BroadcastVoice

Intro to Broadcasting

2011-09-28T21:13:00.000-07:00

The first class session for the Cal State LA TVF 220 Intro to Broadcasting class covers a nearly eight decade long history in about 15 minutes. This presentation put together on Google Docs presentation software is the thumbnail version of the early history of broadcasting. It is by no means a complete view, but a solid over view, putting all of broadcasting into some context as well.

You may also visit a full sized version of this presentation at: https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dfshf32h_62dg6twtc8

The Other Side of a Brutal City

2011-07-16T18:34:00.000-07:00

On June 15 of this year, the torso of a man was found inside a suitcase in the Tijuana neighborhood of Colonia Reforma. At the time, authorities could not confirm whether a decapitated head found earlier belonged to the same victim. For better or worse, Tijuana has a reputation as a dangerous, brawling, heavy-drinking, violent town, the destination of choice for tens of thousands of Americans, out for a good time on Saturday night, cheap and legal pharmaceutical drugs, and a little bit of la vida loca. With a population of roughly a million and a half, it is about the same size as San Diego, just to the north, and despite the grim nature of the street violence there, its crime rate is about the same as Washington DC. What most people don’t know, however, is that despite its much-publicized violence and alienation, Tijuana has a sweet, soft side: it is a city that is passionate about opera.

Opera en la Calle, 2011

In addition to the widely respected City Opera, there are a number of small companies doing work all over the metropolis. In one of the most remarkable demonstrations of the city’s passion for opera, a collaboration eight years ago between the Colonia Libertad-based Café Opera and the Tijuana City Opera, led to a summer festival of live performances on Calle 5, the rough and tumble blue-color neighborhood, smack up against the border fence in the north of the city, a historic barrio minutes from the San Ysidro border crossing, on the other side of town from the Colonia Reforma. Organizers assembled booths to sell food and drink, installed portable bathrooms, vendor tables and cast costumed characters strolling the street. They set up 300 chairs for guests to watch their program of scenes, arias and art songs.

Six thousand people showed up.

Now in its eighth year, there is much that is remarkable about the Opera en la Calle, as the event is called. It is a full-fledged cultural phenomenon, a free celebration of opera, and art in general, written up in most major press and reported widely. It is a favored venue for artists who live in the area, and for many who ome to visit, just for the day-long party. The festival has never been interrupted, despite the surge of drug-related violence of the last three years. This year’s line-up included a traditional Japanese drum performance from San Diego Taiko, and a performance by an ensemble of Irish dancers from Lázaro Cárdenas Federal High School. There were selections from La Traviata and Boheme, as well as portions of the Phantom of the Opera, and Pietro Mascagni’s one act masterpiece Cavalleria Rusticana, which finished off the evening, the first full length opera to be presented in the festival.

Elisabet Mendoza and Jacob Perez

The event has even become an improbable destination for dating couples. Twenty-something Jacob Perez and his girlfriend Elisabet Mendoza snuggle in the cool afternoon air enjoying selections from La Traviata, with as much enthusiasm as they might for pop artists, like Café Tacuba, Los Tigres del Norte or Paulina Rubio.

Jacob explains “People will get even closer to music, and paintings and culture and all that stuff...I think if they go to the way of the culture, they can change.” Girfriend Elisabet Mendoza adds “To have you imagine other things that are not violence, is not our city. Just art, music, things like that…” Starting in 2004, as a cultural promotion of the city, and as an anniversary celebration of the tiny Café de la Ópera on Calle 5, part of the festivities celebrating the founding of Tijuana.

It soon became a renowned event, attracting up to 10,000 people from both sides of the border. In coordination with the State Government, the 22nd City Council, Tourism and Conventions Committee of Tijuana (COTUCO) as well as the private sector, the 2011 edition of the festival featured performances more or less continuously for 12 hours.

Architects from the Technology Institute of Tijuana transformed the working-class street into a tiny Italian village, which becomes the scene of the festival. There were more than 150 singers, musicians, actors and other artists from the region, and under colorful canopies, a variety of restaurants offered a sampling of their food and beverage. The day started around noon and lasted till past 11:00 pm, on a downright chilly July evening.

Jose Medina is a much loved local music teacher and singer. He has been involved in the production of Opera en la Calle from the very beginning, and many of his students are singing today. Though he looks a bit tired from all the planning and rehearsals, he is practically beaming with pride. “Everything you read in the paper, first thing in the morning is assassination and drugs and everything. But this contributes to change the image. This is important…So that at least gives you hope! Tijuana is not just this dark side, we do have this, too. This culture, this hunger of growing up to something so positive!” He then excuses himself, to go help with the set up for one of the acts he has been working on.

Maria Teresa Rique

Returning to run the festival, Opera of Tijuana Director Maria Teresa Riqué, described the rich offering of cultural activities the community offers, including for the first time a complete performance and the live transmission of the project via the Internet.

"The festival is framed in celebration of the centenary of the historic defense of Tijuana in June of 1911. We are preparing a program based on research done by the group Los Californios, led by baritone Manuel Acosta. The main intention of the festival is the promotion of the Opera…I am sure they will enjoy it. You can see the huge amount of talent we have in the city,” Riqué added. "It is great to be able to present a full opera for the first time," said Riqué, noting the involvement of tenor José Luis Duval and mezzo-soprano Ana Rojas. " People who may not be physically able to attend can enjoy the event via a live streaming webcast …a revolution in progress." she added. The performances are presented in a way to attract families, and to welcome everyone and was especially directed to those who have never had opportunity to attend an opera recital or performance, and to attract a young audience.

Between 8,000 and 10,000 people attended throughout the day, enjoying the singing, scenery, art displays, drinks and food, as well as a range of children's activities. Fully a third to a half of the attendees at the Saturday event appeared to be under the age of 25.

Julieta Mesa and Melissa Sanchez

Melissa Sanchez attended this year with her mother Julieta Mesa. It gives her a lot of pride to be able to show off her city. “If you can show the other side of Tijuana, which is an innovative city, where you find that art and culture has much to offer to the country and the world,” she says, while resting in the afternoon sun. “Maybe it is the result that we are receiving so much talent from other cities of the Mexican republic that art and culture and the proximity to the USA makes as to have a fountain of talent. In this respect young people can contribute in art and culture” she concludes.

Singer Marco Antonio La Bastida is a local favorite, and a regular at Café Opera – he sings the title role in ‘Phantom of the Opera’ tonight, and has seen the changes that opera in general and this street festival in particular have brought to this little rough and tumble neighborhood. “This is a very nice event…with all this very bad situation with what’s happening in Tijuana, this is the other side of the coin saying ‘hey, you know we are making something good…’ I think they [the media] should always promote this kind of event.” La Bastida agrees with Maria Theresa Rique’s assessment that this community’s love for opera is not abstract or pretentious. There is an obvious, natural, and enthusiastic love for this art form they say. “It was a way to tell people not to abandon the streets, to tell them to not be afraid,” says Riqué. “Opera won’t bite you; it’s not elitist,” she insists. “You just have to feel it. After all…” she added, “this type of festival is a reminder that the streets belong to the people.”

Jose Medina Interview

Photo Gallery of July 9, 2011 Opera en la Calle

…Sat on the Park Bench Like Book Ends

2011-01-31T02:03:00.000-08:00

Time it was and what a time it was,

A time of innocence,

A time of confidences,

Long ago it must be,

I have a photograph,

Preserve your memories,

There all that’s left you...

- Paul Simon, ‘Old Friends’

The term ‘old friends’ could be interpreted a couple of ways. In common usage, it means colleagues, companions and acquaintances of long standing, people with whom you have a bond of affection lasting many years.

But it might also mean those friends who are on in years, aged and wearing experience on their face and body.

In either case, the idea of connecting with ‘old friends’ holds a special place in our hearts. With ‘old friends’, your shared experiences and memories come back with easy connection. With little effort, we connect with life’s landmarks – births, weddings, deaths and the like – without the need for a lot of explaining.

I had dinner this last week with friends of my family whom I hadn’t seen in perhaps 40 years. Barney and Pat were so close to our tribe in Nevada. He’s 88 now and I guess Pat’s a bit younger. They lived for a while in our funky little town of Virginia City, and shared hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours with us.

Barney was a geologist, with a big booming voice, a friendly grin and a kind of effortless enthusiasm that was simply magnetic. While we assumed that Barney was one of our dad’s endless parade of drinking buddies (and I don’t mean that sarcastically), as kids, we found him really cool. He could tell you anything you wanted to know about rocks. To this day, when I read or hear mention of the element ‘Beryllium’, it is inseparable from my memories of Barney’s expansive and engaging description of where this metal was found, how it got there, and why it was so important.

His wife Pat had her eye on the former sailor when he came in to cash a check at Harolds Club in Reno, where she was working after the war. Harold’s club is the real old Reno. Later eclipsed by its neighbor Harrah’s, Harold’s club was where locals went to drink, gamble, and cash their checks. We’ve had generations of relatives and pals who worked there, or had someone in their family who did as well, in their black pants and white shirts, as cashiers, waitresses, bar tenders, and Keno runners. If you don’t know what that is, you are obviously not from Nevada.

There was a year-long gap between the time Pat cashed Barney’s check at Harold’s Club, and the time she ran into him in Virginia City. She recognized the strapping sailor from the previous year and told her friends to pull over so she could say ‘hi’.

Pat was glamorous to us as kids. She was kind of dazzling – beautiful, confident, and pound for pound, at least as friendly as Barney. One thing led to another, and now they’ve been married for about half a century.

In the interim, there have been the foundation stories of my life: Pat Hart and the Brass Rail, Gordon Lane and his legendary bar next door, which was officially known as ‘The Union Brewery’, but simply known as Gordon’s to anyone who had spent five minutes in Virginia City would know. From Gordon’s, the great pantheon of drinking-legends from that town connected and became a community. There was four-foot-ten Kelly O’Keefe, an Irish miner who could drink anyone under the table. Highway Harry, Bob Dufresne, Agalee Del Carlo, Mike Nevin…they all spent long hours tossing them back and telling what seemed to me the funniest stories in the world.

