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Comedy Nights
P/Times Comp T&Cs
Primary Times Competition
Standard Competition Terms and Conditions
These standard competition terms and conditions (these Terms) apply to any Comedy At Work Ltd competition or prize draw whose published details state that these Terms are to apply (the Competition). In these Terms, the published details of a Competition mean the details set out on the entry form, the publicity material and any web pages dealing with the Competition. These Terms must be read together with the published details of the relevant Competition. In the event of any conflict between them, these Terms will take precedence unless (and only to the extent that) the published details of the relevant Competition clearly state otherwise.
2. Promoter
The Promoter of the Competition is Comedy At Work Ltd, 24 St Marys Court Kenilworth CV8 and any partner referred to as such in the published description of the Competition (Partner).
3. Duration
The Competition will run from the published start date (the Start Date) and will end on the published closing date 31/07/20. Comedy At Work Ltd will not change the Closing Date unless circumstances outside its reasonable control make it unavoidable.
4. Who Can Enter
4.1 Except as set out in Rule 4.2, the Competition is open to the group of people specified in the published details of the Competition. If no particular group of people is specified, the Competition is open to all residents of the United Kingdom (excluding Northern Ireland) who are aged 18 or over.
4.2 The Competition is not open to employees of Comedy At Work Ltd or any Partner, or any of their wholly owned subsidiaries or any marketing services agency, service provider or other person involved directly with the administration of the Competition, or any member of their households.
4.3 If the published details of the Competition do not state that the Competition is only open to purchasers of a particular product or service, no purchase is necessary to enter the Competition.
5.1 Entries must be submitted in the manner required in the published details of the Competition. Please note that:
(a) Entries submitted via email or via a website may incur Internet service provider or mobile network provider charges;
(b) Entries submitted via SMS message will be charged at your standard network rate; and
(c) Entries sent through agents or third parties will be invalid.
5.2 If the manner of entry specified in the published details of the Competition is email or via a website, participants may also submit their entries by writing to the address in Rule 1.
5.3 All entries for the Competition must be received no later than 23:59 on the Closing Date to be eligible for selection.
6. Validity of Entry
6.1 Unless otherwise specified in the published details of the Competition, there is a limit of one entry per person.
6.2 Comedy At Work Ltd does not accept responsibility for lost, damaged or illegal entries. Illegible entries will be invalid and proof of sending/mailing is not proof of receipt. Correspondence will be entered into only at the discretion of Comedy at Work Ltd.
6.3 Late, illegible or defaced entries will not be accepted.
7. How The Winner(s) Will Be Chosen
7.1 Unless otherwise specified in the published details of the Competition, the winning entrant or entrants (each a Winner) will be selected at random from all eligible entries by Comedy At Work Ltd or its agents under the supervision of an independent person on the date specified in the published details of the Competition.
7.2 The selection of the Winner or Winners under Rule 7.1 will be final.
The Winner(s) will be announced in the place or publication and on or about the date specified in the published details of the Competition. If no place or publication is specified in the published details of the Competition, the Winner(s) will be announced on Comedy At Work Ltd website at
www.comedyatwork.com
no more than 14 days after the Closing Date. The Winner(s) will be notified personally as soon as practicable either before or after the date of the public announcement.
9. Winning Entry Details
9.1 The name(s) and counties of the Winner(s) will be sent to anyone who writes to Comedy At Work Ltd at the address in Rule 1 above, within 3 months after the Closing Date, requesting details of the Winner(s) and enclosing a stamped addressed envelope.
10. The Prize
10.1 The Winner(s) will each receive the prizes specified in the published details of the Competition. No cash alternative or alternative prize can be offered. In the unlikely event that a prize should become unavailable,Comedy At Work Ltd reserves the right to substitute a prize which it may determine as being of equal value.
10.2 The prize(s) will be dispatched or made available to the Winner(s) by the date specified in the published details of the Competition. If no date is specified, the prize(s) will be dispatched within 30 days of the Closing Date.
11. Winner Publicity
11.1 Entrants accept that, if they win, Comedy At Work Ltd will have the right, without additional payment or permission, to use their name, age, town of residence and likeness for the purposes of announcing the Winner(s) of the Competition and for related promotional purposes.
12. Data Privacy
12.1 Personal information about the Winner(s) will be shared with Comedy At Work Ltd agents to the extent necessary for prizes to be delivered to those Winner(s).
12.2 Comedy At Work Ltd would like to keep entrants informed of events and other related information or news which may be of interest by email, post and/or telephone. However, if you specifically do not want to be contacted please let us know by ticking the box on the relevant entry form or through such other method as may be specified in the published details of the Competition. You can also let us know by writing to us at the address in Rule 1.
12.3 Comedy At Work Ltd will not pass your email address to third parties.
12.4 All personal data relating to Competition entrants will be processed solely in accordance with current UK data protection legislation.
13.1 By submitting their entry, Competition entrants will be deemed to have agreed to be bound by these Terms.
13.2 Please retain a copy of these rules for your reference.
13.3 The Competition and these Terms will be governed by English law and any disputes will be subject to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England. However, if you are ordinarily resident in Scotland you can also bring proceedings in the Scottish courts.
©2019 By Comedy at Work Ltd


Beautiful stone and cedar shake craftsman style home on private cul-de-sac lot and Fairways at Berry Forest golf community. Master on main, three bedrooms /two baths up, plus bonus room. Home has three fireplaces… One in great room, one in keeping room off kitchen and breakfast area, and one in desirable outdoor covered porch area.


I'd have to agree with Tom and Mike, Bar-tailed Godwit. The bill is covered in mud making it look all black and it's too narrow for a dowitcher. The feeding posture is wrong for an Asian Dowitcher, they feed with a vertical downward motion, this bird clearly shows the bill pointing forward which is how Bar-tails feed.


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Entertainment News | hotspotatl Staff
Tony Parker References Chris Brown's Violent Behavior in Lawsuit Against Nightclub
Things are getting bad for Chris Brown and his uncontrollable temper. NBA player Tony Parker is using Brown's violent tendencies to help win a lawsuit against the New York City nightclub where he was injured. Remember when Drake and Breezy got into the bottle bashing incident at Club WiP over Rihanna last June? Tony Parker […]
Chris Brown & Attorney Call Club Brawl Lawsuit Nonsense
Chris Brown and his attorney have responded to the multi-million dollar lawsuit filed against him and Drake for their alleged role in the bloody brawl that broke out at New York City's Club WiP last June. Brown and his attorneys are calling the suit frivolous. The owners of Club WiP are suing Chris Brown and […]
Chris Brown & Drake Hit With $16 Million Lawsuit For NYC Club Brawl
Chris Brown and Drake have been hit with a $16 million lawsuit stemming from the bloody, bottle-throwing brawl they were allegedly involved in at New York City's club W.i.P. on June 14. The lawsuit, filed by W.i.P. operators Entertainment Enterprises Ltd., claims the melee, which left at least seven people injured, cost them a $4 […]
Chris Brown Disses Drake On "I Don't Like" Cover [AUDIO]
The beef between Chris Brown and Drake shows no signs of slowing down. Weeks after the two stars and their entourages were involved in a bottle-throwing brawl that led to several injured people inside New York City's club W.i.P, Breezy dropped a verse dissing Drizzy on a cover of Chief Keef's "I Don't Like." Do you […]
Chris Brown & Drake Offered Money To Fight?
The now infamous bottle-throwing brawl between Chris Brown, Drake and their entourages that led to several injured people inside New York City's club W.i.P has allegedly earned them an offer to fight from Celebrity Boxing founder Damon Feldman. Feldman allegedly offered each artist $1 million. If accepted, the match would take place August 25 at […]
Spurs' Tony Parker Suing NYC Club Over Drake-Chris Brown Brawl
The fallout from Drake and Chris Brown's bloody club brawl continues. San Antonio Spurs player Tony Parker is suing New York City Club W.i.P. for $20 million for injuries he sustained during the bottle bashing brawl. Parker claims the club should have never allowed both of Rihanna's exes in the establishment at the same time. […]
Lil Wayne Wants Drake & Chris Brown To Squash Beef
Lil Wayne and other Young Money execs want Drake to put an end to his beef with Chris Brown because the ongoing feud is bad for business, reports TMZ. Sources close to Drake told TMZ that Drizzy has received several calls from Weezy, Birdman, Mack Maine and others urging the Toronto rapper to extend an olive […]
Drake Has Not Been Arrested For Chris Brown Brawl, Despite Internet Rumors
Despite rumors that Drake would be arrested during the New York stop of his Club Paradise tour this weekend, the Young Money rapper remains a free man. Hot 107.9 spoke with the NYPD's Public Information office who told us that Drake has not been arrested. As we reported last week, a brawl broke out between […]
Videos | hotspotatl Staff
Drake Addresses Chris Brown Brawl At "Club Paradise" Tour [VIDEO]
The bottle bash that left several people injured at NYC club W.i.P last weekend may or may not have been Drake's fault. But during the New York stop of "Club Paradise" tour, the Canadian rapper eluded to the fact that he felt some type of way about Chris Brown before the fight popped off! "When […]
Manager Of NYC Club Where Chris Brown & Drake Fought Arrested
The manager of the New York City club where a brawl erupted between Drake, Chris Brown and their entourages, allegedly over Rihanna, has been arrested. The New York Daily News reports that Jonathan Cantor was arrested by the NYPD after police responding to complaints from neighbors complaining about the noise at his other NYC club, […]
Entertainment News | ronemariamore
Chris Brown Gives Cops Details And Drake Insists He Wasn't Involved In Brawl
Details of the NYC brawl between Chris Brown and Drake and their entourages are beginning to unravel. Word is, Chris Breezy is NOT trying to risk losing his probation privileges and has been very cooperative with authorities about what went down. On the flip side, Drake is insisting that he is NOT the one who […]
Chris Brown Drake Fight Footage Surfaces! [VIDEO & NEW PHOTOS]
Video has surfaced of the brawl that broke out between Drake, Chris Brown and their entourages last night at New York City's club WIP! We also found more photos of the fight and its aftermath. As we reported earlier, the brawl supposedly started after Drake and Breezy exchanged heated words over Rihanna. Drake reportedly dated […]

