As Cold War tensions came to a head, two men, working across the ocean from one another, became united in the quest to create conversations between Americans and Russians over the telephone lines.

JULIA BARTON NOV 3 2014

The Atlantic

In 1983 President Reagan dubbed the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” but by the end of his first term, he was wondering if ordinary Russians and Americans couldn’t resolve our nations’s difference by just talking. At the end of a White House speech on January 16, 1984, Reagan imagined an American couple, Jim and Sally, sheltering from a storm with Soviets Ivan and Anya. By some magic, there is no language barrier.

“Would they then debate the differences between their respective governments?” Reagan asked, rhetorically of course. “Or would they find themselves comparing notes about their children and what each other did for a living?”

Actually, we know what they would talk about: pizza. And Pepsi. And their hopes for goodwill among nations. We know this because by the end of the 80s, regular Soviets and Americans were talking to each other, through a strange and glitchy videophone. But the story of how those videophone calls happened in the first one is one full of risk, invention, and very strange characters.

Today, American’s have largely forgotten what it feels like to be isolated both by analog technology and geopolitics.
Even before Reagan’s speech, the 1980s were the great era of longing for “ordinary” conversation between Russians and Americans. While governments held formal arms talks, many Soviets lived in closed cities or were, by law, supposed to seek official permission to speak with foreigners. Peace activists in the U.S. were itching for more contact, especially as our government ramped up its anti-Soviet rhetoric.

Today, Americans have largely forgotten what it feels like to be isolated both by analog technology and geopolitics. To peace activists on both sides of the Cold War divide, digital technology was the answer a stuck world was waiting for. What they lacked, the thinking went, was the means to communicate. And in some ways that was true.

All the telephone trunk lines between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. went through Pittsburgh. And there were only 33 of them for the Soviet Union, a nation of close to 300 million. (By contrast, Costa Rica had some 600 circuits to the U.S. at that time). Calls between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had to be scheduled days if not weeks in advance, and even then the quality was terrible. The operators caught a lot of flack.

Then suddenly, with satellite links and then the early Internet, that contact became theoretically possible. And two men, working across the ocean from one another, became united in the quest to make conversations between the two countries happen.

In the early 1980s, Joel Schatz was working as an energy advisor to the governor of Oregon. He found the Reagan administration’s approach to the U.S.S.R. alarming. Schatz had Russian-born grandparents and resented the way the Cold War kept people of the two empires isolated from one another. So Schatz and his wife Diane decided to raise funds to travel to the U.S.S.R. as “citizen scouts.” They left in late August 1983.

At that time, former KGB head Yuriy Andropov held the U.S.S.R. in his sclerotic grip. While Joel and Diane were in Moscow, the Soviets shot down Korean Air flight 007 over the Pacific, killing 269 people including a U.S. congressman. It was a grim time even for the grim pageant of the Cold War. But none of that mattered to the Schatzs’ hope of using technology to bring Russians and Americans closer together, because through their interpreter, they’d met a man named Joseph Goldin.

Here it’s perhaps best to quote Adam Hochchild’s fantastic Mother Jones piece about the Schatzs and this unlikely Soviet man:

Joseph has no official connection to any institution, a fact that has apparently sometimes gotten him in trouble with the authorities. But clearly he is Joel’s counterpart in the Soviet Union, another cultural repairman.

In a country where all professionals have business cards in the same format—last name, first name and patronymic, academic degree, title, address—Joseph has stationery showing a drawing of a man’s head: The lower half is a face gazing at you intently, the top half is a partially completed, many-floored Tower of Babel. Around the edge of this head scrolls the Russian inscription: EXPEDITION TO HIDDEN HUMAN RESERVES.
“Hidden human reserves” were, in Goldin-speak, akin to the untapped “human potential” theories popular among New Age thinkers in the U.S. at the time. And indeed, Goldin was on the board of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, a group that had tried to forge telepathic links with Soviets before satellite technology made the paranormal less of a first resort. With Goldin’s wide, baby-ish face and staccato tumble of English, he enchanted many Americans in search of a free-thinking counterpart behind the Iron Curtain. Joel Schatz remembers thinking, “Here was someone we could work with.”

Goldin believed that the people of the world needed more spontaneous contact. His dream, which he dubbed Mirror for Humanity, was to have huge screens in cities around the globe connected via satellite so people could peer at one another and strike up conversations (as with Reagan, language barriers seemed to be a minor problem for Goldin). Goldin was a utopian, not uncommon in a country steeped in the magical thinking of late-era Soviet Marxism. He saw spontaneous communication as a way to unleash the next era of human development.

Though Joel Schatz adored Goldin’s utopian impulse, he had a more practical take. After his first experience trying to place a call from the U.S.S.R., Schatz had figured out that AT&T had the monopoly on calls to and from the United States. It was nearly impossible to make phone calls to the Soviet Union, without putting in a request, waiting for several days, and (at least on the U.S. side) paying an arm and a leg. Schatz thought this bottleneck was ridiculous, especially because it impeded ordinary communication between the citizenry of two nuclear superpowers. It being the 1980s, Schatz figured it was a problem that could be hacked with computers. There was just one problem: Schatz knew almost nothing about computers.

“We had friends in computers, and they recommended that we buy [one],” Schatz told me. He got a Radio Shack Tandy Model 80 “with little rubber cups to fit over the telephone earpiece and speaker. I was reading the manual on the plane [to Russia] to see how it worked,” he recalls.

But Schatz turned out to be a very good hacker, just not of computers. His real triumph was hacking people, specifically people within the Soviet bureaucracy—which was, admittedly, starving for the chance to reverse engineer Western technology. Schatz seemed to understand instinctively that power in the U.S.S.R. basically flowed as in a high school, with a few influential cliques running the show. His new friend Joseph Goldin also knew this and had endeared himself to the scientific-academic clique, men who were necessary to the military but also a tiny bit mystical. Goldin introduced Schatz to Boris Rauschenbakh, the Soviet astronomer who’d managed to obtain the first images of the far side of the Moon.

As Schatz tells it, “I happened to have an audio cassette of Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ in my briefcase.” He gave it to Rauschenbakh, who in return gave him the name of the right guy who could handle questions of proto-computing. Soon enough, Schatz was showing off his Model 80 computer to a group of powerful Soviet academics.

“These scientists looked at it as if it had been a space rock falling from heaven. They had never seen a device like this before,” he says. Thanks to that meeting, Schatz had the contacts and clearance he needed to set up an email link to connect his office—now a nonprofit in San Francisco—with a place called Institute for Automated Systems in Moscow.

Schatz needed something more exciting to generate interest, and he got it with “slow-scan television” technology.
So Schatz could now send emails from his computer to Russians. But email was still rarely used in the mid-1980s. Schatz needed something more exciting to generate interest in his mission, and he got it with “slow-scan television” technology—a way of sending photo data, pixel by pixel, over voice telephone lines (at 3kHz—like a super-slow television signal). Doctors and scientists had been using the technology to transmit images to one another since the 1960s. Astronauts and cosmonauts used it to transmit images of what they saw in space. But it had rarely been used for conversational purposes, and never for citizen diplomacy.

Joseph Goldin first hit on the idea of attaching slow-scan images to ordinary, person-to-person communication in 1985. He left it up to Schatz to figure out how to obtain the equipment and bring it to the U.S.S.R. Writer Adam Hochschild was present for most of this ordeal, and in his Mother Jones piece, he describes an extensive comedy of errors getting a borrowed slow-scan unit through Soviet customs and set up in a Moscow conference room, linked over ordinary telephone lines to technicians in Berkeley who try to transmit a human image.

Although vaguely recognizable as a human figure sitting in a chair, it looks as if black icicles were dripping down from the top of the screen, and as if the whole thing were viewed through a web of herringbones.

Joel explains the problem on the phone, and then says, “Okay, now I’m going to send you something.” He aims the video camera at a painting on the wall, and pushes the button. “Can you recognize this guy?”

Thirty seconds later comes a voice from Berkeley: “Lenin!” A buzz of excited whispering in Russian runs around the roomful of Soviet bureaucrats. A visual image from this room has just traveled almost halfway 'round the world, over the phone. Several of the men stand up, to get a better view of the TV.
Suddenly seeing and talking to faraway people was sexy, but also easily within reach, even if the picture quality wasn’t the greatest. Finally, Schatz and Goldin were ready to bring it to the world. Like the shrewd promoters they were, they started off with media stunts: New Years’ toasts between poets and musicians at midnight in Moscow, noon in San Francisco. Soon they were linking all kinds of small groups across the Cold War divide: maternity ward nurses and doctors, members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Diane Schatz, an artist herself, linked up cartoonists. And in 1987, the three amateur diplomats had a stroke of genius: connecting the telephone operators who handled the calls between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.

So on October 9 of that year operators at AT&T’s International Operating Center in Pittsburgh sat down in a windowless room to talk with their counterparts at the U.S.S.R.’s International Telephone Exchange in Moscow.

You can see Joel and Diane in the foreground at the table where the American operators had gathered (we do not have film of the Soviet side). Diane, with smooth hair and dangling earrings, talks continuously into a white receiver linked to Moscow. Her husband Joel, Lennon to her Yoko with a bushy beard and round glasses, fiddles with a large Apple PC and points a camera to the operators around the table.

Schatz has hooked all this up to two direct connections between Moscow and Pittsburgh—copper wires strung across land and sea. (Newly installed trans-Atlantic fiber-optic cables had not yet gone online.) Moscow telephones still operated on tsarist-era, un-insulated, copper wires. Schatz and the technicians in Moscow connected their computers to this copper-based technology with alligator clips.

And yet remarkably, they were able to transmit pictures back and forth across the wires—pictures of the operators as they talk. And they wanted to talk about what they do on their breaks.

One American operator positions herself beneath a banner strung up in the conference room: It says HELLO NEW FRIENDS in Russian. Someone has grabbed bottles of soda and a frozen pizza.

“Do you have pizza in Russia?” the woman asks. “Hello?”

The answer comes quickly, from a male voice with a Russian-tinged British accent. “Well, no pizza yet!” It’s not clear if he means they haven’t tried pizza in the U.S.S.R., or they haven’t gotten the image yet. It makes its way through the wire line by line to be reconstructed on a TV screen in the distant northern city. After a few seconds, the man reacts: “Oh, beautiful pizza!” Everyone laughs.

In response, one of the supervisors in Moscow has her daughter play a song on the guitar. It is a little sad and clunky, her guitar out of tune. The Pittsburgh operators listen politely. The Soviet operators have many formal speeches to make.

“Hello,” says one operator named Svetlana. “I am very happy finally to have this rare opportunity not only to hear but to see my counterparts in America. And I very much hope that today’s contact will continue and deepen our acquaintance. I hope we will have more sessions like this in the future.”

After that exchange, the AT&T operators gave his scrappy startup second priority in line for calls to and from the U.S.S.R. First in line? The U.S. State Department.

Around this same time, Schatz got funding from George Soros, the Hungarian-born hedge-fund manager who supported dissidents in the Eastern bloc. Soros helped Schatz turn his Internet and slow-scan link to the United States into a for-profit business called SovAmTeleport, splitting the proceeds 50/50 with the Soviet government, which was opening itself to joint ventures everywhere by this point. The fees for SovAm’s transmission and translation services look steep to us now—more than $1600 in today’s dollars to set up a data account, plus a $330 monthly fee—but there were plenty of customers on the U.S. side eager to pay for a solid link to counterparts in the U.S.S.R.

This was the real beginning of Schatz’s big business. To capitalize on his new connections, Schatz established permanent offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg, hired his first employees, and also began looking at ways to break the AT&T monopoly on telephone connections to the U.S.S.R.

