This afternoon’s commute home had me walking through the Our Lady of Mt Carmel festival procession through Hammonton. Here’s a little while-walking video montage.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Georges And Trayvons
July 16, 2013
Over on Mobtownblues, Kevin Griffin Moreno cops to being George Zimmerman. Thankfully, he’s not: when feeling threatened in a recent situation with racial overtones, he chose to walk away, but it is worth asking how different we are from the characters of this tragedy.
I never had much expectation that the trial of Trayvon Martin’s killer would find him guilty. A good team of lawyers can conjure up reasonable doubt over most anything. As as Alafair Burke writes on Huffington, much of what Zimmerman did was protected by Florida’s insanely-crazy “stand your ground” laws.
But even without that, high-profile court cases get so politicized so quickly that they rarely provide any kind of catharsis, let alone justice, when stacked against hundreds of years of racial injustices. And just as Zimmerman’s judgement was colored by his racial history and biases, so too are ours: our opinions about what happened that evening in Sanford, Florida, are much more a reaction to where we fall in the continuums of privileges than we might care to admit.
Privilege is unearned opportunities conferred by how closely we fit a particular stereotype. When I was in my early 20s, I was once pulled over by a policeman when I was driving aimlessly through a sleepy town at 3 am (no good story I’m afraid: I was simply bored, with insomnia). He visibly eased up when he saw I was white, and he got almost avuncular a minute later when he saw the Irish name on my drivers license. I know that almost-forgettable instant could have played out quite differently if I had been black, with a Muslim name, perhaps, and a chip on my shoulder because this was the fifth time that month I had gotten detained for no good reason.
No matter what I do to educate myself, I will always be George Zimmerman to (many) strangers on the street, just as Trayvon Martin will always be a suspicious house burgler for being a black stranger in a hoodie.
The work that needs to be done – or continued, for we need to remember the many times people have done the right thing – couldn’t be answered by a criminal trial anyway. What’s needed is the education of society at large.
One step is all of the conversations taking place on Facebook and around water coolers this week. Let’s talk about the fears that subconsciously drive us. For Zimmerman’s gun was only one of the triggers that killed Martin. It was fear that gave us Sanford’s gated community and its town watch, along with our nation’s permissive gun laws and draconian legal concepts like “standing one’s ground.” It was that potent mix of suspicion that set in motion a situation that left a seventeen year old kid with a pocketful of Skittles lying dead face down in the grass.
Can we learn to understand the ways we live in fear? Can we get to know one another more deeply in that place that breaks down the gates in our hearts?
Retooling after Google Reader
July 16, 2013
I must admit I’ve been thrown off my blog reading by the demise of Google Reader, closed July 1 with only a few months warning. I remember when Google’s was the newest member of the RSS reading options. Its simple interface and relatively-solid performance eventually won me over and its competitors gradually stopped innovating and finally closed.
In the last few months other services have taken up the challenge of replacing Reader, but it’s been a chaotic process and a gamble which would be rolled out in time. One of my go-to programs, Reeder, now works for the phone but not the Mac app. It runs off of the Feedly service, which I now use in the browser to access my feeds.
I rely on these blog reading services to keep track of over 100 blogs. RSS may not be sexy enough to be a mass-market service but for those of us whose temperments or hobbies run toward curation, it’s an essential tool. As the new systems mature, I hope to keep up with my Quakerquaker reading more thoroughly.
The language and testimony of the fire alarm
July 15, 2013
Careful and deliberate discernment held in a manner of unhurried prayer is fine in most instances, but what’s a group if Quakers to do when a fire alarm goes off? Do we sit down in silence, stay centered there some number if minutes, and then open up a period of ministries to reach toward discernment.
Of course we don’t. Who would? Like any group if people in the modern world, we assemble without question and leave the premises. But why? Because of shared language and testimonies.
A ringing bell does not, by itself, constitute a call to action. Power up your time machine and bring your battery-powered alarm system back a few thousand years and set it off. People would look around in confusion (and might be afraid if the alien sound), but they wouldn’t file out of a building. We do it because we’ve been socialized in a language of group warning.
