30/9/2013

One Dot per Person

Cartographer’s-eye view of Madison, Wisconsin, the home of Walking Point. Screenshot taken from the map created by Dustin Cable of the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.

Via Wired, an incredible piece of cartography:

Drawing on data from the 2010 U.S. Census, it shows one dot per person, color-coded by race. That’s 308,745,538 dots in all–around 7 GB of visual data. It isn’t the first map to show the country’s ethnic distribution, nor is it the first to show every single citizen, but it is the first to do both, making it the most comprehensive map of race in America ever created.

White people are shown with blue dots; African-Americans with green; Asians with red; and Latinos with orange, with all other race categories from the Census represented by brown. Since the dots are smaller than pixels at most zoom levels, Cable assigned shades of color based on the multiple dots therein. From a distance, for example, certain neighborhoods will look purple, but zooming-in reveals a finer-grained breakdown of red and blue–or, really, black and white.

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I imagine much of the focus will be on the cities that always come up when talking about urban segregation: Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., etc. What really draws me to this map is the opportunity to look at some of my favorite cities to visit — Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle, San Diego — and learn something new about them.

maps race urban America

24/9/2013

That belongs in a museum!

A low-res, pirated copy of a fantastic shot of two 11th Armored Cav soldiers at Loc Ninh (1969), now owned by Corbis. I have obfuscated most of the photo with editing software to avoid running afoul of Corbis.

I team-teach a cultural history course on the Vietnam War at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I’m putting together a mini-lecture on what I’ll call “GI couture” — the hairdos, uniform modifications, and various fashion accoutrements like Montagnard bracelets, peace medallions/buttons, worn rosaries, etc popular with (and unique to) those serving in Vietnam. One goal is to get our students to think about what kind of message a Marine, sailor, soldier, or airman is sending by the way he wears or modifies his uniform or grooms his facial hair, and who might be the intended recipient of the message depending on where in Vietnam the subject is stationed. The other is is to give them some tools to help them identify the different eras of the American war by examining the way troops are wearing their uniforms, and then to think about how troops are presented in the feature films we watch in our film festival or other Vietnam cinema they’ve already encountered. (Do the depictions fit with the era of the film’s setting? Costuming can be as important as music in creating or fleshing out characters.)

Since I don’t have access to any physical material from that period, I’ve been trying to find photos online. Flickr has proven to be a solid resource, though one which takes a fair amount of time to sort through and some creativity in crafting search inquiries. Corbis has thousands of images, many of them photographs taken by military and civilian combat journalists, but sells very expensive licenses in exchange for access to high-quality image and usage rights. Hi-res images are vital for some of the interpretive work I’d like to do because they provide the best available level of detail for things like poems, mottos, or other messages that were frequently written by troops on helmets, flak jackets, or even vehicles.

Every time I find a great photo somewhere which would work perfectly for the lecture and then look for a high resolution version on Corbis , I wind up feeling like Indiana Jones trying to retrieve the Cross of Coronado from Panama Hat.

digital media history military history Vietnam War

20/9/2013

On Fidelity

My wife and I recently spent a long weekend in Baltimore. My mentor’s daughter was married at the Howard County Conservancy, and we gave ourselves an extra day in the city and flew back on a Monday. It was the first time I’d been to Baltimore, and the first time I’ve been that close to D.C. since 1997.

There were some pretty awesome highlights:

Our flag is still there.

Fort McHenry is fantastic. The place is full of history, not only from the War of 1812, but also the Civil War, WWI, and even WWII. It’s something to stand on the ramparts and think about what this place meant. Even if you don’t care for the Star Spangled Banner as an anthem, putting yourself in the mindset of the defenders of a young nation against their former colonial overlords makes the fort’s official name — “Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine” — make perfect sense.

Interior of Baltimore’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation.

The Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation. We arrived near the end of Liturgy and watched a proud father of infant twin girls showing off one, presumably there after her forty day blessing, to any and all who passed by him after Liturgy. The cathedral itself is gorgeous inside and out, as you can see above.

The gulls had plenty of breeze to soar and wheel on. I was very happy to capture the moon as it emerged from behind the clouds.

Sandy Point State Park is very pretty, and the beach looks out on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and the shipping traffic steaming through the bay. If you want to dip your toes in the Chesapeake, or fly a kite on a windy day (as Sunday was), this is a great place to do it.

