Crayons to Chaos

a filigree of stories

I'm supposed to have a draft tonight, of my second story on the Z Crew. But my brain is stuffed with too many stories competing for space - two of which are due next week, two of which need to be started next week - bouncing against one another like ping-pong balls. In short, the messy plate sliding off my brain's crowded table:

• Z Crew in Action.  Or How a Bunch of 12-Year-Olds Started a Movement. I'm going back to the same school I invaded in August, but tonight (after this spill) I need to sketch out the story as I see it. Due Saturday noon, setting me up for a Friday all-nighter at this rate.




• House v. Bell.  Since the supreme court keeps refusing to agree to hear Hamdan v . Rumsfeld, despite all the reasons it should, I've taken on a different case for my first story for the legal reporting class: House v. Bell, one of the scores of death penalty cases where DNA evidence has emerged to challenge these sentences. The story told me by House's attorney yesterday, which I'll spill a little on Sunday as I get ready to write, sounds like an episode of CSI:  spilled vials of blood, evidence disappearing and re-appearing, and fantabulous stories by the prosecution, along with a political subtext that reminds you that court-stacking is about more than Roe v. Wade. (That last point, citing House, was made elegantly in a Times editorial last year.) Due Wednesday, October 19. at 4:30 p.m.




• Astoria business story. A new power plant is going up - reportedly so  mean, clean and environmental that even NYPIRG loves it, after years of opposition. Peter Vallone, the local poo-bah, and a coalition community groups fought it until the New York Power Authority agreed to also shut down,  by 2008,  the much dirtier plant next door. I talk to Vallone Friday, and go poke around the site Monday, while trying to get 2 or 3 person-at-the-plant interviews.  Due 7 p.m. Thursday, October 20 at 7 p.m.


• Rant for "Critical Issues in Journalism." I haven't written much about this wild strange class of ours, led by Richard Wald -- wherein 235 students (combined full and part-time) listen to speakers and then engage in a sort of Oprah/Donahue open mike. I'll likely talk about it further as I'm breeding that paper, 750 words on "something we've talked about."  One of which was "Are bloggers journalists?" I'll likely talk mostly about my hero Lindsay, 18 yrs younger than I, whose lovely blog served as the base for an investigative trip to New Orleans -- and inspired her to quit her big pharm job for the freelance life. Due Friday, October 21 - and you can be sure I'll be writing it in the middle of the night, too.


• Astoria feature. This week I need also to start reporting on a long fuzzy feature, a "mood and feel" piece: I'm thinking about the food pantry I've visited; a profile of a Muslim woman I'm about to interview;  or a comparison between Fr. Brady's two parishes - the one by the housing project, which is scheduled for closure, and the one that has services in 5 languages and a more middle-class congregation. Due: full draft noon Thursday, October 27, t work on in  lab.
• Take-home. A long, more complex story, perhaps relating to the masters' project (see below).  I have to generate 3  and send them to Dale and Stacy tomorrow (when??).


• Masters' project. The first draft isn't due till January, but a proposal is due 11/18 and we need to be doing an interview a week. Next week, I'm talking to the gatekeeper at the New York Veterans Administration Centers -- my way into the returning soldiers coordinators, and the lives of those who try to help vets sort out their lives when they come home. Whose story will emerge from all that is anyone's guess.

I'm tired even writing this. Will I have the energy for the girls and boys of the Z Crew? I just wish I already had a camera-phone, for my trip to the school tomorrow.

How can I possibly juggle so many stories? How can so many characters vie for attention? How can I do justice to any of them? Is this phase of the program meant to be like stroke recovery, and have us grow new neurons?

I talked to Sree, for just a moment, yesterday. He said this is much more overload than in a real job. But is that really true? No wonder I want to write books - though I bet most who do are doing that on top of all of the above.

over hiss over dale

So what happened? Did I let the blog go entirely? Did the depressive extreme of the bipolar spectrum I described last month - last month? - send Chris into a tailspin from which she hasn't yet recovered? Has the opposite happened, and my writing been such a rousing success that I don't care about blogging any more? Can you tell anything by the fact that I keep shifting back and forth between first and third person, as I try not to let October go the way of September?

Besides, one of the things I've learned in the interim is that my work at the J School is better when I write here-  when I share my experiences on the beat, the things I'm learning, the way I did with my very first story. I should have done the same with the second; I should have written every day  (as I'd started to, below) about the fearless Father Brady. But I was drowning, and disoriented by the emotional roller coaster of RW1.

