I just started working as the Senior Producer for Multimedia at GlobalPost. We'll be launching an international news Web site in January. It's very exciting...
Blog
I produced this multimedia presentation exploring the vocal performance of McCain, Clinton, and Obama as they vie for the White House. Expert voice coach, comedian, and sometimes commentator gives her two cents about how presidential they've been sounding on the trail. Check it out.
March 10, 2008
I couldn’t remember the first time I ever heard about the “American Dream” if I tried. As an American, it’s a concept that’s been ingrained in me since birth. It was reinforced when we memorized the pledge of allegiance in kindergarten with all that “liberty and justice for all”.
The “American Dream” is shorthand for all the United States is purported to stand for. A search of U.S. publications over the last seven days yielded several hundred mentions in reports on the mortgage crisis and the latest jobs report, immigration and healthcare, television and theater reviews, obituaries, and this article by Mary Hanna of the Tri-Valley Herald:
“The American Dream is to be able to attack at will, eat anything they please and vomit it up on people’s cars.”
When we say, “liberty and justice for all”, we mean it, even for the California buzzards Hanna was writing about.
More often references to The Dream is used to describe middle class life. Cynthia Tucker, summed it up in her nationally syndicated column:
“Tidy little houses… big shiny Chevrolets and Fords with bench seats… health insurance to pay for the occasional tonsillectomy or appendectomy… pensions generous enough to purchase nice gifts for the grandkids.”
The Dream also represents the chance to have those things. It’s the classic rags to riches story, recounted by Wendy Killeen in The Boston Globe:
“Phyllis LeBlanc, who attended college at night while working as a part-time candy dipper, is now owner, president, and CEO of Harbor Sweets in Salem, which sells goodies in stores all over the country and online. Based on her own life, she believes the American dream is attainable for everyone.”
It is the idea that humble beginnings are no impediment to greatness:
“A poor farm boy who grew up in rural Mississippi goes on to throw for more yards and touchdowns than anybody in history,” Mike Bianchi wrote of retiring Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Farve in the Orlando Sentinel. “Maybe we love him so much because he embodied the American dream itself.”It is the hope of transcending inequality, the hope some African Americans had when they moved out to Palm Springs, Calif. decades ago, before their homes were bulldozed for a new development:
“They came out here believing the American dream was out here in California,” said the Rev. Carl McPeters in The Desert Sun. ”They thought they left Jim Crow.”
The Dream is what has given the United States its reputation as the land of opportunity, and made it a nation of immigrants. Immigrants can even have the chance to become the next American Idol, as Sharon Fink of the St. Petersburg Times pointed out, describing Idol finalist Ramiele Malubay, who’s from Miramar, this way:“a foreigner fighting to get a piece of the American Dream.”
And all of these themes are being invoked by reporters and politicians alike in the course of the current presidential campaign. Here’s Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont using The Dream to endorse Senator Barack Obama, the black-immigrant-hick from Kansas-Kenya-Indonesia-Hawaii-Illinois:
“The American Dream is based on a belief that we can turn improbabilities into possibilities. Our nation is moving out of a troubled time in its history, and I believe the improbable campaign of Barack Obama offers just the sort of possibility our nation needs.”
This post was originally produced for News21.
March 3, 2008
Hillary Clinton got up really really early today to shake hands with workers at Chrysler’s Toledo assembly plant as part of the final push ahead of the all-important Ohio primary Tuesday.
My-brother-in-law, Teddy, got up really early to go to work at an automotive castings plant in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Clinton has been sparring with Democratic rival Barack Obama over how to stop outsourcing and fix faulty trade agreements that have hit the ailing manufacturing sector. Republican frontrunner John McCain has been advocating more investments in retraining for workers forced out of factory jobs.
My brother-in-law is not likely to see his job as a controller on the block, but the weakness of the auto industry does cut into his quality of life.When I called last week, my sister, Jen, was getting ready to make a brief escape from the lingering Wisconsin winter with their two-and-a-half year old daughter, Lucy, to visit our grandmother in Florida. Teddy was resting up for another week at the plant.
“I probably made a mistake for staying in the auto industry," he told me.
Teddy started his controller job at JL French 14 months ago. The job has him constantly evaluating the supply and demand in an extremely volatile industry for his bosses, and when he should get out of the business.