It’s clear how the Internet blew the minds of those few Soviets privileged enough to access it.
Schatz’s first Russian employee was a 25-year-old named Andrei Kolesnikov, who had been running the hulking computers for a factory in Moscow. Talking with him now, it’s clear how completely the Internet blew the minds of those few Soviets privileged enough to access it. Kolesnikov remembers sitting in Schatz’s Moscow apartment, looking at his Apple PC, stunned that it could be linked not only to Schatz’s office in San Francisco, but with computers around the globe. This was his first glimpse of Usenet.

“It was a big, big thing for any person at that time,” Kolesnikov says. “But for me it was kind of double-shock because I was just a Soviet guy from the factory!”

In August 1991, hardline Communists deposed Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and declared themselves head of a new government. For three days, the U.S.S.R. had almost no telephone contact with the outside world. But SovAm was able to fly under the radar and keep sending out news from its clients, which now included major Western media. Kolesnikov didn’t sleep for 72 hours.

The coup was routed and six months later, the Soviet Union had dissolved into 15 pieces. Joel Schatz was suddenly a telecom mogul in a new country—the Russian Federation—a country now desperate to join the world. He continued traveling back and forth to Russia as SovAm Teleport became GTS, which spun off into something called Golden Telecom, which eventually merged with VimpelCom, now the seventh-largest mobile carrier in the world. In Russia and many former Soviet republics, VimpelCom sells its services under the brand BeeLine. In 2012, VimpelCon pulled in $23.1 billion in revenue.

The Schatzes sold their shares in GTS in the early 2000s, but their involvement in the booming Russian telecom market clearly made them wealthy. They now live in a Japanese-style mansion atop a hill in Marin County, surrounded by fountains and manicured landscaping.

They talk about their Russia experience as a wild ride they simply jumped on for a time. Their former employee Andrei Kolesnikov is now in charge of Coordination Center, the top-level domain name service for Russia’s Internet. And he agrees that the Schatzs were simply in the right place at the right time.

“I believe in Karl Marx,” Kolesnikov says wryly. “If there was no Joel, there would be someone else. This was just part of the historical transformation.”

But while the Schatzs got rich off the transformation, it was not as kind to Joseph Goldin. In the 1990s, he spent three years living in San Francisco with the Schatzs, trying constantly to convince people of his scheme for giant TV screens connecting the globe. But after the Cold War, Americans quickly lost interest in all things Russian. Goldin’s last accomplishment was a worldwide sing-along of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” at the opening of the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics. It’s moving to watch, and you can see and hear Goldin’s fantastic dream for humanity as whole stadia of people take up the chorus around the world.

Soon after that, Goldin died of a heart attack. The few Russian newspapers that noticed reported that he was trying to organize a “spacebridge” between Chechens and Russians, who were then killing each other at a rapid pace.

Good cross-cultural communication is more than just talking—it’s work.
In his vast house, Joel Schatz still keeps up with the news from Russia, bewildered by its recent bender of anti-American hatred and Internet censorship. Clearly now, the problem is not that people don’t have the means to communicate—they can talk to (and troll) one another all day if they wish. But good cross-cultural communication is more than just talking—it’s work. A “natural” conversation between strangers with different upbringings involves a massive amount of discomfort, especially for Americans who are not often pushed out of their zones in this way. I speak decent Russian and have been traveling back and forth to the former Soviet world for three decades now, and I’m still not good at it.

Listening back, I’m haunted by the many lofty speeches the Soviet operators made in that 1987 exchange. This, for Soviets then and even for many Russians now, is the culturally appropriate thing one does in a first meeting with foreigners. It clearly confused the American operators, who thought they were there to talk about their kids and pizza. The thought of orating over a phone about the friendship of mankind would’ve been as ridiculous to them then as it is to me now, but it probably would have sent a cue of “normal behavior” to the Soviet side. The Soviet operators said they hoped their new off-hours contact with Americans would continue, but AT&T apparently did not think the effort was worth it. As far as Schatz knows, no other video-calls were made between the two groups.

Joel Schatz and Joseph Goldin were among the many tech visionaries who foresaw the end of analog isolation. But American awareness of foreign cultural cues is still pretty much the same it was in the 1980s. In fact, these late Cold War exchanges with Russians seem to be a high point of American interest in really engaging with people of another nation.

But if Russian leaders turn back the clock to pseudo-Soviet threat-mongering and isolation—a model that seems to be their default endgame—things might get so bad that Americans may again need to take an awkward turn as citizen diplomats. Next time, though, it won’t be the technology or the talking that is the challenge. The hard part will be, as it always has been, listening and understanding what the other side is saying.

(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

Oct. 4, 2012: Going live

Dec 30, 2013: Best of Narrative 2013

The strange death, and even stranger life, of a radio experiment called Fab 105 – all Beatles, all the time, and peace and love for everyone.

By Julia Barton

Saturday night, just two hours before Tony Rodriguez planned to pull the plug on Fab 105, people were still begging.

“Man, I hope you find a way to keep the station on the air,” they’d say, stopping by the corner of the suburban Dallas theater where I was trying – unsuccessfully – to interview the object of their affection. Tony’s dark eyes, moist from telling me how, say, the fact of creation testifies to the existence of the Creator, would dry quickly as he turned to face his beseechers.

“Sorry, dude,” he’d intone. “The Beatles die in Dallas. Again.” And he’d lose his train of thought. Again.

So I don’t have the whole story on why Rodriguez, 37-year-old heir to a local Spanish-language and Christian broadcasting empire, decided last August to devote one of his frequencies to “peace and love.” Nor do I know why that concept entailed playing only music of the Beatles, covers of Beatles songs, and selected solo compositions of ex-Beatles. Tony’s decision to end “Fab 105” is similarly shrouded in mystery, though I think it had to do with the fact that his “electronic art” experiment (as he described it) was costing him wads of money. But more than that, Tony, like so many others in the radio business these days, wants out. As I drove home from the goodbye party (the first of three, all sold out), I listened to Fab 105 crackle its last amid the more powerful R&B and country signals around it.

“Hey, the gallery’s closed now,” Tony was saying. “Please exit to the left.”

I’ll miss the Fab not for the barrage of Beatles (though John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” and William Shatner’s version of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” are both rare pleasures). I’ll miss it because Tony, in lieu of commercials, brought the rare gift of weirdness to the dial.

“Imagine a perfect robot …” he’d say, in one script about ants read by his DJ, Chris Bjork. “With all its technology, mankind can’t build a creature so complex. When we see an ant, we squash it. Yet God created ants, and God created us. Think about it!”
And I would think. Not about ants per se, but about the little shudder of joy that comes only from hearing something unexpected on the radio.

I’ve just put in a year as a public radio reporter, and I’m not excusing myself when I say that these days, most radio sucks like an ill wind on its way back to hell. For reasons I still can’t understand, our audio landscape is cursed with a dullness so severe it’s macabre. Sure, a few maverick college and community stations inject a little anarchy into the mix. But no other medium favors the shrieks of undead creatures like Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis and Christopher Cross so completely over breathing, viable artists. No medium does more to catapult obese sociopaths and condescending windbags to fame. No other medium survives on ads so irritating, pledge drives so unctuous, gimmicks so desperate. Even television, that vast wasteland, regularly sprouts weird little seedlings (“Dr. Katz,” “X-Files”) that are nearly unthinkable on blasted Planet Radio.
And despite all its scrapings at the bottom of every known common denominator, this could be the medium’s golden age compared with what’s to come. Although it got little notice, a major provision in last year’s Telecommunications Act lifted most restrictions on radio ownership. The minute the bill passed, the industry entered a consolidation frenzy that shows no signs of abating. Just last week, two Dallas-area radio moguls, Evergreen and Chancellor, merged to form the country’s second largest radio corporation, projected to control 103 stations. And info-defense empire Westinghouse, which quickly grabbed most major-market stations, now owns a billion-dollar chunk of the airwaves.

Compare this with the mom-and-pop industry radio was just a few years ago, and it ’s easy to see why most watchdog groups consider the medium a lost cause. Just 10 years ago, the government limited frequency ownership to seven FM and seven AM stations in the entire country. Now broadcasting empires can own up to eight in each city. Ever more corporatized and formatted, “radio as a dynamic force has been all but destroyed,” says Andy Schwartzmann, president of the nonprofit Media Access Project.

And if you’re a public radio listener, don’t expect many creative surprises there either. With government support drying up, National Public Radio has cut back on innovative shows like “Soundprint,” the premier radio documentary program of its kind. Local stations, meanwhile, have joined the formatting craze, “test marketing” symphonic movements and jazz pieces to see what their demographics like best.

Reporters and producers on the lower end of the dial sound clinically depressed these days. “It’s truly sad out there,” Robert Smith, a reporter for Seattle public radio station KUOW, says. “There’s no incentive for anyone with talent to do creative things.”

But Ira Glass, who for many years reigned as the king of weirdness at NPR, disagrees. “In non-commercial radio … nobody really cares that much if you’re funnier. You can fly under the radar at a typical public radio station,” he says. “Most reporters would kill for that kind of freedom.”

Glass, now at WBEZ in Chicago, produces “This American Life,” a program heard on 87 public radio stations – and, in RealAudio, on the Web. On it, odd people like monologist Spalding Gray, former elf David Sedaris, producer Scott Carrier and Salon music columnist Sarah Vowell explore odd themes, from the fear of Starbucks to the cruelty of children. Surprise: Thus far, no listeners have died. In fact, no one even complains, Glass says, “except when we have animals eating each other.”

But it will take more than a couple of well-placed weirdos like Glass and Tony Rodriguez to keep radio from continuing its slide into a sort of bad porn for the ears (and trust me, you do not want to imagine the bodies of most radio professionals engaged in that activity). Industry experts continue to feed us dull and stupid programming because we stay at the trough. Imagine, instead, calling a mechanized station every day to demand a human DJ. Imagine boycotts of advertisers on formats that play Bryan Adams more than once a year. Imagine all the people leaving their narrowcasted niches and listening to each others’ music, to the confoundment of marketers everywhere.

Or imagine you’re an ant about to be squashed. Think about it.

Salon, 2/27/97

NPR’s Bob Edwards: Last week in Ukraine, a body was uncovered which many believe is that of a journalist who’s been missing for two months.  The discovery has caused a storm of controversy in Ukraine, and as Julia Barton reports, it comes at a time when journalists in the former Soviet Republic feel their rights are under attack.

BARTON:

Heorhiy Gongadze founded the internet newspaper “Ukrainska Pravda” last April to provide critical coverage of politics in Ukraine.  But the night of September 16, Gongadze disappeared. And since then, the paper’s staff has gone from covering the news to being at its center.

Despite pet birds chirping in a cage, the mood at “Ukrainska Pravda” is especially grim these days.  That’s because last week, the publication decided to investigate a body that had been found in the town of Tarashcha,  about 90 miles from Kiev. The paper’s editor, Olena Prytula, has complained of a lack of cooperation from authorities overseeing the investigation into Gongadze’s disappearance.  But she says the coroner in Tarashchy turned out to be a sympathetic soul.

PRYTULA: He didn’t act as an official, he just acted as a human being. He said if you really think that’s Georgiy, you should take this body and bury it, and you’ll feel better.

The body, which was unearthed on November 3, was decapitated and badly disfigured.  But Prytula says several factors positively identified it as Gongadze’s, including the contents of the stomach, jewelry found on the body, and shrapnel lodged in one wrist.  Gongadze had been wounded in the same spot while covering a civil war in the neighboring republic of Georgia.

But in a bizarre twist, authorities snatched the body while Prytula was out seeking official permission to remove it.  She says the corpse was taken without the coroner’s knowledge.

PRYTULA: He just came to us and said, “There’s no body.” He was surprised and told the police so right front of us.

The coroner confirms Prytula’s account, and authorities now say the body is in a Kiev morgue undergoing a thorough autopsy.  But the macabre chain of events has put public officials on the defensive, including Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma.  The President recently expressed doubt that the body might be Gongadze’s.

