fauna corporation

As mentioned earlier, I maintain a blog that follows my favourite NHL club, the Boston Bruins.

The NHL’s Free-Agency period begins on Wednesday, so I thought I’d post here to let people know I’ve written a piece on the Bruins’ options, with regard to Restricted- and Unrestricted Free Agents, trade rumours and the team’s options going into the 2009-2010 season.

The piece can be seen on Black, White and Gold, and is current as of this writing. There was a time (ie: pre-salary cap) when dozens of players would be dealt before you could post that they were being shopped, but “today’s NHL” follows a more careful, complicated path where teams need to jettison players as they add new ones. It’s like watching billionaires play Jenga.

Enjoy the post. Let me know your thoughts.

shibuya in the rain - photo by scott w. gray

The Guardian Online has consistently been ahead of the curve in terms of multimedia journalism, and have therefore become an excellent resource for audio slideshows. The Guardian uses these audio slideshows to explore both the variety of stories possible and the diversity of techniques involved in capturing the fullness of an immersive narrative experience. Which is to say, their journalists do an tremendous job of placing the viewer in the scene they are describing.

This afternoon I watched an excellent, understated piece by David Levene on the Shibuya intersection in Tokyo. His audio slideshow accurately transmits the organized chaos of this, one of the busiest intersections on the globe. The cuts between the cellphone and CCTV cameras were, to me, especially indicative, as were the images of baffled Westerners.

For my part, I watched this flash-mob street crossing myself in March of last year, mesmerized by the endless waves of humanity and machine at every light change. In fact, searching for a genuine Japanese experience, I watched the ebb and flow across Shibuya from the Starbucks visible throughout Levene’s audio slideshow (look for the glass front wall).

Over the last few years we’ve seen a steep decline in the number of trains using the switching yards that lie just north of our house. The University of Montreal purchased the land and are in the process of changing it over to be part of the University’s facilities.

Below is an audio-slideshow - this is the first in a series I will be doing, documenting the changes to the switching yards and the neighbourhoods adjoining them.

Let me know what you think, or if you have suggestions for subsequent pieces.

Through the 2008-2009 NHL Season I maintained a blog about the Boston Bruins, a team I’ve followed since I was about 8 years old. I had always wanted to write about my beloved B’s, so I started the blog primarily to talk about what it is like to be a Bruins fan here Montreal, and I posted as the team enjoyed a remarkable season.

I thought I would mention it here, because otherwise it is just an item in the blogroll. Also, its the off-season, so we’re all jonesing for a bit of hockey info.

You can have a read of Black White and Gold right here.

Have a look around and leave a comment if you have something to say. I’ll also be posting here about pieces there, I imagine.

A great deal of my writing has been focused on music and the audio arts, so I thought I would put up a post here about Urban Camouflage - the blog that I’ve used to collect the majority of my music writing over the years.

There was a considerable gap between late 2007 and early 2009 as I was busy with other writing outlets, but as I’ll be updating Urban Camo more regularly, I thought I’d post here to draw your attention to the blog. Check it out, and let me know your thoughts.

Hello there. Thank you for the visiting the Fauna Corporation website.

This site will be regularly updated with the professional writing and audio work of Scott W. Gray. I decided to compile the materials on this site under the single title of the Fauna Corporation for simple identification purposes.

From time to time, I’ll also be using this front page to post about some of my current obsessions - primarily related to multimedia journalism (my own and that of others).

Please check back regularly for updates, and feel free to send me a note if you have questions or comments.

Best regards,
the Fauna Corporation Management.