CCLaP

Greetings, if this is your first time to the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography; my name is Jason Pettus, CCLaP's Executive Director, and I welcome you. I thought I would take a moment, for all of you who are new, to explain exactly what the center is all about, and what exactly we do. This information is also laid out all pretty-like in a PDF brochure, for those who would prefer reading it that way; simply right-click on this link and choose "Save Link As..." to your hard drive.

CCLaP's mission is to connect underground artists of outstanding quality with the audience eagerly seeking these artists; we do this by maintaining a uniquely personal relationship not only with our artists but with our audience as well. It's to both groups that we seek advice, project ideas, tips on who to feature, even hosts of our live events, workshops and clubs. And instead of maintaining separate membership and artist-development programs, CCLaP combines the two into one, bringing both artists and patrons together in not only a professional but social way.

CCLaP's specific list of products and services can be broken down into the dozens, but roughly fall under one of the following groups:

Live events: Those we usually charge an admission fee for, unless otherwise noted. Includes the weekly CCLaP Slam; monthly CCLaP Showcases; monthly CCLaP Sessions; as well as special events. All events, unless otherwise noted, are $3 for the general public, free for both Members and Fellows.

Creative work: A growing collection of artistic work on display, made by both Members and Fellows of CCLaP, as well as fans and audience members. This collection will also be turned into merchandise, starting later this year, that will be sold online and in general gift stores in the Chicago area; it is the main way our for-profit center plans on paying our bills.

Community events: Those that are usually free to the general public, unless otherwise noted, most also organized and run by our Members and Fellows. Includes workshops on both artistic and business issues; a series of discussion and hobbyist clubs; an entire series of intelligent family events; as well as our special "CCLaP After Dark" series, specifically for those over the age of 21.

CCLaP Online: Special online features we offer only at our website. Includes a regularly-updated podcast; an ever-growing collection of frequently asked questions; a collection of over 30 RSS feeds; as well as a special section called the Sandbox, where artistic work is released under a special Creative Commons license, for other artists around the world to use legally in "mash-ups." This section will also eventually include the "Cafe Network," a new social network CCLaP will sponsor, linking visual artists with the cafes and other retail spaces in Chicago that feature artists, as well as the audience looking for both these artists and venues. It will also eventually include a wiki, maintained by our Members and Fellows, entitled "The CCLaP Guide to Being a Self-Sustaining Artist."

Publications: Starting early in 2007, there will also be a publications section to the CCLaP website, where you will not only be able to download the latest eBooks for free, but also directly order and pay for our latest paper books, to be FedExed or mailed straight to your home. (CCLaP is currently seeking a publications intern for the 2007 winter semester; to get an early jump, contact us now.)

Regular events start in September 2006; CCLaP is currently hosting a series of special one-time events throughout the summer. To learn more about any of these products or services, please click on their category in the sidebar menu.

Last night I got a chance to attend the weekly reading series at Cafe Ennui, in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, organized and hosted by CCLaP Fellow Scott Ridgway. I had a lot of fun, as a matter of fact, so thought I'd post a few photos from the event here at the site as well, plus a five-minute audio recording I did with Scott after the show. If the computer/device you're on has Flash Player, you should be seeing a little box above where you can listen to the audio right now; or you can right-click here to download the MP3 file. Remember, we post MP3s here in an open format; you can convert them to whatever format works best for you, own multiple copies, and transfer from one device to another.

I love going out to artistic events here in the city, and love doing little reports about them here at the site; if you'd like to let me and the CCLaP community know about yours, please feel free to add our email address (cclapcenter at gmail dot com) to your organization's mailing list.

(Image courtesy Windy City Times)

I'm happy to announce that Nikki Patin, CCLaP's Director of Live Events, is finally back in Chicago for the first time since the center's opening, after attending an HIV conference in Washington DC. We're going to give her a couple of days to get her bearings again; and then she too will be regularly posting material to this website as well as me, so I hope all of you are looking forward to that.

In the meanwhile, though, I wanted to mention that Nikki recently picked up another award for her creative work and professional life (like she needed another one); she was one of the recipients of this year's "30 Under 30 Awards," given out by the Chicago GLBT newspaper Windy City Times. And she's in really good company, too; you can click here to see the full list of recipients yourself.

