Cultural Diversity Week 2009 – Melbourne

Viva Victoria @ Fed Square, Sat 21 Mar, 11-6pm. Cultural Diversity Week 2009 is already a highlight on Victoria’s cultural calendar & the celebrations have just become a whole lot more exciting with the addition of a new multicultural festival presented by the Victorian Multicultural Commission as the main event! Representing more than 50 countries through music, art, dance, craft & food stalls highlights will include two stages of music from around world, a vibrant marketplace of quality handmade products & an exceptional selection of traditional foods. Plus children’s activities, roving performers, a public art installation & a market bazaar. Feat a performance by Felix Baloy from the Afro Cuban All Stars joined by Kenny López  Havana Connection. 

www.culturaldiversity.vic.gov.au

FedFest 09 – Melbourne

Indulge your senses as Melbourne’s freshest short film festival, FedFest 09 come to life! Celebrate the cream of filmmaking talent to emerge from our shores and feast upon a program of the very best short films produced in recent times. Be inspired; be entertained in a vibrant carnival style atmosphere with roving performance by ‘FAD’.

Productions, stilt walking by Empyrean, Monash School of fire twirling, live drumming by Funk Del Mundo alongside some of Melbourne’s most prominent DJ’s Jen Tutty & Emma Peel.

Date: Sunday March 15th 2009
Films start at 8.00pm
Venue; Federation Square, Main Plaza, Melbourne

Price: Entry is free

Website: www.fedfest.com

The Black Harmony Gathering – Melbourne

The Black Harmony Gathering @ Fairfield Amphitheatre, Heidelberg Rd, Melways Map 30 J12, Sun 15 Mar, 2- 6pm. Featuring Indigenous artists, The Koori Youth Will Shake Spears, the Grenadines, Skye, Robert & Brett, Meriki Hood,  Johnny Mac & Biri-on Laskidjeka. With friends from Sudan, Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Jamaica, Ethiopia, West Papua & East Timor. Tabura & Laloran Choirs, Ajak Kwai & friends, Afro Habesha Band & the incredible African band Blak Roots dance us into the autumn twilight. Enjoy the koori BBQ, African food stalls & a market place of Indigenous & African wares plus MC’s Kutcha Edwards, Little G & Stick Mareebo.

Volunteers needed for Black Harmony Gathering. If you would like to be part of this great annual event please contact office@multiculturalarts.com.au or (03) 9417 6777

Making a Difference – The Chillout Festival

Get Ready for Disco Stampede!

This year’s Chill Out rounds up everything shiny, stretchy, clingy, glittery, daggy and fun to grab you by the glitterballs and drag you back to a time when John Travolta was slim and cool (okay, he’s still pretty cool)  and Mamma Mia was number one in the charts.

This is no city disco – it’s a Disco Stampede! Blending the best of city and bush – our 12th annual festival in Daylesford (Victoria) and surrounding towns set for 6 – 9 March, 2009 - will mix country and disco like no one has done since Dolly Parton first thrust her way into the spotlight.

Looks very cool – Leo Sayer and the Topp twins performing; and this year ChillOut has committed to raising awareness and funds for an important community cause in Hepburn Shire. Supporting Buddies for Wildlife in 2009  – a project of Wildlife Victoria and The Alannah and Madeline Foundation .

Chillout Festival website: http://chilloutfestival.com.au/

Play social marketing bull shit bingo

Are you gagging to monetize the wisdom of the crowd with your sticky strategy? I bet you are, you saucy minx. So next time you’re networking with your social media strategist pals or attending a hot Enterprise 2.0 conference, take along a Social Marketing Bullshit Bingo card. If you get a bingo, you know you’re among thought leaders who really know how to strategize in the attention economy.

Play the Social Marketing Bullshit Bingo card

Google says hello to Twitter with a stream of 1s and 0s

“I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010″

That was the first official tweet from Google’s official Twitter account. The second tweet announced the launch of its App Status Dashboard, which we just covered. This looks to be another move in the direction of transparency and communication from the Googleplex.

More from Venture beat …

Comfortable: Textanudes by Arlene TextaQueen

An exhibition of Textanude works, mostly from Arlene’s travels in the USA and Canada in 2005-2007.

Wonderful women and queer performers in felt-tipped naked glory on paper on the walls of Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art in Paddington.

