Video Pod Chronicles

The Pod Chronicles staff today had breakfast with Virginia Geier of the Sundance Institute and Margaret Hunt, executive director of the Utah Arts Council. The following audioblog episode is our interview about the upcoming Sundance Film Festival. Virginia noted that you will be able to see many of the Sundance Film Festival short films on-line immediately after they open at the festival, which opens January 19th and closes January 29th. There is already lots of video available at the site, including videoblog-type posts showing preparation for the festival and interviews with filmmakers.



Sundance

Thursday, December 22, 2005

MY GOLDFISH AT THE HOTEL MONACO, SALT LAKE CITY

He is bigger than life
in the optics of his little bowl
swimming around the perimeter
kissing the glass
wiggling his lucent tail.

I have named him Fred
while smoking my weekly cigarette,
a Dunhill red
made to "unique standards of perfection."

My ex smoked Dunhills
once in a while
around the time she took up jogging
twenty-five years ago.

The BYU Philharmonic plays
a Christmas hymn on the Sony.
A car drives by slowly in the dark.
Fred angles down to touch the pretty pebbles.

Suddenly he darts
about as if scared he's running
out of time and space.

Easy, Fred.
Your world appears to work,
and so, today, does mine.

Todd Parmley lives in New York City, but each Christmas for the past four years he has starred in David Sedaris's The Santaland Diaries, a production of Tooth & Nail Theatre in Salt Lake City. The 70-minute performance is a wickedly funny behind-the-scenes view of the elves and Santas at Macy's. In this MHPC interview, Parmley talks about the show and how a friend of his who actually worked as a Macy's elf reported that Sedaris's sendup is not that far from the way it really is in Santaland.

I flew to Salt Lake this afternoon for a WESTAF meeting tomorrow and met Parmley by coincidence before tonight's show. The show has generally been sold out, but I was lucky enough to buy a ticket, and Parmley said he would be glad to come find me after the show for a podcast, which he did.

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

With quick e-mail help from Propaganda's tech support, I was able to salvage the missing podcast and trim it considerably. I'm still baffled by the iTunes Music Store connection. Yesterday MHPC showed up on a search of podcasts, but today it's nowhere to be found. In any event, here is episode 2, a review of Mile High Oratorio:

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

I worked for two and a half hours this morning on a new episode of Mile High Pod Chronicles, only to find that the audio was terrible and it was, worst of all, boring. This was a big setback, because the topic was last night's performance of Westside Oratorio, written and directed by Tony Garcia at the King Center at Auraria Campus. I was so pumped up about the performance that I thought it would be easy to capture the buzz in a podcast. The Oratorio begins with the story of the first immigrants to Denver from Mexico and continues through the leveling of homes to create the Auraria campus where many children of the displaced families went on to earn advanced degrees. Tony himself teaches at the campus, so his artistic creation represented a full circle. The music was written and conducted by his friend Daniel Valdez. The show was over-the-top wonderful, a presentation of Su Teatro.

Giving in to the fact that this podcasting business is not going to be a total snap, I bought a book titled Secrets of Podcating by Bart G. Farkas. I feel such an urge to post new episodes of The Barclay Show and the Pod Chronicles that I'm tempted to put things up before they're ready. Down boy.

New glitch: The Mile High Pod Chronicles can now be found at the iTunes Store, but the Barclay Show has disappeared. Can you only publish one podcast per person at iTunes?

Podcast

Monday, December 19, 2005