Julia R. Barton

Julia spoke at the 2013 American Society of Journalists and...

Sat, 11 May 2013 13:33:00 -0400

Julia spoke at the 2013 American Society of Journalists and Authors conference about podcasting and the craft of audio.

Life of the Law

Sat, 11 May 2013 13:00:00 -0400

Julia edits The Life of the Law, a new and unique radio and multimedia project that explores the relationship of law to the experience and meaning of American society and culture.

Episode 1: The Secret Power of Jury Nullification

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

(Producer: Shannon Heffernan. Editor: Julia Barton)

Paul Butler grew up in a black neighborhood on the Southside of Chicago. He was a smart, talented kid and ended up going to Harvard law school. When he graduated, he wanted to do something to give back to his community. Crime was at an all time high and he knew black people were the most likely people to be crime victims. So he became a prosecutor. “I thought I [was] going to go in as this undercover brother and make a difference from the inside,” he said.

But as a prosecutor, Butler’s biggest job was to put people behind bars, “And it turned out I was good at that,” says Butler. “I was this clean-cut black guy and most of the jurors were these older black people. They would just beam at me when I said my name is Paul Butler and I represent the government. They’d be like, you go boy. They’d almost do whatever I wanted”

Almost. Except when it came to petty drug cases. Even when it was very clear someone was guilty of a drug crime, juries came back with an not guilty verdict. Butler was confused, “Why would they let someone they knew was guilty of a drug charge go free?”

Then, one day, he was prosecuting a routine crack cocaine possession case.

“The defendant was a young, good looking African-American kid. And the defense was something like, ‘Yeah, the police caught me with the drugs, but they weren’t mine’,” said Paul, laughing. “I was like okay, for the law it doesn’t matter, it’s what’s called a strict liability crime. So you’re guilty. The judge even told that to the jurors.” Paul was sure he had this one in the bag.

“But then the jury came back with a big fat not guilty. I was like, Oh my god! What’s up?”

Paul waited outside the jury room. And as the jury filed out, he tried to talk to the jurors. “None of the black jurors would talk to me and then the only white woman stopped for a moment. I said, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘We all knew he was guilty but he’s so young.’”

Even if the jurors thought the boy was too young, the law was still the law. Butler asked the more experienced prosecutors what was going on. It turned out it has a name: jury nullification.

When a jury nullifies, it finds a defendant not guilty, although the jurors may actually believe he is guilty. And because it’s illegal to retry someone, the person goes free. Jury nullification happens when jurors don’t agree with a law, or think there should be an exception.

For example, if someone assists a terminally ill spouse in pain with a suicide, it’s a murder according to the law. But often, juries will find these people innocent. And increasingly, juries are finding people with minor drug offenses innocent, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The senior prosecutors Butler talked to hated jury nullification. They thought it weakened the legal system. But Butler couldn’t shake the feeling that these older black jurors were up to something important. He left the prosecutors office and when into academia. The first thing he wanted to study was jury nullification.

The History of Jury Nullification

Jury nullification dates all the way back to English common law. It was designed as a check and balance on the government’s power, and it has played a big role in American history. During the revolutionary war it was illegal to speak out against the British. But juries would just find the defendants innocent. And during prohibition, juries nullified to keep bootleggers out of jail.

But the history that really made Butler start considering the power of nullification was how it was used during slavery. In 1850 it was illegal to help a slave escape. But juries often refused to convict the defendants. According to Butler those nullifying jurors helped set up the conditions to abolish slavery. “What would you do?” asks Butler.

For Butler, it was an easy answer. Slavery’s wrong.

But jury nullification has a dark history too. Jeff Cramer is the managing director of Kroll Investigations and has tried at least 100 jury trials. “I don’t think anyone could really advocate for a system where the juries can really do anything they want to do,” he says.

Cramer says historically, juries have used nullification to do things we look back on as being right. But they’ve also used nullification to do things that we look back on as being really wrong.

The most infamous examples are from the civil rights movement. In August of 1955 two white men killed Emmett Till, a black 14 year-old who they said whistled at a white woman. The evidence was clear. Later, the two white defendants would even admit to the murder. But the all white jury found the white defendants innocent. That was nullification, too.

“The risk is people get away with murder,” says Crammer. “And they get away with murder because the juries in those cases regarded the defendants as more valuable than the victims. So if we allow jury nullification, it doesn’t work, system’s over. It’s broken.”

Contemporary Jurors

Shari Diamond is a professor Northwestern Law school. Jury deliberation is usually very private, but Diamond got an unusual level of access to study them in action. She’s observed hours and hours of juries deliberating. Her conclusion? Nullification doesn’t happen very much.

“No one disputes that juries take their work very seriously,” says Diamond. “The jurors will say I sure don’t agree with that law, but we don’t have a choice.”

Of course juries are a cross section of society, so they tend to have the same prejudices and sensitivities of a general population. But Diamond says you have to remember that in order to be on jury, you have to first get through a selection process. That weeds out people with biases, people who might nullify.

According to Diamond, “The jury is us, but perhaps a better us.” That better us nullifies only in rare circumstances, usually when our accepted morals don’t match up with the letter of the law. “One way of saying it is this a sort of safety valve,” says Diamond. “We tolerate it, officially it’s not the law, and there are in fact court opinions that say they have no right to do it. But of course, we build a system where the jury has the power to do it.”

Paul Butler, the prosecutor who was having trouble getting guilty verdicts, thinks it may be the most direct form of democracy we have. Twelve people, in a room, charged with coming to a single conclusion. And like any piece of democracy, like voting, people will sometimes make bad decisions.

He left the prosecutors office and became a professor at George Washington University [note: Butler is now a professor at Georgetown University Law Center]. Butler now believes those jurors who nullified in all those drug cases were on to something. “There are more blacks under criminal supervision now, than there were slaves in 1850,” says Butler.

Butler thinks drug laws are to blame for those high incarceration numbers. Statistically, there are fewer black drug users, but more blacks in prison for drugs.

So just like the jurors nullified the fugitive slave laws, Butler thinks modern jurors should nullify drug laws. “Sometimes the law really is unfair and sometimes jurors really should say people are not guilty, even if they committed the crime, especially if it’s a drug case, because the drug laws are selectively enforced and I don’t think it’s fair. So if a citizen has a power then she should use it.”

Keeping The Secret

Now despite the role nullification plays in our justice system, chances are you haven’t heard of it. And there’s a reason for that.

Most people in the legal system think juries shouldn’t nullify. It’s too dangerous to put so much power in the hands of just twelve people. Still they can’t take away jurors ability to nullify without taking away other basic rights enshrined in the Constitution.

But there are three ways the legal system tries to discourage nullification.

First, as a juror, you take an oath that says you will uphold the law. Second, defense lawyers aren’t allowed to tell a jury to nullify. Third, most judges give instructions to a jury that basically tell them that they must find a defendant guilty if they broke the law. So juries may be able to nullify, but the system is set up to hide that.

But some activists are working to spread the word about nullification.

Julian Heicklin describes himself as, “the biggest pain in the ass in the world.” He’s a small, older man with a lot of big opinions. Heicklin is a member of the Fully Informed Jury association, a mostly libertarian group. Their goal is to make sure jurors know that they can nullify.

Heicklin stands outside courtrooms handing out literature and talking to people. Heicklin thinks nullification is a good strategy for all kinds of laws he sees as unfair, including gun laws.

In August of 2011 the US government charged Heicklin with jury tampering– a serious offense. The case got a lot of attention. Especially when the judge denied Heicklin a jury trial, because, after all, it would be another opportunity for him to tell jurors how to nullify.

But if courts want to keep this jury nullification thing on the down low, then Heicklin says, the joke has been on them, “They made a national issue of this, they did something I could have never done by myself.” Heicklin says he is just a shabby old man with a few pamphlets, but by prosecuting him, the courts handed out “the biggest pamphlet ever.”

Since I spoke with Heicklin, the case against him has been dropped. But he plans to be outside those courtrooms again soon, for better, or worse, making sure the secret power of nullification is a little less secret.

99% Invisible

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Julia Barton is one of the great radio reporters and editors. She edited some of my pieces…and I swear every single piece I’ve done since then has been better because of my contact with her. No kidding.

—Roman Mars

There’s something that links most of the everyday objects presented in “Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design.” But it’s hard to tell exactly what that is just by looking at this collection of wobbly dolls, drinking glasses, primitive arcade games, and arsonistic space heaters. The essence, argues editor Michael Idov, is the system that built them: a post-WWII economy, mostly closed from the rest of the world, trying to transform its tank and grenade factories into places that churned out Western-style consumer goods. Idov grew up in Soviet Latvia with “some pretty terrible stuff,” but he believes the experience makes him, and other Soviet citizens, hyperaware of good design when they see it. Julia Barton explores the good, the bad, and the weird products of the former empire.

The Vesna 309-4 cassette recorder (© Ilya Popenko, Made in Russia by Michael Idov, Rizzoli, 2011) “None could quite stack up to their foreign counterparts in sound quality, but, like so many things made in the USSR, they were unbreakable. The final advantage was this: if your Soviet stereo was being reluctant, hitting it always worked.” -Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design.

Morskoi Boi Arcade Game (© Museum of Soviet Arcade Games, Made in Russia by Michael Idov, Rizzoli, 2011) “From afar, the game appears to be as complex as a submarine itself, with its blue tin cabinet covered in mysterious, bright yellow and red gauges. Upon closer inspection it becomes apparent that this is just a box covered in stickers…” -Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design.

Sputnik radio ad (© TASS-Photo, Made in Russia by Michael Idov, Rizzoli, 2011)

BK0010-01 Home Computer (Viacheslav Slavinsky creative commons 3.0) “In short, the BK is the reason your company’s IT support team is fifty percent Russian…its bare-bones severity…laid the foundation for the emergence of the might Russian hacker.” -Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design.

[99% Invisible podcast, May 2011]

American Icon

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 10:34:00 -0500

by Julia Barton

Twenty years since its official demise, Dallas is the show that won’t die. Turn on a TV in many parts of the world, and you can still see the original saga of conniving oilmen, their business feuds, their alcoholic wives and sultry mistresses (and underaged nieces). And now the cable network TNT plans to start shooting a pilot for a sequel to the series, featuring the next generation of Ewings to fight and slut their way around Southfork Ranch.

Growing up in Dallas, I only remember seeing one episode: “Black Market Baby.” And that was because my best friend, Jennifer White, was an extra in it. Her father worked on the local set of Dallas when the show came to film exterior shots in Dallas once a year.

Recently I sat down with Jennifer to watch “Black Market Baby” again.

“Seven years is a long time,” the actress Linda Gray fake-drawled to her husband, J.R. Ewing. “And there’s nothing wrong with me.”

