monsoon affects India for months that a well written and lengthy article in English, that predates the Hindi Wikipedia page, would be translated rather than written from scratch. Many of the pages are, and several of the Indian Wikipedians I spoke with thought this was just fine. Marathi Wikipedian Mandar Kulkarni, whom I met with in Pune, envisions a Wikiworld in which articles are written in any language and translated to the others. Logistically, not so realistic, but in the true spirit of an open Internet in which one can write about his local community in his local language and share that information with anyone on earth in their local language.

I asked Kulkarni whether this translating of pages leaves out the Indian perspective on English and other non Indic languages pages, but he assured me that because so many Indians edit English Wikipedia, the Western viewpoint isn’t the only one being represented, a sentiment echoed by English Wikipedia editors Pradeep Mohandas and Pranav Curumsey.

For Indic language editors, writing in their local language is a way to keep that language alive and add to the long literary tradition while English language editors are more focused on the globalized world of knowledge. For many, whose local language is another Indic language, Hindi becomes a language of “us” or India, with the local language that of “me.” It’s the language that ties the country together, but not the one that necessarily does the same for neighbors. Further, the definition of “Hindi” is rather complex. Colloquial Hindi, used conversationally, has subtle variations dependent on the location from which the user hails. This can include loanwords from other Indic languages that would be used in one region but not another, or pronunciation. For me the Central India, New Delhi Hindi sounds the most familiar while the pronunciation used in Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra make my ears work a little harder. Wikipedia doesn’t suffer too much from these differences, first, because it’s written so the pronunciation differences don’t come info play and second, because it’s written in Modern Standard Hindi, a Sanskritized Hindi that differs from that one would use when, say, picking up a tuk-tuk on the street.

It sounds confusing, but it’s really not any different from the regional dialects and different forms of English that exist throughout the English-speaking world. The difference though, is that many students aren’t literate in Hindi at the levels they are in their local language and English. They’re fluent, but Hindi education doesn’t continue throughout school with the rigor English education does. For this reason, many editors have worked on Hindi Wikipedia as a means of practicing a language they can speak effortlessly.

But that doesn’t mean the tuk-tuk driver, or his son or daughter is left out completely. Modern Standard Hindi doesn’t always mean lengthy literary prose. Sometimes a page is just a little stub, where translation of an English page is an option but where something more local and unique can be understood by those without a high level of education and, if they choose, can be added to.

Dispatch from a far flung corner of India

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by the Wikimedia Foundation.

A towel, as any Douglas Adams fan will tell you, is a necessity for galactic travel. One would likely be helpful in India as well, but more useful is a copy of The New York Review of Books. Surprisingly, this publication, which was passed onto me as a hand-me-down of a hand-me-down has proven the most vital instrument in a backpack full of useful things. Forget the snacks, scarf, Hindi grammar book, and hand sanitizer, NYRB is the most versatile, acting as a fan, shooing away bugs, and many articles are interesting enough to pass large amounts of time with little effort while others are so exceptionally dull they promote sleep in even the noisiest of circumstances. Clearly, I have found the perfect travel companion.

My backpack might make me look like every other twenty- or thirty-something traveler trying to find the answer (man) but what I’m looking for is a little different than the tour-led culture or the off-the-grid spirituality.

While the Hindi-language Wikipedians I’ve tried to meet with have been timid – understandably, as there are only 2 active administrators and fewer than 250 active editors (compare that to English Wikipedia’s 1,500 administrators and 144,000 active users) – it’s been quite easy to explain the fellowship project to those I’ve met. My fellow travelers, the ex-pats I’ve met and many of the locals all seem intrigued by the project.

Several of the middle-class non-Wikipedian locals I spoke to didn’t know there was a Hindi-language version of the Wikipedia but thought it made sense and one journalist even said he’s considered looking at the community of Indian Wikipedians himself. Of course, when a debate came up about the ages of Bollywood stars this didn’t stop anyone from searching in English on their mobiles.

That, of course, is one of the biggest challenges to the Hindi-Wikipedian community, how do they compete for readership with the English-language version when cellular and computer technology is sold to consumers with Roman alphabet keyboards and pre-installed English-language web browsers? There is, of course, also the question where Hindi Wikipedia fits into the urban/rural landscape of India.

Surprisingly, it was in Khajuraho, a small town of fewer than 20,000 residents in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh that people seemed less willing to speak to me in Hindi. The taxi drivers and train passengers of Delhi and Rajasthan were surprised when I used the language, but in rural Madhya Pradesh the local pride is in their ability to use English. Not only has this been unexpected but it makes me wonder about the intended audience for a Hindi Wikipedia.

Clearly, for the rural residents of Khajuraho, English is the language they use to demonstrate their education while the urban editors of Hindi Wikipedia are trying to retain a linguistic heritage. It was only an elderly security guard at Khajuraho’s temples who finally engaged with me in his language after he used all the English he appeared to know. One might assume, as I did, that it would be the urban elites who wish to speak in English while the rural residents would focus on Hindi but in fact the opposite was true. Everywhere I went middle and upper class urbanites switched easily from one language to the other, perhaps aware of the colonial implications of English in a way their rural counterparts aren’t.

Even more surprising in Khajuraho than the refusal to use Hindi by the young people when speaking to a Westerner is the access to the Internet. For three days in Delhi I scrambled to get a SIM card that would offer me access to the Internet (turns out you need a passport photo here to get connected, or know the right people). Wifi was almost nowhere, even several high-end hotels told me one could plug into the ethernet but there was no wifi available. Jaipur, a city of more than 2.5 million has intermittent and very slow internet and my cellular internet is useless. In tiny Khajuraho however several restaurants announce free wifi and jewelry shops double as Internet access points, not that I’ve yet actually seen anyone taking advantage of these technological options, and I image they are also exceedingly slow.

As an outsider I can only make educated guesses about both the language and internet usage questions that I have. Rather than speculate, I turned to Ajay Awasthi, a local documentary filmmaker and cofounder of an educational and environmental charity called Global Voices. Awasthi confirmed my suspicions that in the rural community English is the language that designates education, which is why everyone here insists on speaking to me in my native tongue. Because Khajuraho is a center of tourism in an area largely dependent on agriculture, students here also learn a little French and a little Spanish alongside English and Hindi to allow them access to the tourist rupees. While initially it may seem positive that local kids are given an alternative to agriculture, Awasthi warns that many young people leave school as soon as they’re able to earn a living and are not truly becoming educated. Of course, here lies the moral dilemma for the tourist as well. When a young person asks for money for his education it feels terrible to look the child in the eye and say no, but one does just this in hopes that the same child will stay in school longer. Providing access to information in the local, native language is exactly why Wikipedians are working in Hindi (as well as a handful of other Indic language Wikipedias). Their work demonstrates and reminds us that these languages have a long history that is deeply tied to the communities who use them.

As for internet, Awasthi says the majority of the computers in town are internet only machines set up for tourist use. When locals do use computers, he says, they do so in English and mostly as communication devices. These young people aren’t searching the web for information, they’re simply logging on to connect with friends. That the technology they have is in English is telling. In fact, even the small coins, worth one and two rupees, don’t carry Devanagari numbers, and instead are emblazoned with the familiar 1 and 2 numeral, accompanied by the image of a hand holding up the corresponding fingers for those without basic numeral literacy.

