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Audiovisual Cultures Podcast Round-up The guests on the January 2021 episodes got us off to a great start for the coming year with differing topics that at their core hinged upon storytelling. For 82, I was joined from California by filmmaker Justin McAleece, and in 83, urban planner Mustafa Sherif called in from Sweden. Both conversations involve us talking through some logistics of film, video and podcast production with a common thread of finding ways to facilitate telling an interesting story, whether through music videos, corporate demos, advertising, comedy mockumentary, serious documentary or platforming someone with something to say that the rest of us can learn from.  As I begin to draft this, it is the 9th of January and in the past few days there have been deeply troubling scenes in the USA resulting from the outgoing president inciting his red-capped supporters to violence against, well, just about anyone upholding the democratic process. As many who have no choice but to

I feel as if much of my life these days is overcome with learning and managing new systems - online and business systems in a work sense as well as new ways of being and functioning in a being alive/surviving sense. I want to spend less time on social media but I have a podcast (have I mentioned it?) and a small creative business to promote, so it took a few tries to find a decent, free post scheduler (I'm trying Later.com ) and figure out how to work it, then set aside time for blitzing through posts (which need images to pre-load) and sorting up to a month's worth at a time. This is one system along with Etsy where I've found it necessary to work between the app on my phone and the website from the computer to achieve everything I need to just make one listing or post. It's flipping exhausting, and that's before we get to the spreadsheets. Facebook has been on at me for months about tagging my page photos with shop listings. That was another nearly full day just

Part 1 Part 2   Part 3   Part 4 Part 5 Part 6   Part 7   Culture as Threat The type of punk memories re/enacted in Good Vibrations were recorded at the time by filmmaker John T. Davis in Shellshock Rock (1979). The documentary was famously banned at the now much more liberal Cork Film Festival for its ‘poor quality’, that is, its energetic lo-fi presentations of bands’ live performances – an aesthetic now long standard in music videos – and the anarchic punks’ unsavoury behaviour (including instances of mooning), which, again, are tame by today’s standards. Davis’s film indicates that Good Vibrations is an accurate portrayal of twenty-first-century nostalgia for punk and the hopeful message in official peacetime invoked by the notion of Northern Irish punk having more in common with hippy values than the anger and style of punk’s branches in Britain, Ireland and North America. Good Vibrations also had to become a saleable product, and so appeal to the nostalgia for vintage as a wa

Reaching the point in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) surrogates for Miles and Keiko O'Brien (Colm Meaney and Rosalind Chao) got me thinking about the ways that actors' real-life pregnancies are met with creative responses in television shows to the extent that whole story arcs reshape the series. Sitcoms such as Frasier and Brooklyn Nine-Nine found ways to re-dress the pregnancies of Jane Leeves and Melisa Fumero through Daphne Moon's stress-induced weight gain and Amy Santiago's love of bulky folders, undercover work as a pregnant prison inmate, and then later a pregnancy for her and Jake (Andy Samberg). It is in science-fiction, though, where the creative explanations for or concealment of a bump really shine. As I've mentioned many times on this blog, I spent much of my teens and twenties as a committed X-phile. In the show's lore, its whole structure and story arc underwent radical change when Gillian Anderson became pregn