Welcome to mine!! I'm a DC native living at the intersection of the arts, the LGBT community, the nonprofit sector, politics & policy, social media, & technology!!
Yeah...this is a real U-Haul video, on their YouTube Channel, a "How To" to apply decals to their vehicles for Burning Man.
Honestly, though, good for them. I mean, ultimately it does come down to money. But if that's the case, they've probably received more in fees from damage done by folks covering their logos by any means necessary.
It's probably not only good business for them, but a cheaper alternative than any clean-up fees to fix the damage duct tape can do when removed, after baking on a vehicle in the desert for over a week.
So there's this article I think is pretty cool and informative, "Cooking Trends Among Millennials: Welcome to the Digital Kitchen".
I go to share it among my various social profiles, G+, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
Except when I get to Facebook, an error message warning appears:
Just in case you can't read that:
But it's the internet, and why such things happen are a mystery to me. So I see if it's an issue with the sharing mechanism on the site, and go to Facebook to paste the link natively.
Surprise, surprise, what do you think happens next?
So, yes, apparently this piece about millennials and the digital kitchen is abusive content for some on Facebook.
I guess my question is why? Have you experienced this with any other content or sites, on Facebook?
Share your own thoughts in the comments,
JR
P.S. If you'd like to read the piece on millennial and the digital kitchen, you can view it here.
No those three don't really have much to do with each other...except that I found them to be the subject of several pieces I read this morning.
Thought I would share here.
Presidents often turn more moderate to make gains in their final years. Think of Bill Clinton's 1997 budget deal, or George W. Bush's 2007 (failed) immigration reform effort, or Ronald Reagan's 1986 tax reforms. Second terms can feel like new presidencies.
President Obama's increasingly successful second term has been the exception to that rule. It's been a concentrated, and arguably jaded, version of his first term. The candidate who was elected to bring the country together has found he can get more done if he acts alone — and if he lets Congress do the same.
What do you call a multimillion-dollar, for-profit company that’s run in large part by unpaid or underpaid grunt laborers? A century ago, you might’ve dubbed it robber-barony or sharecropping — if not, you know, outright slavery.
In 2015, though, we call it the social Web: a glorious dystopia where everybody works for likes — as in, “for free” — while a handful of tech tycoons profit.
“If I was a different ‘kind’ of artist, Anaconda would be nominated for best choreo and vid of the year”. And there, in a single tweet on Tuesday, rapper Nicki Minaj kicked off a conversation about race, feminism, and the music industry that might have been ignored had it not been derailed by the planet’s biggest pop star, Taylor Swift.
So this has been an interesting exchange. I am still processing it myself, so I thought I would just put the relevant articles/links here.
A disclaimer: I have performed with Synetic Theater in a couple of shows and have been a company member.
That being said, I'm curious what others think. And here we go with the opinion piece that started it:
In Act 5 of “Love’s Labor Lost,” one character scoffs at pedants: “They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.” The latest Shakespeare fashion, at least in the Washington area, is to invite people to a feast of language and serve nothing but grunts, grimaces and grins—with a few gyrations thrown in for dessert.
To begin, it is unclear to us from The Wall Street Journal’s latest opinion piece whether or not the writer James Bovard has seen a Synetic production, or whether his opinion has been formed from YouTube videos and editorial content from other publications.
Wall Street Journal contributor James Bovard has a message for Arlington’s Synetic Theater and its wordless productions of William Shakespeare plays: Recite the script, or get off the stage.
Bovard, a libertarian policy analyst by day, writes in an op-ed in Tuesday’s Journal that Synetic’s silent, sultry, and often fleshy productions are turning traditionally high-fiber theater into empty calories.
My Wall Street Journal piece on Washington’s Silent Shakespeare Oxymoron outraged Synetic Theater and its devoted fans. Synetic posted a long response on Tumbler and hit the alarms. The Washingtonian did an informative article this evening on the controversy – “Wall Street Journal to Synetic Theater: Do Shakespeare With Words!”