Barney worked all his adult life as a geologist, and by all accounts, it was a profession he loved with a passion that was almost as strong as his passion for his beautiful wife. He also came to love our eccentric little town in the mountains.

They never had kids. My own circle of siblings all grew up and had their own broods; life went on, and all of a sudden, it’s four decades later.

Pat and Barney live on the water in a small, comfortable apartment in Newport Beach, just off the Pacific Coast Highway. They don’t get around so much, because of their physical limitations, but Pat managed to cook up a fantastic meal when I came by for dinner this week – crab cakes, Italian bread salad, pot roast, mashed potatoes and gravy... The food was great, but it was passing time with these two ‘old friends’ that was so moving to me.

In a real sense, as kids we were exposed to a lot of personalities which we have ultimately combined into who we are as adults. Barney and Pat, along with Gordon Lane – who just passed away this last year - Pat and Penna Hart, and all the other characters who came into our lives each left a little something. A wicked sense of humor from one, a booming gregariousness from another, an unshakable need to stop and help out or, the ability to make an instant party from yet another; they have all become our ‘character’ as adults. Barney and Pat’s open, honest and joyful embrace have contributed to who I am as an adult.

Driving back up the 405 San Diego freeway toward home after that dinner, I pondered how wise the native Indians were in this country, long before the white man, something that had never struck me as strongly. For many westerners, the concept of ‘our elders’ or ‘our ancestors’ seems quaint and archaic. But after my visit with Barney and Pat, I felt a very sweet and fierce connection not only to them, but to my brothers and sisters, my parents, and to a younger, more wide-eyed me.

Barney & Pat Eglit

Whatever...

2010-12-18T15:06:00.000-08:00

The fact that our congress finally consigned ‘don’t ask – don’t tell’ to the dustbin of history is not that big a big deal.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s historic, it’s moving, it vindicates everyone who fought for this decision, and it endorses our beliefs that our brothers and sisters serving in the military can ‘access their integrity’, to quote Lt. Dan Choi, who was booted last year after coming out on national television.

I’m not saying it’s not important, but I’m a little leery about congratulating ourselves for doing what should have been done not seventeen years ago, but 50 or 80 years ago. To be sure, the battle for acceptance of sexual minorities in our military was a significant stop on the path to acceptance. But it seems odd to celebrate something that should have been done anyway, even without the battle.

We had no international celebration when our medical institutions defeated smallpox last century. We did not hold festivals for giving the vote to people who should have had the vote all along. We have held no celebrations when women began to earn equity in the work place (of course, they are still not earning at the levels of their male counterparts).

In the long history of the fight for civil rights of LGBT people, this military issue was not exactly at the top of the stack. The concurrent fights for the right to adopt, the right to fair and equal treatment in the work place and in accommodations, domestic partner rights which allow partners of LGBT people to visit their loved ones in the hospital, the right to inherit the estate of a gay partner who has died, and of course, the big, big question: the right to marry - these issues loom like skyscrapers over the landscape of public policy.

While LGBT people can serve openly in the militaries of nearly two dozen countries, including Australia, Canada, Israel and Italy, gay people are still persecuted, injured, jailed, and executed in Uganda, Iran, Russia and other countries just for being who they are.

With a growing number of states in the US and countries around the world affirming the right to marry, gay marriage would have to be considered the biggest and most vital challenge in the fight for civil liberties. There is no issue more central, more vital, and more momentous that the right to legally choose who is allowed to marry whom. On that day, I will feel that the biggest hurdle to LGBT acceptance has been breached.

My comment about the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask…’ is more of a rhetorical flourish than a deep feeling. News of the US Senate’s vote on the question made tears well up in my eyes, and a deep and emotional feeling of vindication wash over me. We will take whatever victories we can, and fight for the ultimate right: to marry whomever we wish. The repeal of ‘Don’t Ask…’ may not be the biggest victory for Gay rights, but it is certainly big enough.

When every person has the right to live their life openly, with dignity and standing in their community, then I will celebrate like it was 1999.

Red Earth and Pouring Rain

2010-07-31T02:32:00.000-07:00

The towering, sprawling masterworks of Indian literature – especially the love poem the Ramayama, and the Muhabarata, which includes the Bhagavad Gita – are unruly, shaggy dog tales that read like a combination of Beowulf, Dante’s Inferno, and Milton’s Paradise Lost rolled into one. They are story upon story upon story, and to many westerners first exposed to them, they were seen as inferior literature, because they didn’t follow Plato’s unities of poetry. But the authors of these great Hindu epics have produced some of the most soaring, transcendent literature civilization has ever produced.

We have advanced somewhat since those years of the Raj, an era which demeaned the great Indian literature, in a spasm of Victorian judgment one hopes, with an ability to appreciate these shimmering, epic tales of wars, gods, love and death, and all the rules that make up ethical living, the works have come to take their proper place in the pantheon of world literature. Despite the west’s long standing ignorance, many have come to appreciate the awesome literary efforts that these works represent.

Vikram Chandra channels these ancestors in his novel Red Earth and Falling Rain, which in some ways out does even those two thousand year old Vedic texts. The title of the novel comes from a Tamil poem nearly 2,000 years old, which at least in translation, echoes contemporary passions:

And how

Did you and I meet ever?

But in love

our hearts have mingled

as red earth and pouring rain.

In post-modern western literature, we have become accustomed to stories within stories; wordsmiths shattering rhetoric and syntax for some deeper truth, but mostly we remain cued to the importance of one central story. So as writers like James Michener and William Faulkner (not exactly post-modernists; but the point holds nonetheless) spin their complex tales, we always refer back to the central story to know where we are and what is the perspective from which we are observing.

In Chandra’s epic work, our attention is constantly pulled, to the point we don’t quite know what is the central story: a young Indian, returning to India from California with a broken heart, a magic realism tale of a monkey pulled back from the brink of death by his ability to tap out fantastic stories on an old typewriter, visits from a number of the best known Hindu deities – most notably Ganesh the laughing Elephant god, and Hanuman, the monkey-like god of war, battle and alliances.

In the tradition of those great Hindu epics, Chandra leaves our head spinning, unable to decide where the center of the story is. In a playful way, we are always brought back to the story of the type-writing monkey, whose story – as fantastic as it is – is no comparison to the swashbuckling tales of the two young men – Sikander and Sanjay, born at the same time – as they travel across the subcontinent, facing adventures, growing up, suffering and becoming men.

Oh, and for good measure, Chandra even throws in a connection to Jack the Ripper in Victorian London.

Even if your brain is being stretched, trying to figure out which hand to watch while Chandra weaves his magic spells, the tales within tales, the endless stories within stories, are hypnotic, and somehow, deeply moving.

It is said that authors speak through their characters. If this is true, then we can conclude that to Vikram Chandra, humanity’s ability to tell stories is what renders us something like gods. Everyone has a story, and each one makes us a little more human. The stories invest us with dignity, position, and the weight of history, with each telling.

If you try to summarize what the book is about, you would be lost. To be sure, there are some overarching themes of honor, duty, and the unshakable love of family. But to say that, no less than saying the Bible is a book about sin, misses the point entirely. Red Earth and Pouring rain contains the material for at least ten novels. Each story is woven into the others and each leaves off where another begins. Like the nearly endless cycles of life that Hindu tradition tells us is the fate of the world, Chandra’s masterpiece resonates with the vibration of life itself.

Daniel Liebeskind’s Rocky Mountain High

2010-07-05T00:56:00.000-07:00

Clearly, the standard was set by Frank Gehry’s gleaming museum in Bilbao and Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Much has been written about how Gehry and his associates used sophisticated computer programs to scope out the complex forms that make up those dazzling buildings.

It always seemed to me, however, that the interiors of those spaces would be so reinforced and engineered that they would make the spaces claustrophobic and alienating, with essentially no vertical walls to enclose the space and windows punched out at strange, vertiginous angles.

Daniel Liebeskind’s new Denver Art Museum faces many of these challenges as well. Planted baldly to the south west of the older Hamilton wing, the prime motif of the new wing is enormous, slashing diagonals of space, bordering on the bombastic; and like the Gehry structures, sheathed in a gleaming metal skin.

To be sure, the outdoor shape of the building is dramatic and eye catching, especially by comparison to the forbidding castle-like Hamilton building, which looks like a ten story prison tower, except for the use of the beautiful dimensional stone-like surface and the elegant clerestory windows punched into that surface. But the Hamilton wing of the museum suffers in the way a lot of modernist/immediately post-modernist architecture does: while it may have looked grand when it was new, from the context of the times and the location, it has not aged gracefully. The Hamilton wing, which was completed in 2006, looks like it could join the ranks of those other modernist icons – Lincoln Center in NY, The Music Center in Los Angeles, The Kennedy Center in Washington, Empire Plaza in Albany – as dated and frankly, a little ugly. This is not to say that the Hamilton wing architecture resembles any of those other modernist milestones, but rather that the impulse of how you plan and build public structures is related.

The museum is set a bit outside of what has come to be called 'LoDo', the lively, popular neighborhood just south of downtown. The museum is in the Civic Center Golden Triangle neighborhood, adjacent to the State Capital, the Denver Mint, and the handsome Denver Public Library .

The great surprise is that inside Liebeskind’s angular prism-like structure, the interior spaces are lovely, slightly mysterious, in a playful hide-and-seek way, and they are quite welcoming.

While there may not be a right angle in the building (except for doors and individual window panes), the spaces never feel threatening or disorienting. Instead, they unfold in a series of surprising, graceful spaces, which seem quite happy to have humans within their volume.

It’s not easy to tell where you are, exactly. The windows in the Liebeskind wing are narrow, and looking out them doesn’t help much to orient the viewer.

