At the Gala, In the Garden... ;D

Well, that's that. After feverish grinding to complete the radio content, it's airing this week on WEAA 88.9 FM. The segment I personally worked on, History, played Monday, and it will be continuing throughout the week. Exciting stuff!

Better yet, this of course means that I and my classmates can be reabsorbed into the Garden Gala planning proper. Besides contributing some oatmeal cookies for one last bake sale, I've got a lot to do.

Now that my Fridays are no longer devoted to those planning sessions, and I'm not teaching or attending class Thursday, I can use those days by slashing through my fabric stash for stuff to cut up into table runners.

Okay, so I'm not nearly as terminal a case as Gail Ellsperman, owner of that photo, but I still feel like saying to myself, "Bad seamstress. Use your stockpiles for good, don't sit on them like Smaug with his hoard." I need to find out the dimensions of the tables we'll be using.

Any other little decorating tasks that can be started outside of the event day are things I'd like to get a jump on. Rolling up napkins and tying them with twine? Packing raffle stuff prettily into baskets? I'll be on it.

Come Saturday, I'll help the caterers with prepping food--it sounds like we've got a lot to do there, especially considering that they have other events to handle besides ours, which they're doing basically out of the goodness of their hearts. I'm going to be on food duty the day of the Gala, too, so it makes sense to get in on it beforehand.

And then...Sunday. Game faces on for the Garden Gala! It's been a crazy time, and I'm eager to see our work pay off. These ponies know what I'm talking about:

(Sorry, but that's been stuck in my head forever!)

After all that, it'll almost be a relief just to write a paper reflecting on the semester. Compared to what we've been doing, that's easy, but also a bit of a let-down.

Home Stretch

I can't believe how fast the semester (and, within that, the radio project) have gone by. With our teachers playing hooky last week (kidding--they went to a conference in Montreal to talk about this very work!), most of us decided to use our Thursday "off" to meet up anyway and work more on editing.

No! Bad sand! Get back up there! Darn you space/time continuum!

Seriously, though, it's really shaping up nicely. I think we'll have a segment to be proud of once it's all done... so, by Friday! We've managed to rearrange our audio in a coherent manner to explore the themes of (for my group) history in the communities of BayBrook and Sparrows Point, and it's exciting to think that our hard work will begin airing on the Marc Steiner Show next week!

I've felt very disconnected, though, and isolated from the rest of my class as they plan the May 18 Garden Gala Fundraiser for the Filbert Street Garden. I'm glad the class met normally last Tuesday, so we "radio show people" could touch base with that part of the class' efforts. We're doing that again this week, too, and I'm glad--despite all of the time needed for the radio work, it's important to stick with everybody on our main mission, especially as we come to the final push.

(Apropos of nothing, my relatives are looking forward to coming to the Gala.)

Also there's still 41 days left for the IndieGogo campaign!

Writing for Speaking

As our work on composing and structuring the audio for our piece on The Marc Steiner Show shapes up, my group feel we are doing well on that front. However, a new challenge has arisen: writing a brief introduction for the piece.

Monica, Zoe, Nailah and I are all assigned to the "Monday" segment. It's supposed to lay a foundation, a groundwork, for the whole week. How much explanation is too much? The clips we use should be the focus, but I worry that unless we explain ourselves at least a bit, listeners simply won't have any sort of frame of reference. I think we especially need to make the connection between Sparrows Point and BayBrook explicit.

(This metaphorical illustration brought to you by Google Maps and the GIMP, because I am a whole ball of ideological contradictions.)

Since Dr. King has class meeting as usual, it will be good to both discuss our radio progress and get back into the swing of Garden Gala-related things. I feel like I've been away forever, even though it's only been a couple of weeks!

Voices & Composing

It seems weirdly appropriate to be blogging about a class focused on environmental justice today, of all days. Happy Earth Day, everybody!

Image courtesy of blog.ereach.com.

The sun is shining (for now), birds are singing (for now), and it's just all-around a nice reprieve from the horrid cold we've been dealing with. For now. :P

Work on the radio show continues. In addition to regular class times, we meet for two hours every Friday to try and keep everyone informed. It's not easy--we've been a bit discombobulated, with trouble getting all of our audio files corralled in one place for editing. The other classes have a bit of an advantage, as they've already cut up and sorted the footage used for the Mill Stories documentary, so I often feel like I'm just playing catch-up.

