The City At Random...

[Intro] Simultaneously winning "Best Mini-Docs" in Utah and being adopted as the "online video content provider" (read: digital step-child) for the best damn alt-weekly on the planet was too good to be true. To celebrate, my team and I took full advantage of the free bar at the Port-O-Call party City Weekly threw this last Friday. If you happened to be there, you might've seen the yahoo in a green hoodie circling the buffet table and later making a jackass out of himself on karaoke... that was me. (I owe you beer, Loren).

You may already have heard of us. X96 caught wind of SLC Random last September and pulled us into doing a documentary for the Big Ass Show the following month. In a mere 6 days we edited 8 hours' worth of footage down to a 36-minute rockumentary... but not without collectively consuming enough Red Bull to turn God herself into an insomniac.



We love Salt Lake City the same way Woody Allen loves Manhattan. It's because of this love that in February of 2007 we gathered our courage and approached Bill Frost about the little video projects we had been working on and our idea for a documentary podcast series. After much finagling and a few hands of poker, we were finally able to coerce Mr. Frost to let SLC Random share with all of you, dear CW readers, our particular vision of the city.

There are plenty of amazing stories in the valley. Too many for the over-worked (and underpaid?) staff of CW to cover each week. We want to pick up the slack by focusing on the unseen random things that make up our community. How many of us have heard the story behind the man who rolls around the Gateway in his motorized wheelchair filling the air with bubbles? Who knows about a local chef who hosts a weekly Sunday dinner in his Pioneer-era home... for free? Or, who's familiar with a writer who's single-handedly bringing back text-adventure computer games, much to the cheers of the visually impaired?

It's stories like these that SLC Random intends to cover in short, 3-5 minute documentaries that will be posted on the City Weekly website. Anything and everything from local events, humanitarian causes, personal interest stories about artists, nut-jobs, politicians, raconteurs, fashionistas, acrobatic acts and religious zealots--all the quirky things that, when put together, make the whole of Salt Lake as weird as it is.

As we're still gaining momentum, and we're new at the whole "business structure" thing, we'll be updating fairly irregularly - at least until we've gotten more equipment and some fund-age to operate on. (Hint, hint!)

In the meantime, keep checking back at SLCRandom.com for more info. There you'll find links to our Myspace and YouTube pages... our very humble beginnings.

Questions, complaints, suggestions, donations and ideas are whole-heartedly accepted. Just email us at casebusters@slcrandom.com

Here's to you, Salt Lake! *Raises beer mug* (SLC Random Team)