Archive for May, 2006
25 May, 2006 | No comments
Why Life IS Like My Bathroom Drain
There are things in life I will never ever learn until I own them… like if I owned my own home I might find it in my own best interests to go to the hardware store invest 50 cents in a hair stopper… but I don’t own my own house. I rent an appartment. It occurs to me once every three months when I am reminded by the plumber to purchase a hair stopper because that would probably stop the hair from clogging in the tub… but I don’t and I probably won’t… nor will I learn how to clean it on my own. It’s someone elses problem and dime so the impact on my life is very little other then an annoying week of harassing my landlord into calling the plumber because taking a shower is like taking a bath only I don’t want to take a bath I want to take a shower…
so what does this have to do with Media et all and/or at all? I’m not sure but there must be an analogy in there somewhere… oh yes I remember…. I never appreciated how hard it was to make vlogs and podcasts and such… it’s easy to judge and that’s what we do as viewers of life… because it’s cheap and free to watch and have theories… but doing is hard work and for a website and podcast and vlog to look great there is plumbing to do and things get clogged up and it’s not like we “The N1L team” have plumbers to call when things aren’t draining properly… we have to roll up our sleeves and scrape money together and get dirty and learn the ins and outs of the plumbing trade so if you want to come over and take a shower you take a shower and not a shathe (shower and bathe or if you like a bower)… sometimes we are like an ikea nightmare where we all see the directions and it should be step by step but if you can’t figure out the picture it really sucks that the directions are not in English and that you have to buy special parts to fix the parts… anyway now I know I’m not going anywhere… this is all because I have to design a website for my class… and I’m stuck… and part of me wants to give up but part of me really needs the shelving and just spent 90 bucks on the furniture and I tried the avoidance route only to find out I couldn’t take a relaxing bathe because my plumbing is screwed up… AND it’s bull the way they make it look fun on those TLC makeover swap neighbors do it yourself living room projects… because it’s not fun because there are not beautiful people milling around making sure you task gets mastered all so we at home can watch in a neat half hour show… instead you have to take a bower and your room is messy and none of your friends that know code will answer the phone because they think it’s time you learned to swim even though you are swimming already in shathe water which is disgusting thank you for asking…
have i mentioned i need to build a website by oh yeah tomorrow…
19 May, 2006 | 5 comments
Will and Grace both say Potato but I say po-tat-toe
So here’s a thing I’m tossing around in my head… it’s a hot potato idea so I am like thinking it and then passing it along and if you drop it then you are out.
Will and Grace came to an end this evening and I realized that tv love is about relationships and people working on relationships and the whole show revolves around the characters as they evolve (even though usually there is very very little evolution unless children are involved who physically grow up and out of the character before our eyes)… we get the “characters” and their “flaws” and we relate to them having to interact and react to one another. In TV shows there is no pressure for the cast members to even have the outside world interact with the cast it’s really about the cast and their relationships with one another… and the other people are props or tools used to help redefine and draw out the “character” in our favorite characters.
It’s a bud of a thought. I’m not sure I have a point… other then these dramas and sit-coms are the only cast of characters who bring us some consistency in this world… we know this time slot on this day this show will happen… tragedy may strike the show may get interupted but we then rejoice when it comes back to its regularly scheduled time slot where the characters don’t have to deal with the world tragedy they will just deal with one another in the very typical way we are used to them behaving… and that must be part of why we like them. We can count on them. We can count on their reactions. We can count on their timing. We enjoy the familiarity and routine of the characters and their routine.
Ok I have to go back to having the flu now. And then I hit the airwaves in a few hours (because I am now part of a mediated routine… for others… ) Someone who is not so cracked out on Nyquil could probably take over the hot potato of an idea and expand upon it from here…
14 May, 2006 | 3 comments
Chris Cornell, audio slave
We’ve been having a rough time of it this semester, between some annoying technical difficulties and a truckload of school work that has prevented us from adequately dealing with those issues. Due to ongoing phone malfunctions in the studio, we’ve had quite a bit of cleanup to do on some of the interviews. Hopefully this will all change in a couple of weeks when we bag the FM portion of our show and go mobile with podcasting.
