There have been a lot of changes in my work life since the fall. In October I left my stint as a Host/Producer for Vocalo.org to take a different job, still at Chicago Public Radio. Now I’m doing multimedia production to support our work with various “internal” audiences, like our board of directors and foundation funders. (As opposed to producing content for public consumption in our broadcast or on the web.)  I’m pretty sure it’s a temporary gig, as I want to go back to producing story content asap, but I’m enjoying the work for now.

I’m definitely enjoying my current project. I’m working on a series of video portraits of people who have been dedicated and impressive members of the Vocalo community. I’m trying to get a sense of who these people are, what their lives are like, and explore why they would want to be part of an experimental media community like the one we were trying to build.

I’m starting with Bert Downing, the owner of Carter’s Barbershop in North Lawndale.

Bert and a really cute kid

North Lawndale is a historically black neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, and was briefly home to Dr. King when he settled there to launch the northern campaign of the civil rights movement in the late ‘60s. When he was assassinated in 1968, residents of North Lawndale rioted, destroying much of the neighborhood’s business core and physical infrastructure. Common perception is that the neighborhood has never fully recovered from the riots – after the riots is a common refrain among older residents – although there have been efforts to redevelop the neighborhood, attract new businesses, and provide better access to basic services.

A lot of what people will tell you about North Lawndale now are the stereotypes that apply to many urban ghettos (a word I’ve heard several people from North Lawndale use to describe their own neighborhood). Poverty. High rates of incarceration. Unemployment that is two or three times the national average, even when the economy is bad.

But inside the barbershop I’ve seen something different: a strong, functioning community, talking with itself. I guess it’s a cliché that barbershops are where the “real talk” happens, but I’ve seen it and heard it there again and again. And Bert is the conversation impresario, calling his friends and telling them to get down there if they don’t want to miss out on the good talking, excited to turn his barbershop into a radio station for the day.

Here are some clips that came from the various live remote broadcasts we’ve staged at Carter’s Barbershop over the past two years. (We includes fellow producers Dan Weissmann and Luiz Perez.) The first is Bert, describing an incident with a customer/cop that went down in the shop some years back.  It’s called Get ‘Em! Or, You Picked the Wrong Barbershop and features probably my favorite Bert-ism of all time.  See if you can guess what it is.

3:17

This second clip comes from another live broadcast, and an interview with a patron named Mr. Heywood. It’s sad and funny at the same time.  When three neighborhood teens drowned at a school retreat after sneaking out paddle boats in the middle of the night, we discussed who was at fault: the adults chaperoning the trip, or the teens themselves. The conversation turned into an in-depth discussion of parenting, with people, including Mr. Heywood,  sharing stories of their own teen misadventures. This piece is called Mr. Heywood Climbs the Tracks. Intro read by Delaney Hall, music by Hauschka and Zoe Keating.

3:42

Finally, here is some raw video of Kastaway from the shoot we did at the barbershop last week. Kastway is AWESOME!! Carter, the original owner of the barbershop, was his mentor, so he basically grew up in the shop. He’s a super talented MC and one of the funniest people I know. I’m really glad to have an excuse to hang out with him again, because he’s really fun to talk to. He’s going to take me around the hood some time next week so I can get some contextualizing footage for the video piece. My favorite part of this video is where he describes Bert as “the uncle I never asked for.” Heehee!

More updates on this project as it progresses!


Girls on the Gridiron 1

20:15

I half  laughed, half cringed when I saw this recent Time Out Chicago cover story about lingerie football.  It wasn’t that long after I had finished talking to several players from the Chicago Force about how they wish ESPN would drop their coverage of this fake, sexist “sport” in favor of actual women’s football.

Because the women of the Chicago Force do play football.  Real football, with tackling, and hitting, and all the brutality and passion you’d expect from the sport. There are over forty players on the Force of all ages, races and backgrounds, none of whom are paid to play the game but all of whom play at the highest levels of competition.

In this piece, four members of the team describe what it’s like to be a woman in a man’s game.


Malort

03Jun09

IMG_0032

10:05

If you’ve never tried Malort, I don’t know how to recommend it to you. On one hand, if you’ve never had it, you’re missing out on something authentically Chicago. On the other hand, it’s disgusting. It’s a liquor that’s a Chicago tradition, as robust and unique as it is nasty.

When I first moved to Chicago and didn’t really know anyone, my friends Coyote and  Brandon decided they were going to adopt me and show me what this town was all about. High on their list of priorities was introducing me to Malort. This piece is a guide for the uninitiated, and tells the story of my friends’ fond obsession with this two-fisted liquor.

Photo:  Coyote and Skidmore flash the sign for “Midwest” while brandishing a bottle of Malort. Yup. I think this picture about sums it up.


National Debt

01Jun09

Japanese American internment

20:30

When we talk about debt, we often mean a kind of personal debt that comes from borrowing money and paying it back. But there’s another kind of debt – when someone has wronged you big time, and now they owe it to you to make it up somehow. The U.S. government is no stranger to this kind of debt, or this kind of big wrong. There was slavery. And what happened to the Native Americans. And then there was what happened during World War II.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. rounded up 120,000 people of Japanese decent and put them in internment camps. Nearly two-thirds of them were American citizens. Years later the U.S. government would apologize and pay reparations to people who had been held in the camps, but it took decades to make that happen.

In this story, Chiye Tomihiro and Sam Ozaki, two survivors of internment, describe how they went from being seen as model citizens to being seen as the enemy, and how they fought to get what was owed to them after the country admitted its mistake.  They tackle the question: how do you pay someone back when what’s been taken away is their  basic human dignity?

