Breadfest (a benefit for the community justice and mediation center) @ Fountain Square Ballroom. 6-8:30p. $10.

Bread Fest 2007
November 15, 2007

Times: 6-8:30 p.m.
http://www.bloomington.in.us/~mediate

Location:  Fountain Square Ballroom (101 W Kirkwood Ave)
Phone:  812.336.8677
Admission:  $10 (plus cash bar and silent auction)

Everyone is invited to attend Bread Fest, an event to benefit the Community Justice & Mediation Center.  Attendees will have the opportunity to taste a wide variety of breads submitted to the Bread Baking Contest by professional and amateur bakers. Various toppings and hors d'oeuvre will complement the bread tasting. Local wines and beer will also be available at a cash bar. The event will also include music and a silent auction. Prizes will be awarded by judges in three bread categories: yeast, quick breads and celebration. There will also be a "People's Choice Award" for a favorite bread chosen by event attendees. Call 812-336-8677 or e-mail cjam@bloomington.in.us for more information about the event.   To enter the Bread Baking Contest (deadline Nov. 8th) or to learn how you can help the Community Justice & Mediation Center, visit www.bloomington.in.us/~mediate.
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Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project Pack-A-Thon, Thursday October 11 2pm-2am.

What: The Midwest Pages to Prisoners Pack-A-Thon
When: Thursday, October 11 2007 2PM-2AM
Where: The Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project, adjacent to Boxcar Books and Community Center at 310A S Washington St, Bloomington, IN, near the corner of 3rd and Washington St.
For more information: E-mail to mwpp@pagestoprisoners.org, on the web at http://www.pagestoprisoners.org/, by phone to Boxcar Books at 812.339.8710.

On Thursday, October 11th the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project is holding a Pack-A-Thon at its space next to Boxcar Books and Community Center at 310A S Washington Street, near the corner of Third and Washington Streets, across from Third Street Park. The event will start at 2pm on Thursday afternoon and go a full 12 hours until 2am that night.

The Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project currently has a backlog of book requests from prisoners that spans at least three months. With the help of Pack-A-Thon volunteers, we hope to significantly reduce that backlog!

Volunteers at the Pack-A-Thon will be reading letters sent from prisoners, filling requests for books from our collection of books donated by members of the Bloomington community, and packaging those books so that they are ready to be mailed. No prior experience is necessary, and training will be provided to new volunteers on the hour, every hour.

While we hope to get a lot of work done, this will also be a fun and festive event, so bring music, snacks and beverages to share, as well as everyone you know! Additionally, book donations and donations of packing supplies such as envelopes large enough to hold 3 books, large sheets of paper that could be used to wrap packages of books, or packing tape will be very useful.

For more information, contact the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project at mwpp@pagestoprisoners.org, pagestoprisoners.org, or 812.339.8710.

For those unable to attend this special event, Pages meets several times every week to help send books to the imprisoned. The regularly scheduled meeting times are Mondays (during the school year) from 7-9pm , Thursdays from 7-11pm, and Sundays from 2-5pm.

The Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project is an all volunteer effort that strives to provide free reading material to prisoners in the United States. By providing free reading materials upon request, we hope to aid in the rehabilitation process and stimulate critical thinking behind bars. Our volunteers are concerned citizens and activists interested in rehabilitation, rather than punishment.

The project exists to alleviate pain, boredom, and attrition and to provide a direct opportunity for self-education. Additionally, we exist because prison libraries sometimes fail in this respect, and are understocked, or are only able to be patronized during specific and limited hours. Finally, The Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project exists to inform others about the condition of the prison system in Indiana and throughout the nation and the effects of incarceration on our communities. Through the letters and books that we send and receive, we hope to build connections between those who are within the criminal justice system, and their communities at large.

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notes for week of 2007-09-29

Saw that Radiohead is offering a name-your-own-price downloads for its new album.  This might be a better model for Defiance, Ohio audio files since I see a problem with totally free-as-in-beer audio files as being perceived only for promotional purposes or not valued in the same way a physical record is.  I would love to plant the bug in listeners’ heads that while digital downloads lack some of the substance and features of records or discs (artwork, tangible object) the fluidity that they can be transported and shared ought to be viewed as an asset in the same way that artwork would.

I’ve been watching the Ken Burns documentary, The War on PBS pretty intently, and it’s so much to take in. Some of the most elequent, descriptive, and thoughtful comments quoted in the film were by a veteran named Eugene Sledge, from Mobile. It turns out that he published his diaries from his time fighting in the Pacific theatre. The book is called With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa.