Howard Sherman, Arts Management Guru (yes, I've got a bit of a professional crush on him), joined the conversation with this:
Seemingly out of nowhere, The Wall Street Journal published a column yesterday, “A Silenced Shakespeare in Washington: Shakespeare without puns is like French cooking without butter,” which slams the work of Washington D.C.’s Synetic Theater for their movement-based productions of Shakespeare, productions which have garnered critical and popular acclaim for more than a decade. What’s curious about this op-ed cum review, written by a contributor who is not a member of the paper’s arts staff, and certainly not their widely-traveled critic Terry Teachout, is that not only does it seek to demolish Synetic’s work, but to trash anyone who might enjoy or support that work.
The Washington City Paper also jumped into the fray, with this blog post:
Taking as his inspiration the upcoming Synetic Theater revival of its movement-driven Midsummer Night’s Dream, noted twattroll theater expert James Bovard decries the use of NEA grants to fund the “grunts, grimaces, and grins” produced by a pair of husband-and-wife nepotists—“raised in Soviet Georgia,” which should have given us a clue—who’ve made a career of wresting the spoken word from the cold dead hands of the Swan of Avon.
Then this DCist piece in response to a Fox news program called Outnumbered, which did a segment about the controversy.
The drama surrounding the Synetic Theater's series of wordless Shakespeare productions continues, with Fox News (who else were you expecting?) weighing in.
In a rather misleading (what else were you expecting?) report, the hosts of Outnumbered—the show whose premise is four women to one man discuss current events—give their opinions on the production. The conversation was based almost entirely on the Wall Street Journal opinion piece that sparked this whole thing. None of them, it seems, had seen their shows.
Blair Ruble, former Board Member of Synetic Theater, shared this on HowlRound:
In mid-July, The Wall Street Journal published a criticism of Arlington’s Synetic Theater by Libertarian commentator James Bovard, the author of the fittingly titled book Public Policy Hooligan. Bovard’s critique focuses as much on the fact that Synetic has received funding from public coffers as anything having to do with what Synetic has put on stage. It’s not made clear whether Bovard has ever attended a Synetic performance. Bovard’s concerns were picked up by Fox News where a posting by Elizabeth Harrington a week later shouted scandal with a headline that read “Feds spent $95,700 to adapt Shakespeare without words.”
This song "Let It Go" before Frozen made it cool ;-)Whoa whoa whoaI know a place out on this earth called homeAfter...
Posted by JR Nexus Russ on Tuesday, June 2, 2015
[Under Construction: So I actually just started working on reconstructing what had been a Storify "story" in December 2018, when I went to reshare it and saw that the site was no more. But I thought it worth posting so you can see how far I've gotten, so far. May work on finishing it in time for the 10th anniversary in 2025.]
So...this happened on Twitter today...
Prologue
Shout out to whoever is running the @dcpl account.
I wanted...no NEEDED to share this after what has been an amazing weekend with dog & pony dc, in an intensive at...
Posted by JR Nexus Russ on Monday, May 18, 2015
So I thought I'd reshare posts that seemed to resonate with some of my Facebook friends.
This:
Not sharing this to oversimplify things, but doing it to share just one story. One of a multitude of nuanced stories in...
Posted by JR Nexus Russ on Tuesday, April 28, 2015
And this:
Know your history, even with the words we use...eSPEcially with the words we use.
What's more interesting are the...
Posted by JR Nexus Russ on Wednesday, April 29, 2015
AND this:
This...ALL of this.
Thank you for sharing, Jerry!!
And please, keep comments relevant to this post, which is just a...
Posted by JR Nexus Russ on Wednesday, April 29, 2015
.@BurningManGLC helped distill my life mission & values as Nexus to the ROCK cXn.
Connecting:
Resources
Opportunities
Communities
Kindness
— JR Nexus Russ (@AWayofLife0) April 26, 2015
This distillation of values to the R.O.C.K. cXn has been absolutely descriptive and iterative in the process.
