We are happy to welcome Melissa Brice as the newest member of our team. Melissa joined Canary in September as a PR & Marketing Assistant, and she’s already worked on some of our biggest campaigns and has been a valuable addition to our staff.

Melissa is a graduate of Albright College in Reading, PA where she completed a duel major in Theatre/Communications with an emphasis in Public Relations & Marketing, and was awarded the Shirk Scholarship, Department of Theatre Award, and inducted as a lifetime member of the Jacob Albright Scholars, in addition to earning multiple Irene Ryan Nominations as well as graduating magna cum laude.

Melissa has previously worked in public relations for the Wyomissing Area School District and did event planning for Albright College. She also has several years of in-depth volunteer work experience with Reading-based non-profit organizations including Years of Tears, a Reading area victim-advocacy organization, and Kids Count Club, a challenged youth mentor program.

In addition to Public Relations and volunteer experience, Melissa has been a major contributor and integral force to the nationally-recognized Domino Players Theatre Company as a main-stage director, actress, and production team member under the study of Jeffrey Lentz. She has also served on the Executive Board for the company as Treasurer. Her fondest work includes: Lucy in The Threepenny Opera, Pitti-Sing in The Mikado, Cathy in The Last Five Years, Matt Damon in Matt & Ben, originating the role of Lydia in the World Premiere of You Are Here, and acting as a director for the productions Tick, Tick, Boom!, Shelebration, and Words, Words, Words.

Other fun facts:

• Recently married June 27, 2009 to Justin Trupp
• Studied voice lessons for 8 years
• Favorite Music: The Format, Jason Mraz, Johnny Cash, Damian Rice, Robert Plant, Nina Simone, The White Stripes, Lifehouse, Broadway Musicals….I could kind of go on forever…. It’s easier to ask what I don’t like. Answer: death metal and songs with poor grammar.
• Has performed in both Disney World and Disney Land
• Favorite plays are Matt & Ben, Becky Shaw, and Waiting for Godot.
• Favorite Musical: The Last Five Years
• Favorite Movie: Hamlet 2, The Birdcage, Funny Girl, Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog and The Hangover.
• TV: Boy Meets World, Glee, The Office, Clone High, How I Met Your Mother
• Siblings: Two brothers, 20 and 18.

The best thing about working at Canary: I’m at my best when working as a part of a team on something that I am passionate about, so the team, the environment, and the clients we represent provide the opportunity for me to learn and work to my highest potential.

Google Chrome lets you search lots of sites from the address bar in addition to Google.com by default. For example if you type “youtube” and hit tab you can limit a search to only youtube. I wanted to search drupal.org more quickly so I did a little hunting around for how to add my own list of frequently used sites to the list. Here’s the step-by-step for the mac version. I’m sure PC is very similar.

1. Open the Options panel by choosing “Preferences” from the Chrome menu, or by hitting “command-,”
2. Next to “Default Search”, choose Manage. This brings up the Search Engines management window.
3. Click the “+” on the bottom left to add your site. Below are the options I used to add Drupal.org

Name: drupal.org
Keyword: dr
URL: http://drupal.org/search/apachesolr_search/%s

Easy!

It’s official, the inaugural year of the Philadelphia-wide Philagrafika 2010 international print festival (a Canary PR client!), which celebrates the vital role of print in contemporary art, has made an imprint on The New York Times’ art critic Ken Johnson!

In Johnson’s review, which hit newsstands today, he calls the works presented in the festival’s core exhibition, The Graphic Unconscious, “provocative,” “entertaining,” and “fantastic.”

In his review, Johnson reflects, “Is printmaking dead, or is it reborn? Is it a meaningful category at all anymore for contemporary artists who revel in mechanically produced imagery of all kinds and fearlessly use and misuse whatever tools are at hand? If you think these questions matter — and there are good reasons to think they do — you need to plan a trip to Philadelphia.”

You can read Ken Johnson’s full New York Times review, here.

And, take a look at the accompanying Philagrafika 2010 photo gallery, here.

To check out the festival for yourself, Philagrafika 2010 runs through April 11 throughout Philadelphia. For participating venues and a full calendar of festival events, please visit: www.philagrafika2010.org.

I don’t know about you, but I am very excited for fall this year—warm sweaters, falling leaves, pumpkin-flavored everything, and Edgar Allan Poe. Yes, Edgar Allan Poe! On October 7, it was officially the 160^th anniversary of the death of Philadelphia’s one-and-only master of macabre. Ironically, this year is also the 200^th anniversary of his birth. To celebrate, our client, Brat Productions, has built a 13-room labyrinth of his most famous tales full of the suspense, literature, and violence for which the celebrated poet is infamous, for the world premiere of Haunted Poe.

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!

This week, everywhere I seem to look, I see Wild Things. The world is gearing up for the release of the much anticipated live-action film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze. And the excitement is growing here in Philadelphia too. Philly’s own Rosenbach Museum & Library (a Canary client!) is the sole repository of the original artwork of Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are and about a gazillion other books.

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.”

We’re seeking a smart, detail-oriented lover of the Arts to join the publicity & marketing team at our small but rapidly-growing public relations, marketing and graphic design company. This is an entry level position and an opportunity to work in a fun, informal but hardworking office, focusing on campaigns for some extraordinary artists and cultural organizations, from major theater and dance companies to museums, arts festivals and more.

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.

In our last post on designing with grids, we created an overlay layer in Photoshop that we use while designing so we can visualize the css grid we’ll eventually code while we’re designing. Today I’ve got another flavor of that, but this time we’re in the browser, and checking our CSS against the grid as we go.

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

StreetTalkin.com, Philadelphia’s internet video channel, recently filmed two interviews with 2009 nEW Festival Artists’ Gabrielle Revlock and Olive Prince. This year’s nEW Festival will feature premiere dance performances from June 3-7 and dance classes from June 1-19. Revlock will premiere SHARE!, a playful dance about a girl who loves to clap, while Olive Prince Dance’s OUT blends the lines between reality and make-believe. Check out the videos below to learn more about the two Philadelphia-based choreographers upcoming premieres.

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

Gabrielle Revlock

Olive Prince Dance

WHYY viewers can now view Philadelphia Young Playwrights (a Canary client!) in a WHYY Experience segment. The short film features Nirvana Rivera, Dwight Wilkins and Young Playwrights from the Meade school in Philadelphia. Watch the video online by clicking the image below and visit whyy.org/artsandculture/experience.html to view more Experience videos.

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