I'm having so much fun in Vegas I forgot that I'm supposed to be making a movie.

Where to start? I began writing this blog post from the Imperial Ballroom in the Park Plaza in Boston. I’m finishing it from a rental house in Las Vegas. To recap:

This is what happened to my car on July 3rd, less than 24 hours before I was to leave for Boston. I’m not as concerned about the stuff that was stolen as I am about the damage done to the car. Unfortunately, I only have liability coverage on my car insurance, so no help there. I’m really not sure how I’m going to be able to afford to fix it. Maybe I’ll play the nickel slots -- daddy needs a new rear windshield.

Rewind to Boston. I attended the Alliance for Community Media national conference as a representative of SPNN. The conference was held at the Park Plaza Hotel in downtown Boston, and I arrived with two teenage girls in tow. RayLynn and Mai Cha were the two youth chosen from the Set It Up crew to attend the conference. In recent years, there has been a drop off in the youth presence at the ACM conference. In the end, the total registration for youth at this year’s conference was two: Mai Cha and RayLynn. While the number is certainly disheartening, their impact was felt. By the end of the conference, the two had reached quasi-celebrity status. They not only attended but participated in the conference workshops, asking questions and bringing their unique perspectives to the table.

When thinking back on the conference, the word that keeps popping up is “exhausting.” Being the sole adult chaperone, chasing after two teenage girls for sixteen hours a day wore me out. However, it was also unbelievably fun. I had never been to Boston before, and (save for the East Coast attitude and criminally bad driving) the city is fantastic. Our first night, we walked to the river and listened to a live performance by the Boston Pops with special guests Aerosmith, emceed by Dr. Phil (!). This was followed by the most spectacular fireworks display that I have ever witnessed (did you know there are fireworks that explode into wireframe cubes?!).

We walked the Freedom Trail, a red line that twists around downtown Boston (and eventually across the river to Cambridge) and stops at different historical landmarks. We saw the site of the Boston Massacre, the Old South Meeting House where people congregated before the Boston Tea Party, and the graveyard where John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Samuel Adams are buried. We walked around Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market, saw the boats along the Long Wharf, and strolled around Boston Commons. We had fresh octopus in Chinatown, clam chowder at the keynote luncheon, and on our last night in Boston, Mike (the executive director of SPNN) took us out to Legal Seafoods. One of the highlights was the dinner boat cruise aboard the Spirit of Boston, where we spent three hours of a gorgeous day out around the harbor.

Fast forward to today. Current temperature: 102. I arrived yesterday evening, was picked up by Thomas Fuller and whisked away to the Rio. Tom’s friend and housemate Pi-master (so named for his interest in mathematics and his affection of pi-themed clothing) was playing in a final table. After a well-fought run, Pi-master was knocked out in third place, netting him $85,904. Needless to say, the experience has been surreal. In the first few hours, I saw Phil Ivey, Doyle Brunson, Howard Lederer, Scotty Nguyen, Joseph Hachem, Gus Hansen, and Phil Hellmuth. I even ran into Simpsons co-creator and Mental Engineering panelist Sam Simon.

More to come…

Set It Up is over. The 2005-2006 season has drawn to a close. The end of an era. As I struggle with the idea of the next three months without my daily Set It Up fix, I'm comforted by all of the exciting things that are going on this summer. The Youth Advisory Committee will begin meeting every other Friday, and their amazing video promo should be edited by Thursday. I've been busy coordinating the neighborhood video classes that will run throughout the month of August. Arrangements have been made for the ACM Conference - RayLynn, Mai Cha, and I will be in Boston From July 4th-9th. The media committee refuses to lose momentum as we continue our work on various projects. Long story short, there will be plenty to keep me busy this summer.

I'd also like to point out the renaissance that my small blogging community seems to be undergoing. If you click on any of the links to other blogs in the sidebar, you'll find some really fantastic content. From Riley's slideshow of youth-produced artwork to Jeremy's rant about Tires Plus; from Roxanne's dissertation on BBQs, Apples to Apples, and race to Tom's existential observations about life, poker, and the pursuit of happiness -- it makes me believe in the internet again. I have always been fascinated with the internet as a communication device, a social networking tool. Rather than an anomie-inducing threat, I prefer to see its potential for community building. There's something beautiful and dangerous about its decentralized power, one of the last refuges in mass media where the radical, the independent producer, and everyone else get a chance to speak. Maybe this is what drew me to public access television, and why I'm sticking around for another year.

The season finale of Set It Up is now available! Click the link on the sidebar to view it.

Check it out, there's a picture of me in the CTEP Annual Report! And look, there's Ivan and Mai Cha too!

The new episode of Set It Up is now available online! There's a link to it on the sidebar, be sure to check it out.

The one thing that has been keeping me from updating this blog has been Google Video. In attempting to upload the latest episode of Set It Up, it has given me nothing but grief. I think that our last episode was just fantastic, and I really want everyone to see it, so I'll keep working on the problem. In the meantime, here are a few more photos from the Set It Up Photo Project to appease your unquenchable thirst for youth media.




What else have I been up to, you ask? We've been working on the last episode of Set It Up, which is a "producer showcase," meaning that the youth can choose any topic or style of video that they wish. Just as in the last episode, we are going to do an outdoor shoot where the hosts introduce the segments. The twist? We'll be bbqing in a park for the shoot. It's going to be awesome/delicious. I've also been working on coordinating four summer video classes that we will be running. We'll be working with middle-school aged kids in four distinct neighborhoods around Saint Paul. And the most exciting thing I have to report? The Set It Up t-shirts just arrived about five minutes ago!

Busy as always. One of the coolest things I've been involved with lately is the Set It Up photo project. A while ago, I came up with the idea of having the Set It Up crew take home digital cameras and take pictures of their surroundings. We would then use the pictures a) as an introduction to Photoshop, b) as the raw material for a video segment, and c) as youth-created art to decorate our walls! I collaborated with Roxanne to run the program, and here are some of the pictures we ended up with!

These past few days have been pretty exciting. On Friday, the Youth Advisory Committee met to begin pre-production on the promo they will be creating for SPNN's Youth Education department.

There are three main ideas we want them to convey in the video: people should watch our shows, join our programs, and come to our events. The idea the YAC finally decided on is to follow someone around who is putting up flyers. As soon as a flyer is posted, they'll use chroma key to have it "come to life" and start talking about how awesome SPNN is. The magic of television.

Our current episode of Set It Up is almost finished. We had an open day on Sunday for people to work on their pieces. After watching most of the segments, Mejid remarked that our current episode is going to be the best yet. Get excited.

SPNN was abuzz on Saturday. Mental Engineering, the television show I help out on, had some fantastic guests. Writer, radio host, and SNL alum Al Franken was there. He was joined by Sam Simon (the co-creator of the Simpson), Margaret Werry (an historian from the University of Minnesota), and Leola Johnson (my former advisor from Macalester). Macalester College President Brian Rosenberg and Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman were both in attendance as well.

As if this weren't enough, professional poker player Tom Fuller has been staying with us for the past week. Highlights have included seeing the Joggers, Giant Drag, and Pretty Girls Make Graves at Triple Rock, getting him hooked on The Office and having him declare it the best show on television, and going to see Sigur Ros (that last one doesn't happen until tonight, but when it does, it will definitely be a highlight).

Two new videos. The first one is on the the CTEP Media Committee Vlog, which you can always access using the link in the sidebar on your right. The other is a short video that I produced using footage I shot when we were at the Western Sculpture Park for Set It Up. I call it A Day in the Park.