Rumor has it that Liebeskind’s ideas for the museum were inspired by the nearby Rocky Mountains, the same inspiration Santiago Calatrava’s is purported to have used as the basis of his Denver International Airport main terminal. Their interpretations couldn’t be more different, but while Liebeskind faced endless challenges to replace the World Trade Center in New York, civic leaders in Denver largely embraces his adventurous ideas.

The result is one of the most eye-catching and welcoming spaces west of the Mississippi, and signals Denver’s arrival on the international scene, not just for it’s football team, mountains, and fresh air, but also for it’s art, culture and architecture.

NB: Form Magazine has just announced that Calatrava will oversee additions to the Denver Airport; the designs for which are typically dramatic and compelling. Take a look at Form's report for the details.

New Therapies Could Revolutionize HIV Treatment

2009-12-12T01:34:00.000-08:00

This article in the MIT Technology Review journal outlines a novel new treatment for HIV that not only shows great promise, it could revolutionize how not only HIV is treated, but also how a wide range of infections that could respond to genetic therapies.

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Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors' blog: Scientists Engineer Stem Cells to Fight HIV
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24502/

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Jon Beaupre's Publish2 Profile:
http://www.publish2.com/journalists/jon-beaupre/

Where Have all the Glaciers Gone?

2009-11-27T20:58:00.000-08:00

In the fall of 2009, I had the great pleasure of participating in a reporting trip to Peru with my much admired colleague Claes Andreasson, to cover a number of powerful and moving stories connected with environmental change in that amazing country. Over the course of two weeks, we recorded 30 interviews, 24 hours of audio, 16 hours of video, and close to 700 photos. For me, the trip was as much a luxury escape from Los Angeles, school, and the weekly drill of my life. The circumstances weren't luxurious, but getting away was. For Claes, this trip shows how he earns his bread and butter. There were so many stories that we followed, but I am only posting this one video as an overview of what we accomplished.

What do you put in the bird-cage?

2009-08-30T13:12:00.001-07:00

Elizabeth Churchill's carefully reasoned take on the future of news is as much a nostalgic reminiscence of a medium that is fading. It's not simply a 'woe-is-me' take however, but an insightful analysis of the current media environoment.
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interactions magazine
http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1272

William Vollman's Brand of Imperialism

2009-08-22T10:47:00.001-07:00

William Volman

William T. Vollman is consistently one of California's most provocative and prolific writers. His 'novels' are set in as disparate locales as the mountains of Afghanistan, Soviet era Berlin, and colonial Jamestown Virginia. His latest work takes on the Imperial valley of extreme south eastern California. This is the New York Times preview of the book.

I'll have more to say about Vollman a bit later, when I have some time to write...

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William T. Vollmann, an Author Without Borders - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/books/29vollman.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

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Legislation to Increase Accountability for University Foundations & Auxiliaries Passes Key Committee

2009-08-19T22:48:00.001-07:00

Legislation to Increase Transparency & Accountability in

University Foundations & Auxiliaries Passes Key Committee
Senate Bill (SB) 218 comes in response to financial scandals involving foundations in the already cash-strapped state university system

Legislation to make the spending practices of California State University subsidiary organizations and foundations more transparent was approved by the Assembly Appropriations Committee Wednesday.

Senate Bill 218 – authored by Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) – updates the California Public Records Act to include campus and statewide auxiliary organizations at CSU, University of California and California Community Colleges. The bill – which is co-sponsored by CFA and the California Newspaper Publishers Association – was passed unanimously by the committee with just one abstention.

“Placing state college and university auxiliaries under the authority of the public records act will safeguard the use of taxpayer funds and provide much needed accountability and oversight to state policymakers,” said CFA President Lillian Taiz, a professor of History at CSU Los Angeles. At the CSU alone, these auxiliaries manage more than a billion dollars with little or no public oversight.

As legally separate tax-exempt entities, they are not currently covered by the California Public Records Act, even though the universities that form these subsidiaries are. According to data from the CSU Chancellor’s Office, 20% of the CSU’s $6.7 billion budget is funded by these auxiliaries and foundations.

“This legislation will enable us to pull back the curtains that hide these foundations and ensure that taxpayer dollars for our public universities are used as they were intended and not for the pet projects and slush funds of campus administrators,” said Taiz.

The bill must now be voted on by the full Assembly, perhaps as early as next week. The bill previously passed the state Senate by a margin of 35-1 and has received zero no-votes thus far in the Assembly.

Earlier this year, a campus foundation at Sonoma State University was found to have used donated funds to provide huge personal loans to a former foundation board member. Some of this money may never be recovered. This money was intended to fund scholarships for qualified students.

There are currently 87 CSU-related non-profit auxiliary organizations connected with the 23 CSU campuses and/or the CSU Chancellor’s Office. CSU auxiliaries often operate campus bookstores, concessions and student unions, manage foundations to benefit students, and operate campus parking facilities, to name a few of their functions.

Many newspaper editorial boards from across the state have come out in support of SB 218, including the Los Angeles Times, the Sacramento Bee and the Riverside Press Enterprise.

NB: On Oct. 11 of this year, Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill, which had passed both houses of the state legislature with seemingly overwhelming support. One can only imagine that the UC and CSU systems together brought to bear considerable pressure on a governor who would not benefit much by passage of this bill. Needless to say, the veto was a great disappointment to advocates for an open and transparent operation of the state's two higher education pillars.

Gay Marriage and Women in the Military

2009-08-19T22:30:00.001-07:00

While I disagree with many of his conclusions, this commentary on the changing roles of sex and gender is consistently provocative and a challenging analysis, by one of Colombia's most compelling commentators.

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Hombres casados y mujeres generales | ELESPECTADOR.COM
http://www.elespectador.com/columna156355-hombres-casados-y-mujeres-generales

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(Very) Strange Bedfellows

2009-08-19T02:51:00.001-07:00

This is a fascinating story of how conservative icon Ted Olsen has taken up the cause of Gay Marriage. That's right, in SUPPORT OF, not opposed...compelling article in the NY Times

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Ted Olson's Supreme Court Adventure - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/ted-olsons-supreme-court-adventure/?hp

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Dems Give Up and Semblance of Bipartisanism

2009-08-19T02:49:00.001-07:00

Health Care Legislation

In its typical fashion, the New York Times analysis of upcoming health care legislation is concise, accurate and reliable. If you don't have an interest in public policy, this might be considered boring, but for wonks like me, this is a good meal...

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Democrats Seem Set to Go It Alone on a Health Bill - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/health/policy/19repubs.html?hp

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Novel Economic Stimulus Package

2009-02-15T16:01:00.000-08:00

Her name was Shannon, and she was the tallest, most beautiful woman I think I had ever seen in all of my 18 or so years. It had never occurred to me that I would find myself in the lobby of Joe Conforte’s Mustang Ranch, selecting a woman from the line up the same way you chose sides for softball. Frankly, I didn’t know what would happen, but at 18, the idea of asking for and getting sex seemed miraculous. My close buddy Jim had “connections” which meant more or less that with the little piece of cardboard, printed with some numbers on it, would equal someone putting her hands all over my body. But that’s the way it worked. Jim had selected a tall red head, as I recall, and Shannon threaded her way through the maze of rooms to her tiny, windowless space. She looked at the card Jim had given me, and said, “OK, just a minute…” and left the room with the card. When she came back, we got to work…

Legalized prostitution has been a part of Nevada’s landscape for a long, long time. While there were notorious red light districts in the gold and silver rush ghost towns of old Nevada, there was perhaps no more famous purveyor of sex than Joe Conforte. The millions of dollars he made from the world famous Mustang Ranch was paid out in taxes to Storey County, where I grew up in the county seat Virginia City. He was written about widely, including a couple of notable articles in Rolling Stone, Look Magazine, and The Boston Globe.

But by the 1990s, Conforte had managed to burn a lot of bridges, and was accused of not only bribing any number of county officials, but also of underpaying his taxes by millions of dollars. He did what any self-respecting pimp would do: he got his money out of the country and moved to Brazil. You should check out his story: Google Joe Conforte and Mustang Ranch.

Prostitution poses some fundamental questions about life. It is at once the greatest betrayal of innocence and the most pragmatic business available. Most sensible people know better than trying to legislate morality, but remain uncomfortable with the issue of sex for money. It’s a hypocritical position – even for me – on one hand to condemn the idea of prostitution, while justifying the capitalistic egalitarianism of it all on the other. Oh, and possibly engaging in the commerce as well.

I even have one friend who believe that it is Johns who are being exploited. They are, reasons my friend, paying for what might under other circumstances be given for free.

Joe Conforte

In any case, since its legalization in Storey County in 1971 (my visit would have been in 1972 or so), the ‘cat houses’ as locals call them, have been limited to rural counties of the state, an not allowed from the bustling gaming metropolises of Las Vegas, Reno and Lake Tahoe. Those same (hypocritical) civic leaders felt legalized prostitution in those big casino areas would discourage families from visiting. This led to some of the biggest and best known brothels being located within a 30 mile radius of those big gaming centers.

The economic downturn has caused some of these communities to reconsider that reality, as you can see in this Neal Karlinsky portrait of brothel owner Dennis Hoff on ABC Nightline, Feb. 5, 2009. The 6:40 video even features a brief sequence shot in my home town of Virginia City.

Got Milk of Human Kindness?

2008-12-15T01:03:00.000-08:00

There were a lot of emotions that swept over me watching Sean Penn's latest performance as San Francisco gay activist Harvey Milk. First off, it's a dazzling performance, with a gentle physical take on Harvey Milk. Penn found a sweetness and a believability in the character that was something of a revelation. Of course, we didn't expect a flouncing, prissy Harvey Milk - he was neither of those things. But Penn has shown himself again and again that often being among those called "the best of their generation" means turning down the fireworks to find some inner truth. Ditto James Franco as Milk's handsome boyfriend Scott. By comparison to Franco's performance in last summer's Spider Man, this is one of the most under-played and restrained performances of Franco's career, and he shimmers in the role. Even Emile Hirsch, who made friends with Penn last summer in "Into the Wild", and whom never seemed even vaguely "twinky", comes off as a sweet, genial Cleve Jones, equal parts youthful impetuousness and fiery activist. Ironically, the argument could be made that it was ultimately Jones who had a greater, more lasting effect on society even than Harvey Milk, a decade after the Milk episodes, as an AIDS activist, and a founder of The Quilt Project.

