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In the tradition of Lennon &
McCartney, Roosevelt & Churchill, and Laurel & Hardy, the 8
episode online series “Curiously Adirondack” brings together the creative skills of
two very different yet instantly compatible individuals: Josh Clement & Ed
Kanze.
The Adirondack Park in New
York is a wondrous and unique place -- three times the size of Yellowstone and the
largest park in the Lower 48. On the private lands in the park live about 100,000 year-round residents, all of
them hardy and a great many quirky and ferociously independent. To live in the
midst of the most extensive temperate deciduous forest on the planet, they endure long cold winters, swarms of biting insects, and a rugged,
rocky, frost-haunted landscape that defies inhabitants of all species to eke
out their livings.
It's a hard place to
prosper. Yet for all the rocky patches, the people who dare to live inside the
park are well rewarded by grand scenery, abundant wildlife, and no end of free
entertainment in the form of skiing, skating, snowshoeing, hiking, boating,
swimming, berry picking, fishing, hunting, and gardening (although it's not
always easy to produce a ripe tomato here.)
The aim of our project is
high. That is, to do this place and its singular people justice. We want to bring Adirondack Mountain life alive for
all the poor souls who don't share the pleasure and pain of living here.
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Josh Clement is a Renaissance man, not only a
talented and richly creative videographer but also a musician, composer,
husband, and father of two with a delightfully demented sense of humor. Ed
Kanze has a Renaissance streak, too. A former National Park Ranger, he writes
books, magazine stories, and newspaper columns, climbs trees, chases birds, and
when not behaving like Huck Finn, runs an Adirondack Mountain nature guiding
service. He is the father of two, too, but not the same two.
Clement & Kanze have produced two
videos together, a straightforward piece on earthworms and a Monty Pythonesque
piece on blackflies, that inspired Josh's employer, Mountain Lake PBS, to think
these two could be cut loose to produce eight new quirky, supremely
appealing videos to be posted on the station's excellent website, mountainlake.org. They'll parade under the banner "Curiously
Adirondack."
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PBS has given us a vote of confidence! They will match your donations, dollar for dollar, up to $20,000. So your
gift has double the impact! So here we are, rattling a tin cup, asking you to
reach into your pockets, pawn your jewelry, or cash in your childhood stamp
collection to help PBS and Mountain Lake PBS set off in bold new directions,
with Clement and Kanze as guides.
Believe us, we're not going to fatten
our wallets making these videos. We're going to work hard for modest rewards. Days
of professional work go into producing a few minutes of polished final product.
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The videos supported by this campaign
will entertain, encourage, inform, inspire laughs, and generally make the
world, and the Adirondack Mountain region in particular, a better, kinder
place, one short increment (five minutes or thereabouts) at a time. Sponsors
will be listed prominently with the credits except for those that request
anonymity.
Curiously Adirondack's tentative episode list includes:
- Leaps of faith: a look at
exquisite and hidden Adirondack swimming holes and the kooks who jump into them
- a moose-calling contest that has
to be seen and heard to be believed
- an outing with four young
naturalists who bear uncanny resemblances to the producers, and who will
find and share seriously cool stuff
- a walk through a historic cemetery
with a vibrant, energetic elderly woman, a pillar of her community, who has
extraordinary stories to tell of people we wish we'd known
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Raising money isn't easy. We can all
use more of it. We're going to work hard to carry out this campaign, pleading,
cajoling, and doling out incentives. If we succeed, our work will only be
beginning. It's not simple making videos in the Adirondacks. You have to
face blackflies, mosquitoes, no-see-ums, deer-flies, the occasional lovesick
moose and hungry bear, along with inquisitive tourists and locals who have
good reason to wonder what you're doing behind and in front of that camera.
Conditions like these breed tenacity. We never surrender. And so, the
Clement-Kanze production team and Mountain Lake PBS will work hard and long. We
expect to march forward until, with your help, victory is achieved.
Then comes phase two. It'll involve
hard work behind and in front of the camera, writing, rewriting, recording
voice-overs, and long hours in the production room cutting, splicing, adding,
subtracting, plugging in sound effects and video flourishes, and then getting
the final product up on the web for you to view and enjoy.
If we fail to reach our goal (you won't
let that happen, but in the unlikely case that the pawn shop denies fair value
for your treasures or the pennies in jar on the kitchen counter add up to less
than expected), we’ll still do our best to make a few episodes. But it might
not be all eight.
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If disposable income is short or
otherwise indisposed, please contribute to Curiously Adirondack in other ways.
Blab about us on Facebook. Effuse on LinkedIn. Yak on Twitter. Tell your friends, your auto
mechanic, your hairdresser, the mailman. Be
creative on behalf of creativity. We can use all the help we can get, and
by golly, we'll be greatly grateful for it.
We like to think the more people know
about Curiously Adirondack, the more they'll rummage dresser drawers for spare
coins and push us toward our goal.
Thanks for listening. Thanks for
watching. Thanks for supporting Curiously Adirondack!