For those working on Hindi Wikipedia this means the rural population, which could benefit from the efforts of these Wikipedians, are unlikely to ever come across the project. Of course, this doesn’t mean the project is doomed or the work done isn’t important. As internet usage and media expands into rural areas young people are more and more likely to experience urban lifestyles and in time many of these same people may begin to seek out more information about those other walks of life.

Thus far, every step of my trip has benefited from the generosity and knowledge of others. Before long I’ll have read the entire New York Review of Books and its usefulness will diminish but I have no doubt that something unexpected will sneak in to take its place as just the thing I need at just the moment I need it.

The Far End of the Maghreb

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published by Current Intelligence.

A boarded up movie theatre in Marrakech’s Gueliz neighborhood tellingly demonstrates the city’s struggle with both poverty and modernity. It sits abandoned, barbed wire preventing access to windows and doors, a block from a bustling street filled with European-style bars and restaurants, many beckoning visitors with 1950s-era neon signs. Scattered among the aging, once high-end hotels are the signs of what’s likely to become of them. Multi-story empty buildings, closed off on the ground floor, their window openings, devoid of glass, allow the weather to seep in. The Gueliz, once the French enclave of the city, is no longer new, as its other moniker, Ville Nouvelle, implies. Instead, it has become a dying hub of Marrakech’s struggling middle-class. Few of the buildings suggest that they have been repurposed, their lifespans seemingly limited to the businesses that once thrived within their walls.

Were it not for the mix of low-end fashion, galleries offering affordable contemporary art, and beat up late-model cars, the Gueliz would seem frozen in time. It moves along, but at a pace that has been left behind by the Europeans who built it.

As pundits fill television screens, offering predictions about which Middle Eastern states will fall next to waves of protest, Morocco does, from the inside, seem relatively safe. From the Gueliz to the traditional Medina, newspaper stands dominate major intersections and offer Arabic, French, German and English papers and magazines. According to the CIA’sWorld Factbook, 53.2 percent of the total population can read at least some of those papers. Of these, 65.7 percent are men and 39.6 percent are women. There is a range of information about the rest of the world on offer to them, and for those lucky enough to have internet-capable devices. There’s an outdoor garden, a literal cyber-park, that offers access to the online world. For the rest, the satellite dishes that spring up from nearly every rooftop in the city channel information from around the world.

An air of oppression certainly exists, but it isn’t crushing. Marrakech may also be unique, in that so much of its economy is dependent upon outsiders. Evidence of a tourist-based economy are everywhere, from the luxury hotels that line the road from the Medina to the Guilez, to the tour groups wandering through narrow, high-walled streets peppered with impoverished idle youth, to street signs that point only to sightseeing destinations and roads leading to other cities.

Nearly all of those sightseeing spots are stunning if dilapidated examples of Islamic architecture. Outside them, local boys offer hash for sale in a handful of Western languages while school-age children bat sad eyes in efforts to exchange packets of tissues for a few dirham. The history that hides behind the high walls is inaccessible to the very people to whom it belongs - part of an unspoken, subtle antagonism between Moroccans and outsiders. Too much struggle on offer and the tourists won’t come, making that struggle even worse.

Unemployment in Morocco already sits at approximately 9.8 percent, only slightly higher than the United States’ estimated 9.6 percent or Egypt’s 9.7 percent. Government is largely invisible, with private security guards most prominent at the city’s train station and a mixture of private and public uniformed police forces in the Medina’s main square. The protests that took place across the country last Sunday are unsurprising but not fraught with the urgency found in similar ones across the continent. Rather than calling for an overthrow of the ruling powers, Moroccans demanded the king introduce constitutional reforms that would limit his power. Easier said than done: he’s part of a ruling line that claims to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad and took power in 1631 — a power declared in the constitution to be sacred. The reforms that protesters called for limit the king’s power to dissolve the government or to have the final say in government appointments, giving that power back to voters.

The protests in Morocco are less likely to be broadcast around the world than others taking place in North Africa. This isn’t because they’re less important. They’re just less dramatic. Rather than a people trying to topple a longstanding government, Moroccans are trying to compromise with the system that already exists. Reform might not play out well on television but it certainly is just as extraordinary.

Reshape the constitution to make life better for the people of Morocco and perhaps that beautiful old cinema can have another life too.

All Jazzed for Al-Jazeera

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published by Current Intelligence.

When little girls and boys dream of becoming journalists they imagine something similar (though perhaps with a bit less time detained) to what Al Jazeera’s reporters have been through in the last two weeks. Journalism, in its most idealized state, includes not only reporting on the exciting events of the world, but participating in them. It also, no matter how much objectivity one shoots for, means standing up for what’s right.

It’s that standing up that’s caused an Al Jazeera English blackout in the United States since its inception in November of 2006. It’s no secret that America’s right wing has protested Al Jazeera since its inception as anti-American — a shaky label that, if included to mean anti-U.S. government, the right’s darling FOX News certainly could share.

Now, however, as people find themselves captivated with the ongoing protests in Egypt, it’s that strong editorial stance that seems to be drawing people to the internet for a look at the channel. Al Jazeera has successfully demonstrated itself to be the definitive source for information on the story. Americans are sharing links to AJE on Facebook and Twitter, The New York Times reports that the online campaign to bring the channel to the U.S. is working, and talks with Comcast will be held later this month.

All this is great, because Al Jazeera might be what the American television news landscape needs right now to focus its attention back on the actual events of the day, and less on its own rhetoric and misreporting.

There’s one little problem though. While Americans found themselves supporting Egyptians during the heat of protests, the story has already begun to fade from the headlines. Julian Assange has found his face splashed on the front pages of the Guardianand The New York Times, while the Egypt spotlight has dimmed. So too will American enthusiasm for Al Jazeera.

I’m not saying they’ll stop watching and start uninformedly talking smack again. Al Jazeera has proven itself a network that will relentlessly chase a story it thinks worth telling, even as its journalists are detained, its offices raided and its feed officially banned. Americans will do what they always do (which means going back to whatever it was they were doing before). A few might put AJE into their news rotation but with the heavy focus on the Arab world, most will turn away, in that other American tendency: isolationism.

As life returns to normal for some Egyptians who can’t keep their shops closed any longer, so too will Western news habits. Just a week ago most couldn’t help but ask which country would be next. Most, unfortunately, won’t tune in to find out.

Protests in Pretty Places

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published by Current Intelligence.

According to a 2010 report (pdf) by the U.S.-based watchdog organization Freedom House, nearly 1/4 of the planet’s 194 countries are “Not Free”, freedom in this sense based on the political rights and civil liberties of the country’s population. Not surprisingly, the stretch of North Africa (running from Algeria to Egypt), where protests in recent weeks have seen governments toppled and online communication sites such as Twitter and Facebook blacked out, rank high on the lacking-political-rights-and-civil-liberties scale.

To the West, “Partly Free” Morocco has managed to stay out of the headlines for the most part — despite its freedom rating falling in the last year and a case of self-immolation by a young man in Casablanca last Friday.

East of the North African protest strip, of course, the freedom ratings aren’t much better. From Jordan to Afghanistan, with pockets of partial freedom here and there and the exception of a very free Israel (Occupied Territories notwithstanding), what in many places is democracy in name only is being challenged by people who want undemocratic leadership out.

