Category: Uncategorized

The White Savior Industrial Complex

Novelist Teju Cole wrote this on Twitter:

The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

and elaborated on the idea of “The White Savior Industrial Complex” in a post on the Atlantic website.

It made me think about the relationship between the need for emotional experience and Occupy protestors participating in protests around the shooting of Trayvon Martin and more generally about how the need for emotional experience (and a culture that heavily mediates emotional experience) compels myself and others toward activism or particular gestures within activism.  I’m still trying to sort this out.

Making sure South migrations get run when using Django’s create_test_db()

I’ve been experimenting with using Lettuce for a project.  When not using Django’s test runner, you can use the framework’s test database hooks by calling create_test_db() (see the Django docs for create_test_db()) from a method in your terrain.  Django Full Stack Testing and BDD with Lettuce and Splinter is a great resource for seeing how to get up and running.  But, I was having a terrible time because create_test_db() was throwing an exception because it was trying to run the flush management command to flush data on a table that hadn’t yet been created.  According to South’s documentation, “South’s syncdb command will also apply migrations if it’s run in non-interactive mode, which includes when you’re running tests.”

While South’s syncdb command was getting executed by create_test_db(), the option that tells the command to run the migrations after running syncdb, wasn’t getting properly set.  It turns out there is a (not very well documented) workaround, you have to call south.management.commands.patch_for_test_db_setup() before your call to create_test_db().

So, your terrain.py might look something like this:

from lettuce import before, after, world
from django.db import connection
from django.test.utils import setup_test_environment, teardown_test_environment
from south.management.commands import patch_for_test_db_setup
from splinter.browser import Browser

@before.runserver
def setup(server):
# Force running migrations after syncdb.
# syncdb gets run automatically by create_test_db(), and
# South's syncdb (that runs migrations after the default
# syncdb) normally gets called in a test environment, but
# apparently not when calling create_test_db().
# So, we have to use this monkey patched version.
patch_for_test_db_setup()
connection.creation.create_test_db()
setup_test_environment()
world.browser = Browser('webdriver.firefox')

# ...

Week in review

What I’ve been doing this week – on and offline.

Getting older

I went to see Paul Baribeau this week.  It was one of the more crowded house shows I’ve been to in Chicago.  The feeling between Baribeau and the audience as pretty strange.  He writes songs that are explicitly personal, so it’s strange to hear a whole room singing along (not to mention singing along slightly off-time and off-key).  Maybe it speaks to the real need that people have to understand or process the kind of things Baribeau writes about: relationships and growing into adulthood.  There was this one guy in front who kept demanding certain songs and he and Baribeau got into this kind of weird, mostly-joking but strangely confrontational back-and-forth.  Though I love the participatory aspect of DIY punk, it’s frustrating when it seems like the show means more about you singing along to a song you love than listening to what someone else has to say or how he says it.  At best, I think it’s a compromise between these things, a perfect balance arrived upon organically by the performer and the crowd.  But, there’s a distinct difference between having a collective experience with music and a room full of individual experiences.  Maybe the show felt like more of the latter because people didn’t really know each other. It seemed like the crowd was a mixture of people from Chicago, the suburbs and folks from out of town and people from the suburbs.  Everyone seemed pretty young which might have contributed to the dynamic as well.  Chiara referenced research about “millenials” being more selfish than past generations.

Being off of school (mostly, I’ve still got some loose ends to tie up with my independent study) is great.  For one, I finally had time to go to the library.  I picked up Harvey Pekar’s Best of American Splendor and I feel like I have a different reading of it a few years after the last time I read some of Pekar’s comics.  Pekar writes about his life making underground media in a really unglamorous way, which is refreshing.  You can’t dispute that he loves what he does or makes compelling and at times really beautiful work, but there’s nothing glamorous about working for decades as a file clerk or the anxiety of failing health or trying to figure out how to make ends meet.  As I get older, I’m less interested in finding optimistic ideas to buoy me through tough times and more interested in how people persist, even through tough questions or challenges.

