Rub some coins together for ya boy. During any of these slots, please:

Blues in the Night with Art Dwyer, 4-7 p.m., Friday, April 12
Talk Block with various hosts, 8-11 p.m., Monday, April 15
Juxtaposition with Rob Levy, 7-9 p.m., Wednesday, April 17
Interstate with Pat Wolfe, 10 a.m.-noon, Friday, April 19
Blues in the Night with Art Dwyer, 4-7 p.m., Friday, April 19

Thanks for your consideration and generosity.

So I posted an open letter to Pride St. Louis, Inc. It got a decent bit of run locally, plenty of pass-alongs and the like, chalking up about 1,600 pageviews in a span of three days. There were some nice, personal comments, too, which were pleasing to hear, of course.

My writing the note, though, came from a place of being aggravated with the tone of the Pride response to a piece I wrote on the young effort called Keep Pride in Tower Grove, as well as some of the personal attacks aimed at organizers in article comments sections and the like; these came from anonymous sources, though they felt orchestrated. This stuff bugged me, I wrote something up, hit send. And then: I realized this wasn’t my fight. So the note’s down. Hopefully, it helped push the conversation a small amount, but if it didn’t I’m fine with that, too. Sometimes, you realize that you’ve waded into weird waters and didn’t need to do so.

One aside: as for my teenaged abilities to crash the door at Faces, I actually recycled that anecdote from a piece from last year’s Second Set series on the stlbeacon.org. It’s here. And is 100% true.

If you commented on the original post and wish to remove the comment, please do so, or let me know and I’ll yank the note. Thanks for taking the time to write.

For two years, I’ve attempted to widen my horizons by reading, viewing and altogether consuming information on a specific topic. This isn’t a new or unique concept, as I found out just this week that Mark Zuckerberg learned Mandarin in 2011 and slaughtered his own meat animals in 2012. (I’ve killed some chickens and we’re also both on Facebook… and therein end our similarities.) Meanwhile, I half-assed attempts to study reggae and photography within the same timespans, with middling success. Mark wins again.

My goal in 2013 is a full embrace of generalism. And completism.

After reading 52 books a year for a decade, I slumped to the mid-20s in 2011 and didn’t break out of the teens in 2012. The house is littered with half-finished books; with a bit of directed time, a half-dozen, partially-consumed titles could be quickly polished off in January.

There are flickr photo sets to be revisited. A couple of websites with incomplete bits. That whole Second Set e-book business needs a push.

And there’s the AFI movie list.

As minor backstory: one of the topics I obsess over with my Mass Communications classes is the notion of how cultural elements move into general circulation among Americans. Ten-year olds can sing along to Rihanna, but I do I need to even know her song titles? Is there one, set game that would make me understand why students play video games (solo and in worldwide networks) for 20 hours a week? And does it make me a bad person to have never seen “The Shawshank Redemption”?

Haven’t got all those questions answered, but for the past three, maybe four years, I’ve attempted to knock off the American Film Institute Top 100 Films, a list released in 1998 and updated in 2007, totaling 123 films in all. In fits-and-starts, I’ve finished most of the movies, but have some epics remaining: “Dances with Wolves” and “Titanic.” And some that I’m not especially interested in seeing: the two just noted, along with “Cabaret” and “Patton.” And, yeah, there’s “Shawshank,” too, along with the last 120-minutes of “Intolerance,” which, to my mind hasn’t worn very well over the last near-century.

And so it goes. If you wanna watch a movie or read a book in tandem, gimme a shout. If it’s a book of photography or a raggae film, we can make that happen even quicker.

It’s winter break. The time when digital projects get reborn and spam folders get cleaned. As I haven’t been posting here much in recent months, I didn’t expect to find a lot in the unapproved comments filter. To my amusement (heck, amazement), an actual, non-robotic message of goodwill has reached me, just in time for the holidays!

Adding a hint of mystery, the message was sent on September 5, 2012, during a month in which I didn’t post a single item on the blog. (Shame on me.) Future Ed Golterman posts will get erased without a reading, and I can only imagine more are coming. (Oh, who I am kidding? I’ll read them, but won’t publish them.) But this one’s such a good-natured gem that I had to pass it along, in total. Enjoy:

========

You dont know why some buildings survive
and others dont? Did you ever save a building,fight pricks for a decade. getting it on the Register, and aruging its economic value every day for a decade. And watch that building save a pissant hockey team? And,
may be a hard-endged sport-casinos downtown?

You have no platform, experience or
achievement from which to proport being an historian. An urban expert or economist. or preservationist.

