Indian women have been granted an unprecedented break–8 women-only commuter trains. Was anyone else struck by this headline news, and by “struck” I mean,… did you pause?
On these trains known as Ladies Specials, a weight has been lifted. Men are not there to do what they reportedly do onboard every day–pinch, grope, molest, threaten and shout insults at the women. Apparently, this harassment is the norm. Apparently, it was bad enough to warrant the government stepping in.
Imagine a women-only train. It might be like a big slumber party. In my world, it would manifest as a man-free subway at 4am on a Saturday night. Oooooo. How fucking freeing! What about a man-free traveling experience? I would drive across America or any wild country and push deep into the night, until I collapsed alone and sleepy in my car, a tent, or a grassy ditch on the side of the road. I’d be relaxed, watching the stars sparkle without letting my imagination roar me into at least twenty minutes of heart palpitations: A man is going to find me here and hurt me. A man is going to find me here and hurt me. (An aside: I know plenty of women who are braver than me on that front.) Though I am deeply nourished by the different men in my life, I am also convinced, after 30 short years of living, that this fear of men is inherent in all women, even those who refuse to admit it.
Why? There are so many books that attempt to pin it down, so many poems. No need to descend into the messy discussion of biology (predators, the mechanics of body parts, sowing seeds, choosing carefully for your womb and all that fraught stuff). Instead, here’s some wisdom from a man on the topic… (more…)
Three years ago, at dusk on September 10th, my boyfriend and I spun our bikes down the entire west flank of Manhattan, what feels, in effect (because of the scenery change) like distance. In reality, it is 13.4 short miles. Fresh to New York City, we vowed with the open-heart of newcomers to explore the cracks. This bike ride was the start. As spotted London Plane trees gave way to the behemoths of midtown and eventually to the hip of downtown, we pedalled by completely unaware of what everyone else on the island was aware of. Because though we are Americans, the physical history of two crumbling towers was not imbedded in us. We didn’t know this space when the World Trade Centers existed. We only knew the aftermath. New Yorkers felt the empty space. As interlopers, we were disconnected.
As we neared what we could not yet recognize as ground zero, we noticed droves of people moving inland, police officers cordoning off streets, a solemn collective buzz–the tell-tale signs of a gathering. We shrugged at each other and chalked it up to the wild ways of New York. “Must be some crazy event!” I laughed out loud, letting the wind whisk my voice out to the Hudson River.
It’s embarrassing now how oblivious we were to the date or the occasion. Later we learned that at the exact moment we coasted by on our bikes, on the eve of September 11th, President Bush stood at ground zero to address the world, the nation and New Yorkers. Hence, the crowds.
High school economics was not my forté. Only one concept stuck: supply and demand. But recently, I’ve had market shifts on the brain. This September, the press has emblazoned talk of solar panels everywhere, from Nat Geo to the good old stand by NYTimes. Apparently China, noting a future demand, has jumped on it, creating more factories to produce the panels and polysilicion, the substance needed to make them. The US has done nothing of the sort. Prices have gone down, as happens with most things made in China. (that’s a whole other conversation)
Imagine the moment one human hands-on witnesses the amorphous market beast suddenly shift.
Has this happened to you? Here is my story:
Central Otago, New Zealand 2005
With the afternoon light softening, I place a clump of cherries into my 18th bucket of the day. I have been picking cherries on this orchard for two months now. My workmates are men from China, Malaysia, India and New Zealand–we’ve gotten mean at each other and all adoring. Like siblings. So it goes in the field. Most of these big juicy purple cherries, called Lapins, will be sold to Japan and some to North America, or at least that’s what our gang-boss Nigel says. As we sweat and move quickly (getting paid for how much pick), I keep wondering: How long does it take these cherries to get to the mouths of consumers? Who loads them on an airplane, a truck, the grocery store palette? What if those consumers knew that Bob, Remy, Hydah, Nigel, John and Molly had hand-picked these cherries in a small town on an island in the southern hemisphere? Do they think about it?