Anyway, our congratulations to Nikki; and like I said, once she's feeling up to speed, you can start expecting regular updates at the site from her as well.

Just wanted to let everyone know that I'm in St. Louis (Missouri) as we speak, the city where I grew up, to attend a family function this weekend. And I'm looking for local artistic venues and projects to feature here at the site while I'm visiting too, so please send along your suggestions if you're from the area and know of any. Tomorrow, for example, I'll be attending a gallery opening in sleepy little St. Charles, the city just west of St. Louis where I technically grew up (and yes, I'm more surprised than anyone that I'll be attending a gallery opening in St. Charles); and then on Sunday I'm hoping to make it down to the Foundry Art Centre, also in St. Charles, this simply amazing communal creative space that I've been to before. Lots of photos and audio to come, so I hope you'll get a chance to tune in.

Greetings from St. Charles, Missouri, the sleepy suburb of St. Louis where I grew up, where I am spending the 4th of July holiday in order to attend a family reunion. And, why, look at what I got a chance to attend while here -- an art opening! It was for a friend of mine, actually, a great paper artist and illustrator named Angela Franklin; it was held at a cool new coffeehouse in the downtown historic district called Picasso's, at the corner of Main and Jefferson.

Art openings? Trendy coffeehouses? St. Charles, Missouri? Well, yes, as a matter of fact; for those familiar with this area but who haven't been back in awhile, St. Charles is in fact turning into quite the little metropolitan area. It turns out that lots of young people are moving back to the St. Louis region these days, and that many of them are choosing to live in St. Charles for economic reasons (i.e. lots of inexpensive houses here); and these young professionals are also bringing their modern desires with them to St. Charles, a desire for things like coffeehouses and art galleries, non-profits and the like. Speaking as someone who's either been living here or visiting the area regularly for 37 years now, I have to admit that the change is welcome.

Angela's husband Michael, by the way, is an artist himself; he was a poet for many years (mostly in the Portland area of Oregon, although with many other locations in there as well), now doing murals and other large-scale painting projects. I think we're going to get them set up as CCLaP Fellows soon as well; so you can hopefully look forward to seeing more of their work here in the coming months.

I'm in the St. Louis area until July 5th, by the way; if you know of an interesting cultural event for me to attend while here (especially ones that maybe don't get a lot of publicity), please just let me know.

Okay, it took some convincing by Nikki Patin, our Director of Live Events, but I decided to put together a MySpace account for CCLaP; you can find it here. This will also now be a third option for people who want to know about our upcoming events, along with our usual accounts at upcoming.org and Google Calendar.

So why was I so against the center having a MySpace account at first? Well, it wasn't because of any particular problem with the service itself; I've been a personal user of MySpace for awhile now, although admittedly go crazy pretty quickly from all the MP3s and mismatched color/design schemes there. (I am over 30, after all, and therefore officially don't "get it" anymore.) No, the main concern is what you website visitors are seeing along the left-hand side right now; all those dozens and dozens of categories we're already tracking here at the site, even before having to give out links to external services we use.

I'm all for using external web services when they make sense; but I've deliberately tried to keep their number here to a minimum, to base the choices mostly on how useful they are, and to deliver all the rest of our information through our in-house Movable Type database. Nikki has convinced me this week, though, that it's worth us taking on a MySpace account as well, along with the extra link this will now cause in our already insanely-long sidebar; just from the sheer number of young artists and arts fans that use the service already.

Anyway, so that's good news for all you MySpace lovers out there; that you will now be able to get all the news about our upcoming events directly there now too, without having to visit our website first. Let the Friending begin!

Hi there, to all the hundreds of people who our metrics are telling us are showing up here each day, and sorry you haven't heard from me in awhile. I wanted to sit and just briefly explain what's been going on with me as of late; it involves this site continuing to be a little quieter than I want it for a couple more weeks, but then with suddenly a remarkable new detail that I wasn't nearly expecting.

Those who follow my personal life know that I have been doing freelance work, for a new online social network that concentrates mostly on small businesses and their customers, called MetroProper. (In fact, the owner of MetroProper, Phil Tadros, has graciously donated tech equipment to CCLaP over the previous months too, things such as mics and speakers, which is why they are listed as a sponsor here as well.)