In fact, Tom, you represent as you come close to mid-century in age, a complete generation that never experienced St. Louis as a real city. So you had no frame of reference or background in what makes a City7.

Unless you attend my presentation at UMSL
in 1998 0 What Makes a City.

You are not alone.

========

I am not alone in receiving weird notes from this kook. That is true.

For almost exactly two years, or about 100 weekly columns, I was given an interesting opportunity at stlmag.com. The initial idea I pitched them revolved around exploring. A weekly blog that would let me get to know St. Louis in new and unique ways. If not truly “new,” at least new to me. At first, I opted for some tried-and-true stuff, like running around abandoned packing plants; at other times, I visited people in interesting jobs, folks like the hellbenders exhibit keepers at the Zoo. It was fun, though all over the place, thematically. In trying to find the weekly outlet’s “voice,” I eventually settled into a pattern of four stories a month around a common theme. At that point everything clicked.

When posting these stories to Facebook in recent months, a common joke intro was that I was trying to be a better St. Louisan by writing these. And while that was just a goofy conceit to get hits for the pieces, it also turned out to a be a bit true. This November, for example, I took the concept of Autumnal Wanderings and went to four places in/around town (and one short road trip), all of them being locations new to me, despite most of them being well-known. Every experience was cool, even one made while in the throes of a killer cold. I visited some massive graveyards, walked down a path off of the Delmar Loop, visited Cairo, IL.

As the blog is now going into a new direction, my freestyle columns are going away. Interestingly, the piece on Cairo is going be the last. The vortex of loss surrounding Cairo is apparently very strong indeed. But I feel like it’s a decent piece of writing, a worthy capstone to an enjoyable, two-year experiment.

It’s here. And some additional photos are here.

Ah, KDHX. We’ve got history.

Over the next week, I’ll be a pretty regular contributor to the membership drive. Five different slots, more than that many shows (with a longer stint on the talk show lineup) and one really early morning; at least for these old bones, getting up at 6 a.m. is an act seldom, if ever, attempted.

If you can rub some coins together for your boy, any of these times would be wonderful places to kick in a buck/two. Thanks for your consideration.

In the summer of 2010, a well-regarded local video producer asked if I wanted to work on a web series with him. Familiar with the term, but not the form, we spent the better part of an afternoon watching Apple TV and talking about what “works” for web-based, episodic programming. For various reasons, the project never came into being. Oh, well. If you’ve worked in independent media circles for any length of time, it’s more surprising to see a project come into being than it is to see it fizzle.

A few months back, I met with two trusted folks at O’Connell’s. The place had meaning because I’m (to this point, more theoretically than actually) working on a book about O’Connell’s, to celebrate the pub’s 50th anniversary. I needed to talk so someone else about making sense of creative progress, as I’ve recently started getting bogged down in every phase of project creation, from prepping to execution. The advice gleaned at that meeting was that I should focus on the O’Connell’s book and not the web-based web series, now known in my head as Half Order Fried Rice. I agreed with the advice, then did the exact opposite of the plan. Good intentions didn’t carry the day vs. inspiration.

To get Half Order out of my head and into reality, I needed some major elements to come into being. Either a producer who could execute the video components, or a sudden uptick in even the most basic skills of web video on my own part. After annoyingly striking out on the former, I borrowed some money and bought a solid camera, then a MacBook Pro. And those things sat underutilized for another good while, until I figured out how to finally use the kid-and-elderly-friendly iMovie. When you’re psyched out, it’s sometimes hard to get past the first, big push needed to learn a new skill. And, for me, it wasn’t until artist Kevin Belford sat down with me one afternoon at Kaldi’s that the fog started to lift. In the span of a couple hours, I dumped down some video from old SD cards, cut together some clips and generally left feeling as if the project might actually happen. Which was important, because…

By this point, I’d already shaken the digital beggar’s cup on the Indiegogo corner stoop. Not sure how much money to ask for, I chose $1,001, figuring that the amount would give me enough to buy any additional, needed equipment, plus could spot me some cash for lunches and drinks for the cast, plus other unknown add-ons during the shooting process. Unlike Kickstarter, Indiegogo accepts any project, but with different pricing gradations; to get the full percentage, I needed to raise at least the $1,001 and the final push to that number didn’t really come until the literal last few hours, when the day prior’s $600 became, magically and exactly, $1,001. Everyone that kicked in to that fund is thanked on the site and in my brain, whether they potted $200 or $5, the range that came in. (And, in the interests of disclosure, one of the cooks at The Royale handed me a $5 bill, an old-fashioned twist on the whole process.)