The heady years of the late seventies rush back to many of us, especially those with ties to San Francisco - remembering those rallies, marches and vigils in the Castro, and electrifying reality of gay pride, and the sense that the world really could be changed with just a few dedicated people standing up for what is right.

But Penn is also embroiled in a controversy for his support of dictators like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Fidel Castro in Cuba. As outlined by Patrick Goldstein in a recent edition of the LA Times, Penn comes off somewhat hypocritical in his support for a number of regimes which have never treated LGBT people very fairly. This has to pose something of a conflict for the politically savvy Penn, who has never made his liberal, anti-Bush policies a secret. One wonders how he will resolve, either publicly or privately, the apparent contradiction of his loving, even reverent portrayal of one of Gay America's icons, and his support for those dictators.

Nonetheless, Gus Van Sant's treatment of the material was moving, even if the device of having Milk dictate his tale into a tape recorder, ostensibly prior to being assassinated, seemed strained, and some of the TV footage had the ring of "see, this really did happen, here it is on TV" - even if the actual news footage was produced just for this film. You have to assume there is supposed to be a sense that this was the way it was if we show it as a TV sequence. These quibbles detract nothing from the solid performances and the utterly affecting material.

Van Sant dips his Penn in Milk writes in magic ink.

His Name Shall Be Called Wonderful

2008-12-13T00:26:00.000-08:00

They’re not exactly the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, or the Cathedral Choir of St. John the Divine in New York or Saint Sulpice in Paris. They’re a Pretty Darned Good civic choir in Pasadena, and as a PDG choir, they are one of hundreds around the country, made up of executives, teachers, house wives and musicians looking for meaningful expression in their lives.

I’m not denigrating the PDG Pasadena Master Chorale, it’s just that there are a lot of really wonderful choirs to be found, so in addition to their sweet tone, and their challenging selection of numbers, there had to be something else about tonight’s concert that touched me so much.

Yes, you’ve probably heard of Benjamin Brittten and even the renaissance writer Michael Praetorious, but have you ever heard of Morten Lauridsen or Henryk Gorecki? I hadn't either, so, no, it had to be something else.

As I sat there in the nave of the First Congregational Church, listening to the second part of the concert – selections from Handel’s Messiah – the warmth of the music washed over me and sent me deep into thoughtful revery.

So first off, it has to be that Mr. Handel hit me somewhere meaningful. At a time when central European powers, the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, and the Maria Thereses are setting the tone of the late renaissance, a Brit stands out for having composed one of the great pieces of music in the western canon (well, one Brit who was a transplanted German). While his “Music for the Royal Fireworks” and “Water Music” are dazzling in their own right, it is squarely on the history and reputation of his great masterwork “Messiah” (not THE Messiah!) that he has inspired and moved people, educated or not, since that day in 1742 when it debuted in a small concert hall in Dublin.

The quartet which led off this portion of the show here in Pasadena was sweet, and charming in its way. We could see that this would be a serious, if truncated version of the great oratorio, featuring just some highlights of the twenty-plus song cycle, sort of the ‘greatest-hits’ selections.

The early pieces “And the Glory of the Lord” and “Surely He Hath Born Our Griefs” were solid, competent and moving. And who can argue with the bombast and hummability of the Halleluja chorus.

But strangely for me, it was the ecstatic and lyrical “For Unto Us a Child Is Born” that raised a lump in my throat.

I don’t think it was because of the religious sentiment – I’m far too cynical to succumb to that sort of thing.

Rather, I think it is that in this beautiful, joyful refrain, this most British of compositions (composed by a German nonetheless) captures the sense of western civilization as it is declaring itself the most important power on the planet. And when I say power, I don’t mean mere military might or commercial domination. Rather, I mean these tones, voices and instruments have been organized in a way that celebrates western civilization, that joyfully proclaim to the rest of the planet that our music – and by extension, our art, our architecture, our commerce, our literature – has triumphed over the lumpen anguish of the dark ages.

The beautiful passages taken from Isiah say that this is more than simple engineering, this is art, this is man’s highest aspiration, this is western civilization, with God on its side, triumphantly saying to the world:

“…the government shall be upon His shoulder;
and his name shall be called Wonderful,
Counsellor,
the Mighty God,
the Everlasting Father,
the Prince of Peace.

We may have equaled those refrains since 1742 in great works by Beethoven, Haydn, and modern masters – Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Faulkner – but we have never exceeded them.

Prop 8 Backlash

2008-11-12T00:57:00.000-08:00

Of all the amazing “firsts” to come out of the 2008 election, it is the just-developing rift between some African American LGBT figures and the rest of the “No on 8” crowd.

“8”, of course, referring to Proposition 8, which halted California’s short-lived Gay Marriage experiment.

Pollsters have noted that the same black voters who so enthusiastically supported the candidacy of Barack Obama, in large numbers supported Prop. 8, and essentially bought into the argument that our children would be ‘taught gay marriage’ in schools, and that would be a bad thing…

Of course, there are numerous black leaders who voted against the measure, not the least of whom is my friend and colleague Prof. Ron Buckmire, with whom I serve on the board of an LGBT broadcasting group. Prof. Buckmire was quoted in the Nov. 8 LA Times as saying “There is a lot of work to be done in the black community.”

But an astonishing number of black voters either felt there were not enough rights to go around for everyone, and blacks should get them first, or there are secretly deep currents of homo-gender-phobias we haven’t noticed before.

Latest to pile into the debate is LA blogger Jasmyne Cannick, who wrote in that same edition of the LA Times charging Gay leaders with essentially ignoring the plight of people of color, and only calling on them when they needed support. In short, Gay America, says Ms. Cannick, is every bit as racist and prejudiced as main-stream America, and they shouldn’t be surprised that Blacks voted two to one for the measure.

Ms. Cannick was briefly also involved in the broadcast venture for with Prof. Buckmire and I work.

I think for many of us who marched with our Black brothers and sisters, who signed petitions, who worked the tables at the street fairs and parades, who participated in boycotts, who insisted on inclusion in our faculties, boards, and governance and who have genuinely tried to right the wrongs of other generations and other times, those charges sting.

But I think it is also counter-productive to make claims that “white people think this way” or “black people think this way”… That’s too easy an explanation for something that is much more complicated.

I remain committed to the causes of equality, at every level, within any group. If our Black leaders feel that not enough has been done, I hope they will step into the positions of leadership and inspire by their deeds, not condemn by their bitterness.

LA Times Story “Why gays, blacks are divided on Prop. 8
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/orange/la-me-gayblack8-2008nov08,0,2231845.story

LA Times Commentary by Jasmyne Cannick(I can't get these links to work, so you'll have to copy and paste till I get them fixed...sorry...)
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-cannick8-2008nov08,0,3669070.story

NPR segment featuring Jasmyne Cannick
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96751056

NPR blog mentioning Jasmyne Cannick’s comments
http://www.npr.org/blogs/newsandviews/2008/11/blackgay_prop_8_backlash.html - commentBlock

TJ's Ugly Secret

2008-11-01T00:18:00.000-07:00

It is no secret that life is tough in San Diego's Mexican twin, Tijuana. As a continental center of the drug trade, it's become used to horrifying levels of violence.

Less seen and less discussed, however, are the dark and grim worlds of drug users, many deported from the US. They congregate on poor streets, to better watch out for each other and to help each other inject heroin and other drugs.

My former student Luis Treto left CSULA in 2006 to become an extremely accomplished reporter for the Mexican TV network TV Azteca, first for their LA affiliate, and then after a couple of reorganizations in 2008, as a network reporter based in Los Angeles.

This is one of his recent stories on this topic. Warning: it's pretty grim, so discretion is advised.

http://terratv.terra.com/templates/channelContents.aspx?channel=1027&contentid=77658

2008-10-29T18:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a video essay I did on a subject near and dear to my heart: technology and it's life-cycle.

Failed Technology

Very clever move...

2008-09-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

As the presidential campaign comes down to the final lap, it's been interesting to watch the strategies of both sides, none more clever and brilliant than Sen. McCain's announcement last week that he had to suspend his campaign to rush back to Washington to work on the massive financial bailout plan working its way through congress.

First, since he is not receiving donations from private citizens, he has no incentive to be on the trail fundraising. He's received about $84 million of taxpayers money so far, so he doesn't have to manage a big fund-raising machine.

But second, there is no suitable response from Sen. Obama to the McCain announcement. If Obama challenged McCain by saying that he disagreed with him on the subject of suspending the campaign, he looks insensitive to the plight of millions of people whose lives and livelihood are at risk. He can't say McCain is 'over-reacting', when it is clear that the risks to the American economy are indeed dramatic.

If he announces agreement with Sen. McCain, he looks like he is playing 'catch-up', since McCain had the idea first, and he - Obama - would be faced with the prospect of doing the same: suspending his campaign, and stopping the juggernaut of a fundraising machine he has put into motion (Obama has declined public financing of his campaign, so he has to raise his own money).

Either way, he is thrown into the defensive position, something he is not accustomed to.

Never mind that many congressional leaders privately mocked McCain's move - Barney Frank, for example, claiming that McCain was coming to solve a non-existant deadlock in the negotiations.

Never mind that one leader, even of the stature of McCain, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Paulson, Bernanke or other economic heavy-hitters, do not individually have the ability to save the country from this mess.