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


it's been a lovely few days of family time but i can't wait to curl up in my own bed, soak in my own tub, and not engage in small talk for at least 24 hours. woke up at 5am and am catching up on e-mail while we await our delayed baltimore flight to take us home from newark. i think i am officially traveled out for awhile.
gramma's birthday soiree was tons o' fun and i have some entertaining photos to share. amazing how exhausting it is to fly to oklahoma, drive from oklahoma to texas, galivant all over texas shopping (did you know vera wang has a new line at kohl's?), participate in a party for the 95-year-old queen, drive back to oklahoma, and fly home. i'm truly pooped and my body is so out of sorts. dined on dark chocolate m & ms (gramma even had to hide them from me because i was eating her whole big bag), sipped a ton of tea, ate oodles of tex mex, dined on the buttercream icing from gramma's cake, and tried to get in anything fresh any chance i could. my family loves pre-packaged everything. my body is out of whack!
while waiting for our next plane, i pulled out the trusty planner pad to see what my week had in store for me. wrote in numerous to dos with my new multi-colored gel pens and am ready to dive back in - after a good long bath tub soak, some yummy yoga, fresh food, and good night's sleep in my own bed.
by the way, many of you requested "pink palace" photos. with all the recent travel, it has been hard to capture the cozy condo without packed or unpacked bags strewn throughout. i promise you that those photos are forthcoming but i just couldn't bear to show them in the state of flux my home has recently been in. stay tuned.
Thank you for agreeing to post some pics of your living space!
The pic of the sewing machine and books in August was an inspiration!
I know what you mean about going home - my dog was actually laying down behind my car's back tires this afternoon as if to say 'no more!' It was adorable!
I was wondering if there might be the chance to have some hip tranquil illustrations to download as clip art for one's personal use (only personal use). I am trying to use my laptop computer for ideas, inspiratonal thoughts, lists, etc. as you mentioned in the #100 podcast in conjunction with my planner pad. I would be much more inspired if I could 'art up' my personal documents with some fab drawings of a HTC lifestyle!


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Saudi Human Rights
Biden adviser slams Saudi sentencing of rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul
Jake Sullivan calls nearly six-year sentence handed down to women's rights activist 'unjust and troubling'
Published date: 28 December 2020 21:54 UTC | Last update: 1 year ago
US President-elect Joe Biden's national security adviser has condemned Saudi Arabia over its sentencing of women's rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul on terrorism charges.
Jake Sullivan said in a Tweet on Monday that the sentencing was "unjust and troubling", and pledged that the incoming Biden administration would "stand up against human rights violations when they occur".
Saudi Arabia's sentencing of Loujain al-Hathloul for simply exercising her universal rights is unjust and troubling. As we have said, the Biden-Harris administration will stand up against human rights violations wherever they occur.
— Jake Sullivan (@jakejsullivan) December 28, 2020
A Saudi terrorism court on Monday sentenced Hathloul to five years and eight months in prison, despite international criticism of her detention and pressure to release her.
Hathloul was arrested in May 2018 after openly calling for the right to drive before it was granted and for the removal of male guardianship laws that had long stifled women's freedom of movement and ability to travel.
According to rights group ALQST, court documents in Hathloul's trial were rife with "gross judicial flaws", including evidence from the prosecution where she is said to have confessed to actions related to her human rights activism.
Her family has alleged that she has experienced sexual harassment and torture in detention. Saudi authorities vigorously deny the charges.
Loujain al-Hathloul, the Saudi activist who has put women's rights on the map
Loujain's trial comes just days after the Saudi terrorism court sentenced prominent American-Saudi doctor Walid Fitaihi, 56, to six years in prison on charges that include getting US citizenship without permission from authorities and sympathising with an unidentified terrorist organisation.
Fitaihi was sentenced despite pleas from US lawmakers and officials calling for his release.
Fitaihi, a physician and well-being expert with a large social media following, was arrested in November 2017 as part of the so-called "Ritz Carlton purge" that saw the detention of dozens of Saudi royals and business leaders.
Sullivan's criticism comes as Biden has taken a uncharacteristically harsher tone towards Riyadh.
In recent months, Biden has pledged to end US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, has promised to "reassess" Washington's relationship with Riyadh in the aftermath of the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and called the Saudi kingdom a "pariah".
US President Donald Trump and his administration, on the other hand, have remained largely silent on the various cases of human rights abuses, and Trump has gone to great lengths to defend Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the aftermath of Khashoggi's murder, despite a CIA report linking the crown prince to the act.
Last week, the Trump administration notified Congress that it was moving forward with a $478m sale of 7,500 precision-guided missiles to Saudi Arabia.
The US was also reported to be considering granting bin Salman legal immunity in a lawsuit accusing him of attempting to assassinate high-level intelligence officer Saad al-Jabri.
Uighur scholar could be deported from Saudi Arabia 'within days', says family
Saudi princess freed after three years in jail: Report
Tigrayans deported from Saudi Arabia detained and mistreated by Ethiopia
Saudi rights activist launches hunger strike over conditions at al-Hair prison
Al-Akhbar under cyberattack for reporting Saudi and Emirati bankrolling Israel deals
Trump administration notifies Congress of arms sales to Saudi Arabia


The East Meadow Soccer Club invites you to our 27th Annual East Meadow World Cup Indoor Tournaments. Once again, we will be holding our tournaments at the turf fields at Coleman Country Day Camp in Merrick, NY over MLK & Presidents Day Weekends. Specific dates are January 19th or January 20th 2018, and February 16th or February 17th 2018.
In our 27th year we plan on selling out both events once again, so please register early!! As a reminder, your credit card will not be charged at the time of registration, you will only be charged if your application is accepted.
One day format for all teams - quick session times normally around 3 hours.


Small bamboo coral beads are embellishing the teardrop frame of these delicate earrings. Handcrafted and wire wrapped without the use of any machinery, these feminine earrings display unique details. The intense red of the bamboo coral is starkly in contrast with the shiny sterling silver of the earrings' frames and the two materials complement one another. Easy to match to any number of colors, the red of their coral will make of them your go-to earrings.
Due to the use of the wire wrapped technique, these earrings are surprisingly light and easy to wear all day long.


