Author: Jenny Woods

In the past few months, Minnesota has hosted PEZCon X, an international PEZ convention; the Free Range Film Festival, screened inside a big barn in the heart of the state’s organic farm country; and the Hungry Cyclist, an Englishman biking across the world for Macmillan Cancer Relief.

Chuck Olsen, a highly caffeinated thirty-four-year-old filmmaker who wears little black glasses, has captured these stories and many others. Olsen is the owner and operator of Minnesota Stories (www.mnstories.com), a new daily blog that consists of artful video clips. His “vlog” is rather like a regionalized, abbreviated, video version of This American Life. Due to the limits of bandwidth and attention span, Minnesota Stories are usually short, mini-documentary films running up to about five minutes.

Olsen first got the idea about four years ago while working at Twin Cities Public Television. He initially envisioned a television series. As he became more immersed in the vlogging community, he realized the medium’s potential and adapted his idea for the Internet.

Anyone with a video camera and a Minnesota story to tell (or show) is welcome to contribute. Olsen said vlogging is a way to democratize production in a time of mass media conglomerates, and to create a sort of “citizen channel” that is considerably more accessible than community access television.

“It’s kind of a continuation of what you see with blogs,” Olsen said. “A lot of people who didn’t have a voice in broadcast or print media or mass media now do.” Besides Olsen’s footage, Minnesota Stories showcases work from many others. Some are amateurs and others are professionals. Chuck Tomlinson, the former co-host of Radio K’s Cosmic Slop show, posted his wife and daughter’s journey to Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas, to support Iraq war protester Cindy Sheehan. Other recent entries have starred residents of St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood and Duluth cartoonist Chris Monroe, creator of the comic strip Violet Days.

Olsen is a busy new-media mogul. In addition to Minnesota Stories, he contributes to MNSpeak.com, a spiffy and smart Twin Cities daily blog. He got his start as a correspondent for the pioneering daily vlog Rocketboom. He also began posting clips of a longer documentary about blogging called—naturally—Blogumentary. He found it a useful filmmaker’s tool. “It’s great,” he said. “You get that immediate feedback from people, and people can follow the progress of what you’re doing immediately,” he said.

While Minnesota is rich in stories for his vlog, Olsen looks beyond the land of lakes. He and friends are trying to organize an international “vlogathon” aimed at raising funds to put the relatively simple technology into the hands of people worldwide, and to raise cultural awareness.

“It’s hard to hate somebody if you can see how they live, and see that they’re real people and you have things in common with them,” he said. In November, Olsen will teach a vlogging workshop at Minnesota’s Center for Media Arts in St. Paul. “We want to teach people how to videoblog—give them the equipment and the knowledge—-to create that cross-cultural dialogue. Even if there’s a language barrier, you can show people things and still communicate.”—Jenny Woods

It’s not easy to get your hands on a twenty-one-key embaire xylophone from Uganda; to acquire hers, Nichole Smaglick sacrificed a chicken. Through this act, she demonstrated her reverence for both the instrument and the Busoga tribe, giving thanks to and blessing its xylophone-playing ancestors.

“When playing the embaire with the group in Uganda, I can enter an altered state of being,” Smaglick says. “It’s not a trance, but more like being consumed by something. In the first moments of playing, I am creating. Then it slips from my hands into the interlocking engine of all six players. ‘I’ turns to ‘us.’ Then this engine we created seems to come alive.”

In 1997, after a couple of years of traveling to African countries, Smaglick founded Another Land, a tour company that organizes safaris and homestays with villagers from several tribes, during which travelers take part in dancing, beer brewing, and other daily activities. The first time she returned to Minneapolis from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, her living quarters seemed positively overstuffed compared to those of the people she’d been visiting. She promptly purged about three quarters of her possessions, primarily clothes and knick-knacks. Now she keeps only what keeps her going. “It is a skill to learn how to live with less,” she says.

Granted, the embaire practically fills a room by itself, but technically it counts as just one object. Smaglick’s African instruments include an amadinda xylophone, thumb pianos, a zeze harp, and an “endangered” ennanga harp. She double-majored in African studies and piano performance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but in 1997, Africa took precedence when the pianist sold her Steinway for a ticket to Uganda to conduct research for Another Land. “I went for six years without a piano,” she says. “The piano is like my lungs. Now I can breathe again.” (She’s since replaced it with one signed by Henry Steinway himself.)

Despite the Steinway and a few other Western furnishings, African objects dominate Smaglick’s Nokomis-area house in Minneapolis, where she resides about eight months of the year. Her collection gives deeper meaning to “conversation piece.” A Chagga spear hangs over the entryway, and in the bedroom is a replica of a love seat owned by the last sultan of Zanzibar. The Barabaig of Tanzania gave her several gourds, both decorative and practical, to celebrate her marriage to musician Steve Schley (from the local bluegrass outfit Free Range Pickin’). A beaded leather cloak was another gift, the kind normally given by a mother to her daughter. And a tribeswoman gave her a bracelet in friendship with the request, “Tell my story.”

With that in mind, Smaglick founded a business with Barabaig women, the Amias Project (amias is “beautiful” in Barabaig), selling their shawls, jewelry, handbags, and scarves. She plans to open a retail space later this year in Northeast Minneapolis’ Northrup King Building; in the meantime, she’s looking to round up Twin Cities musicians to whom she can offer lessons on the embaire, an ensemble instrument. “I need some people to play with!” she says.—Jenny Woods