Pekar is also pretty unapologetic about his mercenary intentions with his art, which is also refreshing.  DIY punk spends so much time demonizing making money, or rationalizing it, but doesn’t provide a lot of examples of working-class people finding complex, sustainable lives while still basing what they do on some core values.  A few weeks ago I read an interview I liked with the hip hop group Das Racist that touched on authenticity, punk and class:

Suri: That’s the whole thing. Punk bands have never had the question of authenticity because authenticity was about how broke you were. The whole break between punk and hip-hop in the 80s was because hip-hop kids were like, I will rap about having money because I grew up with none of it. White kids were like, I will not sing songs about having money.

Vazquez: I think it’s complicated in both circles. There was like broke punk kids and rich kids and broke rappers and rich rappers.

Suri: But a lot of punk kids choose to be broke and rap kids, we don’t choose to be broke. I grew up wanting to make money at every opportunity to. I wouldn’t shun my money. I’d buy a $200 pair of sneakers.

Kondabolu: And my mom wouldn’t let me go to vintage clothing stores. She’d be like, “Why are you going to buy someone’s old clothes?”

Vazquez: It’s also easier—you know, the idea of rejecting privilege comes with the fact that you have it in the first place.

I also went to Quimby’s, the first time I made it there since I’ve been a Chicago resident, and in a total impulse buy, I picked up Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs: A Midterm Report on My Generation and the Future of Our Super Movement Again, as I get older, I’m interested in how people iterate their ideas and reconcile them with new experiences.

Gentrification

Gentrification

Pekar and Joe Sacco also have a nice comic about gentrification in the American Splendor compilation. I like how, in just a few frames it captures the ambivalence around neighborhood change. There’s the fear of people getting pushed out, some hope for seeing resources come into a neglected neighborhood and folks just having other concerns.

I went to dinner one night this week at a good, but slightly fancy place in Logan Square. Driving north on Kedzie from Humboldt Park, you could see a demarcation between different neighborhood residents as we got closer to the square.  Teenage Latino girls with these fabulous neon hoop earrings gave way to 20-30-year-old white people walking their dogs.  The restaurant was pretty terrific, but the patrons didn’t look like the neighborhood as a whole, which is always a little disarming.  It’s a good reality check though, to recognize where I stand, despite a consciousness of issues that affect communities in Chicago.

Restoring dialog

The “Restoring Honor” Rally was big news and a big site for meta-analysis this week.  I heard this segment on WBEZ’s Worldview and thought commentator Frank Schaeffer did a pretty good job of pinpointing the way that some Americans responded in the wake of Obama’s election.  They looked around and realized the country they lived in and realized it wasn’t the country they thought it was and freaked out.  But Schaeffer also articulates a certain contempt for people who react fearfully to a changing country and to feelings of using power in the culture.  I’d like to see someone speak frankly about this fear and across the divide of those who feel more comfortable in a country perceived as less homogeneous and those who fear it.  I felt like some of this was going on during Obama’s campaign, but once he was elected it sort of dropped off and we’re all left with crazy polarization and taking potshots across the divide.  I don’t agree with the rhetoric or the values of those like Glenn Beck but I think the fear they exploit is a pretty human response that has to be taken seriously and acknowledged, even while trying to move away from that fear.

Fixed width layout widths

I’ve been working on a cleaner version of The Max Levine Ensemble website and a basic theme for Toby Foster’s website.  Because of the artwork that David and Nick gave me, I have to use a fixed-width design.  I was curious what a good width for modern browsers/users should be, and the best example I found was in this  2-Column, Center-aligned Fixed Width Layout with CSS tutorial.  The tutorial author says:

I’m adding a wrapper division around the entire body html we have so far, and in the CSS, I’m giving this wrapper division a background color just for demonstration purposes – and a width. The width is based on current trends per W3Schools Browser Trends. According to this information, the vast majority of all surfers views at resolutions of 1280 or higher, so I’ll shoot for 1280px. To allow room for the scroll bar and a bit of the (white) body background to show, I’ll set the width of my wrapper at 1200px.

