From the Archives

Last week, my friend Brian gave me a gift that was a blast from the past. While cleaning out his parents’ house, he found some old articles he had saved from our days in graduate school. This photo is from an article in The Daily Texan, the student newspaper of The University of Texas at Austin.

It discussed my thesis documentary project, an hour-long film that chronicled the work of a couple who were fighting a quixotic battle to repeal the death penalty in Texas.

I barely recognize the man in the photo. But, luckily, Elton John and I have the same prescription, so I could wear his glasses.

Rediscovered Photo

I just found this photo on my hard drive as I was cleaning out some space for other files. It was taken by the father of a visiting student at the American University in Cairo. She was studying Arabic for a semester in a study abroad program from her college in Michigan. I met the family when we shared a table on the Nile cruise I took with my mom and sister. The student’s mother wore a hat with a propeller on it, so I could always spot her in a crowd. In fact, I used it to navigate my way back to our group, when I would ditch the organized tour to take photos on my own. The father was very kind to send me several photos he had taken, including some with a fish eye lens. Unfortunately, his original email got deleted somehow, and I’ve completely lost touch.

But I love this photo, taken at one of the ruins in Luxor. I think it’s at the mortuary temple for Hatshepsut.

Congratulations Peggy & Bud

This afternoon, I joined my father for a 50th wedding anniversary celebration for his cousin Peggy and her husband Bud. In a community hall in San Miguel, California, Peggy and Bud’s children and church members planned a lovely afternoon celebrating a half century of marriage.

It was a pleasure to meet them. Of course, I went into documentation mode, snapping photos like a mad man, and I’ll share all the images with them.

Tomorrow, I hope to see my great aunt Ruth, who I only met once when I was a year old. She is frail, in her nineties, and lives on the olive ranch with Peggy and Bud out here in San Luis Obispo county.

Opposite San Francisco

One of my favorite places to view the city of San Francisco is from the Marin Headlands in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

It’s just across the Golden Gate bridge to the north the city, and a quick turn under the highway and up the cliffs leads you to some amazing sights. There are WWII-era bunkers with extraordinary views, and former barracks turned into park buildings.

I’ve been coming here since the days when I produced an environmental TV series for CNN/TBS. Peggy (reporter), Greg (photographer) and I would come up here to shoot pictures, do on-camera stand-up segments, and hang out for sunset.

The air is crisp. the Pacific waters mighty, and you can forget you’re only a few miles from town.

Yesterday, I parked the car and walked down to a beach where I sat for an hour and saw nearly no one until I left, when I noticed there was a naked guy doing tai chi near a cliff on the opposite end of the beach, and a guy with a bicycle was heading back up the steps.

Not sure how he got down to the beach — on wheels or on foot.

The bicyclist, I mean.

I assume the naked guy got there on foot. And in pants.

Here are some shots of the Point Bonita lighthouse on a craggy outcrop of the headlands, a view of the bridge from the Sausalito side, and a rose in Golden Gate park near where my friend Brian lives.

Son of a gun, we’ll have big fun…

…on the bayou.

On Facebook yesterday, I twittered a dilemma I had about what to do that afternoon. Should I go to the French Quarter to find the blind man who uses a pony instead of a guide dog, or should I go to the bayou on an air boat?

Since I had no idea where to look for the blind man, I opted for the air boat, and some nature time away from the city.

Captain Kevin — a mid-twenties Cajun kid with an infectious, high pitched laugh — took six of us out from the docks at Jean Lafitte, Louisiana, to the backwater bayou, where canals were once dredged for the lumber trade that harvested cypress trees in the early 20th century.

The canals make great pathways for the air boats, with a canopy of cypress limbs and spanish moss, and some wildlife — gators, egrets, cranes and turtles.

Within a few minutes we spotted our first alligator, a three foot critter, ambling near the bank. Kevin says he estimates a gator’s length by gauging the distance between its nose and eyes. If it’s three inches, then the gator is about three feet long. That’s about how long this one was.

