Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Working the garment

While I was pulling boxes of records out from a dark space underneath the stairs (really), I came across something every home needs:

A cape!

It's timeless yet versatile, and ideal for:

...prophesying...

...stalking...

...casting spells...

...scouting trails, a la Lewis and Clark...

...and impersonating Captain Morgan.


My mom: Are you going to wear it out tonight?
Me: Of course not, it's only for questing! But you can never ever give this away.

And so, I leave you, caped or un-caped, with this clip from Flight of the Conchords.

Drip


I've been having recurring dreams (uh oh! I've started talking about dreams on my blog -- I've officially jumped the shark). I am endlessly drinking water (or other liquids, it's never quite clear...pun!), yet never able to quench my thirst.

Now, if I were to do a Freudian analysis of this, I'd probably have to write down as many details I could remember, including the color the fridge from whence I pulled my drink and the size and shape of the glass, only to discover that my inability to slake represents some kind of failed wish fulfillment for and a subconscious desire for...whatever.

I'm just gonna grab a glass of water. Or two or three. Because I think really I'm just a bit dehydrated.

Image from Flickr user Vicki and Chuck Rogers shared with a Creative Commons license.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Running a generational show down


I just had my official "I'm old" holiday moment. It didn't happen when my younger cousins showed me up at Wii boxing and Guitar Hero, or when I repeatedly didn't get IDed at bars (though I may have another in a few hours at my high school's alumni pub night).

It happened when I was doing an interval workout at the local high school's track.

A group of kids -- probably 5th or 6th grade? yeah I'm so old I can't even tell -- were playing lacrosse on the turf field in the center of the track. That's cute, I thought...until at the end of my third lap on my last mile repeat something shiny and sharp came flying towards my shins. As I lept over it, I glared at the culprit as he gave me that look that says, "Oops, I didn't mean to do that, only really I did because I wanted to see what would happen."

"Fffffffff..." I blocked the air as I ran through all the things I could shout at them. You stupid kids! I'll tell your mother! You could have hurt someone!

Yeah, I officially turned into an old cogderette. All I was missing was an angry fist pump.

And somehow, while my mind was searching for that certain something that would show them, I realized that anything I said would just make them laugh more, and sweeten this moment for the little troublemakers.

Then, as I pushed myself waaaaaay too hard on that last lap, I remembered the chants my friends and I had come up with to taunt our music teacher Mr. Ommit (whose name rhymed with an unfortunate bodily fluid), and how much I loved tormenting Ms. Emery until she exploded, and how much entertainment I got when she screamed at us.

And I also remembered that those kids never got to party like it was 1999 (heck, they probably weren't even born in 1999), and all of a sudden I felt like Grampa Simpson in that episode where he pretends to cry and tricks Bart and Lisa into cleaning the house.

But really...who throws a CD at someone who is working out? Those hooligans!

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 12/27/2008


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Monday, December 22, 2008

Friday, December 19, 2008

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 12/19/2008


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 12/16/2008


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

You aren't who you think you are...


In the midst of the research I'm doing for my Water Class term paper, I ran across this fact:

Humans actually contain about 10 times more bacterial cells in their bodies than they do human cells. [source (pdf)]


It's ... gross and intriguing and humbling and shocking and ... I think my favorite science tidbit of the decade.

Ok, back to work now!

Sunday, December 07, 2008

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 12/07/2008


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 11/30/2008


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 11/25/2008


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 11/18/2008


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Guilt blogging...


Gah! So...6 out of 7 (did I could right?) of my last posts (or should I say "posts") have been my automatically generated diigo bookmarks. Shame on me! And those have been scant because I've barely even been idling away my time on the net.

Gah again, I say, gah!

But enough grunting. Some things that have turned me into a poor (at best) blogger:
  • Cow poop.
  • As mentioned before, The Devil in the White City. At least I finished that one! Post (complete with an analysis of Christian Bale's performance in American Psycho, I hope) coming soon, but I'm not making any promises!
  • The daunting task of learning to use ArcView (and producing some sort of worthwhile conclusions about environmental justice from it).
  • The International Environmental Journalism Summit, recently hosted at CU by the CEJ (sorry about the proliferation of acronyms).
  • The UK television series Skins.
So, out of guilt mainly, I'm posting the feature story that I wrote for Newsgathering a week ago:

Alley Cats

Behind the post office in an alley between Walnut and Pearl Streets in downtown Boulder, an eight-foot tall cat playing a violin grins down on several trash and recycling bins. She rests her welded steel high-heeled shoe –a blue blossom on the toe – on a violin case etched with “Smock ’94.” Not visible from 14th or 15th Streets, Kristine Smock’s sculpture, “Alley Cats,” looks over today’s catch – an overstuffed leather chair and a milk crate – like the patron saint of dumpster divers.

“I do a lot of dumpster diving, looking around for things people have thrown out,” Smock, age 58, says. This artist finds her materials in garage sales, recycling centers, antique stores, and unexpected gifts.

