Here’s some more things of note from my recent podcast listening, as I slowly work off the backlog. Some of this stuff is a month or more old (some of it is years old but I’m just discovering it) but all good.
I heard Justin Kownacki on MacVoices #676. In it, he was talking about PodCamp Pittsburgh but also his vlog narrative series Something to Be Desired. I’ll talk about it more later on, but I’m watching the last episode of season 1 right now over lunch. The acting at times is a little of that forced local theater group style, but overall I’m getting into it. There are like 40 more episodes I have yet to watch, so my opinion has a lot of room to develop but I’m liking it so far.
More RU Sirius love/hate, this time on the love side of the equation. On episode #67, he talked to the makers of the documentary American Hardcore. This sounds really interesting (and I probably need to read the book too) as it seems to fill in exactly the gaps that I had such a problem with in IFC’s Punk:Attitude documentary. Mainly, punk didn’t stop from 1980 to 1990 and just because New York and LA people got blase about it, it didn’t disappear. There is a lot of good stuff in here about the DIY aesthetic, and how a big portion of what made indy punk work was the supportive community of people helping each other out. A lot of these insights are directly applicable to new media, and it would behoove all of us who care about it to pay attention to these lessons of recent history.
The key point in this episode, when the guys won my heart, was when Diana Brown tried to play the “These kids today with their iPods and Gameboys” card, and they refused to accept that. Bravo! I spent most of my life hearing how bad I and my generation were because we weren’t stereotypical hippies like the Baby Boomers. I refuse to do the same thing to today’s kids just because they aren’t like us. Flowers grown in different soil bloom differently, and that is not their moral failing but a fact of nature.
An episode of IT Conversations from the Adaptive Path Conference was an interview conducted by Janice Fraser with Kathan Brown about her art press and book on creativity. There is a whole lot of insight here relevant to new media, about fearlessly approaching your creativity and owning your art. I highly recommend it.