Thanks to Alex Ihnen and nextstl.com, the 10-part series on local graf is up-and-running. Hope you enjoy.

The first piece, just shy of 3,200 words, went live this morning. It’s here.

Watch the video, consider the pledge. Thank you.

There’s something unsettling about seeing your image on a legit movie screen. It’s happened to me more times than I’d have a right to expect. Though, in reality, I don’t expect to be on a movie screen that often. It sorta keeps happening, though.

I know directors, writers, other creators of film and video projects. This leads to the occasional question of whether I’ll help out. And sometimes that means leaving the comfortable side of camera, working in a context in which I have zero training. That’s maybe not totally true. For a chunk of the mid-’00s, I took a fair bit of improv classwork, some of it taught by the late George Malich, under the auspices of the Improv Trick. (Acting for the screen, though? Nope. Never, not ever.)

On Sunday, July 14th, at 7:15, I’ll appear in a movie with George, sharing a scene, or two, along the way. The film’s called “Go South for Animal Index,” and it’s playing the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase at the Tivoli. Having worked on the project for almost two years, it was interesting enough to see short clips emerge, sent via a hidden YouTube page. To see the whole thing, in rough-cut form, just a few weeks back was a wholly different experience; best of all was watching the film in a tricked-out, South Side garage with other members of the cast and crew. A friendly audience, for sure.

As the film’s segmented into several dozen “chapters,” bit of story backed by a specific clip of music, I’d seen a number of the individual chapters over the past half-year. They looked great, Chris King’s direction honed by the fine editing of Dan Cross; all of that imagery culled from a half-dozen different camera operators, with their own distinct eye. But to see them all linked together, in long-form play? Wow. A totally unique and even slightly-jarring experience, indeed. And, let’s be honest: no matter how much I wanted to watch the film dispassionately, as a larger, collaborative piece, every time I popped into a scene, the tension level in my brain jumped a notch. But, to use the classic “car crash” analogy, I couldn’t look away. Though I wanted to. So conflicted!

At a later point in the shooting process, I asked for my character to be phased out. I was working on another, weekend-intensive video project at the time and I needed some mental space cleared. Without giving away anything essential, King came up with an interesting compromise. It was fun to shoot. And that one final scene (shot by Cross) is one I liked watching. In public. With other, friendly people around. Maybe I’ll see you at the next showing, the “real” one, the one coming up pretty quickly.

Or perhaps you’ll come out to the Showcase on the next day. On Monday, July 15 at 5:00 p.m., an 85-minute program at The Tivoli will be dedicated to Documentary Shorts. I didn’t create a doc for this event, though three mockumentary pieces that I produced will show. The three are all related to beer, or bar culture in St. Louis. The cast was largely assembled through my work at The Royale Food & Spirits, where a willing group of people can usually be drummed up for this creative project, or that.

On that Monday, three offerings from the web series Half Order Fried Rice will screen alongside a number of other, short offerings. The assumption is that most of the rest will be true docs, slice-of-life looks at St. Louis by-and-for St. Louisans. It’ll be fun to watch those, though, once again, I’ll be sweating bullets when the HOFR pieces screen. The bits are funny, at least in my mind, largely improv’ed by the cast, based on experiences and characters that I dreamed up as part of alternate, interlocking version of St. Louis. If the funny bits fall flat, or the serious bits get laughs… well, welcome to show business.

There’s a lot of creativity in the St. Louis community, with of folks involved in efforts on amateur basis. And a lot of that unpaid energy’s directed into film and video projects, of all sizes, scopes, angles and intents. That I get to flit through this particular sub-community a bit is still amusing to me. And often gratifying.

If you go to the Showcase and I pop up onscreen, based on either side of the camera, please laugh when you should. And don’t when you shouldn’t. Please?

Kale soup recipe; all measurements exact. Put water in a li’l pot. Add diced onions and start the warming knob. Splash in a couple swigs of fish sauce, a half-pour of honey, a goodly dollop of miso and a smidgen of olive oil. At low boil, add a batch of chopped kale and some bonito sprinkles. Stir occasionally, until kale is all shriveled. Only then, crack in one egg, stirring vigorously for one minute. Stop the warming knob, as you are done. Feeds one. Eat daily, until you can’t eat it anymore. Enjoy.

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.