taˈto͞ois the 1st annual print edition to celebrate Scene360’s 20th anniversary on the web.
This quality edition will include 7 never-before-published interviews with alternative tattooist Gordoletters,Oscar Hove,Julim Rosa, and more. All tattoo artist names will be unveiled as the edition gets closer to release date.
Overachiever magazine is the first magazine aimed at young Asian American women, and we are taking submissions until October 31. We want to hear your stories, pitches, articles, recipes, ideas, and experiences with discrimination: contact us at [email protected]with your name, age, heritage, and past experience with writing. All information will be kept confidential. If you don’t have any experience, that’s fine! We welcome first time writers, as long as you bring plenty of passion and authenticity.
The more I think about the 2020 “lockdowns” the angrier I get. Hospitals were nowhere near being overwhelmed. The course of the virus was not altered. People giddily lined up for their to-go cocktails, placed their grocery delivery orders, and thought they were saving lives.
Many people I know permanently lost their businesses, careers, bands, self-respect, health, life savings. Some committed suicide. Some have children now years behind in their education. All for nothing. So the upper middle class could LARP “pandemic” and bake bread at home.
The service industry lost their shirts, or continued to work serving those who thought they were morally superior because they can send emails from a laptop on the couch. “Safety” became contingent on the neuroticisms of the most sheltered. The working class kneeled.
Primary care and the basic health needs of society dropped off a cliff. ERs became family doctors as family doctors insisted they only see patients virtually. Covid myopia buried all rationality. And what we got is a society now coming apart at the seams.
I’ll never forget the shoddy journalism, corporatism, bogus Government programs, decisive separation of people and political spectrums, and the politics that went into the pandemic to make it happen.
Description: Woman waits for a car emission inspection in 1973.
Original caption: “A woman watches as her car goes through testing at an auto emission inspection station in downtown Cincinnati in September 1973. All light-duty, spark-ignition-powered motor vehicles were tested annually for carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions and given a safety check. All other vehicles registered in the city received an annual safety check. The emissions test on an exhaust analyzer went into effect in January 1975; the safety test had been in effect since 1940.
Lyntha Scott Eiler/National Archives, Records of the Environmental Protection Agency
Hitchhiker with his dog, “˜Tripper”, on U.S. 66. U.S. 66 crosses the Colorado River at Topock. National Archives, Records of the Environmental Protection Agency Charles O'Rear, Yuma County, Arizona, May 1972. National Archives, Records of the Environmental Protection Agency
At the best hotel in hell you can expect simple, clean rooms and the usual mod-cons: Wi-Fi, air-conditioning, a restaurant – and complimentary body armour. Welcome to Mogadishu. Words and photographs by James Hopkirk
After 20 years of devastation at the hands of warlords, terrorists and a succession of foreign armies, you won’t find Mogadishu in a Trailfinders brochure any time soon. But as the security situation slowly improves in the Somali capital – with a little help from 17,000 African Union troops – a tourist industry of sorts is starting to emerge.
This was once a thriving coastal hub, with grand Italian architecture, a cathedral, luxury hotels, bars and even a disco. As recently as the 1980s, women were seen in miniskirts and holidaymakers flocked to enjoy the glorious sunshine and white sand beaches.
Mogadishu today feels not so much like a different era as a different planet. Of its former glories, only the beaches remain unscathed. But in 2011, weakened Al Shabaab militants were finally forced out of the capital by the peacekeepers and while the war is by no means over, the city is no longer the frontline.
Kidnapping, murder and improvised explosive devices remain very real risks for visitors, and if you’re looking for international hotel chains or Egyptian cotton sheets then this is not the city break for you. But for intrepid travellers it’s a rare opportunity to leave other tourists behind and explore a city decimated by war – but where a sense of hope is returning and the first stage of a vast rebuilding project is underway.
Regular flights are now scheduled via Dubai, Istanbul and Nairobi and the (admittedly high) costs for tourists seem to be falling, so if you’re prepared to accept heavy security, limited freedom of movement and basic facilities, it’s never been easier or more affordable to visit Mogadishu.
Sleep
One man is spearheading the growth of tourism in the city: Bashiir Yusuf Osman, the resourceful, forward-thinking owner of the Peace Hotel. This is a man who at the height of the violence, when most businessmen fled, saw a need for secure accommodation – and provided it.
