Tag Archive for Rotcast

Rotcast Ep. 02 Show Bee

rotcast_showbee.mp3

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This show starts with Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin’s take on Rimsky Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebees. We snatched quite a lot of the Isabella Rossellini, Green Porno audio where she talks about being a queen bee and acts out how bees behave.

I liked the idea that this was show number two and that we were making a pun on the letter B. This is the only show where the teaser from the previous show actually announces real content appearing in the following show. Most of the time the teaser sets up the theme, but does not announce real future content.

Next we turn activist and present some discussion of colony collapse. Colony collapse is the shorthand for the problem of dying bees. Bees are key pollinators of the world’s food crops. This environmental problem stayed with us because it was a mystery and it could be just the tip of a frightening iceberg. There are new revelations surrounding the problem of colony collapse. The Daily Mail of London (David Derbyshire, January 21, 2011) reports that a study by the US Department of Agriculture’s Bee Research Laboratory, (…didn’t know we had one of those) lays blame for colony collapse with a type of pesticide called a neo-nicotinoid.

Two reasons why the bees dying might have remained a mystery until now: first, traces of the pesticides in the bodies of bees are nearly undetectable. And second, the Agriculture Department’s study took so long to get out to the public. It hasn’t been published. Possibly the US Agriculture Department is prevented by law from releasing information that might affect the profits of chemical corporation. I wouldn’t be surprised. If you read this and you buy or sell these pesticides, Please don’t!  Boycott the German company Bayer until they cease the manufacture of the pesticides. They may not be the only company who makes them, but they seem to have a large foothold in Europe. I don’t believe we can overreact in this case. The Rotcast podcast does not usually care to make political statements, but we did in this show.

This is followed by our first interview with a dead person in a feature we titled, with little inspiration, Dead Air. We intended the feature to be a passing parity of the NPR show Fresh AirFresh Air often reruns a show when someone they once interviewed dies. And we thought our Dead Air might be an interesting way to talk about the afterlife in an entertaining manner. We intended to focus on dead artists or creative people exclusively. To work with the “bee” theme, we choose Sylvia Plath, as our initial interviewee.  Plath wrote a series of very intriguing poems using bee imagery.

We stopped the Dead Air feature in episode 9 but, we reprised it once more in episode 13. These segments took enormous time and energy and they never seemed finished enough.–Rotwang

Show Breakdown:

Intro music: Flight of the Bumblebees

Audio clips from Bobby McFerrin Interview with Kurt Andersen, Studio 360

Music by Ralph Buckely “Honey Bees are Dying”

Audio Clip: “There was a bee…” from EverAfter (1998 starring Drew Barrymore)

Commercial: Kellogg’s Honeycomb Cereal

The JuicyTruth Wine Review: Bug Juice, a Muscato di Asti by Rinaldi our rating 89 out of 100 points.

Music for the JuicyTruth is: “Then She Stopped” by Dizzy Gillespie

Teaser: Richard Widmark defines Film Noir

Music out: “Honeybee” by Much Love

www.rotcast.com, Skype: callrotcast, e-mail: mail@rotcast.com

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Rotcast Ep. 01: Cherry

Ep. 01: Cherry

The first episode starts strong with love for rock-goddess Joan Jett. Her powerful crunching version of “Cherry Bomb” opens the show. This show predated the bio-pic of the Runaways by a few months. I guess besides the song being on topic, its underlying message, which is about a sexy new bad girl (or podcast) ready to explode into your awareness, seemed like a grabber. This also foreshadows the embarrassing nature of this first show, which is as much about sex as anything else. Mix that with the interspersed stories about my dating and race relations and you have a perfect storm of mortifying digital evidence recorded and archived. Ouch.

I also decided at the beginning of Rotcast that we would not use x-rated words or language. So there is all this implied, or creepy, talk around sexually charged situations. Is there a clamoring from the Internet for this type of restraint? I doubt it. I didn’t mean for the trappings of the show to bait-and-switch listeners. It is just my nature: I enjoy adult ideas, but I dislike “shock” language.

