Vegan Bake-Easy @ 209 N. Madison (6th and Madison). 2-8p. $5.

Vegan Bake-Easy
209 N. Madison Street (6th & Madison). No phone, follow the cupcake signs.
2-8pm.
$5 drink & dessert special
All baked goods are made fresh and vegan.

From the Bake Easy’s founder:

The official opening of The Bake Easy was March 1st and I had a sneak
peak a couple of weeks before. All bakery items are vegan, prepared on
site and made fresh on Saturday. Last week’s menu: mexican hot
chocolate cupcakes with horchata icing, boston cream pie cupcakes,
gluten-free buckeyes, oatmeal-chocolate-coconut cookies, and cherry
plum vanilla pie. A total of 50 people have come to chow down on the
last two Saturdays, with repeat offenders who are not vegan, so I must
be doing something right.

Drinks include bottomless cups of coffee/tea, tall glasses of organic
juice and wine for those who are of age.The dessert quota is as
such:three of any combo of the the buckeyes + cookies, OR two of the
cupcakes, OR one giant piece of cake or pie. Feel free to bring your
friends, family and your pets! I’d love to see you and yours there.

The upcoming menu includes: rice pudding, bread pudding, orange-carrot
muffins with cream-cheese frosting, gluten-free buckeyes, and
oatmeal-chocolate-coconut cookies. The next three dates will be
Saturday, April 5th, April 19th, and May 3rd. My menus rotate but the
time is the very same! Trying to develop a webpage/blog but haven’t
quite got there yet. link will be at www.the-bake-easy.blogspot.com

Published
Categorized as Lets Go

Rachael’s

I’m always a little skeptical about new businesses opening in Bloomington, but Amy gave Rachael’s high marks:

So I wanted to alert you to a couple of cool things going on in town
that haven’t received much press yet and a couple of venues/locations
that should probably be added to the Let’s Go! Calendar. One of them
is Rachael’s Café, located at 300 E. 3rd Street, 812 330-1882. Rachael
is a member of the Indiana GLBT community, a huge supporter of the
arts, and a complete and utter sweetheart. Everyone should meet her.

She’s got a mission statement, but I’ll just put the first part here.

“Rachael’s Café grew out of a desire to create a friendly, inclusive,
peaceful atmosphere for all. Our mission is to bring understanding,
education and acceptance over a cup of coffee.”

Rachael’s Café serves gourmet coffees and drinks, homemade soups,
salads, sandwiches and entrees. She loves ethnic foods and healthy
nutritional options. I’ve been working with her to develop a more
extensive vegan menu. I bake vegan treats for her and have convinced
her to work more with raw foods, live/slow foods (homemade) like
smoothies, kombucha and saurkraut. The best part is that she’s going
to start serving loaded vegan hotdogs and vegan chili dogs!!! (Can you
tell that I’m excited?) I’m quite sure that she’s the only business
doing this from here to Chicago. So basically, I’m stoked that there
will be a new late-night, cheap food destination in town. The café has
wireless internet, good lighting, lots of walls and a large floor
space, perfect for music, dancing, movies, art shows or pretty much
anything.

Here are the dates for upcoming things at Rachel’s Café (missed the
deadline for last month, but I’ll post them anyway)

March
THURS 13th Shalom Writers Circle – Poetry Reading, 7:30-8:30pm
FRI 14th Bob Dylan Talent Show & Friday Night Open Mic (hosted by Alan
Ginsberg), 6pm
TUES 18th Gretchen Clearwater (Democrat for Congress, Indiana – 9th
District) hosts a political discussion about the pros/cons of the
Clinton and Obama campaigns, 7pm
WED 19th Verbal Terrorism Poetry by Jada B, 7pm
THURS 20th Babbling Banshee Dinner Theatre, serving @ 6:30pm, starting
at 7pm. Irish Stew and Boxters (Irish Potato Pancake) served.
FRI Friday Night Open Mic, 6pm
SAT 22nd Babbling Banshee Dinner Theatre, serving @ 6:30pm, starting
at 7pm. Irish Stew and Boxters (Irish Potato Pancake) served.
THURS 27th Babbling Banshee Dinner Theatre, serving @ 6:30pm, starting
at 7pm. Irish Stew and Boxters (Irish Potato Pancake) served.
FRI 28th Friday Night Open Mic, 6pm
SAT 29th Babbling Banshee Dinner Theatre, serving @ 6:30pm, starting
at 7pm. Irish Stew and Boxters (Irish Potato Pancake) served.