Mike Gibson of Love Has No Logic had this to say:

I usually work with a 960 grid. And set up the following column groupings inside it that’ll float around and shift.
3 columns of 300 px with 30 px padding between them.
2 columns of 465 px with 30 px padding (sometimes I’ll altar this to 450 px columns with 60 px padding to let the larger columns breathe)
3 columns with the outer columns both being 200px and the inner column being 500px, 30 px padding, though this is also nice with 45 px padding between each and a 470px middle column
4 columns of 140px with 40px padding
With those basic column constructs I can pretty much start working with any sort of modular design I need.

Music

I’ve been listening to a lot of the bands we’ll be playing with on the upcoming Defiance, Ohio tour.  In particular, I’ve been into The Sidekicks from Cleveland who play melodic punk in the vein of Built to Spill.  I also gave Shellshag a good listen for the first time and I love how they’re poppy but also noisy and weird.

I feel like as I have less time to practice with Defiance, Ohio, I’m more self-conscious about how well we play.  I feel like how comfortable we are playing really effects the quality of the performance, so I decided to get my guitar set up.  I’ve always played acoustic guitars with pretty high action, but after playing Theo’s hollow-body electric guitar and realizing how much more easy and fun it is to play an instrument with lower action, I took it to a guitar tech.  He told me something interesting about acoustic guitars and action:  instrument makers usually leave the action high from the factory because they’re worried about the neck shifting, creating fret buzz in the showroom.

WordPress file uploads

I was setting up a new WordPress instance for Ryan Woods’ painting website, ryanwoods.org and he was having problems uploading files, getting a cryptic error message.  It turns out that the Network upload size limits were set to only 300 KB.  It took a while to find this limit, but it’s at Super Admin > Options in the left hand menus in the administration pages.  Then scroll all the way down and look for the Upload Settings section.

Cooking as consensus

Florence and Sushi

I’ve spent this week hanging out with Florence and Oona since Chiara had school and work all week and they don’t start school until next week.  One of the hardest things has been building consensus about how we’re going to spend our day.  Oona’s down to play music, but Florence doesn’t want to.  Florence likes the idea of riding bikes to the zoo, but Oona neither wants to ride bikes or go to the zoo.  Flash games on the internet seem mutually captivating, but the end-of-the-summer weather is too nice to spend completely indoors.  The consensus activity today was to think of something we want to eat, walk to the store to get the ingredients and make it.  We ended up making sushi and Dora-yaki (red bean pancakes), though the pancakes came out a little weird.

Link Roundup

GAMBIT Summer 2010 Prototype Games – I’ve disliked video games since I was young and didn’t have a console and had to spend hours watching other people play after I died quickly.  But some people are really doing some interesting things with games right now.  I was out of town playing a show when the 3G Summit went down, but from what I learned about it when I wrote a preview piece in the spring, it seemed pretty awesome.  These game prototypes from the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab are all pretty interesting and have some interesting mechanics, visuals or ways of conveying information about the real world.

The Tummy Project – I only met Jamie recently when she offered to give me a ride back from Milwaukee that I ended up not needing, but I found out she has a blog that uses reader-contributed photos of tummies to think about body image.

2009 Illinois School Report Cards – The Tribune Apps Team made this useful news app to navigate Chicago schools and compare them by features like class size, ISAT scores and percent of students who receive free or reduced lunch.

How to Solder – If tour is a good way to lose equipment, playing individual shows is an even better way for me to lose stuff.  At least it gave me the impetus to fix a bunch of old instrument cables I had lying around.  I solder so infrequently that I didn’t realize I wasn’t tinning my wires properly.  This video helped.  Also, the number one tip I have for soldering things is to make a jig.  This video has one simple example, but I often just tape the wires to my desk so everything gets held where I need it.