Tunisians began protesting in mid-December and it took weeks of sustained and on-going protests for President Ben Ali to leave. Egypt, thus far, has one full day under its belt and reports from Algeria imply protest there are unsustained. By cutting off social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, governments hope to quell efforts to organize potential protests but reports (largely on these same sites) indicate that protesters are still managing to relay information to others about assembly points (after all, it worked during the French Revolution… ). Reuters is reporting Egypt has banned demonstrations and will detain protesters, a move that will likely lead to more protests rather than less.

But while the West focuses on protests in pretty places it knows better for their tourist potential than for their internal politics (I’ve already seen London taxis with Egypt and Tunisia travel advertisements on them today) some less dramatic protests also plague the region.

What should stand out most about the demonstrations is how they mirror what’s been happening in the West. Tunisians didn’t oust their president after 24 years simply because two and a half decades is long enough. Rising food costs and high unemployment became intolerable to a people who saw their leaders as corrupt and out of touch. Certainly the London student protesters of late last year, fighting rising tuition costs and feeling deceived by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg (who promised to end fees altogether) can relate. Just today the BBC reported 20 percent of university graduates are unable to find work. Spain, of course, has such a high unemployment rate, and has for so long, that one more bout of unemployment is viewed as an inevitability. Around the globe there are fears of higher costs for food, oil and other natural resources, at risk of rising due to inflation. McDonald’s, that Platonic form of cheap food, is raising its prices — though the more cynical among us will chalk that up as just another move to boost profits.

Lets not forget too that in Pakistan, Karachi University ended its fall term in a fit of violence and protests, starting classes in January two weeks later than scheduled. Here the issue is largely one of gaining political control over the university in the country’s ongoing political disputes. Rather than protest government control and partisan bickering, Americans simply scoff at the seating arrangement for the State of the Union Address, criticising every word while not actually taking action on governmental inaction. In fact, even the press in the U.S. has become so used to rising costs, unemployment and political infighting that it barely reported that the U.S.’ old nemesis Osama bin Laden — you know, the archetypal evil villain, the one who inspired military operations in Afghanistan — released another tape. Not that most Americans seem too bothered. Even the one-time sole representative of all that is bad on earth has become a footnote.

Maybe, for the west, the problem seems too big. Obama’s speech last night talked of the need to freeze spending on everything except defence and major social programs, while his government made more than US$16.5 billion in arms deals with the Near East/South Asia region last year alone. Maybe the low numbers for “Not Free” political rights and civil liberties have something to do with all those weapons in the hands of oppressive governments. Good thing the one selling them all is rated the most “Free” a country can be.

The Panda With the Dragon Tattoo

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published by Current Intelligence.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, an organisation so fond of the Giant Panda that it employed the West’s only one as its logo in the 1960s, there are only approximately 2,500 of them left in the wild, anywhere. China’s rapidly growing economy hasn’t exactly helped the bears thrive but conservation efforts have grown in the last few decades to ensure that the loveable critters don’t vanish completely.

In the past, China has offered pandas to zoos around the world as part of what’s been dubbed “Panda Diplomacy.” Though the practice officially ended in 1984, a press release noting Monday’s announcement that Edinburgh has been granted two pandas demonstrates that pandas and diplomacy go together like bears and bamboo. “The project represents the culmination of five years of political and diplomatic negotiation at the highest level,” it states, “and it is anticipated the giant pandas will arrive in their new home as soon as a date is agreed.”

China’s other long-term diplomatic project, also culminating this week, doesn’t involve fur and probably won’t excite nearly as many school children. It has greater implications. I’m talking, of course, about the handover of long disputed territory from Tajikistan to China. The deal was cut more than a decade ago for the handover of the 1,000 square mile track of remote mountain land (and sorry panda fans, it’s not really habitable for that particular endangered species), but the Tajik government didn’t actually ratify the handover until Wednesday.

According to the BBC, “it is not clear where exactly the land to be ceded is or how many people live there.” But apparently it was all resolved peacefully, save for Tajik opposition leader Mukhiddin Kabiri calling the move unconstitutional.

While the move may be largely symbolic, it is, like the trading of pandas, important to the world’s second largest economy, second largest by land area, and which is getting a little bigger in Central Asia. The stretch of territory in question is in the Pamir mountains, and borders both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The English-language Chinese People’s Daily newspaper reported this week that China and Pakistan are ramping up economic efforts to tie the two countries together. Meanwhile, relations with India are strained due to an incident in September 2010 in which it accused Chinese forces of entering Kashmir and threatening construction workers. In Tajikistan, China initially sought 11,000 square kilometers, and it currently claims rights on 90,000 square kilometers in northern India. Relations between China and India have been less than friendly since a 1962 war over territory, and China’s growth in Central Asia is sure keep India’s attention focused.

Whither Democratic Pakistan?

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published by Current Intelligence.

A near collapse of the government, a high profile assassination, and approximately 25 dead in aerial attacks. And that’s just what’s happened so far in 2011. In Pakistan.

Rather than rehash all the happenings I’m going to assume that if you’re here, you’re already moderately informed about what’s been going on in the past week. Instead, I’m going to look back a little further in order to focus on the future of Pakistan.

Late last fall, Pakistani human rights activist and lawyer Asma Jahangir spoke in London about the future of democracy in her country. Speaking to an audience of about 200, mostly Pakistani lawyers and other left-leaning elites, Jahangir expressed fears that Pakistan would return to the dictatorships of the past but was optimistic that the country could move forward into a more functional democracy.

In Pakistan, “democracy is a growing phenomena”, she said, adding “you can’t run a country like a company, and that’s what’s happening” now. In order to give the power back to the people, Jahangir laid out a twelve point plan that included everything from a freer press, to more accountability and transparency.

She didn’t specifically discuss the blasphemy law that allegedly inspired a member Punjab Governor Salman Taseer’s security staff to assassinate him. She did allude to changes in such legislation, criticising an atmosphere in which peace activists are considered anti-Pakistan and in which standing up for religious minorities risks being tarred as anti-Islam. For Jahangir, these perceptions will only change with more civilian control of the the decision-making process, and a press that’s allowed to focus on alternative voices. The latter is developing, she said, but suggested a press council that does not include the government, instead made up entirely of self-regulating media practitioners. Article 19 of the Pakistani constitution guarantees freedom of speech to individuals and to the press, “subject to any reasonable restrictions imposed by the law in the interest of the glory of Islam or the integrity, security or defense of Pakistan.” But journalists are still intimidated by police and face threats of physical violence.

Jahangir spoke of the need for a stronger, institutionalized opposition. This, for her, includes the appointment of judges who can assess the constitutionality of new and proposed laws, and for committees that would focus solely on government corruption. “We need to oppose for the sake of opposing”, she said, highlighting the view that disagreements in governance leads to better representation for people.

“Even the most liberal parties cooperate with conservatives to make deals that get people not to vote”, she said, pointing out that not everyone in Pakistan enjoys fair representation. Kashmir, of course, is the most obvious (and taboo) case in point. According to Jahangir, the judges of the northern province are tied to the ISI — the Pakistani intelligence service. Decisions about the province are made exclusively in Islamabad, without input from Kashmiri’s themselves. Given those conditions, Jahangir doesn’t believe that democracy can thrive in Pakistan.