The R.O.C.K. cXn (because cXn is an abbreviation used for connection, just in case you hadn't seen that before).
Still seems a little weird to see it so succinctly defined, to the point where I was wondering if I might have just liked it and/or thought about it because the Washingtonian in me loves acronyms.
[I will admit, I LOVED that an abbreviation for connection was 'cXn', as I've played with spelling 'Nexus' with only the X capitalized, so 'neXus'. But I digress...]
And while I do like it for that, for the acronym, I do realize that "the R.O.C.K. cXn" really describes my own path and journey as an artist and arts administrator.
One example where that is more than clear has been this effort to create a documentary about Nation, a significant club and venue in the DC area, which closed in 2006.
Oh, and here is the FB page, in case you're interested.
So, a major challenge and opportunity is how the venue was a place where multiple, disparate communities came together, not always at the same time, but nevertheless it was a kind of home to all of them, the goth/industrial crowd on Thursday, the rave/EDM crowd on Friday, and the LGBT crowd on Saturday.
But because of that, some folks only have a particular association and affiliation with Nation. And so, part of getting folks interested in and building up support for the project has been explaining to the folks that it's not just going to be about the gay scene there, or the rave community in the DC area, but this very special place where we all gathered pretty regularly.
Anyway, just wanted to put that out there. As it's really been informing my efforts, both professionally at work as well as personally with all of my other endeavors, some of which have been gathering dust but are now moving forward.
Some of you may have heard me talk about Ingress. I don't think I've shared some of the Ingress Art out there...
What's...
Posted by JR Nexus Russ on Sunday, April 26, 2015
So I wanted to buy an extra portable charger for my SF trip and I barely step in the store, when I see a notification I'd never seen before pop up on my phone.
It's the Verizon one, in case you were wondering. Anyway, if you know me, you know how irresistible this is, so I click on it to see what happens.
That's pretty cool. I mean it's not like it didn't know where I was, anyway. And the handful of employees there were occupied, anyway. So I explore.
It's making this real easy. I walk around and find exactly what I'm looking for. And, as instructed, I can just scan and pay from my phone. So I scan.
And I pay. I actually need to enter my new credit card info, but in the time it takes an employee to ask if I found what I needed and walk with me to the counter, it's entered and I've completed my purchase.
I will say, I think that's the first time someone used the app at the store. When I told him I just bought the charger (the last one, I might add), he seemed to think that I had ordered it online for home delivery.
I show him the part where it says to show the receipt to someone before I leave, and after consulting with another employee, they realize that I have indeed just checked myself out for the product on the counter.
I coudn't help but think if they might've started wondering what this meant for their own job security.
One could only hope that it wouldn't, but I also realize I'm a bit naive when it comes to these kine of things.
But I digress...in the meantime.my DIY consumer self was very pleased with how expedited technology made my shopping experience, especially as I was rushing on my way to the airport,
So I just wanted to share my schedule for Burning Man's Global Leadership Conference this weekend. I leave Thursday to get there a day before it starts. And I'm very excited for the seminars and workshops I registered for because they all seem to be at the intersection of where my life has been over the past several years, if not decade, of working and playing in the Washington Metropolitan arts community and scene.
Friday
Plenary Session 1: The Next Creative Renaissance, Busting it Out, Building it Up, Bringing it Home!
Plenary Session 2: Updates -- From the Desert to The World
Effective Leadership Skills in the Burnerverse (Breakout Session 1)
Giving Away Money: Art Grants, Community Grants and Walk the Talk Granting Process (Breakout Session 2)
Saturday
Plenary Session 3: Keynote Talks
Leveraging Partnerships and Collaborations to Nurture your Organizations (Breakout Session 3)
Business 102: Corporate Governance (Breakout Session 4)
Sunday
Unconference Session 1
Unconference Session 2
Plenary Session 4: Grant Making that Ignites the Network
Community Engagement: Case Studies on Engaging Communities through Art and Civic Participation (Breakout Session 5)
Future of the Maker Movement (Breakout Session 6)
Closing Plenary Session
Yes...I am very excited. I am looking forward to seeing what I can learn and bring back home to incorporate into my artistic and professional lives, especially if I get to share a bit at work at the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
I'm also hoping to share at the conference, during one of the two unconference sessions on Sunday. I plan on submitting a presentation on the Ten Principles )'( storytelling project I produced at Capital Fringe this past summer.
