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Rod



Last Updated: 1/28/2008

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Gender: Male
Status: Single
Age: 57
Sign: Aries

City: AUSTIN
State: Texas
Country: US
Signup Date: 11/15/2007

Blog Archive
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Monday, January 28, 2008 
Lightning Strikes Group



When:  1 FEBRUARY 6 p.m. EST/3 p.m. PST


     
Join Rod, Christina, Field Negro and guests as we bring back the
monthly panel format to talk about the issues of the day. Primary
season is here and don't think we've forgotten.



Joseph Straubhaar on The International Allure of Telenovelas



When: 6 FEBRUARY 2 p.m. EST/11 a.m. PST


   
   University of Texas Professor Joseph Straubhaar talks with us about
the international appeal of telenovelas.



The Skinny on the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) Festival



When: 13 FEBRUARY 2 p.m. EST/11 a.m. PST


  
    Hugh Forest, one of the organizers of SXSW talks with us about the
film, music and interactive media festival this year and what we can
expect. Rod will be attending and wants to give a preview.



A Conversation with Robert Niles of the USC Annenberg School of
Journalism



When:  20 FEBRUARY 3 p.m. EST/Noon PST


   
   Robert Niles, Editor-in-Chief of the Online Journalism Review, and a
Professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism
speaks with Rod about how the industry has changed and evolved and
what he considers best practices.



Inside "American Zombie"



When:  26 FEBRUARY 5 -.p.m. EST/2 p.m. PST



Film Director Grace Lee talks about her new movie, "American Zombie"
opening in theatres in March.  This should be a fun interview about a
unique and off-beat look at the undead in Los Angeles.  Really!
6:01 PM 
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Thursday, January 03, 2008 
Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Utah and graduated in 1978 with a J.D. degree from The George Washington University Law School. Anderson practiced law for twenty-one years in Salt Lake City, serving as lead attorney in several seminal civil rights and consumer protection cases, and helping spearhead reform of Utah's child custody laws. He served as Chair of the Litigation Section of the Utah State Bar Association, as Legal Panel Director and President of the Utah chapter of the ACLU, and as President of Anderson and Karrenberg, a Salt Lake City law firm.

Since taking office in 2000, Mayor Anderson has implemented a wide array of initiatives to improve sustainability, increase governmental accountability, and enhance the quality of life of all Salt Lake City residents. In 2002, Mayor Anderson committed Salt Lake City to abide by at least the Kyoto Protocol goals in its municipal operations. In 2005, the City far surpassed its Kyoto goal with a 31% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, seven years before the 2012 target date.

Anderson has presented at numerous national and international conferences about techniques cities can utilize to cut costs, reduce pollution, and improve sustainability and public health. He was the only representative from the U.S. to consult in London with representatives from G8 nations regarding climate change, in preparation for the 2005 G8 Summit. Anderson also spoke at the 2006 annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, and at the 2007 annual meeting of the National Environmental Law Societies. He was sponsored by the EPA to attend the eighth meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP8, in New Delhi to present on Salt Lake City's global warming pollution reduction projects. He was invited back as a presenter for the COP10 meeting in Buenos Aires.

In November 2005, Salt Lake City won the World Leadership Award for the environment for its Salt Lake City Green Program, perhaps the most comprehensive sustainability program in the United States. Anderson also received the 2003 Climate Protection Award from the EPA, the Distinguished Service Award from the national Sierra Club, and was named by Business Week as one of the top twenty international figures working to combat climate change.

Anderson has implemented a comprehensive restorative justice program to advance the interests of victims, offenders, and the larger community. In honor of his service to and advocacy on behalf of the Hispanic community, Mayor Anderson received the League of United Latin American Citizens' first-ever "Profile in Courage" award, and the National Association of Hispanic Publications's Presidential Award.

Anderson has been an outspoken critic of the invasion and occupation of Iraq since it was first proposed by the Bush Administration. In the face of utter silence by the Salt Lake City Council, Anderson signed a resolution before the US invasion of Iraq that called for allowing the UN weapons inspectors to complete their mission in Iraq, and for greater cooperation with long-time US allies regarding Middle East policy. During two presidential visits to Salt Lake City, Anderson has spoken at demonstrations against the Bush Administration and Congress (remarks available at www.slcgov.com/mayor). He has advocated for the impeachment of President Bush at numerous public rallies, and has also spoken at demonstrations and sponsored US Conference of Mayors resolutions to take action to stop the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

------

Our second guest is William Purcell of Artcouple Productions in Oakland, California. I'll give you a bit of background on Bill. First of all, he's a treasure trove on Art History besides being a photographer with a distinctive, often quirky style of approaching unique subject matter. Bill and I have known each other for almost twenty years.

