Rooted in their legendary stomping grounds of Asbury Park, New Jersey, follow the story at the heart & soul of Springsteen’s E-Street band through a series of edited YouTube videos populated by Popcorn’s YouTube plug-in. Shuffle through layers of moveable polaroid pictures embedded with Popcorn’s Google Map, Flickr, Twitter, and Google News plug-ins. Dig into Street Views of the historic bars and streets of Asbury Park, explore or submit your own Flickr pictures and populate the Twitter streams with your own updates.

I send out two emphatic thank yous: First to Anna Sobiepanek who is the programming lead on this project and one of the lead developers working on Popcorn since its conception. Anna took the interactive heart and soul of this project and went to work massaging and advancing the Popcorn.js library to turn out our sweet Beta version reality, with speed and passion.

Second, a massive musical, heart and soul salute to Jake Clemons. It was during our own creative collaborations between music, video and interactivity ( Love’ll Never Change | A Fool in Love ) that we learned the sad news of the death of Jake’s iconic uncle, Clarence Clemons. Jake is a musical force, an amazing soul and is burning the Clemons musical fire warmly and brightly in our collective road ahead.

This hypervideo experience is rooted in my passion for story telling and the goal of creating meaningful online experiences that resonate and integrate with people’s lives. It comes out of my learning and explorations with Mozilla Foundation’s amazing Web Made Movies community and the amazing Popcorn.js HTML5 javascript library that drives its passionate forarys into the future of interactive video and the open web. This prototype is also a result of my membership and training in the wonderful P2PU online education community.

Let me know what you think and I’d be interested in hearing of any interactive story experiences that have really resonated with you in the past couple of years. What works? What doesn’t? It remains new and evolving territory for experimentation and learning.

Gospel Space – Interactive Music Television. I was Co- Director and Editor for the pilot of this interactive, user generated, user rated, music discovery show, a convergent media competition to find the next great gospel singer from the grass roots of unknown. Gospel Space was produced by new media pioneer McLean Greaves and his production house, The Nimble Company with broadcast partner Vision TV.

Creative Commons Licence from SBC9

I live in a city. Now there’s any number of problems that can scare a person about a city, violence, crowds, pollution… For me it’s just one thing: Grid lock. Sure, everyone gets frustrated by it, angry. It’s not a pleasurable thing. But me, it actually scares me. My knuckles turn white, I start sweating, my heart rate picks up, my mouth gets dry, and I run from it, like I do my imagination in a midnight woods. It’s a bad thing, so call me a coward, but I just don’t want to get involved. That’s when I head north to escape to the open fields, the fresh air, the sandy beaches and pristine waters, joining the Friday night traffic that stretches like a tapeworm on Hwy 400. I guess that’s why they tell you to face your fears.

But there’s something else out there on those bare county roads. Not a thing so much as a business, a rare trade, and one particular to these parts of Ontario. As you crawl into Perkinsfield, in a township called Tiny, past summer signs that boast of giant “asparagus – 20 feet”, you’ll find the first hint of their kind. Just off the dirt shoulder, where brake lights are filtered by dust, sits the truest answer to grid lock. This one’s an old TTC street car, propped up on a set of aimless tracks. The trolley was carted up to these parts a year ago, retired from its public duties and, under a fresh coat of paint, found a new persona. The RED ROCKET was freshly toasted as the latest addition of the Chip Wagon industry.

Yes the Chip Wagon. Whether you’ve bathed in the masterful brilliance of a “fry” well done or suffered in the bowels over a bad batch of gravy, these double parked beauties are a salute to the idea of stop and go. Locomotive burger shacks, a Meals on Wheels of sorts. Sure it’s not low fat health food. If you’re lethargically overweight, with high cholesterol, maybe you should reconsider that meal plan, and if you’re an ardent supporter of the benefits of trail mix, then drive on. But there’s no denying the place they have in the landscape.

In Tiny there are three, a trinity of sorts. PERKIE’S is the cleverly named trailer hitch cabin that sits by the amber flash crossroads of Perkinsfield. The Red Rocket is an eye catcher that’s opened up just down the road, the smell of competition wafting out of the smoke stacks or maybe that’s poutine. But that would be Vinnie’s, they serve poutine. The Grand Daddy of the bunch, Vinnie’s is the blue and white reformed ice cream truck, whose tires have dug deeper with each spring thaw. They’ll have seen 16 summers this year. Their flabby rubber and grinding rims assured me that this vehicle has no grand illusions of global road trips in its future. Vinnie was the founder and the man who first applied the emergency brake off the main drag in Lafontaine. Whether it was careful market research or a dwindling gas gauge, it’s there he stayed to build his reputation each summer since.