Acoustic Guitar Amplification – This is the guide I’ve always been looking for.

DIY Medill business cards

I finally realized that I needed business cards for my reporting at Medill, but I didn’t want to shell out dozens of dollars for hundreds of cards that I probably wouldn’t use.  I wanted to pay a few dollars for a few dozen cards and have the option of printing more.

So, I created my own using the open-source illustration program Inkscape.  My template is based on an excellent Inkscape business card tutorial.  The design is meant to be printed in black and white on colored cardstock, making the text colored and the background black.

It took me a while to figure out (and obtain) the font for the Medill Logo, but according to What the Font, it’s PF Din Text Pro Thin.  I converted the “Medill” text to a path in the template so you shouldn’t have to have the font in order to use the template.

If you want to get really slick, you can generate a QR code with your contact information in vCard format and print it on the back.

Download:

Drinking the Kool-Aid

I had to read Googled: The End of the World As We Know It for one of my classes. The book frequently explains how Google’s AdWords and AdSense programs changed the way that media advertising works. To understand a little better how these things work from a content producer’s standpoint, I’ve added a few ads to this blog as an experiment.

So far, I’ve been disappointed that the ads aren’t very relevant or informative. I’m looking forward to see how NowSpots (Brad Flora’s local ad platform) shapes up.

Photo by adamknits via Flickr.

Journalism software stack

This is what I use and this is what I want. And its a work in progress.

OS

  • Ubuntu Studio 9.10
  • Windows 7 (Mostly just to run Adobe stuff now)

Hacking

  • Eclipse + PyDev + EGit
  • GeoDjango + PostGIS
  • gvim – For the times when Eclipse is to heavy, particularly when hacking on my netbook.

Multimedia

  • Adobe Premier Pro CS4
  • Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – Haven’t really tried other photo management software.  I like the way this handles metadata and has exporting presets which are good for Medill’s finicky CMS.

Writing:

Communications:

  • Google Voice – I forward a Google Voice number to my mobile dumb phone, my newsroom desk phone, and a Skype number.  This works great because I can give out one number to sources and be able to get their call anywhere.  Google Voice is also indispensable because I can easily record the call by pressing 4 any time during the call.  This is a really helpful feature for when I get a call back from a tough-to-reach source and I’m not in a place to take notes on paper or laptop.
  • Skype – I use this in conjunction with Skype Call Recorder (by far the best and most intuitive Skype recording software I’ve used) to record outgoing calls.  I configured my Skype account to show my Google Voice number in caller ID so sources don’t get confused about how to call me.  I like Skype Call Recorder because it starts recording immediately, but then reminds you to ask for permission and whether you want to keep recording or delete the file.  So, you never have to worry about accidentally turning recording off.  Also, it just stores the recordings as MP3s in a simple and intuitive file/folder hierarchy.
  • Tweetdeck

Information/Notes

  • Tomboy – really useful notetaking program that lets me move bits and pieces of information around fast.  I use my Dropbox to sync up my notes across computers. Become a Friend of GNOME
  • Dropbox
  • Zotero – I use this for storing and annotating web research and PDF reports.  I’m going to try storing audio recordings of interviews in here too.

Sources

  • Delicious – I use this to quickly consume my web research.  I like it because there are extensions for both Firefox and Chrome that make tagging really easy.
  • Google Contacts – Google Contacts is not awesome, but it is a central location for contacts and integrates with Gmail, Google Voice and Thunderbird which I use for contacting sources.

Wishlist

  • More useful Google Contacts – I would really love a short URL for contacts that I could easily drag into my Tomboy notes or word docs so I can easily link to contact info when I mention sources but not have to pepper my notes with a million phone numbers.  It would be even more awesome to have a better Google Contacts API so someone could write plugins for Tomboy/Open Office to quickly/automatically link mentions of names to their contact record.  The current Google Contacts API really only seems useful for syncing client apps with online contacts.  I’d also like a quick-add that parses out contact information copied from web sites.