“To say that this is Gongadze is a responsibility that only the forensic experts can take on,” he said.  “It’s a matter of further investigation, but I think we’ll soon bring this all to a close.”

But many outside observers say the president and his close circle are partly to blame for the dangerous working conditions of journalists here.  Last year…the New-York based “Committee to Protect Journalists” placed President Kuchma third on its list of Enemies of the press world-wide…citing incidents of violence and censorship leading up to the elections in which Kuchma won his second term.

MYCIO: I would say that without a doubt, journalism, real journalism—reporting on events, on issues of public concern, on individuals of public concern—in an objective, professional way, is a very dangerous profession right now.

Mary Mycio directs the IREX-ProMedia “Legal Defense and Education Program,” a U.S.-funded initiative to help Ukrainian journalists.  She says most newspapers and television stations here are now under the control of so-called oligarchs…men and    women who gained wealth during the privatization of Soviet-era industries and who now hold powerful positions in Ukraine’s Parliament and presidential administration. Mycio sees the Internet as one bright spot, and so does the U-S Embassy here, which gave a one-time grant of $24,000 to Gongadze’s website after his disappearance. Olena Prytula says the money has given the site enough independence to confront authorities about Gongadze’s disappearance and possible murder.  But it hasn’t protected them from a sense of shock.

PRYTULA: The biggest horror is the fact that something like this is possible in our country […].  As for me, I’m not afraid of anything anymore.

Prytula says she’s pursuing DNA testing to prove the body she saw is Gongadze’s.  But she and Gongadze’s family still fear that even when confronted with proof, authorities may not release the corpse, and the case of the missing journalist may never be laid to rest. 

For NPR News…I’m Julia Barton in Kiev, Ukraine.

[NPR 11/20/2000]

(Source: NPR)

Julia Barton finds that some Soviet standards could benefit Russian radio today

The radio station, like many others I saw in Russia, sat in a Soviet industrial park on the edge of town. But this one had particularly depressing torn-linoleum floors and an even sorrier scene outside. A pack of stray dogs roamed the snow-packed parking area or huddled on an above-ground heating pipe for warmth. Sometimes I saw them gnawing on the pipe insulation for a snack. Inside, the radio staff seemed to gnaw on our ideas with the same mixture of reluctance and hungry desperation. Should we quote real people in our newscasts? Should we verify facts from press releases or off the Internet?

Hmmm… maybe. But one thing they couldn’t do, the station’s chief editor insisted, was even refer to anyone who contradicted the views of the local government.

“You see,” says the middle-aged woman who previously worked at Soviet state radio in Kazakhstan, “the governor’s office is taping all our newscasts! They’ll make life difficult for us if we make them angry.”

In visiting 15 radio stations, from Vladivostok on the Pacific coast to Kaliningrad on the Baltic, I’d never heard of such control. Neither had my co-trainer and interpreter, Alexander Kleimenov, who lives in Ukraine, where media freedoms are arguably worse. Information on commercial radio still largely flies “under the radar” in Russia. After all, what local official has time to sift through hours of music and primitive infomercials for a few snippets of possibly offensive news? But being an outsider, I was willing to give the editor the benefit of the doubt. What depressed me was that she didn’t seem familiar with any of our suggestions. We’d grown accustomed to any elder in the room piping up during the seminar with the most remarkable statement: “Oh yeah, that’s how we used to do things in the Soviet times.”

Thus we discovered that we weren’t presenting new and radical ideas to Russian radio newsrooms. When talking about narrative form, the use of natural sound and interview techniques, we were actually discussing professional standards that had simply been lost in the shuffle during years of political and financial upheaval. Given my background in public radio, my advice often sounded closer to that of a Soviet-trained radio journalist than the modern DJs-turned-newscasters that populate many commercial radio newsrooms in Russia now. The old-timers sometimes seemed shocked at how much we had in common and that it took a foreigner to get the youngsters enthusiastic about the craft of radio.

Commercial radio displays such a generation gap in Russia because until the breakup of the Soviet Union, FM broadcasting barely existed in the world’s largest empire. Private radio stations had to invent themselves in the 1990s at the same time the country was reinventing itself. Since radio stations were looking to the West for music, no one wanted news to sound like a throwback to Soviet state radio, with its long reports and maternal or paternal sounding announcers.

At one point, I traveled to a radio competition organized by my Moscow-based partner organization, the Foundation for Independent Radio, in the far eastern city of Khabarovsk. There, I heard a commercial radio staffer lambaste a contest entry from state radio: “Sad, sad, sad. It sounds like reinforced concrete!”

But in rejecting everything about the past, commercial radio also threw out the standards that Soviet-trained reporters had developed, says Evgeniy Morozov, general director of Radio Lemma, a commercial station I visited in Vladivostok. Those standards included clear writing, lively interviews and the use of natural sound.

Yes, censorship and, especially, self-censorship were a permanent feature of life in the Soviet media, Morozov admits. But within those restraints, he adds, reporters still had to prove themselves with good work. “Journalists had to present ordinary facts in a way that was interesting for listeners. From simple events—maybe slightly interesting ones —you had to make it SO interesting so that people listened, so that they knew you, they remembered your name.”

Morozov got his start in the 1980s while still in journalism school by working on a regional program aimed at youth, “Primorsky Pioneer.” “It was the lowest, simplest level, programming for children, but almost all journalists started with that, and only then, if you showed you could do the work, could you go on to produce other material.”
Now that system is gone, Morozov concedes, along with any practical education for broadcast journalists. What’s left of journalism training in Russia is poorly funded and full of “useless theories from 40 years ago.” So when Morozov hires staff, rather than looking at diplomas, he picks those who show some common sense and a command of language. “The rest they can learn on the job,” he says.

Morozov’s technique seems to work, as his newsroom was one of the best we visited in Russia. Its relatively large staff of seven editors and reporters all do their jobs with diligent composure. We found plenty to work on with them, but their newscasts are nonetheless a model we could show to other stations.

Sadly, as if to show the fragility of such a phenomenon, the last day of our seminar at Radio Lemma was also Morozov’s. He was leaving to head news programming at the regional state-television station. He said he’d grown tired of battling Lemma’s owners, a local fish-canning company, who seemed determined to sell the station to a Moscow-run network.

The capital sets, as with most things in Russia, the trend for commercial radio. While many local FM stations started up with only euphoria and the owner’s record collection, the realities of formatting and niche marketing have emanated from Moscow into the regions. More and more stations are now owned outright by the city’s networks or those paying to air Moscow “brand” formats, such as Avtoradio, which aims to capture the driving market. (Owning and maintaining a car is still not easy in Russia, so driving is practically a separate profession, or at least a way of life.)

These regional “brand” stations get little more than some promo material and vague guidance from the network, which leaves a lot of room for local programming. The Avtoradio station we visited in Novosibirsk aired a popular afternoon show called “People’s Traffic Jam,” where drivers would call in to report traffic snarls around town. In between, celebrity guests (including yours truly) would talk about their own cars. Kleimenov, who went to graduate school in the U.S., also explained the relative ease of getting a driver’s license there—no triple-digit bribes involved!

While formats and target audiences are concepts Russian radio has largely embraced, much confusion about the role of news per se prevails. Unlike commercial radio in the U.S., Russian radio stations see the benefit of having hourly newscasts, even if only for two minutes. But how those newscasts should sound—and whether any actual journalistic effort or ethics should go into them—were questions still up in the air at most stations.

One major problem is that regional stations pay poorly, $100 to $200 a month on average. News staffs consequently tend to be young and inexperienced, and turnover is high. The Internet has also been a seductive money-saver for stations. Rather than subscribe to costly (but more reliable) wire services, newscasters just get their material off the Web, though they often don’t know how or when to ask questions of what’s written there. I sat down with the young staff of Avtoradio in Novosibirsk to listen to their station’s newscast and then asked what they could remember of it. They couldn’t remember much, and their crestfallen facial expressions betrayed a fear of looming punishment.

How were they supposed to know and remember what all those stories were about? Either a boss handed a story to them, or they pulled it off the Internet. Asking questions, clarifying vague language and generally taking control of the news for the benefit of listeners—all that sounded horrid and daunting. But by the end of the week, after a mock press conference, some writing exercises and much encouragement, people showed more enthusiasm and self-confidence.

One last short-cut to an “exciting” newscast at most commercial stations is a music bed beneath the news. This can usually range in sound from jolting to merely hyperactive. Avtoradio also includes between-story “beats,” a pre-recorded male voice that swoops in to announce the next story: “About The Economy!” or “About Chechnya!” and even, “About That!” (which caused this American visitor some confusion until people explained that “that” is a Russian euphemism for sex).

When I played a typical newscast from National Public Radio, most younger radio staff thought the lack of music gave it that Soviet “reinforced concrete” sound. I’d explain that with at least two sound bites and two voiced reports from around the world, all crammed into three minutes along with a stock-market update, music would be a horrible distraction to listeners. I got a much better response after playing the newscasts of Radio France, which uses music beds subtlely. One program director immediately ran into the studio during a newscast and told the engineer to turn down the volume on the music. Everyone exclaimed that it was suddenly easier to hear the newscaster’s voice and understand what he was saying.

Child’s Play?

Despite the superficial breaks with the Soviet past, Kleimenov sensed a deeper continuity. Now 30, the Kiev-based freelance journalist lived through the whole “extra-curricular” education of Soviet life, from the red-Pioneer kerchiefs to the teenage Komsomol Youth meetings. And too many radio stations, to him, felt like his Pioneer days.

“At Pioneer camp, people would all do skits that were funny to them and
their close friends, but no one else would laugh. But it didn’t matter. If you thought it was funny, then it had to be funny,” he told me.

At many radio stations I visited, that translated into a lack of connection with listeners. What would they like to hear? Would, for instance, weather forecasts be useful more than once an hour in the mornings? Could anyone but the advertisers stand to listen to the ads or, worse, the ads disguised as news stories? This vein of questioning was rare at many stations. (To be fair, it seems absent at many U.S. radio stations as well). Part of the disconnect was due to an almost total lack of audience research in the regions. But part of it seemed a holdover from Soviet days, when listeners really didn’t have a choice in radio. Today, the best stations I visited, and those with the best staff morale, know their listeners now have a choice, and stations must make a constant effort to keep their audience share.

That means communicating with, not just at, listeners. In this regard, one of the best stations I visited was Baltic Plus, in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. It played an “adult contemporary” mix of music, had a strong (though small) news team and featured weekly shows on topics like fashion—though the host, Tatiana Ponomarenko, takes that term to include many issues affecting the modern Russian woman. She feels a bond with the audience that’s apparently reciprocated: The newsroom exhibited a bouquet of flowers from a listener, one of many, we were told, who bring them to her on a regular basis.

Ponomarenko told us that once, as she was waiting to cross the border to Poland, a Russian border guard recognized her name and said that everyone listened religiously to her show in the barracks. “We know we can’t live that life of fashion,” the guard said. “We listen to it like a fairy tale.”

That connection with radio is the motivation for many who work in the field, and it may be the best hope for Russian radio. Anna Bakumova, a young correspondent at Avtoradio in Novosibirsk, grew up with Pioneer Youth radio. She would listen to its plays, sing along with its songs, and even send in a few verses of her own. “It gave me the feeling that radio was many different people, many points of view, all coming to me in my home. It had the feeling of people talking personally to me,” she said.

That wasn’t surprising to hear, considering what Bakumova had asked us, almost tragically, a couple of days before. Soviet radio was great, she said, the way it used sounds and drama. “Can we do that still?”

KnightLine International, Summer 2003

[a Transom manifesto by Julia Barton and Alex Kleimenov]

I tried to download a map of the former Soviet Union to show you the locations of the 15 radio stations I visited during five months on a Knight International Press Fellowship last summer and fall. But there’s a problem with such maps: they’re too big. You can’t print them out on one page and can’t fit them on a computer screen without making the place-names too small to read.