Our supper guests were crabby.

Crab. You probably have heard the crab in Baltimore is good. It is.

Movie locations. One of my favorite films, Avalon, was shot in Baltimore. It’s the third film in Barry Levinson’s ‘Baltimore trilogy,’ which also includes Diner and Tin Men. (A fourth film, Liberty Heights, was added nearly a decade later.) We found the diner from Diner, and the row house Ernest & Nora Tilley (Danny DeVito & Barbara Hershey) share in Tin Men, which is the same house the Krichinskys and Kayes (first-generation Krichinskys who Americanized their last name) live in before moving out to the suburbs (and forever fracturing their immigrant family) in Avalon. Other locations from the films are scattered across the city and surrounding area.

One note about this last highlight. It wasn’t actually a highlight, or it wound up being a very mixed experience for me. I was thrilled to see the diner, which just outside the city core, sadly located next to a couple of expressway ramps. The business was closed; the owner apparently has cancer and struggles to keep the place open even four days a week for breakfast & lunch.

The row house from Avalon, however, drove home to me one of Baltimore’s hard realities. We accidentally drove to the wrong address first, 3107 Clifton Ave instead of 3107 Cliftmont Ave. The Clifton address put us in the Walbrook neighborhood on Baltimore’s west side. It bore the scars of terrible urban management: dilapidated strings of once-beautiful brick row houses with only a few occupants, the rest boarded up and crumbling; vacant lots choked with tangles of tall weeds; pockmarked streets and sidewalks; payday loan pushers; and a very distinct absence of white folks.

One corner — W North Ave & N Dukeland St — really drove the point home. Standing in front of a row of once-charming brick houses, several boarded up and vacant, their wooden porches in the protracted but inevitable process of falling down, was a beat-up wooden bench at a bus stop. On it was written “Baltimore - The Greatest City in America.” Had we not been rushing to see the Avalon house before we had to get to the airport, I would have jumped out of the car to capture with my camera the juxtaposition between claim and reality. This is a city which very clearly has not tried to live up to its motto, at least the folks consigned to live in its poorest neighborhoods.

Since we drove to the wrong address, I nearly decided to call off our trip to the Avalon house. It was fifteen minutes away, and we had about two hours and fifteen minutes until our flight. With luck at the rental car return and airport security we’d make our flight, so we headed off for Cliftmont Ave, in the Belair-Edision neighborhood on Baltimore’s northeast side. We found it. Go read the Wikipedia article on Belair-Edison. It sounds like a lovely place to live between the 1920s and 1960s or so. Single-family homes, a brewery, a vibrant Bohemian community, access to nearby places like Druid Lake. Basically, exactly as Avalon depicts it. Things changed in Belair-Edison. It looks to me like the neighborhood was devastated by a combination of white flight, badly managed relocation from housing projects, and straight up willful ignorance by the city. The houses appear nicer than those in Walbrook, but that doesn’t mean Belair-Edison is a nice place to live. The Wikipedia entry says “Belair-Edison has led the Northeast District, which also has led Baltimore City, in murders for the last several years,” and points to parasitic slumlords pocketing Section 8 vouchers from residents as a main factor in the neighborhood’s atmosphere of resigned desperation.

The Avalon house, second from left.

There weren’t many white folks around, and once we found it I debated whether it was even appropriate to take a picture of the Avalon house. An older black gentleman was standing on its porch, smoking a cigarette, when we pulled up across the narrow street. We sat there in the car for a few minutes while a couple other residents eyed us. Cigarette smoked, the older man went back inside. I hesitated again, and when he reemerged and sat down in a plastic chair on the porch, I got out and took one picture, framing it so he was behind a pillar and wouldn’t feel like I was invading his privacy more than I already had.

Then, swallowing hard, I walked across the street and up to his front step, staying on the sidewalk. I began an apology, “I suppose you see the occasional crazy white folks stopping by…”

He stopped me. “I know what you’re up to,” he said quietly, pausing from puffing on an inhaler. Cursing my hearing loss, I asked apologized for asking him to repeat himself. “I know what you’re doing,” he said.

He put the inhaler back in his mouth. Our conversation was over.