“I had a friend who had an old farm, and he let me dig up the fields,” says Smock. But in the more than twenty years she’s been making art out of trash, she’s found the landscape has changed. “It’s harder to find. People have had their stuff cleaned up.”

Today, after finishing a post-workout lunch of a fried egg, Smock will be painting. Instead of a canvas, she’ll be using old boards.

Holding a fly swatter aloft, Smock stalks after the buzzing insect. “My mother taught me how to recycle as a child. She was a recycling queen,” Smock says. “And it just kind of went into my art.”

A matter of economy

As soon as humans starting making trash, they started making art from it.

“There’s a huge tradition in folk art to basically make art out of whatever is available,” says Richard Saxton, assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado. “And oftentimes whatever is available happens to be trash that nobody else wants.”

“It’s a matter of economy that artists tend to use salvaged trash as a material,” Saxton says.

Smock can confirm this. When she first started scavenging for materials, she says, “part of the reason is probably because I was poor.” But it was more than a simple matter of economy: it was a matter of vision. Smock would look at piles of scrap metal and see, “something that looked like a head or an arm.”

And Libby James looks at spent tea bags and sees faces and landscapes.

Reading tea leaves

James lives in Fort Collins. The two weeks she just spent as an election judge – she leans in as if telling a scandalous detail – afforded her plenty of time to work on her cards, “once filled with tea, now filled with love.”

“People see things in them,” James says. The best part is everyone sees something different.

A writer and talented runner (at 72 her kids still can’t keep up), James says, “I have no artistic ability – I don’t!” Instead, emptying tea bags and creating cards is meditative and therapeutic. “Sometimes I draw,” – flowers and vines snaking through the brown tea stains – “and sometimes I just let things happen,” she says.

James is in her third year of retirement. She previously worked in Cheyenne, Wyo. helping young single parents learn job skills and prepare for the GED. She got the idea to use teabags as a material when a friend sent her a card from a village in Africa.

“I saved it, framed it, and thought, gosh, I could do that. Then they started evolving,” says James.

It’s not surprising her inspiration came from another continent. “You’ll find some of the best examples of recycled art from developing countries,” said Saxton. It’s what happens when creativity meets resourcefulness. “African toys built out of recycled pop cans. Also folk art in the US, from homemade yard signs to roadside attractions.”

James first started using her own tea bags – round ones, square ones, whatever she had on hand. Then friends from her writers’ group and book club started saving them. “Now I have a lifetime supply,” she says.

As for the tea itself? “That goes in my compost,” says James. It will eventually disappear into her garden.

James has a philosophy that all things – like tea, which once brewed looses its essence – are temporary. “All of these cards are going to get thrown away,” she says, one way or another.

The knowledge of her art’s transience is liberating.

Art not just for art’s sake

Using found object as art has come a long way since Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal in a gallery with the title, “Fountain.”

The ability of artists to rethink every day objects – like tea bags, or aluminum cans, or old carpet – and redefine what it means for something to be “used up” is translating into the manufacturing world.

“We’re rethinking how we make things,” says Saxton. “Creative people in the arts have inspired change.” Saxton sees this most clearly in architecture and design.

“There’s a lot of experimentation going on in architecture with cast off materials,” says Saxton. “You can bale anything. And anything you can bale, you can build out of.”

But while some artists are using recycled materials because they are functional, inexpensive and sustainable, others use them to convey a message of environmental activism. Lynne Hull of Fort Collins builds sculptures that are visually arresting – combining aged, twisted snags with recycled boards and metals – to create habitat for migrating birds. Chris Jordan of Seattle digitally stitches together photographs of consumer items – cell phones, plastic bottles, computer motherboards – to show the immensity of consumption.

Looks like trash

When Smock gave directions to her home in Lyons, she described a beige two-story house, as if it would be otherwise indiscernible from every house on the block.

She didn’t mention the purple and orange door with a hand painted yellow doorframe. Or the green, blue and orange bowling balls mounted atop steel rebar like a Technicolor, candy-coated version Vlad the Impaler’s yard. Or the plywood apple, large enough to sled on, mounted in a tree. Or the limp piece of galvanized rubber, once inflated though it’s not clear as what, hanging from a branch.

In recent years, Smock has scaled back her use of trash. In part, it’s because welding is hard on the hands, and Smock has taken up the mandolin.

“I still want to do projects about garbage – I love it,” Smock says. “I like the idea of transformation. You take something that no one wants or they find ugly and you turn it into an other, maybe even some beautiful.”

Smock has transformed a rusted bike chain into the spine of a horse, barbed wire into a bird’s nest, silverware and scissors into a human figure, and plastic bottles into a cloud. She has also made a series of concrete masks.

For several years, her art was part of the Sculpture Trail in Lyons, although that project has been cancelled due to lack of funding. She has public installations – murals and sculptures – in Boulder, Denver, and her home state of New Jersey.

“That about wraps it up. That’s my career,” she laughs. “And some of them are deteriorating.”

Smock’s house is full of her own work – painted cabinets in the kitchen with music notes lacquered on, a single wire bent into a female figure, a type of three-dimensional sketch – and gifts from artist friends.

