NMC Conversations #6
[download MP3] 19.6 Mb 28:30
Just back from New Orleans, Larry, Rachel, and Alan share their reflections on the 2007 New Orleans Regional NMC Conference at Tulane including reviews of the keynote sessions, their highlights from the program sessions, and memories of the special events, especially the Second Line parade. Mostly, this conference wove together cohesive themes of the power of digital storytelling, music, creativity, community, the capacity of human potential especially in face of events such as the post Katrina flooding of the city.
To connect to this experience, see the tagged web sites, blog posts, and 800 plus flickr photos collected under our Tag This Conference effort and the media from the nmc site associated with the conference.
And in reference to the closing section, we provide again the digital story created and shared by Joe Lambert:
Read on for a full transcript of this conversation…
Larry Johnson (LJ): Hello everyone. I want to welcome you to NMC Conversations. This is the sixth in our series of chats with Alan Levine, Rachel Smith, and myself. Today we want to talk about the New Orleans Regional Conference that we just had. But, before we do that, I want to welcome both Rachel and Alan. How are ya’ll doing today?
Rachel Smith (RS): Doing very well. I am actually enjoying a cup of café au lait from Café du Monde right here in my home.
Alan Levine (AL): Oh, wow.
RS: I am into the spirit of things.
LJ: How perfect. I should go get my green-and-white striped hat.
AL: And, we should just, like, sprinkle sugar all over our desks.
RS: That’s right.
LJ: Go get the confectioners sugar and pile it on my keyboard and I’ll have a café du keyboard.
AL: We don’t recommend that.
LJ: You know, we’ve been doing regional conferences now for the past three years, and it’s really been a remarkable arc. We had the first one… well, the very first regional that ever happened in the NMC was up at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and that was back in the late 90’s; a remarkable conference in and of itself. And then there was a period of time when there weren’t any regionals for a while. We began doing regionals again in 2005 with a conference at Yale that actually launched our gaming initiative at the NMC. It was quite a remarkable conference. Last year, we were at Trinity, and really focused on new scholarship, and we had quite a few really engaging sessions around that topic. And this year, we really focused on the idea of storytelling. And so, the regionals have always been a way for us to dig down into a topic or an area of interest in some depth. That certainly did happen in New Orleans, didn’t it?
AL: Absolutely.
RS: It really did. Tulane was such a perfect place to hold this conference. The people were just so friendly and welcoming. As a setting, it was just such a special place to be. The building we were in, as you know, was brand new. I think, Larry, you got the hard hat tour the last time you were there, right? It was still under construction?
LJ: I did. Yeah, I did. It really turned out nice.
RS: It was a gorgeous space, yeah, perfect for the kinds of things that we were doing.
AL: Just the drive through some of the neighborhoods from the hotel.
LJ: Oh, down St. Charles, yeah.
AL: Yeah, where you could still see signs of some of the Katrina effects. Just for me, not really having seen that part of New Orleans before, just the variety and architecture, yeah, it was just mind boggling. And then the Tulane campus is just spectacular.
LJ: Yeah, of course, that whole area had special meaning for me because my daughter was married right at Loyola next door, in the cathedral there, and we rode the street cars up and down St. Charles as part of that celebration. It’s a nice city, New Orleans. There’s really a lot of personal connection to the city for me.
AL: For the conference, the fact that it is a small conference, in many ways is a plus, not a detriment, because of the kind of interactions you can have. You can pretty much almost meet everybody there if you try. And, ironically, I have some colleagues, you know, I work in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I’ve got good colleagues at Arizona State University, and I didn’t really get a chance to talk to my friends, Ruvi, and unfortunately Sam couldn’t make it, and some others from their department. I had to go to New Orleans to talk to them, but it was great. We had some great conversations. That kind of typifies, you know, there was good space between the sessions to meet new people and talk about either your work or what was going on at the sessions.