She also brought up the fact that large tracts of land are being sold to Gulf countries, claiming that the issues that this potentially raises are “not brought up because opposing the Gulf is opposing Islam.” For Jahangir, what’s key is being able to discuss these things openly with a variety of voices being able to chime in. It requires a clearer electoral process, where everyone is assured of a vote that will be counted and where electoral preference be exercised without fear of repercussion. In order to do this, she believes a democratization of the political parties needs first to occur — wherein new politicians are allowed to enter the conversation. That women play a large role, 33 percent according to Jahangir, is a step in the right direction. But she called for still more, arguing that women are representative of the pockets of democracy that flourish in the country.

Jahangir’s criticisms and recommendations for improvements must surely resonate with the citizens of democracies elsewhere making similar arguments about their own systems. In some ways that means Pakistan is on the right path toward a stronger democracy — so long as people like Jahangir keep fighting for it. Clearly, Pakistan has a long way to go and not everyone agrees with Jahangir’s views, but that she and others can and do speak up despite the death threats they receive is a powerful statement.

SUNFLOWER SEEDS — The Changes of Ai Weiwei

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published by The End of Being.

It was inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less unfortunate.

When Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds opened at Britain’s Tate Modern in October, art-lovers were treated to a unique gallery experience. Not only was the massive hall filled with millions of tiny, hand-made, porcelain sunflower seeds — unique in its own right — but you could walk across them, feeling and hearing the crunching below your feet. Ten days later, the museum realized the dust from the trampled seeds was going to lead to a fine dust that Tate Modern curator Juliet Bingham said on the museum’s website, “could be damaging to health following repeated inhalation over a long period of time.”

It was an unfortunate announcement, but one that didn’t come as a huge surprise.

Even more unfortunate, it wasn’t the last change the piece was to go through. In fact, now the original mission to “look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today,” has been tread upon in a way that makes the evolution of the piece even more interesting than the work itself.

I didn’t get the chance to see Sunflower Seeds when it first opened because the disadvantage of living in a place like London is I always have the chance to get there eventually. So long as I show up before the show closes, in this case May 12, I’ll get to see it. But this meant I missed the first incarnation of the artwork. Instead, the first time I saw it, in early November, a rope was set up along the part of the work closest the entrance and I could look out across the vast field of seeds. The only interaction available was to reach my hands to the ground and feel the seeds closest me.

I didn’t take any and put them in my pocket. But, because others did, which meant that when I made it back in mid-December things had changed again. This time the seeds had been pushed to the side, leaving a long aisle down the long-side of the piece where before the work had gone all the way to the back wall of the gallery. This was great because, like the original orientation, you could walk and see just how many uniform seeds made up the piece. Sadly though, the rope was at a more museumish distance from the work — about a foot beyond arms length — so it could be seen but not touched.

Suddenly the close look Weiwei created became a distanced gawking. A position most people who frequent the Tate Modern are used to. The uniformity of the seeds is highlighted and the minor differences fade from view. No longer is the exchange tangible. Instead we are left at a distance where we can see but cannot interact.

I wanted to run my fingers through each and every single one of those seeds. I wanted to rest my body on top of them as if to make a snow angel. And yes, I wanted to pocket one. But now I can’t do any of those things.

Sunflower Seeds is still beautiful, but instead of being a dialogue with its audience it has become just another installation.

See Ya: The Top Job Losses of 2010

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published by Current Intelligence.

Every year the movers and shakers of the world shift roles and power changes hands. This year was no different. Some people got sacked. Others left for greener pastures. Lets take a look at some of the big ones and relive the broken promises, gaffs and controversies that led to an interesting year in job-loss.

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John Magee (Bishop, Catholic Church). Bishop Magee actually tenured his resignation in March 2009 but it wasn’t until a year later that Pope Benedict XVI accepted it. A report noted that Magee, a former secretary to Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II, had failed to report child sexual abuse by several Irish priests in the 1990s in his Cork, Ireland diocese.

Gordon Brown (Leader, Labour Party, United Kingdom). After an election that left no party with a majority win, Labour Party leader Gordon Brown hoped to align the Liberal Democrats with Labour by stepping down. Brown’s ploy didn’t work, however, as the Lib Dems formed a coalition government with the Conservative Party, making David Cameron the UK Prime Minister. Ed Miliband was named Brown’s replacement in September.

Horst Koehler (President, Germany). Though not a position with a lot of real power, Germany’s President found himself at the center of controversy after commenting in a radio interview that the deployment of troops to Afghanistan was necessary to protect German economic interests. Accused of promoting gunboat diplomacy, Koehler resigned his role.

Yukio Hatoyama (Prime Minister, Japan). Elected amid promises to close down a controversial US airbase on Okinawa, Prime Minister Hatoyama left a mere eight months after taking office. The unpopular Futenma airbase wasn’t the only stain on Hatoyama’s leadership. It was plagued with funding scandals, and upon leaving office, Hatoyama asked his party’s Secretary General, Ichiro Ozawa, to step down as well.

Stanley McChrystal (General, United States Army). A Rolling Stone article was the downfall of the Commander of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan. McChrystal and staff were caught out disagreeing with President Obama’s strategy for the war, as well as for disparaging comments about other high-level US government officials. McChrystal was replaced with Iraq “surge” mastermind David Petraeus.

Mark Hurd (CEO, Hewlett-Packard). The attorney for a woman who filed a sexual harassment claim against HP CEO Mark Hurd argued there was no sexual relationship; the claim instead uncovered tens of thousands of dollars in misappropriations.

Yuri Luzhkov (Mayor, Moscow). It’s not completely clear what went down inside the Kremlin between Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and President Dmitry Medvedev. Whether Luzhkov, one of Russia’s most powerful politicians, was involved in corruption or simply disagreed with the President, he was shown the door. His cries of slander and lies went unheard.

Tony Hayward (CEO, BP). The April BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was one of the worst environmental disasters on record. It was statements by then CEO Tony Hayward that made him an international villain: “there’s no one who wants this over more than I do,” he noted. “I would like my life back” The comments didn’t win him any friends, inside or outside the company.

Rahm Emanuel (White House Chief of Staff). After longtime Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley announced he would not run for re-election after more than 20 years in office, the notoriously impatient Emanuel left his position as President Obama’s right-hand man in order to enter the mayoral race. Emanuel detractors then immediately claimed that as a non-resident he was ineligible, an argument that was quickly shot down. He’s expected to win the late-February race.

Kim Tae-young (Defense Minister, South Korea). The May resignation of Defense Minister Kim Tae-young wasn’t actually accepted until November, despite ongoing tensions within South Korea over North Korea’s sinking of one of its war ships in March. Government leaders argued that South Korea’s more technologically advanced military should have been able to prevent such an attack, and lawmakers called for Kim’s resignation several months after he tendered it.

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Business leaders and politicians weren’t the only ones to find themselves without work. Four U.S. journalists broke the cardinal rule of journalism by becoming the story, when personal opinions led to their losing their jobs. Some fared better than others.

Helen Thomas. Thomas, who covered US presidents from Eisenhower to Obama, retired after unpopular comments she made about Israel and Palestine were replayed as part of the news cycle. Despite apologizing for the comments, Thomas has since held firm that she spoke her mind and felt pressure to quit because of her criticism of Israel.

