Author Archive: Jamie Manser

KXCI Focuses on the Future

April 1, 2015 | Jamie Manser

Cathy Rivers, KXCI’s new general manager, in the station’s music library.
photo: Amy Haskell

It’s mid-morning on a beautiful spring day in late March; I’ve got my car windows down while cruising downtown to KXCI, situated in the historic Armory Park neighborhood. I’m listening to Tucson’s community radio station en route, located on the left end of the dial at 91.3FM. Staff members are in full membership drive mode, pitching away with contagious enthusiasm.

“We’ve come a long way in 31 years,” says Traffic Director Melissa Mauzy through the air waves, and gives a brief overview of the station’s membership growth over the last three decades. “I predict, with the new (transmitter) tower, that we’ll have 4,000 members by 2020!” Currently, KXCI has close to 3,000 members.

Mauzy, who is in the broadcast studio with Membership Director Michelle Boulet-Stephenson, asks what the current drive has brought in so far. “We’re over $26,000,” replies Boulet-Stephenson, adding, “We need to see $28,000 in the rear view mirror!” The goal for this drive is $100,000 in ten days. At day three, on March 25, the station was on track to meet its fundraising mission.

I’m smiling as I look for a place to park, impressed by the ladies’ impassioned, intelligent delivery. As I walk up to the two-story brick building, built in 1904, I recall it was once a hotel/boarding house.

The place is abuzz with activity: phones are ringing, volunteers are answering the calls and donation pledges are being taken. Recently appointed General Manager Cathy Rivers is in the production studio, putting the finishing touches on a couple of station IDs recorded with local music luminaries Brian Lopez and Gabriel Sullivan. It takes a few minutes for us to get situated as Rivers is peppered with questions and updates from staff and volunteers. She handles it all with patient aplomb. While conducting an interview during pledge drive is not ideal, deadlines are what they are and we happily work with it.

After the station’s previous General Manager Randy Peterson stepped down to explore other professional opportunities this past December (he is now the Development Director for the Humane Society of Southern Arizona), KXCI’s Board of Directors – of which I am a member – asked Rivers, the station’s program director and The Home Stretch host, to serve as the interim general manager. Rivers’ performance over the last several months provided the board with the evidence it needed to appoint her as general manager and did so in a unanimous vote on March 19.

Katie Rogerson, KXCI’s board president said, “It was agreed that Cathy is the right person for the job and has the talent, expertise and passion to take KXCI to the next level. Just as important, KXCI is community radio and hiring someone from our own community just makes sense.”

Rivers’ career, primarily in Tucson, spans two decades and includes on air work in both commercial and community radio, along with band management, broadcast and music industry experience. A little known fact is that, in the ‘90s when she worked for Journal Broadcast Group, Rivers was the only female in the country to have a solo morning show on a station that was in the top 20 tier of the market. She’s also been a band tour manager and as a singer/songwriter/guitarist, she’s toured for her own music projects. As a well-known DJ, Rivers has a voice that is equal parts confident, soothing, engaging, inquisitive and sultry, which led her to garnering voice-over gigs.

Rivers’ resume isn’t something she immediately shares, one has to directly ask. Her main focus these days is ensuring the continuation of KXCI’s sound fiscal health, which includes monitoring the progress and completion of the “Amplify KXCI” capital campaign. They are close, and the team’s efforts have enabled the station to thus far raise almost $650,000 toward the $750,000 goal. In conjunction with KXCI’s entire staff, Community Engagement Director Amanda Shauger has been working with Deb Dale of Smith & Dale – the development consulting firm hired by the station – on this campaign.

“KXCI has never done anything of this fundraising magnitude before,” Shauger explains. “It is a symbol of KXCI’s maturation and moving to the next level. With it, we have an opportunity to plan for the future and stay relevant with both legacy media and new media.”

Some of the station’s objectives are to create avenues to advance both technologically and educationally. This all must be balanced with regular daily operations, managing the dedicated volunteers (which includes 70 volunteer DJs and hundreds of off-air volunteers); along with addressing listeners’ concerns and looking to connect with broader audiences and Tucson’s evolving demographics. As Rivers breaks down the listenership data provided by Arbitron-Nielsen, she shares that the majority of those tuning in – 30,000 weekly – are in the age range of 35 to 50.

“This is a really great family station. Not for kids necessarily, but for families; and one of the things that we don’t do at KXCI are family events.” Speaking with colleagues in the industry gave Rivers the idea to hold dances for families, offering “an opportunity for fathers to dance with daughters and moms to dance with sons.”

We get sidetracked when we see lunch being delivered by Culvers. During the drive, several local businesses have kept the staff and volunteers fed – Beyond Bread, Reforma, Diablo Burger, Tucson Tamale Company, 4th Avenue Deli, to name just a few. We stop to grab some food, and continue chatting while eating.

“For 31 years, KXCI has done a really great job of being a solid station; those who have come before me worked really hard to make it financially sound and worked very hard in getting some solid programming and solid programming concepts. The nice thing is I’m able to lead in a situation where we are in really good health. There are a lot of things that KXCI has not moved forward on where other radio stations are really now way ahead of us and the gap is just getting bigger and bigger. Until we acknowledge that gap and dig in and find out what’s really going on with KXCI, we can’t move the station further.”

Rivers explains that the gap lies in the constant evolution of technology; other stations have on-demand content and podcasts. KXCI is working toward doing those same things within the next several months. Digitizing content and looking at syndicating some of the station’s mini-programs, such as: Flicks, Growing Native, Arizona Trails, and The Weekly Green, is also on the to-do list.

The phone rings several times, Rivers answers it, “KXCI, may I take your pledge please? Oh, yes, let me get him.” She puts the caller on hold, grins and says, “It is ‘Wednesday Call Day,’ it’s for Duncan.” Wednesdays are the days when labels contact Music Director Duncan Hudson to ask if the station is playing their artists. A volunteer walks into her office to grab something off of the printer; a DJ pops her head in to say hi. While a bit distracting, the lively energy is uplifting.