“Did she just say they haven’t had sex in seven years?” Jennifer exclaimed. “We definitely were not allowed to watch this when we were nine.”

But somehow we know the whole plot: how, five episodes earlier, J.R.’s brother Bobby’s wife Pamela was going to have a baby, but then J.R. accidentally-on-purpose pushed her off the hayloft at Southfork. And now Sue Ellen, threatened that Pamela may get pregnant again, decides to go out and buy a baby. We see her meet a lawyer in a downtown Dallas overpopulated with extras. Then she goes to a “bad” neighborhood to meet a birth mom. Jennifer and her brother—along with a black extra strategically lain across the apartment steps—were on hand to provide some of the badness.

“There I am!” Jennifer gasps. We see the back of her head, being pushed in in a shopping cart by her younger brother. Vampy music plays in the background. And that’s all. It took all day to film the three-second scene.

“Mostly I remember the chuck wagon,” Jennifer said. “There was a guy that sat in there all day long, and his job was to cook whatever you wanted, as much as you wanted. I must’ve eaten like two pounds of bacon that day.” Her eyes lit up. “Cause I love bacon.”

Bacon: That’s what Dallas ended up being for us in the Sunbelt—a tasty treat, unearned and ultimately, not so good for us. But it signaled the moment when, at last, our growing population and wealth were too important to ignore.

As it was originally conceived, though, Dallas had nothing to do with Dallas. David Jacobs—who created J.R., his younger brother Bobby, and the show’s other core characters—told me he only had a vague idea that the show would be set in Texas (which he’d visited once in his life). In 1977, as part of a CBS development deal with Lorimar Productions, Jacobs wrote up an untitled backstory about Ewing Oil and sent it over to Lorimar executive Mike Filerman.

“He says, ‘Yeah, it was fine. But I changed the name,’” Jacobs recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, what did you call it?’ He said, “Dallas!…It sounded better than Houston.’”

Poor Houston. They’re the ones with the oil, and Fort Worth has the cattle. In the late Seventies, Dallas had bankers, insurance brokers, and technology geeks—and they didn’t wear cowboy hats.

Dallas Observer columnist Jim Schutze moved here from Detroit in 1978, the same year that Dallas began shooting. He thought he was moving to a cow-town and so was surprised find Dallas was, business-wise, more like a “little Switzerland.”

“Nobody here wants to be country,” Schutze says, recalling how, early on, the city’s elite recoiled at J.R.’s pseudo-cowboy swagger.

But in 1978, Dallas was still in the doldrums, reputation-wise, from the assassination of President Kennedy. It may have only been a coincidence that Jack Ruby and J.R. bore the same initials, but Hollywood definitely changed the equation: J.R., the bad man who just didn’t care what people thought, sucked up all that Dallas shame and malaise and used it as fuel.

“It made Dallas, which was this grouchy, adding-machine, actuarial city look kind of cool and romantic,” Schutze says. “So Dallas embraced the myth and in some ways became like the TV show.”

That’s the Dallas I remember growing up: rebranded and set free. We could not build malls and skyscrapers fast enough. We could not perm our hair out big enough. We threw up huge subdivisions of giant houses with big chandeliers in enormous foyers. Our megaton, also initialed versions of J.R.—H. Ross Perot, George W. Bush—jolted the nation with their swaggering talk.

But first, J.R. had to get shot.

“Because it was so successful in [its] second season, CBS asked Dallas to do four additional shows,” David Jacobs recalls. “They already had their cliffhanger…And somebody—nobody knows whether it was Camille Marchetta, who was the story editor; or some people say it was Art Lewis, the producer. But somebody said, ‘Let’s shoot the sonofabitch.”

That was the spring of 1980. By summer, Larry Hagman was on the cover of TIME. The November 1980 episode of Dallas—the one that revealed J.R.’s would-be assassin—remains the most-viewed hour of television ever. More than 350 million people tuned in worldwide.

The bullets hardly slowed J.R. down, of course. By then, thanks to some savvy distributors at CBS, he was an overdubbed international sensation—scheming in German, conniving in Hungarian, cackling in French. He even snuck into drab apartment blocks behind the Iron Curtain, where the show did not officially air.

Estonian filmmaker Jaak Kilmi remembers his father—and plenty of fathers in Tallinn, where he grew up—fashioning converters and antennae to filch TV signals from a Finnish broadcast tower across the Baltic Sea. Every Friday night, Kilmi’s family would gather around their Soviet console to keep up with the Ewings. His mother would translate the Finnish subtitles into Estonian.

“Everyone believed that’s the American reality. People wanted to believe that people lived in skyscrapers and had beautiful cars, and everything was shiny and glamorous,” Kilmi says.

Kilmi’s made a documentary, Disco and Atomic War, about how Dallas helped weaken the hold of Communism. In truth, the show’s influence was minimal—until after the Soviet bloc collapsed. In the vacuum, though, Dallas provided a handy blueprint to would-be capitalists. Handy—and often disastrous, as I saw on a recent trip to Romania.

Off the road between the capital of Bucharest and the Black Sea, there’s a green metal arch that looks straight off a Texas ranch. Turn under it and proceed down a long tree-lined drive, and you arrive in a hotel complex called Parcul Vacante Hermes (a reference to the Greek god of business). This place was more commonly known, back in the 1990s, as “Southforkscu.”

The local tycoon who built it, Ilie Alexandru, wanted to be the J.R. of Romania. Eyeing his TV, he first built a white, gabled hotel and called it “Dallas.” Then came the hotels “Texas” and “Western.” Alexandru also built stables, polo fields, a mansion with an eight-car garage and—somewhat inconsistently—a replica of the Eiffel Tower.

The park’s current manager, Rodica Florea, takes me around the grounds, which are practically empty on a cold January morning. Florea explains how she, too, watched Dallas in the 1980s. Unlike in the Soviet Union, the show aired on state TV in socialist Romania. (Some subversive advisors apparently told dictator Nicolae Ceausescu Dallas presented a critique of capitalism).

“I can’t believe it was allowed, especially because we only had two hours of television a day,” Florea remembers.

Ilie Alexandru, born to a poor family, watched it like everyone else. Soon after the fall of Ceausescu in 1989, Alexandru was swaggering across this farmland empire in a cowboy hat and boots. He put on concerts and employed dozens of locals. He even got Larry Hagman to visit once.

But now the hotels “Dallas” and “Texas” are both closed indefinitely for repairs. Turns out the J.R. of Romania built most of Southforkscu with borrowed money he couldn’t repay. He ended up doing eight years in prison for a variety of financial crimes, and he died last year a broken man. The state sold all his assets to investors who stripped Parcul Vacante Hermes bare. Florea’s employers are trying to rebuild the place, but judging from the broken windows in Hotel “Texas,” it could take some time.

While in jail, Alexandru told a Romanian paper, “I admired J.R., but I was like Bobby. The Bobby inside me finished me.”

Even at the real Southfork, the one north of Dallas, people seem surprised that the show still has so much traction.

“I keep thinking, well, maybe no one will come next year,” Southfork tour guide Adele Taylor told me. “But that’s not the case. We do 11 tours a day, and we get a lot of people.”

I end up on a tour with folks from Algeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among other countries. We sit on patio chairs by the pool while Taylor tells us how the cast and crew used film magic to make this place look huge. Southfork’s pool is tiny, and its long driveway actually pretty short. The house itself isn’t much bigger than a 1990s McMansion. Ilie Alexandru would’ve been disappointed.

Many visitors to Southfork have written about this sense of disappointment, but also their awe at how easily we were all fooled. The illusion of Dallas, of course, is bigger than just film magic: it’s the illusion that we, like Ewing Oil, will grow bigger and wealthier forever.

Dallas, the city, was naturally first in line to buy the fantasy in the Hollywood mirror. Just look at the new Cowboys stadium, our pot-holed streets and shuttered public pools if you want to know where that’s gotten us.

But abroad, the illusion seems to have worked differently. At Southfork, I chatted with some Congolese immigrants, Simon Ntobi and his brother Pitshou. Smiling, they talked about watching Dallas in Kinshasha, gathered around a black-and-white TV with their extended family.

Simon Ntobi lives in Dallas now and loves it. In halting English, he explains how Dallas, the show, gave him a head’s up about America—that life here would not be easy.

“The American dream is not true, and is also not false,” he says. “It depends on what you want to do. When I came to America, I didn’t have money…I think only five dollars.”

Now Simon he has a job, a wife, some real money to live on. He says he succeeded by staying focused. By way of explanation, he bursts into the French theme song for Dallas. It actually has words:

Dallas, malheur à celui qui n’a pas compris
Dallas, un jour, il y perdra la vie
Dallas, ton univers impitoyable
Dallas, glorifie la loi du plus fort…

(Dallas, bad luck to he who doesn’t understand

Dallas, one day, he could lose his life

Dallas, your pitiless world

Dallas, you glorify survival of the fittest…)

Somewhere in the world, right now, Dallas is still teaching people about our cycles of boom and bust, our desperate housewives and scheming tycoons. But I doubt TNT’s planned sequel will revive the show for Americans. We know the story too well. We all live in Dallas now.

Studio 360, 02/18/11

Xanadu Effect

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 07:15:00 -0400

What happens when we build big?

Julia Barton remembers going to the top floor of Dallas’s then-new city hall when she was teenager. The building, designed by I.M. Pei, is a huge trapezoid jutting out over a wide plaza. Julia found the view from the top pretty fantastic, especially when munching on a Caramello bar from the City Hall vending machines.

But once she went to a protest in the plaza below. And those same windows, now hulking over her, made her feel small, and the whole event insignificant. Texans have a fondness for big structures—big arenas, big houses, big freeways. Julia wasn’t sure if their hidden message wasn’t simply this: I’m important, you’re nobody.

For people who distrust the big project, Edward Tenner’s 2001 essay “The Xanadu Effect” is some comfort. Tenner, a visiting scholar at Princeton University, ponders the ways in which obsession with bigness can presage hard times for a business or even a nation. Tenner named his essay not for Olivia Newton-John’s anthem or even the Coleridge poem, but for the palace Xanadu built in the movie “Citizen Kane.” That Xanadu, of course, was based on a real-life palace that newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst built in his waning days of empire:

On its 24,000 acres were a 354,000-gallon swimming pool, a private zoo and four main buildings with a total of 165 rooms. Along with other such extravagances, the estate helped send Hearst into trusteeship late in life. The cavernous halls of Welles’ gloomy cinematic Xanadu seemed to filmgoers — as the real, happier building must have appeared to many Hearst Corp. public investors — the very image of the pride that goes before a fall.