So I’ll have to draw you this picture instead. At the end of October, we were standing on the shore of the Baltic Sea near Kaliningrad, a detached piece of Russia that will soon be imbedded in the expanded European Union. A week later we were looking at the Sea of Japan, 6,500 miles away. We had just flown from the longitude of Stockholm across that of Central Europe and Turkey (with a stopover in Moscow), then across the length of the Middle East, the poppy fields of Afghanistan, the angry border of India and Pakistan, not to mention all of the Himalayas, Southeast Asia, China, and divided Korea. Yet we were still in the same country. Imagine nine time-zones worth of jet lag, but still waking up to the same language and the same ads on network TV. Even the “Chinese” restaurants, despite our new proximity to their namesake, served the same scary lumps of unidentifiable matter braised in diesel oil.

The radio station director in Vladivostok (Russia’s Pacific port) was pretty blasé about our epic journey. “We were just in Kaliningrad looking at the Baltic!” we exclaimed. “Oh yeah, how is it?” he asked. He’d grown up there.

We visited radio stations that seemed surprisingly connected to the world, despite being in places that most of the world would think of as nowhere. We also visited stations whose reporters seemed frozen in a modern-day gulag with a mini-disc recorder. We worked with a lot of kids who’d been thrown on the air barely a clue as to what to do, but we also met respected announcers whose listeners brought them flowers and thanked them for years of good advice. One thing is for sure: commercial radio in Russia is a lot more varied and interesting than in the United States. Sometimes we heard things that were discouraging, especially ads disguised (and not very well) as news stories, and silly DJ prattle that made us want to throw the radio out the window – except we were usually in the radio station at the time. Still, I have to give the stations credit. At least they HAVE news, and at least they HAVE DJs that are in the same town as the station, not pre-recorded into some computer in Florida. In fact, Russia’s under-staffed, inexperienced, overworked radio newsrooms reminded me of nothing so much as… your average local public radio station.

The connections between public radio and Russian commercial radio are stronger than just happenstance. The stations invited me through the Foundation for Independent Radio Broadcasting (known by the Russian acronym FNR), a Moscow-based non-profit that tries to keep some semblance of ethical reporting and social programming alive in that country. FNR works mostly with commercial stations in the regions, which in Russia means everywhere not Moscow. A couple of years ago, FNR’s director and editor-in-chief visited the Third Coast Audio Festival in Chicago. That inspired them to organize a series of regional audio festivals around Russia. They got funding from George Soros’s Open Society Institute with the help of none other than Bill Siemering.

I got to go to the first of these audio festivals in Khabarovsk, near the border with China (hence the rush from Kaliningrad to the opposite Russian shore). You could tell that the staffers of these isolated, Far Eastern towns were excited to have the chance to talk about their work and meet their colleagues. Although during Soviet times people moved around a lot – sometimes against their wills – it seems today that Russians in the regions are becoming more and more cut off, not only from the world, but from the rest of their vast country. It costs money to travel, and almost no one has that anymore.

As far as radio goes, more has been lost in the upheavals of the last 11 years. When we’d start talking about a technique like natural sound, which is almost never used on commercial radio in Russia, sometimes an old-timer would pipe up: “That’s how we used to do things in Soviet times.” Soviet radio, I got the sense, paid a lot more attention to the craft of audio, even if the content was in service of the state. Radio workers had training and standards they had to meet. Except for the efforts of training outfits like FNR, much of that knowledge has been lost to commercial radio today. But then again, there was no commercial radio in Communist times, so the transition was bound to be abrupt.

But almost everyone I met was eager to learn these new-again broadcasting tricks. No one likes to go on the air without a clue, and we witnessed many great discussions and revelations during our seminars. I have to give a lot of credit to the person who traveled with me, Alex Kleimenov. He acted as my interpreter, because my Russian is fine for ordering a beer but not for explaining how to write into an actuality. As a stringer for NPR and other public radio programs in Ukraine, Alex is also a great teacher of radio himself. And he had a credibility that I couldn’t have. Alex survived the Red Pioneer and Komsomol Youth camps, he knows all the references to old Soviet movies that I’ve never seen – he is, in short, one of “ours,” a word that has resonance in the former Soviet Union in a way that it never could in the United States.

There are other kinds of isolation than just geographical, and the kind the United States is suffering now may be the worst. Discussion with and knowledge of our colleagues abroad is one small way to counter that.

Transom.org, 6/1/03

At a hotel ballroom in Tucson, Arizona, a wedding reception is underway. The music is Turkish, but the master of ceremonies breaks into Russian. Many of the women here wear Muslim head scarves, though some of the men are drinking vodka. And the round loaves of bread on every table are like those baked in the Caucuses. The scene offers a glimpse of America’s newest refugees, the Meskhetian Turks.

The US is taking in some 15,000 Meskhetian refugees from Southern Russia. These refugees are essentially stateless. Although most were born in the Soviet Union, they’ve been denied legal residency in Russia. Their plight actually began more than 60 years ago, as World War II was coming to an end.

Faramus Ibrahimov was born in Meskhetia, a mountainous region of Southern Georgia on the border with Turkey. His relatives were poor farmers who spoke mainly Turkish. In November of 1944, Russian troops told them they would all have to leave. They had been branded “enemies of the people” for their ethnic ties to Turkey. More than 100,000 Meskhetian Turks were loaded onto trains bound for Central Asia. Ibrahimov was seven at the time. He spent a month on the train.

“On the way, people were dying–children and the elderly,” Ibrahimov remembers. “Their bodies were tossed out of the box cars. It was impossible to bury anyone.The soldiers would come by and pull the dead from the cars like cattle. They treated us worse than cattle.”

By some estimates, 17,000 Meskhetians died on the 1,500-mile journey. Most of the survivors landed in Uzbekistan, then still a part of the Soviet Union. Ibrahimov says life was not easy there, but at least the Uzbeks accepted them as fellow Muslims. Then in 1989, ethnic tensions erupted in Uzbekistan. Soon they escalated into a full-blown pogrom against the Meskhetian Turks.

Mukhabat Tsatsigir was among those who fled.

“We gathered the kids quickly and left,” she says. “I had five young children and I was worried that they would be killed. We didn’t think about what we were leaving behind - our house, our belongings. We just grabbed the kids and left.”

Tsatsigir’s family headed for Krasnodar, the Russian region closest to the Caucuses. She and others thought the Soviet government would help them resettle. But the Soviet Union soon collapsed and Krasnodar didn’t want the refugees. Authorities there passed laws to declare them “illegal migrants.”

“They were officially stripped of the right to work, to register their birth certificates. When children were born, basically, they have no mother and no father, officially. They just appear as orphans who then have to be adopted by their own parents,” says Los Angeles attorney Steve Swerdlow.

Swerdlow has documented the conditions faced by Meskhetian Turks in Krasnodar–conditions he says include beatings, arbitrary imprisonment, and frequent demands for bribes.

Recently the violence has escalated to murder. In 2003, Swerdlow and human rights groups helped persuade US officials to take in the Meskhetian Turks of Krasnodar. He says their resettlement represents a post 9/11-style refugee program, one with very specific limits.

 "Refugee officials have been thinking about how reconceive this program to make it more agile, and I think what was important were to find groups that were relatively finite or relatively manageable, who don’t represent a security threat,“ Swerdlow says.

Mukhabat Tsatsigir now lives in Tucson, in an apartment complex where some thirty Meskhetian families have settled. Everything is good here, she says. But she worries about her brother in Russia who didn’t qualify for the resettlement program. US authorities stopped accepting applications last year.

It’s a huge concern for Meskhetian activist Sarvar Tedorov.

"Families are being broken apart,” Tedorov says. “That’s why I’ve said if you are going to accept only a part of us, you’re helping Russia’s genocide of our people.”

Tedorov applied for resettlement after a nephew was beaten to death in Krasnodar last year.

He and his family now live in Phoenix. They drove down to Tucson for the recent Meskhetian wedding.

In the hotel ballroom, the bride and groom are doing a traditional dance. Well-wishers approach with dollar bills, a symbolic gift for prosperity in their new life here, so far from the many lives they’ve left behind.

The World, 10/03/06

Tucson Weekly, 11/16/06

(Source: pri.org)

The old international arrivals gate is walled off from the rest of Terminal B at DFW Airport. So most travelers never see this hall covered with banners like “Highland Village Elementary says Welcome Home!” and “God Bless Y'all.” A small crowd of nervous relatives, veterans and other volunteers has been milling around, waiting for an incoming plane-load of soldiers to get through customs and claim their bags. The bugle call suddenly blasting over the loudspeakers makes it pretty obvious about when they’re finally headed our way.

The soldiers are still in desert camouflage. They go down the line shaking hands. But around the corner, before they see anyone else here, they get hugs from two women waving red-white-and-blue pom-poms.

Linda Tinnerman and Constance Carman live in nearby Grand Prairie. They’ve been coming to the airport nearly every day for the last three years. Somewhere along the way they transformed from volunteers into icons.

“You know, after we started coming, it seemed like they were all so young,” Connie Carman says. “And we have grandchildren. [The soldiers] would come and hug and us, because they were just so happy to see us. And so we said, oh we’ll be the huggin’ and kissin’ grandmas for all of these kids.”

Connie’s wearing a red t-shirt that actually says “huggin and kissin grandma.” She’s the softer-spoken one, with silver-gray hair. Her long-time church friend and fellow widow Linda wears a matching red t-shirt. Linda’s whoops pierce even the bombastic music over the speakers.

“We’re a little loud sometimes,” Linda laughs. “I’ve tried to tone myself down–but I’m just so happy when they come in, and I really want to greet them. But I’ve tried to tone it down a little bit because it alarms some of them.”

About 120 soldiers run the gauntlet of greeters today. Ian Pounds of the 82nd Airborne Division stands outside looking a little dazed in the mild sunlight, not sure what to make of his first R&R leave.

“It’s overwhelming,” he says. “ Just everybody clapping and stuff, it’s a little too much.”

I ask him his plans for his break.

“You want the truth or the public relations thing?” he laughs “I’m gonna study the Bible, hang out with family, and hang out at the park also.”

Or not.

“I wanna drink some beer, that’s what I wanna do. That’s the truth,” Pounds admits, as he heads onto a shuttle bus to grab a flight to Austin, the last leg of his four-day journey from Iraq. Down the sidewalk, Sergeant Matthew Hibberd is waiting to go to Kansas City. He’s been in the military for nine years, so he knows that Rest and Relaxation leave isn’t always relaxing.

“You expect everything to be put on hold when you got back,” Hibberd says. “As far as you’re concerned, wherever home is–you’re expecting that not to change. But everything does. So when you get home, it’s like, ‘Wow, they tore down that old place there.’ Or, 'Oh, my wife dyed her hair again.’ Just little things that you’re not quite expecting.”

Hibberd’s happy to have the warm welcome when he flies into DFW Airport. And it seems like a lot of soldiers cherish the huggin and kissin grandmas. Some are on long layovers here, so the grandmas take them out to lunch or dinner. They’re kind of a neutral way-station between the fraught worlds of family and military life.

“There’s a lot that they’re going through. And they are happy to see a grandma image when they come back–they really are,” Connie Carman says. “Sometimes they will kid around with us, and sometimes they have serious things on their minds that they want to talk to us about.”

Like the soldier who called his wife to pick him up from the airport, only to find out he was being divorced. Connie and Linda say they’re constantly urging young soldiers not to get married while on leave, because they’ve seen so many of these relationships crash later.

Most of the soldiers they only see briefly, but twice: First, when they fly in, and then two-to-three weeks later just down the terminal, when they reassemble and are put back on military duty.

The soldiers line up in uniform for manifest at noon every day. A sergeant reads them a list of rules and regulations now that they’re back under military law. First and foremost, no drinking in the terminal while they wait for their flight out.