William Purcell is an artist and photographer living in Oakland, CA. who holds academic degrees in business and art.  The past 30 years of his professional career have been an  exploration of the intersection between the two disciplines, most recently as a manager at The New Lab, a premier commercial photographic lab in San Francisco. His technical expertise and business knowledge have allowed him to earn his daily bread without compromising his artistic interests.

He is currently working on a series of  documentary landscape photographs of  Mountain View Cemetery, which was designed by New York's Central Park creator Frederick Law Olmsted.  This project examines the nature of  social stratification in a classic 19th Century cemetery.

William has a passion for art history, with a particular interest in photography as a catalyst for social change.  This potpourri of professional and personal interests has led to a rather unique perspective on the business we call Art, which  he loves to debate with anyone willing to have the conversation.
6:02 PM 
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Tuesday, November 13, 2007 
This week's interview is with my friend and colleague, Tom Parish.  Tom is head of Tom Parish, Inc., and a well-known podcaster featured at ITConversations.com.

Tom Parish founded a specialist social media advisory consultancy more than 2 years ago, which acts for corporations considering the use of social media systems and related business strategies. It advises boards on how to design flexible strategic approaches, manage the social media process and create benchmarks. Social media includes consumer generated media, business blogs, multi-media (audio and video) used in viral marketing and RSS technology for easily distributing all forms of media globally on portable and non-portable devices. Tom is host of Enterpriseleadership.org sponsored by BMC Software and his own show called Talking Portraits at ITConversations.com.

Tom began working with the Internet in its infancy while employed by a spin-off from MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1983. (Tom graduated from TAMU with a BSEE in 1976). He has been intimately involved with the intertwined evolution of the web and business in the last two decades. In addition to his 13 years as a highly respected engineer and engineering manager, Tom also has 12 years as a top performer in sales at high-tech companies.

In the 1990s, Tom combined his extensive Internet expertise and sales experiences to manage a global marketing and creative service group for Motorola's highly successful worldwide Digital DNA brand marketing campaign -- it successfully reached more than 22 million people in North America, South America, Europe and Asia. Tom produced more than 80 audio Internet Radios shows for the Digital DNA Internet Radio Program.
7:57 PM 
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Thursday, September 20, 2007 
I was asked to join the promotional team for the documentary film Desert Bayou on the same morning that I had decided it was time that I cut back from all the work I do. I told myself I had to learn to say "No." I have too many projects on my plate as it is. I need to scale back and do more quality work and not worry so much about quantity or exposure. Let's face it, I'm one of the most exposed writers on the Web. But I could not say no to "Desert Bayou." The devastation of New Orleans, the loss of a city I had loved and hated, was too close to my heart. This is a project I must do.

Once again, I must return to New Orleans. This time, I go as a flak for a film I consider both important and historic. This time, I go for the pre-release screening being done in partnership with the Film Buff Institute of Loyola University on 28 September, prior to our theatrical release on 5 October at the Village East theatre in New York City simultaneous to the opening in New Orleans on the same date.

Here's the back-story: Master P., one of the people featured in this documentary, had his family among the six hundred (600) New Orleans evacuees who found themselves at a desert National Guard training facility outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, immediately after the storm.

Still shocked from the aftermath of the storm, after spending days on the street in front of the Ernest Morial Convention Center, being herded into buses and driven to a plane, these people had no idea where they were being taken. After disembarking in the desert, they and their belongings were immediately searched - even though they were tired and hungry and had traveled to this undisclosed location for hours. Then they were subjected to not one, but three, criminal background checks. Three!

Then the realization kicked in: they were in the desert in Utah. Utah, considered one of the whitest states in the nation (approximate African-American population: 1%). One African-American resident of Salt Lake City featured in the film states that, before the arrival of the New Orleans evacuees, she only knew of nine other African-Americans in the whole city. This is where the story begins.

It is not the story you expect. Master P calls the tale historic. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, syndicated columnist, radio personality and host of The Learning Channel's "Shalom in the Home," calls the events in this documentary a defining commentary on America as a nation.

Rabbi Boteach lost his radio program at the Salt Lake City station that carried it in his efforts to bring healing to the situation and was instrumental in moving these African-Americans into a dialogue with the nearby Mormon community who had put up bureaucratic barriers into integrating them into the community.

I encourage you to give this film serious consideration. It opens in New Orleans and New York City in early October, 2007. Please go to http://desertbayoumovie.com and leave your comments. Please join our community and take action on the issues of housing, electricity, health care, mental health care and water - basic human needs - that still challenge the people of New Orleans. Share this information and this URL with your friends and colleagues.

Having written about New Orleans for almost a decade now, I am either moved to tears or sardonic laughter. It's that kind of city.

What I feel now is despair because I "talk" – via e-mail or on the telephone – with someone I know or love in New Orleans just about every day. That's the kind of people we are, us former and present New Orleanians. As my friend and colleague, Katy Rechdahl, who was at the Gambit Weekly and wrote about my wrongful imprisonment at Orleans Parish Prison and now writes for the New Orleans Times-Picayune commented for my book about our city, "There is just something sweet about the people here." That isn't said much in the national press.

Katy had her baby during the height of Hurricane Katrina. Thanks to the good offices of a nurse who evacuated her out of town, she was able to take the child to her sister's home in Arizona.

So many of us were spread so far. Katy to Arizona, me to North Carolina, my friend Tim Farley and his family to Ohio, Scott and his lady Tierney to Minnesota, and those six hundred (600) people to Utah. There is not a state in the Union – other than perhaps Alaska or Hawaii – where we were not sent or fled toward.

The word "Diaspora" certainly comes to mind. I certainly feel displaced and I have run into lots of people where I now reside, in Austin, Texas, from New Orleans who feel the same way.

So this sense of anger on our part – a sense of anger that was palpable to me from everyone I spoke with when I tried to return to New Orleans the first year after Katrina – abides with us. All I can remember from my last visit to New Orleans, in August of 2006, was the eerie feeling I had driving through once-thriving neighborhoods and asking myself, "Where are the people?" I might as well have been driving on some landscape on the surface of the moon…

The anger was there, the sadness, for those who had already returned, and it was so overwhelming, so all-encompassing, that I knew I did not have the strength to endure it.

Now, another year later, I plan to return – but with trepidation. While I know my mission is important, I also know that I am tearing the scab from an old wound. I return because the producers of the film have committed to establish a grant program to provide funds directly to people already rebuilding in New Orleans or people who plan to return home. In addition, when you'll visit desertbayoumovie.com, you'll see there's a very strong community action component to what we are doing. I hope you'll take part. I'm proud to return under those circumstances. I am doing my part to rebuild the city I loved and hated.

I want to see the Mardi Gras Indians, a part of history, back in New Orleans and thriving. I want to see my old neighborhood, the Ninth Ward, rebuilt. I want some of what we have lost to be reclaimed. I don't want the blatant racism back, though, the thuggery or over-the-top level of violent deaths. That's where my hate of that city comes in.

So I guess what I saw in "Desert Bayou," while parts of it brought tears to my eyes, was so important. There is a message of hope and healing in this film that I want to share with everyone I know. I don't agree with Curtis and Clifford – the heads of the two families in this film – that we cannot return to New Orleans. I do agree that their stories are important American stories that everyone should see, discover, discuss and then decide what actions need to be taken.

My own personal action is to help bring artists and musicians back to the Crescent City. You have to decide what action you need to take – on housing, potable water, mental health care. It's your call. This is our chance to define ourselves as Americans.
6:54 PM 
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Wednesday, September 19, 2007 
Imagine this: You just spent days in the sweltering heat lying on the street with the few belongings you own, cheek-by-jowl with hundreds of other people in the same situation. All of you, hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, have just suffered the worst natural disaster in the history of your country. You are hungry, dehydrated, tired and you keep hearing that help is on the way but days have passed and nothing has changed. Well, strike that, things have gone from horrific to hellish – that's what's changed.

Suddenly buses arrive and you are herded into them – at least you and a few hundred others are – while many more are left behind. Their desperate cries echo in your ears as you are bussed away.

Is this a scene from the war in the Balkans? Is this Lebanon or Iraq?

No, this is America, circa 2005, as seen from the eyes of the actual participants of an airlift from New Orleans, Louisiana, in the important documentary film, "Desert Bayou" by acclaimed director Alex LeMay.

Lots has been written and filmed about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and Gulf Coast Recovery but LeMay's film is a powerful documentation and commentary on a little-known story about where some six hundred (600) New Orleans evacuees – refugees in their own country – found themselves.

After disembarking in the desert, they and their belongings were immediately searched - even though they were tired and hungry and had traveled to this undisclosed location for hours. Then they were subjected to not one, but three, criminal background checks. Three!

Then the realization kicked in: they were in the desert in Utah. Utah, considered one of the whitest states in the nation (approximate African-American population: 1%). One African-American resident of Salt Lake City featured in the film states that, before the arrival of the New Orleans evacuees, she only knew of nine other African-Americans in the whole city. This is where the story begins.

It is not the story you expect. Master P calls the tale historic. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, syndicated columnist, radio personality and host of The Learning Channel's "Shalom in the Home," calls the events in this documentary a defining commentary on America as a nation.

At the "Desert Bayou" Web site are resources to take action, a community of Bloggers talking about important social issues surrounding Gulf Coast Recovery, and how you can participate in helping cities like New Orleans, Biloxi and others ravaged by the storm. You can express your opinions and get involved. Start today!
6:53 PM 
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