Tag Archives ⇒ story

Remembering Juanita Nelson

March 10, 2015
· Martin Kelley

juanita04One of the coolest activists of her (or any) gen­er­a­tion is gone. Juani­ta Nel­son’s obit­u­ary is up on the nation­al war tax coali­tion’s site. My favorite Juani­ta sto­ry was when some agents came to arrest her at home and found her dressed only in a bathrobe. They told her it was okay to go into her bed­room to change but she refused. She told them that any shame was theirs. She forced them to car­ry her out as her clothes fell off. Talk about rad­i­cal non-cooperation!

Update

Pam McAl­lis­ter point­ed out on her Glob­al Non­vi­o­lence: Sto­ries of Cre­ative Action Face­book page that this sto­ry is online. Here’s a bit more of Juani­ta her­self telling that bit:

Sev­en law enforce­ment offi­cers had stalked in. I sat on the stool beneath the tele­phone, my back lit­er­al­ly to the wall, the sev­en hem­ming me about in a semi­cir­cle. All of them appeared over six feet tall, and all of them were annoyed.

“Look,” said one, “you’re gonna go any­way. You might as well come peaceful.”

There they stood, ready and able to take me at any moment. But no move was made. The rea­son was obvious.

“Why don’t you put your clothes on, Mrs. Nel­son?” This was a soft spo­ken plea from the more benign deputy. “You’re not hurt­ing any­body but your­self.” His pained expres­sion belied the assertion. 

The essay where that came from is much longer and well worth read­ing.

Visual storytelling through animated gifs and Vine

June 27, 2013
· Martin Kelley

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.

Of violence and mental snaps

July 20, 2012
· Martin Kelley

Yet anoth­er hor­rif­ic shoot­ing. It’s hard to keep off the news feeds for each bit of new infor­ma­tion we learn of the per­pe­tra­tor and his vic­tims. It’s nat­ur­al to want to under­stand. If we do final­ly learn of a moti­va­tion behind James Holmes’s actions, it will prob­a­bly be more the trig­ger that set him off — the straw that broke the camel’s back, per­haps, or the dan­ger­ous obses­sion that’s informed his world of late.

A few years ago there was a fel­low from a near­by town who declared him­self the grand wiz­ard of his own branch of the Klu Klux Klan. He would announce plans for a march a local town and instant­ly the media would be rac­ing their news vans there to get reac­tions from politi­cians, police chiefs and ran­dom peo­ple on the street. Head­lines would ensue, blog­gers would go to work, counter-protests would be announced, etc. But the grand wiz­ard turned out to be most­ly an Oz-like appari­tion of smoke. No estab­lished KKK orga­ni­za­tion rec­og­nized him. His ral­lies would attract at most two of his bud­dies. He was in his ear­ly for­ties and liv­ing with his moth­er. He was fired after three weeks work­ing at Wawa, the local con­ve­nience store chain. Yes, he could have been a dan­ger if he had got­ten a hold of a cache of guns but he nev­er did. He was a guy who was a los­er at every­thing except get­ting media atten­tion for out­ra­geous pro­pos­al. Last I looked up he’s got reli­gion, recant­ed his racist ide­ol­o­gy, and apol­o­gized for the KKK talk.

Anoth­er sto­ry I could tell is more per­son­al, of a not-so-distant rel­a­tive who went on a middling-murder spree — five dead in the end (I’ll omit details for rea­sons of fam­i­ly diplo­ma­cy). I only met him once but I’ve come to know the set­ting that shaped him. Some of the issues that shaped him go back gen­er­a­tions and are still active. To tell the sto­ry of his snap would take a nov­el on the order of Jef­frey Eugendies’s Mid­dle­sex. I have an autis­tic son and know that this con­di­tion runs in the fam­i­ly. I try to imag­ine throw­ing him into a main­stream school set­ting with no sup­port and no diag­no­sis, and then bring­ing him up in the fam­i­ly tra­di­tion of alcohol-based self-medication; a stint on the armed forces would just add to the explo­sive mix. Forty years from now my pre­cious lit­tle boy might well be the top sto­ry on Action News. And it would be a tragedy.

If I had a time machine, I think I’d do exper­i­ments to under­stand the nexus of ide­ol­o­gy and indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ty. I’d give a 24-year-old Osama bin Laden a desk job in an obscure Sau­di min­istry, and an 18-year-old Adolf Hitler a prize to a pres­ti­gious for­eign art school.

Vio­lent ide­olo­gies are often the per­vert­ed man­i­fes­ta­tion of less-visible per­son­al and fam­i­ly tragedies. I hope we can find a way to step back from the voyeurism of Col­orado details to find ways to extend our­selves in love and care. Tonight, when you feel rage or indig­na­tion, call up a friend or rel­a­tive in pain. Yes, gun con­trol can help les­son the imme­di­ate tragedy. But let’s not for­get the long-term solu­tions. Think about how we lob­by to  widen access to med­ical care (e.g.: uni­ver­sal health­care) and pro­grams for the needy of our youth (hint: fund the schools, expand special-needs pro­grams, bring back after-school pro­grams and enrich­ment oppor­tun­ties). There are three- and six-and eighteen-year-old’s out there tee­ter­ing on cross­roads of alter­nate futures. Let’s hold out our hands and invite them to paths of heal­ing and love.

