I’m late posting this too, right about the time my new son was being born, I got word that I had been nominated for a Streamy Award, and award given out to recognize outstanding achievement for shows produced originally for broadband distribution. I was surprised and honored to even be nominated for my work here. I won’t be able to attend the Awards Gala held tomorrow night in Beverly Hill’s so I’ve asked my friend Bill Chott to attend in my place. The event will be streamed live tomorrow night here, so I guess I know what I’m gonna be watching tomorrow!

My name is Steven Smith. Steven Fitzpatrick Smith is how I usually sign for the name is rather forgettable. I have a blog of my own, STLstreets.com for about four or so years now. I have also been blogging for MTV for the past year covering politics in the state of Missouri. I have done many other projects over the years from training fighters and staging boxing matches to writing to production various of video and film projects. I also own a tavern called the Royale located on the southside of Saint Louis. Becoming a tavernkeeper has changed my life dramatically for now I live above a public business in which hundreds of people tromp through every day. It is great really, but I do not have any privacy at all, but well, it could be far worse.  There is more to tell sure, but this site about the content, not my bio.

Bill Streeter, the man behind the mighty force of LofiSTL asked me to hook up on this project. I am honored to be associated with such a high quality content site, but I cannot promise to deliver anything of the same caliber. I plan on this site being my first and main outlet for my independent content. I will post up some interesting observations, stories, rough video and information all around.

I am still writing for MTV through the election, so my posting will be sparse at best. I plan on taking it easy on the writing and video editing for a few weeks afterwards, but then I will be going full throttle again on some new independent video and writing work around the holidays.

So for the time being I will post up some interesting links that I have found.

This is an amazing video of koyaanisqatsi of Pruitt Igoe. I hope at some point to do video that is at least a shadow of this scope. I am not sure I am quite skilled or artistic enough, but I will enjoy trying to do it.

Here is another video of Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO speaking to Union members on race and the Presidential election.  I am not sure this is enough, for I have had a ton of experience with Union guys, but it is a powerful speech.

You may have noticed that there are big changes afoot here at Lo-Fi Saint Louis and I figured that it was high time to let you in on some of the details of what to expect from this space in the coming months. I’ve redesigned the site in such a way that it can now funciton as a forum for a lot more than video content. Of course the video episodes of Lo-Fi Saint Louis will always be front and center, but I’ve been itching to expand into some other forms of content as well, like photography, audio and just good old text. So you’ll notice that this new layout will serve this purpose well. With all the video front and center and a nice cozy blog that will sit right beside it all. The main inspiration of this has been my recent foray into still photography, and my growing interest in how photographs can be a compelling way to tell a story. I know that photojournalism is a fairly old and well established profession, but my interest in it is new and I toyed with the idea of starting a separate photo blog, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it would just make sense to expand lofistl.com. And then I thought, as long as I was at it, why not just start blogging in a more regular way too? So that’s what you will start to see in this space on a more frequent basis. So, that, in a nutshell (albeit a rambling nutshell) is what you should start to see here in the coming weeks.

I also have another thing to tell you about what I’m doing here. I’ve recruited a couple of other people from around town to also blog here from time to time. I don’t want to say exactly who these people are yet. But you’ll find out in good time. So at some point Lo-Fi Saint Louis will cease to be (pretty much) a one man operation.

So thats it. Thats the big news. I wanted to throw a big party again this fall to launch the fall season of videos here, but time just got away from me. But watch for some kind of bug shin-dig next spring to celebrate four years of this mess … such as it is.

Season 4 of regular episodes of Lo-Fi Saint Louis will start this week, and continue until the end of November, and regular photo, audio and text posts will commence shortly. So subscribe via email or rss if you haven’t yet to keep up with all this crap.

Thank you and good night,
Bill Streeter

I’m getting ready to roll out a new version of Lo-Fi Saint Louis. It will be new, big, bad-ass, and cool and um did I say new? So things might turn up missing and seem kinda sloppy from time to time while I work on it. Anyway here is a photo of some demolition to enjoy while I work on the back end of this thing. Sorry for the inconvenience. The new site should be up and rolling in about a week or so.

LO-FI SAINT LOUIS RESET PARTY
Saturday March 8 at the Mad Art Gallery
2727 S. 12th St. STL, MO
Doors at 8pm
RSVP here (upcoming) or here (myspace) or here (facebook).
Featuring live performances from The Helium Tapes and The 75s
Plus video and more!
$6 at the Door, Cash Bar

Hey I just wanted to let you know what is going on with LO-FI SAINT LOUIS. You might have noticed I have only posted once video since Christmas. Well there is a reason for that … I’m taking a break. I’m not quitting. I just need a break to recharge and rethink what I’m doing here. Lo-Fi Saint Louis will relaunch on March 3rd and we’re gonna have a big kick off party on March 1 March 8 at Mad Art Gallery (details to come).

I really want to take this time to make Lo-Fi Saint Louis the best it can be. To advance the production values and make it even more fun to watch. From now on Lo-Fi will appear 2 times a year in 10 week seasons. A spring season and a fall season. Each season will be 10 weeks and consist of 20 episodes. In the mean time I will be working on some other projects so stay tuned to see what those are.

Of course the best way to be notified when there is new content available on LOFISTL or when and where our big relaunch party will be on March 1 March 8 at Mad Art Gallery, is to subscribe to the RSS Feed here or subscribe to updates via email. And of course there is the Circuit. Any way you do it you will be the first to know when LOFISTL is back.

Again the important links are:

Subscribe to Lo-Fi Saint Louis by Email
RSS
The Circuit

Thanks for watching. And I’m more excited about LO-FI SAINT LOUIS than ever now, because I already have some great stuff lined up for the spring season.

