Beyond Visibility: Illuminating and Aligning Femmes in NYC is a day-long event for LGBTQQI2 folks on self-identified femme/inine spectrums to come together in conversation, coalition, and celebration of *all* the parts of ourselves and our many communities. Events are taking place in NYC, Toronto, Philadelphia, San Francisco, London, Los Angeles, and beyond.

On Sunday January 15 from Noon-2p, femme/inine folks are invited to enjoy a Brunch and Skillshare Salon. At 2:30p join a Community Discussion moved along via transformative facilitation, where everyone will have the opportunity to contribute their needs, desires, and celebrations. This will be followed by break-out groups to continue engaging in intersectional topics such as Safety, Pride & Shame, Truth-telling, Health and more. From 5-6:30p, take a dinner break and participate in documentation including a zine table, blogging station and photo booth!

Because Beyond Visibility aims to create and hold femme/inine queer space to ally with and learn from each other, and to discuss ways to align organizing and organizations to ensure that femme communities grow as intersectional sites of gender justice, the brunch, discussion and break-out groups are free, intentionally safer-spaces, and for only femme-spectrum people of all ages, genders, and abilities.

An additional function of Beyond Visibility is to illuminate the cultural, political and artistic work of participating individuals and groups, and so all are welcomed to the two cultural events taking place. At 7pm at Judson Church, join us for a Literary Salon including Kate Bornstein, Trina Rose, Cristy Road, Nath Ann Carrera, Dondrie Burnham, Alejandro Rodriguez and more. This event is $2-$10.

Starting at 10pm, head over to Brooklyn and the Cabaret/Dance Party where Hana Malia & Glenn Marla bring biting performance art, Serpentina of the Coney Island Side Show makes sparks fly, musical stylings from Jazzmen Lee-Johnson & new work by Sassafras Lowery! DJ’s Shomi Noise and Nolita spin fierce femme tunes all night! Allies welcome to attend & dance the night away with us! This event is $5-$12.

This event is co-produced by 20 local organizers and is partnered with the bi-annual Femme Conference [www.femme2012.com/]. Beyond Visibility takes place the day the Conference releases its 2012 call for performers and workshops, and aims to generate conversations that grow local community as well as resonate into the Conference, which is taking place in Baltimore August 17-19, 2012. Co-sponsoring organization include the Heels on Wheels Roadshow [www.heelsonwheelsroadshow.com], NYC’s own glittery performance art queer femme tour, Feminist Press [www.feministpress.org/], and QUORUM Forum [http://quorumnyc.org/].

For more information on the NYC event, please visit: www.beyondvisibility.femme2012.com/

Find the event on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/beyondvisibility

A toolkit of ideas for femmes in other towns to hostess their own femme gatherings are here:
www.heelsonwheelsroadshow.com/toolkit/

Blender – 3D arts, animation, modelling. create films, animations, movies
GIMP** – hi-res, high-end graphics application package. print photo editing [registry.gimp.org - extensions and plugins]
Scribus – desktop publishing, professional page layout
Kino [for linux] video editing
Shotwell [linux-only] photo manager/publisher
Latek – academic publications, set up templates
Inkscape — vector-based image development [aka FLS Illustrator]
Audacity** – audio editing. one of the best!!
Aviary — server-based, more user-friendly and more shareable
WordPress** – self-server or web-server-based
Bluefish — HTML editing
Jack Pulse — real-time audio, multiple devices

And here is one example from the Occupy the Internet .gif blast from Nov 1st. And we’re looking at these folks, where you can get the .gif <embed> code if you like…

If you want to stop and take in so that you too can have wild, wild dreams, may I suggest attending ALL [or at least one] of the Fame and Shame in the lower east side performances taking place each weekend all month. I made the website and produced/designed the posters illustrated by Ms. Cristy Road.

Intellectual Property

Remember how we live in an individualized society where we’re taught that we all have to Make It On Our Own and can accumulate wealth to be passed on to our heirs so they Don’t Have To Work As Hard As We Did  etc etc. It’s about back there where intellectual property starts — the idea that a product of your brain is yours alone to monetize and no one else can get in there. Fast forward to fifteen years ago when the digital revolution made it possible to very easily copy things: documents, pictures…music files, computer programs, are you getting where we’re going?

