Brother can you spare a five?

Less than a year ago I didn’t know anyone who was raising money in small increments – the eyes were on the big prize, the large gifts, suitable for naming and framing. Over the past few months phrases like “kickstarter” “indie go go” and “go fund me” have been popping up with more and more frequency in my messages, inbox, and on my Facebook feed.

Here are some of the ones I know about. Click on the thumbnails for more info on each.

The Fringe Creation Lab  Bricks and Mortar for a Movement – One of the greatest challenges of being an artist in the city is finding a financially and physically accessible space within which to rehearse and create.  That’s why the Fringe opened the Creation Lab with subsidizes rates for as little as $5/hour. Keeping the Creation Lab space rates so low is REALLY important to the independent arts scene in our city.  By supporting the Creation Lab, you are supporting creativity, innovation, and the grass roots organizations that make our city so vibrant.

Proud by Michael Healey Donations made on this page will go towards funding the world premiere of Michael Healey’s Proud in Toronto, Fall 2012. The third in a trilogy of award-winning plays about Canadian values, Proud is about what we actually want out of our politics, and our politicians. One man devotes his entire life to moving the country several millimetres to the right on the political spectrum. Will he succeed? At what cost? A Pygmalion for a country that, until Stephen Harper came along, had no need for one.

 

The Edward Bond Festival Campaign A one-time festival celebrating the work of the internationally renowned master playwright Edward Bond. Your contribution will ensure that all eleven encounters we are programming can be carried out as planned: six workshop readings of Bond’s works, a workshop presentation of Bond’s play Have I None with the collaboration of Bond himself before a live audience, a Symposium featuring Edward Bond and UK director Chris Cooper, and an acclaimed Ryerson Theatre School remount production of Bond’s epic play The Bundle, with a festival finale political theatre cabaret The Wrecking Ball.

 

Artist with Brain Injury needs refurbished computer – I suffered a trauma-related brain injury (c-PTSD) and have been living with the support of the Ontario Disability Support Program. I am at the end of my trauma therapy at Women’s College Hospital, where i am enrolled in a visual art programme.  My work is shown at the SPEAKArt Gallery, Artscape Triangle Gallery, and I will be making art live at Roncy Rocks Festival, The Annex Patio Art show and at my official Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Installation in September. I want to use these opportunities to start a conversation about brain injury. Please help me get a refurbished Macbook Pro so I can continue to create art.

 

As today’s complete aside I was at Panamerican Routes last night to see the opening of Blue Box. A fantastic show of ups and down, laughter and knowing glances, and a throughline to make you think. And salsa! Go catch it if you can, or see something else – it’s a great festival and full of a ridiculous amount of talent. And Aislinn Rose captured one of my favourite things – when Toronto theatre spills into the streets.

 

 

 

 

Sunday Roundup on Monday

Sorry for the delay folks, I was at a wedding this weekend – two of my favourite people say I do in front of all of us and a grand old celebration was had by all.

So what went on this week?

Everything Stops For Tea – started the week with a terrible cold that’s going around and seems to have left me.

New Day New Digs New Info – spent the day at the Centre Social Innovation at 215 Spadina, setting up me new workspace and attending a great workshop.

Information Overload/Information Detox – great article on how to undertake a detox from all the info that seems to be coming at us these days

A Weekend of Culture – Culture Days, Nuit Blanche and what turned out to be a very successful fundraiser for the newly forme Stratirical Theatre.

A busy week ahead of getting into aq new schedule, new work and new school. I mentioned last week that I am starting a business entrepreneur course through the Toronto Business Development Centre, and later today I’m a guest speaker at the UofT Scarborough campus. The 3rd year Arts Management undergrads are working on a project where they are researching the arts issues for the provincial election  prior to working on “doorstep questions” to ask candidates. I’m looking very much forward to school and guest speaking. Will keep you posted.

a Weekend of Culture

Many,many, many things going on this weekend – too many to list. I shall send you straight to the sources. Go, participate, learn, laugh, experience – BE. These are the things that help make this a great city. Be part of it.

For one sleepless night experience the city transformed by hundreds of artists for Toronto’s sixth annual sunset-to-sunrise celebration of contemporary art.  Discover art in galleries, museums and unexpected places. From a streetcar, alleyways and storefronts to churches, ponds and parks, choose from more than 130 destinations and chart your own path.

         Zone A        Zone B      Zone C

 

 

 

 

 

Culture Days is a collaborative pan-Canadian volunteer movement to raise the awareness, accessibility, participation and engagement of all Canadians in the arts and cultural life of their communities.  Annual, Canada-wide Culture Days events feature free, hands-on, interactive activities that invite the public to participate “behind the scenes,” to discover the world of artists, creators, historians, architects, curators, and designers at work in their community.  Activities by Region

And finally…

On Saturday, October 1st, beginning at 8PM (doors at 7:30PM) Stratirical Theatre Company is hosting a fundraiser for their inaugural production, “A Workshop Presentation of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter”.

South London Crime Boss WILSON has cordially invited you to his home for an invitation-only soiree, celebrating the Family’s victory over the war with the McCormick Family – the Irish Mafia. This will be followed by a cruise around the islands on his yacht, The Dumb Waiter,  outfitted with a casino and burlesque parlour.
But before anyone has finished their third drink, mayhem ensues! IT’S MURDER! It’s up to you as loyal friends and family of the Family to figure out WHODUNNIT. The year is 1960. Dress appropriately. But only if you want to...