The downside of the Xanadu Effect has seen itself play out in other places—the Empire State Building, for example, was conceived in the 1920s but completed during the Great Depression, when it was known as “the Empty State Building.” Tenner’s not arguing that big things shouldn’t be built; he’s saying bigness is a gamble. It pays off when it it uplifts people, gives them a sense of grandeur and purpose. It fails when it crushes them or just makes life a pain, as in the big-built city of Moscow, where pedestrians have to scurry under the wide avenues in tunnels:

(Above: A pedestrian tunnel in Moscow. Credit: Veronica Khokhlova)

On a recent reporting trip to Russia for PRI’s “The World,” Julia travelled to Sochi, Russia’s southern-most city and upcoming host of the 2014 Winter Olympics. Sochi is Europe’s biggest construction site right now, with Xanadu-like ice-palaces going up right on the Black Sea.

(Above: Big Ice Palace. Credit: Julia Barton)

All the construction—including billions of dollars of infrastructure—is good news for the Russian state and shoring up its presence in the Caucasus. It’s not necessarily good news for the locals. Julia interviewed a Sochi resident, Alexei Kravets, who’s been in a stand-off with authorities about the fate of the home he built by the Black Sea.

(Above: Alexei Kravets. Credit: Julia Barton)

Kravets’s court case to save his home has been standing in the way of a new railway complex. Construction workers have been throwing rocks through his windows, scraping his walls with backhoes, and hauling away his storage units. Kravets has been confronting them on film:

It’s a dramatic example of big vs. small, but this type of conflict often happens in the face of massive development. Edward Tenner says beyond just governments or private developers, we all need to think more carefully about the costs and benefits of building big.

“Bigness is a strategy that just about always fails, unless it succeeds. Or you could say it always succeeds except when it fails. And there really is no one way that you can regard it. You have to see it as a very powerful, easy-to-misuse, but also tempting way to go about things in life,” he says.

Notes:

Julia Barton produced another great story from 99% Invisible about the Unsung Icons of Soviet Design. An all-time fav.
More audio from the Russian protest Julia attended on her own podcast, DTFD.
Julia’s story for PRI’s The World: Sochi 2014: Building Boom for Winter Olympics Leaves Some Behind

Audio Danger

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 07:00:00 -0400

(illustration by Lisa Padilla)

Nieman Storyboard

Audio Danger: Stories from the edge of listening

by Julia Barton | January 4, 2012

[As part of our mission to look at storytelling in every medium, Storyboard is pleased to introduce Julia Barton, who will bring us several posts in 2012 focused on developments in and examples from the world of audio narratives. –Ed.]

Writers and video producers live in dread of the wandering eye. Audio producers live for it. That’s what makes us, in our secret hearts, troublemakers. We want you to lose sight of everything in front of your face: to stare through that dish in your hand, ignore your children, drop into a glazed-over trance of our making. Maybe don’t drive off the road, but please do miss a few exits or get stuck in your car. Good audio should be dangerous that way.

But it’s very hard to accomplish, especially these days, when more and more audio comes to us via that distraction machine, the Web. Hence these posts. In the Storyboard spirit, I’ll be talking with audio producers and editors about how they accomplish their best stories, what obstacles they’ve overcome and the strategies they’ve learned along the way. I should point out that conversations about audio craft have long been underway on sites like Transom and airmedia.org. And there’s a great new podcast, “How Sound,” from longtime audio instructor Rob Rosenthal, who also interviews intrepid producers. In the posts I’ll be doing for Storyboard, I’ll simply be adding to (and sometimes echoing) all those worthy explorations.

I got my start in radio in 1995, while pursuing a master’s degree in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa. Doing airshifts at WSUI, the university’s then-analog AM public radio station, was for me just an amusing side trip on the way to a blurry future in magazine writing. But then we started airing a new show, “This American Life,” at 6 a.m. on my Sunday shift. I had a huge list of things to do during that hour, but I kept forgetting about my impending newscast and listening to the radio instead. The stories, at once mesmerizing and funny and surprising, actually endangered my work. So I had to start putting TAL on cassettes to hear later, like a portable, or pocket – or what’s the word? – cast.

Since those days, I’ve been a radio reporter, an editor, and contributor to such programs as PRI’s “Studio 360” and “The World.” Still, every time I sit down to craft a new audio feature, it feels almost as hard as the first time. Every piece is its own hellish puzzle.

That said, audio – especially broadcast radio – is a pretty conservative medium. Listeners appreciate familiarity and tend to punish experimentation (see below for one example). On the upside, I really don’t have to try anything new. On the downside: well, not to offend anyone, but there are plenty of places on the low FM band where, format wise, it remains 1979. That’s fine for many; I don’t want it to be fine for me.

So I sometimes go in search of the subtle shifts that amount to major trends in our hidebound world of audio storytelling. To that end, I talked with two people with their ears especially open: Julie Shapiro, the Artistic Director* of the Third Coast International Audio Festival (TCIAF) in Chicago, and Roman Mars, who was a judge for TCIAF’s awards competition this year – and who produces a successful and innovative podcast of his own, “99% Invisible,” about design. (Full disclosure: I’ve edited Roman’s work and also did a story for him).

Hundreds of aspiring Next-Big-Thing audio producers submit their best work to TCIAF from around the world. When I asked Shapiro and Mars what trends they’re hearing, most of their answers fell under one surprisingly simple category: the “Radiolab” Effect. WNYC’s “Radiolab,” in case you haven’t heard it, is an occasional broadcast and regular podcast about science, and it’s as highly produced as anything on the radio. Most “Radiolab” stories are crafted from hundreds of hours of audio, a ratio that that’s hard for even the most accomplished programs to pull off. Ira Glass recently confessed in Transom, “If they could do an hour of this every week, I think I’d have to quit radio.”

So Shapiro and Mars aren’t hearing a replication of of Radiolab’s labor-intensive production values, but they are hearing another trademark of the show, its conversational style. You’d think, since the talk radio format is mostly talk, that this would be a given. But radio evolved in the age of oratory, when a stentorian delivery helped pierce the broadcast static, and that’s what listeners still expect.

In the age of HD and earbuds, though, producers are finding they can sound more like themselves. “Radiolab” co-hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich break down complicated stories through a relaxed Socratic dialogue, an approach that’s also been popularized by NPR’s “Planet Money” and APM’s “Freakonomics.”

“People are starting to recognize you can have fun and talk about interesting things as well,” Shapiro says. Or as Mars puts it, “In America, we explain things a lot. So much that we need two people.”

Shapiro and Mars also hear a big “Radiolab” Effect in the deeper integration of music and storytelling, far beyond the musical scoring that’s a hallmark of “This American Life.” You can hear Jad Abumrad’s Oberlin music composition degree in the show’s use of original music to explain concepts (this segment from the episode “Loops” is a good example). That technique is showing up in more TCIAF award winners, like this independent piece, “Kohn,” about a man with a disability that causes him to speak slowly but also causes his brain to hear himself as speaking like everyone else. Producer Andy Mills reached out to the band Hudson Branch to compose a song about Kohn’s brain, and the spoken story acts almost as a setup for the performance.

TCIAF’s winning story this year, “The Wisdom of Jay Thunderbolt,” takes the musical approach a step further, remixing whole swaths of an interview with an underworld character who runs (or ran) a strip club out of his Detroit home. The nervous, disorienting result crystallizes at the point when Thunderbolt pulls a gun on his interviewers.

“None of us could stop listening,” Mars says of the piece. “It solved problems in really creative ways. Almost every step was chancy.”

“Chancy,” of course, thrills the veteran producers behind TCIAF, and it’s their job to reward it. Yet flagship programs such as NPR’s “All Things Considered” get a lot of flack when they showcase even mildly risky work. So it’s to the show’s credit that it teamed up with the independent producers at Long Haul Productions to air their story about the relationship between hydraulic fracking and earthquakes in rural Arkansas. The piece breaks many formats: it’s non-narrated, meaning interviewees and “found sound” do all the talking; and it features a commissioned song interwoven among the interviews. Listeners were quick to vent their fury at NPR. “I don’t want artsy, stylistic reporting; I want factual reporting,” said one.

“How Sound” podcaster Rob Rosenthal later interviewed the producers, Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister, about the experience. The upshot? It sucked, but ATC’s editors are standing by the team, and maybe next time they’ll make more effort to explain experimental formats ahead of time.

At least the angry ATC listeners were, well, listening. And maybe catching a whiff of how dangerous that can be.

——-

Feb. 3, 2012: NPR’s Kelly McEvers on trauma and the calculus of risk

March 2, 2012: NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling’s secrets to great tape

March 15, 2012: Transgressive voices

May 22, 2012: The magic behind unscripted radio

Studio 360

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 17:01:00 -0400

Chris Drury’s Carbon Sink (Courtesy of Chris Drury)

It’s easy to overlook public art — until it suddenly disappears. Recently, Penn State removed its statue of the late football coach Joe Paterno after a huge outcry (both for and against keeping it). Last year, Maine’s governor made the controversial decision to remove a mural that celebrated the labor movement, housed at the state’s Department of Labor.

A year ago, the University of Wyoming’s Art Museum commissioned an outdoor sculpture from British artist Chris Drury. Carbon Sink was a 36-foot-diameter vortex of logs killed by pine beetles atop a bed of Wyoming coal. The artist said he wanted to draw a connection between Wyoming’s extractive industries and damage wrought by climate change (which has encouraged a devastating pine beetle infestation across the West). Following this year’s commencement — less than a year later — the sculpture was gone: the logs put in a scrap heap, and the coal into the university’s power plant.

“I thought it was a little hypocritical to use carbon dollars to fund an anti-carbon sculpture,” says Tom Lubnau, the Republican majority leader of the Wyoming State House of Representatives. Lubnau represents Gillette, the center of the state’s coal and natural gas region. He notes that between 60-80 percent of Wyoming’s budget — and by extension the University’s budget — comes from taxes on the energy sector. Lubnau’s comment got play in the New York Times and elsewhere, something he tells Kurt Andersen he finds “surprising,” since in his mind, he was just pointing out the obvious.

Lubnau denies that lawmakers demanded the sculpture’s demise. “It was always meant to be temporary,” he says. But Jeffrey Lockwood, a professor of Natural Sciences and Humanities at the university, believes that the removal “was a political response to political pressure.” Lockwood has written about the controversy for the Wyoming news site Wyofile. The sculpture, he reports, was intended to remain in place until it had eroded entirely.

In a recent bill, Wyoming gave the university’s Energy Resources Council — an industry group — right of approval over art going up in the university’s newly renovated recreation center. Lubnau doesn’t see any issue with that. “What’s wrong with allowing … [the] industry [to] have approval, or the veto power on a few pieces of art in this one building?”

Lockwood sees the opposition to the work as ironic, since he believes it was not meant as an attack on the energy sector. Producers and consumers alike, he says, “we’re all culpable with regard to climate change.”

