Last night was FBi Radio and Time Out’s Sydney Music Arts and Culture Awards (or, to those-in-the-know, the SMACs)!  This was the 2nd annual SMAC (ouch), dedicated to outing things-that-add-zing to Sydney.

It was a great night, with a great group of nominees (would love to see all these folks at the next IS!).  As FBi co-runs the SMACs, its a pity they can’t be nominated. The not-for-profit station is a real engine to making Sydney a more wonderful place – with a crew that’s full of heart and committed to boosting the good stuff. And of course, Time Out’s been great at making that good stuff easy to find.

Dan Ilic of Hungry Beast fame was the very game MC.

So, you’re probably thinking WHO WON, ALREADY?! The Marrickville collective running the Red Rattler, that’s who.

Being nominated was huge and it was great to have been in the company of such a worthy field.  Others in our category (Best Collective) included Even Books, Trust Fun and the Imperial Panda Festival. Check them out. They all look set to do interesting stuff in 2010.

Gregg

How sweet is this: Interesting South has been nominated for a Sydney, Music, Arts & Culture Award, under the category “Best Collective”. The awards are run by Sydney’s independent, community-based radio station, FBi and Time Out.

We’d love your support. It involves just a few mouse clicks and voters are entered in a draw for some great stuff.

Just hit the SMAC logo, below, to vote and get more info. Interesting South appears at the bottom of the page…

We wanted to share a note received from Sarah Garnett, founder of the Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library.

Thanks again,
All the best
Sarah Garnett
Founder
The Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library

As a result around $1,500 was split between 3 charities – The Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library, Mission Australia’s early learning initiatives and Kiva.  All chosen because in different ways, they’re all about spreading ideas.

IS relies on it’s community to make things work – speakers (who do it for the love of their topic), organisers (who do it for the love of sharing ideas) and the audience (who pay in terms of time and ticket money) – so the note’s really to all these people.

The number of people who’ve come up with words of support and encouragement to the organisers after last night has been great.

A couple things worth mentioning -

One person talked about not having read the programme, but when Tim L asked the audience to tell the person sitting next to them what they were interested in (hearing speakers speak about), he found it a bit uncomfortable:

Him: “Um, so, what interests you?”

Her: “Oral Sex”

(He was unaware of Prof. Basil Donovan’s upcoming talk entitled, Oral sex is the new black).  Anyway, what an icebreaker.

Like many of the team pulling together IS3, I missed dinner so I grabbed a banana at the interval.  I have to admit I had an uncomfortable moment when I realised I was chatting to the good professor chomping on a banana.  Suddenly I felt a bit self-conscious. The thought popped into my head “Freud would have a field day.”

This is the third event and each time I’m struck by how different things engage different people.  The same talk will ring totally different bells with different people.

Check out Tim Longhurst’s quick run through on the speakers, as told through Google’s Street View.

Hats off to Charlie Perry for not just thinking about someone who has something to put on stage, but following through and sending in a nomination form for IS4 (Charlie – Please send me your contact details.  Remo gave me an extra IS T-Shirt and it’s yours).

Everyone knows of someone with a tale to tell.  It might be quirky.  It might be challenging.  It might be odd.  It might be fun.  There are few forums where the criteria for talks is so open.  So if you know of someone who’s got something engaging to say, please click on the link with the topic form, fill it out and send it in.

There’s nothing decided yet for IS4 (date? venue?), but nothing helps move things along quicker than a bucket of stories that need to be told.

Gregg

for taking part in last evening’s 3rd Interesting South.  What a night!

I’ll write up more a little later (I’m clearing the car out of extension chords, a bell, a few left over bananas and mugs…) but really wanted to mention Tim Buesing and Lukasz Karluk of Holler.  A number of people commented after the break on their clever work, which was on display in the bar area.  Facing their TV monitors you could be instantly transformed into Ziggy Stardust…or a have a digital set of street-smart headphones magically dropped on your head.  The work was called Face OFF and the guys have done lots of other stuff that meld people into technology.

But Patrick Hofmann’s right: why talk in words, when seeing stuff is so much better! Here’s a Vimeo link to some of their other work!
Gregg

As of this morning (Wednesday, 12th August) the final ticket has been sold.
Thanks to all who bought tickets…we’re just over a week away!

Click here to learn more.

There are some crackers.

The organisers are meeting Wednesday evening and we should firm up the selected topics shortly after that (shooting for 48 hours later).

We’ll keep you posted.

Just a quick note to let potential speakers know we’ve extended the deadline for the submission of Proposed Speaker Topic Forms to Sunday, July19th.  A number of people asked for more time and it seemed only fair to extend this to everyone.

If there was someone you thought might be interested in speaking – someone with something out of the ordinary to share – there’s still time. But Sunday is the deadline.

The form is very short, with only about a paragraph of graft, summarising the topic.