It took me a while, but I finally got the hang of producing a QuickTime Virtual Reality 360 degree panorama. To have a look around hover your mouse over the image above, click, and drag it to the right or left. It’s far from perfect – I have to get better at maintaining the same exposure and measuring the tilt angles of the photographs – but I’m pretty happy with how it came out. (You can press ‘shift’ to zoom in and ‘control’ to zoom out.) I’m still amazed by the technology (and the underlying math) that makes it all possible. I took about 60 different photographs to produce that QTVR file. Those 60 photographs add up to about 270 megabytes, but the resulting QTVR file is only 1.9 megabytes. When you break it down, that whole virtual reality scene from Pafnerscharte Ridge is really just 8.3 million 1′s and 0′s. I have to give props to all the bonafide geeks out there who are able to work out the math that turns those 8 million bits into what feels like standing on top of an Alpine ridge.

If you’d like to make your own QTVR file, first you need to use Hugin (free and open-source) to stitch together an equirectangular panorama. Kevin Purdy has a good guide to do just that on Lifehacker. There are various tools to turn the resulting panorama into QuickTime VR file. I used CubicConverter, which is pretty old school but does the trick. There are some helpful tutorials on the website.

Anyway, I spent the past few days in Bad Gastein in the Central Eastern Alps. The town is far past its prime, but hints of 5 star luxury still echo its glory days as a mountainous spa resort for the rich and famous. (I made another QTVR of Bad Gastein here.) For whatever reason, the town tends to fill up with Italians in the summertime and Swedes in the winter. (If I were Swedish the last place I would go for my winter vacation is the Bad Gastein. Do these people hate sunny weather or what?)

The hiking around town is both breathtaking and easily accessible. Here was my path:

It doesn’t look so impressive from Google Earth, but let me tell you, that was some major elevation gain. The blue circle is the ridge where I took all the panoramic photos. The green square is where I ate the best smoked trout I’ve ever had:

It was an amazing, exhausting day. My calves still ache. I put a few more photos on Flickr.

Georgia in Miami

Ivan in Amsterdam

You can listen to the entire show, including a piece by Chris Vallance on Maker Faire Africa, here.

The BBC also recently featured the work of Foko Madagascar, a Rising Voices grantee. Christina Corbett of BBC World Radio interviewed Tahina and Andry.

Tahina (on far right) explaining how to use Ushahidi to report from mobile phones during times of crisis.

Andry on the phone with Ariniaina explaining that it was not safe to be outside because soldiers were firing tear gas.

In May Solana interviewed Tahina about his use of Ushahidi to improve reporting during the coup. You can learn more about Madagascar’s 2009 political crisis on the Global Voices special coverage page.

La frase escrita en la pared al otro lado de la calle dice:

Ni indigenismo, ni oligarquía
Viva la revolución obrera

La calle principal, de concreto arrugado y lleno de huecos, se ramifica en un vasto laberinto tejido de callejones empedrados, bautizados con los nombre de países Latinoamericanos, líderes de esta revolución o la otra. Uno de cada diez edificios es un esqueleto de concreto y ladrillo, una declaración de lo que podría ser pero todavía no es, una metáfora de este continente entero.

Eddie y yo caminamos por el centro de Cochabamba en busca de lo que será un almuerzo tarde o una cena temprano. La economía informal se pronuncia en cada esquina: DVDs pirateados, maní dulce, cajas de diabetes. La plaza mayor (lo mejor que trajeron los Españoles al nuevo mundo) está llena de los habituales lustrabotas cargando sus cajas de madera y las parejas de novios adolescentes metiéndose la lengua por la garganta. Las mujeres redondas se sientan en la sombra ofreciendo artesanías e importaciones chinas. Los árboles de grandes hojas pesan, cargados de historia.

En el camino de regreso al apartamento de Eddie las calles están ocupadas con la emoción vibrante del atardecer: algunas chicas jóvenes sonríen vergonzosamente mientras intercambian los chismes del día, los chicos con su cabello peinado hacia atrás y el pecho levantado toman con firmeza las manos de sus novias. La luna llena está escondida detrás de las colinas, esperando que la ciudad se asiente, antes de levantarse y pintar lentamente el piso del valle de norte a sur, con una luz lechosa.

Sé que este no es mi continente. Se que siempre seré un extraño aquí, no importa cuántos modismos aprenda, no importa cuántas letras de canciones pueda cantar, no importa cuántos platos pueda cocinar. Pero caminando por las calles de los pueblos y las ciudades latinoamericanas siempre me llena de una sensación de familiaridad, una sensación de calma.

El podcast de hoy es una colección de parte de mi música electrónica favorita de América Latina. Está hecha para las largas caminatas a través de los callejones empedrados de su ciudad latinoamericana favorita.

Descarga (Clic-derecho y guardar)

[Traducción por Lena Zúñiga]

Even something like that, just the sun setting behind a hill, that’s something you never see in the city.