Perched on my ladder, I look over the leafy canopy towards… (more…)
This week, I’m sharing my own work, because I’m so dang proud of it. Chris & I, along with our incredibly talented Austin-area friends, created this 2 minute water conservation PSA in response to RainBird’s “Intelligent Use of Water” film contest. Austin is in the middle of the worst drought in 50 years, and last week, officials announced even tighter water restrictions, so this awareness-raising contest comes at a crucial time.
We had a great time making this film, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how it turned out. Enjoy!
In exactly three hours, President Obama will be hosting a town hall meeting on healthcare reform. The town is the small Montana town I now live in. He’s here; he’s here; he’s here seems to be the refrain echoing in this valley. Last night at a dinner party, a friend told about how the preparation for the event had touched him. Working on a job up at the ski mountain, he heard a deep rumbling in the sky and waited for it to approach. He looked up as dark green helicopters skimmed towards him along the tops of lodge pole pine trees. Both helicopters were emblazoned with “United States of America” in blue. This man, a gentle horse-loving man, waved. One of the uniformed men in the helicopter waved back. “They were checking it out,” he explained, making sure no ill-doers were hanging in the woods nearby the mysterious lodge slated for the President and his family. I smiled at the visual. I also sighed with the relief of a common person. I am not the President or a famous person who, by sheer role, needs hundreds of people (and thousands of dollars) to scour a place before I go ahead and land.
But it did remind me of the time I met President Bush in my brother’s hospital room. No one patted me down. No one looked inside my purse. Perhaps, without my knowing, they did a background check on my name. The only physical check was a haunting one. A secret service man shook my hand and said, “You are about to meet the President. You will address him as Mr. President.” As the standard words slipped from his mouth, he burrowed his eyes into mine. It was a mental strip down. Any lie I’ve ever told rose to the surface. He knew everything. Did he catch my profound irritation and near hate for the important man I was about to meet? Uh oh. He could see, though, that this young woman had no desire to tackle Mr. President. Secret service people are trained to read the intricate movements of eyes, to look for something suspicious. Imagine if we all knew how to read the landscape and intention of each other’s eyes. Is it an animal instinct we once had? What a powerful and terrifying tool.
Remember studying The Jungle by Upton Sinclair in Civics class? We read excerpts and made gagging noises when we got to the parts about rat pieces and feces found in American food. Maybe we didn’t quite understand the other call for social reform in the book: to end the profound mistreatment of immigrant workers at the turn of the century. 1906 seemed like another world. We had no idea how close this book hit to home, to now.
Everyone who eats should watch Food, Inc. Or at least the trailer.
Should you buy popcorn and M&Ms? Probably not– unless you can down them during the previews. This documentary isn’t for the faint of heart, but it’s tasteful and informative. Most importantly, it argues for our right to knowledge, to be able to find out “what’s in the kitchen.”
After a “hard time” living in a provocative desert that threw my body off-kilter, I thought sitting still would do me good. I didn’t want to (nor could I afford) “going to the ashram,” which I’d read about somewhere. At the ashram, Hollywood-esque folks paid an exorbitant price to be forced to eat only kale, hike and sweat it out, and lose 20 pounds to fit into a dress for next month’s party. I wanted something authentic, which to 23-year-old me meant Hindu monks in saffron robes teaching us the intricacies of the Bhagavad Gita.
I found the exact place in the Catskill Mountains and laid down a precious, hard-earned $2,000, the most monumental straight-cash purchase of my young life. We sat crossed-legged for hours–chanting, meditating and doing yoga asanas for 30 days in a row. My inflexible hips opened too quickly, a mistake I am reminded of every time they crack and click. We read ancient texts. We even wore white uniforms. I was one of the four people who camped on the soggy lawn. It was a wet September. Everyone else slept in the housing barn. We ate brown rice and vegetables; our one taste of sweet manifested as shriveled dates. I eyed these delicacies and when the communal breakfast platter made its way across the room to me, I had to steady myself from snatching my one date, from snarfing it up like a pig. On the last day my new friend, an Irish woman recovering from cocaine addiction, admitted that every night (more…)
“Ma’am. Is it true Missouri girls are crazy?” I had just grabbed a bite while my flight was delayed. I looked down at my eight and a half months pregnant belly while I swallowed and then glanced back up to see the National Guardsman who had directed this question at me. A fresh scar ran from the side of his mouth across his left cheek.