Photo by jm3 via Flickr

Media overload

Someone, presumably who knows who I am because of Defiance, Ohio asked me what I thought a good strategy to stay informed and conscious about what’s happening in the world without being inundated with biased or incorrect information. This question was strangely aligned with things I had been thinking about and speakers and readings in my How 21st Century Media Work class at Medill.

Here’s my answer:

I’ve been doing some reading lately that has made me think about issues
connected to your question. Jack Fuller, a long-time Chicago journalist
recently wrote a book called “What is Happening to News: The Information
th Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism.” He makes two assertions
that really helped me make sense of the current media moment. First, we
live in a world where we have a ton of information and technology to
push that information at us in a relentless stream. This, Fuller says,
creates a consistent response in the human brain – it puts us in a state
of emotional excitement that makes us respond more to emotional information.

As people who create information (news organizations, advertisers,
musicians) have to compete with more information, they try to leverage
the way our brains work by creating information that we will respond
emotionally to and thus pay attention over all the other noise. The
heated debates between pundits (or wingnuts) on cable news are a good
example of this.

Fuller’s second contention is that we live in a time where people are
less trusting of authority (whether it is information from the
mainstream media, the government, academics, experts, etc). This, he
says, is a huge shift from the generation that came of age during WWII
who saw a structured, hierarchical society as a feature that helped win
the war. This observation was really important to me because it made me
rethink the idea that progressives were necessarily exceptional in our
questioning of authority. We may just be guided within a larger dynamic
of skepticism. Certainly there is as much skepticism on the right as
there is among progressives. The main difference is who those groups
define as the authorities to be questioned.

So far, I haven’t really answered your question, but I think Fuller’s
two points are important for how I now think about news and information
in the world. Before I finally get down to an answer, I want to talk
about what motivates me to seek out information. A big part of that is
the idea of radicalism in the Ella Baker sense of the term:
understanding and addressing the social condition at its root. To get
to this understanding or action, it takes a lot of inquiry, questioning
and dialog, part of which can happen through media.

– From what you wrote, it sounds like knowing what’s happening in the
world and using that information to get a sense of injustice or paths to
justice is important to you. Obviously, consuming information and
talking to people about that information is a big part of that process.
However, many issues are complicated and nuanced and information
providers don’t always do a good job of capturing the things they report
with depth or nuance. Still, I think its important to interact with
information in a critical but not necessarily adversarial way (which is
hard given what I mentioned earlier about a lot of information being
presented in a way that has high emotional impact – in many cases that
means in an adversarial way).

As a journalism student I realized how easy it is to insert bias,
inaccuracy, narrowness, or prejudice into a story, not because the
reporter or news outlet is evil or wants to be manipulative but because
of other factors. Maybe the journalist’s experience (or lack of
experience) keeps her from asking all the questions about a story or
seeking a full range of sources? Maybe sources aren’t willing to talk
to the journalist because of their perceptions about the media or the
journalist (warranted or not). Perhaps there just isn’t time, space or
resources to fully explore the story. In any case, I think both media
producers and others interacting with media and information are best
served by trying to get a complete picture. Instead of asking “is this
right or wrong”, it might be more productive to ask, “what doesn’t make
sense?”, “what questions aren’t answered?” or “how might the
writer/publication’s experience mediate what I’m reading/seeing/hearing?”

Besides providing nformation, another thing that information providers
do is to frame issues. They define what the “sides” are to a debate (or
whether there’s a debate at all) and what the “left”, “right” and
“center” of an issue are. Given the perceived need to make information
have emotional weight, I think its really easy for information providers
to pick voices and framings that are loud and provocative but aren’t
necessarily the most productive or relevant. I think people interacting
with information shouldn’t just assume the framings we’re provided. One
of the best techniques I’ve been taught as a student reporter is to ask
sources, “what person/perspective who is on a different side of the
issue do you most respect?” rather than just picking the most outspoken
voices. If reporters aren’t doing this, then those interacting with the
media need to.

