News

Sweet and Lo-Fi

Continued from page 4

"The iPod is a great device, but it's one-way," Bluestein points out. "They're not thinking very Web 2.0, which is all about two-way communication: You put out a podcast and your listeners communicate back to you. In the short term it may benefit them, because they'll be able to resell all this crap that's being put out on TV, but that's not the point of the medium. They're a little misguided."

The Creepy Crawl would be the perfect place to stage a cockfight. It's dark, and it comes equipped with cheap tallboys of Stag, a fence to separate purple-Mohawk minors from major-league drunks, walls covered with profane posters and graffiti, and loud music. Really fucking loud music.

Suffice to say that when a wispy Asian dude in a white fisherman's sweater enters the black-clad fray followed by a fellow toting a set of decks, it's worth noting. Seems the Creepy's managers have deigned to rent the club to some Everything But the Girl remix lapdogs on this December Friday, boxing the 7 Shot Screamers into a 9:30 curfew.

"Johnnie O and the Jerks could not play tonight because of extenuating circumstances involving techno music," announces the Screamers' lead singer, flanked by a standup bassist wearing a shirt that says "Christ is Life. Everything Else is Just Baseball."

"But they'll be playing the afterparty at our friend's house," the mascara-laden frontman adds before launching into a vicious X cover. "There will be drugs, booze and guys."

As the kids in the fenced-in pen go apeshit, Streeter and a second cameraman, Brian "Bowls" McLean, fight for prime angles. Bowls, who attended college with Streeter in Chicago, is using Streeter's handheld; Streeter has borrowed a larger camera and monopod from a friend. Two days later, the video will be cut, buffed and live on Lo-Fi for the world to stream.

"I can edit most of my clips within an hour," Streeter imparts.

The Screamers purposely drag out their set an extra fifteen minutes to piss off the beat-heads, at which point the Creepy clears out. Next stop for Streeter and Bowl: St. Louis Centre, where a pair of artists are busy pimping out the otherwise-vacant third floor of Middle America's most moribund shopping mall (see related story in this week's issue).

After the quick scoot down Washington Avenue, Streeter and Bowls are greeted in the employee parking garage by Peat Wollaeger, whose latest artistic obsession has been to stencil the silhouettes of his favorite five fat dead comics — Candy, Farley, Belushi, Hardy and Arbuckle — on sundry walls.

"We've met a lot of very talented people in St. Louis," says Wollaeger, another Chicago expatriate. "There are some skills in this town."

Usually Streeter approaches artists or musicians and asks permission to film them in action. Tonight he's here at the invitation of Wollaeger, who tracked him down via e-mail after stumbling onto Lo-Fi Saint Louis on his newly acquired video iPod.

"I got a free iPod the other day through one of those bullshit spam e-mails," Wollaeger says. "Lo-Fi Saint Louis was the first [video] podcast listed on iTunes. I was like, 'No shit!'"

After riding the freight elevator to the third floor, Streeter hits the record button and asks the artist to talk about the largely vacant mall his installment's going up in.

"It was the epitome of the '80s," responds Wollaeger, occupying his hands by whitening Chris Farley's face with an aerosol can. "At the grand opening, they had Tootie from The Facts of Life and Ricky Schroder there in his white cardigan. Then this mall got pretty rough.

"It's an empty mall — what better place for art?"

Wollaeger poses a question to Bowls: "Do you ever find yourself going to a mall?"

"Never," Bowls responds. "I'm a grown man."

When the makeshift gallery erupts in laughter, Streeter stops filming, compelling Wollaeger to second-guess his commentary.

"That was all pretty wack, wasn't it?" the artist wonders aloud.

"Nah," Streeter comforts. "I'll cut it all together to make you sound smart."

This might as well serve as Lo-Fi's mission statement.

"I don't think the rest of the world looks down their noses at St. Louis like a lot of people here seem to think," Streeter reflects. "I don't think the rest of the world has much of an opinion either way. It's really a great place to be and compares well with a lot of other cities, in my opinion. Lo-Fi makes St. Louis look cool because St. Louis is cool."

"There is a lot of interesting stuff going on here, but nobody knows about it," seconds fellow transplant Art Chantry. "San Francisco, in the old days, was just a bunch of small drops that became puddles, which eventually became a pond. We're still building puddles in this town."

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5