Produced by:

Julia Barton

Sochi 2014 Building Boom

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 23:32:00 -0400

Sochi 2014: Building Boom for Winter Olympics Leaves Some Behind

By Julia Barton ⋅ March 26, 2012

Katya Davidenko sits with a group of students who study English at a college in the Russian resort city of Sochi. She said she’s excited for the day when thousands of athletes and spectators from around the world will descend on her hometown for the 2014 Winter Games.

“Before Olympic Games were announced, I felt like I will leave this city and go and live somewhere else,” Davidenko said. “But now, when I see what is happening here, I obviously will stay here.”

But not all the students share Davidenko’s enthusiasm. Diana Kozlova, who recently got married, said rents are going up quickly and she can’t afford to start a family.

“The local people can’t live here because life in Sochi has become very expensive,” she said.

Whether Sochi is getting better or worse as a result of the coming Olympics, one thing is certain — this once sleepy resort town will never be the same.

Almost every corner of Sochi now bears the marks of massive construction. New hotels and condos sprout from the hillsides. The Russian government is building new highways and some 30 miles of light rail. The construction requires multiple tunnels through solid rock.

Sochi’s facelift has officially cost the Russian government at least $10 billion, and state-controlled companies like Gazprom have spent billions more constructing hotels and resorts in the area.

Russia has pledged that Sochi 2014 will be the greenest Olympics yet, but the environmental groups Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund have already pulled out of an agreement to monitor the construction. They say the government largely ignored their recommendations.

They’re especially concerned about unofficial dumps springing up in Sochi.

Tatiana Skyba lives in the hills above the new Olympic ice skating and hockey arenas. She says one night last April, she and her neighbors were awoken by a terrible noise. Their houses shook as if in an earthquake. It was a landslide.

Skyba said her house was knocked off its foundations. The city gave her and her neighbors some money to build new homes. But those houses have started sinking at strange angles. The ground is still moving, and residents now blame a large dump up the hill. They say trucks bring loads of concrete rubble there every day.

City officials say there’s no connection between the dump and the sinking of nearby homes. Still, Sochi has seen an increase in landslides since Olympic construction began.

Meanwhile, Skyba and her neighbors are stuck in their tilted houses above the gleaming Olympic park.

“We have this joke among us on the street,” Skyba said. “By the time the Olympics start, we won’t have to buy tickets. We’ll have already slid down there.”

At least Skyba still lives in her old neighborhood. About a thousand Sochi families have had to move because of the Olympics. That number of evictions is small compared with other places that have hosted recent “mega sports events.” The UN Human Rights Council found that the 2008 Beijing Olympics prompted at least 6,000 evictions.

In a statement, the International Olympic Committee said that it takes the issue of relocation very seriously.

“A certain number of relocations have been necessary for the construction of Olympic venues, and Sochi 2014 and the government has assured us that people are being fairly compensated in line with Russian law,” the IOC said.

While the IOC said it has met with some of the displaced families in Sochi, it hasn’t spoken with one man there who’s been in a standoff with Russian authorities.

Alexei Kravets stands in front of his home on the Black Sea in Adler. (Photo: Julia Barton)

Alexei Kravets has been living in one room of his house on the Black Sea coast. He’s been without water, gas or electricity for five months, since the city demolished the rest of his neighborhood to make way for a new rail yard. His cinderblock house is surrounded by mud and rubble, and he’s painted slogans like “IOC help!” and “SOS!” in red on all the windows.

“In the evening, a backhoe comes up to the house and starts to scrape the concrete just to pressure me psychologically,” Kravets said. “If I left the place for, like, 15 minutes, they’d tear it down right away.”

Kravets said the backhoes have damaged the walls and he’s afraid the house could collapse on him. He’s refused the government’s offer of an apartment three miles from the coast. He’s a lawyer, and he’s appealed to Russian and European courts for help, but has gotten no ruling.

“We never asked anything from the state,” Kravets said. “We built the house all by ourselves, and now the state is taking it away from us.”

Kravets pulled out a small laptop and showed a video he made. Recently he put some of his belongings into a metal storage unit behind his house to save them from demolition. Construction workers immediately showed up with a crane to take the unit away.

“Where do you work?” Kravets demanded of the supervisor in the video. “Where are your orders to remove my things?”

“We are building Olympic facilities,” the man said. Kravets again asked for court papers, but the man brushed him off.

“It’s a government decision,” the man said.

Evangelizing in Ukraine

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 05:58:00 -0500

Ukraine’s Embassy of God Evangelical Church Struggles With Founder’s Controversy

By Julia Barton

February 13, 2012

PRI’s The World

Audio: Play | Download

When it comes to going to church, Ukraine is mostly Orthodox Christian, but Protestant churches are gaining a foot-hold there.

One of the biggest now is the evangelical Embassy of God, based in the capital Kiev.

The church’s founder, Sunday Adelaja, originally hails from Nigeria and he represents an unusual success for Africans in the former Soviet world.

Adelaja, who grew up in a poor Nigerian village, said couldn’t afford to go to college. Then in 1986, he got a rare offer.

“Of course, thinking about it now looks kind of funny, because I got a scholarship from the Communist party of the Soviet Union,” Adelaja said. “The whole idea was to give scholarships to Africans — young, dynamic Africans who are brilliant — so that they may go back to Africa and do Communist and socialist revolution.”

Adelaja laughs at this because he kept a secret from the Soviet Communists. Before moving to the officially atheist Soviet Union, he became an evangelical Christian. He kept his faith under wraps until the USSR fell apart in 1991.

“I just knew that God was pressing me, pressing upon my heart, to step up from the boat, and step into the water, and try to just offer the word of life, the gospel, to the nation of Ukraine,” Adelaja said.

It wasn’t easy at first. Adelaja said that’s because he’s black.

Africans still face frequent harassment in Ukraine and other parts of the former Soviet Union, and you can still find racist depictions of blacks in the media.

Still, Adelaja managed to get his own Sunday morning television show in the mid 1990s. And his church, Embassy of God, began to grow.

(Worshippers sing a hymn in Russian at an Embassy of God church in suburban Kiev. This branch of the church meets in a Soviet-era auditorium. Photo: Julia Barton)

It now claims to have 100,000 members, though that number is hard to verify. Adelaja preaches the so-called “prosperity gospel,” that God intends the faithful to have financial wealth and happiness. It’s in contrast to the Orthodox Church emphasis on reward in the afterlife.

Adelaja no longer has a TV show, but his church is sprouting branches around Ukraine and beyond.

In suburban Kiev, about 100 Embassy of God members meet in a wood-paneled, Soviet-era auditorium. It’s extremely cold out, and the worshippers keep their coats and hats on as they sway to the music in the sanctuary.

Their pastor, Ruslan Mahmedov, pulls up the day’s Bible verses, in Russian, on his iPad and projects them on a screen behind him.

Many here say Embassy of God helped them when no one else would. Yuri Shostak says that four years ago, when he got out of prison, he was living in the storm sewers. Then he got into a drug rehab program run by the church, and now works there helping other addicts.

“For me, it’s a miracle that I’m here now,” Shostak said. “I have everything. I have clothes, I have shoes. I have people that I love. I’m so grateful that Pastor Adelaja took us in, that he came here to Ukraine.”

But not everyone is glad Sunday Adelaja is in Ukraine. Authorities in the Orthodox Church have condemned him. They say Embassy of God is nothing more than a cult with a charismatic leader. According to Ivan Bodnaruk, a Kiev attorney, it’s worse — the church is a financial scam.

“What is Sunday Adelaja doing in Ukraine? I’ve asked myself that question,” Bodnaruk said. “I think he came here to make money and maybe build a political career.”

Bodnaruk represents hundreds of Ukrainians in a civil case against Adelaja and members of Embassy of God.

It all goes back to an investment fund that church members started here in 2006. The Kings Capital fund promised high dividends. But it turned out to be a Ponzi scheme that bankrupted many investors — people like Elena Urbanskaya. She mortgaged her apartment to invest in King’s Capital. She said Embassy of God members coached her through the whole process. Then the fund collapsed and she lost everything.

“It was a terrible shock for people, because within the church, people trusted each other,” Urbanskaya said.

(The main sanctuary of Embassy of God in Kiev is still a temporary structure. The church has been raising funds to build a modern mega-church, but Pastor Sunday Adelaja blames bad publicity from a legal case for hampering their capital campaign. Photo: Julia Barton)

Ukrainian prosecutors maintain that Adelaja ran Kings Capital from behind the scenes. They’re pursuing charges that could put him in prison for up to 12 years. Adelaja denies any involvement.

“Just prove what I have done! I don’t even know what I have done. I’ve never visited the company. I don’t even know where it is,” he said.

Adelaja added that his goal was never to make money and amass power, but to save souls. Now, he said, he can’t walk the streets without someone shouting insults at him, or worse.

“Believe you me. For every day I stay in the Ukraine, I die a thousand deaths,” Adelaja said.

Perhaps it was the below-zero temperatures, but on a recent Sunday morning, the main chapel of Embassy of God was only a third full.

It’s an inflatable structure, like those that house tennis courts. It’s supposed to be temporary.

Embassy of God hopes to build a new mega-church. But that’s on hold for now. Membership and donations are way down. Adelaja blames that on bad publicity from the legal case.

The case could take years to resolve.

Pro-Putin, Anti-Putin

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:55:00 -0500

Writing the Best Known Pro-Putin and Anti-Putin Songs

By Julia Barton ⋅ February 3, 2012

PRI’s The World

Thousands of protesters plan to gather in Russia on Saturday to call for political reform. But Moscow will also host competing rallies, some in support of Russia’s current prime minister and top presidential candidate, Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s supporters and detractors both have pop songs to sing about him. But oddly, Russia’s best-known pro-Putin and anti-Putin songs were written by the very same songwriter.

Alexander Yellin sits in an expensive café in downtown Moscow. The 53-year-old lyricist is partly bald – what’s left of his graying hair is tied back in a pony-tail.

Yellin writes songs that others sing. Ten years ago, he bet a friend $200 that he could create a hit song in Russia on the cheap.

Yellin won the bet. His pop song “A Man Like Putin” became so huge that it’s been translated into English.

When “A Man Like Putin” came out, Putin had been president for two years. Yellin said his song reflected the country’s admiration for the man.

“At that moment, there was such euphoria that there was this new, young leader who’d move the country forward,” Yellin said. “The song was a bit ironic. It wasn’t opposed to Putin—it was written in a way to depict Putin as the ideal man, even the ideal husband for women.”

Yellin may have written “A Man Like Putin” as light satire, but it wasn’t taken that way. Vladimir Putin made it his anthem and even played it at rallies. Yellin, who’d been a dissident rocker in Soviet days, seemed a bit uncomfortable with the embrace.

