Posted on

Performing Arts and Broadcast Entertainment Professors Should Not Compete with their Students

One of the first things my friend, and mentor — and Columbia University in the City of New York professor — Howard Stein told me, was that he was once a produced, and award-winning Playwright, and when he decided to teach other Playwrights at the University of Iowa for a living, he gave up his Playwright life because he didn’t want to compete with his students. I thought that instinct was honorable and right and the lesson sticks with me today. New plays have a hard enough time getting produced on their own, and when you’re in direct competition with your professor for stage time, and production dollars, you quickly discern how easy it is for the amateur Playwright to fail in the same professional arena as the Professor.

Continue reading → Performing Arts and Broadcast Entertainment Professors Should Not Compete with their Students

Posted on

Three Eras of Preservation and the Scourge of Magnetic Tape

In the Modern Age of Entertainment, we have — so far — sustained Three Distinct Eras of performance preservation. The First Era was Film.  The Second Era was Magnetic Tape. The Third, and current, Era is Digital. The most cursed of all the Eras, is the misbegotten second — Magnetic Audiotape and Videotape — where performances were not actually preserved, they were only perpetuated to die!

Continue reading → Three Eras of Preservation and the Scourge of Magnetic Tape

Posted on

On Becoming a Mentor: Listen to the Birds

Memory is an acute thing. It can baptize you, take you over, reflect on where you’ve been and, in some extreme cases, incapacitate you. Memory can also warm, warn and welcome you — and this story is a matter of the latter in the name of one my earliest mentors and influencers, Rick Alloway. Yes is hard. No is easy. Rick Alloway was always a Yes Man in the most honorific possible way.

Rick gave me my start in radio at KFOR 1240 and KFRX 103 in Lincoln, Nebraska when I was 13-years-old, and he helped correct me, win me and convince me in every single way of the world. He was never harsh or cruel or condescending — even when you earned such treatment. His greatest talent was simply listening and being infinitely patient. In the radio advert below, Rick is in the front row wearing a mustache and I’m right next to him sporting the sun-sensitive hipster glasses.

Continue reading → On Becoming a Mentor: Listen to the Birds

Posted on

The Ghost Business: More Adventures in Script Doctoring as The Script Professor

I recently wrote about a fellow who wanted my Script Doctor services via my Script Professor.com website, and the reaction to that poor guy was so fascinating across all my public and private interwebs, that I decided to offer a follow-up to that adventure. When I do script doctoring, or ghost writing, as The Script Professor, anything goes, and by that I mean, I can fix anything written that is broken — and that includes scripts for television, radio, film and books and scholarly papers and anything else that might be in need of pruning or total rehabilitation.

Continue reading → The Ghost Business: More Adventures in Script Doctoring as The Script Professor

Posted on

Relaunching Boles Dot Com as a Preservation Portal and Restoration Reserve

Since uploading over 500 videos to Vimeo PRO — I’ve been thinking about content and production and restoration and preservation of all the things I’ve worked on over the arc of a lifetime — and I decided now was the time to start digitizing the mountains of paper and film and video and audiotapes that engulf the small gully of my world.

Continue reading → Relaunching Boles Dot Com as a Preservation Portal and Restoration Reserve

Posted on

That Ringing in Your Ears is the Music of Your Mind

We have a horrible new neighbor living above us, and she’s young and preppy and VERY LOUD!  She bangs things on her wood floor/our ceiling all day and all night long.  She walks heavy on her heels back and forth and back again.  She drags her furniture across her wood floor/our ceiling that creates fingernails-on-chalkboard by osmosis.

I have taken to using earplugs when she’s at her most obnoxious and the earplugs do seem to filter out the precise range of her banging on our heads to make her terrorism from above us sort of tolerable.  I’ll leave the whole injustice of, “Why should I have to wear earplugs all day long so I can’t hear you being obnoxious?” question for another day.

Continue reading → That Ringing in Your Ears is the Music of Your Mind

Posted on

Why is Silence in the Workplace No Longer Golden?

I amazed by the noise levels that are acceptable in the modern workplace.  I’m a self-employed wonk-for-hire — so I spend a lot of time working quietly by myself on my own terms — but sometimes I have to go to a client’s building and try to get work done in the cacophony that has become the public work space.  I have no idea how people get things done in the midst of the cubicle world where people yell into telephones and cellphones and each person has their own radio blaring and conversations take place from one corner of the workspace to the other and it is all done using a voice that curdles milk into whey.

Continue reading → Why is Silence in the Workplace No Longer Golden?