Markham Nolan | Literary Mercenary

When I left Ireland to go travelling in 2006, Ireland’s property boom was at its giddy height. People were shitting themselves that if they didn’t buy now, they’d never own a house and end up living under a bridge or, worse yet, with their parents. They were racing each other to get on the property ladder, outbidding the next dupe for grab-bag cardboard box houses in satellite towns a poxy commute from Dublin. (You can see these developments now in Guardian features on Ireland’s ghost-towns – bus tours are imminent). I had no money, and no intention of trying to stretch what I had to buy a malodorous little hutch on the fringe of society, valued at its weight in gold.

So I filled my backpack, my girlfriend did the same, and we headed for South America. Of course, we couldn’t resist the lure of the ladder for long. In Bariloche, Argentina, we did the numbers. And we bought a tent (pictured). Here’s an edited version of our bitchy little missive home.

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After two months on the road, we were beginning to feel like escape artists. Our friends are back home, joining Ireland´s fastest-growing club, Club Property Ladder, and we are off here with nothing to our name but two backpacks so full they are screaming for mercy. But we got nervous.

So we did the mature thing. We invested in a home. Nothing flash, you understand; with the market being the way it is we first-time buyers can´t be choosy. We just reckoned that now is the time to get our foot on the ladder, so that in three years’ time we can trade up for an extra three square feet, three feet nearer Dublin´s city centre, and feel really smug, and maybe even rub it in the noses of people who were a few months later than us and can´t afford to make the jump just yet. Peasants.

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For the last few years I’ve been a solid lurker on the boards.ie photography forum, which is a profound source of photographic help, information, inspiration and the rest.

Rain from Markham Nolan on Vimeo.

Marooned as my garden office temporarily became an island, I got out the camera and started shooting out the door in frustration.

Good thing I didn’t have a gun to hand. Nerdy details over the fold.

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There’s an aul saying that football isn’t life and death – it’s much more important than that. It’s a lazy cliché, but with the post-mortem of Africa’s first world cup, many will toot their horn, saying that football could be responsible for breathing new life into the continent.

In a bar on Friday night, a friend told me how he was amazed at the ubiquity of football when he was working in Ghana, where every flat patch of dust became a soccer pitch, and anything solid and spherical was used as a ball. Football was everywhere, a complete leveller.

The picture above is a genuine African life-and-death soccer situation. The flat patch was, at one stage, the bottom of a dam near the village of Kilema, a coffee & banana plantation area on the lower slopes of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro. The dam was drained after a tragic death where a young boy fell into the waters and drowned, and a separate, safer, area was set aside further uphill for storing water.

The dam floor had been flattened by sediment, and after drainage it became a grassy, level clearing. What was abandoned due to death came alive again as soon as a set of posts were set up, and every evening we were there, the old dam would fill with kids playing soccer until the light faded.  The ball was knackered, the leather worn to scrubby suede, and turning up with a puncture kit and a pump made a Californian friend of mine a local hero.

That’s all I got on this topic, I’m no soccer fan. But I am a fan of Jessica Hiltout’s marvellous video series created ahead of the World Cup. One is embedded here. Go find the rest.

Joy Is Round from THE AMEN PROJECT on Vimeo.

(A.K.A. The Feature No-One Wanted)

Meet Barry Canton. Barry works in a dull-looking warehouse on the Boston shipyards. It’s beside a large dry dock where they raise cruise liners from the water to scrape off barnacles and repaint their undersides. On the opposite side of the dry dock is a tatty warehouse built by the US military. Its lifts are strong enough to take Humm-Vees to the fifth floor, but all it houses nowadays are artists and artisans, who unwittingly look across the dock at part of America’s energy revolution. Unassuming Barry from Sutton is part of a group of dockland geeks who could revolutionise fuel production for the coming century.