This piece was produced as a collaboration between Robin Amer and Jesse Seay, and narrated by Jesse.

Photo: Women at the Tulle Lake War Relocation Camp, circa 1942. Photo by Bob Bobster.  From Bob: “Tule Lake was the largest and most controversial of the ten War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps used to carry out the government’s system of exclusion and detention of persons of Japanese descent…Tule Lake became a Segregation Center to detain Japanese-Americans who were deemed potential enemies of America because of their response to an infamous, confusing loyalty questionnaire intended to distinguish loyal American citizens from enemy alien supporters of Japan.”


Funny Money

20 min

Some people believe that money can break up any relationship. If it didn’t exactly break up Jason and John, band buddies who genuinely liked each other, it sure as hell drove a wedge between them.

A story about what you owe your friends, and what they owe you.

Part of Vocalo.org’s feature IOU: Stories of being in the hole, over your head, knee deep and in the red.

Photo: Funny Money by Material Boy.


C4 Explosion

07Mar09

explosion

2:01

First what happens is you see the light. The light is the first thing you see. You don’t hear anything, you see the light.

Chris Johnson tells the story of the time he saw 2500 lbs of C4 explode.

This piece was recorded as part of Vocalo.org’s initiative Your Digital Life: Stories from the Web. Photo by S.F. Pitman.


wedding-ring4

14:47

Damali Ayo is an incredible artist, an incredible talker, and frankly, an incredible person. I’ve never met anyone with her particular combination of energy, humor, insight and charisma. Also, she has, how you say, balls. (Co-Jones, as my friend Luis would say.) She’s the kind of person I’m frankly a little intimidated by because I’m also a little in awe of her, which is dumb because she’s also super nice and approachable. But so it goes.

When we put out calls for the lists people had created under the Facebook meme “25 Random Things About Me,” I was really glad to hear back from her. We met at the Third Coast Festival a few years back, discovered we were both Brown alumni and kind of hit it off, I think. I interviewed her a few years ago for the Open Source show I produced on race and class in America from the perspective of black artists, and this was a welcome excuse to talk to her again. While we were chatting pre-interview, I took not of at least two or three other things I wanted to interview her about at some point. She’s really interesting.

In this story, Damali describes how she has proposed marriage to three different men over the course of her life, once in her teens, once in her 20s and once in her 30s. And, why she will never propose to another man ever again.

This story was produced as part of Vocalo.org’s initiative Your Digital Life: Stories from the Web.


pregnancy-picture

10:56

Kate moves to Chicago from Michigan City, Indiana at age 18 and suddenly finds herself pregnant. Things go from bad to worse when she goes into labor four-and-a-half months early and gives birth in an unexpected place.

The story comes from Kate Ainsworth’s Facebook List “25 Random Things About Me Which You May or May Not Find Interesting.”  It was recorded as part of Vocalo.org’s initiative Your Digital Life: Stories from the Web. All this month, we’re combing the dark corners of the internet for the stories behind your status updates, tweets, blog posts, and texts. Have your own interesting “25 Things” list? Know the compelling story behind your friend’s last text? Email us at info@vocalo.org or call the Vocalo.org Hotline at 888-635-1112.


My friend Xander Marro, co-founder of the Dirt Palace and Managing Director of AS220, guest curated a selection of her favorite hand-made offerings from Etsy on the site’s Storque blog today.  She was kind enough to include the CD of my documentary Reconstructing Providence among her selections. Thanks Xander! And welcome to anyone who found their way here from Etsy.

If you haven’t checked out Etsy, it’s an amazing site filled with enticing hand-made goodies from what’s probably now hundreds of thousands of artists from around the world. I bought my coffee table there, a felt molskine pouch, and half a dozen other objects I’m pretty attached to. My favorite seller at the moment is OctopusME, who casts silver jewlery from real octopus tentacles.

While you’re there you should also check out the work selected by my other Providence-expat friends Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Anderson of Lucky Dragons, Sumi Ink Club and other projects. I really like both of them and the work they produce together, which is often (as another friend of ours put it) kind of like this magical artistic metaphor for their relationship.  I haven’t been in touch with them as much as I would like…I missed their Chicago show last spring and wasn’t able to look them up when I was in LA this past December.  Hopefully it won’t be too long before I have another opportunity to see them, one I’ll actually take up.

If you fish around my site, you’ll notice that I featured Luke’s work in a couple different episodes of No Soap Radio.  He also helped me build a Max/Msp player I used when I first performed RP in 2004, which I’m still grateful for.


name-tag1Originally broadcast Thursday Oct. 3, 2003. Full listing of Inside Out episodes here.

What’s in a name? In this episode we think about the this word (or words) that precede us everywhere we go. Hosted by Adeline Goss, with executive producer Anna Goldman. Contributors to this show include Robin Amer, Ali Budner, Anna Goldman, and Jenny Asarnow. Thanks to Beth Taylor.

In this episode:

Anna Goldman interviews her friend Mojo (yes, that’s his real name) about just what his parents were thinking, and how he deals with peoples’ expectations of him based on his name.

Robin Amer talks to Sarah McDermott about how she got her very much trademarked corporate nickname.

Ali Budner talks to Luke Woodward, formerly Ayesha, about what it was like to change his name when he also changed his gender.

Jenny Asarnow talks to Rebecca Subar about taking a name, and then leaving it behind.

Then, Ali’s twin sister Brooke Budner tells her about the time she convinced a group of strangers she was someone else all together.

Photo by Caro Scuro.