It’s not so festive here. Connie and Linda have stashed their pom-poms away.

They line up with a few other volunteers to say goodbye to the soldiers. They’re standing in for a lot of anxious moms, like one who tracked them down to send an email later.

“She was so thankful that we were here, and could not believe that we would wrap our arms around her son, a total stranger, to send him off,” Connie says.

Some of the soldiers have teddy bears–souvenirs from loved ones–strapped to their military-issued backpacks. They look pre-occupied and sad. Handshakes and hugs seem like a choreographed consolation in the face of casualties, extended deployments, or the isolation of life on base. But no one turns them down.

Host: Memorial Day Weekend is a time when you may get to play, or you may have to work, or you get to do some combination of the two if you’re a performer at a Renaissance Faire. Those weekend reenactments of old Europe have sprung up around the country in the last few decades. One of them, the Scarborough Renaissance Festival south of Dallas, wraps up on Monday.

Years ago, Weekend America’s Julia Barton used to come to Scarborough Faire every weekend in the spring. Her parents played there in a music group, called Earthly Pleasures. They’re no longer performing, but some of the same national acts are still at the festival, and she went back to see if much had changed.

A little before 10 on Saturday morning, Doug Konziolkza starts his work day, walking towards the front gates of Scarborough Faire.

“We’ve been inside, but now I will have to talk very differently when I get out. I will have to talk like… thees,” he says, assuming his persona. “And there will be people waiting to say hello to us. And we’ll say ‘hi’ to the king and queen.”

Doug will spend the weekend as Miguel Rodrigo Jesus Alfredo Esteban de Zaragosa, a 16th-century Spanish servant and campy buffoon.

“Hola! Buenos dias!” he says in a high-pitched voice to people outside. “You going to come see us? Excellent. Eleven o'clock, first show. I think at 3:30 I’m gonna become a woman, I’m not sure yet.” People laugh – they already know who Miguel is.

Scarborough Faire is set in 1533, during the reign of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. The king and queen stand between some turrets above the customers, called patrons, who’ve paid $20 apiece to enter the fair today.

“Throw open the gates and let Scarborough Faire begin!” proclaims the queen as a cannon booms.

I remember Doug from 24 years ago, when he and his partner first started doing their sword-fighting, whip-trick and comedy shtick here. Don Juan and Miguel are still freakishly the same, still chopping up pasta with a whip.

Not that I ever hung out with the likes of Don Juan and Miguel – I was intimidated by the national acts. As a teenager, I thought Ren faires were all about knowing when to say “in sooth” and “anon,” calling balloons “bladders” and cameras “Flemish painters.”

Don Juan and Miguel could care less. Their act is more Comedy Central than Shakespeare.

At their last show of the day, called “The Weird Show,” Doug bursts into song:

Don’t cry for me, Renaissance Faire!

The truth is I’m not really Spanish!

I’m just a Pollack who comes from Chicago.

And like Janet Jackson, here is my nipple!

It just goes on from there. The audience roars with laughter.

And they love other bawdy acts, like Zilch the Tory Steller, purveyor of crude spoonerisms, as in his recitation of “Jomeo and Ruliet.”

“This left ransom Homeo freally rustrated. Yeah, so he didn’t hog out, no, he spent the best of the right wanging out by her hindow!”

Terrence Foy (aka Zilch) has been working the Ren fair circuit even longer than Don Juan and Miguel, starting in Minnesota so long ago that, “I’ll walk out on stage and there’s an audience already assembled, and they’ll go 'Wow, you’ve gained weight!’ 'Oh thank you! 'Boy you’ve got gray!’ 'I know, you have too…’”

Terry has seen Renaissance fairs go from one-weekend deals with card tables in a parking lot to multi-million-dollar entertainment empires. Life backstage has changed, too.

I hardly recognize the performers’ campground. It’s no longer the flood-prone, poison ivy-infested backwoods that I remember. Not only is there a real bar, they have a greenhouse and a playground. And row after row of campers.

Terry gives me a tour of his. “As far as I’m concerned, this is a $30,000 bathroom, because you get tired – you know this from your experience – you get tired of the little plastic houses all of the time. And having a shower all to yourself, what a fabulous thing!”

It took Terry Foy three decades to acquire luxuries like an RV. He just turned 50, and so far he has no plans to ease up. Nobody here does, including Jose Granados, the whip-cracking swordsman half of Don Juan and Miguel. He’s 53, has a bad knee, a sewn-up lip and several small scars on his hands from years of doing his show.

“I believe that I can just keep doing what I’m doing forever. The sword fights will probably get a little slower. But we can compensate hopefully with more humor or more precision, as opposed to just wildness and jumping around the stage,” he says.

Don Juan and Miguel have slowed down, but no one seems to notice – and in truth, they don’t look much older than when I saw them as a teenager. It’s both weird and weirdly reassuring to know that every weekend morning in spring, after Scarborough Faire begins, Miguel Rodrigo Jesus Alfredo Esteban de Zaragosa can be found inside the gates blowing up a balloon.

“People are coming in now. I’m gonna go play my Bladivarius,” he explains as he joins a group of musicians under a tree near the entrance. As they play their hammer dulcimers, recorders, lutes and guitars, Doug gets a percussive sound by licking his fingers and rubbing the balloon.

Timelessness is of course what we want in a Ren fair. In Scarborough Faire’s version of 1533, Anne Boleyn has never died. The wonder and cruelty of the New World are still far off, and so are the burdens of democracy and modern technology. This scene sounds the same as when my parents played here. Doug Kondziolka can always make a living wearing red and black velvet, being silly and rubbing a bladder. The future will take care of itself.

On a grant from the U.S. Embassy in Moldova, Julia Barton worked as a consultant to help the town of Giurgiulesti set up a journalism program at its local school. The project is in conjunction with the Peace Corps and the journalism program at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Giurgiulesti, on the border with Romania and Ukraine, is remote from much of Moldova and lacks local media. The website RadioGiurgiu.com (in Romanian, English translation available) represents the first attempt at doing local stories since Soviet times.

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

The upcoming 150th anniversary of the Civil War is shaping up to be a big deal. Dozens of states, from New Jersey to Arkansas, have formed commissions to observe the sesquicentennial. Not Texas. The state’s Historical Commission has some grants to preserve a couple of battlegrounds; other than that, its staff must use existing funds to improve a marker here and a website there.

Texas would like to forget it was a slave-holding state. The nation saw that this spring as some members of the State Board of Education tried to erase the word slavery from several parts of the social-studies curriculum. According to the still-dominant narrative here, slavery was no big deal in Texas. As University of North Texas historian Randolph Campbell puts it, “Without slavery, Texas gets to be a Western state,” one that joined the Confederacy for reasons of principle only. History that contradicts this narrative is conveniently forgotten.

In fact, Campbell found from census rolls that by 1860, nearly 200,000 slaves lived in Texas—one-third of the population. And slavery was very much on the mind of Texans in the summer of 1860, when mass hysteria swept the Lone Star State. By year’s end, dozens and perhaps hundreds had died in a slave-insurrection panic known as the Texas Troubles. The events were publicized widely around the country and, some historians argue, may have precipitated the Civil War.

There’s a sesquicentennial you’re not hearing about.

The state has had a complicated relationship with the war from the very beginning. In March 1861, when the leadership of Texas took an oath to the new Confederate States, they did it literally over the body of Sam Houston. The governor sat in the basement of the Austin Capitol, one witness later wrote, stubbornly whittling a stick while lawmakers called him to take the oath. “I am stricken down now, because I will not yield those principles which I have fought for,” Houston lamented when he finally emerged. “The severest pang is that the blow comes in the name of the state of Texas.” With that, the old man was removed from office. And Texas was no longer part of the United States.

Texans had elected Houston and several other pro-Union candidates to office only two years earlier. What happened? To start with, in October of 1859 abolitionist John Brown had tried to foment a slave revolt in Virginia by raiding the federal armory and arsenal in Harpers Ferry. And a drought and heat wave scorched much of the South in the summer of 1860, exacerbating the tense political atmosphere. Water wells dried up and crops withered in the fields as temperatures reached above 100 degrees for days on end. On July 8, most of Dallas’s 678 residents were sweating out their siestas indoors when a fire broke out at Wallace Peak’s drugstore downtown. The townspeople could do little but run outdoors as hot winds blew the flames from one dry wooden building to the next. By the time the fire burned out, half the town’s business district was destroyed.

Similar fires happened at almost the same time in Denton and the hamlet of Pilot Point. The excitable editor of the (burned-down) Dallas Herald, Charles Pryor, sent letters to several newspapers about an alleged abolitionist plot afoot in Texas that aimed to burn the state down. “Each county in Northern Texas has a supervisor in the person of a white man, whose name is not given: each county laid off into districts under the sub-agents of this villain,” Pryor wrote, although he didn’t reveal his sources. “Poisoning was to be added, and the old females to be slaughtered along with the men, and the young and handsome women to be parceled out amongst these infamous scoundrels.”

The response was swift and inflammatory. The Houston Weekly Telegraph wrote on July 31, 1860, that “an outraged country demands the blood of the murderers. Slaves who have thus been had by the false teachings of wicked fanatics, to commit deeds which render their lives a forfeit, demand the blood of the guilty. … Let the whole people organize for protection and vengeance.”

That was a call to form vigilance committees, secretive bodies usually elected by the men of a town or county to bypass normal jurisprudence. “We will hang every man who does not live above suspicion,” wrote “J.W.S.” of Fort Worth’s vigilance committee to the New York Day Book in August 1860. “It is better for us to hang ninety-nine innocent (suspicious) men than to let one guilty one pass, for the guilty one endangers the peace of society.”

The committees formed night patrols and set about identifying suspicious slaves, as well as potential abolitionists. White Northerners, foreigners and Mexican Americans faced terrifying treatment. One man in Marshall wrote his father: “Every man that travels this country is taken up and examined, and if he does not give a good account of himself, he is strung up to the nearest tree.”

The best-documented accounts of the Texas Troubles come from where it began, in Dallas. The vigilance committee met in the still-sooty county courthouse on July 23. According to one retelling more than 30 years later, some members wanted to hang all the slaves in the county, but authorities worried that this would “entail a great loss of property.” So the committee settled on three black men: Patrick Jennings, Sam Smith and “Old Cato.” Cato had been entrusted by his owners, the Overton family, with running their mill; Sam Smith was a preacher; Jennings, who came from Virginia with his master, was later described by the master’s son as “an agitator.”

The three slaves met their deaths the following day on the bank of the Trinity River. The site no longer exists, since the river itself has been rerouted through downtown Dallas. But recently I met with Dallas historian Michael Phillips at the nearest place: Dealey Plaza.

We walked under the Triple Overpass bridge to an isolated triangle of land formerly known as Dealey Annex, which the city quietly renamed Martyrs Park in recognition of all the bad things that have happened on this spot. No marker names the place. “Hanging is difficult to do,” Phillips remarked over the roar of traffic. “You have to know what you’re doing. You have to calculate the weight of the person and then the amount of drop that’s allowed by the rope.” In Dallas, witnesses say, authorities miscalculated. Jennings, who had shown remarkable composure before his execution, “strangled for several minutes. It took him a long time to die. He was dangling, and he was conscious while he tried to free his neck from the rope,” Phillips said.

Most of the area’s slaves watched the brutal deaths. They also faced whippings, according to many accounts. By then, the racial paranoia had spread throughout slave-holding Texas, with hangings reported in Fort Worth, Crockett, Henderson, Waxahachie, San Antonio and many other places.

“Everything you look at says this was a tragic farce, tragic because it caused so many people to be killed—we still don’t know how many—and so many others to be beaten or expelled from the state,” said historian Donald Reynolds, who has written a book on the troubles called Texas Terror. He and many other historians believe that there was no conspiracy, no arson, no insurrection at all. They blame the summer’s fires on the drought, the heat and combustible phosphorus matches, called prairie matches, which were widely used in Texas at the time. (The matches were also aptly called “Lucifers.”)

