Pro-Union Protest

The one year anniversary of Walker + fellow state republicans signing the bill that effectively disinherited the union of their control for efforts concerning the deficit. I received a text this morning that read 'WeAreWI: It's a beautiful day for the rally - hope to see you at the WI Capitol Square at 1:00!' with a link. I had already heard of the protest in last night's class from my ex-journalist professor who said she'd be down there photojournaling. I went down to get some practice shooting in crowds, as otherwise I'd be off somewhere doing homework. I tried remaining neutral; that's what you're supposed to do when you're a journalist. . . . I guess it takes practice.

Some signs were clever. 

Some signs were artistic. 

Some were cute. 

And then some were less than subtle. 

Madison protests are always family friendly. Don't believe what you hear on conservative media sources.

The only police I witnessed. Standing casually by.  

This is when the crowd picked up; around 2pm

When I got there the protests had just begun, which allowed space for most of these photographs. But it picked up so the street was packed by the time I left, reminiscent of last year's 100,000.

Disclaimer: I'm an independent, despite what I feel about this particular issue. But I feel strongly about being represented wrongly. There are no palm trees in Wisconsin, and there is no hostility on Capitol Square.

Seattle Part 2

Beware of would-be rappers peddling their CDs on you. It cost Katy two five dollar bills after being accosted by two young men in their early to mid twenties. They were putting on a marketing act, acting flamboyantly, and we had the misfortune to run into them just as we were trying to figure out how to get back to our hotel street. 

“I want you to have a CD, just ten dollars,” the taller one said. 

She gave him five.

“Tell you what,” he said, having witnessed more green in her wallet, “I want you to have another one, just for you, just five more dollars.”

We were being hustled, but they left me alone when I said I was ‘broke,’ which at that point was true, so I just watched, both annoyed and slightly confused. 

“Where you all from?” The taller one asked us. 

“Wisconsin,” we replied. 

Then the two of them spoke loudly about football, throwing out names like “Green Bay, The Packers, and Aaron Rogers,” which they had to dig out of their memories with some stuttered excitement. “Yeah, yeah, Aaron Rogers!” the other one chimed in. 

I should have been nicer to men twice my size, but as I was caught off guard and there was plenty of people about, I looked at them demurely, and not knowing anything about sports, said “Sure.” 

We turned and started walking, not positive in which direction to go, but glad just to be getting away from them, when suddenly an idea occurred to me. I turned back around just before reaching the street. 

“Hey Aaron Rogers!” I yelled to the taller one. 

They looked around, slightly confused. 

“Do you know how to get to Madison street?” I asked. 

After a little debate between themselves they pointed us in the direction we were already headed. I didn’t have full confidence they really knew, but it was enough to propel us to cross the street. 

“Where do you want to go on Madison street?” he asked as we had already left the sidewalk. 

There was no way I was giving our location to these guys. 

I turned my head while continuing to walk, and with eyelids lowered, in a tone thick with apparent sarcasm I said “Madison street.” 

They broke their act momentarily and laughed, but picked it up again some moments later when the taller one opened his arms wide and proclaimed himself the greatest rapper in Seattle, as he had done just our arrival. We were already on the other side of the street, and I couldn’t tell if that was just for us, but his voice was quickly drowned by the hustle of city life. 

The Museum

There was an exhibit of Native Australian and New Zealand artifacts, which included pictures (mostly portraits of native peoples from the 1800s done by a english explorer and painter) at the historical museum. A dimly lit room with artifacts neatly lined up in lime-lighted pillars and crude depictions lining the walls. People walked around with what looked like crude walkie talkies, or cell phones from the nineties pressed to their ears, which relayed more information via voice recording about specific artifacts. It reminded me of a 1950s documentary of humans in the future. Everyone was quiet and there was an air of speculitivity. One woman leaned in to look at a carving - a smooth idol-sized statue of a man in the style of the native peoples in that era - as though she understood it, and was exhuming deeper meaning from it. I was impressed by the precise detail in the carvings, including the reed instruments, but I would have liked an historical context to these instruments and these artifacts. There was something sterile about them behind glass and I quickly lost interest in the exhibit as a whole, and took out my camera to take pictures of the people looking at the exhibition, instead, which I found much more interesting. Unfortunately, I had missed the part where ‘cameras aren’t allowed,’ and a woman security guard stepped up to me annoyidly.
“Excuse me, ma’am, yeah, um, actually cameras aren’t allowed...?” she said.