- Revaz

The Western side of the DF-to-Queretaro highway fell in perfect gradient from a light blue overhead into a deep magenta, and then ended abruptly with the busty silhouette of the rolling hills of Mexico’s central valley, covered with billboards shaped like oversized credit cards and firestone tires.

As we drove northwest in our rented PT Cruiser (PT = pimp training), it was as if we were pulling a blanket of dusk over each passing pueblo, all at 140 KM an hour.

Revaz’s observation – so simple, so true – were the first words muttered by any of us since we left the spiderweb of Mexico City’s highways, bi-ways, and one-ways. We didn’t need words. We were communicating with music, the language which, after all, brought us all together in the first place and has kept us together ever since.

This was day one of the G5 Mexico Summit. Over the next five days we would come to also realize and acknowledge the differences that stand between us: our motivations, when and why our moods fluctuate, differing viewpoints, temperaments, arguments, and embarrassments.

But no matter what lies ahead, of this I can be sure: we roll down the windows, we plug in the iPods, and the beat starts, hypnotic, arresting, entrancing. The same beat we danced to in Africa, the same beat we carried with us across the Sahara, across the Red Sea, across Asia Minor, across the Bosphorous, the same beat that humans have always carried – and will always carry – deep inside. We nod our heads, we drum on the steering wheel, we rap along. Life is good. And we are here to enjoy it together.

Download (Right click, save as)

The format of this year’s G5 podcast is a little different from past ones. The first four minutes are all soundscape from Mexico City and Guanajuato. (10 layered tracks of audio, but most is lost after the mp3 compression.) Then you’ve got nine or ten songs from the hundreds and hundreds that we played on the roadtrip. Enjoy!

If post-conflict reconciliation works effectively here in Liberia, it can work just about anywhere. If development takes hold here, then it can work anywhere.

In this post I will go through and point to all the resources for information about Liberia that I’m aware of. Given my own area of interest and work, it will often focus on media and technology, but I will also point to other resources that should serve as a starting point for anyone wanting to do further research.

As if often the case, the Wikipedia page on Liberia is a great starting point to understanding some of the basic facts about the country, its people, and how the European land grab for African colonies forced Liberians – both indigenous and immigrants from America – to join the era of federal nation-building. Wikipedia also has a good overview of the first and second Liberian civil wars (which for many people are, in fact, one long 14-year war). But to fully understand the complex dimensions of the conflict and how external factors – including the ambitions of other West African leaders and Western business interests – played a central part I highly recommend Stephen Ellis‘ The Mask of Anarchy.

Music

Let’s start with music in order to provide a little soundtrack to this long post. I had no idea that Voice of America maintained an African music mp3 blog, but sho’ nuff it does. Last year Matthew LaVoie dug up some old Liberian 45s from the 60′s and posted the mp3 files. Here is ‘Amour in Twist’, “an instrumental dance number driven by a loping upright bass and the conga player.”

LaVoie also posts a couple songs by Richard Walker, but doesn’t include his biggest hit from 1992, Kakaleka. Fortunately, I was able to get the song from Tobey:

Photograph of Lucky Bucky at the grave of a member of their group who had died in a car accident while on tour in Sierra Leone by Kathleen Flynn.

Today the most popular genre here in Liberia is called hip-co, derived from “hip-hop and colloqua” (as in Liberian street English). Vanessa has a great piece on hip-co and how difficult it is to get by as a rapper in Liberia in Slate. Here is the track Mora by Lucky Bucky:

Rebuilding Liberia’s Media

It’s hard to believe that we have only two more full days here in Liberia. Five months have passed since I first visited Liberia with Vanessa, Jessie, Greg, Kathleen, Bill, and Michael. On that first visit we spent most of our time meeting with leaders from the various players in Liberia’s media industry. We met with editors, journalists, and broadcasters from the local newspapers and radio stations, and with the leaders of media development groups like the Liberian Media Center and the Press Union of Liberia in order to gauge the state of the media industry here and what their major needs are.

We discovered that dozens of groups – both domestic and international – are involved in rebuilding Liberia’s press corps. Jackie Bischof, a South African graduate student at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, wrote an extensive report evaluating the state of media in Liberia for one of her courses:

Journalists in Liberia face huge difficulties. With no electricity, newsrooms rely on the use of costly generators. Travel is not easy, there is limited public transportation and the cost of living is high. The low salaries of journalists leads to issues of ethics and unprofessionalism, says Liberian journalist Bill Jarkloh.

According to [Michael] Keating, a commitment by international donors to the training and funding of a free and open press in Liberia is there, and is critical to sustaining the press, until it can become self-sustainable. “There’s a severe shortage of money in media system in Liberia, and that distorts many different things,” he says. “It distorts quality, integrity and it distorts the ultimate sustainability of independent media. Only with significant outside financial help and technical assistance will the situation stabilize and improve.”

Last month the Center for International Media Assistance put on a day-long workshop on media development. The audio from that workshop is available on CIMA’s website. Voice of America also has a short piece on the workshop.