“The initial reports of the various fires in North Texas all tended to agree that the spontaneous combustion of prairie matches was the cause in each instance. Since most of the fires occurred in stores that would have stocked these matches, it was natural for them to reach such a conclusion,” Reynolds wrote in Texas Terror.

But one group does hold fast to the idea that some kind of uprising took place: descendants of the slaves themselves. Donald Payton’s ancestors worked under Crill B. Miller, who owned a farm outside Dallas that caught on fire a few days after the town burned. When Payton, an amateur historian, first read that members of his extended family were implicated in the fire, he felt certain there was a plot. “The slaves weren’t as naïve as the movies make them. They heard and saw things like everybody else did,” Payton said of the turbulent times after the raid on Harpers Ferry. “I just don’t think it was an accident.”

Payton tells his version of the story every year to a huge reunion of the Miller family that gathers around July 8 on the former slaves’ land in Oak Cliff. “I always want people to be conscious that our struggle to be free did not start or did not stop with Martin Luther King,” he says. “We took freedom in hand, and that’s a good feeling.”

If there was a coordinated uprising, it didn’t accomplish much. But that summer’s hysteria did, politically. The stage was set for the state to secede the following year, despite the efforts of Sam Houston to keep that from happening. And the wide reportage on the Texas Troubles across the South may have been the deciding factor in getting other key states to join the Confederacy. With most rumors printed and few retracted, Southerners believed that war had in fact already come to them.

If we’ve forgotten the Texas Troubles, we can first thank many of the participants themselves. One secessionist editor who published the “evidence” of the abolitionist plot later went on to write the first history of Dallas County. By then, in 1887, he could barely bring himself to mention the events of 1860. To write of that time, he said, “would be to open a question, the discussion of which should be left to a later day.”

That day is still being put off. Randolph Campbell laughs at the thought of the state organizing any kind of public discussion or exhibition on the Texas Troubles 150 years later. “It would be murderously difficult,” he said.

Campbell touches on the Troubles in his book An Empire for Slavery. The book also matter-of-factly describes how, at the time, it was nothing odd for a Texan to hold the title “Negro and Real Estate Broker,” and how the leased labor of slaves put young white heirs through college. This was not a moral quandary in 1860 for most Texans, and thousands of them would die in brutal conflict before it started to become one. If, 150 years later, Texans still can’t talk about what slavery made of us, then part of our history remains trapped inside that peculiar institution.

Texas Observer, 08/10/10

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

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.

“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.”

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.

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 got Larry Hagman to visit once.

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. 

(Source: texasobserver.org)

Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

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. DTFD: The Podcast

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

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 produced by Julia Barton for Human Rights Watch, 12/13/2011.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

(Source: soundcloud.com)

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

99% Invisible 
Sept. 3, 2013

There’s a term that epitomizes what we radio producers aspire to create: the “driveway moment.” It’s when a story is so good that you literally can’t get out of your car. Inside of a driveway moment, time becomes elastic–you could be staring straight at a clock for the entire duration of the story, but for that length of time, the clock has no power over you.

But ironically,  inside the machinery of public radio–the industry that creates driveway moments–the clock rules all.

At NPR’s studios in Washington, DC, there are clocks everywhere. Big red digital clocks, huge round analog clocks. There’s even special software and time calculators, where 60 + 60 = 2’00.

(All Things Considered director Monika Evstatieva during a live broadcast in NPR’s Studio 2A. Credit: Julia Barton)

Each show has a ‘clock’, a set template, from which the show almost never varies. Every show that broadcasts—or aspires to broadcast—in the public radio system has a clock. This is the All Things Considered broadcast clock, which NPR and stations across the country refer to on a daily basis:

It’s actually a pretty cool piece of visual design, but one which functions best when it is never seen. This template is used twice every weekday: ATC Hour 1, from 4:00:00pm through 4:59:59pm ET; and then for ATC Hour 2, from 5:00:00 through 5:59:59pm ET.

Here’s how it works: at the ‘top’ of the hour, there is a 59 second “billboard,” which announces what’s going up in the program. Then there’s five minutes for the newscast, which is itself divided into two segments (“Newscast I” and “Newscast II”). Then there are the “blocks”–A, B, C, and D–which is where the stories and interviews (or “two-ways”) live.

Segments can’t run long by even a second, because most of the local stations are automated to cut off the national program where the clock says they can. These times–the dividers between the sections on the clock–are called posts. You have to hit the post. Nothing can go wrong.

Though, of course, things go wrong every day.

(When Julia visited ATC, a live interview segment accidentally got wrapped up 35 seconds early. Then it was on Monika, the director, to figure out what to do. Credit: Julia Barton)

Taking care of the clock is so ingrained in the director’s psyche that a common side effect of the job is waking up in the middle of the night fearing that you’ve blown the post–these are called “director’s dreams.” To cope with the anxiety,ATC directors make their own cheat sheets to help them memorize every queue of every hour of broadcast.Visit any studio that does a regular live feed with a broadcast clock and you’ll likely find a cheat sheet one somewhere in the studio.

The director’s cheat sheets at ATC  have been used so much that they’re in tatters. They have since been laminated.

(Note the correction in the “Top Cast” in the upper right. It’s not “1:00″, it’s “:59″)

When NPR began in the early 1970s, show clocks were much less regimented–or they didn’t have clocks at all.

One of the early champions against the fixed clock was Bill Siemering, a founder of NPR who helped design the network’s overall sound. He came up with the name All Things

Considered (original title: A Daily Identifiable Product). Siemering wrote the mission statement of NPR, which is enshrined in the halls of NPR (note the text on the walls).

(Credit: Interior Design)

Siemering liked a clock that was more free-form, because it allowed for spontaneity and unpredictability. But spontaneous and unpredictable does not always make for compelling radio. Done wrong, and you wind up with laughably bad “Schweddy Balls”-grade public radio.

When Siemering left NPR in the early 1970s, NPR chose to have more subdivided clocks. The constraints forced the shows to get tighter, which some say makes NPR stronger. One person is Neal Conan, former host of Talk of the Nation, who maintains that the earlier, freer days of NPR were not as halcyon as some may remember them.

 These days, podcasting allows for shows such as this one to be free of a post, and go on for as long or short as is fitting for any given story.

Reporter-producer-editor (triple threat!) Julia Barton visited NPR’s old headquarters at Washington, DC, where she spoke with ATC directors Monika Evstatieva and Greg Dixon, and former Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan. Julia also spoke with public radio’s patron saint, Bill Siemering.

Many thanks to All Things Considered Executive Producer Chris Turpin and the other powers-that-be at NPR who gave us unfettered access to the shop during Julia’s visit.

(Note: Julia visited NPR while they were still at 635 Massachusetts Ave, NW. They have since moved to 1111 N. Capitol St.)

by Julia Barton

In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia that it was unconstitutional to execute a criminal who was mentally retarded because it violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “excessive” punishment. But it fell to the states to decide what would constitute retardation under the law. In Texas, the job of defining who could and couldn’t be executed fell to the appeals court. Cathy Cochran was the judge who wrote the state’s opinion, and she cited one of her favorite novels, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, for guidance.

Of Mice and Men tells the story of Lennie Small, a big, strong, but mentally disabled ranchhand in California, and George, another ranch hand who takes him under his wing. Lennie is childlike — he loves little animals but often crushes them. He kills a woman without quite realizing what he has done, and in the end, George shoots Lennie out of mercy, ahead of the posse that is hunting him down.

“Most Texas citizens might agree,” Judge Cochran wrote in what is known as the Briseño decision, “that Steinbeck’s Lennie should, by virtue of his lack of reasoning ability and adaptive skills, be exempt.”

In taking the severely retarded Lennie as a standard, though, disability advocates say that Texas has executed individuals who are less profoundly retarded, but deserve protection under the Supreme Court’s Atkins decision. Margaret Nygren, head of the American Association for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, points out that retarded people may be capable of telling a lie or planning a crime, but “they may not quite understand that the person interrogating them is being less than truthful. They may not be able to make eye contact. They may be so agreeable and wanting to please those around them that they are unable to successfully contribute to their own defense.”

John Steinbeck’s son Thomas also objects to the way Texas has used his father’s imaginative work. “To judge anything based on a piece of fiction, I think, is a stretch,” he said. “And I think it would’ve made my father extremely angry.”

A bill in the Texas Senate right now would do away with Judge Cochran’s “Lennie test,” adopting a more scientific standard of retardation in deciding capital punishment cases. The bill is sponsored by two Democratic senators, but the conservative editorial page of the Dallas Morning News also endorsed the bill, writing “Texas is outlier enough on capital punishment without using literature as a guide for who lives and who dies. It’s time for a legislative fix that removes Lennie from Texas law.”

That would be a relief to John Steinbeck, who, according to Thomas, opposed the death penalty in every case. “I remember once my father saying “If you have to take another man’s blood to make your point, you haven’t thought out the question very thoroughly.”

Studio 360 from PRI and WNYC, 7/25/2013

99% Invisible
Episode 133: Port of Dallas

There’s a photograph we have tacked to our studio at 99% Invisible HQ. The photo, taken 1899, shows three men, all looking very fashionable, suspended mid-air on the lifted arm of a giant dredging machine.

There are plenty of images like this from this era—scenes of people standing around proudly as they shaped the earth. And in these old photos there seems to be a real sense of awe and reverence for the marvels of civil engineering.

The above photo is a scene from the reversal of the Chicago River (see episode episode #86, true believers!). The reason that photo is famous—or at least famous enough for us to have seen it—is because the reversal of the Chicago River was an enormous engineering project that was successful.

But you have to figure that there were countless other photographs depicting similarly-awe-inspiring feats of engineering prowess that we have never seen—because those feats turned out to be failures.

This is a scene from of another feat of civil engineering: the creation—or the attempted creation—of the Port of Dallas.

In 1892, the good ship Snag Boat Dallas of Dallas was employed to clear debris (called “snags”) out of the Trinity River in order to make the river navigable to ships. Dallas, it was imagined, it could be a port city to the Gulf of Mexico.

Dallas, though, is about 300 miles to the Gulf as the crow files. With all the Trinity River’s twists and turns, it’s actually more like 700 miles of river.

Still, the Snagboat Dallas of Dallas was able to clear the river well enough to allow the passage of another well-named boat, the steamship H. A. Harvey, Jr.

When the H. A. Harvey, Jr. arrived in Dallas in 1893 from the Gulf of Mexico, the city went berserk. The front page of the newspaper was printed in red ink because they were ecstatic to be becoming a port city. But the Trinity River still was not easily navigable.

Dallas convinced Congress to survey the river and figure out where locks and dams could help make it navigable. The Army Corps of Engineers finished the first lock and dam in the early 1900s at a site 13 miles below Dallas. But eventually Congress shelved the project. The locks and dams that had already been built moldered.

Then, in 1908, the Trinity River flooded, and made a mess of Dallas. As a result, Dallas hired esteemed urban planner and landscape architect George Kessler. The so-called “Kessler Plan” would transform the Trinity River into a straight channel about a half-mile west of its existing course through Dallas. Levees would contain the new channel and open up miles of floodplain for development right next to downtown. Not all of the Kessler Plan came to pass, but the river was diverted and channeled into a 26 mile canal.

In a a series of fits and starts over the next 55 years, the Port of Dallas project kept moving forward. In anticipation of the imminent navigability of the Trinity River, new freeway bridges constructed over the river were built extra tall to allow sea-going vessels clearance underneath.But by the time the money and political clout was ready to finish the project once and for all, Dallas didn’t really need a seaport. The new DFW airport would do just fine.

