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SIU's VideoTIPLE
Volunteers CHOICED
m
Three years ago Carbon-
dale, Ill., lacked the full
spectrum of cable-televi-
sion programming-but South-
ern Illinois University stu-
dents still wanted their
MTV. So volunteers from the
campus radio station put to-
gether their own music-video
show. Since then, MTV has ar-
rived. But SIU's spirited "The
New Frontier" show has sur-
vived by becoming a video al-
ternative, developing a play list
of more offbeat, smaller-label
groups like the Meat Puppets
and Husker Dti.
New installments of the
hourlong show come out every
few weeks and air three times
weekly on the local-access
channel. The program varies
the tone with student films and
segments like "Woman in the
Street," which asks people
about topics like the grossest
thing they ever found in their
food-"really kind of nutty
stuff," says "New Frontier"
producer Paul Andresen,
"that a rock-and-roll audience
would like."
j-
The New Frontier-ers fat-
ten their video stockpile by pro-
ducing videos for local bands
like 138 and Hunting Sleaze.
"Depending on what the
band's contracts are like, we
can produce a video for basi-
cally any band that will have
us," says Andresen, a 22-year-
old radio-TV major.
The program gets support
from a combination of student
funds and ad sales, and it
scrapes by on what Andresen
calls "an almost zero budget
... all it is is time and a little
elbow grease." Eager music
promoters provide some videos,
and most of the work is done
by the nearly 100 volunteers in
production, writing and ad
sales. They also do multimoni-.
tor "live" gigs at an area bar,
mixing music segments with
"video wallpaper"-visually
interesting filler images-a la
trendy New York clubs.
"Kind of like the Palladium,
scaled down," Andresen says.
"Waaay down." .
Missouri's
Own Henge
No self-respecting Druid
should pass up this road-
side attraction: the new
American Stonehenge-"Mo-
henge" to familiars-at the
engineering-oriented Universi-
ty.of Missouri, Rolla. Complet-
ed by students in 1984 with
$75,000 in private donations,
the 160-ton half-scale replica,
like the millenniums-old
original, is a functional
observatory. Mohenge's de-
signer, Joseph Senne, a UMR
professor emeritus of civil en-
gineering, calls it "sort of a trib-
ute to the ancient engineer."
Stonehenge enthusiasts
among the students and faculty
wryly erected the copy near
the Mathematics and Comput-
er Science Building. Mohenge
deliberately does not duplicate
the English Stonehenge be-
'Kind of nutty stuff': 'New Frontier' student crew tapes the Carbondale group Hunting Sleaze
38 NEWSWEEK o04CAMPUS