Virginia Correctional Enterprises
Inmate-sourced labor for furniture and clothing that public entities throughout the commonwealth are required to buy.
They furnish residence halls for Virginia’s colleges and universities.
There are two Open Minds events going on this Saturday if you’re free:
Floodwall at The Camel
Floodwall will be performing a free show at The Camel on Monday, June 17th with Houdan The Mystic, The Kindling Kind, and Mynah (Evan Hoffman). Come out and enjoy a collage of local sounds from post rock to indie acoustic to ambient electronic. See details on Facebook.
This event will include Open Minds participants performing work they created during the program.
Doors at 7PM, Show at 8PM.
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Poetry in Prison with WTJU
Open Minds collaborator Mark Strandquist will be hosting an event at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. As a part of the “Some Other Places We’ve Missed” exhibition at the Bridge, Poetry in Prison will create a direct feed between a local jail and the gallery. During this time Prisoners and the audience will engage in discussion and the reading of poetry. This will be simulcast with WTJU. Find out more at The BridgePAI. If you can’t make it, stream it live at WTJU.net!
At the Bridge Arts Initiative in Charlottesville, 1-2pm.
The 1960s, a time of change, a time of sharing, a time of growth. Hi, I’m former Yippie leader Jerry Rubin and I lived those years with you, burning draft cards, liberating the administration building, and, of course, scrawling revolutionary slogans on the walls in spray paint. Now, the Berkeley Collection has captured those colorful years, and the grafitti that tells it like it was, on these pre-trimmed, pre-pasted rolls of durable decorator-approved wallpaper, perfect for your den or recreation area. Join me in a protest march down Memory Lane with the pattern we call “The Dissident.
Jerry Rubin on Saturday Night Live, Oct. 18th, 1975.
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Abbie Hoffman’s Steal this Book is online for the stealing.
Loren Glass has a new book out about Grove Press that looks very interesting.
The old adage is true—writing is rewriting. But it takes a kind of courage to confront your own awfulness (and you will be awful) and realize that, if you sleep on it, you can come back and bang at the thing some more, and it will be less awful. And then you sleep again, and bang even more, and you have something middling. Then you sleep some more, and bang, and you get something that is actually coherent. Hopefully when you are done you have a piece that reasonably approximates the music in your head. And some day, having done that for years, perhaps you will get something that is even better than the music in your head. Becoming a better writer means becoming a re-writer. But that first phase is so awful that most people don’t want any part.
"Some Other Places We’ve Missed" at the Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative
An ongoing photo project by Mark Strandquist is opening this weekend at Charlottesville’s The Bridge. For the project, titled “Some Other Places We’ve Missed,” Mark asked people who were incarcerated to write in response to the question, “If you had a window in your cell, what place from your past would it look out to?” Participants then received a photo of the site they described to hang in their cell.
This exhibition will pair the writings with the photos produced in response. The writing is very moving; the images are beautiful.
The opening reception is June 7th (6-9pm), and there are ongoing events scheduled throughout June. I will be on hand Saturday, June 8th, in support of a prison letter writing workshop and a screening of Herman’s House.
If you’re not available this weekend, on Saturday, June 15th, the exhibition will host “Poetry in Prison with WTJU:”
As a part of the “Some Other Places We’ve Missed” exhibition at the Bridge, Poetry in Prison will create a direct feed between a local jail and the gallery. During this time Prisoners and the audience will engage in discussion and the reading of poetry. This will be simulcast with WTJU.
I won’t be around for the broadcast on the 15th, but I will be listening in from Ohio. A recording will be posted online for later streaming.
Hope to see you there!
Brittney Griner @ ESPN
Among other things, Griner discusses challenges faced by cis female, trans, and gay athletes.
She’s pretty incredible.
Edward Tufte forum: plagiarism detection in presentations
Edward Tufte blogged about my favorite academic hypocrisy: plagiarism in slide presentations. The sample he cites here is actually a presentation on how to craft solid slideshows.
The slideshow itself is terribly put together. It’s hard to imagine someone created it in the first place, much less plagiarized it.
