Mash notes and hate mail to mblack@pubnix.net
Tobias Brox on Why Attached Microsoft Documents Are A Bad Thing

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.

The Fringe Diary returns for it's 11th year, 2010. There you go Marina. And since I told Many that there was a photo up last year of him rolling beer kegs, the 2009 diary is here.

The Fringe in The News 2010 though I'm still need to enter some older articles.

See my page about upcoming used book sales, now expanded to include some other local book activity

Studio 303 is having a show on Saturday June 19th at 19:00, it would seem sort of end of term show from the various classes there. I didn't know Suzanne was back from Israel. The iHoopu.com woman with the hoops from the Fringe For All will be performing too. The press release with details is here.

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.

The Fringe is now about "discovery", something I wrote about way back in 2003: Festival of Discovery

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.

The Myth of the Beer Tent

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

Good Riddance to CAM

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