Refocusing, Rivers addresses the broadcasting challenges. “We’re still working on the signal for KXCI. We now sound really great in the northwest and centrally, and we’re still having some issues in the south, we’re working on that. That is on the top of my priority list.”

The new tower was just installed last summer, so the process of working the problem continues to evolve. Shauger is working closely with Rivers and several engineers to find solutions.

Other goals include beefing up the station’s educational components by expanding its summer DJ classes to become year round and adding classes such as voice training, making live mixes and engineering. Having a solid education department will help with grants, a revenue stream they are looking to further mine.

As we wind up the interview, Rivers shares with passion how KXCI differs from commercial radio in the fact that KXCI is actually a part of the music business.

“Commercial radio has nothing to do with the music business. KXCI is a part of the music business because every CD that comes into KXCI gets listened to – whether it is from a 15-year-old down the street or it comes from Warner Bros. Records – every piece of music is given a chance.”

The phone rings again, and I take my cue. Rivers apologies, but it is unnecessary. It is a busy day, and her time needs to be focused on the station. As I leave, I say goodbye to Duncan and wave to Melissa and Michelle and say, “Take it easy!”

They wave back, and Melissa says, “We are, and we’re raising money too!”

Learn more about KXCI at KXCI.org, where the volunteer-produced shows are available for streaming. Listen on the FM dial at 91.3. Check out the website to explore volunteer opportunities, to donate online, and stay tuned for information on the upcoming DJ summer camps for youth.

George Mumford in Tucson – Wed, April 8

April 1, 2015 | Jamie Manser

George Mumford

UA’s Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry is bringing George Mumford – sports psychologist with Phil Jackson and meditation teacher/coach renowned for enhancing individual and team performance though mindfulness meditation – to Tucson to deliver several free public lectures on Wednesday, April 8.

At 3 p.m., Mumford speaks on the theme “Learning to Play, Playing to Learn” at El Pueblo Neighborhood Center, 101 W. Irvington Rd. This free talk, geared toward youth but applicable to all, focuses on simple and powerful methods to achieve your aspirations.

At 7 p.m., Mumford presents “Pursuing Excellence with Grace and Ease” at UA’s Gallagher Theater, 1303 E. University Blvd. The free presentation is centered on how to utilize mindfulness meditation as a key to success.

As an athletic trainer, mentor for at-risk youth and motivational speaker, Mumford urges his diverse clients and audiences to practice meditation as a means of developing concentration, focus and mental toughness. Mumford is best known for working with the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers during their championship seasons in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Mumford’s proven techniques can transform the performance of anyone with a goal – be they an athlete, student, academic, executive, musician, hacker or artist. Mumford shares his story and strategies in his Tucson talks, topics being covered in his forthcoming book “The Mindful Athlete: Secrets to Pure Performance,” set for release by Parallax Press this May.

By hosting George Mumford, Confluencenter continues its mission to sponsor engaging and free programming that examines humanity’s grand challenges.

“The eclectic nature of Mumford’s talks, which include elements of cognitive science, sports medicine and Eastern philosophy, represents the innovative and interdisciplinary work in which Confluencenter invests,” explains Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry Director Dr. Javier Duran. “We are excited to bring Mr. Mumford to Tucson to speak to both the UA and broader Tucson communities.”

Mumford’s community presentation at El Pueblo Community Center is possible through in-kind support from Ward I Councilor Regina Romero’s office. Mayor Jonathan Rothschild is also offering his support by being a part of the El Pueblo Community Center talk. Call 621-4587 or visit Confluencenter.arizona.edu for more information.

Women in the Workforce: We’ve Come a Long Way

March 4, 2015 | Jamie Manser

On Saturday, March 21, the UA Bookstore’s first floor is set to become a portal to the past when a salon – featuring music and discussion – on the women’s movement takes place. The UA Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry’s event, part of the Creative Collaborations series, is looking back at the middle of the 20th century when a seismic paradigm shift occurred in the United States; the shift from men mostly running things to women entering professional fields, and when girls’ ambitions could evolve beyond solely finding the perfect husband and becoming a dutiful wife and mother.

Pianist, Professor Emerita and the UA Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry Senior Fellow Paula Fan, the Creative Collaborations coordinator and host, reflects on the incredible journey of the women’s movement through dialogue with women from journalism, medicine and law – along with songs performed by vocalist Kristin Dauphinais.

“The stories that these ladies are going to tell, its history; they lived through it. I’m in my 60s. I am sort of peripheral to it. These three – in law, journalism, and medicine – we’re talking about the power fields, where women weren’t represented, so I think it is an important event,” Fan said.

These amazing, accomplished and award-winning professionals include magazine and newspaper journalist Linda Grant, Dr. Marilyn Heins, and retired attorney Susan Freund, J.D. All three entered college and their careers at a time when female participation was not the norm. They succeeded in spades through intelligence, determination and hard work. They faced discrimination and had experiences that would be lawsuit worthy today.

Linda Grant, 75, who graduated with a journalism degree from Northwestern University in 1963, shared that when she worked at Fortune Magazine (owned by Time, Inc.) in the 1970s, there was “a strict gender-based policy: men writers and women fact-checkers and reporters.

“This struck me as arrogant and wrong. In 1970, the women of Fortune filed a complaint with the EEOC (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission). As part of the settlement, Fortune and other Time Inc. publications had to institute ‘writer training programs’ for women,” Grant wrote via email. “The men editors hated this requirement, and year after year flunked all the women-in-training. In the mid-70s, I was selected to go through a one-year ‘training program.’ Pretty much everyone on the staff thought it would be a slam dunk, for I had freelanced for other publications and had been writing at Fortune for years. I just wasn’t getting the promotion and the pay of a writer. After a year the editors flunked me as well, which ended the entire training program.

