slambridis's blog

Eric Myers and I will be hosting a four-day workshop in September at 826 Valencia.

Conversations With The World

Taught by Scott Lambridis and Eric Myers
Limited to 12 students, ages 11–14
September 4, 11, 18, & 25
Tuesdays, 6:00–8:00 PM

The Cerrito Speakeasy contacted me about 8 months ago to be their August Artist-of-the-Month, based on the God’s Acre artwork (which features 3 artists and a musician). Twas a challenging hang, but with a few bits of fishing line and some big fat nuts to hang at the end, it came out pretty damn cool.

Click the image for more:

Shouting Fire radio invited yours truly to co-host a radio show hosted by Eric Myers. We played some tunes, and talked about all things Omnibucket and publishing and multimedia, and of course, the upcoming Book of CLAV. The show aired Friday 4/4 at 10am PST, 2PM PST, and 6PM PST.

Notes to self for next workshop:

1. Create & bring sample Story Maps pre-filled.
2. Some of those should be for well-known books & movies.
3. Start workshops with questions about what they learned last time.
4. Class voting for Story Map contents.
5. Make sure each student has one map item per exercise.
6. Add ‘name’ fields to materials.
7. The paper thing, re: last post.
8. Be mindful of my apparent obsession with lists.

Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper. Less paper.

“I thought you said there wouldn’t be much paperwork,” said the sharp and precocious blond locked girl of twelve.

Yes, there was still too much paper. Why didn’t I learn from last time?

Yes, I gave out lots of paper. Yes, I babbled, though no one told me so. Whew.

Day 1 went swimmingly, despite the deluge of paper. I shall not provide mostly-blank pages for brainstorming lists anymore. I shall however continue much the same otherwise since the kids responded very well. I have full lists for each of the eight different brainstorming activities, and completed Story Maps from each of the nine students to prove it.

Kids is some smarties, I tells ya.

My co-teacher Eric Myers and I were quite impressed with the creativity and the willingness to contribute to the class dialogue.

And, as you can see by our own Story Map, we are well on our way to a riveting tale.

Until next week…

Independent distributor Enemi Entertainment now has 2nd editions of Brainchild and God’s Acre available through their catalog.

God’s Acre’s second edition is the same as the first, though it is not a limited edition (copies of the first edition are still available here).

Brainchild’s second edition on the other hand has a few surprises. We removed the three advertisement pages and replaced them with three new artworks. The edition isn’t limited, but it’s improved!

Good friend and Omnibucket editor Rosie Atkins posted the most interesting endorsement of Barack Obama that I have yet to read on her I Ride Muni blog:

Here’s the opening snippet:

“I agree with everything Ms. Kennedy wrote, but when I look at Senator Obama, I see a president like my son. Like Obama, my son is biracial. Unlike Obama, my son, born in 1995, is not unique in his multi-culturalism, or in his brownness. His is a world that is increasingly interconnected.”

RE: The Magus, by John Fowles, p.287

Discussion point (for those who want to read along):

It seems there must be a threshold, partially determined of course by individual personality, but on the grander scale as more of a general threshold amongst the human species, of mystery. That is, how much mystery is necessary for our sense of the grand illusion?

In October, fellow wordsmythe and creative maestro Eric Myers and I began a monthly creative salon. We just had our second one on Friday November 9th at Eric’s place in the Lower Haight. Marisa Egerstrom joined us, though our fourth current participant Nora Sawyer had to bail last minute. After only two meetings it has already branched out from simply a writing salon towards the multimedia where we evaluated a video piece and a vocal performance, not to mention Angie’s cooking. Pretty damn sweet I must say.

The pieces reviewed:

“Life of the Gallows” short story by Scott Lambridis

I’ll be conducting another writing workshop at 826 Valencia in February. The details are as follows:

The Tale is in the End
Limited to 15 students, ages 11-14
February 5, 12, 19, & 26
Tuesdays, from 6:00-8:00PM

The art of creating compelling characters…by doing them in.

Now that you’ve read all the stories the kids concocted in their clever and crazy little brainiums, I might as well ante up and offer my own results to your scrutiny.

The following little tale was generated based off of the student’s brainstorming of possible topics. The title had to be “The End of Ends” and the story had to be about the death of a cat. The other pieces will remain mysterious in an effort to not spoil the story. Enjoy.

For three consecutive Wednesdays in the beginning of August I conducted a workshop at 826 Valencia in San Francisco for a dozen or so kids, ages 11-14. The workshop was focused on creative writing and by the conclusion of the workshop the students were required to submit a story about a character who had died and was buried (possibly in the God’s Acre cemetery).

Here are the pieces they submitted, as they were submitted, in no particular order. Enjoy!

In a previous entry I mentioned an article that The Other Paper wrote on the underground Columbus Ohio art/music/shenanigans space that the members of Blackcat Revival inhabited and ran.

Well, now I have the actual article to read.

The link to the article is here.

The original blog entry (for background) is here.

I was informed today by Banjo Drill that The Other Paper in Columbus Ohio wrote an article featuring the Bucket. The Bucket was (is?) an underground music-art-playspace that we ran together for a number of years while renting it as the the home of Blackcat Revival - where they wrote all the music for Eleventy Billion Miles Away. See, it all comes full circle in the end.

Warning, the events depicted are a carefully detailed re-enactment of actual events by artiste du stick-figure, Jen Hewett. They are NOT the actual events.

I must admit that I walked towards the third and final day of our workshop with a bit of a strut in my step. The hardest parts were surely out of the way and I would probably spend most of the time simply pining for margaritas while everyone was writing their final drafts.

It’s never quite so simple though, is it?

Students started arriving at different points between 15 minutes early and 15 minutes late, each one saying hello and simply requesting if they could continue writing. I told them they could work on the rough draft, but not to start the final one.