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Elastic Journalism

On Friday, the First Lady of Inkville and I checked out "Multimedia Journalism & the Landscape of News," a talk by The Daily's Gabriel Dance. It was sponsored by my old stomping grounds, the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication.

Dance was a popular act; we arrived a few minutes late, and found the room already at capacity and hotter than Hades. Good on him.

A lot of what Dance had to say really hit home, especially his strong recommendation that 21st century journalists need more than one skill set. And as I can attest both as a freelancer and as a former magazine staffer, it's hard out there for a pimp, assuming the pimp is a writer trying to support himself solely through freelance.

Dance's song-and-dance about multimedia was interesting, and he aptly demonstrated how the concept of "journalism" is elastic enough to encompass computer animators, designers, illustrators, and other creatives.

All Dance's examples stemmed from his time at The New York Times, and I'll admit I was hoping for a bit more about Dance's new gig at The Daily. But that job is new, so perhaps Dance deserves a pass for at least a few more weeks. And frankly, The Daily has thus far failed to impress me.

But what really left me scratching my head was the amount of culture shock Dance must be experiencing transferring from the Times, a supposed liberal bastion, to working for Rupert Murdoch. As I type this, Dance's personal website features a link to an article about a journalist's "battles" with Murdock, so perhaps The Daily really is enacting a separation of church and state for the purposes of doing business.

Beyond the Walls of the Restaurant

Dealing as it does with Eugene's Marché restaurant, this is a little companion piece to my article "Salve, Sfizio." Both appeared in Eugene Weekly's summer Chow! Guide. And, dealing as it does with our charming First Lady and a visit to the White House, this seemed an appropriate post for the 4th of July weekend. Happy Independence Day!

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The term “pro bono” more likely conjures images of legal briefs and power suits than it does freshly-sliced rhubarb or the stark whites of a professional chef. But Stephanie Pearl Kimmel, founding chef and owner of Eugene’s Marché, will be cooking and consulting for free in the coming months as part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Chefs Move to Schools initiative. 

As one foot soldier in an army of white-clad chefs invited to Washington, D.C., last weekend, Kimmel and her cohort got their marching orders on the White House lawn, directly from the First Lady. 

The Chefs Move to Schools project is part of the wider “Let’s Move!” initiative to combat childhood obesity, and ultimately to strengthen the federal Child Nutrition program that feeds kids in schools.

“A third of our schoolchildren [in the U.S.] are overweight or obese,” says Kimmel, who cites the “lost creativity, lost contributions and eventually just the medical costs” of that sorry state as major problems for the nation, down the line.

Continue reading "Beyond the Walls of the Restaurant" at Eugene Weekly.

The Old Rugged Cross

I had been waiting for last night's premiere of HBO's new series Treme for months. An ongoing program that takes place in perhaps my favorite city in the world, bolstered by the usual deft characterization and commitment to world-building endemic of HBO shows like Deadwood and The Sopranos is too good to pass up.

Watching the series, even just the first episode, felt like coming home. Seeing the dive bars and grimy row homes, and even the Tower Records on North Peters, on television give me that weird little thrill one gets while seeing an accustomed haunt on the local news.

Whether the series is any good remains to be seen. HBO's programming is notoriously slow to start, and Treme's rambling, shambling, 80-minute opening episode is no exception, doling out juuuuust enough characterization for each of the principals to barely keep the viewer engaged. The music was slammin', of course, and the naturalistic writing and acting, de rigeur for HBO, more than make up for the plodding pacing.

It's difficult to watch John Goodman play a character and let the man simply inhabit it; he's always just so John Goodman-y. But I couldn't help grinning and nodding along as Goodman's character lit into a British journalist dismissive (or ignorant?) of New Orleans and what it stands for in the American imagination. Wendell Pierce's performance was reliably droll and understated, and his character's consistent shortchanging of his cabbies was not only duly funny, it was a compelling and simple symbol for the dire straits in which New Orleanians (not to mention musicians in general) found (and find) themselves. And Steve Zahn... well, maybe he'll grow on me.

The true crime behind Treme, the real sadness behind it, is that enough of the city is still in wreckage in real life that the film crew was even able to identify neighborhoods that could pass for the devastation of late 2005. Our trip there in 2008 revealed plenty of ruined homes, three years after their destruction.

Amusingly, with this summer's welcome return of True Blood, HBO will now have two series taking place in Louisiana. And did I mention that 2011's big-budget Green Lantern movie is filming in New Orleans, as well? I just hope the entire state of Louisiana isn't so trendy and gentrified that we're too priced out of it to, well, head down and move into a gentrified neighborhood, provided we someday, hopefully, relocate there.