Ultimately, I am just very grateful to have been offered the opportunity, courtesy of the regional contacts in DC, and I am thankful to be at a point in my life where I have the resources to take advantage of it.
So, that being said, see you all on the flip side!!
The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (DCCAH) is one of the majority of State Arts Agencies around the country which offers an Artist Fellowship program, one of the few grant opportunities individual artists have to apply for and receive funding without being affiliated with an organizations. For FY15, 91 artists were recommended for funding, and received a combined total of $645,000, with awards ranging from $3,800 to $10,000. Of the 91 artists, 10 were in the dance cohort, artists who identified as dancers, choreographers, dance educators, & interdisciplinary artists who use dance in their work. For the record, only 19 artists applied in the dance cohort. But surely there are more than 19 dancers that reside in the District of Columbia.
The Artist Fellowship Program is the shortest and easiest grant application the DCCAH has. It is not project based and functions more like an award, with the review panel simply looking at your work samples, your artist statement, and one or two other brief narrative answers. There is not a separate pool of money for performers versus choreographers, and there is not a separate pool of money for dance specific work. There is one pool of money set aside for the Artist Fellowship Program across disciplines, which ultimately is dispersed based on how the applications, and therefore recommendations, breakdown across disciplines. This means it depends on who does, and doesn’t, apply.
So if the application is so easy, what are some of the barriers to access? I would say it is awareness, awareness on the part of the dancers, which is a symptom of a larger issue regarding education and training. While we often focus on the process and product of our dance, we are often left to our own devices to figure out the business end of it, whether as independent contractors, company members, choreographers, and/or artistic directors. And if you don’t know that there is an opportunity to be funded as individual, how would one find out if not told be a mentor or peer?
And while not part of the mission of dance companies, surely one of the indirect benefits could be to be a source of opportunities like this to share with your dancers, which some companies might do already. As with a lot of our endeavors, it often takes a village, and it is no difference when it comes to being aware of opportunities like DCCAH’s Artist Fellowship Program (AFP).
I would say the only other challenge is for dancers who perform with companies to think about and have their own individual artist statement. For the purpose of the AFP grant, our definition of an artist statement is:
“A short statement (typically one page or less) written by the artist, that provides background information and influences on the artist’s body of work, overall artistic philosophy, and a brief history of the artist’s development.”
And this might be more of a challenge with dancers who might primarily perform with and be company members of a dance company, but still not impossible. Because ultimately the strongest applications are ones where a dancers has clearly defined their personal artistic DNA through their artist statement, and it shows in the work samples (usually video) they provide. And as with dance itself, applying for funding takes practice to do well. It often takes experiencing rejection and getting feedback on making a stronger application. But ultimately the benefits outweigh the costs of time and energy.
P.S. If you're interested in applying for the FY16 Artist Fellowship Program?
So credit goes to Thomas Cott!! I appreciate his blog posts where he re-shares some of what he put out there on Twitter. Wanted to do the same, as another way to highlight some pretty neat things, for those that might've missed it the first time.