So the city of Dallas moved their river from the center of town to a walled-off floodplain for a Port of Dallas which never came to pass, and for years the diverted river festered; it became a place to dump sewage, and trash, and even dead bodies. No one went there on purpose.

But now, things are finally starting to change. The Trinity is becoming a public green space. Making the diverted river easily accessible for public use is a huge urban-planning challenge for Dallas. But little by little people are starting to use the river. There are some trails for bikes and walking, and you can even take a kayak trip.

Reporter (and native Dallasite) Julia Barton has been obsessed with the Trinity River for way too long. She spoke with Dallas historian Darwin Payne; and filmmaker Rob Tranchin, who produced Living With The Trinity.

Dallas-born actor William Jackson Harper stepped in as the voice of Trinity River boosterism.

As Cold War tensions came to a head, two men, working across the ocean from one another, became united in the quest to create conversations between Americans and Russians over the telephone lines.

JULIA BARTON NOV 3 2014
The Atlantic

In 1983 President Reagan dubbed the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” but by the end of his first term, he was wondering if ordinary Russians and Americans couldn’t resolve our nations’s difference by just talking. At the end of a White House speech on January 16, 1984, Reagan imagined an American couple, Jim and Sally, sheltering from a storm with Soviets Ivan and Anya. By some magic, there is no language barrier.

“Would they then debate the differences between their respective governments?” Reagan asked, rhetorically of course. “Or would they find themselves comparing notes about their children and what each other did for a living?”

Actually, we know what they would talk about: pizza. And Pepsi. And their hopes for goodwill among nations. We know this because by the end of the 80s, regular Soviets and Americans were talking to each other, through a strange and glitchy videophone. But the story of how those videophone calls happened in the first one is one full of risk, invention, and very strange characters.

Today, American’s have largely forgotten what it feels like to be isolated both by analog technology and geopolitics.
Even before Reagan’s speech, the 1980s were the great era of longing for “ordinary” conversation between Russians and Americans. While governments held formal arms talks, many Soviets lived in closed cities or were, by law, supposed to seek official permission to speak with foreigners. Peace activists in the U.S. were itching for more contact, especially as our government ramped up its anti-Soviet rhetoric.

Today, Americans have largely forgotten what it feels like to be isolated both by analog technology and geopolitics. To peace activists on both sides of the Cold War divide, digital technology was the answer a stuck world was waiting for. What they lacked, the thinking went, was the means to communicate. And in some ways that was true.

All the telephone trunk lines between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. went through Pittsburgh. And there were only 33 of them for the Soviet Union, a nation of close to 300 million. (By contrast, Costa Rica had some 600 circuits to the U.S. at that time). Calls between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had to be scheduled days if not weeks in advance, and even then the quality was terrible. The operators caught a lot of flack.

Then suddenly, with satellite links and then the early Internet, that contact became theoretically possible. And two men, working across the ocean from one another, became united in the quest to make conversations between the two countries happen.

In the early 1980s, Joel Schatz was working as an energy advisor to the governor of Oregon. He found the Reagan administration’s approach to the U.S.S.R. alarming. Schatz had Russian-born grandparents and resented the way the Cold War kept people of the two empires isolated from one another. So Schatz and his wife Diane decided to raise funds to travel to the U.S.S.R. as “citizen scouts.” They left in late August 1983.

At that time, former KGB head Yuriy Andropov held the U.S.S.R. in his sclerotic grip. While Joel and Diane were in Moscow, the Soviets shot down Korean Air flight 007 over the Pacific, killing 269 people including a U.S. congressman. It was a grim time even for the grim pageant of the Cold War. But none of that mattered to the Schatzs’ hope of using technology to bring Russians and Americans closer together, because through their interpreter, they’d met a man named Joseph Goldin.

Here it’s perhaps best to quote Adam Hochchild’s fantastic Mother Jones piece about the Schatzs and this unlikely Soviet man:

Joseph has no official connection to any institution, a fact that has apparently sometimes gotten him in trouble with the authorities. But clearly he is Joel’s counterpart in the Soviet Union, another cultural repairman.

In a country where all professionals have business cards in the same format—last name, first name and patronymic, academic degree, title, address—Joseph has stationery showing a drawing of a man’s head: The lower half is a face gazing at you intently, the top half is a partially completed, many-floored Tower of Babel. Around the edge of this head scrolls the Russian inscription: EXPEDITION TO HIDDEN HUMAN RESERVES.
“Hidden human reserves” were, in Goldin-speak, akin to the untapped “human potential” theories popular among New Age thinkers in the U.S. at the time. And indeed, Goldin was on the board of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, a group that had tried to forge telepathic links with Soviets before satellite technology made the paranormal less of a first resort. With Goldin’s wide, baby-ish face and staccato tumble of English, he enchanted many Americans in search of a free-thinking counterpart behind the Iron Curtain. Joel Schatz remembers thinking, “Here was someone we could work with.”

Goldin believed that the people of the world needed more spontaneous contact. His dream, which he dubbed Mirror for Humanity, was to have huge screens in cities around the globe connected via satellite so people could peer at one another and strike up conversations (as with Reagan, language barriers seemed to be a minor problem for Goldin). Goldin was a utopian, not uncommon in a country steeped in the magical thinking of late-era Soviet Marxism. He saw spontaneous communication as a way to unleash the next era of human development.

Though Joel Schatz adored Goldin’s utopian impulse, he had a more practical take. After his first experience trying to place a call from the U.S.S.R., Schatz had figured out that AT&T had the monopoly on calls to and from the United States. It was nearly impossible to make phone calls to the Soviet Union, without putting in a request, waiting for several days, and (at least on the U.S. side) paying an arm and a leg. Schatz thought this bottleneck was ridiculous, especially because it impeded ordinary communication between the citizenry of two nuclear superpowers. It being the 1980s, Schatz figured it was a problem that could be hacked with computers. There was just one problem: Schatz knew almost nothing about computers.

“We had friends in computers, and they recommended that we buy [one],” Schatz told me. He got a Radio Shack Tandy Model 80 “with little rubber cups to fit over the telephone earpiece and speaker. I was reading the manual on the plane [to Russia] to see how it worked,” he recalls.

But Schatz turned out to be a very good hacker, just not of computers. His real triumph was hacking people, specifically people within the Soviet bureaucracy—which was, admittedly, starving for the chance to reverse engineer Western technology. Schatz seemed to understand instinctively that power in the U.S.S.R. basically flowed as in a high school, with a few influential cliques running the show. His new friend Joseph Goldin also knew this and had endeared himself to the scientific-academic clique, men who were necessary to the military but also a tiny bit mystical. Goldin introduced Schatz to Boris Rauschenbakh, the Soviet astronomer who’d managed to obtain the first images of the far side of the Moon.

As Schatz tells it, “I happened to have an audio cassette of Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ in my briefcase.” He gave it to Rauschenbakh, who in return gave him the name of the right guy who could handle questions of proto-computing. Soon enough, Schatz was showing off his Model 80 computer to a group of powerful Soviet academics.

“These scientists looked at it as if it had been a space rock falling from heaven. They had never seen a device like this before,” he says. Thanks to that meeting, Schatz had the contacts and clearance he needed to set up an email link to connect his office—now a nonprofit in San Francisco—with a place called Institute for Automated Systems in Moscow.

Schatz needed something more exciting to generate interest, and he got it with “slow-scan television” technology.
So Schatz could now send emails from his computer to Russians. But email was still rarely used in the mid-1980s. Schatz needed something more exciting to generate interest in his mission, and he got it with “slow-scan television” technology—a way of sending photo data, pixel by pixel, over voice telephone lines (at 3kHz—like a super-slow television signal). Doctors and scientists had been using the technology to transmit images to one another since the 1960s. Astronauts and cosmonauts used it to transmit images of what they saw in space. But it had rarely been used for conversational purposes, and never for citizen diplomacy.

Joseph Goldin first hit on the idea of attaching slow-scan images to ordinary, person-to-person communication in 1985. He left it up to Schatz to figure out how to obtain the equipment and bring it to the U.S.S.R. Writer Adam Hochschild was present for most of this ordeal, and in his Mother Jones piece, he describes an extensive comedy of errors getting a borrowed slow-scan unit through Soviet customs and set up in a Moscow conference room, linked over ordinary telephone lines to technicians in Berkeley who try to transmit a human image.

Although vaguely recognizable as a human figure sitting in a chair, it looks as if black icicles were dripping down from the top of the screen, and as if the whole thing were viewed through a web of herringbones.

Joel explains the problem on the phone, and then says, “Okay, now I’m going to send you something.” He aims the video camera at a painting on the wall, and pushes the button. “Can you recognize this guy?”

Thirty seconds later comes a voice from Berkeley: “Lenin!” A buzz of excited whispering in Russian runs around the roomful of Soviet bureaucrats. A visual image from this room has just traveled almost halfway 'round the world, over the phone. Several of the men stand up, to get a better view of the TV.
Suddenly seeing and talking to faraway people was sexy, but also easily within reach, even if the picture quality wasn’t the greatest. Finally, Schatz and Goldin were ready to bring it to the world. Like the shrewd promoters they were, they started off with media stunts: New Years’ toasts between poets and musicians at midnight in Moscow, noon in San Francisco. Soon they were linking all kinds of small groups across the Cold War divide: maternity ward nurses and doctors, members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Diane Schatz, an artist herself, linked up cartoonists. And in 1987, the three amateur diplomats had a stroke of genius: connecting the telephone operators who handled the calls between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.

So on October 9 of that year operators at AT&T’s International Operating Center in Pittsburgh sat down in a windowless room to talk with their counterparts at the U.S.S.R.’s International Telephone Exchange in Moscow.

You can see Joel and Diane in the foreground at the table where the American operators had gathered (we do not have film of the Soviet side). Diane, with smooth hair and dangling earrings, talks continuously into a white receiver linked to Moscow. Her husband Joel, Lennon to her Yoko with a bushy beard and round glasses, fiddles with a large Apple PC and points a camera to the operators around the table.

Schatz has hooked all this up to two direct connections between Moscow and Pittsburgh—copper wires strung across land and sea. (Newly installed trans-Atlantic fiber-optic cables had not yet gone online.) Moscow telephones still operated on tsarist-era, un-insulated, copper wires. Schatz and the technicians in Moscow connected their computers to this copper-based technology with alligator clips.

And yet remarkably, they were able to transmit pictures back and forth across the wires—pictures of the operators as they talk. And they wanted to talk about what they do on their breaks.

One American operator positions herself beneath a banner strung up in the conference room: It says HELLO NEW FRIENDS in Russian. Someone has grabbed bottles of soda and a frozen pizza.

“Do you have pizza in Russia?” the woman asks. “Hello?”

The answer comes quickly, from a male voice with a Russian-tinged British accent. “Well, no pizza yet!” It’s not clear if he means they haven’t tried pizza in the U.S.S.R., or they haven’t gotten the image yet. It makes its way through the wire line by line to be reconstructed on a TV screen in the distant northern city. After a few seconds, the man reacts: “Oh, beautiful pizza!” Everyone laughs.

In response, one of the supervisors in Moscow has her daughter play a song on the guitar. It is a little sad and clunky, her guitar out of tune. The Pittsburgh operators listen politely. The Soviet operators have many formal speeches to make.

“Hello,” says one operator named Svetlana. “I am very happy finally to have this rare opportunity not only to hear but to see my counterparts in America. And I very much hope that today’s contact will continue and deepen our acquaintance. I hope we will have more sessions like this in the future.”

After that exchange, the AT&T operators gave his scrappy startup second priority in line for calls to and from the U.S.S.R. First in line? The U.S. State Department.