McCain was determined to ride into Washington on his white horse to save the day, even at the personal sacrifice of suspending his presidential campaign. It was a big, bombastic move, but one practically impervious to criticism.

If I was working as a spokesperson for Sen. Obama, I would have cringed at the prospect of having to craft a response to the McCain announcement. This is about the best I could do: I'd have Sen. Obama announce:

"...this is not the heroic John McCain, who survived Viet Namese prisons. This is a grand-standing Senator, in the twilight of his career, rushing back to save the nation from the mess, for which he is at least partially responsible."

With this message, Obama would acknowledge the patriotism of his military service, but still hold his feet to the fire of 'Rome burning."

Crazy, Wonderful Spring...I'm Sorry About That!

2008-06-05T01:21:00.000-07:00

First off, please accept my deep, humiliated apology for sending out this mass mailing. I've run out of time, and it's the only way I can be sure of getting this info to folks for whom (I hope!) it should be important.

Second, this is not intended as a substitute for a personal note, but rather in addition to that. However, as I work down my list of individual notes to get out, I've realized that I'm probably not going to get to all of them - so please accept this with my humble apologies for its impersonality. I promise I will make it up to you with a fabulous meal, a good joke, or something of value.

I just wanted to get word out to you that I am taking off for a month of journalistic adventure in Asia, courtesy of the East West Center in Honolulu. I'll be out of the country from June 8 through July 9, covering close to 40,000 miles in the process. More of this later; it’s just a ‘heads-up’ that I am using this technology to get the basic word out about my apparent absence over the past several months...

It's really been an amazing spring, actually.

Briefly, shortly after returning from NY in March, a bunch of things came together very quickly.

First, I receive word that I had been accepted to participate in this wonderful international Journalism fellowship sponsored by the East West Center in Honolulu. You can read more about the Sr. Journalism Fellowship here:

East West Center Senior Journalist Fellowship/

If you have any interest in what I am doing on this fellowship, go to my website, http://www.broadcastvoice.com and click on either the Itinerary or EWC Program button at the top of the page.

Next, we got word that our new news-convergence venture UniversityTimes/CoolState was named a recipient of a "New Voices" J-Lab Institute for Interactive Journalism grant to grow our operations into three 'micro-bureaus' in parts of East Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley where we are located. This will expand our efforts to make converged journalism a truly community based effort, to get local communities involved in the process of getting heard and getting their news out to the world at large. We are so thrilled and proud to be part of this project. More on New Voices at:
J-Lab "New Voices" Project

Finally, as if that wasn’t enough, I’ve receive tenure and promotion to Associate Professor – an accomplishment that makes me proud first as an achievement on its own, and second, as part of a really wonderful university and educational lab where I work. It’s been a long, tedious road, but now with this security, who knows what we can do next?

This message, then, is partly a way to explain why I’ve been such a bad friend over the course of the past year or two: I’ve basically had my head down, working ungodly hours to make sure I got tenure, to build our University Times/Cool State converged newsroom, and to simply survive and get enough sleep.

It is my hope and plan that from this point on, I’ll be concentrating more on visiting, cooking, seeing more of you, writing some original stuff, and living out the fulfilling and rich life I’ve built here. I will also try to reach each of you individually over the course of the next few days. Some of you I’ve promised information, some I need to get information to – any help you can provide, I’d be so grateful.

Finally, I’m going to try my damndest to report while I’m on the road in Asia and Australia. If you have any interest in following my progress, check into my site BroadcastVoice.com and/or on my blog here at broadcastvoice.blogspot.com.

Thanks for reading this far! Let me know that you got this message. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for understanding what a whirlwind year this has been, and I hope to raise a glass with you very soon...

Con mucho carino; avec beaucoup de douceur, with much admiration and affection

June 5, 2008

Decisions

2008-01-29T14:39:00.000-08:00

We are at an interesting point in our CoolState convergence project.

Our grad students are getting bogged down with not only the technical challenges of the project, but also with competing visions of how the system should work. We started out working on a sort of central structure based on a Fedora database, and the students have been trying to find ways to use the Fedora database to serve all the various needs of the venture.

There are problems, however.

First, not long after beginning the project Fedora produced a later release of the software - V. 2.0 is now replaced by V. 3.0. In general, we always want the latest release of software, but in this case, getting knowledge, familiarity and operability under our belts for the newer version would have slowed us down considerably.

Second, Sepideh, who has been working on what has essentially been considered a 'front-end' to this system became a bit frustrated when the other parts of the system didn't seem to be falling into place (I hope I'm getting my observations correct here).

Third, and probably the most thorny issue here, was how we should use Fedora (if at all) - and a couple of competing visions of what we should do. Ren seemed unsure how Sepideh's CMS fit in with the rest of the structure, Farrukh was unsure as to whether we wanted to use some of the built in features of Fedora to build our system or to customize our user interface from scratch - all against the background of a software package (Fedora) that seemed to be morphing before our eyes.

It seemed to me that since this is an educational process, and that all the work these students are doing will be of benefit not only to our news paper, website, and converged news room, but also to the university at large, and especially for the students who would be learning how to institute such a system in something resembling real world conditions.

With that in mind, we decided that it made a certain amount of sense to have Sepideh develop a Fedora front end that in the terms of NASA would be described as "Fast and Cheap" - essentially, a stripped down version of what we want.

The rest of the team would work to develop a more sophisticated version of the interface, more feature-rich, more variables and preferences.

We set an interim deadline of Feb. 9 to see what each team comes up with as a prototype.

The dynamics are somewhat complicated: Sepideh has approached the project with considerable independence, and for most of the past several months, has largely been working on the project as an outsider. Ren and Farrukh, on the other hand, have been struggling with Fedora usability issues, and trying to define a unified vision of what the project should be.

This two track approach should yield interesting results no matter what; we'd like the extra features, but perhaps getting the prototype operating in a simplified manner could yield some faster results out of the gate.

Also, it is conceivable that both 'products' could be usable in the market place: it is possible that the simpler model being developed by Sepideh would be more appropriate for community groups, senior centers, and libraries to feed into a regional news operation, and the bigger, more complex system would be used by, well, bigger, more complex news operations.

We'll have some learning in a few weeks...

Projekt GB - Projekt1

"The Projekt" Observation

2008-01-29T14:35:00.000-08:00

Interesting Observations
What has been cool about this process so far has been the absolute riches of ideas that we have had to play with. In a strange way, I think that was one of the problems we began to face on 1/28. With so many video choices so easily available, there is a tendency to want to work through each of those effects, when what we really need to do is to stay with one video effect, for example, and really work through its possibilities.

With that understood, putting audio with our project was a lot of fun, though I think we've barely begun to scratch the surface of that medium.

Mostly, there were the absolutely eye popping, hypnotic and provocative images of the 'Hand Ballet', the cell phone video being captured by the camera, and the wonderful tango/romance performances. There was a piece of music that Sara brought that sounded like a swarm of insects and then veered off into all these interesting progressions and developments - it was my favorite piece of the session, although the tang was a close second.

We were using the Tango, of course, in a very playful manner, but in the context of telecommunication, alienation, humor, and trying to connect with people, it takes on a darker, maybe even sadder meaning.

I also love the sort of whip-sawing from one musical style to another.

Can't wait to see photos!

Thursday's Exercise

2008-01-21T12:24:00.000-08:00

I'm really self-centered and narcissistic. When I stole away Jonathan, Alyson and Paul to play with some video for our piece, we left most of the class downstairs in MUS115 working on drumming, under Sara's guidance - working with a percussion teacher from the Music Department (Sara, could you please enter his name here!).

The idea was supposed to be that after Jonathan, Alyson, and Paul got the hang of working with the video, we would go down and recruit the rest of the students to come up and play with the technology. It hadn't even occurred to me that I could be interrupting Sara's work with the rest of the students. So when I got to MUS115 and signaled that we were ready for most of the class to come up to MUS 219 to play with the technology, Sara, almost timidly, asked if we should bring up the percussion instruments and put the music together with the technology.

I said to myself "Oops. I've been pretty presumptuous here." Of course, yes, absolutely, we HAVE to have the percussion there.

Wow. That was a good lesson, because bringing the percussion work Sara was doing to the video work Jonathan, Alyson, and Paul were doing was spectacular. It seemed to me that this session was a great example of what we are looking to investigate. The mixture of the percussion and it's driving, reassuring structure made the movement really natural. Then on top of that, the video images we produced were eye-popping. This was really cool.

Movement and Meaning

2008-01-21T11:56:00.000-08:00

As I observe our performers moving through their exercises, I am struck by the profound relationship between movement and meaning.

In older, more traditional forms, the meaning behind the movement is probably more specifically and formally defined - gestures for sadness, elation, love, inspiration, etc. As movement and dance have become more 'modernized' and 'post-modernized' the relationship between specific meanings of movement has become more sophisticated and complex.

I think particularly of the work of the German choreographer Pina Bausch and New York based Trisha Brown, both of whom have at various times been described as 'post-modernist' choreographers. They are, of course, not the only pioneers in this direction, but perhaps the best known on the world scene. Like non-narrative musical composition and other abstract forms, these choreographers often construct compositions based purely on their aesthetic sensibility, with no specific meaning behind them. With both Bausch and Brown, the results are often tantalizing, teasing, and strangely moving. But if there is a meaning drawn from their works, it is not necessarily a meaning specifically intended by the choreographer, but rather a meaning supplied by the viewer.

This is not to say that there isn't some over-arching idea or meaning, but rather an approach to that meaning that is considerably more sophisticated and subtle than simply proposing that 'a' signifies 'b'. Instead, the relationship between movement and meaning can bypass the 'either/or' bifurcation, and can instead be 'either/and' or 'neither'. But because we are 'playing' in a certain intellectual territory, there IS indeed some meaning we should consider.

As I watch Tanya work with our performers, I love the way she sort of brushes aside any specific meaning or message as she plays. The movement of bodies through space is in itself a lovely, engaging process. I don't suppose she has any specific philosophy behind her technique (or maybe she does), but rather just sets out on playing with her performers and seeing where it goes.