The State of Diversity in the Nonprofit Sector This is the first in a series of posts that will examine data surrounding the current state of racial diversity in leadership, staff, and boards across organizations in the nonprofit sector. -Community Wealth Partners, 2/4/15, Read the full article here
You Should Probably Be Worried That Artists Are Being Priced Out of Cities "The affordability crisis has made the creative life nearly impossible in many metropolitan areas, but stemming the artistic brain drain is a great investment in our collective culture." -TakePart, 2/6/15, Read the full article here
Upcoming Grant Opportunity Deadlines "NEH’s Division of Public Programs grant categories Museums, Libraries, and Other Cultural Institutions (Planning and Implementation) and Media Projects (Development and Production) have two deadlines every year—in January and August." -National Endowment for the Humanities, 2/6/15, More information here
[Philly] has more culture than donors will support "A new William Penn Foundation-commissioned study paints a portrait of the Philadelphia arts scene as rife with both promise and peril." -philly.com, 2/8/15, Read the full article here
Everyone Can Sing "Very few people are truly tone-deaf. Most just need to practice, a new study finds." -The Atlantic, 2/10/15, Read the full article here
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s killing of D.C. cultural project shows only money matters "Not much good, culturally, came of the last mayor of the District, and now the new one is off to a dismal start. Little more than a month into her administration, Muriel Bowser has abruptly canceled one of the most promising cultural projects to take root in the District in decades, tearing up an agreement two years in the making with the Institute of Contemporary Expression." -The Washington Post, 2/10/15, Read the full article here
Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Invites Applications for 2015 Artists Fellowships "American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian artists are invited to apply for the 2015 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF) Artist Fellowships." -Art202, 2/13/15, More information here
That's it!! Let me know if this kind of content is relative, interesting, timely, and/or engaging for you in a comment.
This post is about something I've always offered in passing, but wanted to really, intentionally put out there, as 2014 comes to an end.
I have a pretty awesome space in the +Brookland Artspace Lofts. One of the perks of being the first resident to move in. In fact, check out this video I took from when I and my roommate initially moved in, back in 2011!!
So granted there is furniture here now, but the living space set-up is very modular. Even with the furniture in, when it is all pushed to the sides, one is still left with a clear space to play in of 25' wide by 15' deep, with a ceiling just a little over 9' high.
I, myself, have had dance and theatre rehearsals in my apartment. And this is what I'm offering to my friends and arts colleagues. My space should you need it, and it's available.
Beyond the space, there would be a few additional perks:
Food & drink: I would at least have bottled water stocked and available. Any other snacks, let's talk.
Tech:
I have a video camera and Google Glass for you to help document and record your process, if you want. With the video, I could probably even edit and send you highlights, of bloopers and breakthroughs in your process.
I also have a blue-tooth speaker in case you need to play an audio/music.
There is Wi-Fi.
What would I want in return, if anything? I'm honestly not sure yet. Maybe access to your social media analytics, so I could do an audit of your organization, which I would obviously share with you, but would also add to my own personal body of knowledge and data. Maybe permission to ask to interview and blog about you and the other artists you're working with, for my own social media channels. Would there be a monetary component for the space, food, tech, or my time at all? I'm going to leave that completely up to you.
But first things first. Let's just figure out if you could use the space at all.
The location's convenient, it's barely a 5 minute walk from the Brookland/CUA metro station.
And if you're driving, there's plenty of street parking as our street has not been re-zoned as a residential one yet. Bad for residents, but good for non-residents.
Time-wise? I just need to be here, so that limits it to 6:30pm and after on weeknights, and then weekends. Otherwise, it's just pending availability with any other commitments I might have.
I think that's about it for now. But, like I said, I'm trying to be more intentional about putting this out there as something I want to give back to the community I've received so much from. Especially as I've transitioned to doing more administrative things.
Because after my space was included this past week as one of the stops on a tour that included Dance Place and the Arts Walk on Monroe Street, one of the attendees' reaction and shock and awe reminded me of just how much of challenge space can be, in this city.
And if/when I move out of here (hopefully not anytime soon), I would hate to think that I didn't try to take full advantage of my apartment, even if only providing it as a place for others to help their own artistic visions manifest.
Just to reiterate, this is definitely a one-degree kind of thing right now. If I don't know you personally, I'm sorry. But if we know someone in common that you're working on something with, just have them ask.
So I thought I'd try doing a new kind of blog post. I share so much on various social networks, but the half-life for content on any of those, well...you just have to get over the fact that you will miss things and can't see everything.
That being said, here are highlights of links I've posted over the past week for one reason or another, all in one place. In case you missed it, in no particular order.