It is,of course, the intended course of this reporting class - that every bit of weak or cowardly reporting, every un-tight paragraph, every sloppy referent gets slashes  on paper and references in conference and "I'm worried." This only intensified, to the nth degree, with the arrival of Dale Maharidge -- Dale's brilliant, encouraging in general (he looked at my clips and liked them) and ruthless in his editing and coaching.  He also puts grades on things and thus gave me, recently, the first C+ I've gotten since a psycho Cinema professor accused me of plagiarizing a paper at Binghamton. 

In the meantime, ALL the stories have had to happen are on a far-shorter lead time than I'm used to: some in one day, like the two AP daybook exercises (one of which I bungled so badly that it was irreparable), others in 2-3 days max (reporting Monday, class Tues-Wed, deadline Thurs).  Thus every story already feels half-baked when I submit it, then is justly pilloried, and so on.

This is, of course, exactly what I'm paying for; but it gives the whole experience, as I've been saying lately, the emotional quality of being battered. You feel great - interviews are great, you're learning things, you get nachas for this or that small thing  in drill - and then BOOM the crit puts you somewhere over the edge.

Dale's got used to seeing me in tears, and likely doesnt take it seriously any more: I am honestly trying to put an end to these hissy fits, but it's not as easy as it sounds. (Likely I should eat more. I've lost 7 pounds so far, simply from not having the time, inclination. or money to eat. I've never been this way, and I do think it's made me more brittle than I need to be -- it all gets tied in with trying to keep my fatigue levels at bay, managing the caffeine and my meds and so on and so on.)

Meanwhile the sense of overall deadline pressure really sets in with the other classes - Reporting on Courts and Trials, Critical Issues in Journalism, the law class and the masters' project, which is a long, 5000+ word magazine piece on a matter of some import. You sort of feel like you can't handle any of it, until the effort even to write a pitch feels leaden.

Then you wake up, shake it off, and soon are back on the high of the work -- pushing, meeting people/talking to them, and trying to ride the pulse of the stuff scheduled for you as well as the reporting.  (If you think it's just me, check out our class' loose group blog, The Ten Month Beat.)

Now that I've reverted to second person, it's time to get specific again. But much of the above has held, I was reassured to learn, for many of my classmates. Not that it hurt any less. Until - as  I said to Cynthia Cotts, my master's adviser, last week: "I'm talking to you about this big project, and part of me firmly believes that I'm incapable of writing a postcard home to my mother."

Still, I have some faith that at least some of my beat stories will ultimatelt turn out OK - and I'll post here, tomorrow, the most recent one, which I actually like quite a lot. I've met and been welcomed by some wonderful people in Astoria, thanks largely to one former student from La Guardia Community College.

I chose Astoria as my beat, and decided to keep it (after flirtations w/others, like Fort Hamilton – too far! , Marble Hill/Kingsbridge (too scary!), snd so on) largely because of the inexhaustible mix of cultures on every block,after getting  I had gotten a whiff after teaching at La Guardia, where I taught students from Uzbekistan, Nepal, both Koreas, all Chinas, Bosnia, the subcontinent, and up and down Central and South Americas. Suzanne is one of the reasons I stuck with Astoria, even after I learned that there were 12 other J-06 types (including this blogger, who writes largely in French) who'd chosen the region. Oh, but I have my Queens secret weapon, I thought in total arrogance.

Now, I think it's more like they have me. At least I hope they will begin to think that way.

A striking young Trinidad native in her early thirties, Suzanne has, through her activism on behalf of her three children, become a presence in many of the schools in District 30. She's someone that students approach when they're upset: in the time I walked around with her, two or three grownups did the same, to which I was introduced as "my professor."

As we talked, that first day, she walked me around some of Astoria I'd not been to the last time: through  low-rise streets with small brick attached houses and apartment blocks, Greek and Italian restaurants and churches - including Mt. Carmel, a century-old building in blond stone and ordinary brick, with a notation of mass times: ENGLISH 7 A.M., SPANISH 8 A.M., ITALIAN 9 A.M., ENGLISH 10 A.M., VIETNAMESE 11 and so forth. (Mt. Carmel is, in fact, where I was to spend the rest of the week that I wasn't at Columbia.)

