South by Southwest Takeaways
March 28th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Corita performing at Waterloo Cycles during SXSW
Today I have a guest post up on my friend Alejandra O’Leary’s blog about what my big lessons from SXSW. Coming from the perspective of a nonprofit arts administrator and a DIY musician, I wasn’t sure if the SXSW conference would really resonate with me, but it did, and I think I took away some valuable ideas that I hope will be helpful to musicians and all types of creatives. Please check out the entry here and let me know what you think! Also, if you’d like to listen to the insights and ideas shared in the panel I spoke on, Beethoven + Social Media = Crowd Funding Patronage, you can listen to that here! If you’ve been to South by I’d love to know your big takeaways and if not, I’d love to know what you are working on to take your creative project to the next level!
Corita performing at Cherrywood Coffee House for the Austin Girls Rock Camp party during SXSW
Arts, Forward!
December 6th, 2011 § 2 Comments
Walker Teen Art Council, 2009-2010. Photo Cameron Wittig.
Since graduating from college I have made my career in arts institutions. I’ve worked as a museum educator, public programmer, and now work to support artists in their fund raising and teaching artists about services and resources that can help them grow their practice. In my studies I’ve focused on the arts in the realm of cultural and social policy and thought about the kind of quantitative research that can be applied to arts organizations to better understand and articulate the value of arts and culture in society. I’m excited to announce that for the next few months about I will be blogging about some of these topics as a blogging fellow on the new website ArtsFwd. ArtsFwd examines innovative practices in arts leadership and is a really exciting place for sharing ideas and about adaptive strategies to create dynamic change in the arts sector and move it, well, forward.
Artist Marie Watt gives a talk at Crow's Shadow
My first piece explored arts leadership in rural areas, which features Melissa Bob, the new Interim Executive Director of Crow’s Shadow Institute outside of Pendleton, Oregon. My second piece profiles the Teen Arts Council blog at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota and shares some fantastic ideas of how arts organizations can effectively engage teens and honor their voices in an arts institution. I hope you’ll check these out and join us in the conversation! There’s a lot more innovation to come from ArtsFwd, and we’d love your input!
Interview with Impractical Labor in the Service of the Speculative Arts on NYFA Current!
October 13th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
The ILSSA Reference Reports, a component of the ILSSA Quarterly, are an ever-growing and collaboratively generated annotated list of resources relevant to ILSSA members. The group's founders call the Reports “our analogue Internet.”
Impractical who? Speculative what? What is she on about? If you love bookbinding, zines, letterpress printing, type writers, old Polaroid cameras, and any and all things that have to do with obsolete technology, you will love this project. Impractical Labor in the Service of the Speculative Arts was started by Bridget Elmer and Emily Larned, two artists who are letterpress printers and bookmakers that I greatly admire. It was Emily who suggested I intern at Booklyn, a Brooklyn-based book artists alliance, my first internship in New York. I also worked in Emily’s studio all through college, binding books, scoring and folding CD covers, and sorting type, in exchange for the use of her beautiful Vandercook press and lovingly homemade lunches. It was this kind of impractical labor, and Emily’s inspiring example of how to do it, that made me think very carefully and clearly about what it meant to be an artist and how one builds an artist’s life and balances their life and work.
Set letterpress type for the ILSSA leaflet, What is craft and why does it matter?, included as part of an ILSSA Research Quarterly.
Bridget and Emily’s project/organization is a membership organization that borrows from ideas of a labor union and a research institute and a performance project all rolled into one. I was very flattered to interview them for NYFA Current and I hope you will read the full interview here about their activities.
“Dumpster Diving, Tofu + Zines” in Remedy Quarterly
September 24th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Remedy Quarterly Issue 6 from Kelly Carambula
I am so pleased to announce that a story about my young days as a punk rock zinester back in Portland, Oregon has been published in the wonderful journal Remedy Quarterly. Run by Kelly Carambula of the fantastic food (and lovely cocktail) blog Eat Make Read, the publication features “Stories of food, recipes for feeling good.” Each issue is put together around a theme and the newly released issue number six has “Stealing” as its binding idea. As with anything theme driven it’s really fun to see how each author interpreted that theme. My piece takes on the late 1990′s punk community’s views on stealing and how we used that to our advantage to help feed hungry zinesters at the first Portland Zine Symposium in 2001. It also features a recipe for my potluck standby, peanut tofu noodles.
