LenEdgerly.com

On the regional train to Boston, which makes many more stops than the lickety-split Acela, I'm enjoying the fuzzy edges of my thinking after a night of fewer than four hours of sleep in Lancaster. I stayed up late doing a Video Pod Chronicles episode, then spent the usual amount of time too wired to sleep, replaying the vid numerous times, admiring the little details that make it pleasing to me, like using fade-in transitions to move between one speaker and the next.

In this mellow mood, I was particularly struck by a video blog I came across from a Twitter friend, podcaster and blogger, Deek Deekster, of the Islington section of London. It's a simple creation, with no music, no titles, none of the things I hold to be so crucial in my own podcasts. But it drew me all the way to the end, about 20 minutes. Deek comes across as a grumpy guy who thinks too much, so I can relate to him. The video is shot on a walk through Islington, which he alternately likes and dislikes as a place to live. He shows us someone doing a yoga pose, an example of what he sourly calls "people doing healthy and dynamic things." He zooms in on cute dogs in a park, noting that a man walks a wide arc to avoid them, rightly fearing they could at any time turn into a howling pack of killers. The video made me laugh and made me think, about how all these pretty places in the civilized world exist in a kind of bubble that could burst by the agent of climate change, a grocer's strike, or who knows what. He's right, of course, but to cope on a day-to-day basis, I mostly avoid dwelling in such thoughts. It's still good to have them said out loud once in a while.

So this is New Media: raw and real stuff we'll never see--even on Public Broadcasting--completely unpredictable, original content being offered up into the cyber-commons every moment of the day from all over the world. Most of it unwatchable and worthless. Some of it sublime.

Labels: Islington London Deek Deekster Twitter new media

Thursday, August 30, 2007