Described by Time Magazine in 2007 as “the best hotel in hell”, the Peace Hotel, now with its sister operation the Peace Hotel 2, offers simple but clean rooms along with the usual mod cons: wifi, air con, buffet restaurant – and complimentary body armour.
There are many hotels in Mogadishu, but what separates Bashiir’s operations is the security. Included in the package is your very own team of highly trained, AK47-wielding bodyguards, who accompany you whenever you leave the hotel’s fortified gates.
Both hotels are situated conveniently near the airport and are set in high-walled compounds with barbed wire, blast defences and 24-hour armed security. Most guests are journalists and international NGO staff, but last year around 20 trailblazing tourists came to stay, and Bashiir expects more this year.
Security
In Mogadishu you need armed security with you at all times. This typically involves five or more bodyguards perched on the back of a pick up truck, packing an intimidating array of assault rifles and machine guns. Every time you stop, they’ll fan out around you and take up defensive positions. It’s quite an experience.
This level of protection is not a luxury. Even with your heavies, this is a very dangerous place to visit. Without them, it’s a suicide mission. Al Shabaab and other Islamist militant groups specifically target foreign nationals, and while the frontline may no longer be in the city, guerrilla attacks and assassinations are still a regular feature. And if Al Shabaab don’t get you, heavily armed criminal gangs surely will. As a western tourist you will be extremely conspicuous and you represent a significant kidnap ransom – so you need men with guns on your side.
The security can be frustrating. When touring the city you can’t stop anywhere for long – many of your photos will be taken through your vehicle’s windscreen and conversations with local people will be cut short as you’re ushered back to the car. But you will be allowed to get out and walk around at times and stop for the odd coffee and samosa. And your bodyguards will obligingly pose with you for that must-have “I’ve been to Mogadishu” snapshot.
See
If you’re in the city for just 24 hours, then a half-day city tour in a 4x4, with your bodyguards riding shotgun, will probably be the highlight of your stay. For longer trips Bashiir can organise homestays with Somali families, excursions to remote beaches – and with a bit of notice he can even secure you guest of honour status at a Somali wedding.
War damage
Mogadishu is unsurprisingly low on traditional sights – but perhaps what most tourists will come to see is the impact the war has had on the city. Everywhere you turn, bullet holes and shrapnel damage scar the architecture. Many buildings have been almost completely destroyed, including the old parliament. But what’s remarkable is that life carries on in and around the charred, skeletal remains of once grand constructions. And for all the devastation, new buildings are springing up all over the place.
Liido Beach
Mogadishu’s famous city beach is one of the most popular spots in town and, since the retreat of Al Shabaab, it’s packed with families at weekends. The Indian Ocean here is a glorious shade of turquoise and the water is invitingly warm – only the barbed wire and twitchy African Union soldiers will remind you that you’re still a few hundred miles from the Seychelles. It’s not yet safe for tourists to swim from the main beach, but the neighbouring Liido Seafood Restaurant offers a secure stretch of sand where customers, including foreigners, can go for a dip.
The Lighthouse
Mogadishu’s most iconic architectural relic, battle-scarred and crumbling, it’s remarkable that this magnificent Italian-built, turn of the century lighthouse has survived at all. It stands as a reminder of what the city used to be, and what it has lost.
Black Hawk Down
You can still see evidence of the ill-fated 1993 American operation scattered around the city, including the rusting hulks of several US and UN Armoured Personnel Carriers. The fallen Black Hawk helicopters are no longer part of the tour, however. One crash site is now covered by an unremarkable corrugated iron hut, the other obscured by rubble and giant cacti.
Eat
New restaurants are popping up all over town, many owned by Somalis returning from abroad. Even basic Somali cuisine is very tasty, with a sophisticated understanding of spice. Your options as a tourist will be limited, as ever, by security – following a suicide attack on a popular restaurant last year, armed guards, concrete defences and sandbagged machine gun posts are de rigueur at Mogadishu’s top eateries.
Liido Seafood Restaurant
Set on the seafront with its own secure, private section of beach, this is a popular spot that serves fresh fish and lobster.