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Michigan Movie at the Michigan: "The Pickle Recipe"
Mon, 12/19/2016 - 1:00pm
PREVIEW FILM & VIDEO INTERVIEW
Fermented foods are a form of pickling, but pickles can just be ... pickles, straight up.
See, sauerkraut and yogurt are fermented foods that engage in a form of pickling, with the preservation caused by lactic acid fermentation.
But straight-up pickling is the process in which a vegetable -- in this case, a cucumber -- is preserved by vinegar, an acidic.
In the The Pickle Recipe, a new film set in Detroit, whatever secret ingredients have been added to Grandma Rose's pickling process -- whose dill-icious concoction has had patrons flocking to Irv's Deli for years -- is the driving force behind Joey Miller's desperate attempt to steal the recipe from her.
In other words, this ain't no straight-up pickle.
Miller is a DJ/MC for weddings, bat mitzvahs, and any other party that needs its roof blown off. But Miller (played by Jon Dore) is in debt and he loses his only source of income when all his sound and lighting gear gets destroyed by accident. He turns to his sneaky Uncle Morty (David Paymer) for a loan, who agrees to give Miller the dough -- on one condition: That he steal Grandma Rose's (Lynn Cohen) pickle recipe, a secret creation she's long sworn to take to her grave.
Hijinks ensue and viewers are treated to comedic caper flick with more than a touch of heart.
Director Michael Manasseri and writers/producers Sheldon Cohn and Gary Wolfson are Michigan natives, and nine of the cast/crew members attended the University of Michigan. The Pickle Recipe is playing at the Michigan Theater through December 22, and we caught up with Manasseri, Cohn, and Wolfson in an email interview, whose questions they answered as a group.
Interview: Photographer Michelle Massey/Omeeomi, UMMA/Tiny Expo Award Winner
INTERVIEW VISUAL ART
Omeeomi, we have a winner!
Tiny Expo has become an annual tradition for the Washtenaw-area arts and crafts community, and the juried artists who exhibit their works often leave the downtown Ann Arbor District Library brimming with dinero from all the sales.
But this year there was a chance to take home some bonus bucks.
For this year's event, which was held December 10, the Tiny Expo/UMMA Store Vendor Contest allowed patrons to cast votes for their favorite artists, with the prizes being:
-- 3rd place: $20 gift card to the UMMA store
-- 2nd place: $30 gift card to the UMMA store
-- 1st place: Select products by the winning artist will be featured and available for sale at the UMMA museum store for 6 months.
The top 3 vote-getters were then vetted by Nettie Tiso, manager of the UMMA store, who chose which artist would get to sell his or her works at the museum.
And this year's winner is ... [drumroll] ... [really long drumroll] ... [now the drummer is doing a jazz solo, so this may take a while] ... [security breaks the drumsticks and escorts percussionist out of the building] ...
Michelle Massey, a Ypsilanti-based photographer who calls her company Omeeomi.
We talked to Massey about her art and photography in the interview below:
Interview: Mark Mothersbaugh on Pee-Wee Herman, Thor, and America's ongoing de-evolution
by Patrick Dunn
INTERVIEW PREVIEW FILM & VIDEO VISUAL ART MUSIC
Devo, with blue hats, 2010. // Solo, no hat, 2016.
Mark Mothersbaugh is best known for his indelible contributions to pop music as the frontman of Devo, but his work with the darkly humorous New Wave group represents just a fraction of his diverse artistic output. Since the late '80s Mothersbaugh has composed music for hundreds of movies, TV shows, video games, and commercials. His visual art includes thousands of pen-and-ink postcard-sized drawings, rugs, sculpture-like musical instruments, and eyeglasses. This broad body of work, including the music and early music videos he created with Devo, is the subject of a new traveling museum exhibit, Mark Mothersbaugh: Myopia. The exhibit currently is not scheduled to stop in Ann Arbor, but in a way we'll be getting something even better. Mothersbaugh will appear at the Michigan Theater on September 29 for the Penny Stamps Speaker Series, engaging in conversation with Adam Lerner, who curated the Myopia exhibit and wrote the accompanying book.
In advance of his Ann Arbor appearance, Mothersbaugh chatted with Pulp about maintaining a sense of subversiveness despite corporate interference, his enduring friendship with Pee-Wee Herman creator Paul Reubens, and Todd Rundgren's enviable fashion sense.
Q: You'll be in conversation here at the University of Michigan with Adam Lerner, who curated the new retrospective exhibition of your work and edited the accompanying book. As you've had these opportunities to look back on your work recently, have you had any new realizations about your evolution as an artist over time?
A: [Laughs.] You know, yeah. You do pick up information along the way of being a human, I've found. To me, when I walk through the show ... it's kind of interesting to see what things are the same and what things never change. When I look back at the arc of all my visual art, I can say, "Well, in a way it's permutations on a theme." It really goes back to when I was at school at Kent State. I hated public school. The first 12 years of my life in school were horrid. I was at odds with other students, with the teachers, with everybody. It was just totally unpleasant and I almost ended up at Kent State on a fluke, but it turned out to change my life in a lot of ways. I gained a respect for education, among other things, and I just loved having access to tools that I never had access to before ... There was very limited art teaching in public schools in the '50s and '60s, so it was kind of this amazing world that got opened up to me when I all of a sudden found out about all the things you could do, all the empowerment that came with being in college. I loved it.
But at that time period, I was there for the shooting of the students at Kent State. We had all joined [Students for a Democratic Society] and we were going to help end the war in Vietnam and then things took a dark turn. ... That was in my sophomore year, and [I was] questioning that. I was collaborating for about a year before that with a grad student that was an artist at Kent State named Jerry Casale. Questioning what we'd seen, we decided that what we'd seen was de-evolution, not evolution. I understand that there's different ways for artists to evolve and mature and to fall apart or to build. I think in my case, I think my life as an artist has always been kind of seen through the eyes of someone that was always kind of hopeful, but paranoid at the same time. Or worried about it. Hopeful, but concerned. We saw de-evolution as a vehicle to talk about the things that we were concerned about on the planet, and I feel like my work has been sort of permutations on that theme.
Even kind of shifting into the belly of the beast and moving into Hollywood and scoring films and television, between Devo kind of slowing down at the end of the '80s, I started doing gallery shows. I did about 125 or 140 shows at mostly smaller pop-up galleries and street galleries, just because being in Hollywood made me distrustful of organized entertainment, so to speak. I've found all the smaller galleries to be, a high percentage of them, filled with authentic people that loved and were concerned about art and reminded me of what it was like to be in Devo when we were starting it. We thought we were doing an art movement. We thought we were doing Art Devo. We were like an agitprop group who worked in all the different mediums and were spreading the good news of de-evolution around the world. That was our original goal.
When we signed with Warner Bros. and Virgin Records, they kind of did as best a job as they could of shoving us into a little box that they could understand. ... Even in the late '70s, it was a struggle to convince them to let us make our short films. They had no idea why we wanted to make films with our songs. There were so many things that were a struggle that were needless. As Jerry would say, we were the pioneers who got scalped. But it was like the early days of people recognizing artists that put ideas in front of the actual techniques that they used. A technique was just a vehicle to help you solve a problem or create a piece of art. Being a craftsman was less necessary than ever before in our culture.
Now it's totally amazing how far it's gone. Kids that have ideas now about art, they don't have the barriers that we had or I had. The Internet is such an amazing, wonderful gift and tool for kids. I'm so jealous I'm not 14 right now. I watch my kids – they're 12 and 15, and I watched them make little movies on an iPad when they were even younger. It's totally transparent to them and they're laughing and running around the house. They're making a movie like a little kid would make, but they don't even know that 30 years ago – was it 30? '76, that's like, what, 40 years? Jesus. Forty years ago. It took a year of work first to make the money to pay for $3,000 worth of material and then to find time in editing bays where we could go in and make our seven-and-a-half minute film. And it's not just my kids. It's all over the world. Cell phones and iPads, things like that, are so inexpensive now that you see kids in the Amazon playing with this stuff, taking pictures of things around them and making music on iPhones. You not only don't have to own a guitar or a piano or a set of drums. You don't even have to know how to play it. My kids found this app where they could play drums by just making drum sounds into their phone and it would translate that into one of 30 different drum kits. ... Art has become so democratic. On some levels it's astounding. Anyhow, I don't know how I got to that after you were asking me about my art, but there you go. That's the danger of talking to me after a cup of coffee.
Mark Mothersbaugh, 1964 –Monument to the Conquerors of Space, 2012, ink jet on paper.
Q: That's okay. It was an interesting answer. I want to ask you a little bit more about the concept of de-evolution, since that was of course so important to the formation of Devo. How has that concept played out for you as time has gone along? Do you see de-evolution continuing to play out? Is that concept still as relevant to you as when you were younger back in the '70s?
A: I think all you have to do is look at this current election season in the U.S. It's like Idiocracy has arrived, for real. It's not even ironic or funny anymore. It's reality. It's kind of impressive and depressive at the same time, because we were never in support of things falling apart or the stupidity of man getting the upper hand. We just felt like, if you knew about it and recognized it, you could be proactive and change your mutations carefully, choose them on purpose instead of just letting them be pushed on you and accepting them.
Q: I want to ask you about a couple of more recent projects. You most recently scored the new Pee-Wee Herman movie. Did Paul Reubens bring you back in on that project personally, and did you guys remain in touch in the decades since you worked on Pee-Wee's Playhouse?
A: It's kind of funny. ... Right when he was first creating the Pee-Wee Herman character, we'd already met. This was '70 – I don't know what, '70-something – and my girlfriend at the time, her parents, her mom was instrumental in starting a comedy group out in Los Angeles called the Groundlings. Her name was Laraine Newman. She was one of the original cast members for Saturday Night Live. She would take me to the Groundlings and I saw Paul while he was working on developing this character. We kind of knew each other and he had asked me to do his first movie, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, but I was so deep into Devo and we were touring. I didn't do Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, but he called me up after that and said, "Well, okay, how about now? Would you do my TV show?" It just happened to be that Devo had signed a bad record deal with a record company that was going bankrupt. We were just like rats on the Titanic, along with about 20 other bands that were just sitting on the bow. It seemed like the perfect time to work on a TV show.
I'd been in this situation where I was writing 12 songs, rehearsing them, then go record them, then make a film for one or two of the songs and design a live touring show, and then we'd go out on tour and a year later we'd come back and write 12 more songs. When I started doing Pee-Wee's Playhouse they would send me a three-quarter-inch tape on Monday. Tuesday I'd write 12 songs. Wednesday I'd record them. Thursday I'd put it in the mail and send it to New York, where they were editing the show. Friday they would cut it into the episode of Pee-Wee's Playhouse for that week. Saturday we'd all watch it on TV. Monday they'd send me a new tape and I'd do the process over again. I was like, "Sign me up for this! I love the idea of getting to create more and write more music as opposed to spending all my time sitting around in airports waiting to get to the next venue."
So now, all these years later, [Reubens and I] have stayed friends. He's probably the only guy – other than my mom and dad, who are both passed away now – but he was the only other person who remembered every one of my birthdays and sent me something. That was kind of nice, even if we didn't see each other all the time. So we stayed friends and when this came up, it was kind of like coming around full circle to get to work with him again. I ended up recording the London Philharmonic in Abbey Road, which has kind of turned out to be one of my favorite studios. I've done maybe a dozen movies or so there. And I don't know if you saw the movie or not, but he does a pretty good job of looking like Pee-Wee did 40 years ago.
Q: He does, yeah. It's surprising. You're also scoring the upcoming Thor sequel. How did you get involved on that project and how much work have you done on it so far?
A: That's an odd one for me to talk about, and the reason is because I just happened to casually mention it in Akron. I was reminded that I had signed an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement, with Marvel, and most of the time what people are concerned about is they don't want you to give away the plot of the film. They don't want you to give away any spoilers or tell them any of the details of the movie before it comes out. Well, Marvel quickly picked up on that I had mentioned I was working with Taika Waititi, who is the director. I happen to really like his work. Somebody asked me if it was Thor and I said yes, and they reminded me that I'm not allowed to talk about the movie. So I either am or I am not working on a movie with this guy. He had a lot to do with attracting me to the project just because his movies are super-creative. I really liked his new movie, Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Musically, it's really creative. That's what really caught my interest.
Q: You've done so many different scores over the years, and you mentioned how much you enjoyed that way of working. What appeals to you about that kind of work? How much creative limitation do you feel that kind of work imposes on you and how do you respond to that limitation?
A: Much less than when you're in a band. The first couple albums with Virgin and Warners were great. They signed us just because they wanted the bragging rights of, "Brian Eno paid for this record to be recorded. David Bowie hung out with them in Germany the whole time they were recording it." [Bowie] had called us "the band of the future" in Melody Maker back before we had released anything, just based on tapes we had managed to get backstage to him while he was playing keyboards for Iggy on a tour back in '77 or '76. Where was I going with this story?
Q: I was asking you about creative limitations.
