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How cool! A new Shakespeare play
Hey, fans … this just in from the BBC.
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Time to enter our writing contest!
What do you think?
All right, friends, you can stop calling now. You can start typing, instead.
We’ve been getting calls and emails over the last few weeks from readers wondering when we were going to announce the start of this year’s Short Story and Poetry Contest, an event the newspaper has organized for the last 14 years.
The answer to the the “when?” question, I’m happy to report, is: Now.
Follow this link and you’ll find the rules for this year’s contest.
Followers of the contest will notice right away that there are a few differences this year, starting with the name. What last year was the Dayton Daily News Short Story and Poetry Contest is now something new: the Dayton Daily News/Antioch Writers’ Workshop Creative Writing Contest.
Here’s the story on what we’re doing differently.
Your truly cooked up the idea for the contest back when I had the job of arts/entertainment editor at the DDN, as a way to highlight and encourage the large number of creative writers in our area. The contest, which initially accepted short fiction only, was an immediate hit — we got just over 1,000 entries that first year, from writers young and old. We published the winners in the paper and started something of a tradition.
Teachers, we’ve found, use the contest as a class assignment year after year. The members of writers’ groups help one another with entries. Some of our winners have gone on to publish books, or to study creative writing in college.
Over the years, we’ve made modifications. We added a category for poetry, attracting a whole new community of writers. We began posting winners online. A couple of years ago, we teamed up with the Antioch Writers’ Workshop in Yellow Springs to offer a full scholarship to the weeklong annual event as the top prize in the contest.
And now, we’ve gone a step further — entering into a full partnership with the workshop and its staff to co-manage and blend the two enterprises into one.
The reasons for doing this are several. At the paper, as jobs evolve and change and new priorities emerge, it’s become difficult to keep running the contest in-house as we have in the past. At the same time, we know it’s popular — it’s never drawn fewer than 600 entries, which is a lot of people doing a lot of writing, all of it local — and we wanted to keep the contest going.
The Antioch Writers’ Workshop, meanwhile, has entered its 25th year in 2010 looking for new ways to flourish as an important local cultural institution. The annual, weeklong workshop teaches poetry, essay-writing and fiction each summer in Yellow Springs. It has been working closely with Antioch McGregor to improve and grow, and was looking for more partnerships. The connections between the paper and the workshop — I’m a member of its board, along with former Daily News Editor Jeff Bruce, and the AWW executive director, Sharon Short, is a longtime columnist in the DDN’s Life section — helped a blending make sense.
As the rules make clear, the AWW will coordinate the contest and judging, and offer scholarships to all the winners. The DDN will publish winning stories and help underwrite the workshop this year. The contest and the workshop both will be stronger for it, we think.
And most importantly, the community of writers here, and the people who read and enjoy their work in our pages, should be better served.
To all of you who have been looking forward to entering: Get started! And good luck.
The changing face of film criticism…
What do you think?
It’s well-known at this point that lots of US newspapers have been doing away with in-house film criticism in an effort to cut costs (the DDN, in the interest of full disclosure, did so long ago), but this is a pretty interesting wrinkle in all that…
Turns out, according to Roger Ebert, that Variety, of all publications, is now doing the same thing… This has to be one of those stories that has more to it than meets the eye. Variety exists for pretty much one thing, and film critics are the ones who do it…
Anyway, stay tuned, I guess.
BTW, I’m still a huge fan of Ebert’s writing, thinking and opinionating… He’s one of the greats, in any age of criticism. Amazing, too, that he’s held on even through all his well-publicized health and cancer issues. Quite a man.
A cool new downtown arts space under way
What do you think?
Everybody’s dreams are different. For some, they’re vague, wispy and intangible. For Hamilton and Carli Dixon, they’re made of more solid stuff.
Their dreams are about steel and soil, anvils and presses, bricks and mortar, construction debris and the moving of it. They dream about creating something big — a bustling, lively communal city space that has art at its core.
Hamilton, 49, is one of Dayton’s best-known artists, a sculptor who creates looping, swirling iron constructions that have an organic, plant-like feel to them, and which decorate important spaces in town ranging from the Dayton Art Institute rotunda to the lobby of Dayton International Airport.
Carli, 36, is an artist who owns and runs Freezeframe, a small company that fills an interesting niche: they turn wedding flowers into specially framed dried arrangements and jewelry, creating unusual keepsakes from family events.
But the Dixons are something more: residents of Dayton’s South Park historic neighborhood; can-do owners of an old home they renovated themselves; parents of two small children they hope will learn to love the city as they do; people who believe in community, their city and its future; artsy folks who see a way to contribute to the bubbling street-culture vibe that seems to be percolating in downtown Dayton and which might someday help turn the city around.