We used way too much found audio in this first set of ten shows. But we were learning to edit. Not just to fix flubs, but to simulate believable dialog and timing where there was none before. I’d like to say we have achieved mastery over this but we are trending away from pieced together interviews. I like doing them, but they take along time to prepare, often they don’t work, and we started to realize, they might not add to the reputation of the celebrities. We tended to only pick people who made a positive impression on us, so we weren’t going out of the way to belittle them. –Rotwang

Show Breakdown:

Intro music: Joan Jett’s “Cherry Bomb”
Joan Jett: Interviews with Rosanne; Interview with Japanese TV
Audio Clip “Joey was Cherry…” from Deadwood TV series
Voices talk about their first idols (Jenny McCarthy, Donny Osmond, Angelina Jolie, Diana Ross)
Commercial: “Cherry Mash” written and song by Jim Salestrom
Audio Clip: “You haven’t had and licks yet…” from the movie Dazed and Confused.
Commercial: Trailer for the movie Cherry 2000
Music: Kid Creole and the Coconuts: “Part of my Design”
The JuicyTruth Wine Review: La Crema, Pinot Noir 2006 our rating 72 out of 100 points.
Music for the JuicyTruth is: “Then She Stopped” by Dizzy Gillespie
Audio Clip teaser: Isabella Rossellini: Green Porno
Music out: “Sweet Cherry Wine” by Tommy James and the Shondells

www.rotcast.com, Skype: callrotcast, e-mail: mail@rotcast.com

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Rebel By Default

This will be part of the “Rebel Rebel episode 12″ of the Rotcast podcast.

I was a rebel only once…by default. It was Richmond, Kentucky…Model High School. I Google-ed the school website out of curiosity and the students now call themselves the “Patriots”. I’m happy to say mine was a less politically correct time. When I went to Model, the older students enjoyed rekindling the spirit of the losing South, possibly because there was no danger of bullets or bayonets reaching them from across time and making them regret that choice. Kentucky was a border state during the Civil War. But when I went to Model High School we were definitely “Rebels”.

The year was 1971.

The real Model High School rebels were the juniors and seniors. They were wild, and free. We were younger, impressionable, and hardly rebellious. We merely watched in awe.

I was settling into life in Kentucky. I had been through several traumatic events when my eye was caught by an older women. She was in 8th and I was in 7th grade. Thankfully, I don’t remember the awkwardness, but I can remember one very scary date I made with the beautiful Mary Sue. I’m going to remember it backwards.

First I arrived home shaken. I believe my mom remembers this as well. I must have presented quite a picture. Before I made it home, I had sprinted through a graveyard whistling. Quite a cliché that, but there was in fact a graveyard between the Eastern Kentucky University campus auditorium and my direct path home. It wouldn’t have made any sense to walk around.

On some other night it wouldn’t have been so eerie. I was on foot and alone after my date was picked up. The college students headed towards their campus dorms in the opposite direction. No one was heading in my direction. I was too young to drive so I waited with my date Mary outside the auditorium. Her family eventually came and picked her up. I felt a little better emerging from the theater alive. I had been expending half my energies trying to hide any signs of fear, while sitting with Mary. It was Halloween and I was afraid of the film.

The movie we had just seen was The House that Screamed. A poorly dubbed Spanish horror AKA: La residencia. I never enjoyed horror films but what was most unnerving about the experience was that the audience was made mostly of screaming college girls. They were having a terrific time screaming at every opportunity. I now realize they were trying to be funny due to the title of the film. Well it was too much audience participation for me and it had the effect of an extra cinematic sensation, like a William Castle picture. He was the impresario who installed buzzers under patron’s theater seats to provoke an additional adrenalin rush at key moments.

It this film the big reveal at the end is a mother has an insane son who builds a “perfect woman” out of body parts taken from various boarding school girls, whom he has murdered and butchered, and assembled into a horrific mess. Yuck! No one suspects the boy, because he is young and small. The movie lays some ground work for the boys psychotic behavior. Earlier in the film you see the mother repeatedly telling her son that the girls in her care (and that he finds attractive) are NO good. And the mother is a little too clingy. So in the end, the lunatic basically implicates his mother in his crimes. She drove him to it.

I found the film disturbing for its themes and dramatic presentation. My mission was a romantic one, The slaughter happening on screen was a distraction. But we were very young rebels. There was not much more to be expected from that date besides hanging out with college kids.–Rotcast

I have just ordered the DVD of La Residencia. I think enough time has passed now.

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