**RSVP to straticaltheatre@gmail.com or this event page … OR you could just show up and hope that you’re in WILSON’S good graces enough to crash the party…but you know how Wilson hates crashers!

Have a good, safe, cultural, thought-provoking arts filled weekend!

Information Overload/Information Detox

Interesting article here on Life hack – Do You Need an Information Detox?

(equally amusing to me was the google ad offering a free colon hydrotherapy consultation. Oh, Google ads – #FAIL)

I’ve been thinking about Information and just how  – MUCH of it there is lately – it may be, of course that we are officially back in the swing of things (where did September go?) and the provincial election, Toronto City Council, season openers of varying hits and misses, along with what’s going on with our neighbours south of the border and Facebook invites  and apparently a Kardashian got married and Nuit Blanche is coupled with Culture Days and there are six birthdays today and well, you get the picture. And the things I’ve mentioned are probably less than a percent of a percent of a percent of the amount of information that we are expected to consume. I say expected because it’s in our faces.

This is information overload, and as the article asks – do you need a detox?

Probably. So in the article there’s a list of things you can do, for a week or a day or something:

1. Switch off your phone when you get home from work. – not really. It’s my phone, it’s my way of  actually communicating with people, not just a work mechanism. But I could switch it off at a later time. Or put it on silent – I know I’m at overload point where the sound of it (tone or vibrate) makes me want to throw it out the window. Like right now. It’s MOO-ing at me.

2. Don’t use your phone on your way to and from work. Listen to music or read a novel. – okay this I can do. It’s fiddling with my phone, mostly, it’s killing time waiting for the TTC etc. I used to read and listen to my iPod on the streetcar. Or talk to someone, or smile at a baby. I could do that again.

3. Don’t access Facebook and Twitter for one week. – no. No I could not do this given that my work is heavily based on social media. But I could stop wandering aimlessly around those sites, looking for things, and only look at it if there’s an actual notification. Let’s say three.

4. Don’t read any material that is not uplifting and motivational. – an interesting challenge. I’ll have to think about that one.

5. Turn off all email notifications or any other social media messages. – okay we covered that earlier. I can do that. (now the phone is BLINKING at me. Slowly, inexorably blinking.)

6. Do not watch the television for one week. – does it count that all I really watch are formulaic courtroom dramas, anything in the Law and Order franchise and Criminal Minds? I guess so. Perhaps this could be treated the same way as #2 – if there’s nothing specific on to watch, then no watching or surfing.

7. No newspapers, online news or any other form of world news access. – again can’t do – we’re in the midst of upheaval at Toronto City Council, a provincial election in the next week and a bit, and I am involved in those things. But something I thought of last night was to perhaps hearken back to the days of yore, when the newspaper was on paper and it came out once a day and you read it and that was the news for the day. And occasionally something might have changed by the 11:00 news but more often that not – that was the news. I will read the news twice a day, rather than checking back in far too regularly over the course of the day.

Other options I’ve been busily working on are  – UNSUBSCRIBE. I’ve hit unsubscribe on so many things that it’s unbelievable.  It’s cut my morning email down by more than half.  Ditto my Google reader. If it’s a site I look at regularly without a reminder, there’s no need for it to be on my reader.

Something I used to do was participate in “Acoustic Sundays”. Nothing that required electricity for entertainment. And there’s been a huge cut back on the number of back-and-forths used to arrange a simple outing. I can’t stand it anymore. Remember the olden days? You’d call to say let’s have brunch and okay, let’s meet Sunday at 11:00 at the Gladstone and it was agreed to, no “can I let you know?” and there was maybe one confirmation call and everyone just SHOWED UP and ate pancakes together without any more calls, texts or emails? Let’s get back to that. Let’s go back to just showing up.

It helps that as of next Monday I start a new course for ten weeks for entrepreneurs on how to properly build and establish your own business. I’m excited. In the world I inhabit, too many times you become the marketer because someone has to do it, or you get some new software and boom! you’re the accountant. So two days a week I am back in school, which means eight hours a day of being unplugged. I will be blogging about my adventures. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, are any of those suggestions speaking to you? Are you in need of an information detox?

 

PS I found out my author in the library contest – I shall be lunching with Michael Ondaantje.

PPS I am entirely aware that I am probably one of your information overload bits. : )

 

Sunday Roundup – August 21

(In a completely unintentional nod to the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon below – I published this yesterday by accident. good Lord.)

It’s funny as you get older, the quicker summer seems to go, and the quicker we are to say, “oh well summer’s gone“, “the Ex is in town, summer’s over“, and other similar things. I can’t use back to school ads as a barometer because they’ve been on since July – one ad features a mom who is thrilled with having bought all the kids’ school clothes –  ‘and it’s only July‘. I’m sure it targets the same people who do their holiday shopping year round and congratulate themselves on having everything bought and wrapped by the start of November.

Anyway – where was I?

Monday Stuff and Debt – Interesting article in the Star on how it works for a city to be in debt.

Continental Posting – A great flickr series, the 2011 Nuit Blanche lineup, a contest from Small Print Toronto, and an invite to Vancouver folks to have their say on gaming revenues.

DAM! BAM! Art! – two fantastic art markets I adore – it’s Sunday and lovely out you should take a wander down.

They’re Tweeting! They’re Commenting! Now What? – posting on blog comments and what in heck to do with them.

August 19th – short summer Friday post with a couple of music recommendations – check them out.

And remember folks – despite those who get their school clothes shopping done in July and what have you, Calvin and Hobbes know best: