Thanks for joining us and welcome to Open Infra Live, the Open Infra Foundation's hour-long interactive show sharing production case studies, open source demos, industry conversations and the latest updates from the global open infrastructure community. We are live here on Thursdays at 14UTC streaming on YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook. My name is Kendall Nelson from the Open Infra Foundation and I'll be your host for today's episode. Like I mentioned, we're streaming live so we'll be saving some time at the end of the episode for Q&A so if you have any questions throughout the episode on anybody's topics, please feel free to drop questions in the comments section throughout the show and we'll answer as many as we can at the end. First, I want to give a huge thanks to the Open Infra Foundation members who make the Open Infra Live series and so much more like today's release that we'll be talking about possible. And today we're gonna be talking about OpenStack Z which is the 26th version that was actually released only yesterday. So we have some awesome guests today that I will introduce in a moment here but first data, who doesn't love data, right? So the 26th release, OpenStack Z will introduce 15,500 changes. We really couldn't do it without our amazing community so 710 contributors this release from 140 different organizations which is awesome diversity and even better is the 44 countries that get represented by those 710 contributors across the 27 weeks that we worked on this release. So super, super excited to share everything that happened in Z with you today but obviously we love data so let's keep going. Over the last 12 years and 26 releases we've seen insane amounts of growth of OpenStack usage. So right now we just pulled data from our most recent user survey which shows that there are over 40 million cores in production which is 166% growth since 2020 even let alone the 12 years that we've been working together as a community but since 2012 our community has merged over 576,000 changes from over 8,900 contributors. It's crazy how global our community is and enormous. And we couldn't do it without our sponsors like I said before so we can call out global and growing users of OpenStack like Bloomberg and Walmart, CERN, who doesn't love CERN? I love a good science experiment, OVH cloud, Line, Workday, China Unicom, China Mobile the list goes on and on. So many different kinds of users from all different industries so it's very cool to see all the applications and uses of OpenStack. So moving on, we have an updated map here. OpenStack is obviously a conglomeration of a lot of services for different services. It's a very big complicated sometimes project. So we have updated our OpenStack map to remove some projects that have retired and we actually have added one of the projects that we'll be talking about later today, the Venus project. So we're hopeful that we'll be able to add more in the future but we do our best to keep this up to date so people can have a nice overview of what an OpenStack cloud could look like and all the different options of services available. First up today, we have the Manila project and we have the PTL actually, Carlos Silva to tell us about what happened in Manila during Zed. Take it away. Thank you, Kendall. Yeah, hello, I'm Carlos. The current PTL for OpenStack Manila, the OpenStack shared file system as a service and today I walk you through the highlights of Manila during the Zed cycle and we'll share some of our plans for the 23.1. Also known as NLOP cycle. So starting with some highlights from Zed, the first one to mention is that Manila reached feature parity between the native client and OpenStack client and now users and administrators are able to use OpenStack shared commands to communicate with Manila. The only missing bit is the API micro version auto negotiation and this means that to use the release, this release of the OpenStack client with an older shared file system API service, users will need to set the API version in their environments. This could be done by configuring the cloud config specifying the shared file systems API version or via shell environment using the US shared API version or even via CLI override. After this last bit is covered, we intend to add a delegation warning to the native Manila client comments and last on this topic, I would like to thank all of the incredible Manila contributors for this achievement. It's a long time since we first started this effort and it's great to see the results we managed to achieve. Another feature to be consumed, available to be consumed after the Zed release is the metadata API for shared snapshots. While creating these snapshots, now it's possible to specify metadata. This is a recently introduced feature in Manila but the workflow might already be known to Manila consumers. It works in a similar way as the Manila shares metadata and administrators are able to update snapshots with some metadata keys and values and delete the metadata and filter the snapshots that contain specific metadata. And we have also improved scalability with this FFS NFS driver. This FFS NFS driver received a couple of updates in order to enhance scalability. The NFS cluster protocol helper has been added to allow users to consume and export FFS shares over a cluster NFS gateway. This presents many advantages since the operator no longer needs to maintain their own instances of NFS Ganesha apart of the SAP cluster. For this, we now communicate with SAP manager using the NFS plugin. For new driver additions, we have a new driver that was wedded to Manila and the players are now able to use their MacroSAN storage systems through the recently added MacroSAN driver in Manila. If you want to check the availability of features, please check the support matrix that's linked on the slides. And over the Z-cycle, we have also seen some replication enhancements for the NetApp driver and the NetApp on-top driver for Manila is now doing more accurate checks to determine if our replica is in sync with their parent share or not. And please check the release notes for more information on this. Another big update for Manila was that the RBAC defaults of the shared file systems as a service Manila APIs have been updated to remove system scope personas. This has been done in concert with other OpenStack services and in reaction to operator feedback that they use of the system scope introduces backward compatibilities in existing workflows. The new defaults support the use of scope. However, no RBAC rule by default includes the system scope. At this time, we do not recommend the use of system scope personas to interact with the shared file systems as a service API and because it's largely untested. And last but not least on the Z-cycle highlights, we have managed to tackle a bunch of bugs and there are also some other upgrade bits. So you can check