LJ: Yeah. You know, a highlight for me was, it started right off at the beginning of that conference, with the opening keynote by Nick Spitzer, who, of course, does a radio show on National Public Radio, so he is a phenomenally excellent speaker. But more than that, his understanding of the history of New Orleans and the impact of the jazz and art on the culture of the city is probably unmatched by anyone. He is just tremendously knowledgeable about it. His keynote address used the music and vintage photographs from his archives to really set up the importance of what he called “cultural continuity,” and that’s the theme that resonated with me through the whole conference. It still resonates through to me today. Of course, it’s very important to the folks in New Orleans as they really work on bringing the city back. But I think that it’s important to all of us, and I got the sense in the crowd that others felt the same way. It really did open up the conference, don’t ya’ll agree?
RS: Absolutely.
AL: It was impactful for me. I remember resonating with the small piece where he talked about the musicians and their sort of skills and background. The fact that they come from this background of learning a craft at age 5, so they were builders or welders or electricians…
LJ: Plasterers.
AL: Yeah, the plasterer stories.
RS: You know I didn’t look at the buildings the same way after I heard that.
LJ: Yeah, I know, I didn’t either.
RS: I only saw the plaster and thought about the people that had done that.
LJ: Yeah, can you imagine the whistling that had gone on at those job sites. It must have been pretty amazing.
AL: And then I was one of the many people who went out and bought the CD of the music that he had that benefits Habitat for Humanity. I listened to that on the plane ride home. I think I listened to it three times. I enjoyed that music a lot.
LJ: Yeah, really good stuff.
AL: I had a treat to be able to introduce Suzan Jenkins for the lunch keynote. Like Nick, who spoke with basically just his words and music and pictures, no bullet slides, Suzan just talked, and she was marvelous talking about the work she is doing with the Thelonious Monk Institute, which is more or less a graduate program for jazz musicians. It is really a lot about culture and really continued that arc that Nick started. I was, like, if I had an ounce of musical skill, I would love to be in that program.
LJ: They send the students out into the schools. As folks know, in public education, programs like music and in the arts are increasingly under-funded. So it’s a really nice strategy to get really high-level musicians out into the community and into the schools to help kids get that passion early.
AL: And, she talked about almost some of the same themes that Nick did, about some of these classic musicians. There was Ironing Board Sam, who plays a keyboard mounted on an ironing board stuck inside a giant fish tank. And that’s all she said, and I was curious to learn about it, so I went back and Googled him, and I was just enthralled by this. I can just imagine the stories that would flow from that. And at the same time, she talked about weaving all this with Web 2.0 technologies. She’s got an amazing program. I am anxious to follow what goes on down there.
RS: You know, it just continued all through the conference. And then the closing keynote by Michael Mizell-Nelson was just so moving. He is, as you know, from the University of New Orleans, and he’s with the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, which is an online database of personal stories from Katrina and Rita. They are stories that just cover every human emotion. There is hope, there’s triumph, there’s loss, and it’s just these little facets of what it’s really like, what it was really like for people, and taken together they give you this picture of the humanness of what people went through. It was really remarkable. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s at hurricanearchive.org. Michael was good enough to share how it has moved him personally to be working with these stories.
AL: Just the breadth of it was pretty incredible. The list kept going on and on about the difference of collections that they have developed there. It’s an amazing resource.
LJ: That theme of personal story really was the thread that connected everything in the conference, I think. It started in the opening keynote, it went through the conversations with Suzan and Ironing Board Sam, and into Michael’s keynote at the beginning. But it also permeated all the sessions in quite a dramatic way. For me, one of the sessions that really stuck out was Bill Shewbridge’s session. He is up at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County. They are doing a remarkable project with senior citizens up there, to capture their digital stories, and they’ve gotten quite a bit of external support. These are really, I mean, they are broadcast quality little vignettes. He played more than a dozen during the session. There was one that really stuck out of a woman who was born and raised in the UK and she married over there. Her husband was killed in an air battle over the Sea of Japan and there was very little information about it. Years later, her son became interested and learned Japanese and went to Japan and actually met the family of the pilot that shot him down.
RS: Wow.
