This is fantastic news for Drupal and for other open-source software projects as well. The Obama administration has talked a lot about being more “open” in terms of policy, and the open-source software communities have a lot to offer that will help them achieve this openness in their web presence. Launching whitehouse.gov using Drupal is a great move. There have been others (http://www.nysenate.gov/), and I’m sure more and more public sector sites will be evaluating Drupal for themselves.

New York Times: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/drupal-moves-into-the-white-house/

*That’s part of the point. It’s so customizable you can make Drupal do nearly anything you need, and style it to appear any way you like.

Dave Johnson as Edgar Allen Poe - image by: Gabriel Bienczycki

To create a truly Poe-worthy experience, Brat has put together a team of note-worthy actors, designers, and consultants including “Philly Poe Guy” Edward Pettit, Barrymore-award winners Bruce Walsh (who gives a terrifying performance of The Black Cat while yielding an axe, yikes!) and the absolutely gorgeous Kim Carson, as well as ex-Eastern State Penitentiary: Terror Behind the Walls designer Brad Helm. Brat has also brought in approximately 4,000, now famous (see the article here!), cockroaches from the Insectarium for that extra-added psychological scare.

Being a lover of the arts, but, admittedly, a big baby as well (I watch scary movies rarely and with the lights on!), I was apprehensive about attending the production, which promises “blood – and ghosts and magic and murder and mayhem.” However, I was pleasantly surprised that, although plenty scary for the thrill-enthusiast, the production is so intriguing and unusually gorgeous as well.

After spending four years working very closely with my college’s small theater company, I am completely in awe of what a huge project this relatively small theater company was not only able to pull off, but execute beautifully, and I am honestly so thrilled to be working on publicity for Haunted Poe!

You don’t have to take my word for it; the whole city is a-buzz about this Halloween season’s most exciting production!

The Philadelphia Inquirer calls Haunted Poe a, “compellingly dark vision of the torments that haunted Poe’s soul,” here.

“Directed with considerable flair by Distefano, Poe has a punk rock sensibility: raw, visceral and roughly poetic,” Says J. Cooper Robb of Philadelphia Weekly. Read the full article here.

Also, you can always check out the video footage on ABC.com featuring the production.

Happy Birthday, Edgar!

I love working on publicity for the Rosenbach, especially on projects using materials from the museum’s Sendak collection (which includes over 10,000 pieces). Growing up, we always had a ton of books in the house, including Sendak (thanks Mom!). My favorite copies of Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen and Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and a Prologue are worn and tattered. I played out my VHS tape of Really Rosie cartoons and scratched up my record of Carol King singing Sendak classics, and my Wild Things stuffed animals have now bit the dust. So for me, at 26 years old, it’s pretty cool to get to work on something I loved so much as a kid, and still do now.

Final drawing for Where the Wild Things Are. Pen and ink, watercolor. © Maurice Sendak, 1963. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the Rosenbach Museum & Library

How did Maurice Sendak’s work come to the Rosenbach Museum & Library? Sendak first met Clive Driver, then Director of the Rosenbach, in 1966 at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Sendak was invited to speak, along with other artists and scholars, at a conference hosted by the library on Beatrix Potter in celebration of the 100th anniversary of her birth. From Clive, Sendak learned that the Rosenbach had one of the best Melville collections in the world, among other artists that he loved, like William Blake, John Tenniel, and George Cruikshank. The relationship was cemented in the early 1970s when Sendak decided to give his pictures to the Rosenbach on deposit, marking the start of the Sendak collection at the Rosenbach.

In a 2007 interview, Sendak said, “Clive and I got to talking and he began to tell me about The Rosenbach and the virtues of The Rosenbach, and I was then looking for a place to give my stuff to, but I didn’t want it to go to a university… Because they were buried in sealed vaults and whoever got to see them? The point of giving something away and then treating it as it were death of the family was hardly what I was looking forward to. So I was saying where was a place where people could, if they wanted to, make an appointment and see the pictures. So Clive would say, that’s just what we do… They had people I love, artists I love. They had the Alice illustrations….I remember I would lay in The Doctor’s room – Dr. Rosenbach – and Clive would bring me in some drawings for a French novel by Fragonard and they would be in the bed with me. And there was a big fur, animal fur blanket, and I used to lay under it with my Fragonards all around. Hey – that was living! Of course, they took it all back in the morning, that’s the way of life. So anyways, I concluded that that’s where I wanted to be and that’s where it began.”

Watch Sendak talk about his childhood, love of movies and storytelling as a youth, in an interview featured in a DVD by the Rosenbach below. Stay tuned for the Rosenbach’s new website, designed by Canary! Until then, visit www.rosenbach.org and check out the museum’s current Sendak-themed exhibitions and events! “Let the wild rumpus start!” - Emaleigh

Interview clip from the DVD “There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak: A Retrospective in Words and Pictures.”

Want to see what we’ve been up to lately?  Here’s a selection of some of the many stories we’ve been obtaining for the Festival. Click here.

Looking for a fun place to hang out after the shows? Come have a drink with us at the Festival Bar and tell us about what shows you saw.