This week should be different, though; we've got very clear transcripts with time stamps, and should be able to begin editing. Working with a time constraint of only about 5 minutes will be a real challenge, but we're up for it!

The act of composing is a strange one, especially when working from recordings like these. On the one hand, we're cutting and framing the raw audio into a story, but at the same time, we have to remain true to the original speakers' words and messages. Our "content" can't trump their "speech" in the move to radio. Listening to these voices, some from people (like Catherine Benicevicz) who are no longer living, it hits home how big our responsibility is to properly preserve their messages.

Catherine B passed away last summer. She was interviewed during Mapping Baybrook's project to revitalize the Polish Home Hall in Curtis Bay. I've been listening to her recollections of early 20th Century Baltimore for weeks now.

Bake Sales & Radio

Hello hello! I'm finally climbing out of my kitchen; last night I spent an unreasonably long time making sure that the cupcakes for our class's bake sale were perfect. I made Devil's Food with raspberry filling, and decorated with a drizzle of chocolate and a fresh raspberry on top of each one.

Of course, now it's pouring outside, so who knows how many people will be in the mood to buy? *sigh*

On the other hand, I've really been cracking into planning out a brief radio segment. Marc Steiner of WEAA is allowing our classes time to discuss the issues of place and deindustrialization in the BayBrook and Sparrows Point areas. The planning sessions are grueling, but we're excited at this chance to spread the story.

Right now, our biggest project involves combing through transcripts of recordings from Prof. King's current and previous classes, finding soundbytes from people in the BayBrook area. Hopefully we can come up with some way to coherently cut them together with the fantastic Sparrows Point recordings from Dr. Stefano's students.

Update: The bake sale raised over $150--mostly from people pieing poor Cody in the face! He took on a lot of cream pies for the cause.

Full Steam Ahead, Ask Letters!

It's been a busy few weeks. First, my treacherous laptop suffered a meltdown; the only saving grace was that the friend who fixed it let me pay him in trade. He now has several newly-repaired and -restored WWII-era fountain pens for his use, including two lovely and precious Parker 51s--a big deal back in our grandfathers' time, and rather apropos considering what the laptop crash interrupted!

You see, following that adventure I got myself in line and reconstructed my write-up on Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard, which was in operation during WWII churming out Liberty and Victory ships. I focused on the women workers who were hired on; the transition, I learned, was far from smooth. Class, sexism, and racism all made the issue a real hot potato, based on info I gathered from archived issues of The Sun and The Afro-American

I must thank Katie Hern, one of our class's interns. She did her capstone on the Fairfield area, and turned me ontosome amazing stuff; a couple of photographs she turned up in an archive helped me to find more taken at the same time by Arthur Seigel, a photographer for the Office of War Information. The Library of Congress has a great collection of photos that were taken during the war, painting a picture of people just going about their lives.

Seriously, look at this! It's amazing!

Now, things really seem to be taking off in terms of the Garden Gala planning. The IRC Fellows are helping us design a postcard--a few options are showcased over on Mai Hyun's blog, and we're supposed to talk more about them on Tuesday. So far, I like the emphasis on the Garden's "place" in the ones that include shots of the water tower, a vital landmark and point of local pride. It's so beautiful!

Have you ever seen such a gorgeous piece of functional civic engineering? The gradients! Image courtesy of IRC fellow Brian Dillon.

Our T-shirts show up in class tomorrow, and we're working on the Ask letters for potential donors. (Pedantic nitpicker that I am, I in put a million notes about tiny little formatting issues!)

Committee Work, Step 1: Coordinate!

Most of my participation this past week was limited to working through Google Docs. It just figures that once the snow thawed enough for all of our committee members to feel safe driving, I would get food poisoning and be unable to make it to class!

Still, I think we made some good headway on our Feasibility Study; the Doc provided a great way for everyone to toss their ideas in and comment, even time-shifted. It's funny just how many ideas we all have, when we put our minds to it. Chris Byars, for example, whipped up a really great Vision Statement, something I had been at a complete loss as to even where to begin.

