Month: August 2009

Cut by HALF?!? “Massive province-wide gaming grant cuts leave arts community reeling”

“It appears that arts groups waiting for their frozen gaming grant money to flow are out of luck. Numerous arts groups across the province have received letters via email from the Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch informing them that their Direct Access grants have been denied, including organizations who had multi-year funding commitments.”

From the Vancouver Arts Alliance:

Alliance for Arts and Culture – ARTS COMMUNITY MEETING
Wednesday, September 2, 2009 – 1 pm to 3 pm
Museum of Vancouver, 1100 Chestunut Street

The Alliance for Arts and Culture will convene a community meeting on Wednesday, September 2 at the Museum of Vancouver to discuss our options in response to this week’s announcements regarding BC Gaming Commission Direct Access Grants. The meeting will run from 1 pm to 3 pm.

We will attempt to quantify the damage, bring one-another up-to-date on protest initiatives currently being taken by individual artists, organizations and discipline sectors, and discuss the pros and cons of several possible courses of action for the future.

This meeting will NOT be open to the media, elected officials or cultural sector bureaucrats. While we appreciate the support we are receiving from many in each of these sectors, the arts community needs this opportunity to “talk among ourselves”.

This is NOT a “rally” so we are only looking for one or two persons from each arts organizations to attend. A full-scale arts community rally in the near future will be one of the options discussed. So please don’t send your entire staff and/or membership!

Arts organizations that are not members of the Alliance are welcome to send representatives to this gathering.

Please RSVP to kdm@allianceforarts.com indicating how many representatives from your organization will be attending. Seating is limited, so we need to count noses. We will begin at precisely 1 pm, so plan to arrive early.

QUANTIFYING THE DAMAGE
We have had numerous emails over the past few days from Alliance members and non-members informing us of declined Direct Access grants.

To help us quantify the damage to our community in advance of Wednesday’s community meeting, could you take a moment to email us the following details, in the order noted:

– Name of your organization.
– Amount of declined grant request.
– Whether this was a one-year or multi-year grant.
– If multi-year, which year was declined.
– How many years your organization has been receiving Direct Access funding.
– Whether your organization has a BC Arts Council grant pending.

The government now seems to be mixing apples with oranges in order to make it as difficult as possible to understand our exact standing with various sources of funding. At least one arts organization has received confirmation of a BCAC grant which cites the Gaming Grants Program as the source of the funds, and states that the money will be deposited to the recipient’s Gaming account.

If you receive a similar BCAC grant confirmation, please let us know whether that grant is for the full amount of your original BCAC funding request.

We would also like to hear from any organization which received a Direct Access Grant or grant confirmation in the past week, or does so in the coming days. So far, the only approved grants seem to be those confirmed prior to the freeze — most of them in May.

Please keep your responses to the above questions brief and factual. I will have to compile the answers in a spreadsheet, and lengthy and anecdotal replies will slow down the process.

Send your responses, along with your RSVP for Wednesday’s meeting, to kdm@allianceforarts.com

Thank you for your collaboration.

MEDIA CONFERENCE

The Alliance for Arts and Culture will hold a media conference to announce the outcomes of Wednesday’s community meeting on Thursday, September 3, at a time and place to be determined.

Y’rs,
KDM

Kevin Dale McKeown
Director of Communications
Alliance for Arts & Culture

o: 604.681.3535 (215)
c: 778.228.2548
kdm@allianceforarts.com

robots need love too

My darling friend Dan Mangan has just been dubbed the Next Big Indie King by the Georgia Straight this week, just in time for his sold out CD Release party shows tonight and tomorrow at the grand re-opening of the Cultch. Apparently he’s even on the cover! I can’t wait to snag a copy.