The fact that we can make copies of things is a radical change in the way these assets are distributed, and has brought up a lot of ideas about how to preserve the monetization of these assets, and even more radically, how to make things that are intended to be copied without monetization. Copyright law is ever too complicated to go into here, so lets go to the entrance of copyleft and Creative Commons, and new laws extending copyright from 50 to 75 years+ and now it’s hard to download Adobe without paying.

BUT — some people like that their computer programs and art can be shared with other folks, tested and improved, and so we’ve got a whole world of software that is easily available…

Shareware vs Freeware vs Software

What the hell is going on here? The folks at netc.org have a great tech glossary, and break it down like this:

Freeware: Software distributed at no or neglible cost.

Shareware: Software you can use without paying for upfront. If you regularly use the software or want all the features you pay for it. Not necessarily open source. Not the same as freeware.

Open source software (OSS): Any computer program with accessible source code.

Mac Software That’s Not Audio-Related: Interesting/New/Useful Programs

It seems like every shareware out there is designed to somehow cut tracks out of youtube videos or pull audio off your windows-based cameraphone. Well, none of these do that. These are programs that connect via text and use new technologies for digital distribution. You can see my other posts if you’re interested in web programs or print design programs.

I find decent programs for my Mac on this shareware site.

RapidSMS is a free and open-source framework for dynamic data collection, logistics coordination and communication, leveraging basic short message service (SMS) mobile phone technology.

Flipbooks – freeware/open source
Mac – http://www.macshareware.com/software/digital_flip_books

CMS for images/portfolios
you might want to try Stacey, it’s a SUPER simple, you structure your site as a bunch of text files, images, etc in folders and it’s there. [Note: You need to have PHP5 on your server, but if you get a error message that you don't you can usually email/call your host and have them walk you through updating your PHP version. Don't let the jargon stress you out here.]

But HELLO – there are about a thousand other worthy causes out there right now. Did you know that year-end fundraising gets so buck wild because folks with lots of money need to donate before the end of the year for tax purposes, and the rest of us get caught up in the whirlwind.

In this post I’ve collected ten organizations I believe in fiercely enough to give time or money to, and tell you a bit about them. They are categorized into Media Justice, Movement Building, and Progressive Leadership Development.

Our Resources, Our Disbursements*

Now that I can regularly afford groceries and postage and rent AND going to the doctor occasionally, I budget in** a little bit of redistribution of wealth to my holiday season. Because come early Jan, I will probably feel broke again even though I might not technically be [ps. please don't run around saying "I'm broke!" unless you truly are, ya hear?] and thus I know I need to disburse some of these resources now.

So whether you got a cute check from your family, or an unexpected gig, or a year-end bonus that you don’t have to throw directly onto the interest on your student loans [sigh] — this is a great time to find an organization or cause that it would be actually useful to put money towards, money that might otherwise go to taxis, boxing day sales, or into the void of banking fees. Plus perhaps you have friends who are fund raising for programs, surgeries, travel, etc. If everyone who had it threw $10 at a project, we’d move mountains of money a little bit at a time.

MEDIA JUSTICE

It is sad that $pread Magazine can not be on this list, so please, a moment of silence for an all-volunteer, sex-worker-and-ally-run indie magazine that made it over FIVE years before closing shop. [           ]. If you want to donate and get a magazine subscription in exchange, let me suggest instead the solid and smart Left Turn.

Democracy Now – “Dear Amy Goodman, Thank you for making going to my often-boring temp jobs more bearable by sending your authoritative voice over the radio, tv and internet waves five days a week all year long. Thank you for creating Left/Progressive Talking Points and resisting the  I really fucking appreciate everything. Here’s $25.”

Also the online news source, The Electronic Infantida, who “publishes news, commentary, analysis, and reference materials about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict from a Palestinian perspective.”

FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six is a “firsthand account of community, culture, and resistance in New Orleans in the years before and after Katrina”. Order it. It also happens to be written by Jordan Flaherty, a writer/editor of Left Turn and also one of the most fierce media justice activists and POC allies I’ve had the pleasure of knowing.

MOVEMENT BUILDING

The U S Social Forum — perhaps you made it there this June or perhaps you are wishing you did. Supporting events and orgs AFTER their big event is one of the kindest things you can do, because followup and cleanup sucks, yet it must be done, *especially* if we want to see another one of these Convergences [we do]. PLUS for $25 you get a tshirt! win!

Critical Resistance – This is one of the only [*the* only?] activist org in the country who works full-time to dismantle the Prison/Industrial Complex, and they just lost a major source of funding. Every bit will in fact help them.

The Femme Collective – it’s never too early to donate to the Femme Conference for 2012. Oh – and don’t forget to fill out the survey if you went to the Conference!

PROGRESSIVE LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

You can go LOTS of places to learn how to bank and shop quietly and never acknowledge your priviledge or get tools to fight oppression. That’s called Leaving The House. These next few orgs empower individuals to do more with themselves, in many awesome ways.

FIERCE “is proud to be one of the few organizations that empowers LGBTQ youth of color to take action and create the better world we yearn for and imagine.” and they’ve been doing so for TEN years!

Also amazing, also working to empower youth of color include Safe Outside the System, a “an anti-violence Collective led by and for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans, and Gender Non Conforming people of color. We are devoted to challenging hate and police violence by using community based strategies rather than relying on the police” working through the Audre Lorde Project.

Streetwise & Safe works with queer youth of color who are criminalized for association with sex trade work. *Note there’s a $50 minimum donation.

The Catalyst Program — focuses on movement-building specifically across race and on teaching White people how to wield all that unearned privilege. This is who runs the Anne Braden Program, too.

OTHERWISE

You don’t have to have or use money to give to or be involved with social change, as you know. Your time, spreading the word about a project or organization, and adding your voice are all also critical.

*I don’t know about you, but I get a weird feeling in the back of my windpipe when I want to talk about money in any way whatsoever, which is exactly the feeling that tells me I need to not be quiet.

**I think from growing up poor I became a manically excellent budgeter. Is anyone else like that? I hear it can go several ways but I’m too busy with my spreadsheets and tiny notepapers covered in calculations to really check in with Other People’s Banking. I like to budget one pro-bono client a month as a donation to Social Justice Work, and the income from one client at the end of the year towards economic redistribution. It’s kind of tidy that way for me but again no one else ever need be that anal.

This post is for folks who **have** a website [not a blog] up and going, and want to do some minor text changes or perhaps even go further and add pages etc. If you want a more comprehensive tutorial that starts before you have the website, check out the Hart Collective’s online walk-through for setting up your online presence, from the workshop Sarah Jenny and I have taught across the country!

Basically, you’ll update your site one of two ways – you’ll either download/buy a software that you use on your computer to edit the web pages and then upload the pages to your server, or you’ll use the editor on the server where you host your files.

First Steps: Know everything you want to go into this update

• Gather all the new photos, videos, pics of press, etc. you want on your site. Are they web-resolution?
• Gather into one document the new text, blurbs, links and press clips you want on your site.

Now let’s talk about how to update existing web pages on your site:

Basically, you just have to access your website, launch your HTML editor, place your content and then get the updated pages online! Trust, it is not too hard.

Login and passwords, wow fun.

Collect all the login info you got from your host [the service who puts your website online]. You’ll need all of it; they surely sent you a long ass email at some point that you probably forwarded to the person who set up your server/site and forgot about. Find it. You’re looking for your username, password, FTP login info.

Computer-based editing for a website:

#1. Get a web design program. You can buy/borrow Dreamweaver, or if you want to stay free, try downloading Kompozer – web coding for Mac or PC, which I think is the best of the free web progams – but one or the other of the ones listed may be more comfortable for you to use.