There is an interesting side note here too: this free-form method of play never seems to dissolve into anarchy; there always seems to be an evolving structure. Also - just an observation - the wide range of movements and physical gestures suddenly morph into a formal structure the moment the gesture is repeated, especially once they achieve a second repetition of an original movement. In other words, the first time a gesture or movement is performed, it has to succeed or fail on its own. Then when that gesture or movement is repeated, once, then twice, it becomes a part of the physical 'vocabulary' of the exercise.

No Boundaries

2008-01-21T11:41:00.000-08:00

One of the things I find most inspiring about the way Tanya works is that she doesn't recognize any boundary between what has traditionally been considered "acting" and "dancing". There are long traditions that encourage expertise and vocabulary in each of these traditions - theatre has its long history of character development, connection between character and text, the actor's creation of a "reality" and so forth. And dancers have traditionally dealt with a tradition of virtuosity - meaning that what we would normally consider "dance" had something of an expertise about it, not to be 'indulged' by amateurs. This history of related but separate growth has given us a remarkable and rich literature in both disciplines, but it has also limited their visions.

At its fundamental roots, both dance, and what we consider acting come from the same atavistic tradition: the expression of ideas bigger than daily commerce. And while Tanya does not hit our student/performers with this overly-intellectualized idea, it's really brilliant to see her approach this way. Because she refuses to recognized the boundaries between acting and dance, her communication of this idea to her performers acts to liberate them. Whereas a young performer might feel intimidated to take on a dance project - if they have no dance background - Tanya's simple, almost child-like approach to play finds these performers throwing themselves into their work like they had years of training.

I think it is largely because of the de-emphasis of virtuosity - that is, how 'talented' a dancer they are - makes the play area an open, inviting space.

Creating Content

2008-01-21T11:37:00.000-08:00

We don't usually think of performance workshops as 'creating content', in the way we 'create content' for a web site or online service, but the process is very much alike. One of the things that has been most fun about our Projekt process has been building content without any particular goal or agenda. Rather, we just play and see where things go.

It's very, very cool to see that so much of what we create seems to be good content. My fear is that we are just deluding ourselves and flailing about on stage, but my instinct, after many, many years doing this kind of work, is that this is the real deal. The chemistry of not only the three instructors but especially of the student performers makes this particularly fun.

Students with a background in performance tend to 'jump off the cliff' very easily, whether they know what they are doing or not. Tech heads, like our TVF students, want to have the system well understood before they move much, and they chose to be behind the camera because that felt more comfortable to them.

The atmosphere we are developing makes it impossible for the timid to hide in their shell, and for the adventurous to call upon their mates to get out and get on stage with them.

The result is almost an embarrassment of riches: just about every exercise we have done seems to provide interesting, even provocative material. It seems like there is almost nothing that is NOT usable, which is deliriously lovely and a little terrifying: how do we track and capture all the stuff coming our way, and how will we paw through it to decide what to keep and what to discard? It's a little daunting, but what a fabulous position to be in: what from all the rich, cool stuff we've created do we want to keep? How often do you get a choice like that?

Students Changing the World, One Bug at a Time

2007-08-24T01:30:00.000-07:00

I am so impressed by the seriousness of purpose our Computer Sciences students bring to this project. In many ways their grasp of what we are doing exceeds that of our journalists. This shouldn’t be thought of as a criticism of our journalists; our programs are quite modest and our students are all under-grads, much more adept at wrestling with cameras, microphones, and dangling participles than they are with theoretical approaches to news and the computer’s place in journalism.

Nonetheless, the questions that these young people have raised (cheered on by their mentor, Dr. Abbot) have profound implications for the practice of journalism.

I fear not being able to communicate the significance of this effort. On one hand, it could be an interesting and challenging way to earn a degree (four of our five students are pursuing graduate degrees, one an undergrad degree). Clearly, what we are trying to do is tame a bit a very wild and unruly beast, but this could be said of any massive corporate software project.

But somehow, news is different.

The product of all our journalistic efforts is knowledge (not simply information; we’re awash in a sea of that over-hyped commodity).

And like scientific or cultural knowledge, journalism influences society in sometimes profound ways. It can, of course, trivialize human activity. We find ourselves hypnotized by celebrity, impressed by nonsense, and unable to pull away from dross.

In a larger sense, we have become slaves to ‘mere novelty’; in fact, I coined the term ‘the tyranny of novelty’ to describe how meaningless drivel sucks the intellectual oxygen out of the air.

But it also remains true that while we may get the media we deserve, journalism remains the solid bedrock upon which societies operate. Rarely will you find a good society with a bad press, and where you find a vibrant, engaging press existing in a bad society.

One of the key ideas with which we are wrestling is how to devise a search algorithm that is not premised on simple popularity. One of the key functions of a vibrant press is to frequently turn away from popularity and conventional wisdom to direct society’s gaze on that which is not merely novel, but rather has profound implications for society.

Conventional search engines are based on the idea that the number of links between sites is a good indicator of what people want to see. In essence, they are big popularity contests. There is a certain egalitarian aspect to this reality: every site, every blog, every portal is measured simply by its popularity.

This popularity can be measured in a number of ways: the total number of links to a site, total number of site visitors, total number of unique visitors, page views, etc.

But all these measures overlook the fact that mere popularity can’t accurately predict what is important for society.

Journalists ignore this popularity at their peril, but surely, they have to look elsewhere as well.

In short, search engines work on measures of quantitative value. This is often at odds with what good journalists do. Often, journalists – the good ones at least – must ignore what is merely novel or popular to find out the real meaning behind trends or developments.

At this point, our search technology can’t make subjective judgments as to what will be or actually is important. We still relay on human brains to look over the haul from search engines to determine what is good and valuable and what is not.

I am not enough of a Luddite to believe that computers won’t some day be able to search more smartly in this context; rather I simply acknowledge that we aren’t there yet.

So one of my conclusions at the beginning of the marriage of computers and news is that it is quite possible our first round of projects will be less successful than we dream.

That would be fine. The process of wrestling with, probing and poking at this old beast is an honorable undertaking, and could very possibly change the way we process civic knowledge.

Broadcastvoice: Pleasant Chastisement

2007-08-10T21:20:00.000-07:00

CoolState Vidz

Pleasant Chastisement

2007-08-10T21:00:00.000-07:00

In two fairly inspiring conversations this week, colleagues of mine at Cal State LA planted some very interesting ideas in my brain; ideas that may seem routine in the worlds of systems and programming, but ideas nonetheless, which could revolutionize – or at least dramatically change the way we currently make news content.

First, Dr. Chengyu Sun listened ever so politely as I rattled on about our plans for using computer resources to do the job of gathering and evaluating news more thorough and more efficient.

The major topic of our discussion was on the topic of databases. I’m not talking about a couple hundred records of names and addresses in a so-called ‘flat file’, but rather a potentially massive media database that would make available to users vast quantities of photos, audio, video, text, flash animation, sound-slides, and other media content.

As I saw it, there were three broad scenarios available to us:

First, the use of fairly high-end consumer computers (in our case Mac Pro G5s, with dual Intel processors) installed in our department. We are already using this set up to manage some small text/number databases accessible by faculty, students and staff. There would be some obvious storage and bandwidth limitations on this set up, but it could work as a rudimentary arrangement.

The second scenario I envisioned was the purchase of a commercial server; in our case an Apple Xserve dual core Intel Xeon server with up to 3GHz of processing power. This server would be installed on campus server racks and would eliminate our need to manage back-ups, crashes, updates, etc., but would not only cost us a bit of our very limited budget, could potentially pass on band width problems to the campus. This was not a great solution, because there is an existing history of faculty installing servers here that essentially jeopardized the entire campus system. That faculty member was reprimanded and the server shut down. This wasn’t the kind of arrangement we wanted.

The third scenario I proposed was the leasing of server space at commercial sites off campus, which would handle bandwidth problems and could expand with our needs. The problems, of course, were with money. While server space is relatively cheap at the moment, the cost of band width alone could quickly eat up our entire budget.

Dr. Sun endorsed a scenario that we had pursued as a quick fix solution: embedding media players in our site so that we could filter media through our own editorial process, but still take advantage of the commercially existing media databases online, such as You Tube or Google Video (related sites, but not the same thing…). I had (incorrectly) assumed that we would lose control of our ‘branding’ of the page. That is to say, we wanted to feature videos which has passed through an editorial process in our enterprise before posting them online.

Our graduate programmers, Dhaval Joshi and Manish Sharma came up with a very simple and elegant solution, based on the ideas Dr. Sun endorsed (though Dhaval and Manish had started this work as an interim solution prior to Dr. Sun’s recommendation). That page, under construction, not ready for comments, and definitely not open for business is located at: http://coolstatela.com/coolstate/videos.html

Dr. Sun was so patient with me. I am a journalist, not a programmer or systems expert. His smiling and kindly insistence that taking advantage of other commercial site’s storage space and band width was a revelation.

Today, meeting with Dr. Russ Abbot, I laid out an over-view of three projects I had spoken with graduate students about recently. It is my hope that these three students will take on these projects, which I will explain in a later post.

While the details of each of those projects are interesting in and of themselves, features of which could have a dramatic effect on how we gather and distribute news content, Dr. Abbot was more concerned about my overall lack of vision on how to integrate the disparate and unruly parts of our enterprise. While I have prided myself on the tireless work I’ve done getting phones installed, replacing old furniture, and setting up infrastructure and manual work-flow systems – sort of rambling on and on, Dr. Abbott patiently listened to my blathering and finally asked me “Yes, but how do all these parts work together?”

In the rush to get a news paper published, to get a web site launched, to produce and develop novel and innovative new news delivery systems, I’d sort of missed the big picture: all of these elements have to work together as a whole, not just in the theoretical or editorial sense, but in the system sense as well.