Dave Weigel. Washington Post hired blogger Dave Weigel as its conservative voice, but he resigned after the public release of email in which he made disparaging comments about many of the conservative leaders he was hired to cover (and demonstrated significant personal biases that undermined his credibility as an “objective” reporter). Weigel didn’t stay out of work long, being hired by online news magazine Slate, which is owned by… the Washington Post.

Octavia Nasr. ”Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” A simple tweet, but one that led CNN to fire its 20-year veteran Middle East expert. Nasr’s efforts to explain that she wasn’t expressing approval of Fadlallah’s policies failed to convince.

Rick Sanchez. CNN fired Rick Sanchez for comments made about The Daily Show anchor Jon Stewart (Sanchez called him a “bigot”). Sanchez later retracted but claimed Stewart was prejudiced and uninformed. Stewart, true to form, took on the comments on his program.

Juan Williams. After appearing on FOX News and saying that people in “Muslim garb” on airplanes made him nervous, NPR let Williams go. FOX promptly snapped him up, on a multi-million dollar contract.

Antihero VS Enemy

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published by Current Intelligence.

Web users’ contradictory feelings about the internet came to a head a few days ago with the announcement of Time magazine’s “Person of the Year.” Very few people, it seems, agree that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg should have beat out WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. The former is seen as a mostly one-dimensional, awkward web geek while the latter has mystique. Zuckerberg is merely maligned while Assange is either loved or hated.

But the mission of these two men isn’t very different and, in truth, it is Zuckerberg and Facebook that more directly affects our everyday interaction with the world. Where the two men’s worldviews deviate is a matter of perspective. Both seek to bring an unprecedented level of transparency to the world. For Zuckerberg that transparency is individual. He wants us all to know more about the people with whom we interact on a daily basis. The side-effect of this is, of course, that we also know more about those with whom we used to interact more frequently than we would if we saw them every day. Social networks show us that old friends we haven’t seen in years have babies or are getting divorced. Catching up time with old friends is made nearly redundant.

Assange, on the other hand, couldn’t give a rats ass about us personally. His mission is to expose the inner workings of government, hundreds and thousands of documents at a time. He wants us to learn every crummy thing a diplomat has ever said about another diplomat, every report that’s every been filed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Like it or not, though, Zuckerberg’s formula of wall posts and status updates inform the way Assange’s information is being disseminated. WikiLeak’s Iraq and Afghan Logs came out in two big blasts, which were acknowledged by the public before it went back to what it was doing before. This time, with Cablegate, Assange wised up, releasing documents daily and in small bits. He’s turned the large scale dump into a trickle of status updates that permeates the newsfeed.

This, of course, is intertwined with Assange’s own daily drama; turning himself in to British police, subsequently being freed on bail, and so on. Much like the comments thread of a shared news article on Facebook, the story itself (the leak) gets lost in the personal asides and tangents that bind the commenters.

Assange has logged a lot of likes under his status. But he, like Zuckerberg, remains an enigma. And that is what makes the whole relationship between these two men and the world they seek to change so interesting. Neither is guilty of the overshare, and what we know about both comes from the media. Primarily that enjoyably annoying force called Gawker, which takes a gossipy bent on news and a newsy bent on gossip. It’s Gawker that stalks Zuckerberg outside his house and around town, turning the tables on the private man who inspires public outcries every time his company changes its privacy settings. It’s Gawker that publishes old emails sent by a 30-something Assange to a 19 year old student. It’s also Gawker whose editorial stance of making fun of everything under the sun, got its servers hacked and the email addresses and passwords of commenters flung far and wide onto the web.

This breach of security and exposure of personal information probably would have seen a lot more criticism if Facebook hadn’t already prepared us en masse for mass, non-consensual leaks of personal data.

So while WikiLeaks and Assange are the cause du jour it really was Facebook that was preparing us for this throughout 2010. A year ago, document leaks like those done under WikiLeaks auspices would have seemed like more information we could handle. The fact that they contained little that was Earth-shattering would have made them seem superfluous. But in a world where Grandma is on Facebook and can see how much you enjoyed that microwave popcorn and Hot Tub Time Machine, there’s really no such thing as overshare.

Kettle Cop-Out

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published by Current Intelligence.

I’m able to write this in the immediate aftermath of a 323 for, 302 against (majority of 21) vote in favor of raising UK tuition fees, because I caved in and came home. Fearing being kettled into the protest for the entirety of a cold London night, I marched from Russell Square to Parliament with tens of thousands of students at about 1 p.m. today.

With a heavy police presence, I stayed on the periphery of the protest and attempted to get a close look via an alternate route. From Russell Square we winded out way down Southhampton Row to Kingsway Place, marched down The Strand and were diverted through St. James Park. After sneaking through an alleyway to avoid what looked like a strategic placement of military police a few of us watched as Westminster Abbey was closed up and smoke from a few errant protester’s smoke bombs wafted in the air.

After heading back through St. James Park, passing the Churchill War Room and the Foreign Office, we attempted to get a closer look at the protest via Whitehall, the road that, as of writing, has been open and closed all day due to kettling of protesters. Around 3 p.m. people were allowed off Whitehall, onto Trafalgar Square, but we weren’t allowed in. Police there told us to go back the way we’d come — where it had been obvious to us we would only get in if we were willing to commit to the possibility of being there all night.

According to the Guardian’s live-blog, if we’d gone in we’d probably be there still.

Because the United Kingdom offers the right to demonstrate, this seemed highly undemocratic — a view many people shared with police as they saw potential protesters turned away from Whitehall. Upon meeting up with someone else, I was told where we’d just come from was closed off as well - at the time, again, you could get out but not in. Because I’d attempted to stay on the periphery and avoid the inevitable kettle, I actually couldn’t demonstrate.

Why not go full force and stick it out then? On the march to Parliament there were several groups of young people who were unmistakably trouble-makers. On a warm, sunny afternoon, they already had their faces covered and were looking for any excuse to riot. My partner was asked by a group of protesters for a hex key so they could disassemble the barriers.

I believe in peaceful protests, as I think most of the protesters in Parliament Square tonight do. Rather than barricade them all in to avoid the violent and destructive behavior of a few, it seems that democracy would require the police to maintain order by finding those bent on harm and keeping the remainder of the protesters safe — with the ability to leave at any time.

I left early for my own safety more than anything else, certainly more than for comfort. But doing so certainly doesn’t feel good, because demonstrating and showing support for things in which we believe in a safe and effective manner is what we’re told democracy is all about.

Students, current and future, don’t just lose out because tuition fees are going up. They lose out because their right to be heard and to be represented in an honest manner was disregarded today.

Hell No, We Won't Read

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published by Current Intelligence

Today is a special day for British students. It’s National Student Strike day, a day student organizers around the country are gathering to protest the tuition hikes that will be the result of current government cuts. This comes two weeks after a demonstration that made news worldwide, after protesters entered a building housing the offices of the governing Conservative Party, and lit several fires inside.

Organizers of today’s strike have urged students not to repeat the violence and destruction of two weeks ago, instead calling for a carnival-like atmosphere that shows the playfulness and personality rather than the anger of the nation’s student population.

It’s an interesting time to be a student, especially one from overseas. In my case I chose, in part, to study in the UK because of the cost. Yes, the quality and prestige of the education was the real draw, but when I was accepted and realized that even as a student paying overseas tuition rates, the price was better than it would have been in America.

