Baby Dee, Tammar, and The Silent Era @ John Waldron Arts Center Auditorium. 8p. $7.

Spirit of ’68 Promotions and IU Department of Gender Studies Present:

Baby Dee (Drag City Recording artist)
w/ Tammar
+ The Silent Era
@ John Waldron Arts Center Auditorium
Wednesday February 27, 2008, 8pm
$7 General Admission

From the press release:

 Baby Dee released her latest record, “Safe inside the Day” (January 22, 2008), on Drag City Records, to much critical acclaim. The album was produced by Matt Sweeney and Will Oldham, of Bonnie “Prince” Billy fame, and Will also performs on many of the songs on the album. Other performers on this latest album include Andrew WK, Robbie Lee, Max Moston (Antony and the Johnsons), Bill Breeze (Psychic TV), John Contreras (Current 93), and James Lo (Chavez). Baby Dee will be bring along a full band for this tour.  Band members will be John Contreras (a cellist that plays with Current 93, Calexico and others), Alex Neilson (a drummer who has played with Will Oldham, Jandek, Isobel Campbell and many more), Emmet Kelly (guitarist – The Cairo Gang), and Paul Oldham (Will’s brother).  

Baby Dee is the moniker of a musician who has performed in various capacities for most of her life. She has performed as a street musician in New York, as the harp-playing bear in Central Park, in circus side-shows, and even had a steady job as the organist in a Catholic church in the South Bronx. She ultimately changed her decision about her life’s work in the church because of her sexuality. Baby Dee spent most of her life as a male before finally making the decision to become a woman. The transformation was purportedly tough, but strengthened her in the long run – which clearly shows through in the performance of her music. www.babydee.org 

Tammar will grace the stage with their hauntingly beautiful and beautifully haunting indie-pop. There is no such thing as too much reverb.  http://www.myspace.com/tammarband  

The Silent Era is a wondrous mix of folk and fantasy with hints of Western-European and Middle-Eastern musical influences.  Sure to soon be a Bloomington favorite, the band is comprised of seasoned Bloomington artists, including Vincent Edwards (keyboardist, formerly of Murder by Death), Caleb Weintraub (guitarist, song-writer, vocalist, painter, and assistant professor of drawing and painting at Indiana University), Eric Radoux (multi-instrumentalist), Katie Wrightmire (violist), Taylor Peters (double bassist), and John Taylor (percussionist).   http://www.myspace.com/thesilentera  

Published
Categorized as Lets Go

24/7 DIY Media Conference @ The Internet.

I also saw this on Boing Boing.  A DIY Video Conference put on by USC:

24/7: A DIY Video Summit will bring together the many communities that have evolved around do-it-yourself (DIY) video:
artists, audiences, technology providers, academics, policy makers and industry executives. The aim is to discover common ground, and to chart the path to a future in which grassroots and mainstream, amateur and professional, artist and audience can all benefit as the medium continues to evolve.

It looks like they will be streaming some of Friday’s academic content on the web.

Link to conference website.
Link to live video stream of panel discussions.
Link to info about forums, IRC channels, and other ways of communicating amongs conference participants

Your Campaign Here

Keep Out All That I Fear Yard Sign

One of the yard sign designs that Chiara and I submitted for the Your Campaign Here project, titled Keep Out All That I Fear was selected for production and distribution.

Link

Update: The IDS did a very, very short story on the Your Campaign Here project and Chiara was interviewed:

The first winning sign was a collaboration of two artists, Chiara Galimberti and Geoffrey Hing. Galimberti, an Italian native, said since she is not a U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible to vote, the contest was a chance for her to participate in the campaign.

“Just seeing all the debate, I thought it was a strong avenue for politics without being a part of it,” Galimberti said. “I’m an outsider, but I still have strong political ideas.”

Link to IDS article.Update: I saw this minimalist campaign sign on Boing Boing:

Link to Boing Boing post about the sign.

webserver_auth module for Drupal 5

I’ve been playing around with Drupal for work and wanted to use mod_auth_kerb to authenticate Drupal users. The Webserver Auth module seemed helpful, but only worked in Drupal 4. I got the module working with Drupal 5.5 running on Apache 2.2.3 using mod_auth_kerb 5.1.

Link to my patch to make webserver_auth-4.7.x-1.x-dev work with Drupal 5.x
Link to documentation  on updating  Drupal 4.7 modules to Drupal 5.