Not only is Remedy Quarterly a pleasure to read, but it is beautifully designed. It even features original fonts by Aaron Carambula, among others. In this digital age it’s nice to find a beautiful magazine you can hold in your hand, so the article is only available in the paper journal. Treat yourself! And why not subscribe and support independent publishing and cooking?
And yes, I totally cross posted this to my food blog, 2 Cooks in the Kitchen.
My review of Gary Indiana’s “Last Seen Entering the Biltmore” on NYFA Current!
August 15th, 2011 § 2 Comments
Gary Indiana
There was a New York City that I dreamed of when I was growing up. It was a mixture of Greenwich Village during the Beatnik era and the Lower East Side of the 1980′s. It was full of punks, dreamers, activists and artists. The dangers that might have been lurking there were more aesthetic than real. Poverty and hunger were stylish accouterments. All who were there possessed the ability to transform the urban environment. While obviously this political, arty urban paradise existed only in my imagination some lived it in all its gritty, dangerous, complicated, hungry reality. Patty Smith lucidly captures it in her recent book Just Kids. Gary Indiana’s new compilation out from MIT Press, Last Seen Entering the Biltmore, collects his poems, prose, short plays and works of art from the late 70′s to the present, chronicling through his artistic production his time in this environment after he made the decision to “not to do anything he didn’t want to do” and to become a writer. Last Seen Entering the Biltmore captures Indiana’s sense of absurd and also his strong artistic integrity. I wrote a full review for NYFA’s online magazine for artists, NYFA Current, and would be honored if you checked it out here.
On Being Intimidated To Start
June 14th, 2011 § 12 Comments
For my 30th birthday I made a resolution to start taking concrete steps towards my lifelong goal of being a writer. Besides all the research, outreach, planning and making connections that it entails, it also means sitting down, collecting my thoughts, and actually producing writing.
It feels incredibly self-indulgent, especially because I am also in graduate school and work full time, to write without a specific deadline or with an end result in mind. It seems like a real luxury to dwell in and focus on my own creativity. It’s scary to respect my ideas and creative impulses and take them seriously enough to give them time in my life. It’s ironic, because in my professional life I often act as a cheerleader or coach for artists, encouraging them to take their artistic ideas and careers seriously enough to push them to the next level. I also edit their grant proposals and project narratives and spend much time giving them feedback on their writing.
I’m at the beginning of a new decade and have a clear goal for the end, which is to be a writer in no uncertain terms. Deep down I know that only goal that has ever mattered to me and is the one that I will think about when I assess my life to see if I achieved what I hoped to. I’ve spent the past decade of my life ensuring my career as an arts administrator and I feel proud of that. However, as I spend my work days encouraging artists to trust in their visions it’s difficult to turn around and afford myself the same trust. I think these artists have given themselves the self confidence, and the permission, to trust in what they make and take it seriously. It’s hard to give myself the same permission. It’s much simpler to dwell on my own frustrations or feel like my goals are out of reach.
However, my goals will always be out of reach if I don’t start writing. If I don’t take the first steps to get organized, take a deep breath and push myself into the unknown, how will I even know what I want is possible?
Being a blogger having been a zinester wanting to become a writer
June 1st, 2011 § 4 Comments
The other week I went to the Brooklyn Bloggers meetup at the Bell House with my friend Laura of the blog Eating the Beats. It was my first time going to an event consciously as a “blogger,” and despite having written on Killerfemme for the past few years I’ve been hesitant to really identify as being a blogger versus simply being a person who has a blog. All told, the Brooklyn Blog meetup was fun. I talked to bloggers who write about New York nachos, tech and gadgets from a girl’s perspective, writers for Broeklyn, and a brave young woman who writes about being broke and navigating New York’s dating scene. It was nice to hear people’s interesting ideas and find out about how they are crafting their blogs. However, I also feel like I’ve come to blogging too late to really get into it without seeing the bold commercialism that is behind so many blogs now. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but blogs are often seen as a means to another end, which is fine, if that’s your goal. While I too would love a book contract and/or a regular byline, I don’t necessarily think my personal blog will be my ticket to my dreams as a writer.