#2. Utilize the Tutorials. I cannot stress enough that there are a MILLION good tutorials out there, by web geeks like myself and the makers of the programs. Take two hours and you will amaze yourself, AND save yourself headaches and wasted time down the road.

#3. Get files off your server via FTP, make a backup copy, and open the file in your editing program. Edit [see: tutorials] and be proud of yourself.

Server-based editing for a website

This is not a good place to do a site redesign, but text edits and photo adds/swaps will be easy here.

#1. Login to your server, and navigate to where the pages are. Each server is going to be different, but they all offer a simple WYSIWYG editor that will make text updates to your web page easy and fast.

#2. Open the page you want to edit and change the text you want.

#3. **Save** your work, and the page will automatically overwrite the old version with your edits.

Get Those files online!

Dreamweaver/KompoZer give you the option to input all the login info you have, in order to to use the editing software as your FTP as well, so you can pull files from the web, update them, and put them back online. As long as you are careful and make backup copies, this is pretty streamlined.

If you find setting up the FTP as part of your editing software confusing or just dont like it, you can download separate FTP software. Cyberduck is good and free for Mac, Filezilla is good and free for PC.

Either way, when you take files from your computer and send them to the server where your site is hosted, you will overwrite the old file and the updated one will appear online. Sometimes this takes a few hours to appear, sometimes it happens instantly.

Notes To Make This Whole Process Easier

BACKUPS: What is super important and what I cannot stress enough is this: make a copy of any page you work on before you make any changes. just in case. 99% you will not need this backup copy, but for the one time you do, you’ll be REALLY glad you have it.

SAVE: Also, save your work a lot. Free programs tend to crash more often than non-free. Notice a theme here?

TRACK YR FILE ORGANIZATION: This is boring and annoying, but it’s basically operation-critical. When things don’t link or don’t load, check the name you typed into the HTML, and double-check the path, eg, the <a href=”/xxx/freesound.iua.upf.edu/picture.jpg“> part of the link. this is what tells the browser where to look for a file, and if it is missing enough “/” [which tell the browser to go up a directory or folder], the browser will get lost on the way. It gets technical and you can google research “paths” but sometimes you just need to add a “/” at the beginning or end to send the browser far enough to find the file.

Links

There are a lot of links to programs and self-teaching tool on my DIY page and on the Hart Collective’s DIY page.

Over the summer, that meant working with Philly Stands Up – a radical anti-violence group who uses transformative justice models to work with purpotrators of sexual assault. Their work is fierce so they needed to move from the free blog they had to a website in order to control the content [free=ads] and showcase the papers, organzing and upcoming action camp they are preparing.

Part of my mandate is to empower people to control their own media/means of production rather than take over and leave folks confused, so I met with PSU folks to pick a template, customize it, create a header, determine what kinds of pages and content they wanted to develop; and then we moved on to a skillshare on how to use accessible software to add the content they already had from their blog into the template pages I built. I think it’s coming along but I don’t believe they’re done — editing and choosing content is a *lot* of work!

This September, I worked with the amazing crew of Work Hard/Stay Hard to refresh the office, archives and website at IDA — thats for Idyll Dandy Acres — a collectively-owned-and-run queer farm/retreat land in rural Tennessee. It’s hard to explain how a committedly urban lady like myself was drawn there, so lets just say there is a magic to the warmth and welcoming of the community there that inspires one to give back.

I worked with the Office/Media team and IDA residents to determine what from the last website should stay and what new information needed to be included. You can now donate to IDA from the navigation, and there is legacy space prepared to showcase the work of the Archive crew in digitizing hours of VHS and piles of posters and newspapers!

It’s been a really satisfying few months; and while my plate is a bit full for the fall, I’m looking forward to the new collaborations that will come my way in the winter…and keep dreaming the dream I have about getting a grant so I could donate this kind of work FULL TIME!! Sigh…

I love print design, and I’ve been at it for years; first my making zines in the 90′s and next by making newspapers, magazines and promotional media over the last ten years. So it makes sense that people ask me for tips and recommendations regularly.

Some examples are this page from Femme2010 program, and my print portfolio.