Until then, I'm trusting Treme to present a nuanced, heartwarming, heartbreaking portrayal of the Big Easy, and to laissez les bons temps (et les mauvais temps) rouler. This opening episode of Treme ends with a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral, but only with the downbeat half that leads to the cemetery, the portion set to a funerary dirge. By forgoing the second, upbeat, from-the-cemetery portion of the jazz funeral, the portion traditionally set to hot jazz, the series indicates its characters are at their nadir, three months after Katrina has ravaged them. The central tension of the series, a tension to which I'm looking forward, will be in watching these characters rebuild themselves, and the city they love.

The Prophet

This month was Lane County's annual Project Homeless Connect, described on the program's website as "a one-day, 'one-stop shop' event serving people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless." Back in 2007 I interviewed a couple of the project's clients for articles for my graduate program. That work was never published, so below I am polishing off an oldie but (I think) a goodie. Enjoy.

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Though I offer to keep it under wraps, Paul Lehman wants his full name used for this article. Paul is a poet and author, and the extra publicity can’t hurt. Paul is also a guru. Consumer-driven culture holds no appeal for Paul, so he has elected to engage in a self-imposed exile from mainstream society, to shoulder a life of contemplation, and the lifestyle of a beggar.

At the moment, Paul’s immediate concerns are more earthly in nature. His bodily vessel is hungry, so Paul has made the trek from the mobile home park, his current base of operations, to nourish it. Yes, Paul is a guru, and he dresses the part. A maroon cap bears a Tibetan-looking pattern, crowning a gaunt visage of deep, watery gray eyes and a cascading white beard. At lunchtime Paul holds court, breathlessly reciting one of his own works to a couple of volunteers, a poem about personal growth, and the beauty of truth, and a higher power, surprisingly wrapped in an almost-iambic pentameter.

Neither a free meal nor the role of supplicant are new to Paul, but then he has played many roles in his six or seven decades on this plane… choirboy, soldier, high school teacher. Once he even helped build a boardwalk over a Florida mangrove swamp. Society is a curtain across truth, says Paul, a fog obscuring our knowledge of the power of the self. “That’s why I hang out outside the system,” he grins conspiratorially.

Paul’s self-appointed job is to free the masses from “the shadows of their own poor understanding.” He is Gandalf, Merlin, Teiresias, sprung from the storybook page to sound a word of warning in these dark times.

Historically, mankind feeds and clothes its prophets out of reverence, or awe, or fear. But eventually the wise men almost always combust, set afire by the glare of the social order they serve through its subversion. But Paul does not apologize, and has adopted his own credo, codified in the words of one of his poems:

'Twas then I set aside my reason, / In favor of the moment, / And began to live / in every season / Without need of atonement.

That Lucky Old Sun

I recently read two unrelated nonfiction essays by writers I know personally. Both essays are well-written. Both are difficult to read. And both are about the writer in question being raped.

I wasn't sure I should link to this work, honestly. I had to think about it. It felt weird, like I was revealing confidences. But if these two writers are brave enough to post their work publicly (to sites, I might add, that get many more hits each month than does Inkville), good for them.

"Not Like You," Katherine Gries' starkly assertive article, appears on Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. "Why I'm Funny" is a searingly brutal long-form blog entry from Joel Johnson. Each is recommended, if not, perhaps, in the same sitting.

A good friend of mine I haven't seen in awhile was recently in town for a few days, and over lunch I was catching her up on various writing projects. Later that afternoon, she tagged me in a Facebook post, hailing my "gigs writing about cool and fun topics like ghost hunting and Tiki bars."

And you know, she's right. I'm lucky. In life, and in my writing. Just how lucky was driven home by the work of these two writers. So I can prattle on at length about myself and about whatever popular culture flotsam catches my eye. I have the luxury.

Tough Choices

Graphic Novel recommendations for 2009

From the December 10 issue of Eugene Weekly. Sometimes I write about topics other than comic books, I swear. But hey, if they want to keep paying me to write about this sort of flotsam, who am I to argue?

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In the three years I’ve been writing this annual graphic novel review roundup, I’ve never had such a difficult time choosing which books to cover. 2009 produced an amazing wealth of material, particularly in the realm of graphic narrative journalism and nonfiction.

A standout comic of 2009, The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders (First Second, $29.95) is the true story of Didier Lefèvre, a Parisian photographer embedded in 1986 with
an international aid convoy as it crosses on foot into Afghanistan to treat the medical ailments of mountain villagers. It’s a dangerous adventure, one in which opium dealers and tribal gang lords paradoxically provide refuge from airborne Soviet patrols, corrupt rural cops and harsh winter conditions. Even as Lefèvre is disheartened by the complicated web of strange bedfellows, religious division and sparse mercies of Afghani politics, he simultaneously achieves a grudging respect for the cultural and geographic idiosyncrasies of the troubled countryside. Illustrated comic book panels by Emmanuel Guibert are intercut with “panels” composed of Lefèvre’s stunning black and white photography, advancing the story in a wholly original way and even making a low-key statement about the nature of comics’ graphic storytelling.