I responded with direct politeness and immediately bagged my only source of creative output. 

That was the end of the confrontation, and since I obligingly complied to the correction of my ignorance, I didn’t have any scruples in smiling acknowledgingly to that woman security guard when our eyes met some ten minutes later. She didn’t smile back. Later the male security guard I had met and joked with upon entering the museum was seen walking in a rushed manner in my direction. In consideration of our earlier established rapor, I smiled at him, but again, there was no smile back when he locked eyes with me. It occurred to me that my hand was resting in the bag that held my camera, to keep warm, so I redeposited it my coat pocket. I was feeling slightly paranoid at this point, and annoyed that an honest mistake could render such suspicion, but no one confronted me directly again, and I would imagine the “incident” was talked of in their next security meeting with petty blame and a firm resolution to follow. 

The Convention

The convention was made up of different workshops, which were all located on different floors, and were held back to back, in  different rooms labeled North, South, East, and West. I focused on the workshops that discussed social and multimedia, since that’s the future of journalism (and in fact the present). There were amazing speakers and instructive content. 

One speaker was the senior editor of msnbc.com. He was by far the most encouraging - “Journalism is the best job in the world... if you’re interested in people and learning about everything” - and talked about multimedia, which was to me the most interesting subject. The main points of this workshop were:

1. Journalists have to function today as both camera operator, interviewer, voice-over, script-writer, and editor. (Great for creative control freaks like me!) 
2. How to hold a successful filmed interview; and he went over sound, the nuances of what kind of questions to ask, and how to ask them. Lighting, and tactics for person-to-person interactions - “Make people forget that they’re in an interview.”  

“Journalists have a bad reputation for being without empathy. Shoving microphones into a father’s face and saying ‘how does it feel that your son died?’ And I hope you students are going to help change that. Be personable and be kind. Don’t be an expert in anything. If you’re impressed by something, don’t be afraid to say ‘That’s really cool!’” 

I came away inspired.

The workshops on social media made me glad I have a Smartphone, and I suddenly felt like I have cultivated a healthy addiction to it and to my multiple, non-academic, computer tabs. 

Seattle Part 1

Getting There

I had an opportunity to go to Seattle for a Student Journalist convention that went Thursday through Sunday in early March 2012. It was held in a Marriott hotel we stayed at, about six blocks from the main downtown. It was me, my editor (another student) and our advisor from our school, and many many other students and advisors of college newspapers from across the country. 

I woke up at 3a.m. on Friday morning, having gone to bed three hours earlier. I had to stay up to pack, having been too busy between work and school to prepare sooner. Neither did I have anything to carry my clothes in, which had to be a carry-on, so, hearing some movement upstairs, I crept up the steps in the outer hall and knocked on my upstairs neighbor’s door at 10:30 Thursday night. He answered, apparently having recently been asleep. 

“Do you have a smallish duffle bag I can borrow?” I asked, proudly stating my destination. 

Inviting me in, he shuffled around his closet and brought out a perfectly sized duffle bag which he said he never used and kept around “just in case.”

Providence. 

I packed only what was necessary (and maybe one or two other items). 

Advisor was meeting us both at my place, and while getting out of his car to direct Katy (student editor) into my driveway, I tripped and flailed haplessly into the mud and grass, giving a tomboyish stain to the only pair of pants I had brought (I was wearing them). 

Our flight left at 5:30a.m. Layover. Lots of homework with breaks of people-watching: There was a punk-rock girl with headphones who looked bored with life. I loved her boots - at least $90, and knew her skirt was exactly $50 because I had cut it’s picture out of the magazine and pasted it into my scrapbook some weeks before. 

There was a traditional follower of judaism, with the beard, prayer shawl and distinct black suit. I noticed him praying in the corner of the waiting section. There was a comforting rhythm to his sways as he mentally recited scripture, but I purposefully didn’t stare. He happened to be seated next to me when we boarded. I sat by the window. 