A: Yeah, the first couple albums they left us alone. Then we unfortunately had a radio hit and Warners then looked at us as gold. They had made a bunch of money off of us and then they started showing up at our rehearsals and our recording sessions. We'd be working on something and then some guy would pop up with a mullet and go, "Hey, do anything you want on this record, you guys. Feel free to do whatever you want. Just make sure you put another 'Whip It' in there!" And it changed our whole relationship with the recording industry, because where we enjoying being slightly anonymous and our feeling was that we were able to be kind of subversive, all of a sudden we had all this pressure and people commenting on our choices.
On that album that they were coming to listen to, we had done a cover version of "Working in a Coal Mine" and they fought to take it off the record. The record company pushed it off of our album. So we gave it to some movie called Heavy Metal, because we thought, "Oh, we're going to get a free ride with all these heavy metal bands when they put out their album. Our little weirdo song will get a free ride with Van Halen." We thought that was funny. Then that turned out to be the song that went into the top 20, so we pulled all these lame heavy metal songs along for a ride, which the joke was kind of on us. Then Warner Brothers panicked because right as they were about to release our new album, we had a record that was in the charts playing. They freaked out. They pressed singles with "Working in a Coal Mine" on it and stuck them inside the album as an afterthought. They just did the most nincompoop things.
So working in film and TV, you're much more anonymous as a composer. There's not a magnifying glass on you and you have so much more freedom. Pop music back then is the same as it is today. From song to song the variation is very small. It's like the fashion industry. There's like 50 pairs of the same jeans coming out from different manufacturers. The label's a little different, and some of them have a stitching thing where they put a loop in them, and then somebody else has one button that shows at the top of the pants, and then somebody else has a pocket that zips shut or something. But they're all exactly the same. It's all the same stuff. Pop music is like that to me and still is. So when I went into working on Pee-Wee's show, it was a whole different world. I could do punk hoedown music on one episode. I could do South Sea Islands goes into Ethel Merman with Spike Jones stylings in it for the theme song for the show. It was all wide open and I loved that so much, coming into this world now where you have such a wide palette. In so many ways it's superior. For me, I always had two brothers and two sisters, and Devo had two sets of brothers. So the idea of collaboration was always a part of my art aesthetic. I always liked to have people to collaborate with. So having a director that has ideas, and he tells you what he's trying to do with his film and you help him see that finally or you help him hear it, is very satisfying to me.
Q: You mentioned the broad range of creativity you were able to express through something like Pee-Wee's Playhouse. How do you manage to still express that broad range of creativity, or express that subversive element you mentioned earlier on with Devo, in some of the more conventional movies you've done, say a Last Vegas or something like that?
A: There's really super-literal ways to do that, if you have something you want to say or you want to talk about. Subliminal messages are so easy and nobody pays attention to them. [Laughs.] It's really funny. I remember the first time I was doing a Hawaiian Punch commercial. It was my first commercial and I was kind of not sure how I felt about doing TV commercials, but I liked the idea of being in that arena. It needed a drumbeat and I put, "Choose your mutations carefully." [Imitates drumbeat.] Bum-buh-buh-bum, bum-buh-buh-bum. And Bob Casale was my longtime engineer and coproducer on all this stuff. I remember we were in a meeting with Daley and Associates, the ad agency that was representing the commercial. We played the song and in this room I'm hearing, "Choose your mutations carefully." I'm looking at a guy over there tapping his pen on the table and as soon as the commercial ends I turn bright red and Bob Casale looks at me like he wants to kill me, like we're going to be in so much trouble. And the guy is tapping his pen and as soon as this commercial ends he goes, "Yeah, Hawaiian Punch does hit you in all the right places!" He just shouts out the main line from the narrator at the very end. We just look at each other and I'm like, "It's that easy?" We did it for years and then I got caught by a picture editor who said, "I know what you did." He called me out. He said, "I know what you're doing. You should take that out." I think I put "Question authority" in something like a lottery commercial or something, so this guy made me take it out. But the ad agencies never called me on it. And I even talked about it in articles before, and I still get hired by ad agencies to do commercial music. So they must not really care.
Q: So you haven't stopped that practice then?
A: Well, it depends. You have to have a reason to do it. Usually the more sugar that's in something, the better the chance that I'm going to say "Question authority" or "Sugar is bad for you." That's one I've done a couple of times. It's easy to do. They're easy to find, too. You can find them if you know which commercials you're looking for. You can look them up. And you hear it, too. Once you know that it's there, then you hear it. If you don't know it's there, your mind doesn't want to make it happen. It just goes in there like malware. What's the opposite of malware? What if it's there to help you out? I guess that's an antibiotic. It's like a covert antibiotic.
Q: A probiotic?
A: Yeah, probiotic. That's it! It's a probiotic.
Q: You certainly have plenty of non-Devo work going on and have for a long time, but Devo also still gets out there and tours from time to time. How do you feel about the band's role in your life these days?
A: I only have one really big problem with the band, and that is that we still play as loud as we did when we were onstage in Central Park or at Max's Kansas City or whatever that place was that we played in Ann Arbor. I think it was a bowling alley. I can't remember. It was some stage where it had a proscenium around it that looked like a TV screen. ... What I remember about that night also ... is that Todd Rundgren had shown up to see the band and he had a suit made out of tan oilcloth plastic. I was like, "How did he get that done? That is so awesome!" I remember being so jealous of this suit that Todd Rundgren was wearing. While we were talking I just kept staring at his suit the whole time and then looking around to see if I could tell if it was possibly a commercially made thing, which it wasn't, I'm sure, in retrospect. But it was the first time I'd seen a tailored suit made out of plastic. [Mothersbaugh likely recalls Devo's 1978 show at the Punch and Judy Theater in Grosse Pointe Farms in 1978, which coincided with a Rundgren show in Royal Oak.]
Q: You were saying, then, that today your only problem with the band is that you play as loud as you did back in the day?
A: Yeah, we play so loud and I have tinnitus. It's hard for me to go play 10 shows in a row with Devo and then go back to my studio and try to listen to the woodwinds from an orchestra. It takes me like a week or so for it to calm down enough that I can go back to work. It's not worth the tradeoff for me to go deaf just so I can play 50 more Devo shows, to be honest with you. We'll do one here and there. We did a benefit earlier this year. Will Ferrell talked us into it. It was like the worst thing for me because I'm standing onstage and they're wheeling all these drummers out onstage. Part of the thing was a joke that they had 12 drummers all at once, so not only did they have my drummer, but Mick Fleetwood was onstage and Tommy Lee was onstage. They were all playing simultaneously, like a dozen drummers, the Chili Peppers drummer and all these. I'm standing there going, "This is the worst thing that could have possibly happened." I went home from that and it was like gongs were going off in my head. So that's the thing that makes Devo where I have to draw a line. I can't do a big tour again.
Q: So if you're going to be onstage these days you'd rather be doing something like you will be here in Ann Arbor, where you're just having a quiet conversation onstage.
A: Preferably. Yeah. That's totally different. And all I ask is that people in the audience ask questions. Speak clearly.
Patrick Dunn is the interim managing editor of Concentrate and an Ann Arbor-based freelance writer whose work appears regularly in Pulp, the Detroit News, the Ann Arbor Observer, and other local publications. He exercised considerable restraint in asking Mark Mothersbaugh about anything other than Pee-Wee Herman.
Mark Mothersbaugh will appear at the Penny Stamps Speaker Series Event, presented by the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the Michigan Theater, 603 E. Liberty, on Thursday, September 29 at 5:10 pm. Free of charge and open to the public.
Preview: 2016 Allied Media Conference: Holistic Solutions for a More Just and Creative World
by Anna Prushinskaya
Tue, 05/31/2016 - 9:37am
INTERVIEW PREVIEW WRITTEN WORD THEATER & DANCE FILM & VIDEO VISUAL ART MUSIC
The awesomely expansive 2016 Allied Media Conference will be held in Detroit this year and aims to "bring together a vibrant and diverse community of people using media to incite change: filmmakers, radio producers, technologists, youth organizers, writers, entrepreneurs, musicians, dancers, and artists." The content of the conference is diverse too, including workshops, shows, and dance parties.
I interviewed Morgan Willis, Program Director of the AMC, about what we can expect from this year's conference.
Q: You talk about AMC as a collaboratively-designed conference. Can you give a sense of the number and scope of collaborators who have worked on this year's event?
A: The Allied Media Conference is created each year through the passionate contributions of hundreds of coordinators, presenters, and volunteers. The AMC organizing process has been developed from an iterative cycle of feedback and learning between AMC participants and organizers. Through trial and error, survey and response, the organizing process is a continuous work in progress.
This year we have 60+ volunteer coordinators of the 28 different tracks, practice spaces, and network gatherings at the conference. We also have approximately 10 full time and part time staff members that work on the conference, as well as an advisory board of nine intergenerational, long-time AMC participants. We share the conference organizing process through our zines "How We Organize the AMC" and the "AMC Presenter Guidelines."
Q: Who do you hope to see at AMC?
A: The AMC is a conference that is excited to center participants who live at the margins of conventional conference spaces: immigrants, youth, elders, black and brown folks, queer folks, parents, and others, while remaining open to our vast network of participants across all identities and spectrums. We hope to see first time AMCers, returning participants, Detroiters and media-makers from all over the continent.
Q: How does being situated in Detroit influence the conference?
A: This year will be the AMC's 10th anniversary of being held in Detroit! Detroit is important as a source of innovative, collaborative, low-resource solutions. Detroit gives the conference a sense of place, just as each of the conference participants bring their own sense of place with them to the conference. Detroiters are also a significant percentage of our coordinators, participants, presenters and attendees.
Our offsite tours and field trips allow participants to see a variety of grassroots media-based organizing initiatives and experience different parts of the city that they may not know about or have access to. One of the most popular tours that is back this year is "From Growing Our Economy to Growing Our Souls" which explores Detroit history and emerging visionary organizing, led by Rich Feldman of the Boggs Center. Other tours will explore urban farming, "green" infrastructure, the Motown United Sound Recording Studio, and more unique places and initiatives in Detroit.
Q: Any tips for navigating the conference for newbies? How about return visitors?
A: As the AMC continues to grow, we hope to ensure that it is a welcoming space for first timers while also cultivating the intimacy and network building that many returning AMCers value so much. This year we will be offering "homeroom" sessions for first timers, hosted by returning AMCers who will help orient first timers to the AMC and offer best practices for navigating through the conference. We will also be sharing a list of "10 Things to Know as an AMC First Timer" on our website (alliedmedia.org/amc) so stay tuned!
One thing we always emphasize to both newbies and returning visitors is to plan your schedule in advance. We just released the online schedule and we highly recommend that attendees read through the 250+ sessions to get a feeling for what you're most interested in before you arrive. This will also help you identify people and organizations you'd like to connect with so you can grow your network and build long lasting relationships.
Q: What are you personally looking forward to in this year's conference?
A: The Opening Ceremony is always a highlight! This year, through a partnership with the Detroit Institute of Arts museum, we will host the Opening Ceremony inside the beautiful Detroit Film Theater, which has double the capacity of our previous venue. The event is produced by Tunde Olaniran and will bring together performers, activists, and live music as a celebration of the powerful wave of creative movement-building happening across the country.
I'm also especially excited to see the evolution of workshops from last year into tracks (series of multiple workshops) this year, like the "Black Death Mixtape" session, which has expanded into the "Black Survival Mixtape" track. And I love the return of tracks and network gatherings focused on important topics such as climate resilience and disability justice.
We will also be hosting several community dinners this year, which are a way for attendees to meet and connect over affordable, delicious, and locally sourced food. I'm especially looking forward to the Saturday night community dinner, "Bil Afiya: A Community Feast" at Cass Corridor Commons!
Anna Prushinskaya is a writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The 18th Allied Media Conference takes place June 16 - 19, 2016. AMC offers housing, registration, childcare information, and more online. Registration is on a sliding scale from $75-$500.
Interview: Olivia Mainville
by Steven Sonoras
INTERVIEW PREVIEW MUSIC
Mainville and company will swing at the Pig and Cultivate this weekend.
20-year-old Holland-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Olivia Mainville is busier than most musicians ten years her senior. In the past two years she played with the folk-rock band Watching for Foxes, collaborated with The Appleseed Collective and The Ragbirds, toured as a solo artist supporting Connecticut's Caravan of Thieves, released a debut EP that was mixed in Nashville, volunteered as a programmer for Grand Rapids' WYCE-FM, and started her own band, Olivia Mainville and The Aquatic Troupe.
Given the restless blur of Mainville's career to date, it's appropriate that her new band's debut album — "Maybe the Saddest Thing," which was recorded in April 2015 and released last December — resists categorization. Mainville cites Sufjan Stevens, Katzenjammer and Django Reinhardt as key influences, and her latest record also features splashes of folk, baroque pop, alternative rock and ragtime. With so many flavors in the mix, Mainville has had to coin a new term to summarize her band's specific genre (or lack thereof): "gypsy swing folk."
Mainville and her band will bring their rollicking live show to the Blind Pig this Saturday and Cultivate Coffee and TapHouse in Ypsilanti on Sunday. I caught up with Mainville to talk about going solo, managing her own band, and playing most of the instruments on her latest record.
Q: You played in various other bands before playing your own songs live and eventually forming the Aquatic Troupe. When did you decide to take the leap to start focusing on your own original material?
