I got hooked on radio drama when I was young mostly by accident — it followed the comedy hour on CHUM-FM. I listened to Orson Welles on the The Third Man serial long before I saw any of his movies. Thanks to various sites, I’ve been enjoying the old time radio drama on my MP3 player.

Almost a year ago I was struck with the idea that it would be interesting to make a kind of audio drama that took advantage of the MP3 player, to turn it into a kind of primitive interactive story. I grew up on computer text games like Zork and books of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure ilk so it was a natural fit. And here’s the result: the first 20 minute episode of “The Letter” that you can listen to on an MP3 player or the computer. At the end of each track, you decide what should happen next…

Try this Flash player below or click through for other playing options:

Read the rest of this post »

My pal Scott lent me his copy of The Winking Circle, a DVD made by some kids in small-town Ontario that documents their attempts to “eccentrify their lives.” More than anything else I’ve seen, it reflects the essence of the cut-n-paste photocopied zines — it’s an hour long piece that masterfully mixes the visual eye-candy of skateboard stunts and crazy haircuts and artbikes with stirring music and non-idealogical philosophy. It’s spectacle reclaimed, really: spectacle given a soul.

So it’s not so strange, really, that Coke wanted a piece of it. And why go to the trouble of buying something you can just steal?
Read the rest of this post »