Some of Smock’s pieces carry a blatant environmental message – like the Statue of Liberty she made representing forms of renewable energy – but ultimately, that isn’t what motivates Smock or carries her through the inevitable criticism.

“Some people said ‘that looks like trash.’ But that’s not the majority,” she says. “A lot of people liked it, especially kids. If kids like it, you know it’s successful.”

Viewing the artwork of Kristine Smock and Libby James in Boulder:

You can find Kristine Smock’s sculptures between 14th and 15th Street on Lawry Lane and at the main branch of the Boulder Public Library outside the children’s museum.

Libby James’ cards are for sale at Art Mart (1222 Pearl Street).



Image from Flickr user dbking shared using a Creative Commons license.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 11/16/2008


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 11/15/2008


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 11/11/2008


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Monday, November 10, 2008

More recycled art!

What's the first stage of writing?

No, it isn't getting a candy bar (that's somewhere around number 3 or 4)...

It's procrastinating!

Ok, so this isn't very sage advice. But it is bringing you another slideshow of the work from an artist I'm writing about:



These pictures come from Kristine Smock's public installations in Boulder. (In case you missed it, here is a slideshow of pictures I took at her house.)

Anyway, back to finishing writing my feature on recycled art...

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 11/08/2008


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Friday, November 07, 2008

Jordan Meets the Animal Kingdom 2 11/07/2008


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Devil in the White City


I just wanted to let you know that I bought The Devil in the White City randomly at a book store last weekend.

I started reading it last night. And I can't. Stop. Reading.

So...I've give you a thorough report when I'm done, but until then...I may be a bit sparse.

(Now, if only I could somehow time reading this book with a trip to Chicago. Unfortunately, I have to finish what I've started, and it doesn't look likely I'll make it to the Windy City tomorrow...)

Thursday, November 06, 2008

How to not get rich


My good friend Yiyan -- aka Julia Gulia, who also happens to be going through the experience of being a grad student in a new city -- recently posted about career advice blogger player Brazen Careerist.

(By the way, Yiyan I love your graphic, especially because there is no destination!)

Well, what could I do but check out this advice-giving former pro volleyball player/fashionista's site?

I'm kind of glad that I did, because it totally convinced me that I never ever (ever ever!) want a "career."

The Brazen Careerist -- aka "Penelope Trunk" -- thrives off of posting *shocking* counter-intuitive tips (like how now is the perfect time to buy expensive clothes...the state of the economy will make you look extra posh and shiek) and giving image advice.

This doesn't quite work so well for someone who, ahem, wears jeans 95% of the time. (Or is that my image? Maybe I just need to cultivate it more!)

Penelope Trunk is a pragmatist who seems bent on tearing down down silly idealists like me who get their career advice from Robert Sullivan.

I'll update in about ten years and let you know how I'm doing on that avoiding a career thing...(hopefully not squatting in my parent's house with six cats).

Bonus "oldy but goody" tidbit:

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Fort Collins: beer, kick-ass grandmas, and unexpected leads

Last Friday I made a pilgrimage to Fort Collins, CO to meet a grandmother who makes greeting cards out of used tea bags.

But oh, it turned into so much more than that.

Before I interviewed her, I stopped by the New Beligum Brewing Company. Coolest. Brewery. Ever.

Not only did I get to take a tour -- and learn about how they use wind power and have their own water treatment facility where they capture methane gas and use that as power too -- and samples of tasty beer, I met some bad-ass brewery-goers from Arkansas who built a house out of scrap materials. I also met a Fort Collins woman who fills up her pickup truck with manure from a sheep farm to use in her garden. AND I found out that all of the cool brewery tile artwork surrounding the giant vats of fermenting grain were made out of recycled materials.

Why on earth would I care about either of those things? No, I won't take a chance and leave the answer up to you...

I'm currently working on a story about recycled art and a story about livestock manure. Yes, it's true. So this, ladies and gentlemen, is bona fide proof that play IS work, and that sometimes getting in some personal fun-time can lead to important, well, leads.

But back to the tea bag lady. Her name is Libby James, she's 72, runs marathons, won the Bolder Boulder 22 years in a row ("That's not true. I got second once" she corrected her kids...), was an election judge, is a writer, and is basically more than awesome. Her kids or runners too, but Libby jokes that she can't run with them because they are too slow!

At first I thought "I hope I'm like her when I'm 72." Then I thought, "wait a second, I wish I could be like her now!"

She invited me into her home to pass out candy to trick-or-treaters, made me a pita sandwich, and introduced me to her family. She also offered to let me stay at her house if I want to run the Fort Collins Marathon in May.

Oh, and she's friends with a crew of dumpster divers.

Which reminds me, I need to get cracking on my dumpster diving story...

Friday, October 31, 2008

Library Juxtapositions

I love juxtapositions. Here's one from this morning.

I picked up two library books from CU's book-sharing program that arrived at Norlin:


Yes, similarities exist beyond the fact that both these books came courtesy of Jefferson County Public Libraries:
  1. From the looks of it, I'm ready to do some physical and literary strength training.
  2. They are both books that I probably won't be done with by their Nov. 21 due date.