I honestly can’t remember if, as I walked away, I said I was sorry, or thanked him for being kind, or what. I was happy I had found the house that was so central to one of my favorite movies, and happy that someone was living there. Perhaps the house will remain standing and occupied for decades to come.

But I’m not happy with how the old gentleman and his neighbors in Belair-Edison have been neglected, or had their community’s needs shrugged at by city officials, or however you care to describe it. It’s not right. It was clear I didn’t belong there, both as a tourist and as a white man. I don’t care about Belair-Edison’s demographic change from a Bohemian neighborhood to a majority African-American neighborhood. It wasn’t the color of my skin that was the problem, though it clearly identified me as an outsider. It was the economic disparity between me and the residents which really was the problem. I was just looking for a house from a movie I admire, but I may as well have been a disaster tourist as far as the old man on the Avalon house’s porch — his porch — was concerned. And though that certainly wasn’t my intention (I don’t know one area of Baltimore from another), he was right. I was a tourist in an economic disaster area, a place where people are cheated by slumlords and robbed of dignity by the City of Baltimore, which apparently has allowed this situation to continue for the twenty-plus years since Avalon was filmed in Belair-Edison. This neighborhood could be a treasure, not just for its residents, but for the city. It once was, and if someone gave enough of a damn, it could be again.

To the old gentleman on his porch, I wish I could remember the last words I said to you. I can’t apologize again without invading your privacy, but I promise I learned a lesson. You, and Fort McHenry, will be the Baltimore which will stick in my memory.

Baltimore cinema travel urban America

13/9/2009

We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.

Animation discovered via Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish.

There are a couple things which seem incredible and noteworthy about this representation of the opening movement to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, quite likely the preeminent piece of music, not just of the Classical or Western canon, but in all of human history.

First, one marvels at the visual complexity required to render that which the ear renders so readily comprehensible.  This representation in particular drives home the message by substituting musical notation for simple graphs more widely understood by the portion of society well-familiar with listening to music, but “musically illiterate”in the sense that they are unable to sightread musical notation.

Second comes the realization that this dauntingly intricate masterpiece was written and revised between 1804 and 1807–08 by a man with rapidly-failing hearing relying on piano reductions of the score, and without access to a full orchestra, recording studio, or modern multi-tracking computer composition software.  This alone would be humbling to such a degree that one might justifiably feel thoroughly benighted before registering the fact that Beethoven was simultaneously occupied with the writing of three string quartets, his Violin Concerto, Fourth Piano Concerto, Piano Sonata No. 23 (Appassionata), Fourth Symphony, Sixth (Pastoral) Symphony, and the opera Fidelio, all of which are prominent and celebrated works by their own right.

With apologies to Montesquieu, Beethoven was great because he was gifted to such a degree that very few souls in the course of all humanity will comprehend things on the same plane, and yet he somehow managed to express himself in a manner which his countless inferiors can dimly understand.

Carriage Return music

14/6/2009

As-salatu khairum minan naum: Prayer is better than sleep.

The last few months I was in Iraq I was stationed on this tiny-ass FOB (FOB Trebil/FOB Givens, on the border with Jordan) way out in BFE. There was a mosque right next to our perimeter, and the mosque’s minaret overlooked our entire position, which was somewhat unsettling for us.

The minaret overlooking the FOB.

At the time, I was working a 12-on, 12-off schedule. For twelve hours, from 1800-0600, I stood watch in the COC (Command Operations Center), monitoring the satellite uplink and the shortwave radios, and (since the Sergeant of the Guard liked catch a few Zs at night) regularly conducting radio checks with the guards posted on the roofs of our buildings. Most of the time I was one of five or so people awake on the entire FOB, which was a bit disconcerting in the event that anything seriously ill went down in the night.

Looking toward the Jordanian border, marked by the lights just beyond the structure in the middle ground, at night.

I’ve always been a night owl, so the late shift didn’t bother me. I was posted on that watch because I was a digital communications guy, not a radioman, so there wasn’t really anything else for me to do on the FOB, making the job was mine more or less by default. It was something of a vote of confidence in my sense of personal responsibility, since I was directly responsible for keeping us in contact with Camp KV, the next nearest base, which was over two hours away. Help would be a long time in getting to us, should something really bad happen, but apparently I enjoyed enough of the platoon commander’s trust to be the one guy who absolutely had to remain awake through the entire night.