Around this same time, Schatz got funding from George Soros, the Hungarian-born hedge-fund manager who supported dissidents in the Eastern bloc. Soros helped Schatz turn his Internet and slow-scan link to the United States into a for-profit business called SovAmTeleport, splitting the proceeds 50/50 with the Soviet government, which was opening itself to joint ventures everywhere by this point. The fees for SovAm’s transmission and translation services look steep to us now—more than $1600 in today’s dollars to set up a data account, plus a $330 monthly fee—but there were plenty of customers on the U.S. side eager to pay for a solid link to counterparts in the U.S.S.R.

This was the real beginning of Schatz’s big business. To capitalize on his new connections, Schatz established permanent offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg, hired his first employees, and also began looking at ways to break the AT&T monopoly on telephone connections to the U.S.S.R.

It’s clear how the Internet blew the minds of those few Soviets privileged enough to access it.
Schatz’s first Russian employee was a 25-year-old named Andrei Kolesnikov, who had been running the hulking computers for a factory in Moscow. Talking with him now, it’s clear how completely the Internet blew the minds of those few Soviets privileged enough to access it. Kolesnikov remembers sitting in Schatz’s Moscow apartment, looking at his Apple PC, stunned that it could be linked not only to Schatz’s office in San Francisco, but with computers around the globe. This was his first glimpse of Usenet.

“It was a big, big thing for any person at that time,” Kolesnikov says. “But for me it was kind of double-shock because I was just a Soviet guy from the factory!”

In August 1991, hardline Communists deposed Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and declared themselves head of a new government. For three days, the U.S.S.R. had almost no telephone contact with the outside world. But SovAm was able to fly under the radar and keep sending out news from its clients, which now included major Western media. Kolesnikov didn’t sleep for 72 hours.

The coup was routed and six months later, the Soviet Union had dissolved into 15 pieces. Joel Schatz was suddenly a telecom mogul in a new country—the Russian Federation—a country now desperate to join the world. He continued traveling back and forth to Russia as SovAm Teleport became GTS, which spun off into something called Golden Telecom, which eventually merged with VimpelCom, now the seventh-largest mobile carrier in the world. In Russia and many former Soviet republics, VimpelCom sells its services under the brand BeeLine. In 2012, VimpelCon pulled in $23.1 billion in revenue.

The Schatzes sold their shares in GTS in the early 2000s, but their involvement in the booming Russian telecom market clearly made them wealthy. They now live in a Japanese-style mansion atop a hill in Marin County, surrounded by fountains and manicured landscaping.

They talk about their Russia experience as a wild ride they simply jumped on for a time. Their former employee Andrei Kolesnikov is now in charge of Coordination Center, the top-level domain name service for Russia’s Internet. And he agrees that the Schatzs were simply in the right place at the right time.

“I believe in Karl Marx,” Kolesnikov says wryly. “If there was no Joel, there would be someone else. This was just part of the historical transformation.”

But while the Schatzs got rich off the transformation, it was not as kind to Joseph Goldin. In the 1990s, he spent three years living in San Francisco with the Schatzs, trying constantly to convince people of his scheme for giant TV screens connecting the globe. But after the Cold War, Americans quickly lost interest in all things Russian. Goldin’s last accomplishment was a worldwide sing-along of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” at the opening of the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics. It’s moving to watch, and you can see and hear Goldin’s fantastic dream for humanity as whole stadia of people take up the chorus around the world.

Soon after that, Goldin died of a heart attack. The few Russian newspapers that noticed reported that he was trying to organize a “spacebridge” between Chechens and Russians, who were then killing each other at a rapid pace.

Good cross-cultural communication is more than just talking—it’s work.
In his vast house, Joel Schatz still keeps up with the news from Russia, bewildered by its recent bender of anti-American hatred and Internet censorship. Clearly now, the problem is not that people don’t have the means to communicate—they can talk to (and troll) one another all day if they wish. But good cross-cultural communication is more than just talking—it’s work. A “natural” conversation between strangers with different upbringings involves a massive amount of discomfort, especially for Americans who are not often pushed out of their zones in this way. I speak decent Russian and have been traveling back and forth to the former Soviet world for three decades now, and I’m still not good at it.

Listening back, I’m haunted by the many lofty speeches the Soviet operators made in that 1987 exchange. This, for Soviets then and even for many Russians now, is the culturally appropriate thing one does in a first meeting with foreigners. It clearly confused the American operators, who thought they were there to talk about their kids and pizza. The thought of orating over a phone about the friendship of mankind would’ve been as ridiculous to them then as it is to me now, but it probably would have sent a cue of “normal behavior” to the Soviet side. The Soviet operators said they hoped their new off-hours contact with Americans would continue, but AT&T apparently did not think the effort was worth it. As far as Schatz knows, no other video-calls were made between the two groups.

Joel Schatz and Joseph Goldin were among the many tech visionaries who foresaw the end of analog isolation. But American awareness of foreign cultural cues is still pretty much the same it was in the 1980s. In fact, these late Cold War exchanges with Russians seem to be a high point of American interest in really engaging with people of another nation.

But if Russian leaders turn back the clock to pseudo-Soviet threat-mongering and isolation—a model that seems to be their default endgame—things might get so bad that Americans may again need to take an awkward turn as citizen diplomats. Next time, though, it won’t be the technology or the talking that is the challenge. The hard part will be, as it always has been, listening and understanding what the other side is saying.
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See also: These video chats helped thaw out the Cold War, PRI’s The World, 11/7/14.

Radiolab, Feb. 12, 2014

Whether it comes from government spokespeople or celebrity publicists, the phrase “can neither confirm nor deny” is the perfect non-denial denial. It’s such a perfect deflection that it seems like it’s been around forever, but reporter Julia Barton takes us back to the 1970s and the surprising origin story of what’s now known as a “Glomar Response.” With help from David Sharp and Walt Logan, we tell the story of a clandestine CIA operation to lift a sunken Soviet submarine from the ocean floor and the dilemma they faced when the world found out about it.

In the 40 years since that operation, the Glomar Response has become boilerplate language from an array of government agencies. With help from ProPublica editor Jeff Larson and NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston, we explore the implications of this ultimate information dodge. ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer explains how it stymies oversight, and we learn that, even 40 years later, governmental secrecy can be emotionally painful.

After listening to the story … 

After 40 years, many of the details of Project Azorian are only now coming to light. The US government’s default position has been to keep as much of it classified as possible. It took three years for retired CIA employee David Sharp to get permissionto publish his account of Project Azorian. And FOIA played an indirect role in that, as Cold War historians got the CIA to release, in redacted form, an internal history of the mission. After that and a threat of legal action, Sharp was finally able to publish his manuscript in 2012.

We mentioned conspiracy theories that have swirled around Project Azorian filling the void where official silence has reigned. One of them is promulgated in the 2005 book “Red Star Rogue” by Kenneth Sewell and Clint Richmond. They posit that the K-129 was taken over by rogue Stalinist KGB agents in order to start a nuclear conflict. But the conflict was to be between the US and China, as, according to the authors, the sub had powers to disguise its sonic signature as a Chinese Navy vessel.

This book is the basis of the 2013 drama “Phantom,” which features Ed Harris and David Duchovny as Soviet military officers who sip vodka in a very un-Russian way.

Russian Naval historians, like Nikolai Cherkashin, are not only insulted by this take on the cause of the K-129’s demise, they say the true cause is much easier to pinpoint: They say an American vessel, possibly the USS Swordfish, collided with the Soviet submarine. 

Despite the fact that the US government has turned over many documents about Project Azorian and what it found to the Russian government, many in the Russian Navy stand by their theory that it was far too easy for the US to locate the K-129 on the bottom of the Pacific, given the technology of the time. According to these theories, Project Azorian was nothing more than an elaborate cover-up disguised as… an elaborate cover-up. We can neither confirm nor deny that we exactly understand how that would have worked in practice or execution.

But for our money, there’s probably no stranger and more telling document from this time than a video of the funeral at sea for Soviet sailors ostensibly recovered by the US during Project Azorian. Audio of the service starts at 1:25 in this post. Eulogies and rites are performed in both English and Russian (albeit with an American accent).

It’s one of the more solemn moments of the Cold War, and one that the Glomar Response helped keep a secret for a very long time.

On the night of December 8, 2013, a huge crowd gathered on a tree-lined boulevard in downtown Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. The crowd was there to watch as a statue in the boulevard was pulled down by a crane. The toppled statue was of Vladimir Lenin — the communist leader who started the revolution that created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).  Ukraine was once a part of the Soviet Union…

In the 1970s, a Soviet journalist…

named Valentin Zorin made a series of documentary films about the United States. At a time when few Russian journalists came to the U.S., Zorin traveled all across the country, and gained access few American journalists had. The Cold War was a battle of ideas, and Zorin saw himself on the frontlines. He was on a quest to unmask the United States by spreading doubt, conspiracy theories, and a strange cocktail of truth and misinformation. 

Photo: SPUTNIK / Alamy Stock Photo

Key Sources:

• Watch and listen to a subtitled excerpt of one of Zorin’s films called America Autumn 1971.

• Read about the history of Soviet television in Ellen Mickiewicz’s Split Signals.

• Learn more about the history of Cold War journalists like Zorin in historian Dina Fainberg’s new book Cold War Correspondents.

• Listen to a 1970 radio interview of oil tycoon and conservative American propagandist, H.L. Hunt.

• You can watch many of Zorin’s films (including The Puzzle of Dallas and Boston Contrasts) online (in Russian, no subtitles).

• Watch the opening of the 1967 Cold War thriller Billion Dollar Brain.

• Listen to Senator Susan Collins querying Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey at the Senate Intelligence Hearing on the Russian Influence in the 2016 Presidential Elections.

• Watch and listen to President Reagan's Interview With Soviet Television on May 20, 1988.

• Listen to reporter Charles Maynes’s interview with Russian journalist Lyudmila Savchuk.

• Watch a news report about Valentin Zorin’s visit to Disneyland (at 6:48 in the linked video).

• For more stories about Cold War cultural diplomacy, check out our editor Julia Barton’s podcast Spacebridge, co-hosted with Charles Maynes.

Finally an annual collection of the best nonfiction audio stories pulled from podcasts, radio, and audiobooks, featuring a foreword by bestselling author, and audio fan, David Sedaris.

The Best Audio Storytelling is a new collection of thirteen of the year’s best nonfiction audio stories from podcasters, radio journalists, authors, independent creators, and more.

The stories within this anthology transport you to a lush garden, to life in prison, to a cruise ship bar, and even into outer space. Curated by Pushkin Industries Executive Editor Julia Barton, a longtime editor of podcasts and radio, with a foreword by lifelong audio junkie David Sedaris, The Best Audio Storytelling is a celebration of the most innovative and powerful audio storytelling of the year.

This year’s collection includes pieces from: 

• Author Jason Reynolds

• KCRW Radio Race “Newbie” Award winner: Ezra and Eve Austin (aka “Mass of Kugel”)

• Investigative podcast Will Be Wild

• Critically-acclaimed investigative podcast Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s

• History podcast One Year: 1986

• NPR’s Morning Edition

• Science podcast Terrestrials

• Actor Lake Bell

• Planet Money

• Rumble Strip

• The New York Times

• Award-winning podcast Ear Hustle

• Richard’s Famous Food Podcast

Run Time: 6 hours
Category: Literary Collections / Essays
ISBN: 979-8-9850802-9-2

After yet another day reading about audio industry layoffs and show cancellations, or listening to podcasts about layoffs and show cancellations, I sometimes wonder, “With all this great audio being given away for free, who did we think was supposed to pay for it all?”…

Spacebridge tells a largely-forgotten saga of the late Cold War, when despair about the prospects of a nuclear conflict gripped the world. Both Soviets and Americans grasped at emerging communication technology via satellite and early Internet “spacebridges” that brought together citizen diplomats ranging from New Agers to tech-enthusiasts to astronauts. The urge to “just connect” helped tilt the world from top-down broadcasting to the more horizontal, Internet-levelled society where we all now live…for better and/or for worse.