“I wrote a strong letter of protest, took a leave, came back, and was promoted to associate editor and writer only months later. This was huge victory for all women. I celebrated by quitting Fortune and joining the Los Angeles Times in L.A.

“This fight – which the women at all magazines followed – led to the opening up of jobs for women. It has been detailed in a book by Lynn Povich called ‘The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace.’ Newsweek was first; Time, Life, Fortune and Sports Illustrated followed months later. The lawsuits were based on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and follow-up legislation in 1979 that prohibited any company who did business with the U.S. government from discrimination,” Grant explained.

Dr. Marilyn Heins, a pediatrics expert, received her medical degree from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1955 and her undergraduate degree from Radcliffe (Harvard) in 1951. Heins, who is 84, shared in an email that at her undergrad orientation, Radcliffe’s Dean told the women that they were there to become educated mothers for their children.

“I went to college to become a doctor, so this was a bit of cognitive dissonance. One of the libraries was for men only and, yes, Harvard was a man’s world in those days. Most professors were at least somewhat accepting of the women students but I remember one asking us not to knit in class. I did not know how to knit then and still don’t know how.”

In a 2001 award acceptance speech, Heins recalled that “on the first day of our obstetrics rotation, the head of the department began the introductory lecture thusly: ‘With apologies to the women attending this lecture in order to become physicians, the function of young women is to have babies.’ I was a conscientious student so I wrote down his words verbatim. It took 18 years for that remark to somehow surface into my conscious thoughts and enrage me.”

Susan Freund, J. D., 69, graduated from college in 1967 with a degree in economics and a minor in accounting. “I was the only female in all of my business classes, but felt very supported by the professors. I made very good grades in my business and accounting classes, but was advised by my accounting professor that only the government (not private accounting firms) would hire me upon graduation because of my gender. He was right. I took a job as a field agent with the IRS. I was told at the time I was hired that there were only four female field agents in the whole U.S. I don’t know if this was true, but even the federal government was very much male dominated at this time.

“Before law school, I earned an M.B.A. from Monmouth University – I was the first female to do so. All of my professors and classmates were very supportive. I began law school (at the University of Arizona) in 1974. I was almost 29 and by then, a third of the class was female. We were the first class with substantial female numbers. The male classmates were very supportive, but some of the professors not so. Fortunately, the tax and business law professors were great. I graduated in 1977. After law school I went on to get a Masters of Law degree in Taxation at NYU. Again, a very good experience both with classmates and professors. I graduated in 1978,” Freund wrote via email.

When asked what some of the enduring accomplishments of the women’s movement are, Linda Grant wrote that the achievements for women today are proven by the numbers. “Women are everywhere: doctors, lawyers, engineers, journalists (no women’s pages anymore).” Dr. Marilyn Heins reflected Grant’s statement by saying, “the civil rights and women’s movement made enormous differences. Women have acquired access to virtually all professional and career opportunities.”

As Grant also said, “the movement could have done things better, but revolutions are messy. I think the movement wandered off course when it blamed men for everything, when bra-burners and demonstrators were silly. All we wanted was equal pay, and we are still working toward that goal, but progress is being made – two steps forward and one back.” Heins added that women’s advancements in achieving professional positions of power still needs a lot of work.

All three women, all mothers, echoed the same concern about child rearing. “Who is going to nurture the children?” Grant asked. Freund said that “one of the biggest challenges facing women today is how to manage a career and family. The support just isn’t there, for either the mother or the father. Maternity/paternity leave is too short.”

“The ‘big problem’,” wrote Heins, “is far from solved. When women work, either to fulfill their career dreams or feed their family, in a nation whose policies seem to assume all women are at home as in the ‘Dick and Jane’ books, who takes care of the children, our future?

“I hope today’s young people, both men and women, will use their creative thinking and political power to solve the ‘double burden’ problem.”

Creative Collaborations’ “Women in the Workforce: We’ve Come a Long Way” is free and runs from 11 a.m. to noon on Saturday, March 21 at the UA Bookstore’s first floor – located next to the student union at 1209 E. University Blvd. There is free parking in the Second Street Garage at Mountain Avenue. More information is at Confluencenter.arizona.edu or by calling 621-4587.

Shushing the Librarian Stereotype

March 2, 2015 | Jamie Manser

University of Arizona Research and Learning Librarians Cindy Elliott (left) and Nicole Pagowsky (right) explore librarian stereotypes at Confluencenter’s Show & Tell event on March 11.
photo: Jamie Manser/Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry

They are classic scenes in the 1984 film “Ghostbusters.” One is the opener with the grandmotherly librarian who gets the bejeezus scared out of her by the “free-roaming, vaporous, full torso apparition” haunting the New York Public Library. The other scene is with that ghost, who seems to also have been a librarian in her earthly life, shushing the Ghostbusters when they try to ask her questions while she is reading; she then terrorizes and chases them off when they don’t comply with her request to be quiet.

With the comedic team of Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Harold Ramis as the main focus, it is easy to gloss over the ghostly librarian typecast as an elderly white woman who wears her grey hair in a bun, shushes people and then turns monstrous when she’s not obeyed. It’s every little kid’s nightmare. But, let’s stop a minute, pull back for the wide angle perspective and look through a different lens.

If you are a librarian, the depiction probably touches a nerve because “Ghostbusters” certainly isn’t the only movie that perpetuates the stereotype.

“It’s everywhere,” says University of Arizona Research and Learning Librarian Nicole Pagowsky.

“It is everywhere,” agrees Cindy Elliott, also a Research and Learning Librarian at the UA.

“Especially in the media, the stereotypes are in everything from cartoons up into popular films, and television shows. Music, all kinds of things,” Elliott shares.

The three of us are chatting at the UA Main Library in mid-February, digging into the enduring and erroneous images often associated with librarians. The persistent portrayals and the implications will be shared, “in a fun way,” by Pagowsky and Elliott at Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry’s Show & Tell – a multimedia learning experience – on Wednesday, March 11.