But even just a few years ago, he told foreign journalists there was no point writing anti-Putin songs—no one would listen to them.

All that changed last September, when now-Prime Minister Putin announced he was running for president — again. A political opposition leader asked Alexander Yellin if he’d write a different kind of song now, one that reflected the country’s disgruntled mood.

Yellin came up with “Our Madhouse Votes for Putin”, which is from the viewpoint of a patient in a psychiatric ward. “Why is there a hole in my head, and in the budget?” he asks his doctor. “Why instead of tomorrow today is yesterday?

“It’s all so complicated!” the patient concludes. “It’s just too messed up. Our madhouse will vote for Putin, and with Putin we’ll be happy.”

Alexander Yellin said mental illness provides an obvious metaphor for the way Russians view their leaders.

“Schizophrenia seems to me inherent in Russians,” he said. “On the one hand, Russians don’t love those in power, but on the other, they just go along with everything that’s done in the political arena.”

Yellin and his group Rabfak—a Soviet acronym for “Workers’ College”—released the song in October and the video went viral.

Rabfak performed at protest rallies here in Moscow last December. A group of Russian linguists named “Our Madhouse Votes for Putin” the Russian phrase of the year. The last time Yellin won that honor was in 2002—for the phrase “A Man Like Putin.”

All told, Yellin said he made about $8,000 off “A Man Like Putin,” plus the $200 bet. He doesn’t regret writing the song; he even hopes it might get recorded again.

“This time,” he said, “its satirical nature might come through.”

Middle Class in Ukraine

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:45:00 -0500

By Julia Barton ⋅ May 22, 2012

Like her country, Olena Koshil has been running non-stop for 20 years. At only 32, she manages a TV production company in Kiev. She speaks several languages and has been working in national TV since she was a teenager. In 2004, like many other urban professionals, she became involved in the political upheavals known as the Orange Revolution.

In November of that year, on Kiev’s Independence Square, Olena felt her life change for good. She was among thousands who crowded into the square to protest results of the presidential election.

“At one moment everybody understood that it’s the moment you can decide, and you have to take part,” Olena recalls. “And it was a very new feeling for me, for example, and I think for many people.”

That night, Olena and her husband Denis Samygin made up flyers and drove to the outer reaches of Kiev to paste them on bus shelters.

“Don’t go to work, just go to Maidan, because tomorrow, it’s our last chance,” Olena wrote on the flyers.

Olena and the other protesters believed the vote had been rigged in favor of a candidate from the industrialized Eastern part of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych. The campaign had been incredibly bitter, and opposition candidate Victor Yuschenko had even been poisoned.

After two weeks of protests, the Ukrainian government allowed new elections to take place and that time, Yuschenko won.

Olena was thrilled—and for about a year, she says, the country seemed transformed. But slowly, she watched the energy of the Orange Revolution fade. Three years ago, when new elections came around, Ukrainians elected the candidate who’d been defeated in the Orange Revolution, Victor Yanukovych.

The new government has put some Orange Revolution leaders in jail. That’s upset the European Union, and upset the middle class Ukrainians, who want more links with Western Europe. At this point, Olena is both frustrated and defiant.

“I don’t think that we lost. Because you never lost your experience, you never lose your experience. If you lived the experience, you have that, and this is yours,” she says.

But meanwhile, Olena has a lot to think about in her own life. She has two children. And a few years ago, she and Denis got a mortgage to buy in an apartment in a 100-year-old building in central Kiev. They renovated it to take out all of the Soviet-era touches. The closet-sized bathroom became…a closet. And the old kitchen is now the bathroom.

“It’s very great to have bath-ROOM,” Olena laughs. “Because ‘bathroom’—you have to have to have a room. To have a bathroom with a window, and so big, it’s like extraordinary.”

Olena says she and her circle of friends define “middle class” as having enough money to own an apartment and a car, and to travel abroad. She and her family live comfortably, but for Denis, this sense of comfort pretty much ends at their front door.

“What’s lacking for the middle class is any kind of social protection, as far as health care is concerned, or the legal system,” Denis says. What’s more, he says government bureaucracy makes it hard to run a business. He should know—he’s co-owner of a public relations firm. He says things are getting more corrupt again under the Yanukovych regime.

“More people are talking about how it’s pointless to live here,” Denis says, “and it would be better to leave.” But he and Olena have no plans to go. They care too deeply about Ukraine. After their children were born, Denis even switched from his native Russian to speaking Ukrainian all the time. Denis says this means his wife will usually get the upper hand when they argue, since she’s a native Ukrainian speaker.

Olena grew up in a provincial city southeast of Kiev. Her mother was a pediatrician, and her father an engineer. They were solidly middle class. Except this was the Soviet Union, so the middle class didn’t really exist. Olena remembers going to Soviet military parades with her family.

“From somewhere my father brought these balloons and I [thought] it was a miracle, these balloons. I liked it very much,” Olena recalls.

Balloons felt like a miracle because her parents didn’t have much. In 1991, when Ukraine became a new country, they suddenly had even less.

“My parents were not paid on their work. It was very difficult. There was no money, like there’s no money at all,” she says.

Still, Olena’s parents insisted that she to go to a good school in Kiev. Olena paid her rent in the city by bringing food from the countryside on a two-hour train ride. It eventually paid off: Olena got into university in Kiev and started working as a journalist. Within ten years, she went from hauling plucked chickens on the train to being a national TV editor.

Olena needed determination and energy to succeed in the face of historic change. But now things have started to slow down—and Olena’s not sure she likes that. She describes her current state, half-humorously, as a kind of stagnation, an “existential crisis.”

“Because everything has happened already,” Olena says.

Exciting as her life has been, Olena doesn’t want her children to feel the same pressures she did. Her daughter Sonja, who’s six, has a mobile phone, and 3-year-old Marco knows how to navigate a laptop computer. After Sonja asked for a dog for three years, Olena got her one.

“She has to experience that dreams—if you want something, dreams come true. Just to experience this in her life,” Olena says.

And in the children’s bedroom, the floor is covered in balloons.

I miss hating...

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:11:00 -0500

I miss hating the Soviet Union

My obsession with the USSR was a form of teen rebellion. Now, I can’t help thinking: They despised us like pros

Ronnie Dunn, half of the former bestselling country music duo Brooks & Dunn, has a singing voice that’s echoed through many a truck stop and stadium. And Dunn loves himself some Soviet art.

You read that right. Soviet art. This summer, I went to Nashville to interview Dunn for PRI’s “Studio 360.” “I’ll show you my Gerasimov,” he said with a drawl, as he strode up his mansion’s staircase in cowboy boots. “That one’s a Timkov.” The balladeer showed me wall after wall of impressionistic landscapes, portraits and sketches. And then he turned the interview on me: What was Moscow like the last time I went? How’s the traffic? When did I learn Russian, and why?

“Wow,” I thought after I collected my jaw off the floor and said goodbye. “He’s got the Thing. He’s got it bad.”

I should know. I’ve had the Thing most of my life. The Soviet Thing: an addictive mixture of wonder and disgust evoked by all aspects of that communist empire.

The Thing used to rule whole sectors of our military, academia and media. Of course, it suffered a pretty bad blow 20 years ago this month, when the Soviet Union finally gave up the ghost. But it’s still powerful, maybe now more than ever, as an unacknowledged absence in American life. We live in a country with a USSR-size hole in its soul.

Like Ronnie Dunn, I come from Texas, a place where people used to run for city council on their anti-commie credentials. Better Dead Than Red could have been our state slogan. The summer of 1984, after making his possibly-not-accidental gaffe that he’d begin bombing Russia “in five minutes,” President Ronald Reagan descended on my hometown for his joyful renomination. The Dallas RNC was a festival of Cold War hard-assery.

In that atmosphere, rebellion was easy: just pop open a textbook and learn the Cyrillic alphabet. That’s what I’d been doing at the only high school in Dallas to offer Russian. I figured I’d become a foreign correspondent like the guys whose names graced the USSR sections in bookstores: Harrison Salisbury, David Satter, Hedrick Smith. Go to the Soviet Union, decode mysteries, publish fat tome. Easy!

And then I actually went there. Inspired by the Юs and Яs I was tossing off, my grandparents booked us on a five-city group tour of the USSR. The summer of 1985, we boarded a plane for Leningrad.

I found everything I wanted — a world apart, bleak but exotic. Our first hotel room overlooked an unfinished construction pit filled with dirty water. Television showed factories, Mikhail Gorbachev and ballet. Outside the windows of our tour bus, the grim signage flattered my primitive Russian: a book store was called BOOK STORE; the restaurants, RESTAURANT. We were the wards of Intourist, the state (and only) tourism agency, and our guide was chirpy and sweet in English. But I could spark apparatchik contempt in her face whenever I mangled her native tongue, which was often.

The Soviets paid their flat-footed American tourists (code name, “Dear Guests!”) way more attention than we deserved. Every meal was an alcohol-laden banquet, in between which Intourist arranged endless cultural displays and/or “exchanges” with wincing local journalists. Away from our minders, people swarmed us. In Yerevan, friendly Armenians invited us to parties, wheedled us out of Eurythmics cassettes, and — in the case of the young ladies — tried to get into our pants. In Kiev, a sad college student approached me to practice English. I was obsessed with finding propaganda souvenirs, so he took me to a lonely shop, sighing as I snatched up GLORY TO THE WORKER posters.

When I got back to Dallas, I missed all that Soviet attention horribly. Then I realized that it was still all around me, if fainter. After all, the Soviets had missiles dedicated to my hometown, a place that, if you asked me, had nothing better going for it than some new parking ramps downtown. Our parking ramps could be the start of Armageddon! They were special. Yet they also remained unexploded.

The Soviets engaged us on our favorite terms, ideological. In the shining light of their competitive fixation, anything we did right was a moral victory. Just watch this archival footage of Richard Nixon debating Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev in 1959. Nixon is bragging about color TV cameras. And he’s having the time of his life.

Middle Eastern terrorists are disorganized; the Chinese have an annoying habit of making all our stuff. The Soviets stood apart but hated us like pros. How can you ever get over an enemy like that?

The Supreme Soviet voted itself out of existence on Dec. 26, 1991. I don’t recall caring any more than the rest of America. We won. Not only was the USSR a has-been, but it had also devolved into 15 countries whose names I wouldn’t have recognized except that I’d been to some of them. I’d stopped studying Russian years before — the trip had the perverse effect of making me realize the language was actually hard. But then immigrants from former Soviet lands started showing up. They were Afghanistan War veterans, artists, just ordinary guys overstaying their visas. They told me little scraps of jokes in Russian that I could understand. They introduced me to underground Soviet rock I could’ve heard in 1985 if I’d had a clue.