Barry, his wife, their lecturer and a few fellow college classmates left MIT two years ago to start their own business, Ginkgo Bioworks, named after a rare plant classed as a living fossil. At the time there were plenty of research businesses going belly-up, and broke scientists were offloading lots of usable but unsaleable equipment. So Barry and his team did some scientific skip-diving, grabbing equipment for free or for cheap and fixing what need to be fixed to equip their lab. They fitted out their premises largely with orphaned machines, carted out the back door of college labs, and quietly went to work.

Two years later, things are a little different. US Vice-President Joe Biden has just cut a $6million cheque made out to Barry, his team and their collaborators to develop a new fuel from genetically-modified bacteria. That’s some good recycling.

Their work is, publicly, much-maligned stuff. The Ginkgo team deal in Franken-science, DNA-tinkering, injecting genetic material into a nasty little bacteria that most people treat with heavy doses of bleach spray. The modified E-Coli organisms that Ginkgo produce do not do what regular bacteria do. They emit fragrances, flavourings, and now a fuel that you can pour straight into the petrol tank of your car. Barry’s team are making a bacteria that ‘eats’ Carbon Dioxide and ‘poops’ a clean, lead-free, sulphur-free petrol.  And they have plans for much more. Their collaborators are working on bacteria that make foodstuffs. Bacteria that produce malaria drugs. Bacteria that kill cancer cells.

Of course, you’ve never heard anything about this Dublin-born scientist because, despite pitching the story widely to Irish newspapers, no-one wanted, or had the budget this feature. But it’s a story worth telling. So here it is, as it could have been, below the fold.

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YOU ARE:  A small NGO or non-profit organisation. Maybe you’re based in Dublin and work in the community here, or maybe you focus on sustainable development projects in Africa or elsewhere and partner with organisations in the field. You have a track record of getting things done and have proven success on the ground. You’re looking to produce some online audiovisual material that will tell your story but you don’t know where to start.

You need someone who can take your ideas, build them, polish them and produce something stirring that you can easily embed on your website and disperse online. And you want them to do it for free, because you have no money.

HE IS: Someone who’s looking to further build his own multimedia portfolio, a journalist who has a history of storytelling ability, and started his journalism career in photography before pursuing print. He’s someone who’s got a qualification in development studies and will understand your point of view.

He’s only recently turned to multimedia, but he’s been taking photos for more than 13 years, and so he’s got a good eye for framing a shot. And as he’s been turning out podcasts, he’s au fait with audio. He’s just looking for some good, interesting stories on which to put it all to use.

Does it sound like we have a match? Well then, we should meet.

For the next two weeks, I’ll take submissions from NGOs or community groups that want their story told in a new and creative way to help them promote themselves, cheer an achievement or particular success, or to thank someone that’s made a difference. And on June 24, I’ll sit down with the submissions and pick two, one Dublin-based and one that works overseas.

For those two organisations, I’m offering a once-off freebie, a film or audio slideshow of up to five minutes in length that I’ll produce in HD quality and give to your organisation to use as you see fit, for ZERO COST. We’ll collaborate on the storyboard and work together with a mix of whatever materials you might already have and new ones I’ll create. I’ll include your graphics to the best of my ability and to your spec. I’ll put every creative faculty I have at your disposal (within reason) in order to make something that will really stand out for you and your organisation, and in the interests of sustainability, I’ll show you exactly how I did it so that you can replicate it yourselves in the future and we’ll learn together. I’ll blog and tweet the process to give the project extra legs and promote it as widely as I can.

Interested?

Here’s what I want from you:

One creative story idea from your organisation.

That’s it. Just your best idea. Hit me with some background details, some suggestions on filming/photography locations, and how you think it might work. Email me at markham [dot] nolan [at] gmail [dot] com

I’ll pick the two winners based on feasibility, how interesting they sound, and we’ll take it from there.

I solicited some advice via Twitter a few days back on what radio producers look for when it comes to audio file types and the like. Conn O’Muineacháin of Edgecast media was kind enough to spend about ten minutes chatting to me on the phone about the radio milieu and was hugely helpful, and complimentary. Benjamin Chesterton of Duckrabbit was another.

