“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.”

That bloodline includes Mississippi — along with Arkansas and Texas, and Chicago and Los Angeles.

“The rawness of Russell City music…that’s definitely Mississippi,” Stewart says. The rawness is “that real down-home, that real strong rhythm, that real simplicity, 1-4-5 every single song.”

Russell City was a gathering point. It was not a city, but an unincorporated district of Alameda County, now part of Hayward, where music and venues were unrestrained.

“Russell City was a mixture, because the African Americans came from Mississippi, came from Arkansas, came from Texas…and they all got together on the West Coast before they went on to their maritime jobs,” Stewart says. “This was during the ’40s, when West Coast blues was still getting its shape.”

Clubs in that era were basic: “Dirt floors and broken electricity. Amps buzzing, so if you touched the wrong thing, maybe you get grounded,” Stewart says. “No health inspectors, no city inspectors, no nothin’. Just the good, raw blues.”

Williams came out from Mississippi to play in Hayward. The blues are everywhere, he said. The music brings people together, and he sees more resemblance in the sounds of Russell City than the stylistic differences Stewart describes.

“I’ve heard blues in China. I’ve heard blues in Australia. Everybody’s trying to keep it as traditional as possible,” he says. “The blues is bringing us together all the time.”

Russell Kidd, selling T-shirts on Saturday, also feels that connection.

Watching Williams wail on stage, he muses on the music: “It reminds me of the suffering they went through in their early years,” Kidd says. “You can still hear that sound. It reminds me of the suffering I go through in my own life. When you put it to music, it makes you feel good. That means it gives you hope.”

The Hayward/Russell City Blues Festival will continue from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. today. The lineup includes Zac Harmon, Johnny Rawls, Vasti Johnson, Mississippi Bo, Harmonica Blues Explosion and Stars of Glory.

Production notes: I tried to keep this video simple: What is West Coast Blues? What does it sound like? Text could give more detail on the history, but I wanted sound to be part of this. I used the newspaper’s Canon camcorder (including a tripod and shotgun mic), and edited in iMovie. It’s still not as polished as I’d like, but I’m more comfortable with the medium now, and editing is getting faster.

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.

In the two months since his arrest, Buck has bent his journalistic efforts toward freeing Maree. His personal web site tracks the campaign’s progress and lists ways to help. Buck is now trying to build a global alert system using Twitter to quickly spread the word when others are taken.

Buck went to Egypt to finish a master’s thesis in journalism. He extended his stay into April to cover a labor strike in Mahalla, where textile workers were demanding higher wages and protesting rising inflation. Security forces infiltrated the crowd. When protesters pushed him and Maree into a cab to flee, police stopped the car, telling the driver Buck was CIA.

“It was kidnapping, basically,” he said of his arrest. “It’s a tool of any dictatorship. In order to stay in power when nobody’s elected you and nobody likes you, that’s what you have to do.” And this is where Buck stops being polite and starts sounding like an activist, even though everything he says about Egypt, America, and the complicated relationship between them is true. “We give them millions of dollars a year to fund their military dictatorship government so they can arrest and abuse and rape their people,” he said. “It’s farcical to pretend we’re promoting democracy in the Middle East and pay Mubarak’s government to do what they do.”

Indeed, Mubarak’s regime has a well-documented history of abusing Egypt’s people and its press. Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based press freedom group, ranks the country 146th in terms of press freedom. The US gives about $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt annually, and the US Agency for International Development gave the country $25 billion between 1975 and 2002, according to the state department.

“People have accused me of not being objective and of being an activist because I’m willing to say these things,” Buck said in a phone interview. “I don’t think that’s bad journalism. I hope that’s good journalism.”

Buck knew Egypt’s human rights record going in. He had spent two years studying the country’s media and had previously made several trips to the Middle East.

“I’d interviewed people who’d told me about being arrested, being tortured in prison, being raped in prison,” he said. “I knew that there were cell phone videos circulated of police raping people in prison.” Still, his attitude before April 10 was essentially, “Bring it on.”

“I knew these things happened, but it was obviously very different when it happened to me. And I certainly didn’t get the worst of it. My treatment was pretty good comparatively.”

Buck’s misadventure in Mahalla was widely reported. Upon being taken into custody, he twittered “Arrested” from his cell phone, which caught the attention of media, diplomats, and activists in the region. He was released shortly thereafter.

