Q CLAPS Newsletter and Performance Calendar

Excerpted from Volume 29, Issue 5 to carry you through early June performance events in the Albuquerque area. Subscribe to Albuquerque Community Live Art and Performance Services weekly newsletters and performance listings at website links below. I subscribe but do not always remember to repost or link. This is just one of many Albuquerque area calendars  ~ a topic surely worth a post of its own, but not today. Although carrying more art exhibit and gallery openings this time (May was a heavy concert month), Qclaps is primarily performance oriented, as indicated by the name. 

Local calendars tend to be more detailed and comprehensive than national or even state calendars. Few, if any, are 100% comprehensive. That means checking or subscribing to multiple calendars - and, for event organizers, listing in them. Depending on individual calendar focus (so do your homework), these area calendars, excepting ones (i.e. Duke City Fix) that are limited to Albuquerque proper, would be good places for the arts council and other Mountainair event organizers to list coming events. Concerts, exhibits, activities, Jubilee, Sunflower, and more. Don't overlook the NM Magazine and NM Tourism calendars either. Both are from NM Department of Tourism and now synced so that listing in one automatically lists in the other. Local businesses and organizations can list in the New Mexico Tourism Business Directory for free.

This part of the spring concert season offers dozens of live performances to choose among. There are also special fundraising events to fill funding gaps that all performing groups have been experiencing. Check the new Upcoming Events and Auditions & Calls sections of the newsletter and go to the website for further information on each event. Become a fan of Q CLAPS on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Here's hoping to see you soon, live and in person, 

Bruce Edgar bruce@qclaps.info and Barbara Lemaire, *Albuquerque Community Live Art and Performance Services

Upcoming Events:

NM Art News from The Collector's Guide

Trouble viewing? Click here

New Mexico Gallery News New Mexico's Weekly Art News :: As heard on Classical 95.5 and 102.9 KHFM Brought to you by The Collector's Guide :: an F+W Media Publication Here is a sampling of art events happening throughout New Mexico this weekend, as heard on Classical KHFM radio.

Friday Night in #Mountainair: Soirées on Broadway

Come to Manzano Mountain Art Council's new community art center, Mountain Arts on Broadway, for(MMAC's Friday soirées, 7-9:30 pm every Friday (until further notice) starting this Friday May 27

Elvis' Computer Has Left th Building

Hi - just a quick note on a borrowed computer to let you know I am w/o computer access for the immediate future although doing my best to remedy that condition as soon as possible ~ so no email, blogging, Facebook posts or other social media. Time to catch up on reading. I promise to do my best to catch up on on back mail, posts and maybe even calendars/event announcements in as timely manner as humanly once I have dealt with the narcoleptic computer (keeps falling asleep without warning) one way or another and am re-connected.

Vanessa

2011 #Mountainair Sunflower Festival: Call for Artists & Artisans

Call for Artists and Artisans

Sunflowers, watercolor by Dianne Doan, 2010 ©

What: 2011 Annual Mountainair Sunflower Festival

When: August 27, 2011; 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Where: At the Dr. Saul Community Center and around the town of Mountainair, N.M. Mountainair is about 75 miles south of Albuquerque on U.S. Highway 60.

More info: 505-847-2205 or www.MountainairArts.org/SunflowerFestival

Application deadline: August 1. Visit Web site to download application form or call number above.

Mountainair, N.M.—The Manzano Mountain Art Council (MMAC) is now accepting applications from artists and craftspeople for the annual Mountainair Sunflower Festival, which will take place on Saturday, August 27, in downtown Mountainair. Deadline for applications is August 1.

Awards include a Best of Show Award of $100 and two Awards of Merit of $50 each. Advertising is extensive (e.g., state and regional newspapers and magazines, arts weeklies, etc.). Each year the viewing audience expands as visitors discover the charms of Mountainair, also known as the Gateway to Ancient Cities because of its proximity to the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument.

Application Information

MMAC is seeking artists and craftspeople who create their own work. The price of an indoor booth is $25 and an outdoor booth is $10. Indoor booths (which are limited in number) are approximately 8 feetby 10 feet and an outdoor booth is 10 feet by 10 feet.

Please visit www.MountainairArts.org/SunflowerFestival for more information and to download a copy of the application form. Or call the Sunflower Festival message line at 505-847-2205.