I’ve mentioned the Duckrabbit crowd before. They do some great value multimedia training and produce some lovely material. Largely thanks to them, and other similar groups I’ve found through them, I’m really digging audio slideshows and video at the moment. Check out, for example, Slowcoast, and go meet Hans the Cyclist.

Benjamin sent three emphatic tweets about radio production (The most emphatic saying: NEVER MP3 .. NEVER EVER EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!”) This one made the most immediate difference to my own output so far:

I’ll be doing a lot more of this stuff, and what’s clear is that while the photos have to be good, the audio just has to be crisp and clear. I’m not gonna go into detail about the ins and outs of this recording below, but I love how the full richness of my grandfather’s voice comes across. It takes over the whole thing.  (I recorded it in .wav, Benjamin)

I’ve been putting together more and more podcasts recently, and I’ve found inspiration for that from the RadioLab podcasts from New York’s WNYC. Theirs are without compare the most exquisitely edited podcasts and radio documentaries out there. If you haven’t listened to them, seek them out on iTunes. After that,  if you want to know a little more about how they layer up their podcasts, look in particular for one entitled ‘Making the Hippo Dance‘. It’s awesome.

In the video below, I sought out some nice ambient noise to warm things up. My first love is pictures and so audio slideshows rather than plain audio will always make more sense to me.  And although I tried hard with pictures, Granda’s voice just takes this over. I blame Benjamin.

In total I spent an hour with Granda, nothing more. When I arrived, he was half an hour from finishing up in the garden, so I had to be quick with the camera. I’d been up in his house a while back and seen the light in his potting shed when the idea struck me to put this together. Granda’s Garden is his sanctuary. It’s what keeps him looking about ten years younger than he is. His lawn is like a thick, rich carpet. When you walk on it you want to just kick off your shoes and feel the satiny green scuff between your toes.

So here it is, anyway, Granda’s Garden. Enjoy.

Granda’s Garden from Markham Nolan on Vimeo.

A while back I posted a short online poll to guage Irish journalists’ perceptions of the NUJ.
My motivation for doing so was my own ambivalence towards the organisation, stemming from not having had much to do with them, having witnessed their toothlessness in the face of tough management, and having had some disagreements with them right at the start. (They sent me to the ADM in Scarborough as a student delegate, which was an eye-opener)
That said, I pay my dues and carry the card. I take advantage of the discounts, too, and I’ll be going along to the Freelance Forum next Monday too, which sounds like it will be worthwhile.

The responses I got were interesting.

The survey was taken by an even split of freelancers and staffers, and the first batch of questions dealt with their contact and attitudes to the NUJ.
44% said they had never had cause to contact the NUJ during their membership.
42% said they had found the NUJ to be less than ‘moderately’ helpful.
84% said they were moderately helpful at best, leaving 16% of respondents with a more positive than not perception of the NUJ.
27% of respondents said the NUJ were no help at all.
A quarter of respondents said that they saw no value at all in NUJ membership, with 30% saying it was ‘moderately’ valuable, and 11% saying it was ‘supremely’ valuable.
When asked how representative the organisation was of them, 36% said it was not representative at all.

On the money side of things:
There was an even split of those paying/not paying by direct debit.
67% said they paid their NUJ sub out of a sense of obligation or a feeling that it represented ‘insurance’ if something were to go bad.
60% were wholly unaware of NUJ member discounts; another 33% had never availed of them.
Of those that had (just 7%), the Apple store was the most used discount.

14% said they would absolutely consider cancelling their membership having take the survey. (Remember, 25% said they saw no value whatsoever in NUJ membership)
29% said that taking the survey had made them think about cancelling their membership but that they would probably keep it nonetheless, which is the category I’d fall into, but I didn’t take the survey.
43% said that the survey had not affected their feelings either way.

What was even more interesting were the responses I got outside of the survey. I had people email and tweet me about their NUJ dealings, with a lot of people saying that they paid the NUJ sub but didn’t know why they did it. They just couldn’t bring themselves to cancel the direct debit.

The survey was far from exhaustive, had a small sample and was a mere exercise in curiosity, and is still online for anyone who wants to chip in their responses.