A few days ago, I was lucky enough to get a little time for a one on one interview with television producer Heather Ferreira and ask her some frank questions about her views on the state of the entertainment industry. This 41-year-old retro TV addict says American television is seriously out of whack, but she and her new NYC-based studio are going to turn it around.

You’ve been quoted saying that American television has lost its direction. Tell me what you believe is wrong with TV in the United States today.

The baseline answer is that art cannot be mass-produced like a hamburger, but our networks in charge think it can. Because it is controlled by corporate interests, and those corporations are mass-producing cheap shows like cheap hamburgers, American TV has completely collapsed. There’s a real conveyor belt mentality to TV, a sense of it being produced to meet the lowest common denominator. When corporations control artistic expression, creativity dies. Creativity takes unusual, unpredictable paths, and that scares corporations. Corporate America wants homogeneity – everything produced alike. That’s why radio sounds the way it does and TV looks the way it does. For example, for the last fifteen years a lot of songs on the radio have all had strikingly similar chords. I would say a good 40% of male pop songs since 2004 have had almost exactly the same four-chord progression and melody as Tyrone Wells’s single “More”. There’s female versions of it, too. Not to fault the artists – they wouldn’t get signed if they refused to sound like that – but when you have corporate boardrooms deciding what gets played and seen, that’s what you get. Everything starts looking and sounding the same. That’s fine if you manufacture widgets or shoot burgers down a conveyor belt. But music, television, and movies should not be produced that way.

There are very few people in the world who can claim to have had the kind of impact on global culture that DJ International founder Rocky Jones has. Having taken a long sabbatical from the music world, Rocky (and DJ International) is back to once again change the face of the music industry.

For those of you not in the know, Rocky was the owner of the legendary “Warehouse” club in Chicago from which the "House" genre derives its name; his label, DJ International Records, was also the first label to publish what would become known as House music, a genre of music that exploded on the global scene in the mid to late eighties and is still going strong; elements of House and its sub genres have now become as much a part of mainstream culture as hip-hop or rock.

My wife and I turned up at Largo last night expecting to see Neil Finn doing his usual solo (or semi-solo) act, but wow, what a surprise. Largo has a habit of keeping quiet about the line-up of their “special guests” so even finding out that Neil was on the roster was a stroke of luck. What we didn’t expect was six members of the 7 Worlds Collide project appearing on stage – i.e. Neil Finn, KT Tunstall, Jon Bryon, Elroy Finn, Lisa Germano and Bic Runga, who were in LA to meet with record execs and promote the second 7 Worlds album (that will be coming out later this year).

All of these guys are incredibly talented musicians, jumping round the stage, rotating from instrument to instrument. Taking turns on guitar, bass, piano and xylophone. It was one of the most chaotic, unorganized gigs I’ve ever seen, but was also one of the most fun. They performed a number of tracks (publicly) for the first time ever, including KT Tunstall’s new up-coming single which was both comical and astounding, changing from an acoustic to rock sound driven by necessity. Her (acoustic) guitar failed about thirty seconds in, so she started adlibbing about the guitar while she tried another, which also failed. Bic darted across the stage and handed KT her (Bic’s) electric, which KT grabbed and started shredding, giving the track a whole new feel – actually think I prefer it that way.

District 9 (in my humble opinion) is hands down, the best sci-fi movies of the decade (or at least for now, that may change when James Cameron’s Avatar comes out in December).

Set in Johannesburg, South Africa (which makes a nice change from NY, LA or Chicago) and directed by joBerg native Neil Blomkamp, the movie puts a new and unexpected twist on the venerable alien invasion saga. Instead of aliens turning up, intent on invading our planet by any means, the aliens of District 9 arrive disheveled, mal nourished and in desperate need of help.

Shot in a raw documentary style, the movie reflects the way refugees are treated across the world. Placed into a large militarized camp, the aliens are degraded to sub-human levels, where they become bottom feeding scavengers living in shanty style shacks. The locals soon assign the derisive name “Prawns” to the bug like creatures, which in turn draws parallels with the apartheid days, when the derisive Keffa was the local’s word of choice for describing other so-called undesirables. The film is laced with social-political statements from start to finish ranging from racism (or in this case speciesism) and discrimination to plain old greed and corruption, all of which unfolds beautifully throughout the film. Not necessarily subtly, but certainly with impact.

Trying to manage a large crew on a shoot is always a little daunting, but being discrete (i.e. not to attract too much attention) and shooting an entire set in the space of two hours with failing light is definitely a challenge. But hey, I’m game.

The Outbreak – Terra 1138, was definitely one of those occasions. The location was a remote spot in Ventura County; remote enough to cause a number of delays as crew, models and MUA tried to make their way to the location. Then to top it off, one of the guy’s taillights got blown out and had to be fixed immediately, following friendly a stop by the boys from the California Highway Patrol.