“I don’t know,” I laughed it off.
“Well, are you crazy?” His southern drawl slowed the question while his buddies flirted with the women behind the fast food counter, trying to talk them into a lower priced hot dog.
Everyone knows it’s not the most secure time to be a writer. There’s a lot of doomsday rhetoric out there, which I really try to stay away from. I believe that people will always be hungry for stories–well-crafted, beautifully told, reflective. Those take time and, therefore, money, to create. Twitter, in other words, isn’t going to displace people’s interest in nonfiction and novels. Or at least that’s my belief.
Plenty of people are trying to innovate new ways of organizing the news, however. One of the latest is True-Slant. According to the site:
True/Slant is the digital home for the “Entrepreneurial Journalist.” Knowledgeable and credible contributors anchor and build their digital brands on True/Slant using tools that enable them to easily create content and craft stories filtered through human perspective (not an algorithm)…Our goal is to build a community that is as engaged with the news as we are. With that in mind, we opened up the site even though we are not quite ready to launch a finished product. We consider this our Alpha version, and ask you to remember that as you explore the site.
It will be interesting to follow this experiment as it develops.
The ER looked crowded with overflow into the hallway of parents and children wearing face masks. Throughout the hospital, I kept running into moms with a mask haphazardly covering their mouth but not their nose and a toddler with his mask around his neck. They didn’t seem sure of where they were going or what the diagnosis would be. Was I in a remake of the Dustin Hoffman movie, Outbreak, from the 90’s? I tried to tell myself not to overreact. Somehow I got a reputation for being dramatic in my family and I’d like to live it down eventually. But this was scary. All over the hospital where I work in Arts in Healthcare, signs explained the new rules that siblings and friends are no longer allowed to visit patients and detailed the symptoms to watch out for that may point to Swine Flu– all an effort to keep exposure down.
A fifteen year old boy came into the hospital on Friday and lost his life there on Saturday due to a severe case of Swine Flu, accompanied by Pneumonia and MRSA. Another patient also faces a dire situation, and many others are being treated for Swine Flu or Influenza A. I worked with a patient with a fever the other day without even thinking about it. Now I’m concerned. The news is grim, between reports from Iran and the rush hour train crash in D.C. today, but the hysteria over the Swine Flu died down not too long after it dragged my friends back from their honeymoon in Mexico. Why was the fear of it nationally newsworthy, but the reality of it hushed? We’ve all heard how the common flu has taken the lives of the elderly, small children, and the immunosuppressed, but would you have known that the Swine Flu could take the life of a teenager or that at least 63 people have already died of it in the U.S.? Perhaps it’s easier to keep washing our hands and staving off panic.
For those who haven’t seen it, here’s Ellen DeGeneres’s commencement speech at Tulane. It’s about 10 minutes long, but worth watching every second, especially when you get to the end. I don’t watch her TV show, and it’s been ages since I read her writing, so I had almost forgotten how sharp and hilarious she is.
dis·place·ment n
1. the moving or movement of something from its usual or correct place
I have been consumed with the Swat Valley story. Even calling it a “story” shows the distance I have from it–sitting in the library, typing on a computer, going outside to eat my avocado sandwich in a park. According to the United Nations, approximately one million people have fled northwest Pakistan since August. Right this minute, as the Pakistani government attempts to fight (or in the words of Prime Minister Gilani, “eliminate”) Taliban militants, Pakistani families are walking or busing towards refugee camps, where they hope to find food, space, toilets. “Massive displacement,” is the phrase emblazoned across newspapers. Real people uprooted from homes, routines, community, and forced to migrate to safety, if there is safety.