Forstchen’s [“Timeline to Disaster”] reveals a deeper truth about the EMP cohort. The true nightmare, for them, isn’t the disaster itself; it’s the disorder and anarchy the disaster spells, the eruption of longstanding socioeconomic tensions. In this way, prepare for an EMP becomes code for protect the status quo. “The America we know, cherish and love, will be gone forever,” warns Gingrich in the foreword to One Second After. When he says “we,” it’s clear who’s included and who isn’t: He’s not talking about most Americans. For them, after all, the system has already failed.
The Brooklyn Bridge opened for use 130 years ago today.
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year …O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
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Image: “Plan of One Tower for the East River Bridge, 1867,“ National Archives, ARC ID 594709. Date: 1867.
Crane, Hart. “To Brooklyn Bridge” from The Bridge, Black Sun Press, 1930. Available online at poets.org.
On the acreage of the Indianapolis Museum of Art there is a lake that has, since 2010, hosted a site-specific free-floating habitat that houses resident artists. The structure, Indy Island, was designed by Andrea Zittel.
Learn more about Indy Island at the IMA website, or take a tour below:
The mycofilter residency described above is documented thoroughly here. Other residencies linked below:
I *highly* recommend 2012, where you have the option to feed the artist in his natural habitat by leaving food in an accessible cage.
Foreclosure Quilts, by Kathryn Clark. She writes:
Quilts act as a functional memory, an historical record of difficult times. It is during times of hardship that people have traditionally made quilts, often resorting to scraps of cloth when so poor they could not afford to waste a single thread of fabric.
The neighborhoods shown are not an anomaly; they are a recurring pattern seen from coast to coast, urban to suburban neighborhoods across the US. The problem has not been solved, it is still occurring, just changing shape, affecting more of us.
Clark worked as an urban planner before she began to work as an artist. She also has a fantastic textiles project in which she renders idioms in embroidered linen and felted wool.
Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, full text online
The University of Virginia has put the full text of Winesburg Ohio online for your reading pleasure.
My mother lives very close to the town that provided a model for Anderson’s novel. My partner group up just a few miles from Anderson’s hometown; they attended the same college. Anderson occupies a place of reverence in our household.
I recently sent my mother a copy of The Onion’s article, “Walmart Opens in Winesburg, Ohio,” which is the sort of text that is made humorous and sad and sweet by proximity. She wrote back that she loved it, but that she was certain Clyde is too small for a Walmart. I checked, and she is correct.
Great Plains ICWA Summit Hoping to Address Native Foster Care Concerns
From the Lakota Peoples’ Law Project:
The summit starts tomorrow, and the agenda has been successfully broadened to include the author of the Indian Child Welfare Act, as well as the new Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Kevin Washburn. If you can’t attend the summit, be sure to catch the LIVE STREAM here: http://bit.ly/19q7xdh . We can take it from here!
I’m just getting to a place where I can catch up on grading, much less on this blog. For the time being, I want to point you to a project that is happening in Richmond.
Mark Strandquist has spearheaded a few projects at Richmond City Jail that will be exhibited this summer. In one instance he and a few artists met invited inmates to write about what, if they could choose anything, they would choose to look at out of their cell window. Collecting the writings, Strand and a few photographers have gone out and photographed these views, and ferried the photos back to the inmates to hang in their cells. You can read more about that project here.
Outside the jail, Strandquist has brought together a few book makers on a project he calls The People’s Library:
The Richmond Public Library helped collect discarded books that Strandquist and his collaborators recycle into new paper. Since March, they have been holding bi-weekly paper-making workshops at the Main Branch of the library as well as at other places in the community to produce the pages (Dahlberg & Puffenberger).
Once the group has created 1000 books they will bind them and the blank books will be added to Richmond Public Library’s permanent collection. Library patrons will be able to check out the books and add their personal histories. These collective journals will remain at RPL for future generations to add to or to read.
You can follow Mark on Tumblr here.
You can read more about Mark’s project at his website. Listen to him comment on the project in the interview below.
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Dahlberg, Jessica and Caitlin Puffenberger. “People’s Library recycles its own books.” CBS6. 9 Apr., 2013.
Poetry reading tomorrow night at OAR!
5:30-7:30.
Open mic, snacks, general tomfoolery, and the first issue of our workshop’s zine.
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