The longest part of the night was always 0300-0500. The platoon commander sometimes stayed awake until 0200, but by zero three the last guard shift had taken their posts and just about everyone else on the FOB was asleep. I’d call the guard towers every so often to make sure no one was drowsy, or in need of coffee, but other than that I was generally left to my own devices. I read books on politics and issues of The Atlantic my dad regularly sent me, listened to music on my laptop, and stepped outside every so often for a tobacco snack. Cigarettes were cheap out there. I could get two packs of Sumers and a two-liter of Syrian orange soda for under two bucks at the local Iraqi truck stop, and my habit had grown over the deployment to about two and a half packs per day.

The minaret at night (at center), marked by the green and blue lights.

My habit was to get a radio check with the other base just before 0500. Around that time, the muezzin at the mosque would begin chanting the adhān for Fajr, the prayer at sunrise. I loved to go stand outside under the slowly lightening sky and smoke, listening to the eerily beautiful call. Though I didn’t know the meaning at the time, the last line of the adhān is “As-salatu khairum minan naum” — “Prayer is better than sleep.” The call to prayer always filled me with a sense of peace, because, ironically, an hour after the call began my relief would show up, and I’d retire to my rack in the squad bay for a few hours of sleep. For me, the call represented the end of the last hour of the day I could enjoy as my own, uninterrupted by the demands of others, the oppressive and ever-present heat of day, or the noise of a lively squadbay intruding into my fitful sleep as I lay beneath my poncho liner.

Given the events which unfolded yesterday in Iran and carried on into the night, and finding myself awake at this early hour of the morning, I feel it somehow appropriate to remember in my own prayers the Iranians struggling for a greater role for civil society in their country. And although I don’t smoke anymore, before I go to bed I’ll listen to the adhān again and remember what my life was like five years ago in that corner of the world. I hope the events of the next few days change the political climate in the Middle East for good in a way my own country hasn’t accomplished in the six years we’ve been meddling over there.

Iran Iraq Iraq War Persian Spring

3/11/2008

Samizdat

There are things that U.S. soldiers are allowed to talk about with the press and others they are not. One of the things they are not allowed to voice is their political opinion, especially if it goes against their commander in chief. In the privacy of latrine stalls on military bases in Iraq and Kuwait, however, it is quite a different story. I did not see any pro-Bush writings in any of the hundreds of latrines I photographed.

— Zoriah

Eight years ago I voted in my first Presidential election. At the time, I was a supporter of Alan Keyes, who now has the distinction of having lost a carpetbagging bid for a seat in the US Senate to the current Democratic candidate for President.

Six years ago I was preparing for boot camp at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, fully believing that I was going to serve my country honorably in the war against global terrorism.

Four years ago I was freshly home from a tour of duty in Al-Anbar Province, Iraq. My tour impressed upon me the incompetence and utter unaccountability of the senior civilian administrators in the Departments of Defense and State, as well as the President and Vice President of the United States. I read piles of books over that deployment, but the one that I found most compelling was Pat Buchanan’s Where the Right Went Wrong. When I returned home on leave that October, I went to the county courthouse and filled out an absentee ballot for the upcoming election. Displeased with the Democratic nominee and absolutely unwilling to support my Commander-in-Chief, I left the top two slots on my ballot blank.

Three years ago I was engaged in a field exercise and sitting outside my battalion’s Command Operations Center. I just learned that I had been passed over for very well-deserved promotion due to a contentious relationship with my ignorant boss, and I clung bitterly to my M-16 and religion. At that time, my religion was Chalmers Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, which the Battalion XO (Executive Officer) saw me reading and all but ordered me to throw away. I eventually got the promotion, but my odium toward the professional military lingers today.

One year ago, after years of enduring philosophical doldrums, I finally found my political voice after reading the writings of a man who lived the majority of his life under a totalitarian regime. His philosophy challenged me to think about many of my long-standing beliefs in new ways and freed me of the chains of any political ideology. I began to look forward to tomorrow.

And now one night remains between the world of the last eight years and the world of tomorrow. Tonight marks the last day of President Bush’s relevance to the greater share of American political discourse, and a new voice will be heard, calling us to unite and follow him.

I’ll see you here tomorrow as we finish one of the darkest chapters of American history and begin (hopefully) a brighter one.

politics