This weekend, I’ll be seeing:

How Theater Failed America, Mike Daisey

STORE, Kate Watson-Wallace

Welcome to Yuba City, Pig Iron Theatre Company

Company, EgoPo Productions

Kill Me Now, Melanie Stewart Dance Theatre

Tasks include: supporting the PR team by assisting with strategy and implementation of campaigns, crafting story pitches and working with members of the press, writing press releases and other press materials, writing marketing and web copy, updating company’s website and client pages, direct communication with clients, tracking and reporting media campaign results and general project research and database management.

Qualifications: The successful candidate will possess strong written and verbal communication skills and will be an expert at multi-tasking. Internet savvy, social media experience and basic knowledge of MS Word and Excel programs are all a must. A minimum of 1 year of experience working in the publicity and/or marketing fields, and knowledge of Philadelphia’s cultural community and the area’s media are strongly desired.

To Apply:
Explore our website and get to know a little about our company and clients. Email cover letter, resume, salary requirements and 1-3 applicable writing samples to info@canarypromo.com. Please submit any questions via email; no calls.

As promised, I’m uploading my slides from my presentation. They’re just the slides for now, but I’ll update w/ video once all the video from the day is online.

Drupaldelphia Shortcuts Cheats And Cheap Stunts!

Rethink your workflow to fix a lame design and rock your theme development.

Download as .pdf

Links from the presentation

http://blueprintcss.org

http://960.gs

http://drupal.org/project/studio

http://drupal.org/project/zen

http://drupal.org/project/stark

http://drupal.org/project/drush

http://drupal.org/project/devel

http://drupal.org/project/admin

http://compass-style.org

Blueprint comes with a technique for showing the grid in CSS. Just class your .container element as “.showgrid” and it will use your grid graphic as the background image. There are a couple problems with this tho.

• It replaces your desired page background, and you might need that at this stage.
• It’s not really easy to just turn it on and off to quickly check your work.

Since we work in Drupal most of the time we tackled this for our projects by creating a Drupal module that overlays a simple “show grid” button on the upper left corner of the screen that will apply the grid and replace it with our default styles on each click.

So far it’s pretty basic. There’s no admin interface and you have to customize the jquery file for each project. We plan on fixing those aspects soon and contributing it up to Drupal.org. Until then, tho, I’m putting it here for anyone to try it out. Enjoy!

Grid Overlay Drupal Module

Bloomsday at the Rosenbach on Delancey Place

Having the original manuscript of one of the world’s most well-known and acclaimed literary works is a privilege to the city of Philadelphia, one that leaves many people wondering, “Why here?” An article published this week in the Bloomsday Herald is printed below for your enlightenment:

WHY IS THE ULYSSES MANUSCRIPT IN PHILADELPHIA?
By Michael Barsanti, former associate Director of the Rosenbach Museum and Library

In January of 1924 Dr. A.S. Rosenbach bought James Joyce’s manuscript of Ulysses at auction for $1,975. It was a curious purchase—modern literature was never Dr. Rosenbach’s strongest suit. The novel must have had a special meaning for him—two years earlier he had arranged for a copy of the first edition to be smuggled from Paris by a friend. Upon buying the manuscript, he said that it was for his own collection, and it was never put up for sale by the Rosenbach Company.

Joyce first sold the manuscript to John Quinn, a New York lawyer, book collector, political activist, and patron of the arts. Quinn actively promoted Joyce’s career, and his purchase of the Ulysses manuscript was a means for providing financial support. In 1923 and ’24, however, Quinn decided to liquidate his impressive collection. Although the auction was expected to be one of the great book events of the year, if not the decade, neither Quinn nor the auction house thought the Ulysses manuscript would sell for very much. While the book had some degree of notoriety in the United States, it could not be legally printed or sold here at the time, so it was little known.

Quinn had warned Joyce before the sale that the manuscript would not bring a very high price, but Joyce was nevertheless disappointed. It surely didn’t help that Quinn had sold his Joseph Conrad manuscripts a few months before for much more money—most of them to Dr. Rosenbach. In May of 1924 Rosenbach cabled Joyce directly, asking him if he wanted to sell the page proofs for Ulysses. Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver that “When he [Rosenbach] receives a reply from me all the rosy brooks will have run dry” and appended this verse, which suggests that the Doctor’s cable must have misspelled the title of the book:

“Rosy Brook he bought a book
Though he didn’t know how to spell it.
Such is the lure of literature
To the lad who can buy it and sell it.”

The limerick is unfair in several ways—Rosenbach was widely known for his exceptional knowledge of literature, but it is also apparent that he cared deeply about Ulysses. Ironically, Joyce had earlier inquired about buying the manuscript back from him, only to be told that Rosenbach’s interest in Ulysses was personal, not professional, and that he was unlikely to sell it, even back to its author. While the purchase of the Ulysses manuscript might appear to have been only one of Dr. Rosenbach’s canniest bargains, it better testifies to his desire to build a collection that would become a priceless cultural legacy to Philadelphia and the world.

For more information on nEW, visit www.newfestival.net or www.canarypromo.com/newfestival.

Gabrielle Revlock

Olive Prince Dance

For more information about the organization visit www.phillyyoungplaywrights.org.