Fortunately, my colleagues have a good, if somewhat sadistic, sense of humor. Colin the audio guy recently handed off this CD to me to straighten out some noise issues on an interview. Actually I think the best thing about the interview is the title of the CD:
Ha. Ha.
Because of these issues Irene has also been forced to record some interviews at home using a digital lecture recorder and her home phone line. She’s recently joined Colin in attempting to brighten my day with fun CD titles:
Ha. Ha. Ha.
Oh well, it’s nice to feel needed. Although I have to admit that in this case I would rather toss that clipping recorder in a trash bin and not feel so needed. Soon, very soon!
13 May, 2006 | 2 comments
Chips and Typing and Schadenfreude
Ok… so I need like a black computer… or orange rather… something that blends my cheeto finger prints better…
Now back to the show… just got off air from the Free FM show, which was an interesting topic. We discussed… what the German’s refer to as schadenfreude… which is basicaly the guilty pleasure we take in other people’s pain… and in particular how that relates to television. It’s one thing for us to know it is morally wrong to gawk and be entertained by things that are clearly terrible moments… moments that would suck if they just happened in general but the fact that they happened in public to a public figure make the headline news and become viral emails and we all watch and gawk while someone is humiliated in some way… why oh why do we enjoy it?
I don’t know. I really do not know. I spoke at a High School last week about N1L and television and media and I’m trying to inspire these kids to become active consumers of media rather then just passively take it in… we can create we have tools and we have platforms… (random aside… I asked how many had a myspace page and they all rose their hand… and I said how many of your parents know about your page and only two people in the room rose their hand… so I said who owns “your” space on myspace… meaning you are defining your “space” so who owns it… they answered Tom!!!… and I said no no, not Tom but our good friend an pal Rupert he does not greet you hello and ask you to be his friends kiddies because he does not really want you to know he’s around and he owns the site and therefore he “knows” you and your likes and dislikes and your age and your town and he’s going to store it in a fancy database to target market and advertise to you….) m’kay so back to us learning and feeling inspired… ok so then a girl raises her hand and says “Well why do we like the bad stuff?” and i said “I don’t know I don’t get it myself…
and it’s true… we like the bad stuff, we like the dirt, we like to see Tom Cruise get water sprayed in his face and we like to see Tom Cruise get upset and call that man a “jerk”… we liked to see that Tara Reid’s boob slipped out of her dress and that her breast was mangled we liked that her breast was still in the recovery faze and so her nipple looked wierd… that’s horrifying… that’s every persons worst nightmare to be in front of people with no clothes on and not realize it… and it happened to her and that was on of the most viral video clips on the internet….
Why do we like it? I don’ t know… but the kids I spoke to were freshmen and sophomores… they were probably all of seven when the Seattle show aired they didn’t see that season… BUT the entire school had seen the episode where I got hit in the face… that scene gets replayed at nauseum because people like seeing me get hit… they enjoy seeing me get hit… people want to see it again and again… that’s the only thing I actually can’t watch… you see because it is me… i don’t enjoy watching that….
9 May, 2006 | 4 comments
Wanna B On The Show?
Call for all N1L’overs… we’re doing the studio for the last time this Friday! From here (hear) on out (shout) we will be recording out of our in home studio… AND since NONE of us own a home (albeit Skye does live with her ‘rents… but it’s still not her home) anyhooters we will be recording out of one of our tiny SF apartments…
M’kayDokey so if you have an N1L story… perhaps how we met (parasocially of course… if you don’t know what parasocial means then you missed the definition a couple blogs back).
Additionally, got some IDEAS and/or SPECIAL requests… or QUESTIONS… let us know and we’ll set you up with a call in time for Friday’s show… this way we can parasocially love you back (ok the word was used improperly as parasocial relates to mediated relationships only… )
I need to be working on my finals. If I got paid for procrastinating I would be SO rich… and I would use that money to purchase a pink jet to fly us around town to our new home away from school…
4 May, 2006 | No comments
How quickly
…. hmmm how long did it take Andrew Cohen to come check out our site after he got hosed on CNN’s show!!! I guess he is the creative director at Bravo - holy cow he couldn’t even creatively come up with a good comeback they will have to change his title to the not-super-creative director. “Bravo” for Andrew Cohen the little hollywood lemming that could… and the poor host might have been on my side except his tongue was busy kissing the butt of the guy sitting next to him… because when you are a host and you rip and read you gots to really have something to say or else there are a lot of rip and readers ready to hooked-on-teleprompter-phonics right into your not so cushy host job.
