ROX – The World’s Most Independent Television Series:

Bart’s done it. He’s got the whole show online (well, not the whole thing, but it sure likes like he means to). And a comprehensive database of familiar faces, this time, many, maybe most, of whom I DO know. It’s like a video wiki, almost!

Please note that both Bart and Scooter appear in this website as well as in the previously-cited NecroKonicon. There may be greater overlap as well.

UPDATE: The late-nightness of this entry leaves it overly terse. To clarify, then.

J&B On The Rocks, later simply Rox was/is a cable-access show about two young men making drinks and consuming them on camera. Supposedly.

In reality, it was/is an experiment in television, oriented to humor but firmly focused on the goal of creating capital-A art from the raw material of life in my hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, a place very conducive indeed to this specific variety of ingenious strangeness.

B, or Bart Everson, is the mastermind behind that mind-boggling website I link above (it’s sort of like I imagine WAX or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees was intended to be – I say imagine, because I never had the bandwidth to check it out back in the day). As it happens, it helps that Editor B is not only a truly inventive editor who poured his ambition and interest into editing into the show, but also a gifted writer unafraid to put his muse in the service of such a silly idea.

I’m sure that J, the other half of the show, made his own, powerful contributions, but I am unfamiliar with the show in detail, and so can’t identify them. But I certainly heard about the show from folks back home for a few years. I even accidentally attended Bart and Christy’s wedding, just over ten years ago, which was a public party in the former police-station John Waldron Arts Center. It was at that event that I learned that Jake and Freda of the Mysteries of Life had gotten married and were expecting, steps from the place I’d sat as a just-busted 18-year-old, waiting for my folks to come and get me.

It was surreal, because, although I’d vaguely known Bart years before through my ex-wife, he’d been out of town for a significant part of my college career, and then later, we each repeatedly took a video-art class but not together. By the time of the wedding, Bart was a fixture in the local alternative art scene and therefore the people involved in the wedding / puppet-show were all dear and close friends of mine.

Years after that, Viv and I spent a bucolic afternoon hanging out at their near East Side home, playing bocce and shooting the shit about computers and video – Bart was finishing his masters in instructional technology.

So go, watch some clips. Here are two, not-characteristic, ones to get you started:

The pre-ROX Robitussin Rap and also: Carpe DM.)

My favorite boss of all time, Paul Smedberg, brings you some Expert Advice.

(This was originally posted at around 1 am, but then it wouldn’t rebuild and I extended the entry, and… and…

Could the problem character have been that ampersand? Hmm.

No, it appears to be associated with links to the video clips. WTF?

AHA!

Bart links to streaming media clips in his site architecture with a URL formed like this:

However, being a video-oriented guy, he’s configured his server to present media assets, in this case quicktime clips, as index documents, or something along those lines. MT, expecting to be able to analyze the text-based content inbound from that http request, stalls waiting for the document-request to complete.

I shall call it to his attention but don’t know if it’s reasonable to expect a change. Inline links to the clips on the program summary pages would be optimal, I think, and allow him to keep traffic without encouraging deeplinking, as I’m trying to do here.

Ergo, the links now link to the ‘viewer’ 320 x 240 quicktime assets.)