Chris Amico: Journalist

Originally published in the Hayward Daily Review

Terry “Big T” Williams pours his blues out over a swaying crowd, music and sweat rolling off him, green guitar howling.

“I’ll play the blues for you,” he sings, and he delivers on the promise.

The sound comes from the Mississippi Delta, translated and augmented on its way to the West Coast, to Russell City, where a new blues emerged.

Playing in front of Hayward City Hall on Saturday, Williams captures the endpoints of a musical journey espoused by the annual Hayward/Russell City Blues Festival.

“West Coast music is mutt music,” Ronnie Stewart, founder of the Bay Area Blues Society, explains. “It’s a mixture of everything.” (more…)

James Buck secured freedom from an Egyptian jail, but wants the world to remember the plight of his translator.

Read it in the East Bay Express here.

James Buck is famous on Twitter. The photojournalist and UC Berkeley graduate student used the messaging service to text “Arrested” as Egyptian police took him into custody on April 10, and after a flood of media coverage, he was released the next day. But Buck would like a different name remembered: Mohammed Salah Ahmed Maree, his 23-year-old interpreter, who was taken at the same time.

Maree may still be in prison. The veterinary student has been held in a high-security facility called Borg al Arab outside Alexandria since his arrest two months ago, and while local news reports say he may be freed soon, neither Buck nor aid workers in his case could be certain. Maree has been tortured, Buck and others allege. According to his family and Human Rights Watch, he has gone on a hunger strike and been put in solitary confinement. Agents of the interior ministry have allegedly threatened the family, saying that Maree will never be released, even though no charges have officially been filed. Other organizers of the April protests have gotten out, but Maree, for a time, was simply lost in the system. (more…)

(click the image to see a three-part slide show)

Alameda hosted its 14th Relay for Life on Saturday and Sunday, with 400 people on 26 teams walking the track at Encinal High School for 24 hours.

The Alameda Relay’s goal was to raise $130,000 in the event to go toward research, education and support of local services, such as driving cancer patients to therapy.

The relay included the first lap dedicated to survivors, and a luminaria ceremony, with candles in sand lining the track to light the way for walkers through the night to dedicated to loved ones who have had cancer.

This year’s theme was “Celebrate, Remember, Fight back.”

“Survivors celebrate that they made it through the treatment. And of course they remember the friends they’ve lost. And we encourage everyone to fight back,” said Emilia Stephens, the Relay’s team captain coordinator. (more…)

Click the photo for a slide show

Biaggio Parma is “trying to hold a little bit of history that’s fast sliding away.” This jeep was a reconnaissance vehicle in Europe during the Second World War.

Parma served in the US Navy from 1957 to ‘61, working as an electrician aboard an aircraft carrier. (more…)

Slide show: Rick Gunn reflects on his 25,000-mile bike ride through a world we shouldn’t fear.
Three years ago, Rick Gunn rode his bicycle across the Golden Gate Bridge in a heavy fog, pedaled down into San Francisco, took a ferry to Vallejo and turned east. From there, he crossed America, then Europe, Asia and Oceania in a 25,000-mile ride that ended Saturday back where the trip started.

At the end of this very long ride, Gunn has learned that the rest of the world is not something to fear. In detailed accounts of his travels posted online, there is an unfettered joy and unrelenting optimism in what Gunn sees. The journey has made Gunn, a former Castro Valley resident, a devout pacifist and left him with an abiding love for humanity.

The most dangerous place, Gunn says, is here at home in America. (more…)

Fithi Garza decided to tattoo his late brother’s name in Chinese on his arm. He did it in a back room in Dalian’s Nepalese Bar. There is, by my estimation, exactly one advantage to getting inked in the back of a Chinese laowai bar: the characters will probably be right.

(more…)

Four local photographers have work on display right now in Heping Guangchang. The exhibition, called “I love Dalian” (they didn’t get to choose the name) runs until Oct. 15, after which two of them will move to their own show. Details aren’t available for that one yet. Directions to the current show are at DalianDalian.com.

All four studied photography in Dalian over the past year, three completing masters degrees from Bolton U./Dalian Medical University. Much of what they photograph is the same, or follows similar themes: beaches, migrant workers, strange food, blue skies. Yet they see it very differently from each other.

Curious about their perspectives, I interviewed each one and built audio slide shows with their photos. The result is here.

(more…)

The Irish (and those aspiring to be so) invaded Dalian this weekend. The city hosted the All China Gaelic Games, a round-robin tournament of Irish football. Teams from Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen came to compete.

Shanghai took the men’s cup, with Dalian coming in second. Beijing won the women’s division, beating Shanghai in the finals.

For those who’ve never heard of Gaelic football, let alone played it, here’s an overview of how the game is played. Below, Joe Keating, a staffer at the Irish Embassy, explains the rules of the game:

I recommend using headphones if you have them. The wind was awful and I did what I could to fix the audio. If you can’t make it out, here’s what he’s saying:

Unlike soccer you can catch the ball in Gaelic Football. However, after four steps, you have to release it. That can be a bounce, or it can be a kick. It can only bounce once and then you must kick. However, as you’ll see in the game, you can kick to yourself, and the better players will continually kick to themselves. Others find it easier to bounce.

So, four steps then bounce or kick. Second four steps, you must kick, but can kick back to yourself.

At any time you can hand pass the ball to one of your teammates.

You eventually score either a goal or a point. The goal is equal to three points.

After that, it’s easy. Just hit the ball, kick the ball, over the bar, under the bar. What else can you say?

The game often gets described as a combination of soccer and basketball. To me it looks sort of like rugby, but since I don’t actually play any of these sports (tennis, anyone?) I’ll leave it to others to explain.

Here’s a tough job: Spend the next year traveling to every province in mainland China. Hang out with cool people. See everything you’ve ever wanted to see in this country. Blog about it.

David DeGeest and Lonnie B. Hodge (aka One Man Bandwidth) somehow landed this job. Theirs is the China Dream Blogue (like travelogue, get it?), and the project aims to raise money for two charities through ad revenue and help deserving people make good one their own best hopes. The pair stopped by Dalian last weekend, and I grabbed them for some barbecue and brought the video camera. Here’s how they explain the project:

The two charities directly involved are Tom Stader’s Library Project and the Reading Tub, run by Terry Dougherty.

Now, I’m a little skeptical of the amount of cash a blog can bring in. I know there are those that make heaps, but there are mountains more that don’t. So I gave Tom a buzz, and he’s optimistic. Even if it just brings his cause more attention, that can translate into money or volunteers or more opportunities. “I have had good luck with getting donations from blogs,” Tom said. “I received one US$300 donation from Lonnie’s previous blog.”

Three hundred dollars built Tom’s first two libraries. Both are in Dalian, and I watched each be hammered together by energetic volunteer teachers who were already thinking of ways to expand the project. Tom’s planning to be back in Dalian next month, so I’ll get a progress report then.