Pagowsky, who is the co-editor of “The Librarian Stereotype: Deconstructing Perceptions and Presentations of Information Work,” imparts that her interest in examining the formulaic librarian representations stems from a curiosity about how these stereotypes affect the diversity of the profession, along with how librarians are perceived.

“The profession is over 85 percent white and over 80 percent women,” Pagowsky says. “A lot of it is because this stereotype is out there that we’re old white women or sexy white women. It’s not even necessarily, ‘Oh, I’m not sexy, I can’t go into it,’ it’s more like, ‘I’m not white’ or ‘I don’t fit into this demographic.’”

“And it’s damaging because if you don’t fit into that, you don’t see yourself in that role,” Elliott adds. “If you don’t see yourself represented there, you may not feel like ‘That’s for me.’ So that’s part of it too, we work really hard to try to recruit people from all types of backgrounds because it adds to our diversity. We need that to reflect what is going on with society.”

“And also with serving a diverse campus,” Pagowsky shares, “to just have a bunch of the same people with the same perspective developing our services, and our instruction and our interfaces and everything…”

“You want to recruit people from various backgrounds,” Elliott elucidates, “because it reflects our academic community and it reflects the community we live in.”

Along with dispelling the white, female dominated stereotype, Pagowsky also works to dismantle the idea of what librarians are supposed to wear through her blog LibrarianWardrobe.com. “Of course being female dominated, (the stereotypes are) focused on how we look. Which is another issue.”

Elliott adds that “it is weird and interesting, how fashion is very tied to the way someone perceives a librarian, so that blog that Nicole has is great. It shows that there’s a wide variety of people.”

In addition to dispelling mythologies surrounding the surface aspects of what librarians look like during the Show & Tell presentation, Pagowsky and Elliott will also share the exciting assortment of work and research librarians do at UA. Some are archivists in Special Collections, dealing with rarities like space dirt and a vaudeville collection; another librarian helps people on campus deal with and understand copyright issues. There are also health sciences librarians who do community outreach and librarians who work in student retention and campus outreach.

Pagowsky sums up the goal of the Show & Tell presentation, her scholarly work and website by saying, “It’s to show that there’s not really one way that we all look. People dress differently, people work at all different types of libraries, there’s all types of people that are librarians.”

The free Show & Tell presentation, “Shushing the Librarian Stereotype,” is on Wednesday, March 11 at Playground Bar & Lounge, 278 E. Congress St., at 6 p.m. More details are available at Confluencenter.arizona.edu or by calling 621-4587.

On Love: Songs, Science & Psychology

February 2, 2015 | Jamie Manser

Dr. Paula Fan, pianist and powerhouse behind Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry’s
Creative Collaborations.
photo by Chris Richards Photography/courtesy Paula Fan

“There’s a song for everything, for every issue – a piece of music,” imparts pianist, Professor Emerita and the UA Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry Senior Fellow Paula Fan.

Fan is referring to the premise behind the event series she coordinates, Creative Collaborations, in conjunction with the Confluencenter. The monthly Saturday morning events are mini-concerts, with Fan on piano, and include dialogue with a distinguished guest – generally a UA scholar – on a theme that is explored through music and discussion.

On Saturday, Feb. 14, from 11 a.m. to noon, Fan is hosting “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” for the Valentine’s Day Creative Collaborations presentation. Joining her for the discussion at the campus bookstore is UA Associate Professor of Psychology David Sbarra.

“The irony – and I think this is a delicious irony – is he does a lot of research on divorce,” Fan shares with a laugh. “And he has come up with a program that he calls ‘Seasons of Love.’ Basically, it is the stages. It is attraction, falling in love, maintaining the relationship and – we shall call it, for want of a better term – transitions or we can call it change. And that can take many different forms. Of course there is divorce, but there is also widowhood.

“We’re putting a scholarly slant on things we’ve always wondered about, and an explanation,” Fan says. “We talk about the whole idea of getting together, what draws people together and also when it is one-sided, when it is unrequited, which of course is the theme of so many romantic songs. We talk about the chemistry of love, the biological aspects – the reward biology. David also mentions how you maintain a relationship through forgiveness and sexual satisfaction, talking about all the things we experience as human beings in a scholarly fashion.

“And of course with transitions, the idea of when it is over – through either loss through death or whether it is through a break up. And so he’s actually addressing everything that someone has experienced, and something that most of the cohort of music has addressed too. It is a universal experience addressed in scholarly and musical terms with a lot of fun thrown in. A good humored examination of a universal human emotion.”

While, as of press time, Fan was still working on what songs will be performed, she was certain of a few. “We’re going to do ‘Love in the Dictionary,’ we’re going to do ‘The Last, Lousy Moments of Love,’ by William Bolcom. We might do ‘I Never Knew’ which we did at the AIDS (Creative Collaborations on Dec. 14, 2013), because the whole business of love nowadays is not heterosexual love, it is just love. And so there are some composers who have written about love from the gay standpoint and I’m exploring that repertoire too.”

Bemused by the title, “Love in the Dictionary,” I ask Fan to tell me more about that particular song.

“In the first half of the last century and maybe through the 1960s, there were a number of songs written for concert performance that were not popular but they had popular overtones and they were novelty songs and ‘Love in the Dictionary,’ is one because it is a dictionary entry that’s been set to music. And so what better thing to start Valentine’s Day with? So that’s fun. It was done by Celius Dougherty and he wrote a lot of novelty songs in that period. These songs are very, very charming. And it’s just a great kick off and it is literally a dictionary entry!”

Creative Collaborations’ “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” is free and runs from 11 a.m. to noon on Saturday, Feb. 14 at the UA Bookstore, first floor – located next to the student union at 1209 E. University Blvd. There is free parking in the Second Street Garage at Mountain Avenue. More information is at Confluencenter.arizona.edu or by calling 621-4587.

iBorders: Drones & Designs

January 5, 2015 | Jamie Manser

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection drone.
photo: Gerald L. Nino/CBP Photographer

“Google Predator drone.”