Surfing

“Sliding Liberia” follows a group of young surfers to Liberia in search of more than perfect waves. As they travel through the West African country, devastated by decades of brutal civil war, they record the stories of people they meet along the way—-people like Alfred, a young boy who became Liberia’s first surfer after finding a bodyboard while fleeing from rebels. Besides rediscovering a world-class point break that could be the best-kept secret in the surfing world, the surfers find something much more important—-a way to travel responsibly in the 21st century.

Sliding Liberia has a slick website with features on Liberia’s two best known breaks, Mamba Point and Robertsport. The film was directed and produced by two Stanford students, Britton Caillouette and Nicholai Lidow, with an interest in both Liberia and surfing. Nicholai returned to Liberia in 2007 and brought everyone featured in the film a portable DVD player and a rough cut of the film. Sliding Liberia is available on Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon. They also have a Facebook app.

Dan Malloy, one of the surfers featured in the film, has produced a multimedia slideshow for Surfing Magazine about their trip.

Articles about surfing in Liberia have been published at Time, Lonely Planet, and WhyGo Africa.

There are at least two surf camps, Surf Liberia and Robertsport Surf Camp, both based in Robertsport. There is also a Google Group mailing list about surfing in Liberia.

Liberia’s Tech Community

The sustainability of media isn’t only a concern in Liberia; just about every week a newspaper goes out of business in the United States as well. The internet hasn’t just enabled grassroots voices to emerge; it has also enabled advertisers and marketing companies to create their own viral media rather than piggybacking on the content of newspapers, radio, and TV. With the decline of traditional journalism many observers are hoping that technologists can now supplement the role of journalists by creating new interfaces and tools that aggregate and filter information submitted by ordinary citizens. For example, rather than relying on a local city hall reporter, we now have access to most of the same information as that reporter by using tools like Every Block.

Unfortunately here in Liberia the technology industry has been even slower to get on its feet than the media industry. Erik Hersman, who blogs with fiery passion about technology in Africa both on Afrigadget and White African, was in Liberia the week before I arrived and penned a series of informative blog posts about the current state of technology here. He writes of the many barriers to entry:

Liberia came out of a civil war only a few short years ago. The infrastructure was torn apart (there is no electricity grid, rich people run generators), the university and education system are still trying to catch up, and no computer science degree is available … You can’t get online to get to all the free knowledge. Unlike many other parts of Africa, there are very few internet cafes here … The few jobs that there are in the ICT sector are generally with NGOs, a few businesses and government organizations. Only those with good connections get in, so a lot of smart young people miss. Only those in these jobs are able to get the training and certification to do higher paying jobs because they have to be flown out to the training centers – none are in-country.

Erik also met with the CEO of one of the largest mobile phone operators in the country, Cellcom, and introduced his readers to John Etherton, a student at Georgia Tech who has been here for a year, has in-depth knowledge of Liberia’s mobile networks, and is currently managing a fascinating Story Corps-like project here called The Mobile Story Exchange System (MOSES), which enables ordinary Liberians to document their experiences during the civil war. Glenna Gordon will be writing a feature piece on MOSES soon. Here is an example of one such video testimonial recorded on the MOSES system:

I think that John’s project is inspiring. Imagine all of the stories that will be preserved for future generations. I hope he considers adding captions to the YouTube videos and also hosting them on dotSUB where they can be translated into other languages.

Erik goes on to correctly point out that communication technologists here in Liberia need to form alliances with community radio stations. (He also does a nice write-up of how Radio Gbarpola could use SMS to bring in more revenue.) He documents the sad story of the University of Liberia’s non-existant computer science program. (In the words of Michael Keating, most aid money to Liberia has bypassed the university. Indiana University is looking into providing Liberia’s three major universities with decent internet access.) And, finally, on a story that has been well-documented since 2003, Erik shot a brief video with Alfred Sirleaf who maintains a daily blackboard of news and information in the Sinkor district of Monrovia.

Women in Liberia

Though it was mostly young men who were recruited by Charles Taylor’s army during Liberia’s civil war, Liberian women suffered many of the worse atrocities. A whole demographic of young Liberians today is the result of an epidemic of violent rape that lasted throughout the crisis, and which still persists today. Given that Liberia is home to Africa’s first female elected head of state, it’s not surprising that many development agencies are pouring money into emphasizing and protecting women’s rights. In commemoration of International Women’s Day last week Monrovia hosted the “International Colloquium on Women’s Empowerment, Leadership Development, International Peace and Security,” the largest such event the country has put on since its return to peace. Sadly the story was hardly picked up in the media so I’m not sure if it was all talk or if concrete and realistic steps have been put into place. (My buddy Boakai has one of the few pieces about the colloquium. Nadine Hack has a nice summary on her blog.)

With the support of UNICEF Glenna Gordon is working on a project called “I have something to tell you” which features the lives of Liberian girls and will eventually become a documentary by filmmaker Loch Phillips. Make sure not to miss Glenna’s stunning portraits (and the stories they tell) of Ruth, Janice, and Joseta.