Collected in this post are some freeware/shareware programs that might be right for your print project, and a few tips I tell people when they ask about layout.

Learning page layout software is awesome and so satisfying — but time-consuming, just an fyi.

If you’re just making one book I don’t know if its worth it to learn ALL of any program, but you might find you love the process and thus learning a non-try-only version would be advantageous because then you could use it again.

FREE

Free/cheap layout software is one avenue in which the world of freeware is less prolific than in, say, freeware for web design.

Scribus appears to be the best of the free, as it is from 2010 and Mac/PC/Linux compatible – but I haven’t used it so I can’t say more than to read the reviews/manual and see if you think learning it is more time effective than plowing through using Word.

This article has a lot of free print-creation software listed; remember that you might want to edit the photos before you put them in, or you might need to try a few different programs before you find one you “get” the best.

FREE TO TRY

Lots of programs are “free to try,” and often this means you get temporary access to higher-caliber programs — but I’d be careful and test them by exporting one page of my book before laying out the whole thing to make sure that you don’t have to buy the software to export your final product as a PDF.

Here’s a decent, recent list of free-to-try programs; this one, Rag Time Solo, seems to have some recommendations behind it.

Adobe’s InDesign is what I’ve used and loved for almost a decade [!], it is free for 30 days,  you will be able to export your finished file in it, AND there are good tutorials online so you don’t feel overwhelmed. Its a technically heavy program but you dont have to use all the elements.If  you are familiar with Photoshop, the “layers” feature in InDesign is similar and can give you those lovely effects of images behind text etc. Drawbacks? After 30 days you can’t make any more changes without paying the big $$…plus pirating Adobe is getting harder and harder.

DESIGN TIPS

1. No matter how you lay it out, please do your sanity the favor of paying attention to giving yourself at least 1/2-inch margins all the way around the page so printing/copying doesn’t cut off any text. That would suck, right?

2. I recommend exporting final files as PDFs — especially if you’ll be printing from a computer that was NOT the one you designed on, to help avoid opening your project on another computer only to find out that it doesn’t have the special beautiful font you chose and your project looks wonky. Sometimes this happens with your PDF anyway, especially if you’re going through a “real” print service. If you pick a special font it can be advantageous to keep a copy of the fonts in the folder where your document is, just in case. But making PDFs is a good idea for your archiving purposes anyway.

Terra Incognita means uncharted land; and it was used by medieval cartographers to describe what happened “off the map,” and after a weekend of many kinds of inspiration, we chose the term because it reflected our artists’ intentions to ask ourselves to seek new skills and new ways of producing which reflect the world/s we traverse and the edges we play on.

What a DIY residency entails:

• getting out of your apartment/house –> everywhere but NYC, people have guest rooms!
• having to be accountable for at least some of your actions [this ain't wanderlust]
• scheduling art production goals and setting deadlines
• scheduling art-intake time: seeing other people’s work is important!
• a healthy sense of TOSS [Taking Our Selves Seriously]

One of my favorite aspects of a DIY residency are getting to choose/collaborate on the place, time, company and activities for the residency. One person may book the space, another do the menu, another drum up creativity exercises, and another map out locations to visit. I also appreciate that all it takes to create this kind of creative space is setting clear intention. And isn’t that the root of much of our great work anyway?

**I use “DIY Residencies” as a term to define the act of supplying myself with a new place, a quiet space and focused time to work diligently on a project. I feel great that it’s an off-the-grid experience. I have applied for a very few “real” residencies, and from what I can tell the time I spend on those applications would have been equally well-spent working on writing, so if I can accomplish the goal of *producing* with less work to find the place to do it, then all is as well as I could wish for.

We’ve given this workshop several times starting in 2007: at Women, Action and the Media at MIT/Boston, The Anarchist Bookfair in NYC, The Desiree Alliance Conference in SF and Chicago, and at the Hart Collective in Brooklyn.

To fun(d)raise to get ourselves to the USSF, we’re giving a series of BDSM 201 workshops: one on Bondage May 30, and one on Edge Play June 10. Now that’s intersectionality!!