The Murrow Interview

Not that I am anywhere near the legendary status of Edward R. Murrow, but I did have the privilege to be interviewed by Lawrence Pintak, the founding dean of the Murrow School at Washington State University. He does a regular series called the Murrow Interview, and invited me as a guest on the program recently. Larry and I chatted in front of a live audience of high school journalists in Seattle for a convention. We talked about covering the Arab Spring, the immediacy of citizen journalism, the angst in journalism over those same citizen journalists, and changes in the industry that point toward a video-friendly future.

Rubber Duck Derby 2012

I took students from the New York Times Student Journalism Institute to the Bayou Boogaloo today to shoot the Rubber Duck Derby – 15,000 rubber ducks dumped in the Bayou for a race for charity. People pay $5 for a duck in the race, and the winning number won a car. Unfortunately, the video camera wasn’t functioning, so I ended up shooting a few things with my 5D and only a 24-70mm lens, which wasn’t nearly long enough to get good shots of the race. But here are some duckies to look at. The national guard volunteered to retrieve the ducks (which were kept from floating away by a boom on the water’s surface) and put them in crates to use again next year.

 

 

 

The Aerie – My new digs in Chicago

Here are some photos of my new place in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago. I have much of everything in place, but I’m still working on organizing the stuff you can’t see — like boxes of CDs and other things in closets. But it was together enough that I could host my first party – a housewarming gathering of 25 souls, 20% of whom were named Elizabeth (two Beths, a couple of Lizzes and a Zib).

In college, I performed in a dinner theater production of a play called Bad Habits by Terrence McNally. It’s a pair of one-act plays each taking place in a sanatorium. The facility in the second act is called Ravenswood, and I played a groundskeeper and helper named Bruno, described by a local reviewer as “grubby, leering and over-sexed.” The nurses were named Benson and Hedges. I chased one of them around the stage, exposing myself to her and saying “hubba-hubba Hedges!” I remember an elderly couple who were regular theater patrons pulled me aside at a later performance of a different play and asked “how could you play such a filthy character?” I told them I was just acting. I’m rarely that despicable.

Now I live in Ravenswood, and it’s not a sanatorium. And there are no nurses in my building. But I do live in a third floor penthouse with 14-foot ceilings in the living room/kitchen and a strikingly beautiful set of front windows looking out on the trees and the birds. A friend tonight called it an aerie. And I just adopted that as the name for my home. An aerie in the wood filled with ravens.

  

  

  

  

Social Media Experiments, Photos and Serendipity

I don’t print pictures anymore. And I’m sad about that.

I need to do it more. It’s a determination I made after unpacking several boxes in the new condo in the new city. Amid all that newness, I ached for the familiar and found it at the bottoms of boxes, in stacks of old photos, un-filed, haphazard, ranging across years, continents, work and play. Me — with a few more strands of hair making their last stand on the top of my head — crouching in a photo with the crew and a celebrity host of a nature documentary. Me, among friends, family and loved ones, younger and smilier. Me, and that person I wish I knew better. Us.

That serendipity doesn’t come electronically. Not in the same way. It’s one thing to stumble across a folder on a hard drive. It’s another to find a faded print, or a postcard with the ink even more faded away, with only the pen impressions still legible on the shiny white stock.

A day after discovering those boxes I got something in the mail: A simple white envelope with this printed sheet of a self-portrait inside. My friend Lisa in the lower right, hidden behind a pair of goggles on her forehead, huddled under a wall with mementos posted for consideration.

She placed post-its on the print out to say what the things were. “OK comments about a piece of my work.”

Arrows point to a “Blank wolf card” and an “eye patch from October performance.”

At the bottom, a notation of the day the piece was post-marked: “finally got stamps.”

And an explanation of the camouflaged apparatus on Lisa’s head: “Monday I finally turned on EYE MASSAGER I bought from a Chinese site last semester.” And below, she wrote “you can plug them into your USB, but otherwise they kind of suck.”