While it is possible to recognize narratives of heroism and villany in the documentary, more than anything, it makes me think about how immense and terrible war is, that it is incredible to me that after the destruction of WWII, anyone would ever wage war again. It seems so unfathomable, the extent of the horror and destruction, but listening to the stories, memories, and carefully crafted explainations of those interviewed, so obviously worded from a mental dialog revisited over a lifetime, that even those immersed in the belly of the horrors could glean what seems like so much understanding of humanity’s darkest capabilities. Even with this understanding, though, there seemed to be a general sadness in how little this knowledge offered in terms of imagining or crafting a different course for humanity.

notes for the week of 2007-09-24

Tim says to check out Kaati rolls while I’m traveling.

This wiki page has info on how to configure e-mail integration in eventum which Boxcar uses to handle tech trouble tickets. I wanted to turn off auto issue creation because we get a lot of e-mails that don’t neccessarily want to become issues and then there’s the overhead of closing the issue.

The Allied Media Conference is taking proposals for some web development. Josh asked me about Drupal vs. Joomla, and I’m not that familiar with Joomla. This thread seemed to offer some insight.

kdenlive is the software I started using to play around with video editing on linux.

I’ve long wanted to be able to do a substitution or other command on a visual block. It turns out that there is a vim script called vis.vim to help you do this.

I read mail using a lot of different clients. So, I wanted to seperate my mail filtering rules from my mail client. Imapfilter does the trick and though it’s configuration language is daunting at first glance, it’s not too bad.

I was wondering how to drop all tables in a MySQL DB from the command line:

mysqldump -u username -ppassword –add-drop-table –no-data database | grep ^DROP | mysql -u username -ppassword database

worked fine.

Gutbucket, Mouthbreather, Basilica, Stringzz, Goodhands Team @ Fester’s. 10p. $5.

Thursday, October 11th
10 PM at Uncle Fester’s
$5

Gutbucket is the new darling of the downtown New York music scene that nurtured such giants as John Zorn’s ‘Masada’ and ‘Bang on a Can’.  Some call it “jazz-punk” but “cartoon-thrash-indie or psychedelic” could be added to the genre pool.   www.gutweb.com

Mouthbreather hasn’t cut short their lust for wildly energetic rock and roll, despite the fact that they are kick-ass musicians.  Imagine if The Stooges put on magic hats and suddenly had chops like Dillinger Escape Plan.   www.myspace.com/mouthbreathermusic

Basilica can be heard as chamber-music, noise-rock, tech-grind,  post-whatever, or a colossal absurdity.  Their explosion of guitars, bass, drums, violins, and visuals is one of Bloomington’s most truly provocative performances.   www.myspace.com/basilicaproject

Stringzz plays some old and new charts for jazz string quartet and rhythm section.  These young performers will fill the room with the sweetest tones and hottest licks but always with the ripe smell of soul.

Goodhands Team is an anomaly.  Ask 2 people about them and you’ll hear about 3 different versions of GHT.  Electronic and acoustic, rhythmic but aleatoric, GHT exists as a precious abberation.  www.goodhandsteam.com

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Take back the night @ Dunn Meadow (IU Campus). 6-9p.

Take a stand and rally to end rape and domestic violence against women! Featuring live music and speakers followed by a candlelight vigil honoring victims and survivors. Proceeds will go towards Middleway House, a local domestic violence and rape crisis center for women. Co-sponsored with Women’s Student Association, Friends of Middleway House, Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, R.A.I.S.E., IU Men’s Coalition, Office of Women’s Affairs, and Theta Nu Xi Multicultural Sorority, Inc. Location: Dunn Meadow

For more info, contact slu87@indiana.edu

 
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Film Indiana 2007 Screenings @ various locations. various times

From the Film Indiana conference website:

Film Indiana, scheduled for September 14-6, 2007, showcases the archival film holdings and cinema-related collections at Indiana University at Bloomington, including most notably: the Bradley Collection, Kinsey Institute, and IU’s extraordinary collection of instructional and educational films. The inaugural conference, “Screening Shorts,” will focus on short films produced within and beyond the Hollywood tradition.
Information about the screenings (information about locations can be found at the conference schedule):

Friday, September 14, 8:00PM
Forbidden Avant-Garde: Historical Erotica from the Kinsey Institute

The Department of Communication and Culture, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, and the Ryder Film Series present films from the Kinsey Institute Library and Special Collections in two thematic groupings:

The Forbidden Avant-Garde: Selections that focus on out-of-distribution or difficult-to-find works on the subject of human sexuality by some of the masters of avant-garde cinema, including Stan Brakhage and Jean Genet.

