You will want to be at the Heidelberg November 1st to get a glimple of the Future. I saw this poet at iWPS and let me tell you, we are lucky to have him. His bio is courtest of his website.
Future
…Rated 9th in the World [2005 IWPS], Spoken-Word artist “FUTURE” soon to debut album is a must for all real poetry lovers ….Future’s great resolve and hard work earned him the title of 2004 Redemption Poetry Slam Champion in the Detroit region. Taking the title in the nationwide poetry slam contest that was sponsored by FX Movies was just the beginning for him. Future was also a recently showcased artist for the BET/Pantene “Total You Tour†in Detroit and Washington D.C. He shared the stage during the tour with talented artists like Nikki Giovanni, hip-hop pioneer MC Lyte, BET anchor Jacque Reid, Grammy-winning gospel recording artist Yolanda Adams, and comedienne Myra J…FUTURE is not only blessed with Spoken Word but also as a conscious rapper and actor who will be acting in the BET “Aids awareness” movie shot in Washington DC in Nov 4th 2005…. His character’s name is “Q” and he will be playing next to super star Actor Malcom-Jamal Warner.
It will be the farewell show for Almighty Ray, for which we have invited him to perform a set of his unique and highly entertaining pieces. Don’t miss it!
So, if we ran a couple of monthly podcasts as a test, would anyone be happy to signup for them? Maybe an edited and abbreviated version of stuff we record at the Ann Arbor Poetry Slam. If you are interested, give me a shout at steve@thewordsmithpress.com or just blah, blah about it here if you have access.
What follows is from the PSi Forums. I re-post it here for my own record and convenience. -hellslam
POST-INVESTIGATION RESULTS OF FINALS NIGHT EVENT
August 13, 2005
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Compiled by Scott Woods, October 15, 2005 with oversight by Steve Marsh
All debates had by and issues voted on by the officers of PSI’s Executive Council:
Scott Woods, Delrica Andrews, Taneka Stotts, Kimberly Simms, Henry Sampson, Taylor Mali
(Phil West recused himself from the voting process)
Remaining EC involved in discussion only:
Mike Henry, Bill MacMillan, Steve Marsh, Don McIver
(Terry Creech recused himself from discussion)
INTRODUCTION
Everything about this issue and this process is practically new, so we spent a lot of time and energy trying to cover as many bases as possible for this issue, and any future issues like it.
The process looked like this:
1) Upon arriving home from NPS, I mobilized the EC to address this issue with almost 100% focus. So we’ve not spent our time on much else except necessary day-to-day.
2) The EC went about discussing how we should collect evidence and information regarding the event. It was determined that I, with Steve Marsh as back-up, would contact any necessary participants and collect written reports from them. Also if footage was available I was to gather that as well. I was then to compile all of that information into a report for the EC to discuss, debate and vote on.
3) Video footage was obtained from Gabrielle Boulianne, who streamed four angles of video online of what happened onstage. This video was scrutinized heavily, and was the basis for determining who in fact did what, and when they did it (save for what happened afterwards backstage).
4) We agreed on a process to determine who should be voting, how we should be voting and on what we should be voting. We spent a great deal of time crafting an infrastructure that seems to have worked, and constantly looked for the loopholes in the process.
5) We voted, discussed, and in one case, re-voted.
6) We weighed any possible mitigating circumstances, which led to the design of community service options for most of the participants.
7) I compiled post-investigation information into this report.
8 ) We have released this report to the members, thus completing our efforts in regard to the events described.
9) We compiled a list of resultant considerations (further rules, changes to the Code of Honour, etc.) that we’ll work on for the future.
What you have here are the results. The EC has all 20+ reports from individuals on file and have opted to keep that information on an EC need-to-know basis due to its sensitive nature. Also, of the original investigation I compiled from these reports and all available evidence (video), I have culled from it the chain of events that occurred.
Scott Woods
President, PSI
October 15, 2005
We have future from Flint featuring for the November show, and he is really more than enough poet for your 5 bucks, but we have more. The one called Almighty Ray will giving us his farewell performance, as he is moving to the City of Angeles to pursue his acting career. Holder of the title: “The Worst Poet in Ann Arbor” in previous years, Ray is known such pieces as Big Fat Cat and Pepper Steak. I say “known” when I could say “reviled”. Ray’s style is at once hilarious and horrifying. He has filled a void here in Ann Arbor left when we lost Hoppa the Hip Hop Molester. Who will fill the void left when Ray is gone ? Who could fill the shoes of a man like Ray ?
In reality, I’ll miss Ray. He is funny even when he is sober, though that is rare. Ann Arbor will not see his like again, I think, and we are worse for it. Come see his Farewell show November 1st, and wish him well.
Oh me. We have a new look again. It must look like I am being indecisive when it comes to the design of a2slam.com. I assure you that is not the case. The history looks something like this:
- The Original A2Slam Black site - Dark and uninviting, when I learned a little more about color I changed it to something more friendly.
- The Blue and White - A kinder, gentler brighter site. Easy layout, but still irritating to update
- The CMS - A lovely install of CPGNuke, an open source PHP content management system. The design was a little “techy” but it was super easy to update and all seemed well with the world. That is, until it stopped working suddenly, presumeably when the host made some change to the server and didn’t feel the need to let me know. I can live with that, as our uptime is tight, and you can’t beat the price.
- Back to the old Blue and White - I did a nice rollback to where we were before. Again, updating is a manual process.
- The New Hotness - (I hope) I found a highly rated, reliable PHP blog that will work with mySQL 3.* . Will this last ? Your guess is as good as mine.
Thanks for being so patient, I hope to update more as this should make it easier.