CCLaP

Hey, check this out; it's a picture of my friend Susi Spicoli's multi-tiered, physics-defying photography gallery, within this rather fascinating online videogame called Second Life. For those who don't know, Second Life is a rather unique environment; one with all the real-time 3D processing power of a place like "World of Warcraft," but with no pre-designated gameplay decided for you ahead of time. There is no "point" to Second Life, no dragons to slay, no guilds to join; instead it is a blank world, with both the content and activities decided upon by your fellow game players, not the makers of the game itself (Linden Lab, this extremely cool little company based out of San Francisco).

As a result, the universe comprising Second Life (which I'll just refer to from now on by its slang term there, "the grid") is admittedly full of what you might expect -- casinos, bordellos, giant teenage dance clubs and more -- but surprisingly, has also become a mecca for smart, tech-savvy arts administrators as well. There are lots of people around the world, after all, who have always felt they had what it took to run their own art gallery or live-music center, simply that they couldn't afford the physical real estate needed to do so; but with a small parcel of land costing you only $85 a year in Second Life (that is, by upgrading to a professional account), this lowers the barrier to small-business entry quite profoundly there.

What gets all the media attention in Second Life these days is the recent explosion of artists in that virtual world; but just as important and profound, I think, is the explosion of curators, editors, talent specialists and event coordinators. Really amazing things are happening in Second Life, I think, when it comes to the subject of organizing and presenting the arts; and as mentioned, with most of it coming surprisingly not from current arts professionals but rather amateurs, college students and homemakers and office workers, who always thought it would be cool to run their gallery or performance space. And lo and behold, it is!

CCLaP of course has lots of plans for getting involved with Second Life later this fall and winter; our own physical club there, rebroadcasts of our live events in real time, a photography gallery that doubles as a poster store, as well as such exclusive in-game events as Second Life's first-ever regular poetry slam, done through Skype conference calling. And why yes, we are looking for fellow Second Lifers who would be interested in getting involved! We need a variety of specialized people for our projects, doing a variety of specialized things; from those who can bring their SL-installed laptops to Chicago events, to those who can virtually host such events in the grid, while we're busy here in Chicago hosting the physical events. We welcome architects, administrators, publishers, anyone who has the specific tech skills needed to add an element to our overall plans. As always, you can just drop us a line to let us know of your interest; or just contact me while in the grid, where I'm known as "Miller Copeland." I and my avatar look forward to hearing from you!

Happy news to report today; that the CCLaP Showcases, our monthly themed exhibition of mid-career writers, finally has a host. It's Katherine Hodges (pictured above outside the excellent Quimby's Bookstore in Wicker Park), someone who's been a friend of mine for a long time, and who I'm proud to have joining our staff.

For those who don't know, Katherine has been involved with the world of small-press and zine publishing since literally a teenager; in fact, it was a music zine she did in high school called "Spiffy" that first brought her to national attention, after her infamous article "My Mom Made Dinner for Pavement." (Her mom in fact even made Pavement a cake, with a big P made of icing on the top; when they asked what the P was for, she replied, "For Pavement!")

Katherine has been in the forefront of the basement-press community since then, regularly attending conferences and conventions on the subject around the world, as well as self-publishing a series of confessional booklets and zines, detailing such subjects as weight, identity, and moves to giant cities at a young and possibly not-ready age. (Her latest project, for example, is entitled "City of Destiny" and concerns all of these subjects; but Katherine asked me not to link to its blog, because "Oh God, I haven't updated it in such a long time, I'd just be ashamed of myself at this point." So okay, Katherine, update that blog already!)

And speaking of which, Katherine has of course asked if she can have a little extra time to get herself ready for these shows, which we're of course happy to do; and that's why the official start date for the CCLaP Showcases is now set for Thursday, October 19th. Don't forget, the Showcases has its own page here at the website, as well as its own RSS feed, for those who would like to check out the latest news concerning just that subject; and since Katherine is now a Fellow of the center as well, she too has her own webpage and her own RSS feed. I hope you're as excited as I am that Katherine is now in charge of this series; I'm looking forward to some great Showcases this fall!

Today's photograph is the first one we've exhibited by new Fellow Brian Heiser (bio, category page, RSS feed). This is one of over 50 photographs that Brian has donated the publishing rights to, and I'm not sure why I picked this particular one as the first; perhaps because it combines so many of the things about Brian's work overall that I like...