And so I started studying Russian again. In 1998, I made the first of many trips back to the former Soviet Union, to Yerevan. The party town I remembered had been replaced by a dark maze of casinos and starving dogs. In Kiev, Nike — or was it Adidas? — emblazoned the window of the old propaganda shop. I was finally a correspondent, not of static mysteries, but of breathless, murky, heart-rending change. But my bosses didn’t know exactly where I was. “What did you learn in the USSR?” the CEO of a major-market public broadcaster asked when I returned.

What better sign that we miss the USSR than our total refusal to learn what that mess of nations is called now? Sometimes I’ll meet smart, usually trilingual kids in a former Soviet republic — say, Moldova — who’ll ask what story about their country interests Americans. How can I tell them the truth, “None”? If Moldova wants half a nanosecond of our attention, it might pick a better name, such as that of its biggest shopping center, Malldova. Then get back in the news-from-confusing-places line behind its 14 siblings.

What we crave is menace, and only Russia occasionally fits the bill. (Bonus — still easy to find on a map!). True, its citizens just seem to want ordinary things like matching towels, fair elections and the rule of law. But fortunately, Russia’s leaders don’t (they prefer matching jet décor). If anyone misses the Cold War more than we do these days, it’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. When he goes head-to-head with Sen. John McCain, it’s just like old times.

Yeah, old times. Dangerous. Surreal. And all the more so because we can’t even remember what it was originally about. We only know that at some point, something bad made us feel good about our place in the world, and now it’s gone.

By the end of my interview with Ronnie Dunn about Soviet art, he was openly regretting it. “I kinda don’t want the secret out, to be honest with you,” he said when I asked if he could share his passion with the country music world. Oddly, though, he keeps talking about it. He just doesn’t link to any of these stories on his website or fan pages. I don’t blame him. Many of his fans are as politically conservative as he is, and I imagine he has a healthy respect for the limits of what they can absorb. Collecting art might be sissy. Collecting Soviet art? There’s still room for something traitorous in that vintage hobby.

In his latest New Yorker piece, David Remnick writes, “This month, Russians will commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union with almost universal silence.” Remnick has an A-league case of the Soviet Thing, but for once, he’s wrong. Whether they’re singing old protest songs or penning obscene new ones, Russians have been talking about today’s anniversary constantly. How could they not? They lived through the bizarre nightmare of the USSR. We’re the ones who haven’t woken up yet.

Salon, 12/23/2011

Uzbekistan's Last Witness

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:44:00 -0500

When researcher Steve Swerdlow was on the ground in Uzbekistan in late 2010, Human Rights Watch got a rare glimpse into this isolated, repressive regime. Courageous lawyers, torture victims and their relatives took great risks to tell their stories in a series of audio interviews. Soon after, Human Rights Watch was effectively expelled from the country.

Audio [.mp3] produced by Julia Barton for Human Rights Watch, 12/13/2011.

Soviet Art, Country Music

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 23:04:00 -0500

Why does a country music megastar and all-American guy like Ronnie Dunn — half of what was Nashville’s biggest act, Brooks & Dunn — have a house full of paintings from the Soviet Union? It’s a long story.

Twenty years ago, in the fall of 1991, the Soviet Union was being dismantled, and its highly managed art world vanished in a puff of smoke. Unchanged since Stalin’s time, the government-run Artists Union practiced Socialist Realism as the official style, timid in theme and precise in execution. If you weren’t a member of the Artists Union, tough luck — you couldn’t even buy real paints. When the free market came in, the tables turned fast. For Western collectors, who had the money, dissident and underground art (Grisha Bruskin, Komar and Melamid) was hot; official art (Sergey Gerasimov, Nikolai Timkov) was not.

“We found a lot of paintings that were pulled out from under a bed,” recalls Ray Johnson, a Minneapolis collector who went hunting for official art in the decaying empire. Johnson was emphatically not looking for Communist kitsch. “Maybe five to ten percent of the pieces were purely propaganda, or pieces that the government thought they could use to their advantage. But most of the work the artists did they did for themselves and remained in their studios, until people like myself came from all around the world to collect what was in the studios, as opposed to just what was presented by the museums.”

Johnson assembled the largest private collection of Soviet-era paintings outside Russia, and founded the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis with a financial assist from his client Ronnie Dunn. Still, Dunn knows that his passion for Socialist Realism clashes with his image as Nashville royalty. “I kinda don’t want the secret out, to be honest with you,” he tells Studio 360. “I gotta go work on my pick-up, change the oil on my truck. I don’t know anything about this art!”

PRI’s Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen, Nov. 18, 2011

DTFD

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 11:16:30 -0400

I just became virtual friends with Love and Radio producer Nick van der Kolk, and found him wondering (virtually) why there are so few podcasts by women in public radio. I can’t answer for the other ladies, but for me, it’s because I’m doing the dishes. Of course, men do the dishes, too. Sometimes. But so as not to seem like a slacker, I’ve decided to podcast WHILE doing the dishes. Now I’m no longer muttering to myself in the kitchen, I am Podcasting.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

Third Coast

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 08:32:00 -0400

THIRD COAST INTERNATIONAL AUDIO FESTIVAL

Title: Dallas, Pitiless Universe

Produced: Julia Barton

Presented: TCF/WBEZ 91.5, USA, 2011

Collection: Library Spotlight

Tags: First Person, Pop Culture

BEHIND THE SCENES with Julia Barton

Why did you choose this topic, and why now, specifically?

It was actually a commission from Studio 360. They’ve been running this great series called American Icons for years, re-exploring influential moments in American culture, from Moby Dick to I Love Lucy. At the end of this latest round, they asked listeners for their suggestions, and they liked the one about the show Dallas the best.

You interview so many different people for this story, including people in different countries. How involved was the production process and where did you start?

I grew up in Dallas, so I mostly knew whom to talk with there, starting with my best friend from childhood, who was an extra on the show once. And I knew I wanted to talk with the creator of the show, David Jacobs, who turned out to be a fantastic interview.

Then as luck would have it, I was headed to Moldova earlier this year to do some media training in a small town on the border with Romania. So I just googled “Dallas” and “Romania” and found out that the show had a huge influence there. And, better yet, a Romanian tycoon had built a sort of replica of Southfork ranch about three hours by car from where I was staying. So I hired a Moldovan guy with a Romanian passport to take me out there with an interpreter. It was fascinating and a little sad. This didn’t make it into the story, but the tycoon also put a small-sized replica of the Eiffel Tower on his property. He died last year a broken man, having bankrupted himself in his effort to be the J.R.of Romania.

Is it difficult to shape a story that doesn’t necessarily have a central character and narrative arc? How do you go about giving a story like that structure?

It is tricky. Musical moments helped a lot with this. I knew I wanted the Dallas theme to blast out somewhere, and also to include Jimmy Dale Gilmore’s great song about Dallas. Then I found these other weird artifacts, like the Howard Keel song “J.R.! Who do you think you are?” from the album Dallas: the Musical Story. These are all great songs — some serious, some sad, some cheesy. And they’re all supposedly about the same place, but in name only. They helped me navigate through all the different versions of “Dallas” I wanted to explore.

At Southfork Ranch, this immigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo sang me the Dallas theme song in French. Once I found the lyrics to that, I knew that was going to be the end of the piece.

But in between all the musical moments, my editor David Krasnow and I did a lot of anguished rewriting. I talked about some of this recently on Transom. It was really hard to get this story to flow in the right way, and we probably went through about 10 scripts.

This story is really funny, and it sort of subtly makes fun of Dallas while also giving it due credit. How did you think about using humor in this story or in your work in general?

Dallas is funny — come on. We took mercy on it by not including the infamous “It was all a dream” scene which turned the whole seventh season into one big delusion of Pamela Ewing’s so that Patrick Duffy could get back on the series after his character died. But a lot of people love Dallas and it’s had a huge influence both abroad and in my home town. The different effects it had are very interesting to me.

At the end of the piece you say that although Dallas still plays in other countries all over the world, it’s no longer on television in America because “we know the story too well, we all live in Dallas now.” Will you explain a little bit more about what you mean by that? And if Dallas is no longer the kind of entertainment we’re seeking, can you think of a show that would be the anti-Dallas?

I left Dallas in 1987 for college, but it’s followed me everywhere by expanding to fill the national space. In 1992, the three major candidates for president - George Bush, Sr., H. Ross Perot, and Bill Clinton - all came from a triangle centered on Dallas. George W. Bush lives there now, and Rick Perry may well carry Dallas money all the way through the next presidential race. What I meant by that line is that with Dallas now so politically and culturally dominant, it’s not an intriguing mystery for Hollywood to chew on anymore.

The anti-Dallas? Yes, I have that all mapped out. It would be 10-part miniseries about the followers of 19th-century French utopian Charles Marie Fourier. Fourier dreamed of a world where we would no longer follow the laws of man or religion, but realign our social structures according to the laws governing our inner passions, which Fourier had conveniently discovered and tabulated. Though dismissed in his day as something of a pervert and crank, his critique of modern life influenced Marx and intrigued many Russians thinkers, such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Fourier died in the 1830s, but many of his followers helped lead social revolutions in Europe in 1848. Then they were exiled or forced underground, and some decided to start a Fourierist colony in the United States.

It was a disaster. The differences between Fourier’s theories and reality on the ground led to a lot of tragic — and some very tragicomic — scenes. After the whole thing disbanded, the wealthier colonists went back to Europe, but many others had to stay and build new lives in a small town nearby called —

oops —

Dallas, Texas.

I recommend Owen Wilson for the lead. Please contact my agent.

Third Coast International Audio Festival Library Spotlight

Naptime

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:20:38 -0400

Just a little piece I did for the Third Coast Audio Festival in 2006. The rules were:

- each starts with some manifestation of: “To begin with, they never got along.”

- each includes a discernible pre-recorded voice, rhythmic noise, and exclamation

- each lasts exactly 2:30 minutes

The Forgotten Circassians

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 15:30:00 -0400

By Julia Barton ⋅ May 21, 2012

See a slideshow of Circassian cultural activities here.

The Circassians tribes of the North Caucasus were once a romantic subject for British and French writers. Alexandre Dumas and others were rapturous about Circassians’ tall sheepskin hats, their horsemanship and their code of honor; less so about the way Circassians sold their sons and daughters to Ottoman slave-traders. Still, the world had other things on its mind besides Circassians by 1864. That’s when the Russian Imperial Army made a final push to slaughter the war-like tribes of the Caucasus.

Some Circassians survived abroad, and May 21st is when their descendants commemorate what they say is a forgotten genocide. Their voices have gotten louder as Russia prepares to host the Winter Olympics in Sochi—a city on the Black Sea that Circassians such as Zack Barsik say should belong to them.