Villa Sultan
Owned by a Somali businessman who splits his time between Mogadishu and Toronto, Villa Sultan’s raised front terrace offers views of both the heavily fortified airport over the road – and the gleaming ocean beyond it. Food is top notch, especially the samosas, and there’s a large, leafy rear garden that offers respite on hot days.
The Village
With several outposts around the city, this is the only restaurant chain in Somalia with a branch in Hammersmith. The owner is Somali-born but lived in west London for much of his life and his restaurants – both in London and Mogadishu – are highly regarded.
The Peace Hotel
Bashiir imposes a 5.30pm curfew on his guests, so if you’re staying at the Peace Hotel, that’s where you’ll eat dinner. A buffet is included in the room price, and the food consists of simple, international basics such as pasta and stews, along with a few local delicacies. More interesting will be your fellow diners – Somali businessmen, journalists and NGO staff from around the world.
Shopping
The place to shop in Mogadishu is the infamous Bakaara Market, an open air street market in the city centre where you can buy everything from washing machines and mobile phones to rocket propelled grenades and fake passports. This is a crowded, bustling place – which makes it potentially very dangerous for tourists.
You’ll drive through here on your city tour, but if you want to get out and walk around you’ll need to agree this with Bashiir well in advance. Then, if the security situation on the day permits, you’ll have to don body armour before leaving your vehicle. In a market where you can pick up an AK47 with your weekly shop, not everyone here will have your best interests at heart.
Nightlife
As a strict Muslim society, alcohol is completely illegal in Somalia. Officially there is no booze anywhere in Mogadishu – so consider this a chance for a detox, albeit without the accompanying spa treatments.
The Peace Hotel’s curfew means you’ll be watching what nightlife there is from the hotel roof. While Al Shabaab ruled the roost, the city shut down at 5pm, but a British and Norwegian-funded project has seen new solar powered streetlights introduced on one of the capital’s main thoroughfares and as a result local people are starting to come out at night again. How long before it’ll be safe for tourists to join them remains to be seen.
Coming soon
Ever the entrepreneur, Bashiir has bought a large plot of land on Jazira Beach, just south of the city. It’s a beautiful, unspoilt spot, where the white sand stretches for miles, as yet unsullied by the urban sprawl.
Bashiir is preparing to build Mogadishu’s first beach resort here – a large, secure, high-walled compound with “Mombasa-style” beach huts for guests, aimed at tourists, wealthy Somalis and NGO staff in need of R&R. It’s an ambitious project, and one that would have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago. But provided security can hold in the city, Bashiir expects it to open in 2014. Book your sun lounger now…
50+ pages already printed, only two articles. Two. Journalism test review: Bad for the environment, bad for Kiley’s sanity. Hey all-nighter, long time, no see. Can’t say I’ve missed you.
SoThe U.S. Transhumanist Party recently released some demographic info on their first 1,000 members, and while they seem to be missing some some rather crucial demographic markers, here, such as age and ethnicity, the gender breakdown is about what you’d expect.
I mention this because back at the end of June I attended the Decolonizing Mars Unconference, at the Library of Congress in D.C. It was the first time I had been in those buildings since I was a small child, and it was for such an amazing reason.
We discussed many topics, all in the interest of considering what it would really mean to travel through space to another planet, and to put humans and human interests there, longterm. Fundamentally, our concern was, is it even possible to do all of this without reproducing the worst elements of the colonialist projects we’ve seen on Earth, thus far, and if so, how do we do that?
Some of my favorite panels from the final part of the comic I did for Rewire, about about a young girl migrating and being detained as a minor, is out today. This one deals a lot with the fall out from undoing DACA. Check it out below. Learned a lot from working on this (technically and morally) Hope you like it.
“An editor at a prominent Chinese newspaper said he was stepping down from his job because he could no longer withstand the pressures of strict control of the country’s media, according to a resignation note posted online.”
“China detained a total of 20 people following the publication of a letter calling on President Xi Jinping to resign, the BBC has learned.The letter was posted earlier in March on state-backed website Wujie News.Although quickly deleted by the authorities, a cached version can still be found online.”
“Every minute, 72 hours of video are added to YouTube. And every second, more than 3500 photos are uploaded on Facebook.” InterestingTED talk about the process in which journalists must separate fact from fiction from what’s constantly being uploaded on the internet in real time.