At his old job, as a controller at another automotive plant in Belvidere, IL, he was working 80 hours a week. Cost cutting meant Teddy had to handle the workload of two people. My sister almost never saw her husband; their daughter often got her goodnight kiss after she was already asleep.The new job is better. Teddy works about 50, 55 hours a week. He’s home in time to make dinner and he gets weekends off. He still makes a comfortable six-figure salary that allows my sister to be a stay-at-home mom.
But he just found out he, along with his coworkers at JL French, won’t be getting his regular cost-of-living raises. It’s that kind of uncertainty that makes Teddy’s head spin.
Since Jen and Lucy joined him in Wisconsin in July, they’ve been living in a rental, which my sister hates. They can afford to buy a house, but they’re not sure if they’ll be here long enough to make that investment worthwhile.
“I would like to be out (of the auto industry) in the next two years. That would mean we wouldn’t be here.”
He keeps saying that, but the auto industry still pays well. Teddy had a chance to get out of the business when he took the job in Sheboygan. But the job offers from he had in the food and paper industries meant at least a 10 percent pay cut, or as much as $10,000 a year.
“That would have meant downsizing our lifestyle – not purchasing new vehicles, putting money aside for Lucy’s college fund, things like Jen going off to Florida for four days, you’d have to curtail them back.”
This post was originally produced for News21.
February 5, 2008
The African-American vote has become a major focus during this national election with the presence of the first serious black contender, Barack Obama. Black voters are largely choosing between Obama and Hillary Clinton, wife of Bill Clinton, affectionately known as the "first black president".
On Super Tuesday, some of my j-school colleagues and I conducted a survey of black voters in Oakland. Check out our project here.
I produced 10 videos for this project which was created as part of the advanced multimedia class at UC Berkeley.
February 3, 2008
Pundits have been throwing the term "evangelical" around a lot as they talk about the race to the White House. But what does the term "evangelical" actually mean to evangelicals? To find out Adi Sambamurthy and I visited one evangelical church in Sacramento, Calif.
August 24, 2007
Oakland - It's freebox season in the Bay Area.
The freebox is the ultimate take-a-penny/leave-a-penny. You clean out your closet and leave the leftovers in a cardboard box, or a plastic milk crate, or an unrestrained pile on the sidewalk outside your house and your neighbors and other wanderers sift through your stuff, taking that sweater that doesn't fit you anymore or that book you'll never read again. You then, in turn, while walking to get your daily latte or bicycling to the office will encounter other people's freeboxes, finding an unscratched Moby CD or a perfectly good pea coat which you will enjoy until you get bored with it and return it to the curb.
Sure, you and your neighbors could sell the good stuff on ebay and leave nothing but real trash on the sidewalk, but life here depends on good freebox karma. There are no young men driving horse-drawn trailers through traffic, weaving through neighborhoods, ringing doorbells, and collecting scrap like they do in Johannesburg (from where I have just returned), where pieces of corrugated metal and splintered wood become squatter houses. There is no New Jersey that will take the trash once the Bay Area's landfills are full either. And here, where high rent makes thrift a necessity, there are countless crafty do-it-yourselfers who will in fact make something useful out of your half-dead computer monitor and a handle-less screwdriver.
So there is the freebox.
Finding something good in a freebox feels like getting a present when it's not even your birthday. This time of year the sidewalks are bursting with treasures, with all the summer interns moving out and all the students moving in who've realized that it won't all fit in that veggie diesel station wagon and something's gotta go.
The purge is also part of the good karma, of course. It feels good to get rid of stuff and to give it to the universe. It's like, well, giving someone a present when it's not even their birthday, except you don't get to actually know who that person is or see the smile on their face.
And it's way better than just saving your wallet from all those heads of Lincoln that you can't use in a parking meter, or not having to break another dollar when paying for your latte that cost $3.01 with tax.
July 22, 2007
Soweto - I was the one who wanted to go to the shebeen. Shosholo said she'd quit drinking more than a month ago. But Thabiso wanted to make me happy and it took less than a minute for him to convince her to come along.
So we went traipsing off into Soweto's smoky dark, past kids still playing ball in the street, and men wandering to or from their wives and girlfriends.
