“buildbetterbarrel - nine events in new media” is a series of short vignettes that trace the media heritage and folklore of St. Louis, Missouri. Backdrops include Cahokia Mounds, the Chicago lakefront, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, and a street front media lab which operated on September 11, 2001. buildbetterbarrel remembers St. Louis’s Marshall McLuhan and Father Walter Ong. And it considers why McLuhan and Ong were the first “to hear” how electronic media would turn streets into stages for storytellers and myth builders. The documentary is also an epilogue to another story, another myth - one about Josephine Baker, Walter Winchell and J. Edgar Hoover.

:: buildbetterbarrel (wmv, 40 min.)

www.secretbaker.com/digital-city.html
www.buildbetterbarrel.typepad.com

FILM FESTIVALS & SCREENINGS

:: The Media Ecology Association Convention - Mexico City (June 6, 2007)
:: National Media Education Conference - St. Louis (June 23, 2007)
:: St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase (July 2007)