CRITICAL ISSUES LECTURE SERIES presents Rashad Shabazz, Berkeley University “Carceral Geographies and Black Masculinity: The Prisonization of Black Living Space” @ Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, Bridgewaters Lounge (IU Campus). 4p.

CRITICAL ISSUES LECTURE SERIES presents Rashad Shabazz, Berkeley University “Carceral Geographies and Black Masculinity: The Prisonization of Black Living Space”
Time and Location: 4 p.m.
Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, Bridgewaters Lounge
Sponsors: African American and African Diaspora Studies

Published
Categorized as Lets Go

IU Black History Month Events.

From the BHM website:

On behalf of the Office of the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs and the IU Bloomington Black History Month Committee, we are inviting you to join us celebrating Black History Month. The Black History Month website will navigate you through the activities that the Indiana University and Bloomington Communities will feature during the month of February.

The 2008 Black History Month theme is “Building Our Community: Celebrating Our Past; Securing Our Future.” During Black History Month, the campus and the community will come together to celebrate the invaluable contributions that African Americans have made to our community and to our larger society. As we strive to build a better and more equitable community for all of our citizens, our celebration will include programs and activities which, while taking a look at our past, will offer a vision for the future.

The variety of programs planned for Black History Month include our keynote lecture by Terrance Roberts, a member of the Little Rock Nine; Film Director Raquel Cepeda and the Blood Diamonds Documentary; Step Afrikah! Step Show Performance; and the African American Dance Company and its 11th Annual Dance Showcase. Our hope is that you will regularly refer to the calendar of Black History Month programs and activities on this website and join us in our month long celebration. A full schedule of events and contact information are available on our calendar link.

Sincerely,

David F. Hummons,
Chair, IU Bloomington Black History Month Committee

See http://www.indiana.edu/~bhm/events.html for event listing and details.

Published
Categorized as Lets Go

push: Psychogeography


I heard an interview with the author on Living on Earth on NPR and it sounded interesting, and linking reading the Power of Maps and other things I’ve been thinking about when traveling.

From the interview:

GELLERMAN: It’s interesting on airplanes now, on the backs of the seat in front of you, you can see, you know, a map and you see yourself traveling virtually over this place. But, for all intents and purposes, you’re just in this hermetically sealed airplane.

SELF: Yes, and I think it’s a virtuality. I mean, everything about modern flight, which I’ve expatiated on elsewhere in that book, is in fact designed to make the experience boring and dull, it’s designed to virtualize it within a corporate environment. You know, there’s no reason why they couldn’t put much bigger windows in planes. There’s no reason why the stewards and stewardesses shouldn’t wear, you know Ride of the Valkyrie helmets and the captain shouldn’t shout over the P.A., ‘wheee!’ as you take off. You know, they don’t want you to be excited. They don’t want you to know where you are. And in a sense, nobody really wants to know where you are or wants you to know where you are. You know, people who travel for business especially, may go to many different cities in a year, and apart from a tiny little grid of streets around their hotel, they’ll have no real sense of orientation.

GELLERMAN: This line jumped at me, actually. I was surprised to read it. You write that ‘the place chooses you. It’s not so much that you choose a place.’

SELF: I’m not sure whether I mean that literally. But what I think I do mean is that – again, we live in a culture where place is sold to you. We’re kind of accessorized by place. People say ‘oh, I went to x,’ or ‘I went to y,’ or ‘the beaches are fabulous at z,’ or ‘they’ve got fantastic ethnic jewelry in p,’ and ‘why don’t you go to m?’ You know, they’re products. Places are products and travel magazines and travel journalism is by and large a catalog of these products that’s sold to us. And people acquire place as they might acquire any other object in that way, you know, their memory, their digital cameras, you know, they’re loaded up with these vignettes of place just as any collector might show you their Sevre pottery or their beer labels or whatever it is they collect. And I think that, you know, in order to have a profound relationship with place, again coming back to this idea of kind of knowing where you are, you have to look for those places that choose you in that way and say, ‘you know, you’re not going to be here for a day or so or a couple of days, you’re going to have an evolving, perhaps a lifetime relationship with me. I’m a place that you want to know about.’ And I think, you know, for all of us who, who think about, about the world, and who think about our place in it, that that’s true. That has a resonance. And when I look back over my own life, I mean – you know, a couple of the places that I’ve come to think of as kind of ‘my places’ over the years, I didn’t even like them when I went there. It wasn’t about liking. It wasn’t necessarily about having a good time. There was something more profound going on there.

Link to LOE interview.