Mostly I feel like I haven’t found my blogging “community” yet. Perhaps it’s because of the vastness of the blogosphere (if we can even call it that anymore), but I don’t feel like I’ve found bloggers who share my ideas, values and aesthetics. In fact, most of the blogs I read are in French. While I thoroughly enjoy those blogs, it’s hard to connect with those writers when I write in a different language, even if I comment on their entries en francais.
This made me think back to when I started making my personal zine Induglence in 1998. When I first encountered zines I knew immediately that I would make one myself. The concept of publishing one’s own personal writing made sense to me innately, especially as a teenager, because I knew that I could not expect anyone else to publish my work. Perhaps because I knew exactly the kind of writers I wanted to connect with—I would describe them loosely as young feminists interested in art, queer politics, and music—it was easier for me to immerse myself in the zine community. I felt like over the course of two or so years I was able to build up an audience for my zine and also a network of close friends, penpals and fellow zinesters that I felt I shared something in common with. My connection to and beleif in the power of the zine network extended into helping found the Portland Zine Symposium in 2001. It continues to resonate into my adult life because some of my closest friends (and neighbors) are women I met through zines over 10 years ago.
Perhaps its because I have close friends now that I don’t feel the same urgency to seek out people to connect with through blogs. However, I also feel like I am writing in a vacuum, and some days that makes me wonder if I should even continue to bother with this blog. Keeping a blog (and keeping it up more regularly and diligently) has reminded me about the whole reason I started making zines and keeping a blog to begin with: to write. Being a writer has been my dream ever since I was a little girl and it is something I am determined to make a reality in my thirties. I know it’s harder now than ever to distinguish oneself, one’s voice, one’s ideas, and one’s blog (especially if I don’t have hundreds of dollars and hours to sink into the design and hosting of it), but I also feel like its much easier for me to find opportunities to publish and connect with wider audiences nowadays. For me, I feel like blogging and writing for other web-based publications holds a lot of promise. We’ll see what the future will bring.
Hopefully in the next decade I'll be able to write a better novel than Ida the cat.
Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club on Venus Zine!
December 3rd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I was really excited to get to speak with Tina Weymouth, the bass player of the Talking Heads and a multi-instrumentalist and singer in the group Tom Tom Club. Tom Tom Club’s song “Word Rappinghood” is one of my all time favorites (yes, I liked that song before Chicks on Speed covered it) and I have loved them since I was lucky enough to score their records in used bins. Lucky for us all they are reissuing a live record they made several years ago that only had a very limited availability. I got to speak with Tina Weymouth about Tom Tom Club’s 30 years and what has changed and what has stayed the same. Check out the full story on Venus Zine here.
Venus Zine Winter 2010-11 Issue!
November 9th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I’m really pleased to have two pieces in the Winter 2010-11 issue of Venus Zine (which features Janelle Monae on the cover)! A few months ago I got to meet up with Jenny Lewis and Jonathan Rice to talk about their new project Jenny and Johnny. There’s a shorter version in Venus’ new “Heart to Heart” section in the magazine and an alternate version online, which you can read here. 
I also reviewed the new Clinic album, which is unremarkable. I’ll have the PDFs up soon!
Profile of Corin Tucker’s New Band on Venus Zine
October 18th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
If you were like me and grew up in the 1990′s and loved punk rock and feminism, you loved Sleater-Kinney. It’s no longer the 90′s (though with all the plaid coming back this season and all the reissues of classic grunge records you might wonder) and I’m no longer a teenager, but I still love Sleater-Kinney, punk rock, and feminism. I still have not yet found a band as compelling as Sleater-Kinney (though Electrelane filled the gap after Sleater-Kinney disbanded in 2006, but then they broke up too!). I liked S-K long enough to get over my initial teenaged rock star worship and went from buying a ticket to a show in Boston I was too young to go to and hoping for the best to being impressed with their guitar chops on their last record The Woods. They were just a really solid band. Every album brought an innovative approach to their sound. Their live shows were breathtaking and the members were well spoken and stylish to boot. All this to say that despite my ambivalence about music lately I was very excited to hear that Corin Tucker has a new project (and with Sara Lund from Unwound on drums no less!) and jumped at the chance to interview her and write a profile for Venuszine. Her new record, 1,000 Years, is solid as ever and as always, she is always thinking deeply about what’s going on in society and her personal life and working that into her songwriting. Please check out the full profile on Venuszine here.