Bill Streeter

The Shondes (shonde is a Yiddish term meaning disgrace) are from Brooklyn, they’re Mets fans, and they’re Jewish political activists who work for issues like Palestinian justice, Queer/transgender rights and other causes. They also rock — Hard.

Also here are the details about the two events (mentioned in the video) that I have coming up:

Southside Rock ‘n’ Roll Rave
June 2, at 8PM
Koken Art Factory
Address: 2500 Ohio Avenue
St. Louis, MO 63118
The band and DJ showcase features Walkie Talkie USA, Bunnygrunt, Gentleman Auction House, Bob Reuter, and DJs Don Tinsley, Flex Boogie and Fastcode. Food and drinks available for sale.
Price: $10-$15

Pixelodeon
June 9th and 10th
American Film Institute
2021 N. Western Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90027
All the details and tickets can be purchased at pixelodeonfest.com

I have some great things planned for 2007, stay tuned for more!

If I could I would buy you all a beer for Xmas. But I can’t afford it, so I offer you this delightfully depressing song from the Highway Matrons. It’s been a great year, looking forward to a new one.

Update for 2009: I’ve posted this video for Christmas every year since 2006. I keep meaning to rework it but never get around to it. So here it is featured again, originally published on December 18th, 2005

Merry Christmas, everyone!! It’s been a good year for some people and not such a good year for others. Here’s to a good 2006 2010 for everyone.

Eh … Call me an optimist.

They Highway Matrons are Fred Friction’s folk-rock band. You have see them in my video about Bob Reuter, and you’ve met Fred in my video about his bar here.

Update 2009: you can also see Fred in my other series Lo-Fi Sessions here.

Photo courtesy Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.

… for “favorite entertainment vlog (non-fiction)” at the first annual Vloggie awards at The Swedish American Hall in San Francisco. You can read about it here. (Or just search: Vloggies)

I put some photos up from the event here.

UPDATE: There are some other stories about the Vloggies, here and here and here.

Art Chantry rerun, but slightly re-editied and enhanced.

Go see the Gary Panter and Art Chantry show starting on Oct 13, at the Philip Slein Gallery at 1319 Washington Ave St. Louis.

We’ve been having some hardware issues here at LO-FI SAINT LOUIS, some of it due to the recent bad weather here in the River City, and some of it just due to bad hardware. But all will be fixed soon enough. Until then enjoy this video we made for our good friend, Casey Reid. It was shot on the 4th of July this year on the Northside of St. Louis. Sorry there is no flash version of this. There will be when we get the hardware issues taken care of.

We are still producing new content while these issues get resolved so if you are subscribed please stay subscribed because we have some great new stuff in the pipeline. If you aren’t subscribed think about doing so, and you’ll get all the new content as it becomes available.

Thanks!

HERE ARE THE DETAILS:
I’ll be doing a little presentation at the St. Louis Apple Store at West County Mall (click for map and directions). I’ll be showing how I make my video blog and how you can use Apple’s tools or other free tools to do one youself. So if you want to meet me or learn how I do things, or better yet, learn to do it yourself, come to the West County Apple Store at 6PM on Saturday, March 25th.

Music by the Electric.

My intro for LO-FI SAINT LOUIS Rerun Month. The first time I have appeared on my own video blog. A historic moment. Music by The Electric

Okay February is the one year anniversary of LO-FI SAINT LOUIS. So in honor of this I have decided to rerun 28 of the videos I’ve posted in the last year–that’s one a day for the 28 days of February. But they won’t be exactly the way they were oringinally posted. I have invited 28 video bloggers from around the world to record new intros for these videos. AND I am recompressing these to higher quality standards where posible. So over the course of February you will get a video every day from me. And I bet you haven’t seen all of them, and you get the added benefit of meeting some other video bloggers and hopefully you will check them out too. So enjoy!!

Hey, thanks to Mike Seely for the great article in this week’s RFT, and to Jennifer Silverberg for the great photos (click on the photo above to read the story online.) It’s a little weird to get this kind of attention. I’ve always thought of myself as more of a behind-the-scenes kinda guy.

So if this is your first time here check out the categories in the sidebar or just browse backwards to view some of the videos here. Or you can see all of the 40 or so videos that I’ve posted on this site here. Most of them I’ve made myself but there are a few that have been made by others. You can subscribe via iTunes and get new stuff delivered to you automatically. Here is the link to my iTunes page:

And if you don’t like iTunes you can try my favorite video aggregator FireAnt. These guys have been working their butts off developing the best video blog viewer around. Use this link to subscribe via FireAnt.

A lot of stuff is available in Flash video, but everything is viewable in QuickTime, and frankly everything looks better in Quicktime anyway so you’d do well to get QuickTime if you don’t have it already (free player).

Also if you are interested in video blogging check out this great tutorial site called Freevlog, where Ryanne Hodson and Michael Verdi will get you started. They also provide links to all kinds of great community sites and vlog directories. You can find these some of these same links in the sidebar too.

Also if you like or hate a video feel free to use the comment links at the bottom of each post to let me know.

Thanks for coming by and enjoy!

Bill Streeter

Did you ever wanna know more about how a video blog (or video podcast) is put together? Come to the Chicago Apple Store this weekend, Saturday, November 19th at 6:30PM and meet some vloggers and learn how it’s done. I’ll be there, as will Richard from The Richard Show, Josh Leo, David Meade, Mason Dixion, and Nick Schmidt. Hope to see you there!

Click here to download the QuickTime version of this movie.