You may have seen some of the works before but I’ll also be releasing a new limited edition RZA print at the opening.  Exhibition runs from Mar 3rd to Mar 22nd, 2009

Tuesday, March 3, 2009 (opening nite)
Time: 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Location: Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art
Street: 44 Gurner St, Paddington
City/Town: Sydney, Australia

TABU silent film with live music accompaniment – Melbourne

21st March 2009 – 8.30pm – $8 cc.
A very special night’s entertainment at Melbourne’s – Tiki Lounge and Bar – with a fabulous new print of this very famous and rare gem of cinematic history. From the director who made Nosferatu and the very famous Sunrise (often featured in top ten lists of best films of all time) Tiki Lounge and Bar is proud to present – Tabu – with a score composed and played live from music iconoclast and underground legend Mike Cooper.

About  the Movies:
There has never been another film like Tabu. This is a unique blending of ethnographic documentary and expressionist drama, from a master director. The actors are real Polynesians and their ceremonies and rituals are faithfully captured, and interwoven with a tragic love story. The cinematography deservedly won an Oscar – it is truly beautiful. Murnau, away from his usual studio sets, manages to create the same sense of danger using natural light – especially moonlight – and real locations. The performances are very strong – especially Chevalier as the girl, and the old man is as scary as Nosferatu as he haunts her dreams at night.

Sadly this was Murnau’s last film – he died in a car crash just before the premiere. It is a little dramatically uneven, and certainly not the masterpiece that Sunrise is, but it is still very worthwhile. (Source)

Motu Tapu, the place where Murnau made this film, is an actual sacred tabu place. It is therefore understandable that the islanders believe Murnau’s disregard for the tabu, in making a film on this forbidden site, was the cause for his tragic death soon afterwards.

MIKE COOPER – GUITAR /LAP STEEL GUITAR/ ELECTRONICS/ VOCALS
For the past 40 years Mike Cooper has been an international musical explorer, performing and recording, solo and in a number of inspired groupings and a variety of genres.

Initially a folk-blues guitarist and singer songwriter his work has diversified to include improvised jazz and electronic music, live music for silent films, radio art and sound installations. He is also a music journalist, writing features for magazines, particularly on Pacific music and musicians, a visual artist, film and video maker, collector of Hawaiian shirts and appears on more than 60 records to date. Cooper was forging connections between folk and experimental musics long before America got New or Weird… (The Wire)

Where: Tiki Lounge and Bar
Contact: 327 Swan Street, Richmond, Melbourne 3121
Phone : (03) 9428 4336
Website: http://www.tikiloungeandbar.com/
When: Saturday March 21st 8:30pm
Cost: $8 on entry

2009 Format Festival

The return of the hugely successful Adelaide Zinester Walking Tour: Famous for getting kicked out of Borders, breaking into Adelaide Uni, trying to pass as a Christian Gathering and launching the smash hit single ‘Emoticons’.

Taken to new heights at the 2008 TINA festival with a midnight metal zine launch which terrified the local teenagers and saw at least one of Adelaide’s finest indie publishers leave their underpants behind a bush after an ill fated attempt to shit in public.

This year’s walking tour features, direct from the USA, the author of the award winning ‘On Subbing’ Dave Roche,  Arlene Texta Queen, the mysterious Luke You, Lisa ‘Muscles’ Dempster of Vignette Press, Tom and Lou from Breakdown Press, Joel Catchlove, Sydney socialite Amanda Baird, Sam Rodgers, Stan from Excitement Machine/Urtext, low fi super star John Stevens and Maddy Phelan. And I’ll be launching my ‘long awaited’ 30,000 word cycling zine.

If you have zines you’d like to launch, get in touch – we’d love to have you. The idea is to go to a bunch of interesting Adelaide locales and give people 30 seconds to launch their publication whilst standing on a milk crate.

More info: kanbara@senet.com.au

Presented by the Format Collective
Friday, March 13, 2009
Time: 5:45am – 8:45am
145 Hindley Street
City/Town: Adelaide, Australia

Yoko Ono does Twitter

Everyone’s trying to capture the big twits. But there’s so many — who can keep up with them. If you don’t know what Twitter is you can read the full Guardian article . However, I have pinched a couple just to keep you tweet-a-lated.

Yoko Ono – http://twitter.com/yokoono
Perfectly well suited to the medium, each 140 character Yoko tweet is its own mini-performance, starring a warm, fuzzy message of love and optimism. Blissed-out art-hippy vibes.

An Xiao http://twitter.com/thatwaszen
This New York conceptual artist uses Twitter as “a scrapbook, a way to capture thoughts and share them”, believing that the 140-character limit enforces “a discipline of thought and economy of language that encourages sharp ideas”. She also creates Twitter-based artworks.