“Alligators grow about a foot each year for the first six years,” Kevin said in a thick Louisiana drawl, “then they slow way down and only grow about an inch each year.” Which means the record alligator to be seen in these parts, which Kevin said was 13 feet long, must have been plenty old.

“They can live to be 70 or 80 years old,” Kevin said.

I have always wanted to ride on an air boat. I have mental images, from TV in my youth, of Marlin Perkins of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom or Jacques Cousteau gliding across the everglades in search of charismatic megafauna. What I wasn’t expecting was the noise. The ear protection was a necessity; the revving of the V8 engine and the roar from the prop were deafening.

Kevin paused in the bayou and the engine sputtered to a halt. A gator came toward us. “We got this one on the payroll,” Kevin said as he pulled out a bag of marshmallows. He smacked the marshmallow on the water’s surface. The gator sensed the vibration and came toward him. A few marshmallows later and Kevin got a little bolder with the animal, lifting it out of the water by a fold of skin under its chin.

With that gator getting a little tired of being teased, and its belly full of marshmallows, Kevin led the boat further down, then stopped and ran the nose of the boat up onto the bank. He had spotted another alligator, about six feet long, and he lured it to the bank, where he did a few more antics with it, getting his hands near its mouth, trying to get it to crawl up on the bank.

Later, he pulled a young gator out of a little red cooler he had on the boat. It was about 8 months old and less than a foot long. The group took turns holding it.
The skin was softer and dryer than you’d imagine.

I’m not much for the gator handling. I’d prefer they let the animals be and just let us enjoy the ecosystem. But in spite of it, I did like being out in nature, viewing the marvelous environment, the bright green of the trees and water plants, the chocolate brown tannins in the canals, the cypress knees and mossy islets.

Kevin fired up the engine and we glided out of the bayou canal, into a larger waterway, and out through a marshland covered green in irises and lotus plants. He stopped the engine, which spat and choked for a few minutes before finally halting, and then we could hear crickets, cicadas and bullfrogs.

He told me he takes groups out bow fishing in the evenings. They hunt red fish and gar with arrows tied to strings. I’d done it before in Texas, when I worked with the filmmaking division of the parks and wildlife department there. When I make it back this way again, I might give Kevin a call, pick up a bow and try my hand at it once more.

Shrimpers, the Food Bank, Rock ‘N’ Bowl and Roller Derby

With the project in its final day, the students at the New York Times Student Journalism Institute (who come from Historic Black Colleges & Universities as well as other journalism programs at schools with chapters of the National Association of Black Journalists) have completed seven video stories in the past two weeks. Among the 24 students in the institute, about half did either a video or some other form of multimedia (audio slide shows or interactive timelines) as part of the institute’s website.

Sha’Day Jackson (pictured in the hoodie above) devoted her two weeks here to learning video, and she participated in and produced three different stories. She and Jhenelle Johnson produced a video about young jazz musicians. I mentioned that one the other day; it made it onto the NYTimes website.

The two other stories were: one about a shrimper who struggles to stay afloat in a tough economy; and another profiling the women who find a sisterhood in the Big Easy Roller Girls roller derby (in the photo to the right, Sha’Day shoots with reporter Gregory Brand, Jr.).

John Marsh, Mike McCray and Ronald Carter filed a story about the Mid-City Lanes phenomenon known as Rock’N'Bowl, where pins fall as people dance to different music every night.

And Hilary Powell filed her own video story yesterday. We visited a food bank in the morning, and Hilary edited all afternoon to complete a short piece by day’s end. It focused on how food banks are seeing an increase in use — even among middle class families — as food and fuel prices rise.

Bravo to everyone.

And I am particularly grateful to Dillard University professor Mark Raymond (pictured with Sha’Day below) who opened up his TV studios for the institute and spent so much time with the students on shoots and in the edit room. The students at DU are very lucky to have him as a teacher.