I’ve got some serious think-time ahead of me. It’s not at all clear that I can come up with answers for any of Dr. Abbott’s questions, but it’s probably a good thing that I am at least asking those questions.

It’s Fiday night. I’m still on campus at 9:00 pm. My head hurts. But in a good way.

Elated and Terrified

2007-07-18T00:49:00.000-07:00

This new mission I've been tasked with will test me at every level. I've preached and lectured for years about the coming covergence in Journalism. I've taken and taught seminars, consulted with stations, and spoken at faculty meetings. Well, it's time to fish. Due to a complicated series of events, I've inherited not only our campus newspaper to run, but also trying to do that while simultaneously launching a web site that is intended to be the sister outlet to that publication.

All considered, it's a pretty cool deal. The sacred campus paper has been around for 50 years but has definately seen better days. Basically, by the end of the spring quarter, the paper was more or less dead. It had been reduced years ago from a daily to a semi-weekly. Then this last year, it went to a single edition per week, and at that, it was barely holding its own.

The business manager had retired over a year before and had not been replaced. To their immense credit, students worked tirelessly, even heroically to keep the publication on the news racks around campus, but even that was a struggle. It really looked like the end was near.

But after a couple of meetings with our new dean - who has shown more interest and passion for the world of media than we havve seen in a long time - I gave in to a couple of years of being asked to run the paper AND our new web venture.

So, I'm not getting a lot of sleep, and it's scary as hell. But this will be a wonderful adventure. My entire heart and soul is into this project. I'm elated.

And terrified.

The Fame Name Game

2007-01-18T14:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes our problem solving is not very elegant or pretty, but what we are trying to do is just get the job done.

I also like that there is a kind of guerilla mentality in our school and our news operations, that we look for cheap/free solutions, and at the same time can still build an identity online.

There was another key story on which I came down fairly heavy on one of my students for not concentrating in class (he hates listening to me lecture!), but the truth of the matter is that he really dug his teeth into the two stories he took on: Second Life and CSU Budget. The stories are kind of unruly and out of control, like a yard filled with weeds, but he got a lot of stuff together for those stories, and for that, I take my hat off to him. It's so much better to be struggling with a story that is worthy than just skating on superficial stuff.

As an educator, I am appalled sometimes by the interests of students - there seems to be an all-too American obsession with fame and notoriety - especially of the young and beautiful - and little concern for really substantial stuff. For example, for every story on who was wearing what at the recently completed Golden Globe awards, there are ten other, totally un-sexy stories about healthcare, the environment, homelessness and the war that go untold. It seems to me that many of these young people are more interested in fame than accomplishment. It doesn't matter that thousands of times more people will be affected by a healthcare policy change proposed by a city council member, or a county supervisor. What seems to matter is that Justin and Cameron have broken up or that Lindsay has entered rehab. I'm dying for someone under age 40 to get passionate about the state education budget, urban planning in southern California, or the cultural divide between The Music Center and Highways Performance Space. Well, actually, I'd be astonished if they even knew anything about the budget, urban planning, and cultural divides.

Evolution 2.0

2006-09-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

It may seem at times that there is no good news coming from the Galapagos Islands. The issues facing this remote archipelago making up Ecuador’s smallest province read like an eco-nightmare; it seems like practically everything that happens here is a threat to the delicate balance of nature. Want to have a pet dog? It is likely illegal. Do you like raspberries? They are destroying great swaths of the islands. Do you think fishermen are humble, romantic heroes of the sea? In this part of the world they are a ferocious political force, and at the center of a bunch of controversies.

And the assaults on the environment are continuous. Here are the most recent headlines:

Summer 2006: reports received that one of the worlds rarest birds are now extinct on Fernandina Island, where they were first discovered a little over a decade ago. The estimated 100 remaining Mangrove Finches cling to existence on Isabela Island.

August 18, 2006: Ecuador’s largest newspaper “Hoy” announced that authorities had discovered not only invasive fresh water Tilapia on San Cristobal Island, but also a green iguana (believed to be from Central America) and astonishingly, a monkey! These animals do not exist naturally in the Galapagos and are believed to have escaped from tourist boats in the islands.

Sept. 21, 2006: emergency clean up of bunker oil on the shore of Santa Cruz Island. The spill is of unknown origin, but required the efforts of dozens of people to contain the spill and wash off iguanas, birds, and other animals.

Undated: The Charles Darwin Research station reports that “Alien Predators” are competing for the precious Galapagos tortoise habitat. According to the Darwin website, invasive donkeys and cattle trample and collapse nests, destroying the balance of soil humidity necessary for the successful incubation of tortoise eggs, pigs and dogs tear the nests apart and eat the eggs, black rats prey on the hatchlings as they emerge from the nest, and non-native fire ants are capable of killing the hatchlings and destroying the eggs as well. Oh, and don’t forget the goats and fire ants: they out-compete the tortoise for food and destroy the terrain, causing erosion.

This isn’t one or two species at risk, but an entire swath of animals on the brink of extinction.

Since 1997, the country has had seven presidents. The German based political watchdog group Transparency International ranks the Ecuadorian government among the most corrupt in the world.

In 2004, the current president Alfredo Palacio took office after violent and deadly demonstrations on the streets of Quito and Guyaquil demanding the resignation of the previous president, Lucio Gutierrez.
As of this writing, Ecuador's leftist candidate Rafael Correa has widened his lead over his rivals in the October 15 presidential election. Correa has gained 26 percentage points while center-left candidate Leon Roldos, Correa's closest rival, dropped one point to 18 percent.

The real political news is that one of the country's banana barons, and scion of Ecuador’s leading political family, Alvaro Noboa, trails in third place with 11 percent of support.

In just the last four years, there have been 12 directors of the Galapagos National Park (GNP). Back in 1996, Eliecer Cruz was named head of the Park. He was born in the islands and was widely seen as a rare director who really wanted to stand up to the powerful fisherman’s lobby and tourism industries. After prevailing in a number of dramatic confrontations with not only the fishermen, but also one old style judge in Puerto Ayora, even he was replaced.

In late 2004, leadership of the Darwin Foundation negotiated with the Ecuadorian government on the need for ‘solid, cohesive leadership’ within the Park Service organization. By the end of September, then President Gutierrez removed park director Edwin Nuala – Cruz’ successor, a professional biologist and dedicated defender of the park - and replaced him with pro-fishing, pro-development and anti-conservation lobbyist Fausto Cepeda. Cepeda was replaced by Victor Carrion, after tumultuous negotiations with the Minister of the Environment. The current park director is biologist Raquel Molina, who is seen as generally supportive of nature-friendly policies, but with the turn-over in this position, it’s unclear what she can really do. La plus ça change…

This instability (and corruption) can’t help but influence the Galapagos, which encompass 3,100 square miles of protected lands and about 51,000 square miles of protected waters. By most counts, the current population of about 20,000 people was half that number just 10 years ago.

There are at least a dozen endangered species of mammals and fish here. Over the past 10 years, fishermen have nearly depleted the populations of sea cucumber and shark: they earn huge sums on Asian markets.
Those two main economic interests, fishing and tourism, each have a representative in the nation's congress. Each blames the other for the ecological damage. "The problem isn't the fisherman," said Rogelio Guaycha, congressman from the province who also heads a local fishing cooperative. "What's killing the Galapagos is the tourism." Not surprisingly, tourist industry leaders say the same thing about the fishing industry, which is practically untouchable politically.
The future of the islands, which have been certified a World Heritage site by the United Nations, is by no means secure. It is against this background that a nascent news industry has been trying to find a foothold But how much power can the media in a sparsely populated province spread over 20 islands and thousands of square miles of ocean really have?

This was the overarching question facing network TV producer Cecilia Alvear as she coordinated the efforts of a handful of foundations and a spunky journalist group in the Galapagos. On August 25 and 26, Alvear and her two colleagues, NBC network correspondent George Lewis and me - I’m a journalism professor at Cal State LA and a radio reporter/talk show host - presented an intensive workshop designed to improve skills and increase contacts between journalists and public information officers working in the islands.

Enrique Ramos, editor of the ‘Colono’ newspaper published in Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz Island (and an officer at the Charles Darwin Foundation center), helped organize but was unable to attend the workshop because he was under a deadline to get the paper out, said that workshops like this are vital to raise public interest and gain international attention to the island’s problems.

Alvear herself was born in the second largest Galapagos city of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, and is the former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) here in the U.S. Her commitment to the islands goes back many years, providing computers, books and other curricular materials to the local grammar school on San Cristobal island named after her father, Alejandro Alvear, former military governor of the island.

She incorporated a private foundation to raise funds and pursue other support for the two issues that most concern her there: education and journalism.

She set up the foundation in Ecuador and is in the process of establishing a non-profit in the u.s. to raise funds and pursue other support. For now Alvear provides the funds to bring the three instructors to galapagos for this pilot journalism training program. She had the moral backing of the NAHJ (Alvear, Lewis and I are all NAHJ members and the NAHJ "Manual de Estilo' was one of the critical texts used in the workshop). In addition, the Austin Forum of the Knight Foundation for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin also provided support.

The ‘Colegio de Periodistas de Galápagos’ (CPG) is the local sponsor of the workshop. It was founded in 2002 by 15 people working as journalists or in related professions, to reinforce professional standards and improve their skills. The group was first led by El Colono’s Ramos, until the leadership passed recently to Carlos Macias, free-lance journalist and press liaison for the Instituto Nacional de Galapagos (INGALA).

“Colegio” in this context is not an academic institution, but is a term referring a professional association. Larousse Dictionary notes “…the first meaning is of course an institution devoted to secondary education, i.e. high school; but it is also ‘a professional organization devoted to establishing rules for the proper conduct of the professionals who belong to it and to defend the professional interests of its members. So when we talk about the “Colegio de Prioodistas de Galapagos”, that is what we mean.