Ever since our schooldays, we have been taught this language: fire alarms, flashing lights, fire pull boxes. We don’t need to discern the situation because we already know what the alarm means: the likelihood of imminent danger.
Our response also needs little discernment. We might think of this as a testimony: a course of action that we’ve realized is so core to our understanding of our relation to the world that it rarely needs to be debated amongst ourselves.
I must have participated in a hundred fire drills in my lifetime, but so far none of the alarms have been fires. But they have served a very real purpose.
When we do media in an advocacy sense, most of our time is spent developing and reinforcing shared language and obvious courses-of-action. We tell stories of previous situations and debate the contours of the testimonies. We’re readying ourselves for when we will be called to action.
Visual storytelling through animated gifs and Vine
June 27, 2013
NPR’s Planet Money recently ran an article on glass recycling, How A Used Bottle Becomes A New Bottle, In 6 Gifs. The Gif part is what intrigued me. A “gif” is a tightly-compressed image format file that web designers leaned on a lot back in the days of low bandwidth. It’s especially good for designs with a few discreet colors, such as corporate logos or simple cartoons. It also supports a kind of primitive animation that was completely overused in the late 90s to give webpages flying unicorns and spinning globes.
Animated gifs have grown up. They make up half the posts on Tumblr. They are often derived from funny scenes in movies and come with humorous captions. The Planet Money piece uses them for storytelling: text is illustrated by six gifs showing different parts of the recycling process. The movement helps tell the story – indeed most of the shots would be visually uninteresting if they were static.
The short loops reminds me of Vine, the six-second video service from Twitter which I’ve used a lot for silly kid antics. They can also tell a simple story (they’re particularly well suited to repetitive kid antics: up the steps, down the slide, up the steps, down the slide, up…).
In my work with Friends Journal I’ve done some 7 – 12 minute video interviews with off-site authors using Google Hangouts, which essentially just records the video conversation. It’s fine for what we use it for, but the quality depends a lot on the equipment on the other end. If the bandwidth is low or the webcam poor quality, it will show, and there are few options for post-production editing. But honestly, this is why I use Hangouts: a short web-only interview won’t turn into a weeklong project.
Producing high-quality video requires controlling all of the equipment, shooting ten times more footage than you think you’ll need, and then hours of work condensing and editing it down to a story. And after all this it’s possible you’ll end up with something that doesn’t get many views. Few Youtube users actually watch videos all the way through to the end, drifting away to other internet distractions in the first few minutes.
I like the combination of the simple short video clips (whether Vine or animated gif) wedded to words. My last post here was the very light-weight story about a summer afternoon project. Yesterday, I tried again, shooting a short animated gif of Tibetan monks visiting a local meetinghouse. I don’t think it really worked. They’re constructing a sand mandala grain-by-grain. The small movements of their funnel sticks as sand drops is so small that a regular static photo would suffice. But I’ll keep experimenting with the form.
Summer project: making Goop!
June 24, 2013
From 1,444 Fun Things to Do with Kids comes goop. Start with 8 ounces of white glue, food coloring, water, and borax.
Combine glue, three-fourths cup water, and food coloring in one bowl. In another bowl, mix one-fourth cup water with one tablespoon Borax, and add this to the first bowl, stirring until it forms a Goop ball. Remove the ball. Again combine one-fourth cup water with one tablespoon Borax and mix it into the glue mixture, stirring until another Goop ball forms. Keep repeating the process until the glue mixture is gone. Then knead all the Goop balls together. Now you’re ready to play by pulling and patting the Goop into strings and unique forms. Store the Goop in an airtight container.
We only really managed one-round of Goop (see video). We also couldn’t find any food coloring on-hand and so made white Goop.
He’s a kid, I really think he’s a kid… He enjoys Pepsi, he prefers Pepsi to wine, that’s why I say he’s a kid.
June 24, 2013
Testimonies are important because…
June 21, 2013
Yesterday Friends Journal asked its Facebook and Twitter followers to finish the sentence “Testimonies are important because they are ___.” Here’s a word cloud of their answers. This survey comes from Eric Moon’s article, “Categorically Not the Testimonies,” in the June/July issue.