Joined by Estevan Munoz for an hour plus catch up session, we go into topics surrounding the creative process. Portland versus Philadelphia and how an artist evolves from their home base.
One of my first contributors with THRU Media, he was only 19 and searching for a portal to Portland. The time he spent helping build that foundation for the publication was mutual and it reinforced the direction he continued to go. I always thought he had the spark and I continue to see it.
One of the first books I recall reading to educate myself on multimedia was The Gutenberg Galaxy, by Marshal McLuhan. The author that coined the term “global village” and “hot/cold media” should be every journalist and web programmer’s required reading, to build a clear foundation of what the hell they are doing. In this book, he analyzes Don Quixote as a character, and a story, in the early age of print media.
The gist of it is, when Quixote set out to become a “knight errant,” he was reaching back to an older time, a time before the printing press when knights ruled the land by unwritten laws, when literacy was wholly uncommon.
Hilariously written by Miguel de Cervantes, published 1605, Don Quixote is contemporary to the author’s time, and it is a fictional study on the psychological phenomena that trails the advent of major technological advancements in media. When a new medium is introduced, it changes media, and consciousness is affected.
I am currently reading both The Adventures of Don Quixote and Understanding Media, by McLuhan.
Quixote and Pancho riding together. Original painting 1754, Hulton Archive.
By the extraordinary power of this new form of media (mass-produced books) and its disruptive affect on the senses (oral culture versus literate, auditory versus visual), a regular householder in some village hallucinated himself into a knight and set about for a new life of heroic adventures and chivalry.
The most famous scene in the book is within the first tenth of its volumes. That is when Quixote is fighting the windmills he has mistaken for giants, against the alarms of his squire, Pancho de la Mancha. Quixote is an older man, probably experiencing dementia, but a specific kind influenced by books. He believes in a world that he never lived in, because he’s become expert to it through books.
I failed to recognize McLuhan’s lesson about Don Quixote when I engaged in the pursuit of starting an internet-based media corporation.
The modern medium shift today is electric technology. The evolution of new forms of media resulting from the new medium has been rapid. From signal transmissions by wire, to radio, to cable television, and now fiber-optic internet, we are living in the equivalent stage today as Don Quixote was then, as the whole structure of society is being rewired, pun intended.
We are changing and we don’t see it changing us until it has already taken a grip over our behavior.
I reviewed The Gutenberg Galaxy, and the article is archived with the rest of THRU. To have the trail of my work from seed to flower and back to compost is a study of progress itself. The oldest posts there are mine, and very few have been edited since.
About six years ago, all content original to seanongley.com was transferred, along with my dreams, to a string of sites that would eventually become THRU.media My dreams would be supported, if not complicated, by pursuing the dream of building Thru Media LLC.
Today, I have personal insight into the media industry and the whole ecosystem that McLuhan saw coming is unfolding rapidly within my generation.
I’m watching the Quixote effect take people down every day. I would say that my story with THRU is like my own knight errantry, my adventure where I had no calling outside the fire in my heart, no rules except the abstract principles of justice, driven by the affect of a major advancement in electric technology: The Internet.
My Pancho was Kathleen Dolan. Unlike Quixote, I was in love with my Pancho, and we had a domestic relationship. Rather, she was that and my Dulcinea del Toboso, the subject of Quixote’s devotion and chivalry. As such, I both abused Kate by dragging her along into my adventures, and devoted myself to her, as I believed she was destined to be a great writer and that I was there to bridge the gap from bartender to Author.
Kate and Myself covering Bernie Sanders rally, 2015, at Moda Center.
I pulled a special little publication together with some big dreams, worked with other dreamers, and we took it on with a spirited campaign. We held ourselves to a standard that improved the quality of the content over time.
We came very close to launching a successful company, but as I humbly tell my story, I hope to illustrate that I was trying to stand on the shoulders of giants. But they turned out actually to be windmills.
Several years ago, we almost started a new series of videos inspired by Between Two Ferns, but the idea was that I’m couch surfing and interviewing artists at their home, preferably squeezed into a space not hospitable to an interview.
As of posting this, the world is being instructed to stay six feet apart from everyone. That makes this particularly nice to watch right now.
We produced this start to finish in one night, over beers, giving an authentic touch to the skittish editing. We did it with just two cameras and one lamp.
Estevan and Nicholas Munoz are a talented pair of dudes. They both still live and work in Portland. Nicholas is a comedian. Este wanted to be a filmmaker, but now he’s all in as a rapper, going by Chaz Matador. This however suits his other interests: Writing and Comedy. I met him because he was interested in writing for THRU Media. He joined up as an early “staff” writer and helped produce our Indiegogo video.
Watching this now, I think we discovered a good concept, but it was just the context of the moment. It was easy to perform, because back then, I was actually housing insecure, living the starving dirtbag artist lifestyle while posing as this sophisticated media guy. It could have been funny, each time finding a new way to crash at my guests’ house — like the only reason I’m doing this is to find a new couch to crash on.
Co-Produced and Edited by Forrest Brennan, for THRU Media, in 2016.
This mini-documentary was meant to give a tantalizing impression of the performance by Source Material Collective, entitled “I Should Have a Party for All the Thoughts I Didn’t Say.” Headed by the young Samantha Shay, this performance represented a showcase for her vision for theater.
It is an immersive experience, so we found this project unique to cover. With camera and sound assistance from Estevan Muñoz and Joe Jatcko, Forrest Brennan and myself collaborated on the edit. This video was a great experience that I am still proud to be associated with.
