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.