The Mountainair Sunflower Festival is sponsored by the non-profit Manzano Mountain Art Council and is made possible in part by New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Contact:

Dianne Doan

diannedoan@hotmail.com

505-859-9450

Notes, May 8: Have a Happy MD

OK so I'm dropping the morning part.  Bookending themes: Mother's Day and Mother Nature

Mother's Day... it's everywhere, all over radio and TV, not just the advertising. Even Google's got to get in the act, with a doodle (more doodles here) for the occasion, So have a Happy MD, however you unwrap the acronym: Mothers Day, Major Depression (this one's got my vote), Maryland, Muscular Distrophy, Medical Doctor, Managing Director, Memorial Day, Moldava (formerly Moldavia, for that much needed touch of whimsy) Macular Degeneration, Missile Defense, Manic Depression, a handful of bands including MegaDeath, Man-Day (Ironic? Actually, it's "an industrial unit of production equal to the work one person can produce in a day"), Meditation Director, Mentally Deficient, Media Driven, Mnemonic Debugger, Mass Destruction ("hey, you left off the W")

The real history of Mothers Day is not of a Hallmark occasion, boon to florists wiring dead flowers, growers raising fields of inedibles in a hungry world.  

1870 - Julia Ward Howe ~ activist, writer, suffragist, abolitionist ~ wrote a passionate appeal to women and urged them to rise against war in her famous Mother's Day Proclamation, written in Boston in 1870. She also initiated a Mothers' Peace Day observance on the second Sunday in June in Boston and held the meetng for a number of years.  In 1872, she led the first Mother's Day event, an anti-war observance in New York City. Her idea spread, but was later replaced by the Mother's Day holiday now celebrated in May. 

Time Line of the History of Mother's Day

1907 - The modern Mother's Day holiday was created (appropriated) by Anna Jarvis as a day for each family to honor its mother. Anna Jarvis was the daughter of Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis. On 12th May, 1907, two years after her mother's death, she held a memorial to her mother and started a campaign in 1908 to make "Mother's Day" a recognized holiday.

1914 - Library of Congress (LOC) "In May we honor our mothers on Mother's Day. On May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation (another appropriation) making Mother's Day the second Sunday in May." 

---

On the radio... Weekend edition: 

Fake hip-hop; rising gas prices; Libya updates; more Palestine & Bin Laden postmortem; artist Glenn Ligon's intriguing art installations features text, Billie Holliday, history and social/political criticism; Mike Huckabee; Mississippi flooding, not crested in Memphis yet, levels subsiding upriver, headed for the Delta - described so far as worse than the great flood of 1927, so often referred to during Katrina; another Betty White memoir; and more. Missed it? Audio of broadcast will be available online for two weeks at KUNM - Listen!

I may not have managed morning notes or as much in the way of catching up with personal correspondence as intended (yes, I know ~ paving stones) but I'm getting back on my walking regimen, interrupted by wind and the cold snap, and with far less after effects today. Not big news but important to me. Somehow I managed two posts on New Faculty Majority without even getting to the one tentatively scheduled for today. Going Grassroots with Social Media should be of interest to organizers interested in social media for organizing.   

morning notes #6

Notes in the morning, writing in the afternoon. I might rename but am still not giving up on getting out a much shorter early morning note. Random is the mode; learning and sustainability the themes. Again. Anyone notice a pattern?

All week is Teacher Appreciation Week. Day before yesterday was National Teachers Day (links to news), although World Teachers Day is October 5. There is a certain irony to the name: Blame a Teacher Day might suit current mood and rhetoric better. I doubt Standardized Test Appreciation Day will catch on.

The Nation magazine looking for original, thoughtful, provocative student voices to answer this question in 800 words: What do you think is the most serious issue facing your generation? That would be 3 double spaced pages in a standard font such as Times plus 50 words, more or less. All high school and college students eligible. Entries are being accepted through June 30th for the sixth annual Nation Student Writing Contest. Both high school and college winners are published in The Nation and receive $1,000 and a lifetime Nation subscriptions. Finalists are published at thenation.com and receive $250 and subscriptions. Please help spread the word and read last year's winners.

Sustainability...
Taking a step or local self sufficiency, which is a kind of independence, the Mountainair Farm & Garden Market opens today on Cinco de Mayo, anglified by association. Because the market is a crucial component for sustainable local development, food sovereignty and self sufficiency, support it. If you don't think it represents your or community interests, then get involved. In the true spirit of Cinco de Mayo, do something about it. Sustainability involves making the best use of valuable local resources - human, built, natural - means not wasting them regardless of personal animus or agenda.

Battle of Puebla

Cinco de Mayo...

• Cinco de Mayo Celebrations in the Southwest 
• Dos Equis Food Truck 
• Tasty Dishes for Cinco de May, 
• 4 Fabulous Fruit Salsas 
• How to Green Your Cinco de Mayo 

Not as unrelated as you might think....