The shebeens are unmarked places, hiding behind the same metal gates where women cower at night, keeping watch over sleeping babies. We ducked into one such innocuous spot, with only the music blaring from behind the beige concrete wall of the three-room township house to give it away.
We slipped past the house to the steel-tented portico where slabs of braaied meat rested on a dead grill on one side, fridges full of 750ml bottles of beer were caged behind iron bars on the other, and men (already either half drunk or pissed drunk though it was only 7 p.m.) milled around smoking cigarettes in between.
South African house music (imagine the sharp melodies of lo-fi electric guitars mixed with heavy synthesized beats) was emanating from an enormous speaker that had been hung in the corner of a glass-fronted enclosure behind the portico.
Inside a ballerina was dancing enthusiastically with herself in the hip-shifting local style. A few men had taken up space at the long folding table beside her, paying much more attention to their beer than the show.
The majority of the seating in the joint consisted of red and black plastic crates bearing the SAB (South African Breweries) brand. As Shosholo pointed out, the crates were far preferable to the rickety wood and bent-metal chairs which were missing of few of their slats.
I was happy sitting there, swigging from our bottles of Hansa, taking in the scene while any possibility was drowned out by the stereo (well, it was actually mono, since there was only one speaker, but you get the idea).
One guy in designer jeans shadow-dance in the corner. Another was attempting to read the newspaper despite the noise.
Perched on the opposite row of SAB crates, a man was devouring a flask of whiskey and a can of soda. Alcohol was cheap in the shebeen. I'd given Thabiso 20 rand to buy two longnecks and he'd brought back change.
While my top half was getting into the rhythm, Thabiso was trying to convince me to take a turn on the dance floor. I wasn't sure I wanted to invite the drunken men to join me, figuring the spectacle of my white skin in this place was probably enough to make them salivate.
Of course the shebeen was equal spectacle for me, an essential stop on my tour of Johannesburg's most famous township, after swinging by Nelson Mandela's old house and the site where 12-year-old Hector Peterson was gunned down during student protests against apartheid in 1976.
I popped across the room to flash a picture of my friends, then slid back to snap a shot of the local who had now emptied his flask of whiskey.
The music stopped with a jolt between every song, as if a DJ somewhere had to feed a new CD into the player for each track. During one of the breaks the shadow dancer came and sat next to me. His body was warm and pounding with the exasperation of his performance. He leaned over me to talk to Thabiso, in Zulu, but the music, which had started playing again, was too loud to hear him anyway. The two young men were smiling in jovial discussion, and so I smiled too. This is cool, I thought, I'm digging this.
Then the shadow dancer bounced out of the room, with the newspaper reader following suit, having finished browsing the ads.
Half a bottle later I grabbed again for digital, which I'd stashed in my back pocket for easy access, to photograph the ballerina who was still shaking her poor excuse for a booty.
The camera had apparently slipped out of my pocket. I leaned my plastic seat away from the wall to fetch it. It wasn't there. I slid over and checked behind the adjacent crate. Nothing. I checked behind the one on the other side. Nothing.
"What is it?" Thabiso asked.
"My camera."
Thabiso shook his head, flashing back to his conversation with the shadow dancer. He'd told him that he and the newspaper reader were dashing out to get beer, even though the shebeen had an ample and affordable supply.
When the pair came back empty-handed Thabiso confronted them under the portico. The music stopped. The drunks swarmed around the argument. I stayed put, hoping no fists would be swung, no guns would appear.
The ballerina came over to comfort me by telling me over and over again, rather oddly, that "white is beautiful". Perhaps she was thinking that the good fortune of my skin color was a consolation for whatever trouble that had transpired.
We left while the thieves, who continued to profess their innocence, were being interrogated by the owner and several righteous others.
We returned to Shosholo's place before 10:00, the night ruined. The camera was gone, the thieves had dumped it somewhere, and instead we had a crappy cell phone which Thabiso had confiscated from them in the earlier negotiations. The phone was locked with a password, and the camera would soon be useless without its battery charger and USB link. It was a futile exchange leaving nothing but hard feelings.
Everyone I know in South Africa has been robbed, and Soweto has a particularly notorious reputation for crime, but I'd wanted to return from the township unscathed. I wanted to prove my ability to cross boundaries without consequence, to be able to discredit the depictions of the townships as thug-ridden zones, suffered by the poor only so they can earn the currency of street cred. I was sorely disappointed.