Tony and I have tickets to his show tomorrow. Who else is going?


dan mangan – basket
dan mangan – the indie queens are waiting
dan managan – journal of a narcoleptic
dan mangan – robots (performed live at the vancouver folk fest)
dan mangan – so much for everyone (live at the vancouver folk fest)

For those who aren’t local, check his site for upcoming dates.

if it wasn’t worth it, then you’ve killed us both

I love him like fire. Warmth, light. Temptation drives me farther away, of desire, malicious, feigned, humming electric through my body like waking up to a kiss, welcome in the middle of the night. Chorus end, refrain. My hands flex, the desire to blacken his eyes, break his fingers, as I say to him as he clatters down the stairs next to me, invisible as I refuse to look up, “because that would mean more to you.” The verses repeated, wait, I love you. Funny way of showing it. Every day, a song that sounds the same. Bridge. Sharps, flats. Chorus again, our voices together. Refrain.

words / actions

Bunny Project at Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden 2008

Performance commissioned by Kalmar Museum of Art, Sweden. During the inauguration of the new art museum in Kalmar a suspicious individual sneaked around the premises mounting sculptures made of carrots, alarm clocks, red and blue cables, metal wire and tape. On direct orders from the Swedish secret police the performance was stopped since the Culture Minister refused to give her inaugural speech if it were to continue. The speech , as it later turned out, was about how art must be allowed to be free and provocative.

SUP DAWG I HEARD U LIKE TORRENTING SO I PUT AN INDEX IN YOUR INDEX SO U CAN PIRATE WHILE YOU PIRATE!

via Scott:

Pirate Bay user downloads entire site’s index files.

Creates a 21gb mega-torrent.

Adds rudimentary code to allow people to recreate their own copies of the site.

Uploads it to the Pirate Bay.

1st clones of the site already running (but struggling under the current media attention).

Ladies, we just went very meta indeed.

I will never be your beauty queen

Her hair spreads out like fire and its like she just can’t stop
and then the cops come: Doughnut guard state car rolling up along the side
With the fire lanterns burning, the sirens opened wide and they say,
“Excuse me, little miss, it’s time to take this home”
and they try to get her address, she says, “Sorry I don’t have one,
it’s only me and these feeding fields, look where you are”
She kicks at the hem of her skirt, and on go the cars.

He sits across from me like a carving in diamonds and soft, stupid gold, caught in the betrayal he wrought, delicate and final, wet, salty, and full of things I dare not speculate, not if I care to stay sane. We are at lunch, recovering from the power outage at work, offices on the same grid, the mean infinitesimal click of my machine shutting off, along with the lights. A sound like his eyelids slipping into place, the smallest of tics in the middle of the night. (Remembering, suddenly, how he cried.) I am not well, too torn, too unhappy. There was too much to gain to have it so thrown away. (Remembering, too, how he drew in ink on my flesh, how I traced the word redemption with my finger on his chest.) Watching our silence, watching words lash like justice out of me, I order an ice-cream sundae instead of a meal, a frivolous urge born of rioting self defense. Meeting him blankly, gesturing with my spoon, the ice is broken but it does not save me. It is all I can do not to leave, to leave and keep walking, to keep walking until I am half asleep, crumpled and restless, a nameless bundle treading sacred ground by the side of a highway. South maybe. East. All I can hope is that one day this will be behind me, a memory of pain my brain might not decide to keep.

She says, “Take me around and dance me outside, show me a place where we might hide.
What I want, I’m afraid, that you can’t afford to buy”

beautiful creature almost died

I sleep on the bus flat on my back like a tipped statue of buddha, crossed legs along the wall, knees pointed vaguely toward heaven, my hands demurely folded together, tucked in the warm, ragged edges of my sleeves. Awkward, possibly, but it’s comfortable.

My dreams last night were all of an old friend, the two of us living in a city we’ve never been to, walking through a community garden together, visiting his tent-like home on the side of a river, entertaining at a wedding somewhere on a bridge, everything underlaid with memories of his old kitchen, the music he made for us while I cooked dinner. If they was anything, they were dreams of missed chances, a universe where never were became might have did, became could have been, became not history changed, but future history made.