Historical Erotica: A cross-section of films, dating from the early- to the mid-twentieth century, that provide a glimpse of what was considered to be erotic material early in cinema’s history.
Saturday, September 15, 1:00PM
Hollywood in Brief: Short Films from the David S. Bradley Collection

The Bradley Film Collection was acquired by Indiana University in 1997, after the death of collector and filmmaker, David Shedd Bradley. Nearly 4,000 16mm films—both classic and obscure—span the history of cinema in the United States and Europe, with the silent era being particularly well represented.

The screening will showcase some hidden gems from the Bradley collection, including trailers, promotional shorts for the industry (“behind-the-scenes” looks), fiction films currently not in distribution, as well as rarely-seen works by women directors.
Saturday, September 15, 8:00PM
Sex, Hygiene and Cultural Byways: Vintage Films from IU’s Instructional Film Collection

Making the world a better place one 16mm reel at a time: teaching gender, monitoring sexuality, appreciating our friends around the globe, managing problems in the workplace and the psyche.

Note: This screening will be held at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater

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Paris, je t’aime Ryder Film Opens @ Bear’s Place/Fine Arts 015. 4p/7p

Paris, je t'aime ("Paris, I love you") brings together some of cinema's
most eclectic, acclaimed directors (Alexander Payne, Alfonso Cuarón, the
Coen brothers, Wes Craven and Walter Salles) along with some of the most
intriguing actors working today (Steve Buscemi, Catalina Sandino Moreno,
Maggie Gyllenhaal, Fanny Ardant, Nick Nolte, Gena Rowlands, Juliette
Binoche, Elijah Wood and Natalie Portman) for a series of short films
celebrating the spirit of Paris. Each director tells of an unusal
encounter in a Parisian neighborhood; the vignettes go beyond the
postcard view of Paris to portray aspects of the city rarely seen on the
big screen.(116 min)

Screenings:
Sat, Sept 15 at 4:00 at Bear's Place and at 7:30 in Fine Arts 015 Sun,
Sept 16 at 5:15 at Bear's Place Fri, Sept 21 at 7:30 in Fine Arts 102
Sat, Sept 22 at 4:00 at Bear's Place and at 7:30 in Fine Arts 102 Sun,
Sept 23 at 5:15 at Bear's Place Fri, Sept 28 at 7:30 in Fine Arts 102
Sat, Sept 22 at 4:00 at Bear's Place  
Fri, Oct 5 at 7:30 in Fine Arts 102
Sat, Oct 6 at 4:00 at 7:30 in Fine Arts 102

For group tickets please call 339-2002.

For more about The Ryder Film Series visit www.theryder.com
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Shapes and Sizes, Yeasayer, Vollmar @ Waldron Arts Center. 8p. $7

Shapes and Sizes
Yeasayer
Vollmar
Tues. Sept. 18th
8pm
$7
The Waldron Arts Center

Shapes and Sizes are Canadian imports making a splash on Sufjan
Stevens Asthmatic Kitty Records. The off-kilter time signatures and
quirky instrumentation recall Deerhoof and Bloomington's favorite sons
The Impossible Shapes.They are a hodgepodge of sounds and ideas that
come together to create a piece of indie-rock perfection that is a
treat for the ears.
www.myspace.com/shapesandsizes

Brooklyn natives Yeasayer return to the Bloomington stomping grounds
where they wowed audiences opening for Frog Eyes. The groups music is
as richly diverse as the members themselves and the burrough they call
home. Much like TV on the Radio, Yeasayer's music is a perfect
amalgamation of gospel, funk, disco, pop, rock, and soul. In a sense,
take everything that is good about music over the past 50 years or so.
Throw it all into a blender and let it marinate in the art-rock
inflected sheen of Brooklyn and you have the aural joy that is
Yeasayer.
www.myspace.com/yeasayer

Vollmar is the create outlet of the humble virtuoso Justin Vollmar.
Vollmar's unassuming demeanor belies a gifted songwriter and musician
whose songs are touch all those who bare witness to the serenity of
his craft.
www.myspace.com/vollmarmusic
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