Poverty and Development in Liberia

If you’re interested in international development and aid with a focus on Liberia then the blog of Chris Blattman, an assistant professor of political science and economics at Yale, is a must-read. His snarkiness is sometimes a bit over-the-top and there’s an excess of posts about airport departure lounges, but he also has an eye on just about everything related to development in Liberia and how to measure it. He frequently points readers not just to examples of ugly aid dependence and undermining of the local private sector, but also effective programs in creating new jobs for ex-combatants.

About Liberia by Liberians

Almost all of the links I have provided so far point to articles, blog posts, and books written by foreigners. Given all the obstacles faced by Liberia’s media it is no wonder that it is difficult for local journalists to publish their content online.

Over at Rising Voices I just published a video and summary of the blogging workshop we did yesterday at the American Embassy Library. Erik Hersman does have a point when he writes that “bloggers are born, not made” but to discover those natural bloggers in a country like Liberia, new media workshops are still necessary. I have only been able to identify one Liberian blogger, Bill K. Jarkloh, who has started blogging on his own without attending our workshop. Jarkloh’s posts tend to be in-depth and knowledgeable, but oftentimes don’t provide the necessary context for an international audience. That is a common problem with blogs and it’s the reason why the authors and editors on Global Voices add context to the excerpts they highlight in order to make them easier to understand.

You can also stay informed about Liberia by listening to audio clips on STAR Radio’s website and by monitoring the local press on AllAfrica.com.

To Conclude

One of the intrigues of Liberia is that nobody knows where the country is headed in the short or long term. It is clearly in a much better state than it was five years ago as the country emerged battered and devastated by war, but a long road of uncertainty lies ahead. Will aid and foreign investment continue to flow in? How long will the United Nations Mission in Liberia stick around? Will the university get the resources it needs to train its students for the global economy? Will Liberian refugees living abroad return to Liberia to start new businesses? Will the tenuous peace last through the next election cycle or will the country return to the mind-boddling factionalism that has defined it since the fall of the True Whig Party?

No one knows, but it is worth keeping your eyes on some of the links above to see what happens.

During our Mexico honeymoon.

At the dawn of our then-budding romance HP asked me for some help with his website. “Dawg, I am on top of PHP and coding,” he wanted to clarify, “but this WordPress template shit doesn’t make no sense to this ESL-educated mo-fo.”

And so, he wanted to pay me money to install some WordPress plugins on his blog and add a few lines of code to the design template. In fact, he was adamant about paying me. And I was just as adamant that I’d only do it as a gift. Finally, in the spirit of bi-partisan consensus, we agreed that I would help with his website and he would take me out to dinner. (I told you there was romance.)

In a way, it’s easier to explain why HP insisted on paying me money than why it was I insisted not being paid. What was my motivation? Lewis Hyde says this:

It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don’t want to be bothered. If the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I’ll shop elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade.

By offering a gift I was building a bond.

In part one of The Gift Lewis Hyde shows how gift rituals and gift institutions are part of every culture, but tend to be especially strong in tribal societies. As is often true, a Woody Allen joke most clearly captures the argument. In one of Allen’s last stand up routines he once took an old watch from his pocket, checked the time, and said, “It’s an old family heirloom. [Pause] My grandfather sold it to me on his deathbed.”

“On his deathbed,” Hyde argues, is the key element of the joke. It would be much more acceptable if a grandfather sold his grandson the watch while he was alive and kicking, but not during an important ritual like death.

Much of part one of The Gift is an ethnographic survey of other cultures and their gift-giving rituals and values. The most significant gift circles, according to Hyde, involve at least three parties. It is one thing to buy a friend dinner one night and expect that he or she will return the gift sometime down the road. But it is a different institution when I buy you dinner, you then buy your friend dinner, your friend buys dinner for someone else, and our expectations are only that the gift will continue and eventually make its way back to us.

These gift circles worked well in tribal societies of 40 – 60 people, but tend to be more metaphor than reality in cities of millions of people, in an era when we easily accumulate a thousand Facebook friends. In the West we have co-opted the Indian term, karma, to describe the idea that the more we give the more we will receive.

Hyde sees the world as divided between what he calls eros – giving, creativity, mystery – and logos – order, economy, hierarchy. We seek mystery and creative inspiration in art and we seek order, justice and logic in politics. But while we are attracted to both forces, we also feel compelled to draw distinction between them.

Most tribal societies, writes Hyde, operate on gift economies. They farm shared land, circulate gifts of food and crafts, and strengthen bonds with giving rituals during birth, puberty, marriage, and death. But when they interact with other tribes those gifts become commodities. They trade rice for salt, baskets for spears, and even humans for gold.

