Today's Channel 3 finds

[prog]

All this week I'm going to write reviews of what I watch on Somerville's community access TV. I'm watching them all via TiVo, after going through the series schedule last night and choosing a swath of them to record. I picked shows solely by merit of their titles looking interesting, or their websites (when available) intriguing me. They are all listed on the SCAT schedule as series (as opposed to one-shot dealies).

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"Democracy Now!": a daily news show by the Pacifica Network. I will sum up their whole angle by noting that they consistently refer to the anti-Coalition/anti-government fighters in Iraq as "the resistance".

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"Joey Daytona's World of Adventure": Nominally a call-in show, but nobody seemed to call, and anyway the host -- the title character, apparently an amateur film and car archivist with a tendency to refer to himself in the third person -- stopped displaying the phone number five minutes in. Actually local, unlike the previous show; our man was using the "HOT (host-operated television) Set", a little do-it-yourself mini-studio that was among the things I was shown on my Saturday tour of the SCAT facility.

Mr. Daytona seems to devote much of the show to displaying examples of ancient film he's come across, with a preference towards those that involve race cars somehow. On today's show he showed a 1904 film made by of someone cruising around Boston, and then a piece of video marketing -- old enough to require intertitles -- from a long-ago stock car manufacturer. During both, he played apparently random music samples. (I thought that he might have been trying for a thematic match when he popped in Radiohead's "Everything is in its Right Place" while the video showed assembly line workers, but then he switched to the theme from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" while we were still on the assembly guys, so who knows.)

After about 20 minutes, he interrupted what looked like some 1965-ish race car test footage to just get up and leave without saying another word. He did switch the video to a generic SCAT title card first, but forgot to turn the mics off. I heard the next HOT Set users come in and set up until one of them apparently noticed Mr. D's forgetfulness and pressed the button that dropped the station back into showing the old community-bulletin loop (now to the tune of bleeped-out hip hop).

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

Hee

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

'Democracy Now' has managed to find its way on to a number of public access cable networks. We have it too but I haven't really watched it much. It kinda reminds me of a news show you might see in Romania or some Euroslavian country.

We get some interesting shows on our public access channel including the loony conspiracy theories of Lyndon LaRouche, some bizzare singing asian lady, "Cooking with Bob" (no words ... watch a big hunk of meat cook on a grill for about an hour), "Chess Anyone" (also no words ... call in and play chess against the guy on TV ... all you see is the magnetic chess board and the guy moving the pieces around).

[prog.livejournal.com]

Those last two are just totally awesome.