For years, I’ve heard about this mythological, golden age of American education when college was affordable. A time before Reagan took office and tuition prices skyrocketed. I’ve always taken these stories with a grain of salt. My in-state undergraduate tuition, at a large and well-respected university, was manageable — paid for with part-time odd jobs and a little help with the rent (by far the most expensive part of living in a college town) from my parents.

Less than 10 years later, tuition at that same school is two and a half times what it was in the late 90s and early 2000s. Non-resident tuition is nearly US$29,000 per year, or US$2,000 less than what I made five years after graduation, at a job I probably wouldn’t have had without the subsequent Masters degree I got a few years later from a private institution.

Undergraduate students here in the UK pay about £3,500 per year, or US$5,500 — a couple thousand more than I paid for my undergraduate education, but a couple thousand dollars less than I would be paying if I were to start college now at my alma mater. With the rate hikes students are facing, those costs to go to as high at £9,000 per year, around US$15,000.

As an American, it’s hard to be outraged at that hike. In the U.S., according to an October 31 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sarah Lawrence (a small, prestigious liberal arts college in New York state) costs US$57,384 a year, and a non-California resident has to come up with US$50,649 to attend the University of California at Berkeley (that’s a mere US$75 less that it costs to go to Harvard, by the way). But that little hippie California town name glares out at me. Berkeley. Where professors refused to play along with McCarthy’s persecution of suspected Communists. The home of City Lights Bookstore. The hub of free-thinking in America, where it turns out thinking comes with a very hefty price tag.

If the tuition caps in the United Kingdom are lifted, and next year’s students are forced to pay twice what they pay now to get an education, what’s to stop schools from continuing to raise fees, until they come to mirror the oppressive cost of private (and now even public) education in the United States?

Maybe that golden age in the U.S. isn’t so mythological after all. And maybe the students gathering in Trafalgar Square can help the one that exists right now in the United Kingdom remain a reality.

LADY WARRIORS OF AFGHANISTAN

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by The End of Being.

In journalism there’s a little thing called burying a lede, which means you’ve told a nice story but the real heart of what you’re covering is somewhere near the bottom, where not everyone who starts the story is sure to find it. A great example of this comes from a Sunday, October 3 New York Timesabout the female Marines working in Marja, Afghanistan.

We get two and a half, well-written and interesting, pages about 40 ladies who are “attached” to combat troops, skirting the Pentagon’s rules against women in combat.

The story begins with a line that could easily be followed up with this revelation, “They expected tea, not firefights,” but instead waits until its third section break (page three of the online edition of the story) to reveal just how loopholes to these regulations are being found and exploited. In fact, “in a common side step during nearly a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, women are “attached,” rather than assigned, to combat units. The female engagement teams simply say they “accompany” Marine infantry units on their patrols,” tells us that the rules are being bent on a regular basis.

I’m truly sorry that these women have been shot at, lost their friends in battle and that long deployments has ruined the romantic partnerships of more than one of these women, but these problems are no different from the trials that face men in their same situation. The difference between these women, and what the Times glossed over, is the exploitation of both the women and the rules the U.S. military is currently engaged in. Sending a group of soldiers to a large base for one night before putting them back in the line of fire hardly constitutes their staying temporarily in a combat zone. In immigration it’s called a visa run, and it can cause problems when a person tries to legitimately gain access to a visa.

Capitalizing on these kind of loopholes assumes that no one is paying much attention, which may well be the case in both the Afghanistan war and the East Asian countries where such immigration practices are common, but a lack of accountability doesn’t make either right or legal.

Sound and Vision: The Albuquerque Museum’s unusual color swap

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by the Weekly Alibi.

As far as cognitive peculiarities go, synesthesia seems pretty sweet. Instead of just hearing sounds, the brain translates the aural with another sense function, say vision or taste. What is for one person an F sharp can, for the synesthete, be a green- or raspberry-hued note.

Scientists have a hard time putting numbers on how many people are affected by synesthesia because many who have it don’t realize it’s any different from how anyone else sees the world. Of course, there are also varying degrees, so while one person might be flooded with a wash of color every time he reads a book, another might only get a faint whiff of chocolate cake when hearing a jazz quartet.

These types of perceptual differences are the subject of the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History’s exhibition Sensory Crossovers: Synesthesia in American Art. Though the works are largely confined to walls, the artists’ secondary sensory experiences bring a multidisciplinary feel to much of the art on display.

For the critic, a show such asSynesthesiacreates a problem. The collection is meant to be viewed without a focus on the intellect as much as an attention to feeling and reaction. Possibly the most fascinating part of this experiential viewing was finding myself in disagreement with the artists’ vision of the world. In her works “Lil Hardin and Louis Armstrong” and “Toscanini at NBC,” Theresa Bernstein’s use of muted, earthy colors looked like I think the music of these artists would. But “Charlie Parker” caused me to recoil. Green?! Charlie Parker doesnot sound green. Ever. Maybe, every once in a great while a dark, brownish yellow.

It seems ridiculous, in retrospect, to so adamantly disagree with an artist’s choice of colors based on a purely gut feeling, but that experience came through again and again throughout Synesthesia.

Emil Bisttram’s “Musical Notes” made me so hungry upon walking in the gallery that I avoided it until the end—then hit up Little Red Hamburger Hut on Mountain on the way back Downtown because I thought I was dying, even though I’d just eaten. Seriously, I blame that whole adventure on Bisttram, whose work I normally glance at and think nothing of. Oddly, it wasn’t this work’s bright-red, fish-shaped object as focal point and tiny chopstick and sushi-like satellites that made me hungry (I didn’t even notice the shapes until later)—it was the sheen of the oil paints. Something about the glossy red, green and yellow made me crave a burger. I noticed the shape later and actually wished I were craving sushi, as I like it better than beef.

Was this all an acquired synesthetic experience, a psychosomatic adoption of a neurological condition I’ve actually said I wish I had? Maybe. Or perhaps some of the artists in the show are simply so effective at sharing their way of seeing the world, it rubs off a bit.

Arthur Garfield Dove’s “Fog Horns” looks like fog horns might sound; but whether that comes across to every viewer before he or she sees the title is impossible to know.

Charles E. Burchfield’s watercolor and ink on paper “Telegraph Music” vibrates with a sense of sound and uses the wavy lines we’ve been exposed to in sound drawings since childhood.

The literal works in Synesthesia often come across as an artist’s example of what they think synesthesia would look like, whereas several of the more abstract ones, such as Ira Jean Belmont’s “A Color-Music Expression of an Excerpt from Richard Wagner’s ‘Prelude to Lohengrin’ ” or e.e. cummings’ “Sound,” appear to be more genuine expressions of experience. cummings’ painting, in particular, looks like one of his poems, clearly defined forms and relationships but without the need to adhere to obvious structure.

An eight-piece series titled “Symphony #2” by Horace T. Pierce is astounding in its form due mostly to the adoption of his vision of music into contemporary conceptions. The watercolor and airbrush on paper works are geometric expressions of music that look like the still frames of music visualization software, though Pierce’s work uses a less neon or psychedelic color scheme. “Symphony #2” was painted between 1949 and 1952 but takes a familiar shape. It makes me wonder if synesthetic experiences are not only similar to one another but can be understood by those who aren’t affected by them directly.

The show, which moves to the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, N.Y., after its four-month run in Albuquerque, features a strong collection that reaches beyond the visual to speak to its audience. A cell phone tour accompanies several of the works, though it can be a touch didactic, steering viewers to a certain experience, rather than allowing them to simply have it.