A: I joined a couple of other bands, but it never filled up the time like I wanted it to. We didn't have that many shows with the bands I was in. I wasn't really like totally into the music. It was one of those things where you're joining it because you can, and because they want you. It's not necessarily because you're super passionate about it. Obviously everybody's going to be a lot more passionate about their own craft, or at least most people. So in this case I was more passionate about my own craft, and I decided to pursue it on a new level.
Q: What was the first instrument you learned to play?
A: I started playing music in the fifth grade. I picked up the viola in orchestra. Basically I did it because I wanted to look really cool. I wanted to be one of those cool kids holding a viola case [laughs]. None of the other elementary school kids got to do that, unless you were in orchestra. I was in orchestra for four or five years, and I switched to the upright bass in high school. And then eventually I picked up the mandolin, which is actually in the same key as a violin, so it wasn't too different. And then I traded my upright bass for a violin. Then I picked up a guitar.
Q: How do you describe the kind of music you play with your band?
A: I describe it as "confused" [laughs]. We're actually starting to get more of a defined genre, although it doesn't present itself too well in the music right now. We're more a swing, jazz, ragtime and surf party band, now more than ever. But we also have our old songs, which are maybe more indie rock oriented. We're definitely leaning more towards the whole swing vibe now.
Q: There are so many different styles of music on your most recent album. Is that all you, or do you open your songs up to influences from the other band members?
A: 90 percent of the record was my bandmate Andy [Fettig] and I. He did all the trumpet, flugelhorn, and I think he did some saxophone on there. And then we had Bleu, my trombone player, and at that time he wasn't really too much in the band so he only laid down a couple tracks. Other than that I did all the strings, the accordions, the guitars, and the vocals.
Q: That's surprising, because the record has such a full, immediate sound, like a full band in a room locked into a groove. Can you tell me more about the process of making the record, where you recorded it, and how long it took to put it all together?
A: Before we started to record, I had kind of a different band. We had one different member, and we were only playing as a three-piece. We got together, chose the songs we were going to play, and we got together 10 days before we went into the studio and we rehearsed the all songs every day, added parts, and figured out all the other stuff so we could have a successful recording session without wasting any time.
We recorded it over the course of four days, but we had some problems with our drummer so we had to kick him out of the band. We re-did a lot of the drum tracks. We actually got it done last year in April, but we kept going back, which postponed it until about December. We kept adding things to it, and we kept finding things we didn't like and wanted to make different. We kept going back into the studio.
Olivia Mainville & the Aquatic Troupe. Photo: Derek Ketchum
Q: Gerry Leonard, David Bowie's former musical director and lead guitarist, plays on the record. How did that come together?
A: I watched him a long time ago with Suzanne Vega, and I had talked to him a couple times as well and he was a really nice guy. I emailed him and I asked him if he would record on a track of ours. We decided that we wanted to make it an 11-track album, so I recorded the song "I Need Time" specifically for Gerry Leonard. I needed to write a song that worked with his style, and it was a great success. We actually just sent him the stem cells. He took it, recorded it, and it came back perfect.
Q: What else are you juggling in addition to your musical career? Do you have a day job? Are you in school?
A: I do a lot of yard work [laughs]. I also take lessons. I'm taking guitar lessons right now, and I'm about to take vocal lessons, because you can never stop learning. I'm also the booking agent for my band, so I book all the gigs. We're not run under any management, so all the money stuff and whatnot is all up to me. I book, I order the merch, I pay for the recording sessions, all that other stuff.
Q: That's impressive. Was there anybody who helped you along and showed you the ropes for how to do all of this yourself?
A: When I was 17 I got invited to go on a little tour with a band called The Accidentals. I played as their merch girl and roadie, so I helped them pack up, I help them load in, I sold their merch, and all that. I learned from them for a while and then I got invited to live with them for a summer and play a bunch of shows and stuff. Their manager Amber showed me the ropes and told me how to pretty much run a business. Everything was pretty strict and serious, which is what it should be, and I learned a lot. It definitely played into how I run things now.
Q: Are there any plans to take your band outside of Michigan or the Midwest in the near future?
A: Just a month ago we went out on an East Coast tour. We went to Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and a lot of other places. We're going to Wisconsin this summer, and we have two tours in September. We have a Southern tour, and we have a West Coast tour. We'll be hitting up Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and we're going to try New Orleans. And then we're going to to the West Coast, so we're going to hit up Colorado, Iowa, all those places.
Q: What's it like performing outside of the safety net of your home state, away from your friends and family and the local musical community? Is that intimidating?
A: If I think about it too much it seems a little intimidating. It's always different. You never have the same crowd for any show. It's always interesting. You definitely play some not-so-great shows when you're out on tour, but we've also played some pretty nice ones where we had a really good response from people. But you get those ones where you get three or four people show up [laughs]. Every band has to go with that, unless you're super famous.
Q: What do you see in the future for your band? Do you have any kind of plan for where you want to take your sound, or how you might approach your next batch of songs?
A: We're definitely more for a rowdy crowd. In the future I would love to play to a lot bigger crowds, jazzy themed bars, stuff like that.
We're actually writing new songs now. We have four new tunes we're working on recording. We already have two down. We want to come out with another 10 song album, hopefully before December. We want to work with a guy named Adam [Schreiber] from Jack & the Bear. He does a very cool style of recording, very old sounding. It kind of works with the new genre we're going with. We already have one of our songs recorded. We're waiting for it to get mastered, and we'll release it out to the public.
Steven Sonoras is an Ypsilanti-based freelance writer.
Olivia Mainville & the Aquatic Troupe play the Blind Pig on Saturday May 14, supported by Sedgewick, Jason Dennie, and Nadim Azzman. Doors are at 9 p.m. The Blind Pig is located at 208 N. First St. The show is 18 and up, and tickets are $8 in advance and $10 at the door.
The band will also open for Sedgewick at Cultivate Coffee and TapHouse on Sunday, May 15. Cultivate is located at 307 N. River in Ypsilanti. There is no cover, and the show will run from 5-8 p.m.
Preview: Threads All Arts Festival - April 1-2
The first Threads Festival looms.
The Threads All Arts Festival is a new cross-disciplinary arts festival that'll take place in the Yellow Barn in Ann Arbor on April 1-2, 2016. It's two days packed with music, dance, poetry, film, theater, and visual art, and the two-day pass to the festival costs $5.
The festival came together after six students at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre, and Dance thought up the idea, and then U-M's EXCEL program funded the project.
Launched in September 2015, EXCEL stands for Excellence in Entrepreneurship, Career Empowerment. Jonathan Kuuskoski, Assistant Director of Entrepreneurship and Career Services at U-M SMTD, says that the goal of the program is to catalyze success for all of U-M SMTD students and alumni through curricular and co-curricular programming and ongoing mentorship. The Threads festival is one of twelve projects funded by the Performing Arts EXCELerator program.
Kuuskoski says he's proud of the work that the Threads team has done so far. He says the project was selected and funded at the highest level because it is "a very audacious idea, but one that seemed to be rooted in a very present community need."
I met Meri Bobber, one of the students on the Threads team, through my work as the manager of digital media at the University Musical Society - you'll catch several UMS Artists in Residence participating in the festival.
Through Bobber, I connected with the full Threads team (Nicole Patrick, Meri Bobber, Sam Schaefer, Peter Littlejohn, Lang DeLancey, and Karen Toomasian) to chat about what's exciting about the project and what we can expect in the future.
Q: How did the festival first come together?
A: Sam and Nicole were sitting together dreaming of attending the Eaux Claires festival in Wisconsin. They realized that if they were dreaming this hard about attending, they should also probably put together their own festival. At first it was a joke, but then they won a grant. The festival had to happen.
Sam and Nicole quickly realized the festival was in no way possible with just the two of them, and they reached out to four people that seemed to fill every role possible. This team has been digging deep to put together the Threads Festival. We have all helped each other develop ideas, compromise on our way-too-ridiculous ambitions, and organize an event that represents the amazing, unique town that is Ann Arbor.
Q: You talk about how it's important to you that both students and Ann Arbor community participate. Why is this important to you?
A: The purpose of all of our work is to make something great for Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor, in its awesome uniqueness, is not JUST a college town and not JUST a little city. Its special blend of communities, artistic and otherwise, is what makes it different from any other place in the world. To celebrate the city's whole artistic community through this festival, we strive to bring students and non-students together.
Q: What are you most looking forward to at the festival?
A: WE CAN HARDLY WAIT FOR ALL OF IT. We are looking forward to seeing all of the tiny pieces that we have thought about as independent or abstract come together into one coherent thing. We can't wait to feel the sense of unity and action that we hope this festival will create. We'll consider this year a success if people walk out smiling, or rather, thinking. We're such dorks about everything...we were stoked to order porta-potties. It's just amazing. All of it.
Q: You're aiming to make this an annual festival. That's an ambitious goal. What do you hope for the festival in the coming years?
A: We want Threads to help expose budding artists in this area. They are working their butts off, but in a town where there are (thankfully) a ton of live performances, many don't have a large turnout. Simply put, we want people to look forward to this festival as a way to discover artists, so that they can look for these artists around town and see/hear/interact with them beyond just this one day.
We would also love to find a way for the festival to feature a larger outdoor presence in the future. We want guests to be able to leave behind the distractions of daily life, and experience a multi-stage festival event for a few days in an open and peaceful outdoor environment where the music and the river, or wind, or even the sound of crickets can exist in a way that allows a unique experience to emerge.
We want this festival to find longevity far beyond this season so that there is just one more GREAT thing about Ann Arbor.
The Threads All Arts Festival is takes place in the Yellow Barn in Ann Arbor on April 1-2, 2016.
Q&A with 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival Executive Director Leslie Raymond
by Amy Cantú
INTERVIEW PREVIEW FILM & VIDEO
Leslie Raymond is in her third year as Executive Director of AAFF.
I recently stopped by the busy Ann Arbor Film Festival office to chat with Leslie Raymond about the upcoming 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival running March 15-20, 2016. Leslie has been involved with the AAFF since the 30th Festival in 1992; this will be her third year as the Festival's Executive Director.
Q: What's new or different about this year's Festival?
A: Well, we're seeing a lot of animation. We're also seeing a lot of feature length documentaries, nine or ten of which are in competition, as well as three films by Chantal Akerman who passed away tragically last October. We felt she was such an important figure in the history of avant-garde cinema as well as a great role model for women.
Q: Why do you think there are more documentaries this year?
A: Yeah, David [Dinnell, program director] and I were talking earlier about this being a more "moving image" culture where so much of the information we receive now comes through the moving image because of its ubiquity. Now we can shoot a movie on our cellphone, edit it, and publish it in minutes. Maybe that has something to do with it, although I don't know why that would draw somebody more to making something more documentary than narrative.
Q: Which of the Festival events excite you the most this year?
A: Grahame Weinbren's 78 Letters - which will show on Sunday, March 20 at 3:15 pm in the Main Auditorium - is an interactive series of one-minute pieces where the audience will help direct how the work goes together. I'm particularly excited about that. There will also be a 1975 installation by Lis Rhodes at the Ann Arbor Art Center on Friday, March 18 from 3 to 5 pm. It's titled Light Music and it's composed of two 16 mm projectors projecting abstract imagery from either end of the viewing space with an optical soundtrack read by light passing through. We're also excited about the live shadow puppet performance by local artist Tom Carey that opens the "Films in Competition 5 (Ages 6+)" event. We call it "family friendly" and "ages 6 and up" but it's not just a "kid's show." One of the things important for us is to engage audiences on other levels than just being a passive observer.
Q: Do you think audiences are more receptive today to an interactive experience?
A: I think so. And we want to provide opportunities for Festival viewers to be part of the fabric of the environment. Along these lines we have the "What We Saw" cards in the lobby -- we've done this for several years now -- where we invite participants to fill the cards out, let us know what they think about what they've just seen, and then take pictures of them for a slide show. There will even be an Oculus Rift piece in the grand foyer of the Michigan Theater -- a 9-foot inflatable bubble! -- where people will be able to put on the Oculus Rift and have an 8 or 9-minute Oculus Rift experience.
Q: I know someone who's coming to the festival for the first time. What do you want her to take away from the experience?
A: We'd want her to feel the empowerment of seeing a lot of different things about the world. I think there's so much to be said for being able to access all of these different viewpoints and ways of expressing things that go far outside the mainstream culture. We'd want her to experience the richness and diversity we live in. So I'd hope that somebody coming for the first time would see things they're not familiar with...and be okay with that.
Q: The legacy of the AAFF as the longest-running independent and experimental festival in North America is an honor for Ann Arbor. Do you feel a sense of responsibility that Festival goers leave with a sense of that history?
