A note about the podcasts
There's two of 'em, for starters
Subscribers to my Substack will have noticed a sudden uptick in comms in the last couple of days.
Rest assured, this is mainly a result of incompetence mixed with a splash of my customary impatience and not any deliberate comms strategy.
I’ve been thinking about getting my podcasts to talk to my Substack in a seamless, hands-free, no-need-to-see-how-this-sausage-is-made way for some time.
Finding myself with a lovely dollop of time on my hands yesterday I thought, “Today’s the day I make that happen”.
What followed was a classic Gen X tech failure: I knew enough to know it could be done, but too little to execute my plan successfully.
After hours of frustrating fannying about hunting down RSS URL feeds (whatever the hell they are), tackling obscure error messages like: “Substack cannot publish with drawer open”, and having several surprisingly cheerful conversations with the Substack helpline (if it’s a chatbot, it’s a really good one!), I spent yet more hours manually uploading individual podcast episodes.
Anyhoo, these are the aural fruits of my labours:
ReCooper8: this is a fortnightly show I co-host with my bestie, Katie Abbot, on Arrow FM 92.7, one of Aotearoa’s 12 community access radio stations. The show’s a low-key, relaxed arts-inflected chat show and we usually have a bloody good laugh. We once did a live stage version at Studio 73 in Greytown. Our favourite review was, “It shouldn’t have worked, but it did”.
Burst Mode: I made this 11-part series in 2021 in collaboration with the New Zealand Institute of Professional Photographers, and with particular support from my friend and image-maker Esther Bunning (episode 1). Burst Mode features bite-sized interviews with photographers from Aotearoa New Zealand, and further afield. The show’s format is simple: each photographer is asked the same 10 questions, and the interviews are generally around 15-20 minutes long, bringing you closer to some of Aotearoa’s most influential image-makers in the time it takes you to go for a quick stroll with the dog. In the series, you’ll get to know: Esther Bunning, Timothy Lomax, Jase Blair, Rebecca Kempton, Nick Servian, Glen Howey, Michelle Fey, Janyne Fletcher, Tessa Williams and Ya Zhuo!
It took me a while to cotton on to the fact I could schedule the posts heralding the availability of each arduously uploaded episode, by which point I’d already fired off several posts to subscriber inboxes.
From this day forward, a new Burst Mode episode will be delivered every day for the next eight or so days, and a fresh ReCooper8 every fortnight.
ReCooper8 is also available in vision as well as sound. Here’s the latest with Vic Ross, who took up co-hosting duties while Katie has a holiday.