Deliquesce: SITE Santa Fe tries to extend its branches a little too far

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by the Weekly Alibi.

I remember the exact moment I fell in love with moving image arts. It was September of 2002, somewhere on the upper spiral of New York City’s Guggenheim Museum. I entered a little room and there, projected on the wall, was Shirin Neshat’s “Passage,” an approximately 12-minute film depicting the funeral processions of Iranian men and women. I happened to walk into the screening room just at the beginning of the film and sat through it twice, unable to articulate what I had just seen and felt. Afterward, I wandered through the rest of the exhibition Moving Pictures in something of a daze.

More than a year ago I heard this upcoming SITE Santa Fe exhibition was to feature video art. I have been anxiously awaiting it ever since. The Dissolve, however, a show that features more than 20 works, left me in a very different daze than Neshat’s work and Moving Pictures. Instead of being inspired and filled with joy, my world more open and more complete than it had been before, I wandered out of the building after two hours, sat down with a beer, and tried to realign the aural and the visual.

There is some amazing, and potentially transformative, work in The Dissolve, but the show is installed so oddly it becomes difficult to focus on any one. Instead, sounds and the flicker of screens overlap, creating an atmosphere that represses individualism.

To be honest, I couldn’t see every work in the show because by the end my nerves were so on edge, so frazzled that I became increasingly angry at each corner I turned. I felt like an epileptic watching a strobe light.

The first piece you come across, Hiraki Sawa’s 2003 “Airliner,” sits in the lobby. As with many of SITE’s installations, the lobby piece is one of the strongest, but it suffers from the atmosphere of sound and light. “Airliner” is a short work that consists of images of planes flying over the pages of a quickly flipped-through book. Because of the light that seeps in from windows and doors, despite efforts to minimize the rays with dark fabric coverings, the hand that holds the book is mostly obscured.

Assuming that this problem would only exist within the entry space, I bounded forth, excited to revisit the aesthetic of Kara Walker, whose work I also encountered for the first time in that trip to New York eight years ago, and whose work I have come across regularly since. Walker uses shadows to discuss themes of racism and slavery, often including violent rape scenes. The works “Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road” and “Lucy of Pulaski,” both from 2009, drew me in through their powerful imagery. Though more than 25 minutes long, I was committed to sitting through the entirety of the work. But, there was a problem. The sounds from a nearby piece, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s “Traffic #1: Our Second Date” bled through the space. While I watched the burning of a shadow-puppet and cellophane Southern town, the sounds of car horns overpowered the piano-based soundtrack. To make matters worse, a couple struck up a conversation with the docent next to “Traffic” and the ensuing echo of a conversation I couldn’t quite hear was so distracting I had to abandon the Walker to penetrate the exhibit further—and hope that in doing so I would find myself alone.

Thomas Demand’s “Rain” caught my eye but was even closer to “Traffic,” so I had to remind myself to return to it later—which I did, though a different conversation dominated that viewing as well. Instead, I slipped past Robin Rhode’s “Kid Candle from ‘Memories of Childhood’ ” and Paul Chan’s “4th Light”—both of which looked as if they would be more interesting in the conceptual stage than they were once put onto walls—into a back room that was dominated by fabric walls and fairly bright lighting. Berni Searle’s “About to Forget” was a great way to experience art despite imperfect conditions. The three-channel video projection begins with cutouts of people, traced from photographs. Red paper is dropped into water and, for the next three minutes, color bleeds in abstract swirls. It’s like the artful chaos of slowly pouring cream into a cup of black coffee. The meditative loop drew me in for some 15 minutes as people came and went on the benches next to me.

Sadly, the remainder of this room, an egg-shaped enclosure of thin green fabric, held work that was unwatchable. Many of the works were fantastic but the sound from an adjacent piece bled so loudly over that of the piece in front of which I sat, I couldn’t concentrate. “Maria Lassnig Kantate,” by Austrian artist Maria Lassnig, was the worst of these, and the irritating song of the pretentious and narcissistic work overtook everything else.

I escaped to The Dissolve’s standout piece, William Kentridge’s “History of the Main Complaint,” a short, charcoal drawing animation that was so alive one could almost see it being drawn as it progressed.

Reinvigorated, I sat on the floor, as there was no bench, in front of Avish Khebrehzadeh’s oil painting (“Theater III”) onto which a short film (“Edgar”) was projected. It was beautiful and moving. Khebrehzadeh should be furious that her work has been placed in a section of the gallery that suggests one should glance at it and move quickly on. Anyone who tries to watch it will have their attention drawn to the casino-like lights and clinks of Federico Solmi’s “Douche Bag City,” itself an interesting work but one that so thoroughly ruined “Edgar,” I gave up, breezing past the remainder of The Dissolve.

SITE has, in the past, projected video with skill. In The Dissolve, the small space tried too hard and put too many pieces in too close a proximity. If half the works were removed, installers could have properly placed each work and created an enjoyable, rather than hostile, environment that makes any true experience of inspiration impossible.

The Only Thing to Fear is Islam Itself

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by The End of Being.

In the early 700s, approximately 100 years after Muhammad first heard the voice of God as he meditated in the Arabian Peninsula, Islam came to Spain. Since that time much of Europe has spent untold amount of money fighting Islamic rulers and the residual fear of all things Muslim has spread to the United States.

That fear revolves around one single idea: conquest. In the last 22 years of Muhammad’s life, he went from a preacher to a small band of followers to the ruler of the Arabian Peninsula. From there, after the Prophet’s death, Islam continued to spread and, to this day, has not ceased to influence the world far-and-wide.

From 711 to 1492, a year engrained in the minds of every American schooled child, Muslim rulers controlled Spain. For two hundred years, from the 11^th to 13^th centuries, European Christian armies fought Crusades in the Holy Land, In the early 1200s the Mongolian rulers began to accept the religion as their own, with three of the four khanates embracing Islam. The end of that century, in 1299, saw the beginning of the Ottoman Empire, which would last until the end of World War I and, in the 1500s, which stretched north almost to Vienna. Also during the 16^th century, the Mughal Empire rose in India, where it lasted until the introduction on the British Empire in the 19^th century.

For European descended Americans, there has been no enemy as consistent as Muslims throughout history. Current American propaganda often uses vague terms to describe the men behind the 9/11 attacks, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath government, Iranian leadership, and tribal communities opposed to U.S. action in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Though these groups share a religion, they are often politically and nearly always ethnically, different from one another. Taliban and al-Qaeda are often used interchangeably, though the former is an AfPak political party and the latter a loosely organized, multinational and stateless army.

So, what is so frightening about Islam itself? Nothing really. It’s a misunderstood religion, thought by many to be Eastern but having closer ties to Judaism and Christianity than to Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism or the rest. Even Sikhism is more closely related to Hindu philosophy than to Muslim beliefs.

It seems that often Islam becomes a scapegoat because it is, and has been, thought of as bad for so long by Northern Europeans and Americans. One can easily look at an Islamic country and blame anything he or she wants on the religion without looking at the remainder of the culture around it. Perhaps poverty, lack of resources and a different history affects a culture as much as its religion.