As far as he knows, Barsik is the first Circassian born in the US. He grew up in Passaic County, New Jersey, where Barsik’s father emigrated from Jordan in the 1950s. Barsik’s dad joined a few Circassians there who were refugees from the Soviet Union. Many more Circassians have arrived since then, mostly from the diaspora in the Middle East. Now Circassians in the US estimate their numbers at about 5,000.

Barsik spent his New Jersey childhood hearing about a place his family hasn’t lived for generations—the North Caucasus. He grew up speaking Adyghe, the Circassian language, and hearing stories, songs and poems from his grandparents as well as the Soviet refugees.

“Our history, a lot of it is based on oral history,” Barsik says. “And me constantly hearing these stories… we had a very rich exposure.”

Through those songs and stories, Barsik learned the importance of 1864 to Circassians. That’s when Tsarist forces killed thousands of Circassians in the mountains and forced others onto ships across the Black Sea. Historians say most of them died on the journey. Those who survived never saw their homeland again.

About five million Circassians now live around the world, but only 700,000 remain in the North Caucasus. Almost no Circassians live in Sochi, a city between the Caucasus and the Black Sea. That’s where Russia is spending billions of dollars to prepare for the Winter Olympics in 2014. Zack Barsik says when Russia won the Olympic bid, it galvanized the Circassian diaspora.

“Sochi was our capital, and we want to return,” he declares. “We want to have a country. Just like every other people on earth love to have a country, we want to have a country.”

Not surprisingly, Barsik and other Circassians haven’t made much progress persuading the Russian government to give up its prime, warm-coastal real estate. But the Circassian issue has become a surprising headache for Russians. Circassians are moderate Muslims—and they haven’t been a problem for the Russian state until recently, unlike other Muslim groups in the Caucasus such as Chechens. But now thousands of Circassians want to return from places like war-torn Syria. The Russian government isn’t sure how to respond, says Valery Dzutsyev, an analyst for the Jamestown Foundation.

“They see non-Russian immigration to the North Caucasus as a security threat,” he says. Dzutsyev added Circassians used to be isolated. But now with the Internet, they’re re-uniting.

“In the North Caucasus, the Circassian people became much more aware of their history in the past few years–and large part of this is attributed, I would say, to the influence of the diaspora,” Dzutsev says.

The diaspora in northern New Jersey remains active with cultural events and classes at places like Circassian Benevolent Association. One evening, Circassian youth there practiced a complicated wedding dance called the widj. The young men and women clasp arms in a tight line, then spin on a central axis.

Classes like this at the help transmit culture to a new generation. But even dedicated activists like Lisa Jarkasi say it’s not easy to keep the culture alive. The 29-year-old takes Circassian lessons via Skype from a tutor in Turkey. Adyghe is not related to any other language.

“It has 185 verb tenses,” Jarkasi says. “It is extremely complicated.”

Studying language helps her understand her identity, she says, but it only goes so far.

“For the longest time ever, I felt like I had something missing. And even til today, I still do. There’s a part of my heart that’s broken,” she says.

Jarkasi’s never been to the Caucasus. But she says her heart won’t be mended until Circassians have the right to live in the mountains of their ancestors. Short of that, Jarkassi will be among those unfurling the green Circassian flag at Russian embassies and consulates around the world on Monday. Zack Barsik admits that while he’s angry about Russia’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, the Games are a rare chance to draw attention to his cause.

“We don’t want to be a footnote in history of a people that got completely decimated by the Russians and they got away with it,” he says. “And not only that, they went and celebrated the Sochi Olympics on their graves.”

Barsik is commemorating May 21st on the Black Sea, in Georgia—the only country in the world to recognize Russia’s treatment of Circassians as a genocide. Georgia has its own conflicts with Russia. Circassians say they don’t really care about the geopolitics. They’re just glad to have a friendly place to go in the Caucasus—even if it’s not home.

The Editor in Your Brain

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 19:06:00 -0400

[Transom.org]

Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?

by Julia Barton

Some of us have been lucky enough to work long past midnight on a radio feature that needs to air later that same morning. We finish the script at midnight and, not wanting to bother anyone, record the tracks and throw it together. Around two, we leave our desk covered with highlighted tape logs and greasy bits of take-out bok choi, go home to sleep for four hours and 33:30 minutes, and then turn on the radio. What we hear is utter crap. When the story is not excruciating and boring, it’s goofy and pathetic. It makes no sense. All that work for nothing.

I’m not being sarcastic when I say one is lucky to have this experience. In our age of digital tweaking and re-tweaking, not everyone gets sliced by the refreshing guillotine of broadcast deadlines. They force us to stop being producers and hear our work as listeners. Only when our minds stop composing and filling in blanks can they start to comprehend what is happening—and failing to happen—in an audio feature.

There are almost immutable rules that govern how we best absorb information and ideas via audio. But even the best of us have a hard time following these rules when we’re composing a story. I’m pretty convinced that’s because we are actually different people when we’re composing. We’re using a different side of the brain than what the listener is using when he or she hears our story.

David Krasnow

If only there were some kind of formula we could all follow in our blindness. But there isn’t. Studio 360 editor David Krasnow has been doing this kind of work for 20 years. “Every piece feels like reinventing the wheel,” he tells me. Every story has its own constraints and its own best structure.

That said, you can get great insight into the process by reading the words of experienced producers. But one of the most relevant things I’ve read about our craft actually comes from playwright Tom Stoppard. “It’s about controlling the flow of information—arriving at the right length and the right speed and in the right order,” he recently told the New Yorker. “If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There’s a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.”

For Stoppard, the long give and take of rehearsals and previews are part of the editing process. We should be so lucky in radio. Many of us get no editing at all, or a cursory deadline once-over for length and basic errors. So we, our own selves, may be the only editors in sight (unless certain members of Congress decide to take over this role).

Teaching Yourself to Listen

Longtime public radio editor Deborah George gave a great talk at Third Coast in 2008 about editing called “Just Listen to Yourself.” (When you have 48 minutes to spare, I urge you to listen to the whole thing.)

“As an editor, I have work that has come in and I can tell that the person has not really listened to it themselves,” George says. But, she admits, it takes some “mental trickery” to be able to do that.

She (and others) offer some exercises here to help us better get into the mindset needed to edit our own work. Even if you are working with an editor, teaching yourself to think like an editor is essential. George cites Radio Diaries producer Joe Richman, who says, “An editor can’t create your work for you.” An editor’s role is to take an already strong piece and “make it lovely,” as George puts it.

Before trying George’s exercises and others here, though, I think it’s best to figure out what kind of writer and producer you are. For lack of a better classification system, I like the one Carl Linnaeus used to divide up the natural world: Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral. In my work as an editor, I’ve come across two main types of producers in public radio: those who feel more comfortable working with ideas and information—let’s call those folks Mineral—and those who work more musically and intuitively, from the audio itself (Animals—why not?).

Producers by Type

You could call NPR science blogger Eliza Barclay a Mineral. She came to radio from writing for newspapers and magazines. “It’s really ingrained in me,” she says. “It is truly different….Writing tight for print, you can still do things that you can’t do in radio.” You can throw out a bunch of numbers, names, and titles, for example. But it’s deeper than that.

Barclay had a great piece on The World in November 2009 about Mathias and Guillaume Craig, brothers from the U.S. who single-handedly created sustainable sources of electricity in some of the remotest parts of Nicaragua. But “single-handedly” was the problem—the Craigs forgot to ask the Nicaraguans whether electricity was what they really needed. Their projects had unintended consequences, such as the newly electrified poor spending their life savings on TV sets.

The story was memorable, but Barclay spent four months with The World’s science editor David Baron getting it that way. She was kind enough to share the first draft of her script with us. You can view the draft here.

All the ideas are there, but we’re not really on a journey with anyone. And as listeners, we’re overwhelmed with all the details of how this development project came to be. It’s like looking at a pile of rocks without any clue to the scale of it.

Or what’s lurking beneath this pile of rocks. “A common issue I deal with is that I find reporters give too much away early in the story,” David Baron says. “There’s a tendency to want to say everything up front. That just robs the rest of the piece of mystery and tension. A well-structured story doesn’t just tell you what you need to know—there are things you want to intentionally withhold.”

Here’s the final script Barclay and Baron worked up together.

It flows: from the Craig brothers’ original urge to build windmills for coastal Nicaragua, to their technological successes, to a debate about whether they actually did any good. And in the end, we learn what they learned. We’ve been on a journey with them.

Listen to a clip from Eliza Barclay’s finished piece for The World

Barclay says she had to do more interviews, probing the Craig brothers about what went wrong, to get the tape that gave the story its impact.

But impact is not all you need. I often hear stories that have an emotional impact, or are trying to have one, but leave me just feeling vaguely manipulated. Or—and it’s hard to listen to a lot of public radio features once you recognize the pattern—they sound like nothing more than an amalgamation of zippy sound bites and atmospheric moments. A sure sign that an Animal producer (probably on a tight deadline) is at work.

“Often what reporters will do is sit down, take their best tape, and put it in order,” Baron says. The editor in all of us has to ask, “What is the story I need to know? It shouldn’t be about ‘This is the best tape I have, how do I order it?’ For the listener, it’s ‘What do I need to know next for this to make sense?’ It may sometimes mean a big block of copy. It may mean using not-great tape, but you need something else to make that point.”

I probably sound like a mineralized hard-ass at this point. But when I produce my own work, logic and ideas still go right out the window. Recently I did a piece for Studio 360 about the TV show “Dallas” for their American Icons series. I grew up in Dallas, so I knew who to talk with there to get great tape. And through dumb luck, I got to go to Romania and visit a “vacation park” modeled on Southfork Ranch. I wrote with complete confidence how the piece should begin and end.

I just forgot to put a whole lot of information between. Like, what was “Dallas” about? What is significant about it still, and why should you stick with me for 12 more minutes to find out?

Here’s the last page of one of the many drafts I went through with Studio 360 editor David Krasnow. You can see me and him trying to wedge all kinds of missing ideas between bits of tape.

The stuffing of the script.

And here’s the last two minutes of a scratch-mix I did of a later draft:

Listen to a clip from Julia Barton’s scratch-mix for ‘Studio 360’

Oh, please! Now that I’m getting to the ideas, I won’t shut up. Still, this stage of the process is vital, even if it results in messy writing that mostly will be cut. Without saying the big ideas out loud, you won’t know what they are. So if you think you’re an Animal-type producer, you need to lean on yourself early on to articulate more clearly what your story is about and why it matters. Even before you start reporting.

I got to sit down with David Krasnow before I went out into the field—if one can use that term when reporting about a dead soap opera. He urged me to write about “Dallas” in the same breathlessly amused voice I was describing it to him right there. That’s the other job of the features editor—to keep us from losing our personalities completely.