Professor Benjamin J. Muller is standing to my left, graphic designer Thomas Kafka McCarthy is standing behind me and the three of us are staring at my computer monitor. This image search is work, turning out to be a bit harder than we originally thought.

“See if you can find one in flight, one with the U.S. CBP logo.”

I look at Muller blankly. “CBP?” I’m still getting used to the acronym world of academia.

The professor grins. “Sorry,” he says with his slight Canadian intonation. “U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”

We’re at the UA Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry’s headquarters on East Helen Street, just north of the Eller College of Management. Muller is Confluencenter’s Visiting Scholar – its first – who was invited here due to his distinguished multidisciplinary research on the intersection of borders, borderlands, security, identity, surveillance and biometric technology; issues of deep current relevance to our society. We’re gathering materials in conjunction with Muller’s Show & Tell talk on Wednesday, Jan. 14, titled iBorders: Drones & Designs.

“Here we go,” I say, as the screen populates with a mosaic of square pictures of unmanned aerial vehicles. Muller immediately nixes the drones equipped with Hellfire missiles, weapons developed for precision strikes against people.

“The border drones aren’t armed,” he says. “Yet.”

That small, three-letter word sends a chill down my spine. The facts Muller rattles off, about how local and international borders are monitored and the state sanctioned surveillance to track people’s movements, are creepy. We’re in future world, beyond Orwellian and hurtling toward realizing the 2002 Tom Cruise movie “Minority Report” style pre-crime police enforcement. The botched case of Maher Arar is a prime example. We’ll get to him in a minute.

U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. A.C. Wilson uses a retina scanner to positively identify a member of the Baghdaddi city council prior to a meeting with local tribal figureheads, sheiks, community leaders and U.S. service members deployed with Regimental Combat Team-7 in Baghdaddi, Iraq, on Jan. 10, 2007. Wilson is attached to the 4th Civil Affairs Group. DoD photo by Gunnery Sgt. Michael Q. Retana, U.S. Marine Corps.

Our next Google image search is on biometrics. Eye scans, fingerprint access machines and soldiers scanning civilian irises fill the monitor. McCarthy and I stare at these images, while Muller – in his affable, easy-going manner – nonchalantly informs us about the amount of data being collected by the government, how it is collected and how the collective information comprises each individual’s data double. We look at him, appalled.

“How do you not become super paranoid, knowing all of this?” I ask.

Muller laughs, “Yeah, you know, I have students ask me all the time if I want to go hide in a cabin in the woods. Sometimes the answer is yes.”

Muller is on sabbatical from King’s University College in London, Ontario, where he is an Associate Professor with the Department of Political Science. The 38-year-old’s career path was shaped by the mid- and late-90s political environmental struggles in the Pacific Northwest during his undergrad and graduate years at the University of Victoria, in Victoria, British Colombia.

“At the end of the 1990s, the ‘Battle in Seattle,’ an infamous protest at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle, marked the beginning of the amorphous ‘anti-globalization movement,’” Muller wrote via email when he first landed in Tucson. “These all played an important role in my intellectual development, and my particular interest in borders in a broad sense, and the challenges to notions of inside and outside, us and them, friend and enemy, and inclusion and exclusion. These motivated my decision to pursue my doctoral studies in an interdisciplinary institute at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland to explore questions about security, borders, and mobility in the European Union.

“As a doctoral student in Belfast, my interests in borders, broadly defined, began to flourish. Belfast is a city of borders and even walls. One can, with some understanding of local politics and culture, almost immediately identify different neighbourhoods, their respective political allegiances, religious affiliations and socio-economic status. In some cases, physical walls and barriers create the differentiations, but in other cases, painted curbs, flags, and murals, provide accounts, or the absence of such signs and symbols, provide the necessary cues.”

Muller would later be influenced by 9/11, researching how security, identity, borders and surveillance technologies changed post 9/11 – especially with the passing of the USA PATRIOT (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act of 2001.

As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have informed us, people’s actions are being monitored and digital lives are under scrutiny. Our digital actions comprise our data double.

Professor Benjamin J. Muller
photo: John Nofs

“We all have data doubles. All sorts of them,” Muller explains. “And they may or may not be reasonable approximations of us. We all know what part of our data double looks like because we get those emails that say, ‘You bought this book from Amazon, you might also like this and this book.’ And the company that produces that algorithm also helps produce the algorithm for the Terror Watchlist.

“It’s all about algorithms, it’s all about these little bits – ‘You bought that book, you traveled to that place, you keep phoning these two countries, these are the three places you’ve been in the last five years, this is the city you live in, this is your zip code.’ And all these things get interlinked. In some cases, it’s all the stuff that means it is easier for you to get a job in a certain place or not, or you get certain deals at certain stores more than others or you are more likely to get a credit card over someone else. Those are all our data double too, but, the grander aspects of it are the ways in which these get interlinked with law enforcement and the kind of assumptions. And this whole move in law enforcement about precaution. ‘Precautionary risk,’ they call it. Which is arguably like it’s a pre-crime.”

Which brings us to the case of Canadian citizen Maher Arar. In September 2002, Arar was on a stopover in New York on the way back to Canada from Tunisia. He was detained by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, ended up being shipped to Syria – where he was originally from (but left in 1987 at 17-years-old) – and tortured for over a year in an attempt to ascertain terrorist connections. He was later exonerated by a Canadian commission and awarded over $10 million (Canadian) by the Canadian government.

“Basically, his data double looked suspicious,” says Muller. “In other words, his travel patterns, what he did for a living, who he seemed to contact, his long distance phone call records. These sorts of things all made Arar look sinister. It’s a good example where his data and the way in which it traveled caused him to look a certain way and had very negative consequences for him in the end. It was the virtual border that captured Arar, but his punishment was anything but virtual.”