“Do I have your seat?” I asked, explaining I wasn’t very used to flying. 

“Yes, but stay there. Really.”

Feeling bad, I started getting up to switch with him, but he insisted kindly, which allowed me to see Seattle in landing, the city people say is the prettiest in the U.S. to witness by plane. (He also had a bright, neon pink ipod, which I thought was splendidly ironic). 

It took all three of us to figure out how to find the tram. I had never ridden on a tram or any kind of train before, and we weren’t quite sure it would take us to our destination, or if this was the right one. We attempted to approach a Tram Man in a navy-blue buttoned suit, but all he said was “Board the tram! Board the tram!” in a heavy accent and exaggerated waving motions in that direction. This, and the fact that he wouldn’t explain why, or answer any of our questions, made me suspect this was the only sentence he knew in english. 

The first view of ground-level Seattle it allowed was of the outer-city ghetto. Dilapidated buildings with complicated graffiti passed by, and there was green and moss growing out of everything. 

A steely elevator brought us up to a dim, garage looking building, and then all of a sudden we were hit by a very big, bright, and bustling city, and we were dunked into an icy wind. It was several blocks to our hotel. 

At first I tried not to look like a small-town tourist gawking up at the huge buildings that reminded me of the movies I’ve seen set in New York. Then it occurred to me: we’re on foot, ladened with our luggage. I took advantage of this conspicuous circumstance and craned my neck at will. 

Our hotel was very fancy (even if it didn’t have a pool), and had a complimentary shoe shine (it just wouldn’t have looked right with my sneakers), but the thing I appreciated most was that it smelled like fresh laundry just before you walked in off the street. 

While There:

I threw myself onto the bed exhaustedly. I was starving (eating before flying has potentially bad consequences for everybody) and there was a delay in getting into the room me and Katy shared. It was 1p.m. 

The City:

Tourists seemed to run this city in abundance. You could distinguish them from the natives by either of two indicators: 1. they were speaking fluent french or italian. or 2. women weren’t wearing heals. Every native Seattlin female was in expensive high-heels. Was this a Seattle thing, or a big city thing? I don’t have the experience to know, but me and Katy were just as happy looking down at expensive elevated footwear, as up. 

The Farmers Market is located at the bottom of this hill.
The red sign is pictured here in the background.

The most exciting place was ‘The Farmer’s Market.’ Set near the glistening water, foods ranging from fresh produce, to raw fish, to sweet smelling bakeries lined the brick-paved streets. We entered the inner market through a newspaper/magazine section that lined the walls, marketing the same paper media in different languages. 

Downtown, stores such as Anthropolgie and Nordstrom, had more than one floor. I was in so much joy I literally became weak in the knees. But chain stores were at least equalled in foreign imports. I bought a pair of earrings ($9) at a Thai store, and the woman in the Egyptian shop encouraged me to take advantage of the many belly-dancing opportunities in Madison, Wisconsin. 

Hills. Think of the reputation San Francisco has with hills, and then add rain. I personally loved the aesthetic inclines, and the potential it had for daily toning. 

Had a good view of Seattle by night from the 28th floor of our hotel at 8:30p.m., in an empty, unlit gym, listening to go-go-bordello. The treadmills were pushed against the windows and I ran looking down at the lights below. 

I tried on the orange one below.
Not really my color,
or worth the $75 it would have
cost to purchas in the end. 

 My roommate happened to be visiting her boyfriend who lives in Seattle at the same time I was there, and we had dinner the last two nights of our stay. Roommate’s boyfriend works for Microsoft. He’s from Wisconsin, and apparently one of 40,000 employed by Microsoft in Seattle alone. I mention this because he mentioned that about 4% of his coworkers are women. This means the ratio of men to women in Seattle is overwhelming. There are cultural side effects to those statistics. Clean cut, with an unimposing demeanor, he said he can’t even smile casually at any woman in the street, because they will never look at him. With those odds against them, he said, women have trained themselves to avoid over-eager creepers. Even so, if you’re a woman looking for a man, move to Seattle. In fact they should list that in the brochures.