For my part, I used to write a Cheap Local Entertainment column for The Retriever (UMBC's newspaper), so I knew how to find all of the local event listings that we might want to post to. Ahh, memories--combing through listings on FindLocal, Patch.com, and lots of community calendars proves that people really do use such services to find entertainment, so we should take advantage rather than just relying on print news and paid ads. BaltimoreGreenWorks is even targeted to sustainable efforts, so it's almost a sure bet that people who follow it will be the type to care about the Filbert Street Garden. Besides, the more we can do for free, the better. I just need to put together a little standard piece of copy to paste into each such tool. (Not quite a press release, more of a blurb--the press release does need to be written too, though!)

One thing we learned the hard way, though, is that cross-committee communication is key. You see, we (mostly me and D'Arcy Placilla) had put together a basic Save the Date format in anticipation of the fundraising event. In addition to figuring out what information we wanted to convey, we had also kicked around basic design aesthetics. In our mind, the themes of growth, sustainability, and DIY-action would suggested a rustic and recycled look--something like this image from lovevsdesign, which I found through Google Image Search:

Little did we realize that the Events committee was planning a more gala-styled event! So while the info can stay the same, it's back to the drawing board for a more formal feel. *Le sigh* I'm thinking fancier fonts and white or cream cardstock with black or dark green ink. Maybe not quite as fancy as this emdotzee version, but with a similar feel:

Now we're in the middle of polishing off our Feasibility Study, and I'm still working on my Mapping Baybrook research. More on that next week!

Committees & Concepts

This past week, students in AMST-442/680 divided ourselves up into teams: Event Planning, Outreach & Promotions, and History & Products. I'm on O&P, because of my copy editing experience, but will probably be shared out to H&P as well. That's a good thing, since I feel a lot of our promotional materials (as opposed to promotional actions) will need product design input. Prof. Steve Bradley's IRC students, with whom we're partnering, should have a say as well, since from a visual perspective they know more than any of us. Speaking of which, they've just about wrapped up our logo design! I don't have a completed version to put up here, but the one Prof. Bradley posted in this blog entry is just gorgeous. I love the clear, hand-drawn aesthetic of it; the human qualities feel perfect for a community-based project like this one. We're hoping to get it printed on black and green tee shirts (I want a green one!) by a local print shop. I'd say more on this, but I'm not certain whether the deal has been finalized yet. The logo design is also central to the Outreach concepts we're batting around, such as a convenient little Save the Date card to be tossed into each of the products H&P works up. Ideally, I'd want the logo to be ubiquitous and, through the cards, constantly wedded to our upcoming fundraiser event set for May 18 at 2640 Space. In today's class, I hope to talk with my committee and H&P about ways we can use an upcoming craft fair for the dual purposes of fund- and awareness-raising.

Working With People Who Have Actual Artistic Talent

I'm no artist. Composing concepts is one thing, but execution? Not so much. Give me three hours and no distractions, and I can just barely sketch a leaf halfway-decently from life, though the shading will probably be way off. Drawing from imagination is utterly pointless, because proportions are hard and perspective is out to get me. And finally, I don't have the dedication to work hard and learn those skills; unlike artists, I give up instead of practicing.

UMBC's IRC Fellows, on the other hand, know enough about visuals and how to produce them to base their studies and future careers on them. The Visual Arts IRC Fellowships are designed for people with outstanding computer graphics skills. Sometimes, that means that they create things like the visual effects in this 2009 theater performance, "The Crystal Egg":

We, of course, need them for a more prosaic purpose. As this urbantells.net blog post by Prof. Steve Bradley shows, the IRC Fellows will be working with us on creating a cohesive visual aesthetic and specific images to associate with and represent this project. (Yeah, I think that sounds much nicer than "branding".) Some of the t-shirt concepts they've worked up so far are in that blog post. They're all really lovely and worth checking out; it's just cool for me to see them in progress.

Logo and image design, I think, is slightly sexier than copy editing, but still an aspect of professional life many tend to overlook. The importance of projecting a clean, coherent image, like having copy that is correct and tonally appropriate, can make a huge difference in reception. That's not to say that people are shallow, or that you can't begin to operate without workers trained in those skills--rather, I mean that the public at large is just more likely to trust their time and money to operations that look interesting and "legit". Finding a way to create that gestalt, those icons and logos that can make up our project's conceptual visual identity, is a very strong step forward in our presentation to the public.

