Written and directed by Paul Guzzardo, “buildbetterbarrel: nine events in new media” is

is a series of short vignettes that trace the media heritage and folklore of St. Louis, Missouri. Backdrops include Cahokia Mounds, the Chicago lakefront, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, and a street front media lab which operated on September 11, 2001. buildbetterbarrel remembers St. Louis’s Marshall McLuhan and Father Walter Ong. And it considers why McLuhan and Ong were the first “to hear” how electronic media would turn streets into stages for storytellers and myth builders. The documentary is also an epilogue to another story, another myth – one about Josephine Baker, Walter Winchell and J. Edgar Hoover.

You can download the whole thing as a .wav file from the buildbetterbarrel web site or you can watch it in 11 instalments at YouTube. (Guzzardo has other videos posted, so you’ll have to pick through them.) Ong and McLuhan make their first appearance in the 6th event (“mound“) and are the subject of the 8th (“chapel“).

Here’s the intro video:

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and here’s “chapel,” which focuses on McLuhan and Ong:

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