I really don’t know much about Lisa’s social media experiment, other than she asked us all to send us our snail mail addresses, and I’ve seen other folks on Facebook who have gotten gizmos that record audio and instructions on what to do with it in their mailboxes.

I have been pondering this simple printout and post-its. Happy just to play along, and glad it sparked me further to start printing out images on paper — for my future biographer, for me when I move again down the road, for someone else’s grandkids.

The Easter Big Wheel Races of Potrero Hill

There’s something about the Bay Area and the desire to dress up in costumes. And Easter is just one more opportunity for fancy dress.

Each Easter Sunday for 12 years running, San Franciscans have donned a get-up and headed for the hill (Potrero Hill) to ride a Big Wheel or similar conveyance down the world’s curviest street (not Lombard street – that’s second curviest. It’s Vermont Street, which was designed by the same guy).

Here’s a little bit of video from this year’s Bring Your Own Big Wheel race. The only requirements to enter: three wheels, all plastic.

Restoring South Bend

My latest video report is for the New York Times from South Bend, Ind., where neighbors put free labor and their own money into revitalizing the shabby and historic homes left for dead in their small town. I reported it with Susan Saulny during my spring break from Northwestern. A great story about people dedicated to their communities.

You can see it here. 

The Met’s New American Wing

“First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” The monumental canvas of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1851), by Emmanuel Leuntze is the centerpiece of the refurbished American wing at the Metropolitan Museum. The frame is a recreation of the original, based on a photograph of the painting by Matthew Brady when it appeared at a major exhibition in New York. Say what you will about its historic authenticity (it was painted in Germany, after all), the piece is an impressive and imposing work.

The re-working of the American wing is equally impressive. I particularly enjoyed the “visible storage” area, and the recreation of entire rooms from different periods of American history (including an early 20th century room by Frank Lloyd Wright). And I was struck by the number of paintings by Eakins and Sargent (including the latter’s experiments in impressionism).

I came to the Met on a break from preparing to move from my Brooklyn apartment (de-crapifying is what I’m calling it – purging my place of unneeded goods and stuff so I don’t have to unpack it on the other end) to visit the recently unveiled American wing and the Islamic art wing, which was redone last year.

Viral Joseph Kony

“Right now there are more people on Facebook than there were on the planet 200 years ago,” begins Jason Russell in a very affecting video that has gone viral this week. And Russell hopes to put those people to work to bring a warlord to justice. The video, which is nearly 30 minutes long, targets Joseph Kony, the leader of the fierce guerilla group called the Lord’s Resistance Army. Russell says he saw first hand the brutality of the LRA when he met and befriended children who had been conscripted as soldiers in Kony’s bloody and vicious campaign in the jungles of central Africa. Russell and a team of people with an NGO called Invisible Children made the video to launch a campaign to flush Kony from hiding using the pressure of a world-wide effort to make Kony a household name. Showing interviews with a boy he became friends with (who believes it would be better to die than continue living in misery), and rolling the camera while he tries to explain Kony’s brutality to his precocious son Gavin, Russell makes an emotionally compelling case.

There’s already some blowback on the campaign, here and over at the Washington Post, and a tumblr questioning the NGO’s accountability and tactics. And perhaps their campaign is naive. And maybe the group spends too much money on making films and not enough on the ground. But the web is a snarky place. See the film for yourself and decide.

Seeing the video reminded me of the excellent reporting done by filmmaker and journalist Ed Robbins in South Sudan in 2009. He created three pieces for TIME Video, including this one about a young man named Moses who was abducted by the LRA in Sudan. Though I’ve seen it many times, it still breaks my heart:

Russell has targeted 20 celebrities and 12 political power brokers to increase awareness about Kony and pressure politicians to act – including continued support of U.S. military assistance to the army in Uganda.

My Kinda Town, Chicago Is

Images from a weekend in my new city.

Chicago’s Most Famous Ceiling

Chicago’s most famous ceiling: the Louis Pierre Rigal murals on the lobby ceiling of the Palmer hotel (now a Hilton). They’re currently being restored.