I'll let you know how my progress goes, with both...

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Patty Limerick, my new superhero!

Patty Limerick, head honcho at the Center for the American West, spoke in the CEJ seminar today. Let me start with saying: she’s my new superhero! I wish I could be her for Halloween, except that she’s already kind of going to be a parodied version of herself.

She’s going to be a cultural studies professor, “problematizing and systematizing “ the heck out of all the disparate costumes she sees until they make some sort of logical – or at least farcical – sense. Brilliant!

Patty’s strength is finding patterns that stretch across disciplines. It’s something that, if you know me you already know this without me having to say it, resonates with me a million times over But she doesn’t just stop there – she also admits that her predisposition for seeking out patterns (she called it a “symptom”, though I’m not sure of what) means that she often sees patterns when they aren’t there, just because she wants so badly for the world to make some sort of sense. She’s always making hypotheses that then get totally obliterated – and thinks this is what keeps her healthy as she gets up in years.

Patty, you had me at hello!

She has a way of talking that sounds like rambling and tangents yet ultimately makes sense and unfolds into a bigger picture – kind of like a Dickens novel. Here are some of the things she talked about at the seminar:

  • The “Aspenisation effect”: this happens in Western communities where beautiful landscapes exist alongside extractive industries. When the extractive industries (mining, etc.) run out, recreation moves in. Hence, Aspen, where “opportunity has presented itself, and then everything has gotten all screwed up.” You’ve got the invasion of the rich, whose excesses can only be facilitated by lower classes (who are often illegal immigrants). You’ve got people who maintain residency in other states for tax reasons. You’ve got “affordable housing”, which ironically makes it harder for property owners to sell. You’ve got the flier Patty handed around that says “← Aspen, 3 miles. Real world, ?? miles →”…but you’ve also got the ability to actually talk about subjects like social and economic class that have become taboo in other parts of the country. And…I could go on forever, but I need to get on to the next topic…
  • Patty has kind of a crush on water engineers. It’s totally endearing, because of infatuated I was with the idea of engineering once upon a time. She talked about the amazing feat that is the Denver Water Board, and their engineering achievements. “It’s unnerving if you’ve been put in the school of contempt for engineers and technological fixes” she said of the beautiful waterfalls that emerged from the Cheesman Dam on the South Platte– “you can’t look at it and keep that mindset.”
  • She talked about how the more she studies these things, the less she sees about the West that is unique. A lot of the water issues that the West struggles with are repeated (or preceded) by the East, in highly urbanized places like New York and Boston.
  • The West’s prior appropriation philosophy (“First in time, first in right”), which is applied legally to water issues, also subconsciously plays out in issues of immigration, land ownership, and class.
  • According to Patty, historians are totally whack when they try to cut everything into compartments. Life just isn’t like that, and neither are people.
  • The West is known for its hauntedness, but the East is really haunted too – it’s just covered in foliage so you can’t tell as much!
  • She also talked about overpopulation and Al Bartlett and “acts of providence”, but I have to confess I missed that part a little bit because I was busy looking up when the class she’s teaching next semester is held.


I could go on and on about Patty, but I think I’ll just try to sit in on her class somehow. ENVS 4100, M 3 – 5:30 !!!

I have tons more cute Patty Limerick quotes, but I think I’ll save those for a separate (less gushy!) post.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

The Wirfs-Brocks do Rocky Mountain National Park

My parents visited last weekend, and we did all the great things that you do when parents visit: eat (and eat and eat -- Sunflower, Lucile's, Chataqua Dining Hall, Boulder Dushanbe Tea House)!

In between all that eating, we managed to make a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park (and a stop in Estes Park as well -- for some more eating).

We did some light hiking and some sightseeing. Here are my photos from the trip:




(Mom, Dad, you guys probably have better pictures -- are you planning on posting them?)

Recyled art in Lyons, Colorado: Kristine Smock

I'm writing a feature article for my newsgathering glass on waste-to-art. Yesterday I drove to Lyons, Colorado -- about 15 miles north of Boulder -- to interview an artist who makes sculpture from recycled materials, found objects, and waste.

Her name is Kristine Smock, and she's a fascinating, energetic woman who bounced around from topic to topic and room to room in her tie-dyed thermal top and spandex pants -- workout gear -- showing me her workshop and her home.

When she gave me directions, she said that hers was the two-story beige house: she didn't say anything about the front yard packed with bowling bowls on metal posts, larger-than-life figures welded from silverware, and rusted clocks.

Here is a slide show of some of the pictures I took of Kristine's art:



She has done a lot of community projects, including some murals and installations in Boulder that I'm planning on checking out later in the week. She also worked on the Lyons Sculpture Trail for several years, a project that unfortunately isn't up this year.

Garbage is one of her favorite mediums because she likes the idea of transforming something ugly and unwanted into something beautiful. She's also been a lifelong recycler ever since her mother instilled the value of it when she was growing up in New Jersey.