Hyde illustrates this by envisioning an inner and outer circle. Our families are inside the circle. Even if I am a professional chef, I would still never charge my family or my friends when inviting them over to my house for dinner. I am giving them a gift. But when I enter the kitchen of the restaurant where I work I am now dealing with the outer circle. I charge them and I make a profit. Similarly, on this very blog, everything I publish here is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, which means that you are free to share and remix all of it so long as you don’t make any profit from it. I am drawing a distinction between my inner and outer circles. (And I hope that Hyde chooses a Creative Commons license for his upcoming book, “Cultural Commons“.)

Throughout the past millennium, but especially in the last century, we’ve witnessed the accelerating trend of gifts transforming into commodities. (“Advertising is the ‘culture’ of a commodity civilization and the images are kept ‘alive’ as long as they turn a profit – usually about a year.”)

Hyde describes both the German Peasants’ War of 1524 and the resistance of Native Americans to the colonization of North America as wars “against the marketing of formerly inalienable properties. Whereas before a man could fish in any stream and hunt in any forest, now he found there were individuals who claimed to be the owners of these commons.”

There is little argument that what were once treated as gifts and commons are now treated as commodities and private property. But there is also little argument that increased commodification leads to increased economic development. If, for example, I had agreed to HP’s proposal to pay me for my web services, then I likely would have set up a web consultancy, calculated an hourly salary, and sought more clients. I wouldn’t have more friends, but I would have more money.

The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto argues that developing countries suffer economically due to their lack of formal property systems. In many developing countries – especially those with socialist or communists pasts – a certain percentage of land is treated neither as public nor as private. For example, in 1960 23% of Mexico’s cultivated land belonged to ejidos, common plots of agricultural land for formerly landless farmers. (In 1991, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari eliminated the constitutional right to ejidos, citing the “low productivity” of communally owned land.) Other examples of the current privatization of common land can be found on Wikipedia and at id21.org.

In the afterword to the 25th anniversary edition of The Gift, titled “On Being Good Ancestors”, Hyde notes that even while old gift exchanges continue to transform into commodity markets, new examples of gift exchanges are starting to pop up, the vast majority of them on the internet. CouchSurfing is an example of a modern gift exchange. It creates a community of goodwill by offering accommodation (and often food) to travelers looking for a place to stay. The thousands of members who offer their couches and futons are seeking nothing more than what Hyde calls a “feeling-bond”.

Global Voices, and often blogging in general, can also be seen as a gift exchange. When the volunteer authors on Global Voices write a post which amplifies the writings of other bloggers they are giving the gift of listening and they are passing it on to others. In fact, that I believe is one of the central virtues of blogging – to keep information and creativity alive, to continually give the gift of attention. The gift of listening and sharing is what creates a sense of goodwill among online communities.

While I was reading this book a discussion popped up among the G5 about the ethics of illegally downloading music. Revaz, echoing what most musicians and record labels have seemed to resign themselves to, said that musicians today need to come up with new revenue models. The majority of Santogold‘s fans, for example, probably downloaded her album for free. But that’s not where she’s making her money – three-quarters of her debut solo album has already been licensed for commercials, video games and soundtracks. (Another example, perhaps unknowingly, of the inner and outer circle.)

My slightly more radical position, founded in my relationship with music, is that music is art and that art is always a gift and never a commodity. If a musician that I’m invested in is struggling and needs money in order to finish a future work of art, I’d be happy to throw down $10 on SellaBand.com. But music – and musical talent – is too beautiful and mysterious to be treated like a commodity. When I explained this to Revaz, he – ever eager to dissuade me from Kanye – said that Kanye West would not be making music if he were not making money. I disagree. Completely. Kanye (unfortunately) knows that he is a gifted songwriter, rapper, and producer. Even if he didn’t make a single cent from his gift I feel certain that he would still write down lyrics as they come to him and rap over beats in the garage with his friends.

Alex, who is trying to carve out a living as an artist in Mexico City, feels that artists should be compensated for the time they invest in creating their art. (You can purchase prints of Alex’s photography here.)

Lewis Hyde is a writer’s writer. He perfectly describes the flashes of drunken eloquence that come to those of us who try our hand at creative writing. How the whole universe makes sense for a few moments, and we feel capable of shaping what Hyde calls “the plasma of the moment” into the prose of sculpted language. Or, as Ezra Pound put it:

I am interested in art and ecstasy, ecstasy which I would define as the sensation of the soul in ascent, art as the expression and sole means of passing on that ecstasy to others.

Creating art requires both idleness and hard work. Those moments of ecstasy and clarity come most frequently to the artist in times of idleness and calm observation. But shaping the ecstasy of the moment into a piece of artwork – whether a novel, painting, movie, or any other medium – requires countless hours of outlining, editing, reworking, revisioning, and reshaping. The artist must step outside of her own ecstasy to understand how it is perceived by others.

Both idleness and hard work take up time. Some artists are idle for most of the day, soaking up the experiences around them, and then lock themselves up in their workshops at night to create and work. Others, like Chuck Palahniuk or Alice Walker, are idle for an entire year or longer, and then lock themselves away for several months to work tirelessly at shaping their art.