Indy and Bad Geography

At the roller derby in the Mardi Gras float warehouse on Saturday night (and what a wonderful and eclectic life I live to be able to begin a sentence with those words), Gregory was interviewing one of the Big Easy Roller Girls. The beautiful woman with tight blond braids is a Dutch psycho-therapist who moved here some 13 years ago and found a sisterhood with fellow skaters in the roller derby that takes place among the floats and caricatures from parades past.

She introduced herself, giving both her real name and her derby name, and explained that she was from The Netherlands.

“That’s in Europe,” she added.

We laughed. And she apologized; said she didn’t say it because she thought we were dense.

But maybe she felt compelled to say it because people have asked her in the past where The Netherlands is (are?). Hard to believe, but the surveys do show that we in the lower 48 have become notoriously bad at Geography these days. And the Dutch do call their country by more than one name, which may trip people up.

The Netherlands… is that near Holland?

Hollywood doesn’t help. There are countless misconceptions about the world that have been proctored by movies, from the Hope and Crosby road movies, that had little to do with the reality of the actual roads and destinations they portrayed, to the latest Indiana Jones movie.

Okay, Indy is fiction. His exploits are far-fetched. Aliens with crystal skeletons and all. That’s part of the fun. But if the archaeologist cum adventurer and his son Mutt are going to put the Harley motorbike on a DC-3 and fly to Peru, they should land in a place that is at least within a few hours of their destination. The iconic map, with the red line tracing the path as the images of vintage aircraft ghost through, takes them from the U.S. to Cusco, Peru. But in the next scene, they are in Nazca, near the famous lines that can be only seen from the air.

Nazca is near the coast, a drive of a few hours south of Lima.

Cusco is in the mountains, far, far from the Nazca lines, but close to the amazing Inca ruins of Machu Picchu. I’m fortunate to have seen both.

Cusco to Nazca would be quite a hike, even on a Harley.

Institute Video Now on NYTimes.com

The video of kids playing jazz with old timers at the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park in the French Quarter is now on view at the New York Times website. The young journalists here at the NYT Institute are excited to see themselves represented on the mothership. And I couldn’t be happier to help make it happen.

Jazz, Voodoo and Crawfish

They are three pillars of New Orleans culture: the lively music, the spiritual undercurrent and the critters in the mud that are a staple of Big Easy cuisine. And today, young reporters in the New York Times Student Journalism Institute covered all three of the subjects in online videos.

Sha’Day Jackson and Jhenelle Johnson went to the French Quarter to hear young musicians who have been mentored by old pros as part of a Music for All Ages program at the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park. The video we put together is on the institute site today and will run on the New York Times site soon.

J.J. McCorvey and Michael McCray headed out to the Bonnet Carré spillway in Norco, Lousiana, about 30 miles from New Orleans, where floodgates can control the level of the Mississippi River. The Army Corps of Engineers opened the spillway gates for the first time in 11 years, and the nutrient-rich water from the mighty/muddy Mississippi replenished the ponds and creeks in the path of the spillway waters. Folks were fishing and catching crawfish, which were thriving in the ditches and ponds.

And Juana Summers finished a video to complement Juanita Cousins’s story about a voodoo ritual in the city’s Bywater section last Friday night (see more photos below).

There will be more videos in the coming days, so be sure to check back later in the week.

Oh, and for a few grins (especially for those of you who create video and wrestle with editing software), check out J.J.’s blog post about his experience putting together the spillway story.

Arlington

Two years ago, I worked with my friend and colleague Andy Revkin, a science reporter at The New York Times, to create a video piece for Memorial Day. Andy had written a song about Arlington National Cemetery, so I went there to shoot images to complement Andy’s lyrics and music. With finite space, and with some two dozen funerals a day at the site — for veterans dying of old age and recent deaths of soldiers in war zones — Arlington will eventually run out of room. Andy recorded his song with his band Uncle Wade, and after the original video piece ran on the New York Times site, I put together a music-only version that Andy recently posted on the band’s myspace page. Here it is.