Working Towards an Understanding of Place

While working on this project, it looks like I will be doing a lot of what I do best: editing and proofreading. Those aren't very glamorous parts of the work of getting a cause off the ground, but I do believe that they are important. Truly professional-grade documents (advertisements, press releases, etc.) should be easy to read and appear legitimate and trustworthy to the public. In my experience, a proofread document gets very different reactions from readers than a casually thrown-together one. We may "just" be students, but that's no reason not to approach this as a job and commit to doing absolutely all we can to get professional results.

That's why I'm taking AMST-680 in the first place, after all: to build skills I need for my career. Specifically, I want to learn to interview people and collect their oral histories. I study English, and my thesis focus is on the texts produced by fan composers (the sort of work that The Organization for Transformative Works does). While not directly connected to that, this course is at its core about speaking to and working with members of a community to document their histories and understand their goals, and that's exactly what I need.

The history of the Fairfield/Bethlehem shipyards back during World War II might be a good place for me to start.

(Picture via Wikipedia)

My paternal grandparents were Polish immigrants who came to live and work in a New York steel town before the War. They spent their whole remaining lives there, and my father also worked in the mill for a few years before he moved down here, so I feel something of a personal connection to the stories of the place. (Cursory Googling coupled with fuzzy memories indicates it might even have been Lackawanna, a Bethlehem affiliate, but I'm not certain at this time.) I'm also curious: what was the wartime industry like? Did many women take jobs, Rosie the Riveter-style, back then while the men shipped out? And if so, what happened to them when the war ended? The changing role of women in the 1940s and 1950s is just fascinating, and it would be amazing to be able to hear from and preserve the stories of women who lived it. Time is, after all, running out for us to do so.

Furthermore, what are community members' feelings regarding the industry's effects on the local environment? It's a complex issue, with many stakeholders involved. Entire communities rose and fell with the dual influences of available work and devastating pollution. As William Cronon observed in his essay "The Trouble With Wilderness," the position of wanting to get back to a "pure, unspoiled" form of nature is an inherently privileged on, held by people who can afford to be tourists of wilderness. Cronon argues that we need not only protect these sublime vistas, but also to find ways to integrate nature into the fabric of our own, human environments. The Filbert Street Garden is an example of this concept, a little oasis of plants in the middle of BayBrook's vast industrial development, and I wonder whether I can find out more about similar efforts in the area's past; Dr. King mentioned that the vanished steelworkers' community of Fairfield had a well-known garden. How have the people in these places modified them to suit their own needs, and how are they still doing it today?

More questions than answers, perhaps, but that's a good thing at the very beginning of research.

Gearing Up for BayBrook

I'm looking forward to my new American Studies course, but also nervous. It's not like anything I've done before, and I just hope I can contribute. You see, we're supposed to try and really engage with the BayBrook (portmanteau of Curtis Bay + Brooklyn) area with a project involving environmental and social justice. They're giving us seed money and everything. No pressure, right?

We're supposed to be defining our social mission, but the thing is, I think a mission statement might be the one thing I've never written before! While I'm sure those better qualified than myself will trump me--and that's a good thing--maybe it's something along the lines of, "To work with members of the BayBrook and greater Maryland community to help ensure the continuation of a program which provides enrichment in the form of healthy food and environmental education..."? I don't want to sound like we're swooping in and taking charge--how could we?--but neutral language sounds so wishy-washy, wordy, and corporate to me. Dilemma.

It reminds me of the reading Dr. King assigned about Placemaking. In it, Lynda Schneekloth and Robert Shibley argued that places in which we live need to be designed, created, and modified by or in concert with the people who are ultimately going to inhabit them; that coming in from outside, you can't automatically know the details that determine the best way for a place to function. As someone who's been living in apartments for far too long, that struck a chord with me. Working with residents and users makes so much sense.

Ideally, we're hoping to fulfill this mission by helping raise enough money to enable the hiring of someone to work as the manager of the Filbert Street Garden, a community garden in the area. They teach classes about plants to schoolchildren and such. My Professor, Dr. King, has had classes work with the garden in the past, and it seems like a really nice place based on this video:



I really want to go and see it in person soon, whenever the class goes in groups. I miss gardening in the little patch my mom kept, not to mention when I did landscaping professionally, and it's great for any kid to get that experience. Heck, like I said, I'd like to remember that experience!

Here's crossing my fingers that my (admittedly nerdy) skills come in handy for those I'll be working with.