Protestors stand at the intersection of Mountain and College Ave. in Old Town Ft. Collins to fight against Rape Culture. Photograph taken by Megan Fischer
Today –Monday December 8th – in Ft. Collins, the decision on the Andre Alders case was made, allowing an alleged rapist to walk free. In response to the decision, an immediate protest took place organized by a few people who had been following…
MeetBrendan Dooley, a graduate student in the department of Library and Information Science.
What is your area of study and research interests?
I’ve been intent on the archives concentration since starting my MLIS in Spring 2021, but I could see that changing. This semester I’ve been working as an intern here in the archives as well as a reference intern upstairs in the American Geographical Society Library. I find both places to be incredibly fulfilling places to gain experience and am truly enjoying the reference aspects of each as much as the research sides of what needs to be done. Helping others with their requests is incredibly rewarding.
What year are you on in your program? When do you plan to graduate?
I’m in my third semester of classes right now. I took an archives and library course when I started in spring 2021 semester. I did a three-credit fieldwork class over the summer in the UWM archives where I worked on accessioning the Jim Northrup Papers, which was a fantastic experience (and led in part to my internship in the archives here). If all goes to plan I’ll be able to graduate Winter 2022.
Tell us about your summer fieldwork.
The Northrup accession from my summer fieldwork had me working with the personal and professional writings of Native American author/activist Jim Northrup Jr., an Anishinaabe from the Fond du Lac reservation in Northern Minnesota, not far from the western edge of Lake Superior. He was sent to a federal boarding school at the age of 6, and he was a Vietnam vet, journalist and newspaper editor and columnist, poet, playwright, novelist, writing instructor and more. He began relearning his native Ojibwe language as an adult and started an annual camp to help teach it to others. He and his wife, Pat, made traditional birchbark ricing baskets for chaffing wild rice they harvested from nearby lakes and taught that as well at the camp and internationally at events and readings they were invited to do.
What draws you to the archives, special collections, or libraries profession?
A sincere love for discovering information and growing knowledge, for myself and those around me. I’ve been a writer, journalist and editor for 20 years. Circumstances (due to Covid-19) found me out of a regular full-time gig in summer 2020. I used the opportunity, and the Wisconsin GI Bill, to turn that situation into a positive and return to school for my MLIS, something I had been considering for a year or so — though as a part-time nights/weekends student on a longer path to graduation. My love of journalism, similarly, was wanting to uncover stories and share them with the public — that’s all in the same vein as archival work as far as I can see.
What is your favorite collection within the archive, or most interesting record/collection that you’ve come across?
My favorite collection to come across in the archive, aside from the Northrup collection I’ve been accessioning, is the Charlotte Russell Partridge and Miriam Frink Papers, 1862-1980 ( Milwaukee Mss 167). I was typing different phrases and names into the archives’ Finding Aids search just to get an idea of some of the different collections we have. I typed in my last name and got a hit for my grandfather in this collection. He was an artist in Milwaukee who worked on the Federal WPA project here (which I knew), but there is a photo of a pen-and-ink drawing he did in the collection’s WPA section that I didn’t know existed … and neither did the rest of my family! So it was a pretty cool surprise to find that. I plan to make a copy of it for some reprints to frame and hang among his watercolors we have at home.
What are you working on now for the archives?
My two bigger projects right now are the Northrup Finding Aid so the collection can be live soon and an immense scanning task of SAA papers for an off-site patron.
What’s something surprising you’ve learned (about yourself as an archivist or about the profession) since you’ve started working at UWM Archives?
One of the biggest misconceptions I’ve had about the archival profession is the idea that the archivist is a neutral party. That is the biggest way in which my eyes, and mind, have been opened by the UW-Milwaukee MLIS program and working here in the archives and the AGSL — to take a more critical look at the collections, both what’s here and what isn’t. Why is something here? Who thought it was worth preserving? Why did they think that, and what things were missed or not accessioned? What voices are missing? How can I be a positive influence on the collections and ensure there is access to all who want it?
“Do you have to be depressed to write a sad song? Do you have to be in love to write a love song? Is a song better when it really happened to you? Like “Love Thing,” where did you write that and who was it about?”