A: I do think about it a lot. I feel like it's a huge responsibility. The Festival has been here since 1963 and it still embodies the ethos in which it was founded - that particular time and place in history where there was such a rich political, social, and even fashion culture in every direction you looked. I think this heritage ties directly into the diversity of independent cinematic voices and our embracing of that diversity of expressions. It's still relevant. So I think it's important to stay grounded in the Festival's history while also moving toward the future using the technologies that will now allow for much more of this experimentation.
Q: Any final thoughts on this year's Festival?
A: I've been thinking lately about the sense of the collective journey. For a lot of people who are invested in joining us for the whole week – or even if you're only coming to a few programs – there really is a sense of embarking on something unknown with a spirit of adventure. There are all kinds of things to discover, conversations to be had, thoughts to be thought, and feelings to be felt. Part of it is looking at the work and having the opportunity to share it with those you came with or walk out of the screening and then run into someone in the lobby and talk about what you've just experienced.
Amy Cantú is a Production Librarian at AADL.
The Ann Arbor Film Festival runs from March 15-20, 2016. Tickets are available at the door or online.
Interview: Disney Animator Matthias Lechner
FILM & VIDEO INTERVIEW
Matthias Lechner meets a large group of mammals at the University of Michigan. Photo by Patrick Dunn.
Budding animation enthusiasts at the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University had the opportunity to learn from one of the best in their field this Thursday and Friday, as Disney animator Matthias Lechner gave free presentations to students at both schools. As art director of environments on Disney's upcoming March release Zootopia, the German-born Lechner oversaw a staff of about 100 through a four-year process that equates to set design on a non-animated movie.
Zootopia not only features the largest digital environment yet created for Disney; it doubles the size of the virtual world created for previous record holder Big Hero 6. Creating that world entails an insanely detailed process, as every set and every tiny object is meticulously researched, sketched, and then realized as a 3-D model. In a slide presentation, Lechner walked students through the process of developing Zootopia's "world built by animals, for animals," sharing research, early designs, and finished scenes from the film. He interacted warmly with the student audience, projecting enthusiasm for working on his first Disney movie after a lifelong love of the studio's work.
After his presentation at U-M, Lechner chatted with me about the experience of working with Disney for the first time, the very realistic research that goes into creating a fantasy world, and the big Disney project he's got lined up next.
Q: You said that seeing The Jungle Book at age 6 was what interested you in animation in the first place. How did you feel when you finally got your first job at Disney?
A: You'd think that I'd be really happy. But I have to say that the first half-year I was extremely stressed. It was like, "What do they want from me that they can't do themselves?" I guess it was just my style that worked really well, and [Walt Disney Animation Studios chief creative officer] John Lasseter liked it, so they went with me. But everybody's at the top of their game. I'm really used to working on movies that are middle-budget, so you try to make the best out of what you have. Suddenly you have all the time in the world, so you've got to come up with something that is worth all the time in the world.
Q: Disney's such a big studio. How much do they try to impose a house style on what you're doing?
A: That was surprising, that they don't. I go in there and I was wondering, "What is it like? Is there a political agenda or anything like that?" But it's not. The directors try to make it as good as we can, basically to please ourselves. If other people like it, that's great. But nobody told me what to do or what not to do.
Q: What was John Lasseter like?
A: He's a little bit of a celebrity at Disney because he's the über-father, as we'd say in German. He's a very emotional person, in a good way. He likes to hug. I was a little worried in the beginning because everybody really listens to what John wants, and that can be dangerous. But he wants the right things. Whenever he gave a note, it was the right note. So I don't have a problem with that at all. That's great. He's been really good for Disney.
Q: In the animation that you enjoy, do you have a personal preference between cel animation and computer animation?
A: I used to. (Laughs) I come from cel animation, so for set design it had a lot of advantages. You would never have to wonder, "Can we afford this?" because everything's just a drawing. You can draw whatever you want, and if it's only for one scene it doesn't matter. When you're doing 3-D you have to plan: if we build a big set, can we use it in other scenes too? In the early days of 3-D there was a tendency of it not looking satisfying. Pixar did a very amazing job with their films, and yet they aged somewhat. I think now we've reached a point where Zootopia will not look old. It'll just be a movie. In that respect, now I have a lot more possibilities, so I kind of like 3-D.
Q: It's crazy looking back at Toy Story now, which looked so beautiful when it first came out, and seeing how much everything has changed since then.
A: Yeah. Toy Story is saved by the story, and that's Pixar's trick. If the story is entertaining then it doesn't matter that much if it's not perfect. In this movie we really went far out to fill it with detail and with love, basically to the top. We went as far as you can go right now.
Q: You mentioned bringing a NASA scientist in to consult about the "climate wall" [that separates Zootopia's desert and tundra worlds, keeping the former hot and the latter cold]. Why put that level of scientific realism or scientific research into what is very much a fantasy creation?
A: Because they can. It's one of John Lasseter's little things, that he wants everything to be reasonable. Nothing is there just by coincidence. If you say, "This is the design I want," you'd better find a good reason why you want this to be the design. Research is a big part of that. So if they offer to bring this guy in, of course we say, "Yeah. Let's see if we can learn something from him."
Q: You've mentioned how passionate you are about this movie. What do you like so much about it, besides the fact that you worked on it?
A: There's that. And actually that doesn't necessarily mean I like it, because I would see all the flaws. But I'm very happy with the sets. I'm happy with my part of the movie. Imagine that you think of something, or you dream something, and the best people in the world realize that for you. That's an amazing experience. But what I really get a kick out of is the animation of the animals. We have dailies, and every day you see five or six scenes that come fresh from animation. It's like Christmas for me. They're so funny. There's a scene where somebody crosses the road, which was not interesting in storyboard, and then the way they walk just makes it.
Q: How does it feel, after four years, to have this almost off your shoulders?
A: It is off my shoulders now. This [speaking engagement] is just reminiscing. It feels a little bit scary. I really got into it. I have to say, if it would have been only three and a half years, I would have said, "Ah, I can't believe it's over." After four years I was like, "Okay. Done that." It's going to be hard for me to get as invested in the next project.
Q: Do you have your next project lined up?
A: Yes. Off the record–well, you can check if you can say it or not, but it's Wreck-It Ralph 2.
Patrick Dunn is an Ann Arbor-based freelance writer whose work appears regularly in the Detroit News, the Ann Arbor Observer, and other local publications. He can be heard most Friday mornings at 8:40 am on the Martin Bandyke morning program on Ann Arbor's 107one.
Martin Bandyke Under Covers: Martin interviews Peter Guralnick, author of Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll
Peter Guralnick.
Peter Guralnick, author of the critically acclaimed Elvis Presley biography Last Train to Memphis, brings us the life of Sam Phillips, the visionary genius who singlehandedly steered the revolutionary path of Sun Records.
The music that Sam Phillips shaped in his tiny Memphis studio with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Ike Turner, Howlin, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, introduced a sound that had never been heard before. He brought forth a singular mix of black and white voices passionately proclaiming the vitality of the American vernacular tradition while at the same time declaring, once and for all, a new, integrated musical day. With extensive interviews and firsthand personal observations extending over a 25-year period with Phillips, along with wide-ranging interviews with nearly all the legendary Sun Records artists, Guralnick gives us an ardent, unrestrained portrait of an American original as compelling in his own right as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, or Thomas Edison.
The interview with Peter Guralnick was originally recorded on December 10, 2015.
Read more about Martin Bandyke Under Covers: Martin interviews Peter Guralnick, author of Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll
History In The Making: The River Street Anthology
by Doug Coombe
INTERVIEW MUSIC
Matt Jones was ironically hatless at his River Street Anthology Listening Party on Saturday. (Photo by Doug Coombe)
Matt Jones wears a lot of hats—songwriter and bandleader for Matt Jones & the Reconstruction, drummer for Misty Lyn & the Big Beautiful as well as Loose Teeth, Civil War expert/aspiring Gettysburg National Park Ranger, and EMU Historical Preservation student. Yet his newest hat is the most ambitious. He's becoming the Alan Lomax of Michigan with his new project The River Street Anthology.
Lomax made extensive field recordings of American Folk Music from the 40's through the 60's. He covered a vast range of musical idioms with his recordings. They are not only a major historic document, but an endless font of musical inspiration for generations. From Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes to the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack, the list of music inspired by these recordings is staggering. Jones aims to do something similar—just a little closer to home—by capturing a multitude of musicians across genres throughout the entire state of Michigan.
The River Street Anthology had humble beginnings in spite of its now ambitious scope. Matt explains:
It started out as a way to get my musician friends together. There aren't a whole lot of venues in Ypsi. I felt more often than not, I saw my musician friends just sitting around on bar stools—myself included—not playing on stage, and I just wanted something to do. The idea had been there for years—ever since Fred Thomas put his Ypsilanti Folk Singers compilation together back in 2006/¬07. That project was so fun, that I wanted to do the same, and I even asked him if he minded me using the same title (he was happy to let me use it—a sort of Volume II). It started off as a little 10 or 15 person compilation from Ypsi. Within an hour (of posting it to Facebook on February 6, 2015) it turned into 60 people.
It's turned into my dream job that I don't get paid for. I want this to be a legitimate historical document. It's always been my goal to get something into The Library of Congress. I've been trying to weasel my way into history for years. This is even better because I can take everybody with me. It's a way to get everybody on the books.
"This is even better because I can take everybody with me. It's a way to get everybody on the books." Photo by Doug Coombe.
In the process the project birthed in the basement of his River Street home in Ypsilanti has changed him.
I lost my edge. I think that I had developed a sort of reputation around here for being a little dark, sarcastic, and quick to judge. Quick to plunge the knife in. I don't think that is necessarily ever who I really was, but we settle into playing out roles. Sometimes doing what is expected is easier than showing your real hand—vulnerability and all that. I learned real quick that there was no room for that edge in this project. I realized that to make the RSA, I would have to have support basically growing out of my armpits, up to my eyeballs and I found that I liked it. Then I found that everyone deserves it and that people thrive with it. I sit here, a foot away from people and watch/listen to them do what they love doing most. They are excited about taking part in this project and they play their hearts out. If you can seriously sit there, that close to someone pouring it out, and not love it too, I'd say you just might be a sociopath.
"If you can seriously sit there, that close to someone pouring it out, and not love it too, I'd say you just might be a sociopath." Photo by Doug Coombe.
The beauty of Jones' recordings is his stripped down approach. He uses one inexpensive microphone, a preamp for the mic, and a digital recorder. That's it. And he doesn't do a lot of takes. He tells artists it's one take—even though it's not always so. The end result is a great—and quick—spontaneous take that leaves him time to record a lot of other artists in a session.
At first, I wanted it to be one mic, one song, one take—I think just because it had a real nice, punk rock ring to it. I still have just the one mic, and I still only want one song... and it would be reeeeallly nice if people could pull it off in one take. But truth be told, I only tell people "one take" anymore so they rehearse before they get to my house. Usually people get in and out in under a half hour, BECAUSE THEY PRACTICED BEFOREHAND. Thing is—I have never really truly enjoyed the recording studio because it's one of those places where I can't have total control all the time. I don't pretend to be a recording engineer—I want to be a historian, not an engineer. I don't want to sit there while you work your parts out, and decide which lyrics to sing, and have second thoughts about that ending or that intro. We aren't making your next record—we are making a historical document of What You Sound Like Today. So hopefully, when I tell people "one take," it scares 'em enough to rehearse prior, in order to get that one take, and get themselves down on tape, and hopefully, into history the fastest way possible. History doesn't wait—you either get in it or you don't.
"The beauty of Jones' recordings is his stripped down approach. He uses one inexpensive microphone, a preamp for the mic, and a digital recorder. That's it." Photo by Doug Coombe.
All of which brings us to last Saturday. Matt had his second River Street Anthology Listening Party down the street from his house at Cultivate Coffee & Taphouse on River Street in Ypsilanti's Depot Town. Alternately insightful and funny, Matt gave the backstory on his project and shared 10 audio recordings as well as several videos done by Charlie Steen and Mostly Midwest from his project so far. To date Matt has recorded over 200 artists in 7-plus towns in both peninsulas of Michigan.
Charlie Steen / Photo by Doug Coombe
Matt Jones / Photo by Doug Coombe
A rapt audience / Photo by Doug Coombe
Erin Zindle / Photo by Doug Coombe
The evening wound up as Matt added another recording to the anthology—live in front of the hushed audience, Jones recorded Erin Zindle of The Ragbirds (along with percussionist Randall Moore) in one beautiful take.
He took about a minute to position the microphone and get the levels right and hit record. The rest is history.
Doug Coombe is an Ann Arbor and Detroit based music and editorial photographer. He's been a photographer for the Detroit's Metro Times, Concentrate Media, and Urban Innovation Exchange Detroit.
This Sunday Jones continues the project, recording 20 musicians in Kalamazoo.
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text:
// Copyright (c) ppy Pty Ltd <contact@ppy.sh>. Licensed under the MIT Licence.
// See the LICENCE file in the repository root for full licence text.