July 20, 2007
Johannesburg - It's not easy for a young white American woman to explore downtown Jozi.
I first saw downtown while trying to keep ahead of the swell of some 10,000 striking public sector workers. I'd been warned I was taking the assignment to cover the march at my own risk. As it turned out, I was only at risk of being swept up by the toyi-toying (the style of stomping and singing made famous during the uprisings that brought down apartheid), getting lost in the crowd, and missing my ride back to the office.
OK, there was one scary moment when the march reached its fulcrum in front of the provincial premier's office. The throngs were corralled between shiny high-rises and began pushing angrily towards the tiny stage set up on the back of a flatbed truck to get at the deputy premier who'd stepped up to accept the union memorandum since her boss was conveniently out of town. I was standing - teetering really - just behind the truck, microphone in hand. A forceful enough nudge and my head could have been separated from the rest of me.
Striking unions have a terrible reputation for violence in South Africa. Indeed there were scattered reports of violence during the month-long public sector stay-away. One woman told me she'd shown up for that big march at 8:00 a.m., even though she'd just gotten off the night shift and was planning to return for another night shift later that day, because she knew that if she hadn't shown she'd be accused of not standing with the union and would face the consequences.
The union leaders hyped up the second march, three weeks into the strike, saying that it could get ugly. But then it seemed more spectators showed up than demonstrators as shopkeepers shutdown their stores and kept watch on the crowd, waiting for riots that never came.
Between the two marches, I hired a taxi direct to Ghandi Square (named for Jozi's famous one-time resident) for an interview with Zimbabwean musician Bongani Nxumalo. The office where Bongani works his day job is in the Renaissance Centre, but whatever renaissance came through must have vanished decades ago. Bongani's office is at the dead-end of a narrow hallway with scraped bare floors that set off a booming echo as you walk along. The two spares rooms inside the suite are shielded by a white-painted iron-barred door, as if the designers of place knew that the security guy in the lobby below was going to fall asleep from boredom or the previous night's drinking.
I went back downtown at Bongani's invitation a few days later to hit the Safari Hotel where Jeys Marabini, a Zimbabwean jazz player, was performing with his band. The front desk was surrounded by a familiar set of white-painted iron bars.
The Safari Hotel, like many downtown hotels, has a reputation for being a Nigerian-controlled drug den.
The performance hall was oversized for the rather meager crowd that showed up for Jeys, but apparently the adjacent bar was filling up as the band played its first set. The promoters gave up on collecting the cover charge and the let the curious half-drunk bar flies in for free at the break. One can only guess from their lack of enthusiasm for the band's music that they were from every country whose refugees inhabit downtown except Zimbabwe. I don't know how many were from Nigeria, but I didn't notice any drug dealers, or at least none in the midst of a transaction.
But when I went back to the Safari Hotel during the day time, as a white woman in the front seat of a cab I certainly looked like a meal ticket. I had to wave off three guys who had broken from a line-up of dealers leaning against the short concrete wall across the street from the hotel. So, yeah, Jozi can be a bit sketchy.
Despite the danger, I still find Hillbrow (the suburb, a.k.a. neighborhood, a couple blocks over from Berea where you'll find the Safari Hotel) particularly seductive at night. While the streets around it are dark, sidewalk braais (a.k.a. barbeques) and the fireplaces of curb-dwellers illuminate a seething nocturnal world. Plastic plates full of half-brown bananas and green tomatoes are still on offer; cellular pay phone stands buzz with calls home and international business deals.
There is a curious lack of old people and children, except for the sleeping babies tacked to their mothers' backs with tightly wrapped blankets. On the two occasions I've gone to visit Bongani at his Hillbrow rehearsal space, I've found him waiting for me nervously back from the curb, and his group disbanded precisely at 8:00 p.m. before the suburb got too hectic.
More than a month after arriving in Jozi I finally made an expedition to explore downtown. I started in Newtown and headed to Diagonal Street where at last I felt like I'd found Africa. Women in miss-matched layers and men in dusty khakis were shifting through mounds of used clothing in only marginally better condition that had been dumped on the sidewalk. Further on, I maneuvered past hawkers squatting on the curb, watching over their wares: boiled peanuts, socks, hunks of soap, gobs of rat poison, bootleg porn DVDs.