Hyde asks us, how is an artist living in a market society able to survive while preserving enough time for idleness and enough psychic energy for creative work? “The problem is not ‘Can gift and commodity coexist?’,” he writes, “but ‘To What degree may one draw from the other without destroying it?’”

In the conclusion Hyde lists “three primary ways in which modern artists have resolved the problem of their livelihood. They have have taken second jobs, they have found patrons to support them, or they have managed to place the work itself on the market and pay the rent with fees and royalties.” I am under the impression that Hyde himself sees the “second job” as the noblest of ways that an artist can distance her gift from the commodity market. He is eager to point out in the first paragraph of his biography that “he has also worked as an electrician and a carpenter to support himself while writing.” But it is patronage that has supported most of Hyde’s work. In 1991 he was awarded an unrestricted $500,000 by the MacArthur Foundation. He has also received grants from National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lannan Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In addition, he is given an annual salary as the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College and as a fellow of the Berkman Center. His Cambridge office, writes Daniel Smith, was “offered to him rent-free by an architect who had seen him speak about The Gift and who liked the idea of sponsoring a ‘poet in residence’ at her firm.”

But it is the third strategy – to license the art and place it on the commodity market – that Hyde has been recently advocating as a board member of Creative Capital and Trust Art. Creative Capital is both a grant maker and a business consultancy for artists. They ask artists to make specific budgets for their requests. They introduce the artists to galleries where they can sell their work. And they offer professional consulting, such as advising the artists to insure their studios. In turn, the grantee artists agree to share a percentage of any net profits from their art with Creative Capital. Those net profits are then put back into the pot to fund future grantees.

Trust Art, which launched this past week at TED, describes itself as a “stock market for cultural renewal.” The model is similar to SellaBand, but rather than receiving a CD for your $10 investment in a music group, Trust Art will split the profits of any artistic work between the artist and the investors (50% for the artist, 50% for the “shareholders”.) Right now there are ten proposed projects you can invest in. “Portraits of Dreamers,” for example, is a proposed project by fashion photographer Justin Tellian. He is seeking $80,000 to travel to five continents to shoot “a series of large scale photography portraits that unite creative producers in five cities around the world.” In the end he will auction off five of the photographs. For investors to make any return, therefore, each photograph will need to sell for more than $16,000.

Trust Art makes no pretense of art as a gift. Their manifesto calls art a commodity; “the one commodity that’s always fulfilled and enriched our societies creatively, culturally, and spiritually.” It is a nice resource for creative souls who want to fund creative projects, but personally I think it requires an inevitable compromise of artistic freedom when someone is investing $10,000 in you making a profit; and as much of a profit as possible.

Finally, it is worth noting that there is a metaphysical implication to Hyde’s theory of “The Gift”.

We rightly speak of “talent” as a “gift,” for although a talent can be perfected through an effort of the will, no effort in the world can cause its initial appearance. Mozart, composing on the harpsichord at the age of four, had a gift. We also rightly speak of intuition or inspiration as a gift. As the artist works, some portion of his creation is bestowed upon him. An idea pops into his head, a tune begins to play, a phrase comes to mind, a color falls in place on the canvas.

Here is Snyder describing how he came to write poetry in The Real Work:

I finished off the trail crew season and went on a long mountain meditation walk for ten days across some wilderness. During that process – thinking about things and my life – I just dropped poetry. I don’t want to sound precious, but in some sense I did drop it. Then I started writing poems that were better. From that time forward I always looked on the poems I wrote as gifts that were not essential to my life; if I never wrote another one, it wouldn’t be a great tragedy. Ever since, every poem I’ve written has been like a surprise …

If artistic talent is a gift, and if artistic inspiration is a gift, then this begs the question, Who or what bestows such gifts? To whom does the artist owe her gratitude? There is little doubt that Hyde believes in some higher power, a spiritual creator who has given the gift of creativity to some, but not all.

In an interview with Terry Gross, John Updike is quoted as describing an artist as “closer to the gods, with access to the divine sources of tribal well-being.” Updike cites the generation of writers before him as feeling that, “god being either dead or asleep, the writer as inherited what once was the priest’s function.”

The notion of a Brahmin class of talented writers and artists as conveyors of their sacred communion with a higher spirit strikes me as both rather elitist and narrow in terms of defining how – and if – humans communicate with god. However, it is true that we don’t know where artistic talent comes nor why it develops for certain individuals and at certain times. (That is, what is behind the creation of the so-called masterpiece?) Even if we discover a gene for artistic talent (and I’m doubtful), why did that gene develop during the evolution of the human species? What role did it play in our darwinian survival? Why are only certain individuals ‘gifted’ with artistic talent?

In the end, The Gift leaves us with many more questions than answers. Throughout my own reading I found myself going back and forth about how an artist should support his craft, and whether or not art should ever be licensed and sold as a commodity. In the end I think that organizations like Creative Capital and Trust Art are important advancements in enabling artists to finance both the idleness and hard work required to create art. Every artist and lover of art will have his or her own ethics and opinions about how to negotiate the tension between the gift and the marketplace. Hyde has done an excellent job opening our eyes to the reasoning and motivations behind each of them.