Because of a quick series of unexpected crises with the company, I ended up taking on a full-time capacity suddenly with MetroProper, starting around July 1st. In fact, it was a lot more than full-time; for two weeks in a row I put in 100 hours of work each, and am continuing right now to work 50 to 60 hours a week there. And that's why you haven't heard from me in so long here, because things have been just so hectic with MetroProper these days, as we finally get the absolute last details of the crises handled.

The good news is that things are rapidly calming down again; I should be back to what my schedule was supposed to be like, 30 hours a week, I'm hoping within a month. And we here at CCLaP only had one thing scheduled from now until then, anyway, our Geek Dinner and Schwag Night on August 5th; and it's still on, my friends, it's still on! So that's what Nikki and I will be doing over the next week; picking a restaurant to hold it, and then a bar for the schwag event itself; and then taking a total of 10 reservations from members of the general public to attend the dinner, with of course the schwag event afterwards free and open to anyone who wants to show up. (Own a restaurant? Want to host it? Just drop me a line quickly and let me know. Yes, we're also accepting RSVPs for the dinner as we speak; drop us a line too.)

The bad news is that, besides finalizing that, this site will unfortunately be pretty quiet from now until the beginning of September, which is when things at MetroProper will finally be under control, right in time for CCLaP's full schedule to begin. But here's the great news, the unexpected stuff I mentioned before; that as part of coming on now as MetroProper's new full-time Chief Operations Officer (or number-two guy in charge), I will be suddenly making significantly more money than I ever have before in my life. It's such an increase, in fact, that it even pays off here at the center; I'm happy to announce that starting January 2007, our budget will suddenly double from the size it was before. And with no outside investment needed, but rather personally funded by myself; and with no sponsors or advertisers needed for CCLaP for the entire first year.

Hallelujah! I love this news! I hope you do too, because it means wonderful things for everyone; twice the money for featured artists, twice the books and merchandise published, twice the tour resources we offer local poetry slammers. This is one of the things, frankly, that excited me so much when Phil first offered me the job; that yes, it would effectively double my workload per week, but also provide twice the funding for the center as we had before, and without having to turn a profit quickly since it's my personal money. I'm tremendously excited about this new opportunity, which is one of the main reasons I decided to accept the new job.

I'll be honest; it means that things around here are going to be kind of quiet from now until September, except of course for the final details of the Geek Dinner and Schwag Night on August 5th, and of course whatever cool things in Chicago both Nikki and I have the time to point you to. I hope you're excited as me, though, by what this means; that come early 2007, we will be gearing up in a much bigger way around here than we were expecting, and with even two or three employees instead of just poor Nikki handling most of the workload.

Thanks, everyone, for your patience. Please keep checking back whenever you want for the latest. Oh, and if you'd like details about the actual crises themselves, you can always pop by my personal site to get a whole earful about that.

So, both good and bad news to report at once today; that I am no longer working for MetroProper, the company where I had been working this summer. (For details, please see my personal website.) I won't dwell on the bad news, but skip right to the good; that this means I can get back to daily updates at this website, as well as the final steps towards our live-event schedule starting up next month.

And it's about time, I say! Because unbeknownst to many of you, we've been having quite a few things happening here at CCLaP; new Fellows to announce, new artwork to get up to the site, a new staff member to introduce you to, even our first paying Member. All of this has been just sitting around my hard drive this summer, as I put in the tremendous hours I did at my last job; now that I'm disentangled from that, I can get back to getting all this new stuff posted.

So that's what I'll be doing over the next couple of days, is just trying to get back to zero, as far as the things that are waiting to be posted here at the site. And in the meanwhile, we've still got our Stormhoek-sponsored "geek dinner" coming up (which got delayed again because of my previous job), the first CCLaP Session in about three weeks, the first CCLaP showcase in four weeks, and the first CCLaP Slam in five weeks. Yikes!

I'll be detailing all of the above here over the next several days, as well as continuing to point out other interesting things going on in the arts, as well as getting the rest of the CCLaP staff finally signed up as contributors here, so that they too can start posting blog entries for all of you to check out. As always, I appreciate you sticking in with us this summer, as things suddenly got busy in all the CCLaP staff's professional lives; now that things are quieting down again for all of us, we're hoping to throw that energy right back into this center, and making it as great a place as we can. I thank you for wanting to be a part of it yourself.

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.