Press Coverage

By Cecelia Martinez

TROY — A number of community organizations are coming together to use virtual reality to imagine a better future for their neighborhood at a workshop this Sunday at the Sanctuary for Independent Media. Using photos of buildings in a section of North Central/Uptown, participants in the four-hour free workshop will work as a team to create 3D prototypes as an urban planning tool for the community.

Entitled “Second Life for Community Development: Re-imagining Your Neighborhood Through Virtual Worlds,” the  workshop is co-sponsored by iEAR Presents! and the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Troy Architectural Project, the Missing Link Street Ministry, the Uptown Initiative and the Troy Alley Action Project. Stephanie Rothenberg, an artist and educator that uses networked media, will lead the workshop using building tools in Second Life, a 3D virtual world.

Branda Miller, a media arts professor at RPI and the arts and education coordinator at the Sanctuary, said the event demonstrates the collaborative effort between the organizations.

By Don Wilcock
Joe Abbey is a white, self-proclaimed agnostic who also happens to be the lead guitarist in an otherwise all African American regional gospel group, The Heavenly Echoes.

Far from being the infidel in a field of holy men, Abbey fits right in with his band of proselytizers who struggle like all of us to keep their act together in a world gone mad. Joe also is a middle-aged RPI graduate who loves the Rolling Stones and fronts a blues band called JV and The Cutters.

It is Joe’s blues band that will share the stage with Thomasina Winslow and Mother Judge on Friday as part of Troy’s Sanctuary for Independent Media’s Live From Lock One concert series.

One of the reasons Joe never rose to the top in the music business is his own attitude. "If everybody else is a great cook, at least let me bring the plates," he says, explaining that he lacks the technical expertise — and the patience — to learn other people’s songs to perform in a jam situation. Instead, while others would try to trace the Allman Brothers’ guitar prints through "Whipping Post" endlessly week after week, Joe kept coming up with originals. "It was easier for me to make something up than it was to copy or learn something," he says.

World War Three Illustrated is so much more than a comic book. It's an anthology of left-wing visual thought on the politics of our day. Since 1980, it has attempted to "shine a little reality on the fantasy world of the American kleptocracy."
    
This weekend, it will be taking over the Sanctuary for Independent Media, with covers from 30 years filling the walls, live music, multimedia presentations, puppetry and workshops (on Sunday).

The gala celebrates the magazine, which includes the work of Peter Kuper, Rebecca Midgal, Sandy Jimenez, Mac McGill and Seth Tobocman, who will project his comics with live spoken word and music by Eric Blitz, Andy Laties and Zef Noise.

On Sunday, the World War Three events continue with a panel discussion and workshop called "Be The Media! Visual Journalism: Comics and Graphic Novels."

The discussion on zines and comix, and collaborative workshop to make a digital mini-comic, will be led by Midgal, Jimenez and Tobocman. Registration available online.

-- Staff reports

By Elizabeth Floyd Mair

In the feature film "My Suicide: A Self-Inflicted Comedy," a teenage boy announces in media class that he plans to kill himself on camera as his final project. Some classmates cheer him on and encourage him to end it all, while others try to talk him out of it, and still others seek him out as a kindred spirit. His parents send him to one counselor after another, but most of the advice he receives from adults feels like cliched catchphrases and has little impact.  Despite the heaviness of the subject matter, the film finds its comedy -- dark comedy, to be sure -- in the story of the boy's inner journey as he grapples with the kinds of existential questions teenagers deal with as part of growing up.

Director David Lee Miller said recently by phone from his studio in California that the film isn't really about suicide. "Hitchcock always talked about the McGuffin. It's not necessarily the subject of the picture; it's what the picture revolves around. I do not consider our movie to be a suicide movie. Our film's a narrative story about the teen condition."