I'm not sure exactly how the story will turn out. I'm planning on driving to Fort Collins to speak to a woman who makes cards from used tea bags on Friday (yes, I know it's Halloween...maybe there are some cool events going on in Fort Collins?).

I also have the names of some other Colorado artists who use recycled materials, and some art critics who and education experts who study the intersection of recycling and art. I'll be posting updates on my progress here.

As a side note, Lyons was a great little town. Just hanging out in one of its local coffee shops, I like the atmosphere a lot better than Boulder. I'll have to go back to check out the cinnamon rolls.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

The perfect trail running route in South Boulder


Just when I thought this weekend couldn't get any better (clear, crisp fall weather; parents visiting so great restaurants and outings; first Avery Brewing Company experience), I found a running route that is as close to ideal as I can imagine.

Why?

  • It has a mix of surfaces (wide dirt roads for low-impact pounding, narrow rocky trails for billy-goat practice, a tiny stretch of pavement for good measure)
  • It has great views of the Flatirons and Eldorado Canyon
  • It's literally right out my front door
  • It has a healthy dose of climbs and descents, but neither are knee-breaking or quad-busting because they are on mesas, not mountains
  • It links together several trails, so it goes past four (!!!) trailheads, which means four chances for a mid-run bathroom break (if needed)
  • There are lots of people around so I don't feel like I'm going to get eaten by a mountain lion
  • It's just a hair under 7 miles, which is a versatile distance for medium training days--it's also very easy to add on mileage to this loop


Just in case anyone reading this lives in Boulder (or is planning on visiting Boulder), I'll give a brief description of it:
  1. Start at the Marshall Mesa Trailhead (on Eldorado Springs Drive east of Hwy 93) and head west on the Coal Seam Trail and climb up the mesa
  2. When you hit Hwy 93, cross over and continue onto the Community Ditch Trail and ease into a long, gradual descent on a wide dirt road
  3. Turn right onto the Doudy Daw (I think?) Trail when you drop into a creek bed (if you miss it, just take any of the surrounding trails down to the Eldorado Springs Drive, where there is a parking lot and another trailhead)
  4. Cross Eldorado Springs Drive to the Mesa Trailhead (South). Start climbing the Mesa Trail
  5. Turn left onto the South Boulder Creek Trail after about 3/4 of a mile. Here it gets a little rocky, but it's downhill
  6. Follow the South Boulder Creek Trail all the way to the trailhead on Hwy 93. Cross over and run back to the Marshall Mesa Trailhead


That's how I ran it today, but there is ONE thing I think would have made it more perfect (yes, I know you can't improve on perfection--but I'm gonna try):

Starting at either the Doudy Daw (I really just wanted to type that name again because it cracks me up--what is the origin of it? I wish it was spelled Dowdy Daw...) or Mesa Trailhead (South), do the loop in the same direction (clockwise) but run the Mesa Trail segment first. That way, the rocky, slow-ish descent is part of the warm up (unless you have injury prone ankles, in which case you might want to be warm when you run the South Boulder Creek section), and you get to finish ripping down the Community Ditch Trail with some speed.

I've become a big fan of slipping some speed at the end of workouts (even if just 5-10 minutes), so this would be an ideal way to do that. Plus, you get to look at Eldorado Canyon as you stride to the finish.

Find out more:

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Ralph Nader (not quite super) rally at University of Colorado


Yesterday Ralph Nader came to Boulder.

Shocking?

Not in the least. It's Boulder!

A lot of people have kind of a "been there, done that" attitude about Nader -- but then again, a lot of people are still hardcore "we must fight back against the two-party system" disciples.

I didn't fit into either of those categories last night. I fit into the "none-of-the-above/attempted objectivism" category: the (proto) press. I was there covering the speech for my Newsgathering class.

(I'll post my story at the bottom of this post -- which no one is likely to make it to!)

***If you'd like to listen to Nader's CU-ified stump speech...you'll just have to hold your horses! (I tried for about an hour to convert the audio file from a WMA to an mp3 so I could edit it into bite size pieces, but that didn't work out...seriously, if anyone knows how on Mac OS...the EasyWMA Demo was a complete bust.)

Here are some of the observations that I couldn't exactly include in my news story:
  • Eight years ago when I saw Nader at a "super rally" in Portland (Jello Biafra, Danny Glover, and Eddie Vedder in tow) the atmosphere was electric. There was chanting, protesting, marching, hugging...a completely different mood than last night, which just seemed...stale? Maybe it's because I was looking at it all with the bright eyes of a high schooler, but somehow I think it goes beyond that
  • Nader was supposed to deliver a press conference before the scheduled rally. He was over an hour late, so I decided to ditch the tiny room upstairs (filled with local media and other students from my class--but gee the chairs were really posh) and head down to see how the crowd was responding to the delay. What would a full-fledged journalist have done?
  • Nader choked up a few times during his speech. I'm not sure if he was legitimately getting emotional, has some health problems (he's 74), or what...
  • There was this really awkward moment after Nader finished speaking where a local campaigner went up on stage and begged -- literally -- for donations in a "reverse auction" starting at $2300. This went on for a few minutes with the crowd awkwardly (and not silenty, I might add) balking at the request before he lowered the starting value to $1000. I left before sticking around to see what happened. I wonder how that turned out.
  • Bob Kinsey, running as a Green Party candidate for Colorado's US Senate seat, is quite the character. I'm going to leave it at that.
  • Nader and friends got some digs in at the media as one of the root causes of the two-party problem. I actually really enjoyed those parts of the speech, and sort of agreed with them, oddly enough. Do many journalists would readily acknowledge that there are plenty of problems with the mainstream media?