slipstraw

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon of Easter Sunday helping Piper, Michael, Will, and Eric work on the slipstraw structure that Piper, Jrd, and Amy plan to one day inhabit.

Me fluffing the straw

Link to Flickr set of photos from the work day.

this is why I love the Internet

Because it’s so much more interesting than mainstream music media.  AP Magazine asked Defiance, Ohio for an interview for an issue focusing on folk punk and we declined to do it.  Personally, I think that there’s too much focus on promotion and attaching music to genres and really narrow and rigid identities and values and by extension encouraging people reading media to attach to really narrow and rigid identities and values.  Also, it tends to focus on what’s cool in music instead of people’s relationships and experiences with music and music’s relationships and experiences within itself.  Today, I found that the Internet, in particular, Wikipedia offered the kind of more complex and connected information about music that feels more satisfying to read…

I’ve been listening to Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor and was interested in the track The Instrumental because it had this kind of icky sounding Linkin Park-style rock hook in it.  I was interested in who contributed to it, and it turns out it was Jonah Matranga who performed as OneLineDrawing who I used to listen to when I was in college.  The track is interesting because lyrically, it is a critical look at the influence of television yet according to Wikipedia was included in the soundtrack to the Madden 07 video game.

Jonah Matranga has a wikipedia user and I thought this was  interesting  from his user page:

I’m okay with (and happy about) being considered influential in the context of post-hardcore, anti-macho rock, but I take no responsibility for McEmo as it generally manifests today. I deplore the commodification of sincerity, and big budgets to make people look/sound ‘authentic’.

…

I am an utter rock geek, an art idealist, and I absolutely believe in the transformative, transcendent power of rocking the fuck out. Rocking the fuck out is in no way tied to volume or mood, it’s just letting go.

Although  I would also argue that macho rock is also in no way tied to volume or mood and one of the biggest problems with post-hardcore or “McEmo” is that it often reflects the same masculinites (and often mysogyny) as genres of music that are more frequently criticized for those things (metal, hip-hop).  I think that Weezer’s Pinkerton which is infectious and also chock-full of mysogyny and a sense of sexual entitlement is my textbook example of this.

memes for media literacy discussions

  • Lupe Fiasco on sexism (from masculinities in media blog). I heard about Lupe Fiasco when someone brought ihis music up in the Q&A after the MED lecture last month. I heard a really great song called Kick, Push about skateboarding by Lupe Fiasco along with a lot of other great music on the Pandora Radio site.
  • Gabriel Teodros (thanks st!) on multi-racial identity and language in Africa East.  More and more I feel like punk music doesn’t speak to the questions that I need help answering, or to my experience, or connecting my experience with bigger things.  If it does connect with my experience, it seems often to link from my intentional investment in a particular subculture.  That’s not entirely true, because I think punk culture and the experience of playing music and organizing shows in a small town was, and remains, so honestly and beautifully linked with my experience growing up in central PA (and my parents as college-educated middle class people and the lifestyle that created for me).  But, that’s not my whole story, and it’s more and more unsatisfying to feel so invested in music that seems to lack a language to talk about some things, or has a political motivation without a complete perspective (say, in punk’s consistent striving to talk about and against racism but doing so without talking about race).  I’m searching for, and would like to think that I can help make multicultural music, not stylistically in the Lotus Fest, Puntamaya sort of way, but in terms of theme and perspective.