That's it, it's October 23rd 2009 so I'm now fifty years old. So's Weird Al Yankovitch. Martin Luther King III turns 52 today.
Don't forget The Montreal Fringe site
Again this year it's discriminating against browsers, I get "Page not Found" errors with my favorite browser. That's different from last year's error, and it isn't fixed by changing the User Agent header.
Art Groups spam, and that's the core of the fuss over Theatre St. Catherine. I just sent a letter to the Gazette about it, posted here with a couple of extra links in place.
See my page about upcoming used book sales, now expanded to include some other local book activity
A tad late, but on this day, October 21, Jack Kerouac died in 1969,
ie 40 years ago. A mere five years later, I was looking for something to
read at the bookstore and found Ann Charter biography in November of 1974.
All I knew about the Beats at the time was the stereotype of the bongo
playing poem reciting type in the beret, so I knew nothing of Kerouac.
But then oddly, I knew the books before I read any of them, since the
books are so autobiographical. Are they important because they are about
the Beats, or are they important for the writing itself? It's hard to
tell, it's all so self-referencing. There'd be nothing to write about if
they didn't write about each other, yet writing about them isn't so
important except for their place in literary history.
One can send hate mail and mash notes:
mblack@pubnix.net
Tobias Brox on Why Attached Microsoft Documents Are A Bad Thing
The Fringe in The News 2009
The Fringe Diary returns for
2009
Note I'm working backwards, so it's incomplete for June 11 and 10
until I do it later.
I can say what I want here since I was hooked into the Fringe back in 1992 when a group from Syracuse, NY was performing outside the Beer Tent, "Oh, so that's what it's about". I've been to every Fringe since 1994, helped out a bit in every Fringe since 1996, and written something about the Fringe every year since 1995. This has existed since 2000, as a proof of concept page, what we could be using the internet for. And if you've had a show at Studio 303 since the fall of 1993, I've likely been the audience. If you've had a show at Studio 303 since 1999, I probably put the chairs away after you performed.
Some comments on Juried versus non-juried Festivals
It's been a decade since the Urban Dream Capsule was at The Bay as part of the FTA. I wrote this at the time. That's especially for Kristi in the Counting House.
It's September 7th, which means it's been eight months since I ordereda Joan Baez boxed set from Indigo. The only email I've gotten from them on the matter was after the two times I've emailed them, and both times they give a pretty vague answer about when it might be available. It's over the six times the "3-5 weeks" they said it would take when I ordered.
The Fringe is now about "discovery", something I wrote about way back in 2003: Festival of Discovery
I should have put it up months ago, but Emru Townsend needs a bone marrow transplant. He's the Real McCoy, an expression I didn't know the meaning of until he posted about his Black History page back in February of 1997. Details are all over the place, but I suppose Heal Emru is as good a source as any. Apparently, you can win the lottery twice at one time, finding a match for anyone and then finding a match for Emru, since they have found a match but registration should continue.
Sadly, Emru died in early November, he got the bone marrow but the cancer still won, I think it was because the leukemia had gotten too far. But that doesn't mean the campaign was useless, he did get a donor, and they got a bunch of people signed up in the registry. And the next time someone needs a bone marrow transplant, it may just be easier because of the campaign Emru's sister Tamu did to get the issue into public view. She built a good foundation for the next time.
Don't forget the Bring William Shatner to the Fringe Campaign
Volunteers hard at work in 2005, putting the Fringe away. It really is lots of fun. I've done it for ten years straight, and this will be my 11th. If one of the oldest Fringe Volunteers can do it, so can you.
Is this The End of Studio 303?
There's no excuse for a troupe to not have a webpage
see a sample of a simple webpage
List of all the Montreal Fringe shows 1995-2004 here
Maybe not fully implemented yet, but free WiFI access on St. Lawrence Blvd. See story
Check google for Fringe Festival news planetwide
Don't forget the veterans who went to Spain 70 years ago to fight for the Republicans, I was playing with one of their grandchildren recently. The Canadian veterans have a website at www.macpapbattalion.ca
Read Lys Steven's Taking the Leap, about putting on shows. Grab the PDF
Check the forecast here
The Fringe and the Internet have great similarities, both supplying a framework for individuals and small groups, and giving them a place to reach an audience. Both diminish the distance between the audience and performer, and allow for great interaction. And both require working the crowd.
Yet while the Montreal Fringe has been online (see a history) since 1995, neither it nor most of the companies have taken full advantage of the internet.
This is an admittedly late attempt to show some of the potential of the internet, as it applies to the Fringe Festival, and in fact to other situations. It is not "under construction" but it will evolve, because I am doing it on the fly and my intention is to show that a webpage should not be static.
While I'd read a bit about making webpages, this was my first attempt at doing something real, back in 2000. I just set out to learn what I needed in two days, which I hope will be an example that this isn't difficult. It takes longer to create the content than it does to make it into a webpage. This page provides some simple ways of making webpages, and outlines the path I've just taken to get here. The effectiveness of the Web (and the internet in general) is lost so long as people perceive it as a difficult space, and worry about making something perfect so they don't even make a first attempt.
There will be a link from this paragraph about how the internet could better be used. I think some of the problem arises because people come to the internet for a single purpose, seeing it as a utility rather than a community space. But effective use requires looking at what's already out there, seeing what's good and bad, and feeling connected.
You can have a webpage somewhere, and unless you tell someone about it, nobody will know that it exists. A webpage is not a billboard next to a highway; it is only a text file on some hard drive somewhere. If you want to work the crowd, you have to promote the webpage, getting it's location out into the public eye. Thus a webpage isn't publicity, but a means of conveying whatever it is you want, to others. So you still need flyers to reach the audience in the first place, but the webpage gives you a whole lot more space than a simple flyer or poster.
And the internet helps the postering process, by it's very ability to share. Some comments about postering.
However, the ability to link webpages together, creating a web, is rather like the Kevin Bacon Game (as featured in "Bizarre Love Triangle" at the Montreal Fringe in 1995). The connections between various things are already there. But the ability to link pages explicitly shows that connection.
Someone who knows about the Fringe Festival will most likely know that there will be reviews in the various papers. But once those reviews are online, the ability to link means that those reviews can be read effortlessly.
But the Fringe website has not been much of a cluster of things Fringe-related. For most years since the first website in 1995, their website has been nothing more than the paper program online. Thanks to nagging, it has changed a tad in recent years, but the point still seems to be missed. We own the space, we own the words, yet few are taking advantage of it. We can expand the audience, target specific audiences (every show has an audience, reaching it is a different matter), reach Vermont and who knows what else, if only the Fringe website was strong, being useful beyond the paper program and with content that makes people return.
Have a Chocolate Chip Cookie
It's June 7th, 2007. A quarter century ago, we walked into New York City (that's really a lie, we were in the South Bronx the day before and spent the night at a church in Harlem), having taken two months to walk there from Montreal (and other routes took far far longer). We went to the UN, where the UN Special Assembly on Nuclear Disarmament was starting, and the Assistant Secretary General greeted us, and then we crossed the street. I know there were plenty of speakers that day because I have news stories, but the only one I remember was Coretta Scott King, sounding like her husband but yet her own person. I still have the shoes I wore for most of the walk, bought in Plattsburgh when I realized hiking boots were the wrong thing. I don't suppose they'd still fit.
Be sure to check out The Encyclopedia of Canadian Theatre on the WWW
Thanks to Emmett, Coyote, ComCo and The Diggers