--A great sense of formalism, not only in composition but in gray tones;
--A twist towards the surreal, with unique lighting effects that invoke the Victorian Age;
--And a tight focus on subject matter, concentrating mostly on images that are inherently interesting.

Plus, I love that he just candidly took this photo on a contemporary Chicago sidewalk one day, yet looks like it could be a still from a 50-year-old French New Wave flick. That says a lot not only about Chicago, I think, but of Brian's skills as a photographer; you can look forward to a lot more over the coming months.

Please note that this photo's title merely reflects CCLaP's numbering system for Brian's work, and was not deliberately chosen by Brian as this image's name. To see a larger (700-pixel) version, please click on the smaller image above.

By the way, I thought there was something fishy about Brian's original self-portrait! I thought maybe it was just a much older photo of himself, from before I knew him; but then after editing the rest of his submissions, realize that he'd simply mislabeled one of them as his pick for his bio. The one above is actually Brian, which as friends can attest looks much more like him than the last one; it's been replaced in his official bio here as well. As before, click on that smaller image if you'd like to see a larger one. Sorry for the confusion, Brian!

Hi ho, all -- Jason Pettus here, CCLaP's Executive Director. There has been lots of little tweaking going on recently of the center's plan, as we get more involved with the final things that need to happen before our live-event schedule starts. None of them have been interesting enough for their own entry here, frankly; but now that some have accumulated, I thought it'd be okay to post them all at once.

--First, as another entry here goes into detail, we have a host for our monthly CCLaP Showcases, a basement-press and zine veteran named Katherine Hodges. She needs a little time to get up to speed, though, which means that the series will now not begin until Thursday, October 19.

--Second, we've been thinking it over for awhile, and have finally decided that we're going to change the admission fee to our live events, before they actually start; to $5 total, from the $3 it had previously been. We ended up deciding on this for a number of reasons; to put us more in line with our direct competition, so that we could earn a little more per show, and of course because it's easier to eventually lower the price for a show than eventually raise it.

--Third, as long as we're moving the start date of the CCLaP Showcases to late October, we've decided to do the same with the CCLaP poetry slam and open mic too; this will give us more time to secure a venue, and get out the first round of publicity regarding the show.

--And then finally, some fairly major and sad news to announce as well; that Nikki Patin will not have the chance to be our Assistant Director anymore. It's a story as old as time itself unfortunately; since we do not have the budget for CCLaP to be Nikki's full-time job, she simply must make her full-time jobs her main priority. Did you know, by the way, that Nikki works at some amazing places around the city already, including The Center on Halsted and Young Chicago Authors? Or that she has an amazing creative career of her own, which keeps her constantly touring or recording almost a third of the entire year? Yeah, she's awfully busy; which is why I can't blame her for not having the time to take on CCLaP as well, even though it's still admittedly disappointing news to me.

Nikki's deciding at this point if she'll have the time to still be the host of the CCLaP Slam; I'll let you know later this fall, as soon as I know myself. For those who are curious, Nikki's former duties will simply fall back to me; I'm open for maybe hiring a new Assistant Director if someone is interested (please just contact me if you are); or maybe just relying on volunteers to take on very specific aspects of operations (like fundraising, the social-event program, marketing, etc), working maybe only five hours a week, in return for a free Fellowship and all the benefits that come with that.

Anyway, that's what's going on with us! It's strange being a transparent company sometimes, I'll tell you; how the public sees every step of what's going on, before the final plan is put in place. Don't forget that our first show, The CCLaP Sessions featuring Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, is still coming up on Friday, September 15th; and we're actually getting pretty close to finalizing a new venue for the show, too, and should hopefully have the name of the place to announce just about a week from now (or a week before the show, if you want to think of it that way). Zorn's columns recently have sometimes just been side-splittingly funny in this righteous way (including recent rants against Kumbaya and Olympic gold-medalist Shani Davis); I'm really looking forward to sitting down and talking with him.

Well, here's some good news for those of you who have missed it; that I now have the time again to start regularly updating my Favorites page at insanely popular photo-sharing site Flickr.com. This has always been one of my favorite things about Flickr, in fact, and is what garnered them such big praise even from the beginning; that on top of simply sharing photos at their site, you can add a rich set of information to those photos (including now the ability to tag them to a map; here, for example, are ones from my account tagged in the neighborhood in Chicago where I live), have new photos delivered via RSS feed, keep track of your favorites from other photographers and more.