The shoppers seemed unphased by the sellers' quick-tongued chants announcing their stock. Perhaps they were destined instead for the shops on the other end of Diagonal Street - 8X10 hollows piled high with synthetic wool blankets, school jerseys, and bunches of mysterious herbs and roots prescribed by traditional healers.
I wandered in and out of these cubby holes, trying not to be conspicuous - which was of course impossible as a white woman walking alone in this corner of the world. At around 3:00 p.m., as the sun was just barely threatening to set, shopkeepers and passers-by started warning me to watch my back, and corrugated metal gates started clanging down on the storefronts. So I looped around and headed up Jeppe Street into Marshalltown.
There on the plaza in front of the Western-style Woolworth's department store was Jozi's beauty bizarre. Stalls hung with dark locks of fake hair were flanked by clumps of women seated in folding chairs while hairdressers yanked and twisted their tresses into fresh braids.
The women nearly rioted when I took out my camera, and perhaps they would have if rising up would not have put them at serious risk of having their hair torn out.
Maybe the biggest danger in downtown Jozi is women getting their hair done in the street side beauty shop.
June 19, 2007
Lawley - Dennis and I drove well past the road to the Ngobeni's house. Each house - essentially lean-tos cobbled together with scraps of corrugated metal, a plastic tarp, cardboard, maybe a sack of concrete for a stoop, a strip of flooring if you're lucky - is numbered with a slap of paint, but the rutted paths that zig zag between them are unmarked and seemingly nameless. So we had to backtrack to find the red dirt inlet, given away by a white minibus taxi pulling out onto the two-lane asphalt highway that runs from Johannesburg south through Lawley past Lesotho and on to Cape Town.
This is the Africa Oprah Winfrey will never see. Four days ago Oprah was on the top of the V-VIP list for the opening of the "Lion King" in South Africa. She appeared on the red carpet (which was actually green, although I'd seen the crew pulling out a red one earlier - an African mystery) surrounded by a swarm of school girls wearing the green uniforms of the academy she founded here and named after herself. Rumor has it the talk show queen is building a house for herself on the academy's campus. Rumor also has it that the school has the most luxurious campus of any in Africa. Will Oprah ever visit the red dirt villages and townships her under-privileged students came from? Her handlers would have to roll out one hell of a carpet to make sure the dirt didn't stain her shoes.
South Africa, even with the spotlight that Madonna and Angelina have shone on Malawi and Namibia, gets more than its fair share of celebrity attention. South Africa offers easy access to Africa. There are plenty of five star hotels (which I probably will never visit, unless I'm asked to be part of the paparazzi) and multi-million dollar estates on the coast (which I will surely never be able to afford on a journalist's salary). At the same time there are beggars and AIDS patients everywhere ready for a goodwill photo-op.
Oprah came from nothing, or as close to nothing as the U.S. gets. If she wanted to give back to the most under-privileged children in the world, she wouldn't have chosen to do so in one of Africa's economic powerhouses - a place which, all things considered, is already pretty much a success story.
Oprah did not want darkest Africa. She wanted the Disney version. The one with a happy ending.
At the risk of contradicting myself now, I have to say that out among the shacks of the informal settlements beyond Jozi's comfortable suburbs there seems to be a serious shortage of happy endings.
Dennis and I are here to witness a cleansing ceremony following the death of the Ngobeni's 41-year-old son in April. They've slaughtered a goat and two women are pressing the shit out of its intestines with their bare hands into a brown puddle (a goat pie?) on the ground. I'm recording the sound of them wrenching the tissue and the feces, and one of the women asks for five rand in exchange.
Five rand buys nothing in South Africa, not even a can of Coke. Of course, I have five rand, but I tell her I don't. I feel guilty, my stomach tightens, the smile rubs off my face. But what can I do?
I am here in South Africa in part because I want to report this poverty which strikes me as a cruel injustice. I do care about the plight of these women. I do. When one woman asks me for five rand it is as if every poor woman is asking, but though I have five rand I do not have five million.
So I tell the woman we have brought candles and firewood for everyone, and I continue squatting there with my shotgun microphone aimed at them. The women return to their task, perhaps writing me off as just another white person who's come to exploit them.