In A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (Pantheon, $24.95), another graphic story presenting a specific moment in history, cartoonist Josh Neufeld reconstructs the Hurricane Katrina experiences of six real-life New Orleans families. Some flee the city, while others remain defiantly in their homes. Some barricade themselves to protect property and livelihood as others seek an ill-fated shelter in the Morial Convention Center. As in The Photographer, salvation is discovered in the most unlikely heroes, while those sworn to protect become one of the problems they’re assigned to relieve. The affecting subject matter is never maudlin in Neufeld’s hands, never feels ill-treated by the comics format. Sentiment that could easily devolve into a moribund, jingoistic chest-thumping is kept invigorated by stories of struggle for survival that are by turns saddening, thrilling and triumphant, but always engaging.


From a serious tale of world affairs to something that’s anything but, Toronto cartoonist Kate Beaton’s Never Learn Anything from History (TopatoCo, $18) gives world history the “Fractured Fairytale” treatment. Think of Beaton as the brainy kid who sat in the front row of your high school history class, who also happens to be wicked funny. Beaton finds dry-witted humor and more than a little cuteness in a petulant Napoleon, a meeting of Garfield the U.S. president and Garfield the cat and even the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. These comics aren’t for kids: Marie Antoinette advises one homely attendant she’d be better off as a hooker, and an arrow-to-the eye at the Battle of Hastings elicits some rough language. But adult history buffs will discover plenty of wiseass in-jokes in this charming collection.

Continue reading "Tough Choices" at Eugene Weekly.

Sweet Talk: Stretching your dough on desserts

This article first appeared in the fall Chow! guide, in the September 10 issue of Eugene Weekly.

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In the 2000 film Chocolat, Juliette Binoche soothes the pain of the residents of a provincial French town with a single magic potion: chocolate, the movie’s namesake. And while the current worldwide economic recession presents a different set of problems than the 1950s conformity and heavy-handed demagoguery of the film, eating one’s way to happiness still sounds like a tempting quick-fix cure for depression...both the emotional and economic varieties.

With a disheartening 12.5 percent unemployment rate in Lane County, more than three full percentage points higher than the national average, belts are tightening across the Southern Willamette Valley, and extras like sweets seem like a natural place to start trimming the fat. But if the thought of foregoing dessert due to a limited budget makes you want to toss your cookies, some local sugar-slingers are taking steps to ensure their customers can have their cake and eat it, too.

Adam Bernstein, proprietor of eateries Café Maroc and Adam’s Sustainable Table, recently changed the name and menu of the latter from Adam’s Place, a measure to reflect not only sustainability of the environmental sort but a nod toward finances as well. “I think people tend to share more desserts” these days, says Bernstein. 

“We have a chocolate volcano, a shared dessert,” Bernstein says. Ordering a dessert, even a shared one, makes “people feel like they’re getting a bonus,” he explains.

If even half a chocolate volcano is beyond the budget, Amy Brown, manager of the Candy Baron at Fifth Street Public Market, may have the solution. Brown equates the shop’s à la carte shopping experience with a way to save a few coins, asserting that her customers “are appreciative of the fact we carry individual candies, and can buy just a couple of pieces” as a pick-me-up. All the same, Brown says, “We’ve definitely had a [sales] drop at the beginning of the year.”

Continue reading "Sweet Talk at Eugene Weekly.

Rank Strangers

Last night I had the distinct pleasure of seeing bluegrass legend Dr. Ralph Stanley in live performance, and even enjoyed the honor of shaking the man’s hand before the night was through.  After a long and storied career influencing scads of musicians over the course of well over half a century in show business, Dr. Stanley may still be best-known to modern audiences through a more contemporary project.

The tune from last night’s concert that most hit home for me was the standby “Rank Strangers.”  The lyrics tell of the travels of a narrator who returns to his beloved homeland expecting the comforting sights and faces of his youth, but finds the landscape alien, unworldly, unfriendly.  The sense of isolation and disaffection is enhanced by the urgent high pitch of Dr. Stanley’s wavering, warbling chords, and a rhythm that is melancholic, almost downbeat, compared to most bluegrass.

For many American progressives, the past eight years have felt much the same.  We have looked to a nation and a government in which we have placed our faith, and have been forced to judge it unfamiliar.  Where we once beheld promise, we now find desperation.  Altruism has been replaced by bullying, prosperity by ruin, and sincerity by anything but.

In “Rank Strangers” a glimmer of hope appears for the narrator, as he questions one of the locals on the whereabouts of his friends and family:

“They've all moved away” said the voice of a stranger
“To a beautiful home by the bright crystal sea”
Some beautiful day I'll meet ’em in heaven
Where no one will be a rank stranger to me.

It’s a lovely sentiment: one man reaffirming his faith in the justness, the benign intentions, of the universe.  All it takes is patience. 

As for me, I pray that the voters of the United States make the right choice next month.  Or rather, the “left” choice.  Then maybe we won’t have to wait until heaven, after all, to find our nation, and its leader, no longer rank strangers.

And on that note, I leave you with this.