I wonder what this would look like in New York City, (more…)
Two weeks ago, gliding through a small museum in northern New Mexico, I found this quote printed on the wall:
“I have visited this morn the ruins of an ancient pueblo, now a desolate home for wild beast and bird of forest. It created sad thoughts when I found myself riding almost heedlessly over the work of these once mighty people.” –Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846
Someone had actually been paying attention to what had come before her. I wanted to time capsule myself back to horseback, to ask her the 100 questions pinging around in my head.
Today, a new book officially hits the shelves. I’ve been eagerly waiting for it. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City by Eric W. Sanderson uncovers the original ecology of Manhattan, reminding us of what came before the Europeans, of what came before us. When my boyfriend and I kayaked down the Hudson River last summer, I coasted under the GW Bridge and suddently there it was–the shimmer and overwhelm of Manhattan made me reverse paddle against the swift current for minutes, just to keep the feeling of awe alive. What had it been like for Henry Hudson to arrive here? And, for the Lenape people who summered on this green jut of land surrounded by water?
As I daydreamed about who and what, a long-line fishing lure (a heavy one) came out of nowhere and thwacked my boyfriend’s kayak. The culprit? A drunk fisherman and his friends on the shore, trying to hit us, not knowing perhaps that a blow to the head could be a final blow to the head. Awesome–how quickly to be reminded, strangely, of the human struggle that also came before, and continues.
For those curious about Manhattan’s youth…. here’s a brief run down. Mannahatta was packed with a diverse ecosystem; there were more ecological communities per acre on Manhattan than Yosemite. 30 kinds of orchids. 66 miles of streams. 230 types of birds. 80 kinds of fish, and even bears down by what is now Wall Street. Is it no coincidence that a landscape teeming with life and unique diversity bore a city that does the same?
1. Never show your article to a source before it comes out.
“As reporters we are accustomed to exposing automakers who slap together cars and depend on recalls to make everything right. We have excoriated prosecutors who locked up innocents and then, discovering their error, set them free with a bare apology. Many of my colleagues think that front-page corrections are preferable to leaping into the unknown, but I don’t. It’s time we applied the principles of openness and accuracy we monitor in others to the practices we engage in ourselves.” -Jay Matthews
2. Stay objective. You are not your source’s friend. You are strictly a journalist.
This, in my experience, is not only impossible, but doesn’t lend itself to getting the most deep and accurate story. A journalist’s own emotional engagement and investment is key to colorful, insightful writing. Period. Each journalist has to find the sweet stylistic, ethical spot about how personal their relationship gets.
3. Print journalism is where it’s at.
Not anymore. Uh, duh.
Okay, I know some of you are rolling your eyes: “Earth Day, ughhhh, another batch of hippies preaching to the choir…. again.” Actually, the term hippie is slipping away into the lockbox of the past, turning almost inapplicable today. In place of hippies, a new breed of young, educated, iPhone-using doers has taken to the front lines. The Save-The-Earth slogan has morphed into Save-The-Earth-And-Ourselves.
Environmentalists today aren’t necessarily on the free love train. Urgency has, some say, shifted priorities.
Last night at a party chez moi, a friend called me a hippie (in what context I don’t remember). I suspect he knew I would retaliate. The term feels marginalizing, loaded. If you are a hippie within hippies then it is awash. But hippies, like most groups, made a lot of people feel alienated. I don’t like creating alienation. As the night wore on and brownie-making began, I searched my kitchen for an egg I didn’t have. Another friend teased me good-heartedly, “Don’t you have a chicken out back on your terrace?” (Later explaining that I might be the type to urban farm). Another voice: “Can’t you just ask your neighbor for an egg?” For a moment, I nodded, Yes, exactly–a thought quickly replaced by, Do people do that in NYC? I say hello to my neighbors when we pass on the staircase, but I’d feel weird knocking on one of their doors to ask for an egg. And, I’m not usually shy about such things.