—————————————————————————————————
“McGee’s feet are wet enough, and her ideas — and personality — are fresh enough that she could be a fit for any number of talk stations. Preferably on one where somebody’s listening.”
- Ben Fong-Torres, Radio Waves column (San Francisco Chronicle)
“Irene McGee is like a double agent of change, deconstructing the media by becoming the media. N1L is a secret rallying call for everyone to join in the revolutionary fun. Turn up the volume.”
- David Pescovitz, BoingBoing.net
“Smart and very funny, digitized. Never have I enjoyed an interview more, both before, and after.”
-Lawrence Lessig, Author
“N1L provides a bridge between the public’s questions about all things media and the actual sources they don’t have access to. It’s a unique show. Irene is able combine her passion with humor and charm to create a fun yet thought provoking atmosphere for discussion.”
- Joanne Griggioni, Director of Talent Comedy Central
“She’s the one: gee, Irene MgGee, bringing together engaging conversation and media with a mission. Unlike the rest of the pack, she projects the four C’s–caring, commitment, creativity and conscience. What more is there? If a media literate America is possible, Irene will help make it happen with her distinctive brand of edutainment with edge, popular podcasts and righteous radio.”
- Danny Schecter TV producer, filmmaker, blogger Executive Producer of Globalvision Inc.
“Irene gives media a full going over- trying to figure out what makes it tick, its benefits, and its drawbacks, and basically pulling away the curtain of the entertainment and information culture.”
- Jack Vaughn, VP Records, Comedy Central
“Doing the show was fun. I must tell you that I love the title of your show. In the early days, when I had to do interviews and was nervous, I convinced myself that since I never listening to that show, no one did, and so it did not matter what I said, I would just be talking to someone who was like a friend and should just tell myself, no one is listening!”
- Amy Tan, Author
“What Irene does crosses every boundary to weave a conversation about the media as a whole, including the internet and new media, to the old. She brings humor, intelligence and passion to a topic that allows us to examine the media in a new way, and in so doing, to examine ourselves.”
- Jimmy Wales, Founder Wikipedia
2 May, 2006 | 7 comments
Jobless…
M’kay… so how is it possible that our lil’ podcast that could travel the world ain’t bringing in the bacon. Although it IS bringing in some great fan letters and we can’t say enough how much we appreciate everyone’s support. It’s amazing we did the Skye quiz this week and we had a few unanswered questions which we threw out to our listeners to see if people would respond AND so many of you wrote in!!! It’s so cool.. especially since we accidently just stumped ourselves.
Anyway Chris and Skye are about to graduate… so is Melissa. Colin and I are on the super seven year program to get our master’s… but either way we have got to figure out a way to monitize this baby! It is soooooo hard to produce a radio show every week with soooo many guests (seriously since doing my other show on the station with the big ol’ company I learned that the reason that radio uses syndicated shows is because it is easier to produce, simple, and cost effective)… just throw a host in a room with a mic and broadcast BUT that’s not what I consider to be entertainment. I guess I could just get on the mic and talk about stuff but really it’s way cooler to get people from all different sides of an issue talking… I mean WHAT other show could get Noam Chomsky and a producer from Fox news to discuss the same topic… AND have both parties leave feeling good about what they talked about… all these media shows like to do these fake talking head things where someone from the “left” dukes it out with someone from the “right” but really that keeps everything polarized… and that’s not how life and media life works… black and white TV’s no longer exist and we shouldn’t be treating important topics as if they only exist in a black and white TV world….
I am a venting machine… oooh we want to make this work but someone has got to take the risk and turn our dream into a reality… waaaaaaa waaaaaaa or we’ll have to stop and get real jobs even though this is a real full time job for all of us!
Ideas welcome!!!!