More and more, drones are being utilized to target terrorists based on the collection of people’s digital data. “In the past and particularly under Obama, what’s increased are ‘signature strikes,’” Muller explains. “Which again, those are striking data. Because they don’t know that they hit Joe, they can’t maintain the statistics about who’ve they’ve killed. They just know that what they hit was a data point that collectively looks suspicious. And if you are near that person, then you must also be suspicious.

“All those little data points and that’s a signature strike – of a certain data, a signature. It’s very different when we say, ‘We know that Sally’s bad for sure, here’s why. And, so we’re going to get Sally.’ And then they might say, ‘Oh, there were other people driving Sally around, but who would drive Sally around but people who are bad?’ We’re not even at that point, we’re talking about, ‘We know that you bought this and traveled to these four places and contacted these people and had this kind of cell phone network that you were using, then, you’re bad.’”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Unmanned Aircraft System MQ-9 Predator B.
photo: Gerald L. Nino/CBP Photographer

What is also fascinating about the drone technology and the removal of humanizing the people being killed is the fact that “drones view things in a kind of sinister manner. Everything starts to look a bit suspicious when it is looked at through the eyes of a drone. We’ve seen the footage; we know what that looks like – the little people cruising between the buildings. But it turns out everything looks like that from a drone,” Muller explicates.

As I mull over our conversation, I think about Stephen Colbert saying: “Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.” Perceptions of justice and fairness are certainly erroneous when reflecting on the actions of a rabid, paranoid government. They may be paranoid, but sometimes they know how to play the perception game.

At the U.S./Canadian border crossing in Blaine, Washington, the U.S. commissioned Apple Store architecture firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson to design the border facility.

“The way they describe secondary inspections,” Muller says, “it’s more like a comfortable business transaction. So for me it is interesting because what I’m going to talk about (at Show & Tell) is how we envision borders through the drones and designs. So the design in this case, this place has enhanced incarceration capacity, they have more cells – but from the outside, it’s all about a green roof and looking welcoming and there’s Dale Chihuly glass hanging in there. So it’s all really aesthetically pleasing and it conceals all the things that conventionally borders have been about and, in fact, they have enhanced it. And there are other facilities where they have done this as well, concealing the cameras and so on. All the things where there’s more surveillance going on, there’s more ability to capture you, but what they’ve done is made it look nicer, so you feel really comfortable.”

Learn about how drones, biometric technologies, artificial intelligence, surveillance and architectural designs reformulate borders and the bodies that cross them during Muller’s Show & Tell presentation “iBorders: Drones & Designs.” It takes place at Playground Bar & Lounge, 278 E. Congress St., on Wednesday, Jan. 14 at 6 p.m. More at Confluencenter.Arizona.edu.

Where the Thunder Is Born

December 2, 2014 | Jamie Manser

Logan Phillips: Poet, DJ, Artist, Teacher
Photo: Jimi Giannatti

In a lush desert of five seasons, the most sensory intense season is that of the late summer monsoons. When the residents watch with anticipation the clouds building through the day and pray – please give us precipitation, bring us los chubascos! Bring us the relief of release from the searing, breath stealing, oppressive humid heat. Shower our land; replenish the plants and animals, the aquifers and our souls.

These monsoons simultaneously clear away and pile up the detritus, as do the collection of poems in “Sonoran Strange.” With monsoon-like concentrated power – analogous to how the water and wind whip, shape and dance with la tierra – electric and unapologetic are the words that delve into the myriad layers of geology, history, flora, fauna, rivers, wars, pillaging, injustices, absurd realities and the mythologies of both the imperialists and those subsequently subjugated by colonialism.

Scribed by poet, performance artist and DJ Logan “Dirty Verbs” Phillips over seven years, “Sonoran Strange” offers poignant reflections by a man raised in rural Southern Arizona within sight of the border.

Phillips was born in Tombstone in 1983, where his family lived for a few years before his parents bought land near Hereford. “Our area was unincorporated, at that time it was Rural Route 1, down the middle of these beautiful rolling grasslands in the foothills of the Huachucas.”

His was an upbringing imbued by place; as a child Phillips was deeply connected to the Sonoran Desert’s space. With his canine companions, Logan would wander through mesquite boskets until called home for dinner. And of course, in the name of progress, the developers eventually came to claim the land.

“One day the stakes with neon flags would go up and then – no matter how many times I pulled them out – they would reappear. And then, sooner or later, one morning I would wake up and the bulldozers would have been grazing since dawn. And there was nothing left but raw, red earth. And that happened over, and over, and over, and over again. So I think it is that colonization of the land, of which my family was of course a part of, but, to be able to feel that and have it relate to losing my childhood innocence and – you know, when the imagination of a child comes to terms with the structural reality of the society, is always kind of a psychic break and that happened to me very much in relationship to the land.”

From this core of gut wrenching disillusionment, along with an education from a father who was a park ranger and later the exhibit designer for Ft. Huachuca Museum, ensued an understanding of the tales that are told by the victors to spin the stories of genocide and environmental destruction – themes ever present in “Sonoran Strange.”

“On take your kid to work day, my dad would have me in the Ft. Huachuca crazy 1880s military building with these passageways and bookcases and one moment he is showing me this document that has an original signature from Abraham Lincoln on it and then looking at an Apache skull with it smashed out on one side and then looking at a mannequin head that had just been delivered from the mannequin head-makers of an 1880s Chiricahua Apache in a box next to taxidermy of rattlesnakes and hawks…

“My understanding of history is definitely personal, it doesn’t feel dead. A lot of times studying history, especially in books… what is history defined as? Usually it’s ‘not the present,’ and I think that is bullshit. I think there are layers rather than a timeline and as a small kid my dad was telling me these stories which gave me an understanding of layers. But then of course, that fascinates you, discovering this in middle school led me to devouring books on the Apache and weird history books that my dad would have and reading Arizona Highways religiously as a 12-year-old. And then, this (book of poems) is just, as an adult, my adult self doubling down on that same innate curiosity and relationship with la tierra.”

