Video: Ira Glass at the Gel Conference

It’s about surprise and humour. It’s a bit of Storytelling 101 (event leads to event leads to event leads to universal truth). But it’s mostly about craft, and if you tell stories, it’s totally worth 32 minutes of your time. From 2007, here’s Ira Glass at the Gel Conference:

Present again is Ira’s familiar “taking the tools of journalism and applying them to people whom you wouldn’t normally apply them to” mantra.

Particularly interesting is the explanation for why TAL doesn’t have billboards (or “bills”):

One of the differences between our show and the other shows on the public radio is that the other shows will start their show with a list of what’s coming up on the program, which I feel is a sort of singularly uninteresting way to start something. Actually, on our show we would just start the action going. Like, I feel that if we could draw you into the dream of it, you’ll be inside it before you can even think about why you’re inside it or what it is. And it’s far more irresistible.

You can watch the whole video at the Gel site, or if you’re feeling thieve-y, you can just download the FLV file.

Happy Valentimes!

Sooooo good!

Best Live Music Club in Canada

So CBC Radio 3 is doing a big, fancy, link-bait-y poll called Best Live Music Club in Canada. Ordinarily I wouldn’t post about something like this, but my pal Tom’s bar, Phog, made the top 20, which is terrific. Phog is a great venue, both to play and to see a show.

I could encourage you to vote for Phog. I could go on and on, extolling the virtues of this tiny, 60-capacity club in Windsor. I could tell you about the incredible amount of passion that Tom puts into finding, booking, and bringing indie bands and arts events to Windsor. But I won’t. Instead, I offer these two simple exchanges that I hope illustrate why I’ve been voting for Phog.

When I first moved to Windsor, I didn’t know anyone, and I walked into Phog one night. Tom was working the door.

Me: “So what is there to do in this city?”

Tom: “You’re standing in it.”

The second exchange was with co-owner Frank, shortly before I left the bar late one night:

Me (drunk): “I think I have to go home now.”

Frank: “You are home.”

Cheesy? Yes. Sentimental? Yes. But both sure made me feel that I was a really special place. You can vote daily for the Best Live Music Club in Canada, and I encourage you to. It’s going to mean a lot to the club that wins.

The infallibility of iPhoto’s Faces

I haven’t played around with iLife 09 yet, but via an email from Peter, I’ve learned that its Faces feature isn’t perfect:

I guess I don’t need to be too worried about the privacy-destroying ad networks that can track my face I heard Jesse Hirsh talk about this morning on Metro Morning (and that we talked about on Spark last summer).

Corktown Ukulele Jam

My pal Tom gave me a ukulele for Christmas. To me, it’s wonderful. To Jenna, it’s irritating.

So then, I can’t tell you how happy I was to discover the Corktown Ukulele Jam. It started about a month ago, and is held every Wednesday at the Dominion pub on Queen (a five-minute walk from our apartment). Last night, I went for the first time with Jenna and Rae.

Steve and David, the organizers, were welcoming and knowledgeable. Someone played a Jonathan Coulton cover (Re: Your Brains). It was kind of, sort of, like going to ukulele heaven.

I’ll be back next week, and I hope this thing keeps going. It’s terrific. Sometimes I am very glad to live in a city large enough to support something like this.