Photo of the Day: Dawn of the Web

July 12, 2012
· Martin Kelley


The first pho­to on the web pho­to turns 20 next Wednes­day and its sto­ry is more inter­est­ing that you’d think:

The first pho­to­graph­ic image ever uploaded to the Web was a Pho­to­shop dis­as­ter. It was cre­at­ed to sell some­thing, and fea­tured attrac­tive women in a come-hither pose. In short, photo-uploading was born with some orig­i­nal sins that have nev­er quite washed away.

Bonus Youtube: Les Hor­ri­bles Cer­nettes per­form “Col­lid­er”

“Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad, 1902

July 8, 2012
· Martin Kelley

I began Con­rad’s clas­sic tale as a follow-up to last mon­th’s State of Won­der by Ann Patch­ett. Her hero­ine trav­eled to the most remote reach­es of the Ama­zon; all sto­ries that make the trip from the bland­ness of civ­i­liza­tion (Min­neso­ta in Patch­et­t’s case) owe a debt to Con­rad’s clas­sic tale of a steam­boat trip far up the Con­go River.

The book cer­tain­ly has its odd­i­ties, start­ing with the nar­ra­tive voice: we are lis­ten­ing to a sto­ry told aboard a ship on the Thames that is wait­ing for a change of tide to send it on its way out to sea. The narrator-within-the-story, Mar­lowe, tells the entire tale in flash­back, with Con­rad only occa­sion­al­ly com­ing up for air to the deck of the Thames boat (Heart of Dark­ness was writ­ten as a three-part ser­i­al; I assume these nar­ra­tive breaks are the stitch­ing between installments).

I had heard much about this book over the years so I was curi­ous to see the exact nature of the deprav­i­ties upon which the infa­mous Kurtz had indulged him­self. But two-thirds of the way through the book I real­ized we were nev­er to real­ly learn them. We know there’s a remote camp by a lake and an African tribe that regards him as some kind of demi-god, and we hear tell that he’s law­less toward oth­er Euro­peans and single-minded in his quest for ivory. But these are all bare­ly more than hint­ed glimpses.

blankThe sto­ry turns out to be not so much about Kurtz as it is about Mar­lows’ imag­in­ings as he gets deep­er into the con­ti­nent and gath­ers clues about the mys­tery man at the top of the riv­er. I found this to be a relief, as Con­rad seems almost as unin­ter­est­ed in flesh­ing out the Africans along the way. Kurtz is a bril­liant civ­i­lized man; in the jun­gle his sav­agery is unleashed and he becomes a force unto himself.

I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of any­thing high or low. I had, even like the n******, to invoke him – him­self his own exalt­ed and incred­i­ble degra­da­tion. There was noth­ing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked him­self loose of the earth. Con­found the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or float­ed in the air.

Yes, this is a work­ing def­i­n­i­tion of a psy­chopath. If this were a mod­ern Show­time or AMC tele­vi­sion show, this would be the start of the action: the pro­duc­ers, writ­ers, and actors would leave lit­tle gore or deprav­i­ty to the imag­i­na­tion. But for Con­rad this is the moral­i­ty tale at the heart of the book. Short­ly after being found, Kurtz con­ve­nient­ly dies and our nar­ra­tor sails back down­stream, going (we are help­ful­ly told) twice the speed as before, back out to the ocean and civilization.

More: 

Resurrection with the Cross and Rabbi

April 11, 2012
· Martin Kelley

Of course, that is not the part of the sto­ry that moti­vates me. I am not seek­ing to be abused and betrayed, let down by my best friends and hunt­ed by those in pow­er. I may rec­og­nize the neces­si­ty of suf­fer­ing, but by no means do I seek it out. I think most of us grav­i­tate towards the tri­umphant vic­to­ry and joy of Jesus\’ resurrection

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Reading the story of Solomon’s dedication of the first Temple, I’m struck…

December 21, 2011
· Martin Kelley

Read­ing the sto­ry of Solomon’s ded­i­ca­tion of the first Tem­ple, I’m struck by how the pow­ers of divine com­mu­ni­ca­tion attrib­uted to the Tem­ple are ones that Christ brought with­in us. We don’t have to go to a spe­cial place in Jerusalem to get God’s atten­tion.

If a man sin against his neigh­bour, and an oath be laid upon him to make him swear, and the oath come before thine altar in this house; If thy peo­ple go out to war against their ene­mies by the way that thou shalt send them, and they pray unto thee toward this city which thou hast cho­sen, and the house which I have built for thy name.

Embed­ded Link

2 Chron­i­cles 6:22 King James Ver­sion (KJV) — Bible — You​Ver​sion​.com
If a man sin against his neigh­bour, and an oath be laid upon him to make him swear, and the oath come before thine altar in this house; 

An unlikely story from twit​ter​.com/​@​e​r​r​o​l​m​o​r​ris on a conspiracy that never was.

November 28, 2011
· Martin Kelley

An unlike­ly sto­ry from twit​ter​.com/​@​e​r​r​o​l​m​o​r​ris on a con­spir­a­cy that nev­er was.

Embed­ded Link

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‘The Umbrel­la Man’
On the 48th anniver­sary of the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy, Errol Mor­ris takes a crit­i­cal look at the one man seen stand­ing under an open black umbrel­la at the site.