“You lose your voice just struggling with the Lego blocks,” Krasnow says. “When you go to the bar with a friend, you always sound like yourself. When you’re struggling with tape, you’re just a constructor.”

Here’s how our story turned out in the end.

Listen to Julia Barton’s finished piece for ‘Studio 360’

And I do mean “our” story. For all this advice about being your own editor, I don’t think we can produce good work alone. Radio is a two-way process, and I’ve come to relish the collaborative aspect of it.

So which are you, Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? I look forward to your thoughts below.

Yes, I did forget to define Vegetable. Vegetable is what you are after a rigorous editing process. But better that than the miserable you who just heard your unedited mess go out on the air.

Additional Resources

Advice for Cultivating Your Inner Editor

Writing for Radio: Ten Yellow Flags – by David Candow

Myth City

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 11:39:00 -0400

How Hollywood set Dallas free—to be ruthless, rude and shinier than reality.

by Julia Barton

Published on: Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Twenty years after its official demise, Dallas is the show that won’t die. Turn on a TV in many parts of the world and you can still see the saga of conniving oilmen, business feuds, alcoholic wives, sultry mistresses and underaged nieces. Now cable network TNT plans to shoot a pilot for a sequel that features the next generation of Ewings fighting and slutting their way around Southfork Ranch.

I grew up in Dallas, but I only remember one episode: “Black Market Baby.” That’s because my best friend, Jennifer White, was an extra in it. Her father worked on the local set of Dallas when the show filmed exterior shots in Dallas once a year. Recently I sat down with Jennifer to watch “Black Market Baby” again.

“Seven years is a long time,” actress Linda Gray fake-drawls to her husband, J.R. Ewing. “And there’s nothing wrong with me.”

“Did she just say they haven’t had sex in seven years?” Jennifer exclaimed. “We definitely were not allowed to watch this when we were nine.”

Somehow we knew the whole plot: how, five episodes earlier, J.R.’s brother Bobby’s wife Pamela was pregnant. Then J.R. accidentally on-purpose pushed her from the hayloft at Southfork. Then Sue Ellen, threatened that Pamela might become pregnant again, decided to buy a baby. We see her meet a lawyer in a downtown Dallas overpopulated with extras. She goes to a “bad” neighborhood to meet a birth mom.

Jennifer and her brother—along with a black male strategically draped across the apartment steps—were on hand to provide some of the badness.

“There I am!” Jennifer gasped. We see the back of her head. She’s being pushed in a shopping cart by her younger brother. Vampy music plays in the background. That’s all. It took all day to film the three-second scene.

Like my friend at the chuck wagon, the Sunbelt dined out on the rewards of Dallas for years. The show told the world we were now in charge—and if we were ruthless and rude, get used to it. Like most Hollywood myths, Dallas was based on an element of truth. The oil economy of the Southwest was booming in the 1970s while the rest of the country stagnated. As the show became epic, it got easier and easier to conflate Dallas with Dallas, to believe the TV magic also applied to us, that our shiny buildings redeemed us. All acts of meanness or melodrama would be rewarded. Two decades on, our shiny buildings are looking a little dull, and our need for “world-class” structures has drained the city’s coffers. It’s easy to be larger than life on the small screen. In real life, it means making choices. In shuttered pools, crumbling roads and strained schools, you can see what choices Dallas has made.

As conceived, Dallas had nothing to do with Dallas. David Jacobs—who created J.R., his younger brother Bobby and the show’s other core characters—says he only had a vague idea that the show would be set in Texas (he’d visited once in his life). In 1977, as part of a CBS development deal with Lorimar Productions, Jacobs wrote an untitled backstory about Ewing Oil and sent it to Lorimar executive Mike Filerman.

“He says, ‘Yeah, it was fine. But I changed the name,’” Jacobs recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, what did you call it?’ He said, ‘Dallas! … It sounded better than Houston.’”

Poor Houston. They’re the ones with the oil. Fort Worth has the cattle. In the late ‘70s, Dallas had bankers, insurance brokers and technology geeks who didn’t wear cowboy hats.

That’s what Dallas Observer columnist Jim Schutze noticed when he moved here from Detroit in 1978, the same year Dallas began shooting. He was surprised to find Dallas, businesswise, more like a “little Switzerland.” When he started asking the city’s elites about their reactions to the new TV show, he heard a lot of disdain.

“They were horrified by [Dallas] because they associate cowboy hats with people that are country and déclassé, and nobody wants to be country here,” Schutze says.

We have to remember that, in 1978, Dallas was in the doldrums, reputationwise, from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It might have been coincidence that Jack Ruby and J.R. bore the same initials, but Hollywood changed the equation: J.R. didn’t care what people thought, and he still won the day. He was a Dallas hero without shame.

“Dallas slowly figured out that people liked this myth,” Schutze says. “It made Dallas, which was this grouchy, adding-machine, actuarial city, look kind of cool and romantic. So Dallas embraced the myth and in some ways became like the TV show.”

I was in fourth grade at the time, but I remember something changing. The economy was already OK, but now people in Dallas were spending. It trickled down to my parents, musicians who suddenly had a lot of work. The effect was psychological: Somehow we’d been rebranded and set free. We could not build malls and skyscrapers fast enough. We could not perm our hair out big enough. We threw up huge subdivisions of giant houses with big chandeliers in enormous foyers. Our versions of J.R.—H. Ross Perot, George W. Bush—jolted the nation with their swaggering talk.

But first, J.R. had to get shot.

“Because it was so successful in [its] second season, CBS asked Dallas to do four additional shows,” Jacobs recalls. “They already had their cliff-hanger. And somebody—nobody knows whether it was Camille Marchetta, who was the story editor, or some people say it was Art Lewis, the producer. But somebody said, ‘Let’s shoot the sonofabitch.’”

That was the spring of 1980. By summer, Larry Hagman was on the cover of Time. The November 1980 episode of Dallas—the one that revealed J.R.’s would-be assassin—remains the most-viewed hour of television ever. More than 350 million people tuned in worldwide.

The bullets hardly slowed J.R. down. By then, thanks to some savvy distributors at CBS, he was an overdubbed international sensation—scheming in German, conniving in Hungarian, cackling in French. He snuck into drab apartment blocks behind the Iron Curtain, where the show did not officially air.

Estonian filmmaker Jaak Kilmi remembers his father—and plenty of fathers in Tallinn, where he grew up—fashioning converters and antennas to filch TV signals from a Finnish broadcast tower across the Baltic Sea. Every Friday night, Kilmi’s family would gather around their Soviet console to keep up with the Ewings. His mother would translate the Finnish subtitles into Estonian.

“Everyone believed that’s the American reality,” Kilmi says. “People wanted to believe that people lived in skyscrapers and had beautiful cars, and everything was shiny and glamorous.”

Kilmi made a documentary, Disco and Atomic War, about how shows like Dallas helped weaken the hold of Communism. The show’s real influence happened after the Soviet bloc collapsed. In the cultural vacuum, Dallas provided a handy blueprint to would-be capitalists. Handy—and often disastrous, as I saw on a recent trip to Romania.

Off the road between the capital of Bucharest and the Black Sea, there’s a green metal arch that looks straight off a Texas ranch. Turn under it and proceed down a long, tree-lined drive, and you arrive in a hotel complex called Parcul Vacante Hermes (a reference to the Greek god of business). This place was more commonly known, back in the 1990s, as “Southforkscu.”

The local tycoon who built it, Ilie Alexandru, wanted to be the J.R. of Romania. Eyeing his TV, he built a white, gabled hotel and called it “Dallas.” Then came the hotels “Texas” and “Western.” Alexandru built stables, polo fields, a mansion with an eight-car garage and—somewhat inconsistently—a replica of the Eiffel Tower.

The complex’s current manager, Rodica Florea, takes me around the grounds, which are practically empty on a cold January morning. Florea watched Dallas in the early 1980s. Unlike in the Soviet Union, the show aired on state TV in socialist Romania.

“I can’t believe it was allowed, especially because we only had two hours of television a day,” Florea remembers.

Now the hotels “Dallas” and “Texas” are closed indefinitely for repairs. Turns out the J.R. of Romania built most of Southforkscu with borrowed money he couldn’t repay. He ended up doing eight years in prison for financial crimes. He died last year a broken man. The state sold his assets to investors who stripped Parcul Vacante Hermes bare. Florea’s employers are trying to rebuild the place, but judging from the broken windows in hotel “Texas,” it could take some time.

While in jail, Alexandru told a Romanian paper, “I admired J.R., but I was like Bobby. The Bobby inside me finished me.”

Even at the “real” Southfork, the one north of Dallas, people seem surprised that the show still has so much traction. The Collin County quarter-horse ranch was known as Duncan Acres until Lorimar chose it for exterior shots, starting in the second season. The cast and crew only filmed in Texas in the summer; the rest of the year, Dallas, like everything else in Hollywood, was filmed in California.

“I keep thinking, well, maybe no one will come next year,” says Southfork tour guide Adele Taylor. “But that’s not the case. We do 11 tours a day, and we get a lot of people.”

I end up on a tour with folks from Algeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among other countries. We sit on patio chairs by the pool while Taylor tells us how the cast and crew used film magic to make this place look huge. Southfork’s pool is tiny, and its famous long driveway is pretty short. The house isn’t much bigger than a 1990s McMansion. Ilie Alexandru would be disappointed.

Many visitors to Southfork have written about this sense of disappointment, but also their awe at how easily we were fooled.

But abroad, the illusion seems to have worked differently. At Southfork, I chat with two Congolese immigrants, Simon Ntobi and his brother Pitshou. Smiling, they talked about watching Dallas in Kinshasha, gathered around a black-and-white TV with their extended family.

Simon Ntobi lives in Dallas now and loves it. In halting English, he explains how Dallas, the show, gave him a heads-up about America—that life here would not be easy.

“The American dream is not true, and is also not false,” he says. “It depends on what you want to do. When I came to America, I didn’t have money … I think only $5.”

Now Simon has a job, a wife and some real money. He says he succeeded by staying focused. By way of explanation, he bursts into the French theme song for Dallas. It actually has words:

Dallas, malheur à celui qui n’a pas compris
Dallas, un jour, il y perdra la vie
Dallas, ton univers impitoyable
Dallas, glorifie la loi du plus fort …

(Dallas, bad luck to he who doesn’t understand
Dallas, one day, he could lose his life
Dallas, your pitiless world
Dallas, you glorify survival of the fittest …)

Heartening, isn’t it? Somewhere in the world, Dallas is still teaching people about our cycles of boom and bust, our desperate housewives and scheming tycoons. But I doubt TNT’s sequel will revive the show for Americans. We know the story too well. We all live in Dallas now.