• Nonprofit Reveals Downturn in Small Business Lending ~ we're increasingly on our own
• Bolivian law granting (recognizing) rights of Mother Earth, is now moving into United Nations. Think sustainability and environmental consciousness ~ big time. 
• The Commons, an intriguing if quixotic, notion recently blogged on iCreate. Yet, stark necessity could eventually make sharers and collaborators of us even if against our individual wills. Necessity can be a real mother. Neighbors helped one another raise barns as much or more for the social capital as for sociability. 
• On Say’s Law, money, and commodity exchange

We've all heard about Peak Oil, but what about Peak Psychotherapy?

In a world of unprecedented resource depletion, climate change, and economic catastrophe unseen since the Great Depression, each day manifests yet another reduction in energy, materials, services, opportunities, and funds for maintaining the status quo. We witness the almost moment-to-moment deterioration of every institution's infrastructure, and the reality of the privatization of these entities becomes less and less unthinkable. But as peak oil and the collapse of industrial civilization intensify, even privatization will not be able to maintain the bulwark of systems dependent not only on gargantuan sums of money, but on fossil fuel energy and what are certain to be vastly underpaid personnel spread thinly across the substratum of a society in profound disarray. ... 

Most individuals who understand peak oil, climate change, and the ghastly economic realities of our time are likely to agree that access to health care as we have known it is rapidly vanishing. Yes, as collapse intensifies, alternative and natural healing techniques will abound. For some individuals, those methods will prove much more effective than allopathic medicine has been. For others, perhaps those who have suffered severe injuries or have advanced terminal illnesses, the absence of traditional health care will be fatal. In any event, physical and mental health care as we know them today will probably not exist a generation from now.

morning notes #5

Missed the weekend...  going for "weekend notes" but events pushed that aside. Missing the morning here too but did take notes, just late writing them up. As expected, we're into post-event retrospectives, analyses from sundry perspectives not limited to social media or the war on terror. There will be more, with books, specials, movies and especially conspiracy theories yet to come.

• Inside terrorism, Omnivore's annotated links to articles
• Poem on YouTube  reacting to Osama Bin Laden's death 
• Reactions of the global community
• Remembering 9/11/2001 
• more for the Googling

Where were you when...? Momentous events mark our lifelines, milestones. We map our lives by the intersection of public and private; public is shared, private not; nations and cultures do not share all the same markers and when they do, not in the same way. Dating and measuring time by momentous or just memorable event is natural. It preceded time telling devices, hourglass, sundial, watches and clocks. You may not remember a specific date but will remember markers. Dates associated with markers become memorable. Shared markers become part of our shared culture, fading to historical record as remembers fade and die off. Oral transmission keeps some in memory but not as long as used to be the case. You have to sing about something to really remember it (however inaccurately). 

Markers, especially public ones, are more likely to be the sum of our fears than of our hopes, but not always. Events assassinations, disasters, wars starting, depressions, outnumber ones like the original moon walk. Man-made seem to outnumber natural for memorability but that seems to be changing. Inventions and innovations don't make the event list, taking on importance only as significance sinks in. Simplified too, for ease of keeping track. Imagine keeping the one below in your head.

imagine trying to keep this in your head!

My much shorter list, single neither personal nor extended duration events, starts with ones I was too young to understand at the time: Russia gets atomic bomb; later launches Sputnik (spawning fake song titles like Blue Sputnik, It's Only a Paper Sputnik, etc); Cuban Missile Crisis; President Kennedy assassinated (followed by so many others within a relatively short period); Neil Armstrong walks on the moon (Alice and I stayed up watching the landing, flag planting and walk on TV, waking the kids to witness an historic event, which made no impression on them); various (to make this short) events and disasters; Fall of Saigon; Fall of the Berlin Wall; 9/11; death of Osama Bin Laden (longer 20th c timeline already updated to include this). 

The list is very aggression centered. The Cold War begins and ends followed by the War on Terror. Yeats comes to mind. What rough beast is already on its way? Collapses: including but not limited to climate and natural resources. Have a nice day. 

Shared or common culture deficit is increasing common among students, which affects reading, writing, communication indeed learning. Popular culture is shared, created by participants and sharers, but the markers move and change ever more rapidly. This cannot but contribute to fearing change, especially in small communities. The big markers, momentous events, are beyond our control, making it foolishly tempting to control the common culture. Hence "culture war" writ large. The next generation might speak another language, inhabit another culture that the one preceding it cannot understand. How could that not lead to fragmentation and loss of community? 

A difficult balance indeed. One solution: track new markers, share stories about old ones and above all, keep learning the new languages. If you move to another community or different country: learn the language. 

May 1: Breaking bin Laden coverage via Twitter

Scrap or spike the posts I've been working on today. May Day and I actually thought I'd found a way to write a post I could cross post on Poets and Writers Picnic, New Faculty Majority and at least one other. A perfect blogger's Trifecta. Then social media breaks the really big news ahead of mainstream media.