The argument of “fundamentalism” is interesting, as the word originated as a term to describe an exclusively Christian movement. And it is this movement today, in America, that most fears and rejects Islam. What both religions share, beyond religious links that go all the way back to Abraham, is a belief that scripture is the word of God. Because of this view Biblical or Quranic law is divine and cannot be argued against. This is where the confusion comes in. By this definition, all Islam would be labeled fundamentalist because it is part of the doctrine that the Qur’an was revealed by Allah to Muhammad and those revelations include many guidelines for behavior. That doesn’t mean, however, that Islam universally requires those Quranic laws to be governmental law.

What’s fascinating about the current American debate is that the very people who use Christian morality as their platform, when opposing gay marriage or abortion for example, are the ones most concerned that Muslims will try to impose their religious beliefs upon the country. The fear that is spreading is familiar to many liberal Americans, who have feared the Christian imposition on their private lives for years. Now those who believe in a certain religious moral code for all now understand that threat for themselves.

The belief that the moral code is divine is so deep-seeded the assumption becomes that all religious and political beliefs are thought to be from God, therefore making those in opposition of the greatest danger.

There are, of course, Muslims who do believe that divine law should rule all aspects of government and life, but those, like the Christians who believe similarly of their dogma, not the majority. To assume the other is the evil mirror image of oneself is to transfer what one most fears about himself onto the world and to spread that fear beyond the rational.

Rainbow Warrior: The Alibi speaks with Albuquerque’s most controversial public artist

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by the Weekly Alibi.

Every time I get on the Rail Runner in Downtown Albuquerque, I look across the platform at a rainbowdripping down the side of a building just across Broadway. Occasionally, I hear people point it out to their friends, but it largely goes unnoticed by my fellow commuters. About a month ago, a similar rainbow appeared on theAnasazi Building at Sixth Street and Central—that’s the abandoned high-rise recently taken over by the city after developer Vincent Garcia and two others were charged with 19 counts of fraud and money laundering.

It’s like a secret message for the viewer, or a puzzle that invites solving. Like any good piece of art, it begs to be looked at over and over again, to be discussed by its fans and detractors.

Some think of it as a love note, others as a lesson in letting their eyes leave the urban landscape. It seems to cleanse the Anasazi of its reputation, transforming it into something wholly other. The people I know love it. The cops, not so much.

Chief Public Safety Officer Darren White told KOAT news on July 9, “The only person who thinks it’s great is the person who did it. We don’t.”

On Friday, Aug. 6, Albuquerque police arrested a suspect, Ernest Doty, in an an investigation into the paintings. The city’s graffiti removal team is trying to figure out how to erase the rainbows, which have been dripped from the rooftops of several Albuquerque buildings. The same day as White’s appearance on KOAT, signs appeared on the Anasazi stating “this building is unsafe for human occupancy.”

Two days prior to the arrest, theAlibi spoke by phone, under the condition of anonymity, to someone claiming responsibility for the artwork. As of press time, Doty was still in custody and we could not confirm whether he is the man with whom we spoke.

The rainbows you painted seem to have pissed a few people off.

It seems that I have; but not very many people. A couple key people, I suppose.

What inspired you to put up rainbows?

About three or four years ago … I was feeling really depressed and I had this notion that if I went out and painted a rainbow, maybe someone would see it and feel what I was feeling or feel anything as intensely as I was. The first one I did, I just literally dumped the paint over the side of a pretty ugly, abandoned, alleyway building. It came out OK but not like any of the ones I’m doing now.

How many have you done?

I did four and then I stopped doing them because it didn’t have the response I wanted. Then about a year ago I met somebody who asked me if I was the one that had done the rainbow a couple years back. They said when they first saw it, it made them cry. At that moment I knew it did have the effect that I wanted, that people were feeling something. I think I didn’t hear any responses because nobody knew who to respond to. I just wasn’t around when people were seeing it. That triggered me to do more. I’ve been doing them for, I guess, 10 months, maybe a year now, and I’ve gone from here to San Francisco.

Why do you think the one at Sixth Street and Central has gotten so much attention?

The building itself is already kind of in a weird standpoint. It was in the news. It’s just this ugly, eyesore, half-completed building that’s been that way for years. I think because it was already in people’s minds, they saw this ugly building with these ugly connections. I chose that one because I’ve been looking at it since they stopped construction and I knew it was going to be just another building in Albuquerque that was going to sit until it fell apart. I chose it because it already had some attention, and some negative attention, and I wanted to direct that negative attention and show that sometimes something ugly can be beautiful, too.

There’s been speculation that it’s some kind of gay pride symbol.

If you’re gay and a rainbow stands for pride for you, I’m glad that it does, I’m glad that you get a positive from it. But at the same time, I remember being a child and being able to wear a rainbow to school. It was just a rainbow. It symbolized future and promise and dreams. Imagination. I kinda want to just give that back to people. When they see that, maybe they’re having a rough day or a rough year or life and they can just look at it and find peace for a second and remember what rainbows meant when they were a kid, or when they could look up at the sky and see one instead of seeing billboards and half-finished buildings. I want to let anyone find enjoyment in the rainbows.

Why do you choose to do street art?

I want to inspire other people. That’s part of all my art; it’s always positive. I think I chose street art to inspire somebody else in a way that’s outside of the box. Like somebody who wouldn’t normally be exposed to street art, somebody who would just walk past it. Street art really saves a lot of people who are down in their lives and on their luck. This is their one and only outlet. Plus, you get an immediate response from people. A lot of times it’s just, Look at that graffiti on that freeway wall. But maybe the graffiti on the freeway isn’t the ugly thing, maybe that’s not what they’re angry about. Maybe they’re angry about how for the last 10 years you’ve been driving through this prison freeway with these big ugly gray walls and it just took the graffiti to point out the ugly that was already there.

The rainbow on the Anasazi draws attention to something that has been there for years but people have learned to just walk by.

If the building is in limbo, why would you spend taxpayer dollars to remove something that people find beautiful? Shouldn’t the majority of the people get to decide if it stays? Why are we spending millions and millions of dollars painting the ditches? Graffiti removal is part of Waste Management, and they’ll go into a ditch and walk over a couch, past a homeless man and over some broken bottles to buff over some graffiti. Why not pick up the couch, sweep up the bottles and feed the hungry? That’s what we should be focusing on, not painting an arroyo where dirty water is washing into our rivers and polluting our water supply.

What do you say to the people who don’t like your rainbows?

I painted it for anyone who wants a moment to themselves, or a moment to remember or imagine. To the people that have responded negatively, I challenge them to come and look at it. Don’t look at it on your TV or online or in a newspaper; come see it. Don’t look at it knowing it’s graffiti. Just look at it for what it is. Who can hate rainbows? The rainbow [itself] is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, all you have to do is look for it.

I’m curious: Why are you speaking publicly now?

I guess, a lot of people have questions and assumptions. I wanted to let people know it’s not just me, it’s them. I wanted to explain why I did it. Part of the reason I do the rainbows instead of typical lettering is because every sign we see is left to right, and this is up and down. Automatically, your eye wants to follow the line, so you look from the ground up to the sky. It doesn’t have a name and it doesn’t have my name on it. It becomes the viewer’s. That’s part of the reason I want to stay anonymous: It’s not my rainbow, whether you love it, hate it, don’t understand it or wish you had one down your building. It’s for everyone. It’s not for any specific group or genre. It’s for whoever is seeing it at whatever moment.