Julia R. Barton

Story editor, reporter, producer & writer

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Spacebridge

Documentary Podcast · 6 Episodes · Complete Series

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In 1924, a magazine ran a contest: “Who is to pay for broadcasting and how?” A century later, we’re still asking the same question

Radio Broadcast received close to a thousand entries to its contest — but ultimately rejected them all.

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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.

We made an audiobook anthology of audio stories @Pushkinpods!

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Episode 7: Children of Zorin — The Last Archive

Key Sources: Watch and listen to a subtitled excerpt of one of Zorin’s films called America Autumn 1971 . Read about the history

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The Falling of the Lenins

99% Invisible

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-falling-of-the-lenins/

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Radiolab: Glomar

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  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.

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Videochatting w/Communists

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. ------------------------- See also: These video chats helped thaw out the Cold War, PRI's The World, 11/7/14.

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Port of Dallas

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.

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Audio Danger

(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

[juliabarton]

Lennie Test

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

[juliabarton]

The Broadcast Clock

https://soundcloud.com/roman-mars/99-invisible-88-the-broadcast

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.)

More network clocks! And more! And more!

[juliabarton]

American Icon

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

[juliabarton]

Xanadu Effect

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

[juliabarton]

Sochi 2014 Building Boom

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.

[juliabarton]

Evangelizing in Ukraine

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.

[juliabarton]

Pro-Putin, Anti-Putin

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.”

[juliabarton]

Middle Class in Ukraine

By Julia Barton ⋅ May 22, 2012

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.