But, then a ray of sun poked out, shining through the orange-tinged chlorophyll of the maple tree right outside my window. A glistening reflection off of a wee spider’s recent creation. Maybe the same spider that I lovingly flicked outside two nights ago while my sister screeched, ‘don’t kill it, don’t kill it.’

And iTunes, with its genius mind of its own, decided to put on DNTEL’s Rock My Boat featuring Mia Doi Todd. Everything came together for three minutes: the sun’s skirt-raising flirtation, Mia Doi Todd’s sensuous voice, the wonders of nature and her patterns. So here, in the spirit of honoring cottage spider webs, is my homage to those three minutes.

So concerned are they by my lack of punditry that a few have even asked me if I was voting for McCain.

Come, come, some respect please.

Two things: 1.) this is the most pundited election in the history of earth. I have nothing to say that hasn’t already been said a million times. 2.) when I live in a state where my vote matters, I’ll start taking this whole game more seriously.

(As I type this, Michelle Obama is in the background on the Larry King show. Looking good in purple, Michelle.)

But if you would like to hear me say the same things that have already been said a million times by a million people (rather than me describing what just about no one knows about), then here is a clip of Bill and I on the Liberian radio talk show 50/50 discussing the American election:

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As you can imagine, my favorite quote by T-Max, the host of the show, was “the friend of my friend is my enemy”, which was attributed to Mao Zedong. I would like to apologize to the good people of Liberia for misinforming them about the amount Alaskans receive from the Alaska Permanent Fund; this year Alaskans received $3,269, not $10,000.

Today my one and only goal is to teach the IT guys at Sky Radio how to upload all of the episodes of 50/50 to their new website so hopefully we can keep up with the show from anywhere. Any radio program with a host named T-Max and Shaft as its theme song is sure to be a hit among the American hipster contingent. Am I wrong? I am picturing sponsorship by American Apparel.

To tell you the truth, I have already written a post about the US elections, but it’s on a top secret blog. That’s right, the G5 collective is back in cyberspace. It has been over a year since our last G5 Summit in Brooklyn and seven months since our last G4 Podcast.

Get ready for some more choice cuts – we’re only a week away from the second annual G5 Summit. And if two particular members hurry their asses up and post to our new blog, then we’ll go public with it when we’re all together.

The idea of the blog is that every 6 weeks one of us chooses a topic and writes a leading post. Then the other four continue the conversation with their own takes each week on the topic. The sixth week is supposed to be reserved for a podcast via Skype. Revaz chose the first topic: Barack Obama.

West side.

That, above all else, is this bear’s favorite pastime. Sin duda. If I visit your ‘hood and you ask me what I’d like to do, be prepared; ‘let’s saunter’ will be my answer.

I know what you’re thinking: Sauntering? Oso, what kind of psuedo-poetic bullshit is that? We call it walking. To which I respond with four simple words: no, no, no, no.

Walking is a form of transportation, an activity which takes you from point A to point B. Sauntering is none of that. To saunter, as my kindred homeboy Henry David reminds us, is rather for ‘mere idlers and vagabonds.’ In other words, my favorite kinds of people.

To saunter is to submit to the purest of intuition and serendipity. It is idle walk, which I will always prefer over idle talk.

Dhaka, it must be said, is not a city for saunterers. Every step of every block some homeboy on a bicycle rickshaw will pull up alongside of you and query, ‘boss, where going?‘ The problem (in fact, the beauty, the very definition) of sauntering is that this question has no answer. The saunterer shrugs.

Sauntering is not an activity easily understood in a Bangladeshi context. The most aggressive of rickshaw cyclists do not pull up alongside you, but rather pull up right in front of you to cut off your path. That is one surefire way to piss off a saunterer. One young not-so-gentle-man tried that maneuver on me three times in a row, to which I was compelled to warn him: “homeboy, you try that one more time and we gonna be practicing our kung fu.”

Antananarivo, on the other hand, is a saunterers’ paradise.

Hold up … let’s get some soundtrack going here …

Isn’t that nice? That’s Mr. Bob Baldwin singing Tsy Haiko. OK, so firstly, Between 5 and 7 p.m. Antananarivo is abuzz with pedestrian activity. Streets become streams of unrushed walkers lined with banks of candle-lit informal economy. Anything you could possibly want to buy is all of a sudden right by your side, but only between 5 and 7 p.m. Day turns to dusk turns to night. The retreating sunlight plays games with angular buildings, tired eyes, and flashing white teeth.

I join the stream, the comfort of strangers, the silent rhythm, the agile steps – right foot, left foot – floating down the stone pathways that fall down from Tana’s steeple-capped hilltops.

The art of sauntering lies in self-confidence, of choosing your path without hesitation and without regret. And of always remembering where you turn.