LJ: The two families came together after that. It touches me just to remember the video. They came together in this reconciliation that was captured on this 4-minute video so eloquently, and you think about what an amazing story that is and it’s so wonderful that an institution like UMBC can be out there to facilitate this kind of thing. It was a remarkable session.
AL: Wow. I think my heart just skipped a beat listening to that.
RS: Yeah. The different ways that people use to tell stories was also a major theme, as well as the stories they were telling. One of the sessions that really captured my interest was Ruben Puentedura’s session on web comics and storytelling through web comics. He talked about the history of web comics and how they started and how they are now, and he showed different types of web comics and explained how you can use this for storytelling even if you don’t have any artistic expertise at all. He showed methods and tools that you can use to put together a comic; clip art and the one with…
LJ: I remember the one where all the pictures were the same in every one of the series of stories.
RS: Right, and only the text changes, exactly. Ruben’s just got such a good sense of humor anyway, but I think he was the perfect person to talk about that. I really, really enjoyed that session.
AL: I have to agree. Sometimes you go to something and your mind gets opened to a whole new genre that you didn’t even know existed. I was going to talk about that session, but… I also had a great time sitting in on Joe Lambert’s story circle session. I have known Joe for years. We’ve worked with him on projects. I worked with faculty when I was at Maricopa and we were teaching digital storytelling, so I was always on the supporting end of some of this work, and I wanted to experience some because I hadn’t yet gone to one of Joe’s workshops to see what goes on. The story circles are so integral to that process that helps people find their story. They work as a group activity and they get a lot of feedback. Again, just watching Joe work with people is a real learning experience for me because he just connects so well, and he’s got this almost infinite bag of tricks and things that he just pulls out of his back pocket that seem so genuine and in the moment. He had the group introduce themselves, which was very basic, but we did this exercise where we had to write on one side of a card with one word 10 things that we love, and on the opposite side 10 things that we hate. A couple people had to read them off, and the point was that people had to identify which one of those really stuck out to them as being odd for being on that list, and that becomes a springboard for generating a story idea. He talked about how that plays out in his storytelling workshops. It was just marvelous. This wasn’t a presentation, this was an activity, but we learned so much about the story circle process.
LJ: You know, Ruben’s and Joe’s sessions both, in a way, were getting at the same thing, which was how do you boil a story down to the atomic level so that you’re really distilling the essence of the pure story out of it and letting the chaff, if you will, fall away in the process. They take very, very different approaches, but they both get there. It was nice to think about story in that way. We had some fun times in the evenings, too. We did learn a lot, but we also got to have some fun. One of the high points for me was going to the Tulane president’s residence on the campus, which is a glorious, spectacular antebellum mansion. Spending time in all of that history with the art and the furnishings, and really everything in the home telling a story that reaches back into the 1800’s, was really a wonderful event.
AL: And the jazz band that was Tulane faculty.
LJ: Oh, yeah. Wow, were they good or what. Yeah.
AL: And then, also, the video that the folks at Tulane produced all about the history of the house and being used for sets in… was it Runaway Jury that was filmed there?
LJ: Yeah. I was just, actually, going to ask you to maybe talk about what we did the next day.
AL: Oh, man.
RS: Oh yeah, Thursday. That’s going to go down in history. This was the NMC Second Line. For those of our listeners who aren’t familiar with it, the second line is a New Orleans tradition and it involves a marching band, which is the First Line. The marching band plays music and marches, and then the people are behind the marching band and they’re dancing and waving handkerchiefs as they go along behind it. Second lines are used in New Orleans for all kinds of celebrations, like funeral processions that start with a sort of a dirge all the way to the cemetery, and then after the body is interred, the Second Line leads the people away again with music that is much more upbeat. It’s a celebration of the person’s life and just how wonderful life is. Ours was very much a celebration of life and being in New Orleans.
LJ: Our hosts, Derek and Marie, really did a fantastic job of laying out the tradition of second lines.
RS: They did.