Earth Day this year, (technically celebrated on Wednesday) symbolizes a new Earth Day. It won’t reach in front of current headlines about unemployment or health care and, let’s be honest, it might never do so. Nevertheless, for environmentalism, the make-over has begun. (more…)
As more information about the torture memos becomes public this week, it’s important to note that there is also a thrilling news story related, in a way, to torture. Lynn Nottage has won the Pulitzer Prize for her play Ruined, a story about women in the Congo who have been systemically raped and tortured. I haven’t had the privilege of seeing the play, but everyone in the Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts has been buzzing about this play for months, especially about the way it takes a hard look at something awful, yet leaves the audience with great catharsis and hope.
Melissa Silverstein at Women & Hollywood has a great write-up about why awards matter, for the individual artist being honored and for the larger community of women and people of color who are making great work.
Thank you, Ms. Nottage, for creating more space for future artists, for bringing Americans’ attention to horrors we must face as fellow human beings, and for using the powerful medium of live performance to convey hope even in the middle of hopelessness.
Potts, a Carphone Warehouse salesman and 2007 Britain’s Got Talent contestant, rocked audiences with his rendition of “Nessun Dorma.” He went on to win the competition and was subsequently signed to Sony Records, where his debut album sold over 2 million copies.
My friend, Geoff, with Shoot the Messenger Productions, shot this Very Serious response to the National Organization for Marriage “Gathering Storm” video. (That’s his handsome fake-moustachioed mug in the screencap below.) It’s going to be aired on Rachel Maddow’s show tonight.
My favorite is: “If gays and lesbians are allowed to marry, we will have no choice but to switch to digital TV.”
So, what’s the appropriate greeting today: “Happy April Fools’”? I hope you haven’t been tricked too severely. (My long-time favorite resource for verifying questionable information is Snopes.com, by the way. For future reference.)
I’ve been thinking about fools and sacred clowns today, appropriately enough. One of the movies I saw at SXSW was The Yes Men Fix The World, a documentary about the culture jamming activists called the Yes Men. This group uses inventive mischief and deceit to expose the wrongdoing of powerful corporations and governmental offices. The movie features Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, but they’re only two members of the larger group.
The Yes Men have created politically-charged hijinks like:
Indian women have been granted an unprecedented break–8 women-only commuter trains. Was anyone else struck by this headline news, and by “struck” I mean,… did you pause?
High school economics was not my forté. Only one concept stuck: supply and demand. But recently, I’ve had market shifts on the brain. This September, the press has emblazoned talk of solar panels everywhere, from Nat Geo to the good old stand by NYTimes. Apparently China, noting a future demand, has jumped on it, creating more factories to produce the panels and polysilicion, the substance needed to make them. The US has done nothing of the sort. Prices have gone down, as happens with most things made in China. (that’s a whole other conversation)
In exactly three hours, President Obama will be hosting a town hall meeting on healthcare reform. The town is the small Montana town I now live in. He’s here; he’s here; he’s here seems to be the refrain echoing in this valley. Last night at a dinner party, a friend told about how the preparation for the event had touched him. Working on a job up at the ski mountain, he heard a deep rumbling in the sky and waited for it to approach. He looked up as dark green helicopters skimmed towards him along the tops of lodge pole pine trees. Both helicopters were emblazoned with “United States of America” in blue. This man, a gentle horse-loving man, waved. One of the uniformed men in the helicopter waved back. “They were checking it out,” he explained, making sure no ill-doers were hanging in the woods nearby the mysterious lodge slated for the President and his family. I smiled at the visual. I also sighed with the relief of a common person. I am not the President or a famous person who, by sheer role, needs hundreds of people (and thousands of dollars) to scour a place before I go ahead and land.
dis·place·ment n
Okay, I know some of you are rolling your eyes: “Earth Day, ughhhh, another batch of hippies preaching to the choir…. again.” Actually, the term hippie is slipping away into the lockbox of the past, turning almost inapplicable today. In place of hippies, a new breed of young, educated, iPhone-using doers has taken to the front lines. The Save-The-Earth slogan has morphed into Save-The-Earth-And-Ourselves. 
As more information about the torture memos becomes public this week, it’s important to note that there is also a thrilling news story related, in a way, to torture.