In the industry of Chip Wagons, a trade that lives and dies on word of mouth, your reputation is your prize. Everyone knows this. Greg Forget who now carries the spatula behind Vinnie’s banks on it, as do the big boys like McDonalds. No the mighty McD isn’t a wagon but Vinnie’s is, after all, in the same business. It’s the burger, fries and coke, three words that should be added to the Constitution. There’s our distinct society. The car and the burger and fries. Whatever you might think is our cultural identity, that’s a huge piece of it right there. Of course the great scourge has become fat. Deep fried means tasty and deep fry means fat, right! I could hardly contain my scared laughter when I read about Procter and Gamble’s latest invention called OLESTER. A fake fat, what they call polyester sucrose that tastes like fat without the fat content. Polyester was something I wore in the 70’s, not something I want to ingest. The FDA approved it with the mention of the possible side effects for the digestive system. it seems that any large dosage of OLESTER, that is anything larger than a bag of potato chips, turns it into an instant laxative. And, ok ya, it removes all nutritional value from the food as the food can’t be digested. Oooh yummy, sounds great to me. To think how many of these things go on behind those vaulted doors is a little unnerving. But that’s the world of big business, where massive quantities are sold, and huge amounts of money are stuffed away.

That’s where such Frankenstein theories dwell. And then things get smaller, and you slow down a bit and there it is again, just off to the side of the road, a little smoke stack pumping out that familiar smell and some guy’s smothering his poutine with ketchup. It’s a pure Canadian pit stop and it’s here in our backyards.

NOTE: I published this story some summers ago, hence the OLESTER reference may be dated, at least I certainly hope it’s dated and remained so, but none the less I felt this piece deserved it’s timely place on Relative Strangers as I look forward to my own trip up those famous autumn roads to cottage country this week.

Say it ain’t geo-blocked

Of course, being in Cambridge, UK during the screening adds a double edge. I’m going to have to watch this thing online in order to follow through on this great baited mystery that the CBC has dangled before us. But the question is, is the show being geo-blocked? If it is, and chances are yes as most every CBC program is, except perhaps the “George with the incredibly long last name that starts with S” show, then it will be a case of “not to be CBCeen”. I would have a problem with this, because as I mentioned on entering my piece from Cambridge, UK, (regardless of whether it’s in or not) many of we 34 million Canadians aren’t even in Canada, and I’m speaking as a 4th generation Canadian, whose Irish ancestors crossed the Atlantic on a bloody sailboat in 1830 at the kind bequest of the Brits (note generational sarcasm). Putting aside Canada’s frequent flyer national health care patriots, Canada is where Canadians are, and taxpaying one’s at that. So pop the show on the internet please, and open up the geo-block, at the very least to England where even the Canadian Head of State (you know, Mrs. Queen) can sit back with a bowl of microwaved popcorn and see what those crazy Canuck commoners get up to.

In honour of his life I’m posting two clips from my 2005 film “McLuhan Way: In Search of Truth”, which explored the frequently hidden but fundamental role of faith in McLuhan’s life. As I noted in my film back in 2005, in our age with its great explosion of electric media, we can often waver between obsessive desires for connection and perhaps, even greater loneliness. McLuhan offered us reflections of our time and pictures of the new human landscape. At its heart it was a hopeful vision that said: “We might be able to control the enormous change that was happening to us”.

Faith and Perception

A Busy Day in Manhattan

Shave and a Haircut

Anna Sees Everything

Meet Me at the Bar

Check out Pete’s page – peteqwerty51
http://youtu.be/ohBAUtRQmU4

Jake Clemons
http://jakeclemons.com/file/Intro.html

Tip of the hat to Ellie Stoneley who organized this show.

This video is dedicated to the life and music of Jake’s beloved uncle, the magnificent “Clarence Clemons” who was laid to rest yesterday. God bless you Jake, and in your own words “Love’ll Never Change”.

We also talked music and spirituality for a documentary series I’ve started exploring what this means to different artists who sing, write and play from that deep well in the heart and soul that speaks with a naked, truthful and resonating voice. Keep your eyes peeled here for more on that.

4 Million People. 8 Million Feet to Rome.

The funeral of Pope John Paul II was undoubtedly the largest attended funeral in the history of the world. 4 million people descended upon the Vatican in a spontaneous outpouring of love and gratitude for his life.

This was a massive communion of relative strangers.

8 Million Feet to Rome is a very personal film; a film I made as one of the four million pilgrims who attended his historic wake and funeral. I had the privilege of meeting and receiving a blessing from Pope John Paul II on two different occasions. There was a gravitational pull happening in the world on those days following his death on April 2nd, 2005. On the eve of his funeral, converging at the Papal Archbasilica of St. John Lateran, I found and followed the lives of eight young Canadians amongst the four million who spontaneously descended on the Vatican to celebrate Pope JPIIs historic life.