LJ: This was another moment that the conference and its setting had a personal touch for me, because we did one at my daughter’s wedding and we had a horse and a carriage. Some of them are quite elaborate and it was a lot of fun. We had some special little props that helped us do that. One was that the Tulane folks printed up special hankies for us that had not only the logo of the conference and the fleur de lis of New Orleans, but also the tag cloud of all the themes that were part of the event. It was really kind of cool.
AL: That was brilliant. And then, of course, the little surprise thing that you got, Larry; the umbrella. I don’t know how you would describe that in a podcast, because you need to see the picture.
LJ: Yeah. We’ll have to put a photograph of it on the website.
RS: There is. There are photos up on the Flickr site.
LJ: Oh, that’s right. In fact, there are nearly 800 photos from the conference on the Flickr site with the tag. That whole idea of tagging websites and photographs and all of the related NMC events, that’s really taken off. That was a great idea, Alan, to do that, and we’ve gotten a lot of resources at this conference as a result.
AL: Absolutely. Then, we marched, basically, across the campus to the art gallery where we had our reception. We got, not only some good food and drink, et cetera, but we had a chance to see some special exhibits. And one downstairs that was all video and media art. There was one in that right gallery, I don’t know if you saw, that was basically three projections.
LJ: Oh, yeah.
AL: It was one woman, actually, but she played three different parts, more or less going through her daily routine, and they all sort did the same thing. They picked up their spoon with their right hand, they dipped it in their cereal bowl, but occasionally one was just a little out of sync. And then they would switch scenes. It was just an amazing…
LJ: Yeah. One screen she was in Red Rocks in the Utah desert, and the next she was downtown in the middle of the city, and the other one in a field somewhere.
AL: Yeah. They would switch though, doing exactly the same thing. And then upstairs, they had the multimedia exhibit curated by Derek [and David], and some fabulous multimedia art was done up there.
LJ: Yeah. My favorite piece in that one was the projection that went down at the intersection of the floor and the wall with the…
RS: Petals.
AL: Yeah.
LJ: The falling petals that fell onto the floor. Just a little tiny little thing and it was so beautiful.
AL: I like the one that had the boom microphone. It would pick up conversation ambiently and would do some sort of remixing so you would hear it later. It was almost like the whisper box in Second Life to some degree.
RS: The biological art that had the tank, the little glass vase that had the mud and water in it, the bacteria, with the overlay that let the light through.
LJ: Derek was telling me that they actually climbed up on the roof of that, because there is a skylight above that gallery, and they masked off some of the windows so they had exactly the optimal light for that culture to grow in there. Just the depth that the Tulane folks went to make everything be perfect for us; it was just remarkable. Derek, and Marie, and Anne, and Sheldon, just did a fantastic job, don’t you agree?
AL: Absolutely. And then Rachel tapped me on the shoulder and said she found something in a stairwell, it started with a sign. So what exactly… what happened Rachel?
RS: I found a sign taped to a closed door, and the sign said “The Graffiti Project is over. Please do not draw on the walls” and I thought “I like the sign.” So I was taking a picture of the sign and Derek Toten comes over and he goes “What are you taking a picture of?” And I said “This sign, which I thought was really cool!” And he said “Oh, you think the sign is really cool, look at this…” and he opens the door, and it opens onto the stairwell, the building stairwell, which is four stories tall, and every inch of the walls and the handrails and the pipes that are in there is just covered with layer upon layer of brilliantly colored graffiti art. It was a project that they had where the students would come in and paint something in graffiti, and then the next one would come in and would work into that, and over it, and overlay it, and the whole stairwell, every inch, was covered.
LJ: Yeah. They really got into it.
RS: Yeah.
LJ: They finally had to say “Please stop painting the building.”
RS: Right. “Okay, we’re done now.” There are photos of this on Flickr. They don’t do it justice, but they’ll give you an idea. They are tagged with the conference tag, nmc2007reg, and they are also tagged with the word graffiti, so you can find it with those. It was just really amazing to be in that space and see… Well, it was pink. That’s what I remember; it was pink.