“James did everything right pretty much,” said Bill van Esveld, a fellow with Human Rights Watch based in Jerusalem. “He was plugged in. He had a network to fall back on.”

What Buck would like to do is formalize that process, build a network of emergency numbers and listening posts, so when the next journalist, blogger, or activist disappears, the same response will follow.

Right now, van Esveld says, Human Rights Watch and other NGOs rely on frequent phone check-ins when their people are in hot zones. If someone stops calling, it’s time to worry. If that person can shoot off a text message, relayed around the world, van Esveld believes he could get them to safety faster. “It’s good for us. It’s like more rapid-fire, and we can put the pressure on more quickly.”

Egypt is a test case for the idea, van Esveld added.

“Egypt is a really interesting phenomenon. People are getting more and more tech-savvy and government hasn’t figured out what to do about it yet,” he said. The country has a hyperactive blogosphere, and so far, there isn’t the widespread blocking of sites seen in China or Iran.

“It’s giving people a freedom of expression that they otherwise wouldn’t have,” van Esveld said.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone confirmed in an e-mail that he had lunch with Buck a few weeks ago and discussed the idea, although the San Francisco-based start-up isn’t actively building anything for Buck.

“Folks in Egypt and other places are already using Twitter as global alert system — a kind of newswire,” he wrote. “We see Twitter as a global communication utility supporting many different uses.”

Egypt is one of Twitter’s hot spots. The country ranks twelfth internationally in SMS traffic, Stone said. Web traffic is far lower, though, a tribute to the proliferation of cell phones and the slow penetration of Internet access.

Similar networks exist using different technology. The American Red Cross maintains a “Safe and Secure” site where disaster victims can post messages letting family and friends know they’re alright.

Click here to view a multimedia slide show of photographs narrated by James Buck.

(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.

Production notes: I used the pre-built Soundslides stage for the first time on this project. In the past, I’ve coded a simple HTML page linking to multiple slide shows. This tool made connecting threads of a non-linear story simpler.

Most of the photos are mine, except in the last slide show, Requiem. For that one, I used photos gathered in a Flickr Group I set up for this event. Approval came at the last minute, so participation was low, but I think it’s an effective way to bring people into the story. Reactions to the idea were universally positive.

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.

Production notes: All photos were made with a Canon point & shoot. I gathered audio of Parma speaking with a Zoom H2 recorder. The slide show was produced in Soundslides after editing audio in GarageBand and photos in iPhoto. The whole thing took about an hour.

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.

“I’ve had more aggressive things happen to me here and more threats physically…than I’ve had anywhere else in the world,” he said. “I believe that people have an idea that the world is a really dangerous place when in fact it’s extremely safe.”

Still, he recounts moments that almost ended his trip, such as a breakdown high on the Tibetan plateau, halfway between Kashgar and Lhasa, that left Gunn stranded for four hours.

“That was potentially life-threatening because the weather’s wicked up there,” he said. Other cyclists have died on that road. He paced as the temperature dropped, until he found a footlong strand of bailing wire strong enough to hold his bike together.

“That piece of wire saved my (expletive) in Tibet,” he said Saturday, pointing to a spot on his beat-up bike frame, where the wire is still attached. “I was stranded on the side of the road, and the only reason I was able to continue is that I found that piece of wire. In Tibet, there’s not a bicycle shop for 1,200 miles.”

Twenty years ago, Gunn’s mother, dying of cancer, tried to take a last trip to Europe. She never made it. Arriving in London, she immediately fell ill and had to return home. She passed away a short while later.

Even with that motivation, it took Gunn another two decades to set out. He’d traveled extensively, but not on the trip he wanted. He worked as a photojournalist for 14 years, most recently at the Nevada Appeal in Reno.

“The hardest part of the whole trip was just getting out of the driveway,” he said. “The realization took place on my 4,000th commute, during my 14th year as a small-town daily newspaper photographer,” Gunn wrote in his second blog entry. “For nearly a decade-and-a-half I was paid below-average wages to record history through the lens of camera, shooting nearly a million photographs. Following each day, my photographs appeared on the sheets of recycled paper that the better part of 15,000 souls complained about on a daily basis.”

The daily grind of tragedy and banality was getting to him.