using osu.Framework.Graphics;
using osu.Framework.Input.Bindings;
using osu.Game.Rulesets.Objects.Drawables;
using osu.Game.Rulesets.Taiko.Objects.Drawables.Pieces;
using osuTK;
using System.Linq;
using osu.Game.Audio;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using osu.Framework.Graphics.Containers;
using osu.Framework.Graphics.Primitives;

namespace osu.Game.Rulesets.Taiko.Objects.Drawables
{
    public abstract class DrawableTaikoHitObject : DrawableHitObject<TaikoHitObject>, IKeyBindingHandler<TaikoAction>
    {
        protected readonly Container Content;
        private readonly Container proxiedContent;

        private readonly Container nonProxiedContent;

        protected DrawableTaikoHitObject(TaikoHitObject hitObject)
            : base(hitObject)
        {
            InternalChildren = new[]
            {
                nonProxiedContent = new Container
                {
                    RelativeSizeAxes = Axes.Both,
                    Child = Content = new Container { RelativeSizeAxes = Axes.Both }
                },
                proxiedContent = new ProxiedContentContainer { RelativeSizeAxes = Axes.Both }
            };
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// <see cref="proxiedContent"/> is proxied into an upper layer. We don't want to get masked away otherwise <see cref="proxiedContent"/> would too.
        /// </summary>
        protected override bool ComputeIsMaskedAway(RectangleF maskingBounds) => false;