As we began to cross 30th Street, she said about one of the apartment blocks: "Graffiti. We haven't had that around here until recently." Spoken like a true homeowner, though she's a renter -- spoken like a community leader, anyway.

"So many people from India are coming to the neighborhood," she said as we walked past  women in glorious salwa kameez and Hindi names on doctors' offices. Then she put me back on the train to go off to the community board meeting - but also to get ready for what turned out to be just my first interview the next day with Father Edmund Edmund L. Brady.

A slender white-haired man of 72, Brady turned out to be so much of a story that I ended up spending Wednesday and Thursday afternoons with him -- meeting alternately with him and with members of his "Z Crew," the youth empowerment group I'd first heard about from Suzanne. That's when I met Bree and Jessie (not their real names), as well as others who had been part of the group's First Big Battle -- a struggle to gain clarity on the issue of school uniforms. Along the way I heard enough about gangs in the schools to think of it as a separate story.

Father Brady himself turned out to be an old lefty: he was trained by Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation in community organizing, back when he was in Bushwick in the early 1980s, in the aftermath of the 1977 blackout.

My second Astoria story turned out to be a profile of him -- one I'll post immediately after this, even though I'm theoretically in the process of revising it for publication. If you look closely at that story, you'll see what my next one after that was: and soon I'll be writing yet another education story, ALSO from that wellspring.

In between, though, has been My Week in Law Enforcement, which I'll throw up here tomorrow night -- as I'm journaling my day, tomorrow, at the Queens Criminal Court.  In the meantime, I have some hopes that my masters' project and my first paper for the Covering Courts class will help me revisit Book of Days, which I've neglected even worse than here. Now that I think of it.

Time to plunge back in - with phone calls and prep for the week. I'll try to think of it as getting back into Dr.Who's Tardis, to hurtle toward  new worlds and fresh horrors, small victories, and likely a bit of comedy along the way.

surfing through thickening waters

My goodness - here it is Wednesday night and I've not written a scrap here. I'm actually deep into thd next story, but before I get into that -- the education story -- I thought I'd catch up on what happened with the other, and give a taste of today's lecture from Sreenath Sreenivasan, as I begin to process my couple of days in central Astoria. The next post will give you the whole mishegas about Father Brady and the kids of IS 171. (and if that doesn't bring you back, what will?)

Monday morning, Stacy kept three stories from the class to read aloud. Three she read in their entirety: Mariana'a vivid glimpse of Corona, Diane's of Long Island City, and Matt's no-one-on-the-D-knows what orange-alert-means piece. All tight and somewhat funny. The other, all she read was the lead: that was mine.  I was pleased that she liked it (tho she revised it to bring the "topical" stuff forward), and tried not to be neurotic and take personally that she didn't read the whole thing aloud. Even so, I was irrationally pleased to see my work highighted at all.

Her feedback on the story itself was, I think, right on: she zeroed in on holes in my reporting that I knew from word one would damage the story a little (e.g. the job description of Kim's fiancee, Garni' full name) and hard data needed (demographics of the nabe). I actually do want to email Jen to gdt the former and revise the piece.

Then it was time for Lynell Hancock's lecture on educstion, which was absorbing and scary all at once; I'll review it briefly later, but for now I wanted to take my impreasions of Sree's Smarter Surfing.

We began with a broadcast of Robin Sloan's famous "EPIC 2014." You've likely seen this before: it begins: "In the year 2014, the New York Times has gone offline....."

Then before plunging in...a bit of Sree's llfe:

Sreevanisan was born in Tokyo and went on to Bhutan,  and then to Moscow -- "I was a good little Communist" -- then high school in Fiji before moving on to the Upper West Side. His father in Kerala, aghast that his son is a journalist, "framed the MASTER OF SCIENCE degree."  He runs the New Media program here, writes for Poynter, and is the Tech Guru at ABC-TV.

and as I write, I learn that a few others have J-school blogs: and that this lecture has already been live-blogged, last year, by Sam Guston (now at the NY Post). I am, of course, not fast enough to truly live-blog this.

Recommending Firefox, he speaks of an "online kibbutz" of programmers working to fix it, and of all its features (including FoxyTunes, whch I never knew about -- it  lets you manipulate iTunes from the browser!)

He spent an enormous amount of time on Google's many functions, giving special attention to Maps, Alerts. and Translation (noting that "the Firestone tire recall story was broken by a pair of Texas journalists who didn't read Spanish" but could use such translators.