Logan Phillips: Poet, DJ, Artist, Teacher
Photo: Jimi Giannatti

The book’s genesis began as, Phillips calls it, a sprawling five-page poem that later got separated out into a “thread that runs through the book, the repeated narrative, kind of primary thread, that is that poem blown out, expanded out.”

Beginning in 2007, Phillips was collaborating with Adam Cooper-Terán in an effort to turn Phillips’ poems into a five sense experience. From that, the two birthed Verbo•bala Spoken Video – a multi-media performance art collaborative that features video projections and soundscapes. With their first show a resounding success, Phillips was pushed into further exploring the concepts of “Sonoran Strange,” and fleshing out the initial ideas and storylines.

“There are all these characters that started coming up, like La Llorona and Dave Grindman, and the Indigenous Insurgents and all these – almost hallucinatory spirits, people who would start to make appearances in the poems and in single lines… It’s like, ‘Wait, there’s a whole lot more.’

“If you say La Llorona haunting canals in Scottsdale, there’s a whole lot more there, what are the suburban mothers jogging at 7 a.m. after dropping the kids off at school and they see La Llorona, what’s their expectation, what’s their perception? They (the poems) were just going off into this completely unpredictable, prismatic, splintering of images and characters. Most of that work was done in 2011.”

In the fall of 2011, in the resultant wake of SB 1070 and the cries for boycotts and the realization that boycotts suck for cultural workers – an effort to understand space and place happened with the CulturalStrike delegation. It brought “50 artists from around the country and imported them here for a week and lined them up with all the best cultural actors and movers and shakers in Southern Arizona,” Phillips explains.

Participants were shuttled to the Southside and Nogales and the morgue, giving them a “really intense, visceral understanding with no expectations – just, ‘let it filter into your art, see it, feel it.’

“And that to me was a game changer because it was something I knew to be true, that visceral experience trumps political vitriol and framing. And at one of the events there as an open mic sort of thing and I read the ‘Sonoran Strange’ poem and it just – the energy, it was almost like combustion. The energy – it was the right poem at the right time with the right crowd and people not being from here and giving the response that they gave, gave me a huge energetic push. ‘Oh shit, I really need to double down on this work and see it through.’ That was September 2011. And, for the rest of the year, I was writing five hours a day.”

Phillips’ dedication to his poetic craft and concern for accuracy and balance astutely delves and drills into the history of the Sonoran Desert, pulling apart and ripping open the cover-ups. His words turn it all inside out, taking you out of your understanding, mining the depths and stripping bare what the public education’s core curriculum won’t ever share. Every word is saturated with definition, verses rife with schemes of the privileged and the solemn pain of the disenfranchised.

For example:

Under the terms of Guadalupe Hidalgo,
all Mexicans living in the new United States
were made to cut the treaty
into tiny paper squares
and hold them under their tongues
until they dissolved and the new
reality set in
– An excerpt from Sonoran Strange: Gila

This is for every mouth that once spoke Mexican
and now speaks sand just forty miles
as the vulture files from where we now stand
– An excerpt from Sonoran Strange: Cuk Son

Who banned the ethnic studies of cacti,
demanding that they learn only the waters of the Potomac
and not to question why the Santa Cruz runs dry,
why the Gila runs dry; what good is the Potomac
if the Colorado runs dry?
– An excerpt from Sonoran Strange: Carlisle

Homeland of the Chiricahua Apache, homeland of the Huachuca agave.
Where the O’odham were born, where the thunder is born;
psychogeographic landscape of myth. Hollow with limestone caverns,
punctured by prospectors. Lost treasure and endangered species.
Extinct zip codes and boomtowns and the holiest of places.
– An excerpt from Sonoran Strange: Sky Islands

The release of Sonoran Strange is on Friday, Dec. 5 at Club Congress, 311 E. Congress St., 7:30 p.m. The event includes Logan reading selections of his poetry with Gabrielle Sullivan and Joe Novelli playing tunes. Find more on Logan Phillips at DirtyVerbs.com.

Southern Arizona’s Natural Wonders

December 1, 2014 | Jamie Manser

A Show & Tell with Dr. Joaquin Ruiz

Tucson’s Gates Pass.
Photo: Jamie Manser

On a daily basis, most of us are inured to our environment’s incomparable beauty, its rich ecosystems, deep history, and the gorgeous mountains surrounding the Tucson valley. We’re focusing on immediate needs – getting to work, paying rent, buying groceries, taking care of the kids and the pets.

But when we stop our inner nag, breathe deeply and open our eyes, minds and senses to the glorious, mysterious and special Sonoran Desert – it hits us. A dizzying array of input: the vertical relief of the Sky Islands, the expanse of the desert floor, contemplating millions of years of continental plates colliding and drifting, the evolution of flora and fauna, an impossible blue sky and night’s endless stretch of stars – stitched together in constellations of human imagination.

These natural wonders are complemented by first-rate man-made attractions such as the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Biosphere 2 and the Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter. With all of these top-notch attributes, it only makes sense to showcase to the world the astonishing Southern Arizona.

For the last several years, Dr. Joaquin Ruiz – Dean of the UA College of Science and Vice President for Innovation – has shared a vision of Southern Arizona as a destination for international tourism.

“The rugged topography of our region combined with our geographic location between the biological provinces of the Rocky Mountains to the north and Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental to the southeast,” Dr. Ruiz wrote in the Arizona Daily Star in 2011, “results in a unique mixing of species that makes our area one of the most biologically diverse in the world.”

During a TEDx Tucson talk in 2013 on this topic, Dr. Ruiz eloquently elucidated that residents of this area “live in an amazing community. We live in a place that has the richest geology, ecology and history and archaeology of all of the U.S. We should find a way to celebrate that because if we celebrate that, I think that we’ll feel much better about our lives.”

Starting at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 10, Dr. Ruiz is presenting “The Geotourism Corridor: Southern Arizona’s Gateway to Discovery” during Show & Tell at Playground Bar & Lounge, 278 E. Congress St. Attendees can expect to be engaged and inspired by Dr. Ruiz’s presentation while learning about the beautiful and interesting elements that make Tucson and Southern Arizona an extremely special place to live and visit.