LJ: Yeah. I tell you, we really got to experience, I think, the really vital parts of New Orleans. One thing that I carried home with me from that entire experience was just such an appreciation for the spirit of that city, and how deeply important it is to the people there. Of course, we got to see both the parts that… mostly we saw the parts that had been restored, the tourist districts and the Garden District, which were largely unaffected in the first place, and they look pretty normal now. Through the talks and the comments of the local folks there and the hosts, we also got a sense of the challenges in the city. There was a panel session of folks who had been activists, really, who had begun blogging right in the middle of the catastrophe. In fact, some of them were the only real news sources that were coming out, and those people continued to work over the two years since then, to try and help rebuild the city. They’ve run into considerable challenges along the way, as anyone who reads the paper knows. I just was struck by one of hundreds of stories that came up in those and similar conversations, of how you have Internet in a situation like that. This one guy on the panel worked in the shipyards, and there was a cruise ship there that everyone was evacuated from, but the cruise ship had satellite internet. He actually ran a wire from the cruise ship down the street into the neighborhood so that the neighborhood could have Internet access for news, and be able to get word out to the Internet, and the communication. I was just thinking “That guy really belongs in the NMC.” That’s the kind of stuff that we all resonate with, just that “let’s get this done.” It was really, all in all, a really, really remarkable experience. Alan talked at the beginning of this talk, and we’re coming to the end now, about driving into the city and seeing the buildings that will never be restored juxtaposed to the ones that have been lovingly restored, and that discontinuity there was apparent. Whenever you took the time to go around a corner you could see it. As I think about the big picture of the conference, it really was about the importance of story, the importance of collective memory, and of a shared sense of culture. It came through in this event in a most powerful and compelling way for me. I’m really glad that we had the opportunity to go there. Closing thoughts, folks?
RS: I just love New Orleans. I love the city; the art, music, and food, and the people.
LJ: We had to leave early to get back right after the conference, but a large group of people stayed. Alan, do you want to tell us a little bit about what happened on Friday afternoon?
AL: Absolutely. I just wanted to add a little bit. I know, when I followed the Katrina news, at one point I had this knee-jerk reaction. Also, somewhat being a geologist, you’ve got this major city, it’s built below sea level, it’s secured some by crumbly, levee mounds of dirt. It’s like, you know, maybe there shouldn’t be a city there. Of course, people say that often about Phoenix, where I live. You don’t need a modern city in the middle of a desert with millions of people and no water. So, who am I to say that? But having been there and really tapped into, through the presenters and the people we talked to, how rich and deep that culture is. I’ll never have that thought again. That really resonated. Two days after I got back, I got an e-mail from Joe Lambert, who had gone out on the tour with the Tulane folks, where they… I think they called it the Desolation Tour… and they basically drove through some parts of the city that were still not “rebuilt” and still showing signs of the devastating effects.
LJ: The 9th ward, and places that will never be rebuilt.
AL: Yeah. Joe had taken some still images, and he went home and he did a digital story on this, using his voice and some wonderful music. It was a real treat because, as Larry and I were talking the other day, usually when Joe does his presentations he nearly always uses other people’s stories, because he wants to showcase the work that they do. To see Joe’s own story, which is posted on YouTube, and will be put on the NMC Conversations site with this podcast, it was just such a fitting way, for me, to wrap up the whole New Orleans experience.
LJ: I would recommend the video to everyone. We’ve run a little long on this particular podcast, but it was such a remarkable conference that I think it was worth doing. There was just so much to tell. I want to thank you, Rachel, for being part of this conversation.
RS: Of course.
LJ: And Alan.
RS: I am now at the bottom of the cup of my café au lait, so it’s must be time.
AL: That’s the timer.
LJ: That’s right. Did you get the box of Beignet mix with that?
RS: I’m going to. I haven’t yet, but I am going to.
LJ: Thanks to you, as well, Alan, for your comments and stuff. Let’s go ahead and wrap NMC Conversations #6 up, and thank you for being here.
AL: Alright, Goodbye.
RS: Thank you, Larry. Goodbye.