        private bool isProxied;

        /// <summary>
        /// Moves <see cref="Content"/> to a layer proxied above the playfield.
        /// Does nothing is content is already proxied.
        /// </summary>
        protected void ProxyContent()
        {
            if (isProxied) return;

            isProxied = true;

            nonProxiedContent.Remove(Content);
            proxiedContent.Add(Content);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Moves <see cref="Content"/> to the normal hitobject layer.
        /// Does nothing is content is not currently proxied.
        /// </summary>
        protected void UnproxyContent()
        {
            if (!isProxied) return;

            isProxied = false;

            proxiedContent.Remove(Content);
            nonProxiedContent.Add(Content);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Creates a proxy for the content of this <see cref="DrawableTaikoHitObject"/>.
        /// </summary>
        public Drawable CreateProxiedContent() => proxiedContent.CreateProxy();

        public abstract bool OnPressed(TaikoAction action);
        public virtual bool OnReleased(TaikoAction action) => false;

        private class ProxiedContentContainer : Container
        {
            public override double LifetimeStart => Parent?.LifetimeStart ?? base.LifetimeStart;
            public override double LifetimeEnd => Parent?.LifetimeEnd ?? base.LifetimeEnd;
        }
    }

    public abstract class DrawableTaikoHitObject<TaikoHitType> : DrawableTaikoHitObject
        where TaikoHitType : TaikoHitObject
    {
        public override Vector2 OriginPosition => new Vector2(DrawHeight / 2);

        protected readonly Vector2 BaseSize;

        protected readonly TaikoPiece MainPiece;

        public new TaikoHitType HitObject;

        protected DrawableTaikoHitObject(TaikoHitType hitObject)
            : base(hitObject)
        {
            HitObject = hitObject;

            Anchor = Anchor.CentreLeft;
            Origin = Anchor.Custom;

            RelativeSizeAxes = Axes.Both;
            Size = BaseSize = new Vector2(HitObject.IsStrong ? TaikoHitObject.DEFAULT_STRONG_SIZE : TaikoHitObject.DEFAULT_SIZE);

            Content.Add(MainPiece = CreateMainPiece());
            MainPiece.KiaiMode = HitObject.Kiai;

            var strongObject = HitObject.NestedHitObjects.OfType<StrongHitObject>().FirstOrDefault();
            if (strongObject != null)
            {
                var strongHit = CreateStrongHit(strongObject);

                AddNested(strongHit);
                AddInternal(strongHit);
            }
        }

        // Normal and clap samples are handled by the drum
        protected override IEnumerable<SampleInfo> GetSamples() => HitObject.Samples.Where(s => s.Name != SampleInfo.HIT_NORMAL && s.Name != SampleInfo.HIT_CLAP);

        protected override string SampleNamespace => "Taiko";

        protected virtual TaikoPiece CreateMainPiece() => new CirclePiece();

        /// <summary>
        /// Creates the handler for this <see cref="DrawableHitObject"/>'s <see cref="StrongHitObject"/>.
        /// This is only invoked if <see cref="TaikoHitObject.IsStrong"/> is true for <see cref="HitObject"/>.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="hitObject">The strong hitobject.</param>
        /// <returns>The strong hitobject handler.</returns>
        protected virtual DrawableStrongNestedHit CreateStrongHit(StrongHitObject hitObject) => null;
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Due to a rare immune defect Maddy lives cut off from the outside world. For 17 years, apart from her nurse Carla and a teacher, who has to undergo complicated preparations to teach her, nobody has been allowed to visit her. But when Olly and his family move into a house on the opposite, a contact is established which gets deeper and deeper by mails exchanged between Maddy and Olly.
Maddy wants to have more than these mails. She wants to see Olly and talk to him and she is able to realize this with Carla's help. And then something happens which Maddy has only known from her books. Both fell in love and Maddy is no longer willing to accept her isolation, whatever the cost!
This book is suitable for readers between 12 and 15 years of age.


text:
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Stephen Joseph Theatre: The Search for Funds.
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Stephen Joseph Theatre: The Search for Funds. One of the venues where people can satiate their desire to experience the arts is the Stephen Joseph Theatre. The Stephen Joseph Theatre is basically a theatre in the round in Scarborough and was actually the first of its kind in Britain. The theatre takes its name from its founder, Stephen Joseph. The theater had its humble beginnings on the first floor of Scarborough's public library. Currently, the theatre has two auditoria: a 404 –seat in the round aptly named as The Round and a 165-seat endstage/cinema called the McCarthy. The building also has facilities such as a restaurant, shop and full front-of-house and backstage facilities. The Round boasts of two innovations: the stage lift which enabled speedy set changes and the trampoline, a Canadian invention which allows technicians particularly easy access to the lighting grid. All of these improvements did not come without a price. The price tag for the improvements was £5.2 million. This only goes to show that art-related ventures are not only founded in the artist talents but actually involves expenditures that can be quite huge. However, the practice and development of the arts should not be hindered by the lack of capital. The exercise of such an important part of society should never be compromised by financial reasons. This reasoning has been the rationale behind the public as well as private support in the field. Perhaps, the most immediate and important support is funding. The theatre project, for example, was given £1.48 million by the National Lottery Arts Council of England, £500,000 from the Foundation for Sport and the Arts. £495,000 from the EC Objective 5(b) fund. £400,000 from Alan Ayckbourn personal funds. £240,000 from the Chairman of the Development Trust, Charles McCarthy. Other amounts amounting came from donations ranging from hundreds of thousands to pound coins dropped in a collection bucket after each performance.
The post Stephen Joseph Theatre: The Search for Funds. appeared first on Template.
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It doesn't speak well of your campaign if a historic sweep by your party and the death of your opponent still aren't enough to secure a victory. Democrat Jenny Oropeza, who died of cancer two weeks before the election, still defeated her opponent by a landslide in a California state Senate race. Oropeza died too close to election day for Democrats to replace her on the ballot, so they encouraged people to vote for her anyway. Republicans, noting that Democrats didn't directly mention Oropeza's death in their direct mailers, have cried foul. Oropeza won with 58 percent of the vote, compared to Republican John Stammreich's 38 percent. A special election will likely be held in the next three to four months to fill the vacant seat.


text:
President Nancy J. Uscher Will Leave Cornish At End of Contract
Seattle, WA -- President Nancy J. Uscher announced to faculty, staff, and students yesterday that she will leave her position when her contract ends on July 31, 2016. The Cornish Board of Trustees will conduct a formal nationwide search for a new president.
"I came to the College on a five-year contract, which strikes me as a good period of time," Dr. Uscher said. "Announcing this now will allow for an orderly transition." She added that she would reveal her future plans in due course.
"The board is grateful for Dr. Uscher's service to both Cornish and the Seattle community," said Cornish Board Chair Dr. Linda Brown. "We're looking forward to a robust search process that will identify new candidates to guide Cornish into its second century."
Dr. Uscher, a violist by training, is Cornish's first women president since its founder, Nellie Centennial Cornish, who started the school in 1914. Dr. Uscher came to Cornish in 2011 after serving as provost and co-acting president of the California Institute of the Arts. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University.
"It has been a true privilege for me to be at Cornish," Dr. Uscher said. "I am thrilled at the energy and talent embedded in the Cornish community, and how well our graduates are doing in the world. Cornish is on the cusp of big things as Seattle expands its presence on the world stage. The preservation of arts schools and the values they impart is so crucial."
On Dr. Uscher's watch, Cornish erected its first new building since 1921, the $50 million, 20-story Cornish Commons residence hall with classroom space on the main campus in the Denny Triangle section of downtown Seattle. The college also adopted a new visual arts curriculum, launched a film/media program, created a residency for the celebrated Kronos Quartet, began online courses, and stepped up fundraising.