“Something deep inside me was saying that there was something more to my photographic capabilities than the visual documentation of lackluster events that repeated themselves seasonally ad nauseum. Christmas bake sales, service club check passings, first babies of the year, senior volunteers of the week, groundbreakings, ribbon-cuttings, pets of the week, dimly lit high school sports events and local government meetings — the meat and potatoes of my job,” he wrote.

So he quit.

On July 1, 2005, he crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. It was cold and foggy. He and Matt Haverty, a friend of 25 years, rode through the city, took the ferry to Vallejo, then turned east toward Sacramento.

At the end of the journey, his back to the ocean, Gunn is still processing everything he saw. “I’m still unfolding the whole story in my mind,” he said. He is hesitant to pick a favorite place, though in conversation he drifts back to the Silk Road: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Western China.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, about to mount his bike and recross the Golden Gate. “This human family out there wants to see their brothers and sisters. They want to come and meet you.”

Photo by Ray Chavez, Bay Area News Group. This story originally ran in the Hayward Daily Review.

The tipping point in a country’s development is often marked by the moment its population goes from mostly rural to mostly urban.

China is supposed to hit that critical mass of city-dwellers in 2010, but economist Guo Shuqing, chairman of China Construction Bank and a delegate to the recent national party congress, says the nation is already well past that: He believes that currently 60 to 65 percent of Chinese live in cities, around 900 million people.

The Chinese government’s official number is 577 million, or 44 percent of the population, according to Xinhua. Guo recently told China Daily that his number comes from the World Bank’s definition of an urbanite, which counts anyone living in a city at least three months a year who is not a farmer or a migrant worker.

Beijing could see a large chunk of this growth over the coming years. As of October, the capital’s population 17.4 million, a number that includes 5.4 million migrants. A new study released by Renmin University says that migration could drive that number up to 21.4 million by 2020, well above the city’s official target of 18 million.

Nationwide, an estimated 19 million people–mostly men–migrate from the countryside to cities every year, according to the UN Population Fun’s 2007 State of the World Population report. Urbanization presents opportunities as well as problems for policy makers, according to the authors of the report: “Cities concentrate poverty, but they also represent the best hope of escaping it.”

This is something that Yunnan is banking on. The southern region recently announced it would no longer distinguish between rural and urban residence permits starting January 1. That would allow anyone born in the sparsely developed province to legally move to a city, albeit only within Yunnan. Kunming alone could see millions added to its population in the coming years, with increases coming both from those arriving and those who weren’t previously counted.

Widespread urbanity is a recent phenomenon in China. The country put strict limits on who could live in cities between 1949 and 1978, and the hukou system still prevents many from legally moving out of the countryside. Growth in urban populations has been slower than it might have been, thanks both to China’s family planning efforts and a global tendency for urban women to have fewer children.

Cai Fang, a senior researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has urged the rest of the country to follow Yunnan’s lead. The time has come to scrap the hukou system, he told China Daily: “Basically, it has prevented a person from fully enjoying the freedom of migration.”

However, Guo Shuqing cautions that the countryside cannot be ignored, even as cities demand more attention. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found in a recent report that 90 percent of the villages surveyed did not have enough young and healthy labor. With little promise of a future as farmers, migrants who leave for the city may have little reason to return home. But with increasingly fewer people to collect crops, the new citygoers might start to wonder where they’ll get their food.

Production notes: This was all done on my Canon point and shoot, as usual, and I’m pretty satisfied with the sound quality. Note to self: Get all primary interviews done before the subject’s friends show up with beer. Editing went faster this time. I think I’m getting the hang of this.

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.

Production notes:

This started as one slide show but became four when the interviews got too long. I figure anything over two minutes better be damn important, so I gave each photog their own piece. Doing that meant I needed a launch page of some kind. There are ways to do that in Flash (tutorial at Multimedia Shooter) but I neither know nor own Flash. And considering that I really just started learning web design for real, I figured that was a bit out of my league anyway, so I did it in html.

I did two of the interviews—Gavin and Kerrilee—in my apartment, and I caught Dave outside the exhibition, hence the bit of background sound. With all three, I put my USB headset on them, then watched the recording waveforms on GarageBand. Christine is back in the US, so we spoke over Skype. If I were to do it over again, I’d just call her (still using Skype) on her fixed line and pay the 40 cents or so for better sound quality and avoid the computer mic noise. I’m still in the market for some better audio gear.

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.

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.