Twitter started breaking the story around 8:30 pm, well ahead of broadcast media. I might not have noticed if I hadn't been twitterkeeping, sorting new followers on different accounts (PWPicnic, NewFacMajority, Mountainair_Mkt, PermaShelter, VanessaVaile), perhaps not even then if I hadn't been checking @VanessaVaile right then. It follows more news and social media feeds as well as being more diverse and eclectic than the others. Mainstream media groused about wild rumoring  on Twitter, but not that I noticed, maybe because I don't do Drudge, Fox or Breitbart.

I'm not talking about the usual complaint of what can you say worth saying in 140 characters. Series of short messages like David Corn's. Links to longer, more detailed coverage, videos, pictures...even the front page of the New York Times. The following is 99% curated from tweets followed from 8:30-11pm. I'll save confusing you with Twapperkeeper for another time.

“This ends a chapter in the global war on terrorism which has defined a generation,” NBC correspondent Richard Engel said. News was tonight. Analysis, retrospectives and predictions start tomorrow. Indeed a milemaker, 2011 bookending the decade that started 2001. Eventually the period will become a topic for tv specials, books, college courses, retro fashion trends, etc ~ not unlike the 60s have become. What, though will we call the slightly off-set decade? 1--11?

Covering the coverage (meta news)

• How the announcement leaked out, 
• Mashable's tweet-timeline, with screen shots of tweets, 
• From GigaOM, a better and more in depth analysis of news cycle in social media: The Stages of News in a Twitter and Facebook Era 

This evening, as we learn about the death of Osama bin Laden, we’re seeing firsthand what happens when the real-time, immediate notifications of Facebook and Twitter meet real-world events. It’s not the first time, but the death of Osama Bin Laden is truly a global event.
....
Millions discovered the news Sunday night on Twitter or Facebook. And while they may have tuned into the news on television, many more watched the live stream from the White House on the web ... [and] countless other sites offering the news in real time. And some likely followed it via Twitter for far longer than the brief address. 

From the time of the reported first tweet on the topic, coming from @KeithUrbahn who lists himself as “Chief of Staff, Office of Donald Rumsfeld" posted around 10:25 p.m. EDT, Twittersphere and Facebook denizens followed a compressed news cycle as folks waited for confirmation from someone, anyone."

One Twitter User Reports Live From Osama Bin Laden Raid

Sohaib Athar, @ReallyVirtual in Abbottabad Lahore Pakistan, An IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops tweeted it live before realizing what happening. By the time he trended, he also had to set filters on his mailbox to handle the overflow, http://twitter.com/reallyvirtual.  

"I am JUST a tweeter, awake at the time of the crash. Not many twitter users in Abbottabad, these guys are more into facebook. People who dream about twitter follower counts need a shrink, seriously. 'Safer' is a relative term that has lost its meaning in Pakistan"

Next stop, a quick look at Facebook. Not as quick off the mark as Twitter but major print media posted online versions of their coverage there as well as tweeting links, although I did pick up the New Yorker piece, OBAMA AND OSAMA.

Official announcement and speech

• Video on MoJo
• GlobalPost: Watch the video here. Obama announces that Osama bin Laden has been killed. 
• Text of speech

George W. Bush's statement - gracious and statesmanlike

David Corn, Washington editor of Mother Jones magazine and MSNBC/NBC News analyst: SAO (Sr Admin Official): We shared this intelligence with no other country. And...what does this say about Pakistani intelligence/law enforcement. This guy was almost hiding in plain sight.

Here is the formal NYT obituary of Osama bin Laden. Sit back. It's a long one.

Reactions DC to NYC and across the country

• KRQE: Live streaming: celebrations at the White House and around the country 
• Crowds outside WH started gathering *before* announcements, but the major congregation was at Ground Zero in NYC with another crowd gathering in Times Square.

Yes, those cheering guys in stripes are FDNYC

• Wall Street Journal: Notes from reporters covering the celebrations at Ground Zero and in Times Square: 
• GlobalPost: Americans gather at White House, Ground Zero to celebrate news of Osama bin Laden's death 
• TPM Talking Points Memo: Bin Laden Killed: The Nation Reacts (SLIDESHOW) 
• View the story "Images of Celebrations Following News of Osama bin Laden's Death" on Storify 

More Twitter notes and comments

• WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is ensuring that the body of slain al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is being handled in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition, a U.S. official told reporters on Monday.
• Marc Ambinder (WH correspondent) To summarize: 40 minute JSOC raid; two helos, one drone; 4 KIA, inc OBL; DevGru (Seal Team Six) did shooting; only cas was US helocopter
• OBL's ghost already has a twitter account. With over 15K followers.
• Both Clarence Darrow and Mark Twain quoted as saying, "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." 

Which event was more closely followed by more people? This or the royal wedding?