In his speech, Nader made the point that Obama started out with much more liberal policies and views than he has now. Well, I'm not sure how true that is, but Nader's argument was that while the conservative Christian right (Limbaugh and cronies) demanded for McCain to come closer to their camp if he wanted their votes and support. According to Nader, liberals missed an opportunity to do the same because they are so frightened of losing another election. Instead, Obama got pulled more towards the center because of corporate contributions and interests. Hmmmm...

I kind of thought of it more as Obama figured out that in order to change the system, he has to be a part of the system. And that's why Nader, at this point, seems stale. I've even go as far to say that many of the people who feel so inspired by Obama now used to feel that way about Nader. Thoughts?

No matter whether you think Nader should be thrown out of an airplane or think he's the most influential American EVER, he's still a great speaker to see. He has a smart, organized rhetorical style, and if anything, he's good at raising the political temperature in a room. (And he has a great profile: see pic above.)


And now, for comparison, here's my newsy-style story:

At the University of Colorado’s Glenn Miller Ballroom Wednesday night, Ralph Nader urged voters to demand more from the two-party system by playing hard to get.

He demonstrated this tactic by showing up an hour late for his own rally.

The delay didn’t faze the hundreds who turned out with signs, fliers and t-shirts to see the independent presidential candidate. Hitting the stage at 8:30 p.m., Nader spent over an hour speaking about the dangers of corporate politics, the flaws of the two-party system, and the importance of activism. He spoke harshly about the four Colorado state amendments dealing with labor—which he called the best he’s seen on any state’s ballot—that were pulled from the ballot at the last minute.

“We’re the new serfs. They control our money,” Nader said of the banks and corporations he thinks have a stranglehold on American politics.

Bob Kinsey, Green Party candidate for Colorado’s Senate seat, hammered this home as he warmed up the crowd: “Unregulated growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.”

According to Nader, Americans have allowed this to happen by setting low expectations. But now we’ve reached our breaking point.

Nader reminded the crowed that although politicians are courted by corporate funding, “You have the one thing they want: the votes.”

As students, alumni, community members, and even children trickled in, a jazz duo serenaded the crown. Signs and banners lined the walls of the ballroom.

“Wall Street: Use Your Bootstraps,” said one. “Beware the Kool-Aid,” said another.

A poster of Kinsey’s face – with the same sage-colored cap he wore at the rally – was taped to a wall overlooking tables advocating some of Nader’s key issues: energy policy, universal health care and corporate crime.

“A lot of the things Nader says most people believe in, but mainstream candidates can’t support because other interests get in the way,” said David Iseli, standing behind a table covered with Nader/Gonzalez signs and stickers.

Nader called the exclusion of third-party candidates “political bigotry.”

“Small starts don’t have a chance to have a chance,” he said.

In Colorado, where more voters are registered as independents than as Democrats or Republicans, Nader says most people don’t even know they have another choice.

“It seems so foolish that we only have two parties,” said Peggy Sholette, who is visting from Plattsburgh, New York with her husband. “Like children in a sandbox.”

“In our literature, in our movies, in everything, we seem to prize individualism,” said Patricia McGuire of Denver. “But when it comes down to reality, we don’t want anything to do with it.”

McGuire brought her sister Kathleen Ballard, who hasn’t decided yet who she’ll vote for, to the rally.

“He’s a very bright, intelligent man,” said Ballard. “But I think he’s really tired. He has a hard job. He’s the only alternative.”

Nader spoke in Missoula, Mont. earlier today and will be heading to Massachusetts later in the week.


Image from Flickr user Mely-o shared with a Creative Commons attribution license.

Online media guru Amy Gahran comes to the CEJ

Using the web as a journalistic tool is about capturing the "Google juice" and participating in multi-media converations, but most importantly, it's about harnessing a tool we already (most of us anyway) are experts at using: your brain.

Amy Gahran -- blogger, new media consultant, online maven, kickboxer, and many other things -- gave an eclectic, lively, sometimes irreverent("I'll keep talking until someone shoves a sandwich in my mouth") intro to new media for the Ted Scripps Fellows at the CEJ today.

I know, I know, you're thinking, "Duh, I've already heard of Tiwtter, blogging, Flickr, YouTube, etc." Well, Amy had some great tidbits of information that really hit home, even for someone who already uses all of the above:

  • Filtering out noise is a key social skill, and it's one that is key to working with new media
  • The most important skills future journalists need to learn are business and team-building
  • Look to join a conversation instead of starting one
  • "Search engines, like it or not, are the arbiters of your future career."
  • The power of new media is in its ability to document the creative process behind projects (books, longer for articles, music albums, films, etc.)


This last point really struck me, especially since I've been reading a lot about the writing process lately.

So, hopefully I'll be implementing some of Amy's tips on this blog. Perhaps those of you still hanging on (one? two? holla?) will notice...

Find out more:

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Some trash--I mean reusable items--for you!

Today I went to Eco-Cycle's Center for Hard-to-Recycle Materials (CHaRM) in Boulder. The story is forthcoming (uuuuuuhhhh, ideally by 4 am or so...we'll see).

But, just to show you guys that I'm still alive, here's the video that I've made for it:




See you again when I'm not quite as stressed. Or, when my computer returns from the laptop infirmary -- that great Apple repair station in the sky. Not sure which will come first...

Friday, September 26, 2008

Down the Drain (podcast)

Ok, for some reason posting the podcast as an enclosure link isn't working, so...


You'll just have to click here to listen to it.

Down the Drain


Welcome to an experiment in more ways than one! For my first "real" assignment in Newsgathering (journalism bootcamp for first year master's students), we had to do a "micro-beat" at last week's home football game. Aside from feeling important because of our press pases, it was a ton of fun.

I chose to focus on the bathrooms (big surprise...hold the groans, please!). Out of my on-site reporting I created a short written piece and my partner and I made a podcast.

Hope this works...enjoy!

Two jumbo rolls.

That’s how much toilet paper is flushed down each toilet at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Folsom Field during Thursday night’s football game. Ning Sengeara knows this because it’s her job to clean the bathrooms. The Buffaloes took on the West Virgina Mountaineers. She took on mountains of paper towels.

Sengeara guesses each of the several hundred toilets will see 300 flushes. “Each woman goes at least five times.”

A woman waiting in line confirms this: “It’s my third trip in 20 minutes. I’m like an 85-year-old woman.”

Judging from the company Sengeara shares her workplace with you’d think this was Folsom Prison, not Folsom Field.

Three police officers file into a restroom on the east side of the indoor track. The woman standing on a toilet seat to gossip with a friend doesn’t notice as they escort someone out.

A girl apologizes and pushes to the front in a student section restroom, one hand around the shoulders of a friend with blood streaming down her face. “We just need to get to a sink.”

Several EMTs huddle outside a restroom. Inside, a woman is sitting cross-legged on the floor with her back against a locked stall door.

The floors are concrete so the whole mess can be hosed down the drain at the end of the night.

“It’s hard work,” says Sengeara, smiling shyly and mopping.

Sengeara and her colleagues will be scrubbing toilets and sinks by hand until 2 a.m., long after the fans stumble home. It’s the only way to get them clean.

For love of lists


Who doesn't love lists?

1. Not me!
2. Hopefully not you
3. Not Jezebel, either!

Jezebel
, feminist(ish)/pop-culture/politics/cultural-criticism blog extraordinare posted a list "75 Books Every Woman Should Read" this week. Yay!

What struck me most about the list was...just how many of these books I have read. So, in the spirit of when I did this once before (but for the life of me I can't find that post), I'm reproducing the list here with the ones I've read bolded. Just, ya know, in case you were wondering.

* The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
* To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
* The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
* White Teeth, Zadie Smith
* The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
* Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
* Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
* The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
* Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
* The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
* Beloved, Toni Morrison
* Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
* Like Life, Lorrie Moore
* Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
* Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (times 10, at least...)
* The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
* A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
* A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor
* The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
* You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
* Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
* To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
* Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
* Earthly Paradise, Colette
* Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
* Property, Valerie Martin
* Middlemarch, George Eliot
* Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
* The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
* Runaway, Alice Munro
* The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
* The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
* Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
* You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
* Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
* Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
* The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
* I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
* A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith
* And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
* Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
* The Secret History, Donna Tartt
* The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
* The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
* The Group, Mary McCarthy
* Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
* The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
* The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
* Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
* Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
* In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
* The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
* Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
* Three Junes, Julia Glass
* A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
* Sophie's Choice, William Styron
* Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
* Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
* Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
* The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
* The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
* The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
* My Antonia, Willa Cather
* Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
* The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West
* Spending, Mary Gordon
* The Lover, Marguerite Duras
* The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
* Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
* Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
* Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
* Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
* I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
* Possession, A.S. Byatt

Image from flickr user Eccentric Scholar shared with a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?


I'm so glad K.T. mentioned the Boston Globe's article, "Fear of Fairy Tales" in her blog*. I knew having a card-carrying librarian as a friend would have its perks!

Anyway, I'm posting some of my reactions to the Globe's article here, instead of burdening K.T.'s comment section.

A lot of fairy tales had the original purpose of frightening children. They were warnings: Don't go into the woods alone. Don't trust strangers. Stay the hell away from the big bad wolf.

(Of course, depending on your flavor of literary interpretation, they can also be allegories about sex and gender and society and a whole assortment of other things.)

So now, we've become...afraid of being frightened? Or, afraid of frightening our children? Some might suggest that's because the world is already scary enough, but I don't think so. I think if you aren't exposed to fear when you are young, you'll just have a harder time dealing with it when you get older. In fact, maybe that's what has already happened.

And maybe that has happened to me, without even realizing it. My parents didn't shelter me from fairy tales (although I do remember thinking that the Grimm's version were some kind of transgression -- the naughty, scary, exciting version), but that doesn't mean they didn't shelter me from a lot of other things inadvertently.

Because that's what parents are supposed to do. They are supposed to protect their children. And that's why they need scary fairy tales -- to teach their children the value of fear without putting them in harm's way.

Fear is a survival mechanism.

Which leads me to an article in High Country News review two new books on fear and it's ecological and evolutionary role in nature:

A world without fear sounds nice, doesn't it? Liberated from our dread of nosy bosses, environmental catastrophe, cocktail-party conversation and clumsy dentistry, we could wander the planet with a spring in our step and a gleam in our eye. From our modern perspective, fear is an annoyance, an inconvenient emotion to be fenced out or shot down. But fear, as two new books make clear, has its uses -- not only as a critical survival strategy, but also as a supporting force for the entire natural world.


In case you don't want to read the review and skip straight to the books (The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World by Joel Berger; Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators by William Stolzenburg), here's the punch line:
...a life without fear is the most dangerous of all.


It's no coincidence that the titles of both books harken back to the titles of fairy tales.

Any maybe my new-found fear of mountain lions isn't a crutch after all.

*Note: I used to read the Bookslut blog religiously until I started using an RSS reader. Then they didn't make the cut because they don't have an RSS feed. Whaaaa?

Image from flickr user emerald isle druid shared with a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

A review of The Beast in the Garden

The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator's Deadly Return to Suburban America The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator's Deadly Return to Suburban America by David Baron

rating: 5 of 5 stars


When I moved to Boulder I had two great semi-rational fears: ticks and lightning. Mountain lions have now joined the list. I started reading David Baron's* The Beast in the Garden -- an account of a fatal mountain lion attack in Boulder County in 1991 and the events leading up to it -- to assuage my fears and feed my morbid fascination. The book succeed at the later but utterly failed at the former.

The Beast in the Garden isn't quite Anna Karenina, but it's a sign of great writing if you can reveal the climax in the first chapter and still make the rest of the book compelling. Baron does just that, and focuses the rest of the book on how something as shocking as a mid-day mauling in the suburbs could occur.

Baron stipulates that humans have fundamentally changed the definition of wilderness. Or rather, the reality we've created doesn't fit the definition we maintain in our heads. Our refusal to let go of romantic notions of the frontier and the natural order that exists beyond that invisible edge has, well, come back to bite us.

The wilderness hasn't disappeared, but it has evolved. As we've urbanized the landscape, we've also urbanized its inhabitants -- human and animal. Much focus (and faith) is mankind's adaptability, but animals are equally adaptable. In the case of the mountain lion, they've been adapting to the urban and suburban landscape. In places like Colorado's rapidly urbanizing Front Range and Los Angeles County, that means that they have taken up residence in suburbs, watched humans to learn their patterns of behavior, determined that humans are not a threat, and begun to size humans up as prey. This didn't happen overnight. In Boulder County, the process was well documented by a city employee and University of Colorado professor.

The book has plenty of cougar lore (as well as natural history, blood and gore, government intrigue, you name it). But what it doesn't have is a happy ending wrapped nicely in a bow. The future, as Baron sees it, is one where human-lion encounters will grow more frequent, and possibly more deadly. He contrasts, rather darkly, the number of cougars killed by humans and the number of humans killed by cougars, suggesting that the handful of human deaths could be a form of penance. Whether your level of antropocentric thinking allows you to believe this, the conclusion remains that humans have shaken the "natural order" -- whatever the heck that is or was.

The subtext, which Baron never says outright, is that the "beast" is one that humans have created through their patterns of expansion and development. This puts him somewhere between Jeff Goldblum's beat-mathematician in Jurassic Park ("nature will find a way") and the man who goes swimming in toxic sludge ponds in Robert Sullivan's The Meadowlands. It's a fascinating -- though unsettling -- place to be. And Baron presents his perspective in a way that is appropriately tantalizing and frightening.

And what about me? Will I resort to carrying a hunting knife and a rifle when I'm running and hiking alone? I could always move back to Portland, land without ticks, lighting, or lions. For now, at least, I'll stay in Colorado and coexist with that which (semi-rationally) frightens me most.

*David Baron was one of the first people I met in Boulder, before I knew that the Front Range was prime lion habitat. I didn't realize that he was the author of "The Beast in the Garden" until I had less than 40 pages left. (That bumped my GoodReads rating up from 4 stars -- loved it -- to 5 stars -- I recommend it to everyone I meet.) I liked him right away, and not just because, like me, he splits his alliances between Boston and Boulder. He's on the board of the Scripps Fellows program at CU, and works with WBUR in Boston on programs like The World. Cool!


View all my reviews.