In effect it turns all members of Flickr into potential one-person curators as well, using their "Favorites" page as a virtual art gallery, where they alone are to program who's featured. It frustrates me sometimes that we don't currently have the budget to do all the things for photographers that I want; but at least I can start with that for now, with simply pointing out some of the amazing, mind-bending, thought-provoking photographers I'm always coming across, in the thousand or so new photos I peruse there every 24 hours on a good day. This fall, we'll be getting some of those people signed up here as Fellows, and featuring their work here at this site; and then some of them booked into our upcoming cutting-edge Flash-based online gallery, including MP3 audio interviews with the artists concerning each piece, and a full-color PDF catalogue/book to go with each exhibit. Later this winter, hopefully we'll add the 3D, real-time virtual gallery within the videogame Second Life; and then about four to six years down the line, if everything goes well, us finally opening our own permanent physical space here in Chicago.

Anyway, feel free to follow along with my Favorites page there at Flickr, if you want to check out some of what I think are the finest photographers in the entire system (both professional and amateur -- there's a miniscule line there, which is something else I like so much about the service). And needless to say, if you're a photographer and feel like having your work featured through CCLaP, by all means let us know; although we're headquartered in Chicago, we actually feature artists from around the world.

And speaking of one-person virtual galleries; when are one of you young enterprising programmers out there going to build a better interface for Flickr favorites pages? Flickr publishes an open API, after all, which means that third-party developers are welcome to build their own interfaces and applications; hey, Flickr even helps promote them once they're done. It'd be cool to see someone build an interface for people's favorites, that was both more useful and more creative than Flickr's current offering; one that displayed titles, descriptions and artist names, that let the member display them in a certain order, etc. Even better, marry it and a little PHP to a social-app service like Ning, and let the entire community vote on people's favorites, in effect creating a network-wide favorites page as well, like Digg but for photos.

Ooh, actually, the more I think about it, the better of an idea that's seeming. Anyone want to teach me APIs and help build it with me? I'm not joking; I've been wanting to build my first app at Ning for a year now, but simply couldn't think of something worth the time to program. A voter-based favorites system for Flickr, based off everyone else's existing favorites pages, all of it fueled off a public free API, sounds like a good idea to me.

The excellent "web 2.0" site TechCrunch let me know about a new article in the New York Times, announcing just a bit early Google's new News Archive Search. Just like it sounds, the new service will basically let you do Google searches within news publications on any subject you want; but in this case, with those searches being stretched back to the beginning of that publication's existence, which Google is promising will eventually reach 200 years or more. And they've got some impressive people signed up already too; the Washington Post, legal database Lexis Nexis, the New York Times themselves, even Time magazine (who, for those who don't know, already have all 300,000 articles they've ever published online and searchable, dating all the way back to 1923), with more coming every day.

(Image courtesy University of Puget Sound)

Well, hooray to that, I say! And here above is why! Don't recognize what we're looking at? Count yourself incredibly lucky; for this is what my friends and I used to call "Microfiche Hell," back in our undergraduate days at the University of Missouri - Columbia. For about half a century, this was the defacto way that most learning institutions and public libraries maintained archives of serial publications; it was the cheapest option, the option that took up the least amount of space, the one at the time that was most durable for archiving purposes. I mean, never mind that it was such a maddening process, you would end up cursing the need to ever know anything by the end of it all; this is simply the best option there was.

Remember the twenty minutes of looking up an article by hand in a paper book, then hunting down the appropriate reel in a vast, dusty, windowless Citizen-Kane type nightmare of heavy steel shelves? Just to discover that some hippie stole the reel you needed in 1972 on an acid-induced dare, and that the library has still never had the chance to replace it? Arrgghh! I remember that! Google's News Archives Search does away with all that, lets you instantly and elegantly sort through the news right from your home, in an electronic format that lets you instantly cut and paste the text right into an academic paper (unlike us, who had to make weirdo thermal printouts, then go home and retype it all into our TRS-80s).