Finally, as much as I feel like a “fuck the news” mentality isn’t very
productive and is sort of the same as prescribing to the idea that
“ignorance is bliss”, I think it’s a mentality that’s completely
understandable. However, I think it’s important to separate concerns
about the accuracy, depth and nuance of information from feelings of
being overwhelmed by information. As I’ve mentioned a lot already, much
of the information that we interact with today is designed to illicit an
emotional response, in many cases, one that borders on stress. This can
be really, really overwhelming. There was a great episode of a Boston
Radio show called “The Theory of Everything” that I heard once that I
can no longer find but maybe you can where the producer talked about
being overwhelmed by trying to stay informed about the Iraq war. I
think it’s okay to take breaks from media and to accept that there are
limitations to how much information we can synthesize both rationally
and emotionally. Failing to do so can hurt our ability to use
information constructively as much as complete ignorance can.

The short answer, as best I can say for myself is this: consume
information in an emotionally sustainable way, ask critical but not
necessarily adversarial questions and seek out additional information
that helps answer your questions.

Photo by martinhoward via Flickr

The first class for the forgotten class

The first day of class isn’t usually in May, the average age of students isn’t 46 and class doesn’t usually involve a personal call for feedback from the mayor.

But this was the case for 175 Chicagoans who were the first to begin the six-month Chicago Career Tech program Monday.

“What can we do for the forgotten class?” Mayor Richard M. Daley asked the students, “That’s you. You worked hard, you went to school, you worked, you paid your taxes. … But you don’t fit into all the poverty programs. You don’t fit into all the rich programs.”

To qualify for the program, which retrains workers in technology skills, participants must be receiving or have exhausted unemployment benefits, have made between $25,000 and $75,000 annually in a previous job, be a Chicago resident and have at least a high school diploma or GED.

Robert LaLonde, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy whose research includes workforce education and training, said targeting these workers sounds like a good idea. “Those are people who are likely to be employable afterwards and they’ve already demonstrated that they’re trainable,” he said. But researchers have very little data to evaluate programs that target previously employed workers receiving retraining, LaLonde said.

Every week, program participants will get two days of classroom training, two days of job shadowing at a business and two days of service learning at a not-for-profit or government organization. During the program, participants will receive a weekly stipend of about $400 in addition to any unemployment benefits.

Kelly O’Brien, vice president of marketing and communications at the United Way of Metropolitan Chicago, the organization coordinating the service learning portion of the program, said technology skills from program participants would be an asset to the partner organizations. However, she said, organizations were required to provide projects that had a teaching component that would also benefit students.

Service learning projects  from dozens of partner organizations may teach skills including  web development, database management and working with social media.

Amanda Luther, acting director of marketing and recruiting for Chicago Career Tech, said participants will receive training in areas including health-care information technology, digital media, project management and technical certifications. “We wanted to give them the skill set to go out to be placed into a new position in an industry that is hiring,” Luther said.

Over the next three years the city will provide $25 million in funding from its Parking Meter Human Infrastructure Fund, Luther said, with additional funds coming from foundations and the private sector.

Chicago Career Tech is accepting applications for the second group of students, which is expected to begin the program in late October with 325 available spaces. Potential students can apply for the program by filling out a screening application on the initiative’s website.

Related Links

Photo by Brooke Collins/City of Chicago

This was originally published on Medill Reports Chicago on May 19, 2010. It was published in the Chicago Journal as First Class for the Middle Class on May 26, 2010

From “Working” by Studs Turkel

This was on a scrap of paper on my wall for months.  It was part of an attempt at new songwriting processes.  I’m not sure whether it worked or not.  The passage still describes Chicago, even if the characters have changed a bit.

“A commonly observed phenomenon: during the early evening hour, trains, crowded, predominantly by young white men carrying attache cases, pass trains headed in the opposite direction, crowded, predominantly by middle-aged black women carrying brown paper bags.  Neither group, it appears, glances at the other.”