Media with a Forgiving Mind ..

I have referred several times in this blog about the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. That's because it's an amazing collection of stuff about dealing with the emotional content of our work, both in terms of the people we write about and also ourselves.

There is an article I found that is especially resonant with me. It's all about Trauma and Forgiveness, written by BBC Reporter Jennifer Glasse after a workshop on trauma and forgiveness, done by Robin Shohet and Ben Fuchs of the Findhorn Foundation (which is a website you should also check out).

Ms. Glasse starts out being skeptical, but then starts to challenge her own definition of forgiveness. And she made some really good discoveries about herself and her profession.

Well worth a look.

A Splash of Colour

Oh, this page of my blog is looking way too grey .. such is February in Canada. So here's another view ... the Malabar coast on the west side of India with waves rolling in from Africa. It would be nice to be there today, sitting in the sun and looking up at the tall, tall coconut trees.

The History of Podsafe Music

I am finishing my doc about Indian community radio and have a few segments that are naked of background sound. So I did a search for Indian Podsafe Music. Didn't find much except for one enterprising rock band named Parlay who are everywhere in Google search land.

I did find a reallllllly funny site that you have to see called The History of Podsafe Music

This is the comment which instigated the item coming up in Google:



"The first evidence of podsafe music was discovered in this cave drawing in central India. It depicts the mirth and disdain of the fertility goddess after attending a show by an unsigned band. Squirting milk from her breasts was not only a prehistoric version of throwing a tomato, but also indicated the band members' inability to get women."

Click on the site to get the full effect. And the other four significant eras of podcast history.

Going Home to Hamilton

I'm slowly making my way back to Hamilton. It's taken me a long time to figure out where I wanted to be. Last year at this time, I figured I was gone for good. I'm in Toronto right now but watching the apartment ads every day to find a place to call home.

Most of my friends are supportive of my decision to go back, and a couple of them are not. The ones who aren't are former Hamiltonians themselves who have left and I guess didn't have that great an experience when they were there.

That's not me, though. I love Hamilton. When I first moved there is 1992 to work at CFMU (McMaster University's radio station), no less than 6 people in the first week called me and said "hi, remember me?" They were all people who I had known in other cities. And I have always found it so easy to make friends in Hamilton. Something about the city .... I just like being there.

It's also about the character of the town. There are ghosts, there is mafia and biker gangs. There are people with PhD's and salt of the earth folks who are good people who just want to make a little bit of difference in the world.

Hamilton's different from Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa. Because there's no real upper crust in Hamilton (well, okay, now that Ancaster is part of Hamilton, there are a few people who think they're upper crust. But that doesn't go very far downtown.

In terms of the work I do, it's a great city. Cities that don't see the need to change don't have much use for social change work. In Hamilton, everybody knows that a lot has to change. And while some would look at the problems of poverty as an insurmountable problem, I see it as an indication that there is so much useful work that can be done here.

Not that there isn't work to be done in every city ... but it is harder to do social change work in cities that don't want to face the idea that changes are needed. The prettier and richer the city, I find, the harder it is for the people who live there to look beyond the facade. In Hamilton, a lot of people are open to new ideas. Not everybody of course, but we voted him out last time around.

So I am going back to the city with more waterfalls than anywhere else in North America. And more pitbulls than any other city in North America. And a beautiful harbour. And steel mills that are both scary and beautiful at the same time.

I think that's a good way to describe Hamilton ... scary and beautiful at the same time. And real down to earth and a great place to live.

Documentary Poetry

I have been looking for a while for a term that describes the kind of poetry I do .. whereby I combine subjective writing with sounds gathered from the real world. The term I came up with was "documentary poetry" ... and to see if anybody else thought of this genre, I turned to my good friend Google.

I was really excited to find out that it is a term used (and perhaps invented) by Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay. I'm glad to see my work fits into some kind of historical context, and I am also really happy that a poet who I admire and respect and I have something in common. I think we have a lot in common, actually, since she writes from her roots as an activist.

This from the Athabasca University website:

"She offered a theory that Canadian literature favoured a mode she called “documentary poetry,” long narrative poems that comment on particular social topics and that “are a conscious attempt to create a dialectic between the objective facts and the subjective feelings of the poet” (“The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre,” 267). Call My People Home (1950)--about the mistreatment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War--and The Documentaries (1968) are examples of her own work in this genre. In the same vein, Right Hand Left Hand (1977), her remarkable autobiography about her life of activism in the 1930s, combines retrospective commentary with period photographs, newspaper articles, poetry, drama, and unedited letters that emphasizes the integration of the individual history with social history. She also believed in the close affinity between poetry and music. ( Vivian Zenari )