Food and beverages are available for purchase. Show & Tell is hosted by UA’s Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry on a monthly basis. The bridge-building effort strives to connect the community with a wide variety of UA professors’ projects and research through multi-media presentations in the relaxed atmosphere of a Downtown lounge. Get more details on the center and its events at Confluencenter.arizona.edu.

Show & Tell for Grown Ups

November 5, 2014 | Jamie Manser

Steward Observatory in 1923.
Photo courtesy: Peter Beudert/“Focusing the Universe”

Under subdued lighting in a Downtown bar, one generally doesn’t expect to see a panel of flat screens lit up with multi-media presentations by University of Arizona professors. But on a monthly basis, that is precisely what happens at Playground Bar & Lounge, 278 E. Congress St.

On select Wednesdays, UA’s Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry hosts Show & Tell – a bridge-building effort to connect the community with a wide variety of UA professors’ projects and research.

For the last two years, Show & Tell has showcased topics as diverse and expansive as the subjects offered at the university, including: “Global Revolution: From Harlem to Havana” and “Documenting the Border in Unprecedented Times” to “Tales from the (Video Game) Archive II” and “The Poetics of Noise: Poetry and Punk, 1965-1980.”

On Wednesday, Nov. 12, Show & Tell looks to outer space and at the UA’s international role in astronomical research with the presentation “Focusing the Universe.” The in-progress documentary being presented that night bears the same name. Through interviews, narration and images, the documentary delves into the history and influence of the Steward Observatory via a “chronological path of development of astronomy at UA,” explains School of Theatre, Film & Television Distinguished Professor Peter Beudert.

“It is fair to say that nowhere else in the world are three independent academic units of Astronomy, Optical Sciences and Planetary Sciences (at a university). The synergy is amazing.”

To understand how the UA got to where it is astronomically, Beudert and School of Theatre, Film & Television Associate Professor Michael Mulcahy, are highlighting the major players in the Steward Observatory’s creation and evolution. Front and center is A.E. (Andrew Ellicott) Douglass, who was hired by UA in 1906 as an Assistant Professor of Physics and Geography. Beudert describes Douglass as a visionary who advocated funding and building a university observatory for a decade. That funding came in 1916 when Lavinia Steward donated $60,000 to UA to build a telescope in her husband’s name. According to Wikipedia, “Mrs. Steward was a wealthy widow who had an interest in astronomy and a desire to memorialize her late husband, Mr. Henry Steward.”

Other notable influencers in the documentary include: Aden Meinel, who chose Kitt Peak as the site for the National Observatory, was a Director of Steward Observatory and later founded UA’s Optical Sciences; Gerard Kuiper, founder of the Lunar and Planetary Lab who mapped the moon in the 1960s; Peter Strittmatter, the Steward Observatory director for 32 years who turned it into a world class institution; Richard Harvill, UA President from 1951-1971 who invested heavily in Astronomy (and other many important UA units); and Roger Angel, creator of the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab.

Beyond the tales of those individuals are the quirky, historic tales of the process in context. While funding was secured in 1916, WWI thwarted the building of the telescope for several years. Ultimately, it took three different U.S. companies to construct the telescope: “The Warner and Swasey Co. (Cleveland) built the body and mount of the telescope; The Spencer Lens Company (Buffalo) made the mirror; John A. Brashear Co. Ltd (Pittsburgh) polished the mirror,” states Beudert. The pieces were shipped by train, with the last few miles covered by horse-drawn carts.

In 1923, the Steward Observatory, 933 N. Cherry Ave., was dedicated. In 1962, its telescope was moved to Kitt Peak.

“One thing Douglass did was to say the observatory had to be open to the public and that’s never stopped since the 1920s,” Beudert shares. “The mission was to allow people in this community to see what they couldn’t see any other way.”

Visit as.arizona.edu/public to see Steward Observatory’s public resources for sky gazing. Show & Tell: Focusing the Universe is on Wednesday, Nov. 12, 6 p.m. at Playground Bar & Lounge, 278 E. Congress St. Learn more about Show & Tell, and the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry, at Confluencenter.arizona.edu.

An Afternoon with Jimmy Santiago Baca

November 1, 2014 | Jamie Manser

Jimmy Santiago Baca
Photo courtesy JimmySantiagoBaca.com

Presented by The University of Arizona’s Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry & College of Education

Thu, Nov 6
1 p.m.-4 p.m. Free
UA Student Union, 1303 E University Blvd., Kiva Room, 2nd Floor
Confluencenter.arizona.edu

Poet and community activist Jimmy Santiago Baca – who was a runaway at 13, served a five-year maximum security prison sentence, where he learned to read, and emerged from lock-up in 1979 as a writer – comes to Tucson for a reading and a screening of the documentary based on his 2002 memoir “A Place to Stand,” with a Q&A to follow.

Lauded by the Associated Press for “his raw poetry and vivid essays that seek to capture the experience of Mexican-Americans and American Indians in the Southwest,” Baca has devoted his post-prison life to writing and teaching others who are overcoming hardship. His themes include American Southwest barrios, addiction, injustice, education, community, love and beyond. He has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries and universities throughout the country. Baca is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award and, for his memoir “A Place to Stand,” the prestigious International Award.

In 2005 he created Cedar Tree Inc., a nonprofit foundation that works to give people of all walks of life the opportunity to become educated and improve their lives. In 2006, Baca was awarded the Cornelius P. Turner Award, which honors GED graduates who have made “outstanding contributions” in areas such as education, justice and social welfare.

More information is available at Confluencenter.arizona.edu and JimmySantiagoBaca.com. Capacity at the Kiva Room is limited to 100 people, with entrance on a first-come, first-serve basis. Paid parking is available at the 2nd Street Parking Garage on 2nd Street and Mountain Avenue.