I for one applaud Google for taking this on, and for plainly stating in that NYT article that they haven't even begun figuring out how they can make money from it, simply that it seemed like a cool thing to do. On a whim, by the way, I decided to test it out myself, so randomly typed in "1929 stock market crash;" one of the first articles it pointed out was this fascinating one from Time, examining the insane changes that happened in the diamond industry just a mere month or two after crash itself. And that was cool, because it was just what I was looking for; some article actually written back then, in the middle of it, sorta dryly examining just the crazy, surreal things that were going on right at the beginning of the Great Depression. It's definitely a cool thing to check out even at this early date; and it will be really cool, needless to say, when their archive goes back the full 200 years they're promising. Definitely check it out when you have a chance.

Moleskinerie, the official blog of the Moleskine notebook company, let me know about this interesting organization called SketchCrawl. A loose coalition of artists and fans of the arts, basically about three times a year they try to convince as many people as possible to sketch in their notebooks on a given day, and then to share the images afterwards (at a blog, at a Flickr account, giving them to friends, etc). They run a blog, for example, linked to above, where random sketchers send them random things they've been doing; it's a nice little collection of random doodlings, definitely something fun to check out.

Anyway, their next one is September 23rd, and I think I'm going to participate; in fact, I might do the entry for my personal site that day as a series of scanned sketches, instead of writing it out. Ultimately SketchCrawl is after the same thing we here at CCLaP are; to convince more and more people to add at least a little direct arts in their lives on a regular basis, to remind themselves of what's so great about the arts in the first place. And if you haven't been by before, by the way, the Moleskinerie blog is another great one to check out. Makers of the notorious little black notebooks used by famous and infamous artists around the world, their site is a group effort of the entire small Italian staff, simply pointing out interesting things that people are doing with their own Moleskines around the world. I know that RSS readers can sometimes be an endless litany of news and weather updates; that's why I love adding feeds like these every so often as well, simply delivering fun and cool visual work to my reader on a regular basis too. I recommend both.

Just a small note for you literature fans, and especially those of you here in Chicago; that the Gapers Block Book Club, a side project of the insanely popular online arts-and-entertainment guide, has decided to add weekly content to their club's website, along with the monthly physical meet-ups they had been doing. Their first, for example, is an excellent review of their current club selection, Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, a must-read for anyone interested in Chicago's sordid past.

Don't forget, by the way, that Andrew Huff, Gapers Block's founder and editor-in-chief, will be a guest of the center's own CCLaP Sessions on Friday, November 19th. I'll be talking with Andrew on a stage in front of a live audience for about an hour, concerning all kinds of random subjects -- his background, the trials and tribulations of running a commercial website, his thoughts on citizen media and citizen journalism, just all kinds of other interesting things. I encourage all of you to become regular visitors of their site, if you aren't one already; and I especially encourage Chicagoans to make it out to their monthly social events, because they really are quite fun.

Productivity site Lifehack pointed me today to this crazy-long and useful guide for self-publishing writers, over at a place called the Self-Publishing Blog. It's a great, great entry, too, one that seemingly never ends, giving writers advice on everything from the creative process to which printing plant to eventually pick.

By the way, that entire site is a pretty great one; I've just subscribed to its RSS feed, and I encourage you to do so too. Anyway, just a small heads-up for those of you in the middle of the self-publishing process yourselves.

So, I have some news to share today that I'm not particularly excited about, nor particularly happy about; that due to a lack of money, I've had to postpone CCLaP's live-events schedule to spring of 2007, versus this Friday when it was supposed to kick off. It's a frustrating decision for me, one that I put off until the last possible second -- after all, we were less than a thousand dollars away from being ready to start the live-events schedule, and I was really hoping that we might have pulled off a miracle there in the last couple of weeks. But alas, no.

Of course, this isn't all bad news; I've decided in fact to move CCLaP's publishing schedule, originally slated to begin next spring, up to the present day. So for the majority of you who interact with CCLaP (all you website visitors, that is), not much will change here; we'll still be featuring great creative work from brilliant artists around the world, and also sharing news and tips from the rest of the world of the underground arts. In fact, for those of you who live outside Chicago, you actually may be pleased by this announcement; it means not only the usual short stories, poems, essays, photos and more here at the site, but also a continual series of full-length electronic books being published by us too, all of them available for free, none of which contain crippling digital-rights management (DRM) software.

It probably goes without saying that it's been a stressful week for me; that's why I've decided to take just a bit of a break from CCLaP, perhaps a week or so, to regroup and get in touch with the authors and artists who I've been talking with this summer. As always, I appreciate the support that many of you have given the center, and hope that you'll continue to visit here this fall and winter.