With the Indiegogo cuts taken out, I had $931 in my bank account about two weeks after the campaign ended, monies that were already being spent on the show. Turns out that the SD cards I had been using were too slow; I had no idea that SD cards had speed capabilities, but this is the kind of thing you learn at the camera shop. So that was about $80. And the cabbage for the Food Trunks episode cost $17… cabbage for cabbage. The virtually-unseen rodents of the Mouse Racing episode were another $17. Various lunches for cast members nipped a few bucks here and there. And a cast/contributor party at the house ran a modest $49, for snacks and drinks. This wasn’t the no-budget production that many people claim, but it was pretty close.

Several of the actual shooting days will go down as my favorite moments of 2012, with people generously saying “yes” to a project that was mostly improvisational and with the bulk of the content in my head, as opposed to the page. But people kept agreeing and shoots came about at a crisp regularity. Virtually every shoot took place the day prior to posting, so there was a steady production schedule at work, even with actors falling out and with my forgetting to turn on the audio on a couple occasions. An early attempt to use a Flip camera was quickly abandoned when that camera proved unsteady and unreliable, forcing me to re-choose the better looking/sounding Canon.

And therin lies the whole point of the experience, as far as I’m concerned. Prior to this, my attempts to bring video into stories were mixed, at best. Here, for five weeks, I had to force myself to use a camera for both stills and video on a daily basis. And I had to cut the pieces together, into something marginally viewable. I’ll probably be more critical of my own technical work on the project as time goes by; already, I’ve gone back and added a few things that sit there as obvious glitches. More will get fixed with time. But the show, the experiment, is over for now.

Folks invested dollars in my personal education. And I invested enough hours to feel that an honest effort was given.

Intending to extend the show one additional episode, I ran into the wall. My primary actor, aged 13, got a free ticket to Six-Flags and headed to Eureka. Some added folks couldn’t make a shoot that day; maybe I’d burned out my talent pool completely. Actually, I did do that. But the scene I had in mind can be picked up later, for another project, which I now know is more than just a theoretical. It’s doable. What a good feeling.

There’s also a good feeling in watching this last piece. Starring the one-and-only Thad-Simon McRosenthal. A great way to end things, as it turned outz’ a loose idea and some inspired improv combined into a fun segment.

Thanks to those thankable.

HOFR Tight Shoes from Thomas Crone on Vimeo.

The programs have been rolling for the last 22 weekdays.

While the videos below feel a bit naked to me without the supplemental text, here are some that work pretty well on their own.

HOFR: Mumblecore from Thomas Crone on Vimeo.

HOFR Mouse Racing from Thomas Crone on Vimeo.

HOFR: Educations at Close from Thomas Crone on Vimeo.

The summer’s been good, thanks for askin’. Stayin’ busy. Doin’ projects and stuff. Nothin’ too crazy.

Have to share, though, a continued, personal concern on technology: that it’s passed me by. No matter how often I attempt to buy a new, little item that’ll make working life simpler, the issues just keep cropping up in new, unexpected ways. And video hiccups have more become the rule than the exception of late.

With the Half Order Fried Rice project, a series of short videos were planned and some have been executed. I could talk about how it’s tough to pull non-professional actors into a non-paying project and how there’s a good chance that someone/anyone might not show up on a given day. And that’d be true. It’s also a near-given that I’ll foul up the situation once everyone’s on-site. To wit: two, recent shoots with the microphone turned off. Classic. This is a microphone, incidentally, that cost $100, or the exact trade-in value of a camera once bought at a big box’s going-out-of-business sale, before going essentially unused. (It, too, was supposed to be an answer.) The mic, when turned on, sounds like a $100 mic. Which is to say, kinda crappy.

So there’re poor-sounding videos upcoming. Now you know.

But the Flip! This product’s the one worth scorn. At PrideFest a week back, I met with Ben Phelps, a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. We spoke for four-minutes, with my rolling a borrowed Flip cam, as mine had developed a major battery leak of some sort in the week prior. Getting home, I spot-checked the video, which was there and possessing both video and audio. Progress! But the Flipshare software suggested an upgrade, which began to run… and which then deleted everything on the camera, including the Phelps video and my borrowee’s recent footage from Haiti. Ouch!

A consistent theme in my collegiate classes is that students need to become familiar with (if not completely competent in) all forms of media that might tie-into their primary skill. And journalism these days is apparently incomplete without “a full complement of robust visual information,” or some such BS, ala photos, videos, podcasts the now-passe slide-show, etc. All of them, of course, easily integrated into all formats and platforms of social media.

Recreation of self is painful and awkward enough, even without the machines turning against you. When they do, what’s left to do, but… take to the machines and complain?

Kinda. Sorta. Really. Coming soon.