Their part in that is a three-building property on East Third Street on the edge of downtown which they and some friends are trying to turn into a studio, performance and community-garden complex dubbed “Atta Girl Art & Gardens.”
The three buildings at 811, 817 and 905 E. Third St. were once offices, a car lot and a plumbing-supply warehouse, among other things. They were originally just looking for studio space for Hamilton, but saw possibilities in the adjoining buildings, which had been on the market so long that the bank sold them for “a ridiculous price.” But that also meant a staggering amount of effort to make them usable.
They’ve spent months hauling away debris, setting up electricity and heat, and working with the city on permits. The weirdest thing about the property was that it was full of several tons of clothing donated by church groups for Hurricane Katrina victims, but which was never delivered. The Dixons are organizing and trying to find a proper place for the abandoned goods, perhaps sending them to Haiti; plenty of people would have simply thrown the stuff out.
Hamilton will soon move his metalworking studio from the Front Street Studios in East Dayton into 811, and is looking forward to a roomier space without pillars to get in the way of his very physical work. His friend and neighbor at Front Street, woodworker and artist Shon Walters, is helping them clean up the new space and will also soon move his studio there.
He shares the Dixons’ vision of turning a large, open, high-ceilinged space in the back of 905, which has 18,000 square feet, into an eccentric, 300-seat theater for everything from rock bands to dance shows. “I’m a big advocate of combining all the arts into one big event,” Walters said. “We just need the proper venue.”
Carli is working with friends who live in or near downtown to organize communal, raised-bed gardening in the rear of the property, and muses about putting in a coffeeshop someday.
But even with all they’ve done already, and even though they have “a long list of friends and associates” who’ve looked at the space and agreed it has potential, there is still a lot of uphill for the Dixons. “This is gargantuan,” she says, admitting they aren’t rich and are still working through the business plan to realize all that potential. Do they run the complex as a non-profit? Do they form some sort of collaborative? Do they find a local organization to run it? Do they manage it themselves as a business? All yet to be determined.
Meanwhile, they’re pushing ahead. “Great cities aren’t great because the government sits on high in theh sky and does all these wonderful things,” Carli says. “Great cities also have a rich, lively bohemian street culture that bubbles up and gets people out and moving around. You need both to create this murmur of a thriving community.” She and her husband think their project can help, and their enthusiasm and passion have gotten them this far, at least. You can learn more about their plans at attagirl.homestead.com.
“We don’t have any regrets,” Hamilton says, laughing about how much work he has ahead of him. “So far.”
“I really don’t like to talk about things,” Carli says, surveying her new domain. “I like to do.”
Wow, this guy really hates Clint Eastwood…
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… and he doesn’t just hate him a little bit. He hates him a whole bunch.
Check out this posting from the Daily Beast, in which a critic has weighed in on the relative merits of Clint’s career after having watched 35 of his movies, back to back. I admit, he makes a few good points about dreck like “The Gauntlet,” though I still like “Unforgiven.”
Thoughts? Any fans out there?
‘Avatar,’ finally
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Got the chance last weekend to finally catch up with the movie half the planet has already seen twice, apparently, and I’m happy to say that I’m happy I did.
You know what I mean by that, too: Any film — or, for that matter any entertainment — that comes with the level of hype, anticipation and media madness (not to mention cost!) that attended “Avatar” means that the expectactions are high, and you’re ready to to be disappointed. And post-“Titantic,” James Cameron has his share of haters, though over time I’ve stopped being one of them.
Heck, depending on your level of cynicism, you may go in looking for ways to be disappointed.
Didn’t happen.
I had a great time. I was rip-roaringinly entertained. I was thrilled by the whole jaw-dropping spectacle of the thing. I was glad I went. I look forward to seeing it again.
Is “Avatar” perfect? Nope, not by a longshot. A lot of what you’ve already read and heard about the overly simple plot, and the fact that it follows a pretty derivative course that borrows from about a dozen other movies, from “Dances With Wolves” to “The Empire Strikes Back,” are largely true.
However, Cameron gets plenty of credit for finding ways to make the movie feel different from all those influences, and he manages to throw in a few relevant, contemporary political and social messages that are obvious without making the whole thing seem overly preachy.
And of course, he makes the story look different. In fact, it’s safe to say that there is no other film ever created that looks anything like “Avatar.” From the otherworldly landscapes to the creatures who populate it to the blue-skinned humanoids who are the stars of the show, you know you’re seeing something for the very first time — and truly, that’s not an experience you get to have very often.
And yes, go in 3D. In fact, go in IMAX 3D, if you can.
And by all means, have fun. I did!
What did you think?
Shakespeare online!
I stumbled across this site the other day and had to share… Be forewarned, gentle readerpersons, that one might waste a lot of time here.
Forsooth!
Writer and editor 
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