INGALA's Macias has worked diligently to raise the level of public respect for their profession, to more clearly understand their legal obligations, and to look for candidates to fill the few journalism related jobs in the area. The spanish environmental organization "ARAUCARIA" contributed the funds necessary to bring the workshop participants from Santa Cruz and Isabela islands to San Cristobal and provide them with room and board while attending the workshop. INGALA provided a conference room.

Under Macias, the CPG hopes to mount up to a half dozen of these workshops per year for the nascent journalism community in various parts of the islands.
Gina Andrade, owner of Radio Encantada (also a long time talk show host on the station) which is heard on San cristobal and Santa Cruz islands attended the two day workshop. She said that she had watched the islands change over the past twenty years she has been on the air. She felt it was important that people outside the islands be made aware of what islanders were facing, and felt the local journalists in the Galapagos could play an important role in getting the message out.
The intensive training sessions were held at the offices of INGALA, just outside Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on San Cristobal Island. Students were put through their paces discussing a range of issues affecting them:

Credibility: without a deep and solid tradition of challenging, balanced reporting, the student journalists began to equate balanced coverage with their own credibility. It also helped them put public information officers in the proper perspective. They are not adversaries, of course, but they do come to news stories with an agenda that may be quite different than that of the journalist. The attendees learned that they can benefit each other and at the same time keep their journalistic ethics intact.

What Makes a Good Story: because there are so many critical stories breaking around these journalists, and because of their obligations covering other stories, sometimes the ‘world-class’ stories breaking around them are overlooked. The workshop set out to encourage them to look right outside their own doors for important, significant emerging stories.

New Technologies: while journalists in the Galapagos certainly have access to technology to help them report, their available equipment is often outdated and obsolete. The workshop gave them the opportunity to try their hands at equipment that is in use today in the U.S.; equipment which is not particularly expensive to purchase or maintain.

Self-Sufficiency: An age-old problem here has been that 'it's not really news untiil it's picked up on the mainland.' In other words, it takes the certification of the nation's big news organizations to bring important Galapagos stories to the attention of the public. It is hoped that by pooling their efforts and developing new and novel channels of communication, local journalists will have a greater say in getting their stories on the 'national radar.'

Collaboration: considerable time was spent brain-storming ways in which the journalists could help each other, and how their allies and colleagues in the U.S. could provide vital support for their efforts. This has already lead to the formation of an email list serve, making it possible for everyone on the list, both in the Galapagos and in the U.S. to share stories, leads, events, and news that is important to the effort of improving journalism in the Galapagos.

"Lonsome George", the bachelor Galapagos Turtle on Santa Cruz island has a century headstart on the 'Colegio' and although he is still thriving, he hasn't seemed very interested in passing his genes on. The journalists of the Colegio hope they will be more successful at growing their profession in these brilliant, enigmatic islands. If their skills grow as fast as technology, evolution may finally be on their side.

Carapachudos

2006-09-03T21:26:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, in Virginia City, I befriended some young monks who were a part of a small Yoga community. (http://www.hinduismtoday.com/archives/1980/04/1980-04-01.shtml) The swami, whose name was Subramuniya, had led these acolytes into the mountains of Nevada, to meditate, to reflect, and to run a graphics and print shop that served the rest of growing empire. One of the young brothers in particular took a liking to me – I was all of 14 or so at the time. His name was Chris, and he explained why he had left his family in the east, had given up his Christian upbringing to take up with Subramuniya. He told me that among other things, since the guru had contemplation centers in Hawaii, California and other places, he could move his students around as part of their formation. Chris related Subramuniya’s concept of never letting one of his monks get too settled in one place. Travel, change of environment, a new bed to lay down on at night, was possibly the single most growth-invoking assignment Subramuniya could give his students. As Chris related it, travel was what caused you to dig down into the deepest part of your soul, to find your own natural resourcefulness, and to address the world as an equal, and from an entirely new perspective.

That conversation stuck with me deeply over the years. I’ve come to believe that travel unlocks the brain, shakes out old habits, and really defines who you are.

This trip to Ecuador with my friend Cecilia and her significant other George, came out of the blue.

Cecilia was born in the Galapagos Islands, daughter of the military governor of the islands and his young bride.

Cecilia went through a lifetime of experiences, surviving days at sea on a passenger ship in which the engine died, a coup in 1941, and scraping by as a student in Los Angeles in the late 60s. But she has managed to return not only to Ecuador, but to the Galapagos as often as she can, and has continued to try to help the islands by supplying computers, educational supplies, musical instruments – whatever she could to improve the lives of the people who live on the remote chunks of volcanic rock, 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador. The local slang name for folks living on San Cristobal Island (there are slang names for those living on the other islands as well) is 'Carapachudo', derived from the word 'carapace', describing the world famous tortoises.

When a mutual friend who was to accompany Cecilia and George was forced to bow out at the last minute, and my schedule was clear and open to join her, I jumped at the opportunity to not only travel a bit, but also to see those legendary islands that started a revolution in thinking 150 years ago.

The trip down from LA was brutal. Leaving home at 3:30 in the morning, only to survive two very long lines at LAX (this is less than two weeks after the much-publicized arrest of suspected terrorists in England) and dragging nearly 100 pounds of clothes and equipment, by the time we reached Miami to change planes, the tiredness was washing over us like the South Florida surf. The flight from Miami to Quito is really fairly short, and for that I was grateful.

Passport and customs were a breeze, and from what I could see at night, Quito appears to be a genial, friendly sprawl of a city.

We transferred to the home of Cecilia’s brother Eduardo in San Rafael, north of Quito. The place is beautiful and welcoming. More later; my eyes are drooping.

Travel Companions

2006-09-03T21:20:00.000-07:00

Aug. 30, 2006

The travel writer Pico Iyer once wrote that “Taking planes seems as natural to me as picking up the phone or going to school…”. It is in some ways easier to get to some of the far corners of the planet than ever before, but the fact remains, the movement of our physical self from one place to the other, a long way from the starting point, is a big effort. “Beam me up, Scottie…” seems so much easier, but it misses a lot of the journey as well.

But like the comment of Swami Subramuniya so many years ago, travel reveals who we really are.

We can’t rely on our station in life, our reputation, our network of friends – in any but a broad superficial way – to help us on that journey. We really have to dig down deep to discover our inner strengths and our own considerable resources.

The little rituals of how you lay out your toiletries in the bathroom, how you arrange your clothes and laundry, where you put your shoes become very important. For some, the chaos of just throw it anywhere works swell. For others (for me!), there’s a kind of reassurance in putting those little rituals in place when we have so little control of so much of the rest of our external environment.

I also learned many years ago, on my first international trip with Father Paul Meinecke, the pastor at St. Mary’s in the Mountains in Virginia City, that you can really take the measure of a friend’s character by traveling with them. Somehow, the crankiness or peevishness we might tolerate in a home setting becomes intolerable on the road; and on the road, we have ways of escaping, easily.

Since the journey is so tiring to begin with – the strange sense of exertion, even though you are mostly sitting still being transported physically and psychically – we have very little tolerance for petty concerns or spoiled behavior. The demand that your toast be ‘just so’ in a restaurant at home, or that your seat isn’t as close to the window as you’d like just seem pathetic and insensitive.

On the positive side, traveling with a companion who is comfortable with the rigors of living at hours when everyone else is asleep, where your dirty hair, sweaty neck and sleep-deprived eyes are on display for the whole world to see, has a strange bonding effect. You are living in the interstices of life; not quite in country “A”, but not exactly in country “B” either. You’ve been through the trials of deprivation and lack of sleep; you must have connections that are more than casual, you are pilgrims and refugees, after all, temporarily at least, without a familiar bed in which to escape.

Because both George and Cecilia have traveled so widely, their road experiences were much, much broader than mine. Also, since we were traveling to Ecuador, the land of Cecilia’s birth, childhood, and family, they were moving through channels they had passed many times before. This was a sort of trip home for Cecilia.

They are lovely traveling companions. Not only are they solicitous of my comfort and circumstances, they are nearly heroic in their good spirits and cheer. Our rhythms quickly fall into a comfortable pattern: they seemed to tire when I tired. They were hungry when I am hungry, and thirsty when I need to drink something. George, who has covered so many historic happenings in his professional capacity with NBC, has quips, anecdotes and tales of adventure to keep anyone engaged.

Also, at our age – not naïve kids any more – we seem to have a good sense of boundaries too. There are times when we need to be apart and independent, and other times when the meal enjoyed in a local restaurant serves as a review of the days activities and a preview of the day ahead. These meals, which serve as the sort of guide posts for the day, become a really lovely part of the trip; not just for the adventure of eating in a foreign country and culture, but also for sharing our life stories.

I’ve traveled with lots of people over the years; with friends and lovers, family members and professional colleagues, each with its own flavor and rhythm. Some were triumphal returns to home or work, some to fulfill obligations, and some for sheer pleasure. Most, however, were simple jaunts to another city. The handful of those long, international journeys spent with good companions have been few, and I can’t imagine any more pleasant and charming than George and Cecilia.

There is typically a moment at the end of the journey when something crosses your mind to share, and you turn automatically to that friend, and of course, they aren’t there. You are back in your own environment, and that time passed with the travel companion is fading quickly into memories.

Pico Iyer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico_Iyer
Paul Theroux: http://www.paultheroux.com/
Ibn Battuta: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Battuta

Setting out and Evolution

2006-08-19T22:59:00.000-07:00

It's been a curios, slow summer - that feels like it is almost gone. And, well, this adventure hit me out of the blue. I take off from my little deck on Mt. Washington (that's my view in the photo) for the Galapagos Islands with a friend who was born and grew up there.

I'm going to 1.) try to keep up with these adventures here on this blog, 2.) refrain as much as possible from 'first person singular', and 3.) try to post lots of other media as I figure out how to do that.

So, first step, some sleep, since I have to be up for a 3:30 am shuttle for LAX. I'll write more on the way.

You write back!