Why do I love to saunter? That’s an easy answer: good shit happens when you saunter. Beautiful faces cross your path, melodic music slips out of the creaky wooden doors separating you from choir practice, market fresh scents accost you, dusty alleyways lead you to bocce ball games and free shots of horrible whiskey with new friends. The more you trust your intuition, the better it gets.

I am writing this, among other reasons, because I can’t endure the thought that it is time for me to pack my suitcase once again. That a 5 a.m. flight awaits me. That tomorrow will be a new country, a new currency, a city I’ve never been to and know nothing about.

On my last day in Madagascar I had the honor to hang out with five of its cyber-celebrities: Miss Pati Pois, who represented Foko in Brussels; Jogany, the queen of Malagasy cyberspace; Diana Chamia who received much deserved attention for her single-handed determination to help Baby Kamba; Karenichia, who might very well be the OG of Foko bloggers; and Monsieur Stéphane, a man who, in the streets of Antananarivo, needs no introduction.

Diana, Jogany, and Pati Pois

We had lots of fun. I was happy, in the groove of Malagasy life, which seems to always happen just as I’m about to leave. Hopefully I will be back sooner than later. Lots of sauntering awaits me.

Before we go any further, let’s put a soundtrack to this post, shall we? Here’s a song from Habib:

I came to Bangladesh to witness first hand what I’ve been reading about almost every day: the work of the Nari Jibon project. I came in with high expectations and they surpassed even those. Here are some pictures of Nari Jibon’s students and staff:

And here is a video I put together:

Did you catch Asia Afrin “Anni” describe how she wants to be a lawyer and how she feels that women deserve just as much respect as men? Get this, Anni is only 14-years-old. At 14 I think my main concern was figuring out how to use my parents’ car without them knowing. And here is Anni filling me with hope for the future. Thankfully she is at Nari Jibon where she can continue to flourish and find success.

In addition to Rafiq, Sujon, Bipa, Taslima, and all the wonderful staff at Nari Jibon, there is someone else who really deserves much more recognition than she receives for the tremendous success of the project and that is Nari Jibon’s founder, Kathy Ward. Kathy, a professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Southern Illinois University, first came to Bangladesh to study “The Effects of Global Economic Restructuring on Urban Women’s Work and Income-Generating Strategies in Dhaka, Bangladesh.” (For more on this, have a listen to the introductory podcast to the Nari Jibon project.)

There is a thinking in academia that researchers should be completely detached from what they are studying. That the goal of academic research is to establish causes and effects, not to come up with solutions or policy. And especially not to try to implement those solutions.

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to come up with the same conclusions as Kathy and her colleagues: most urban Bangladeshi women are restricted to either garment work or sex work as a way of earning income because they don’t have the skills for other types of labor. But rather than just publishing the obvious in scholarly journals, Kathy set up the Nari Jibon center as a place where all classes of urban women could gain technical skills for a nominal fee. Shawn of the Uncultured Project has a great homage to and video with Kathy.

Update: Special thanks to Marc Fest for his donation to Nari Jibon. You can also donate from here.

What’s this? You need more music. Alright, here’s another Habib song:

Walking through Dhaka’s dusty streets can be oppressive. Everywhere are young tokai, ripe for the brochures and press releases of aid organizations. They grab at your arms, gesturing hunger, pleading for the equivalent of half the cost of a cup of coffee in the US. Traffic and the honking of horns are constant. On the sidewalks amputees sleep on cardboard boxes with flies circling around their eyes and mouths.

At times it gets to be so much that, ridden with guilt, I seek refuge in the air conditioned lobby of a five star hotel and pay more money for a croissant than most Dhaka street kids will see all month.

There is no shortage of research, articles, and photographs about poverty in Bangladesh. But I’m much more interested in those who are focused on how Bangladesh can become a fully developed country (hopefully while maintaining its own unique culture) during the first half of this century. Like residents of other developing countries (especially poor Muslim countries), Bangladeshis often look to Malaysia as an example of a poor country that was able to fully develop itself without pandering to the West and without relying heavily on foreign investment.

Which is why it was so fascinating to read Marina’s impressions of her recent visit to Bangladesh. Marina (a friend from Malaysia who has appeared on this blog before) is the daughter of former Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad who, with some controversy, is credited for Malaysia’s economic boom. During her visit she visited the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, which seems to share Kathy’s belief that educating women is the path toward development. She also visited a rural village to better understand the Grameen bank’s microlending revolution. And she got to know the workers of several NGO’s in Dhaka – incuding BRAC, the world’s largest NGO.

But your best source for getting a better understanding of Bangladesh comes from my good friend Rezwan and his blog, The 3rd World View. Rezwan is a Bangladeshi currently living in Berlin. (Remember his adorable daughter?) He has both an insider’s and outsider’s view of Bangladesh and his posts are a mix of fun, fascinating, and intellectual.

Now I’m about to head to Nari Jibon to say my goodbyes. Next stop: Doha.