all of those updates in the release notes that's linked on this tag. And for 23.1, also known as NLOP, there are some maintenance updates for us. The first one would be the OpenStack client updates which is getting the version auto negotiation working so we can add the deprecation warning to our native client. Also covering features on Manila UI to get closer to feature parity since Manila UI is falling a bit behind of the features we currently can provide to consumers. Adding more coverage to the OpenStack SDK, continuing the migration we have been doing from root rep to preps app, get more tempest test coverage for RBAC since we currently have some testing and a job for the GHSS pulse mode but we want to get more testing for the GHSS rule. If you'd like to hear more about those plans or even bring up your own, we'll be glad to have you in our PTG sessions. So please, if you have some or if you would like to give some feedback, we will also have one operator hour. So feel free to join us and if you want to add your tops to the PTG planning, either page linked or both. So yeah, that's the updates for Manila. Thank you for having me. Thank you Carlos, yes. It's awesome to see all of the hardware enablement that's happening in Manila, adding new drivers and this and that. Speaking of hardware enablement, next up we actually have the Ironic project and the newly elected PTL Jay Popner. Hey, thank you so much, Kendall. And that sounds exciting for Manila. I look forward to seeing that in the world. So first of all, these updates are usually like celebratory things because we got something done but I have the sad news of being able to present that we're gonna be honoring Ilya Tingoff with this open stack release of Zed. He was a long time Ironic contributor. We've dedicated the release to his memory to be specific with Ironic. Ilya put a lot of hard work in making Sushi happen which is the library that Ironic provides for communication with the Redfish hardware standard. And if you're using any of those drivers you owe a debt of thanks to Ilya and that's why we are gonna honor him with this Zed release. And so we've got the sad stuff out of the way. Let's talk a little bit about what we've done during the release. So first of all, just a few numbers to sort of talk about. This is the 18th release of OpenStack containing Ironic. We were first incubated in Ice House and we're all the way through to Zed. Ironic have 43 different contributors across all our projects. And one thing I wanted to take the opportunity to plug here is our intermediate cycle bug fix releases. We push a release every two months in the cycle even though most open stack projects don't because we do have some Ironic users who like using Ironic standalone such as our integration with Metal 3. So this is sort of a fun thing if you're someone who's using or thinking about using Ironic standalone you can also check out one of our bug fix releases and become one of the over 6,000 people who've consumed them since the Zed cycle started. But let's talk about what we've done. The first thing, and this is sort of a not an endpoint but a pretty far milestone in a journey we've been making for a while where we have support for self-service bare metal as a service. And what that means is Ironic traditionally was an administrative API used by administrators and by no but a provision servers and we're slowly moving that toward being an API that can be exposed to more people to more projects and have some multi-tenant awareness. And along that way, we added the project scope manager role to our back model, project scope admins and managers can create and delete nodes which can be tagged with ownership to their project. And when you provision a node as a member Ironic can be configured to automatically mark that node as leased by that project. These are all sort of important things for reflecting the state of who has what checked out in a multi-tenant Ironic world. And this is really exciting. I can't wait to see what operators are able to do with this in the real world. The other thing and the next thing on the slide and I'll say that this is sort of a constant for Ironic. This sort of work is never done that we do in the background to make hardware work seamlessly when provisioning. In this case, a few highlights that I found specifically where we've got some more support for SNMP-controlled PDUs. These are particularly good for development but we do have some people who use those in production for power control. We've got some security enhancement mainly certificate validation work and SSL for some of our BMC back ends and some of that security work also includes making it so that if you change the password on a rev fish BMC that your Ironic connection is now able to figure that out and keep access going. So this is pretty exciting and I'm just, I just pulled out a few things here but we're always making the hardware support better and Ironic really appreciates our hardware partners who help test these features in CI with the real hardware and help us develop them. And this is another one where we're constantly working on this. This is constantly at top of mind for Ironic developers and that sort of operator quality of life. So there's a few things here we've done to try to make your life better if you're running OpenStack Ironic. You can now take our configuration where you can set specific kernel command line options based on your environment and set those per node. You can now actually template in the default values there. So if you've ever had to add a string to make a Linux installer boot or one of our RAM disk agents boot, you'll see that this is gonna make it a lot easier to do that sort of tweaking. We added a new denial of service prevention mechanism which can be configured to limit concurrent deployments and cleaning to prevent a disgruntled user, disgruntled user admin with access or malicious user from chewing through all your hardware really quickly. That comes out of the box configured with very high limits. If this is a feature you're concerned in, I strongly recommend you go read the release notes and make sure you tune that to a value that makes sense for your environment. Otherwise, the limits are high enough, probably is not gonna impact your day to day use. Another one is our kickstart driver which allows you to, instead of deploying an image, you can deploy a kickstart installer. It's been greatly improved. We're now testing parts of it in CI and we support deploying directly from a repository instead of having to use an image directly from there. So that's pretty exciting as well. And sort of the final thing we're calling out here and there's a lot of enhancements around this area. I sort of pulled one out, but ironic cleaning can now be configured to skip devices. So this means if you have a persistent bare metal machine that has a lot of data on it, you don't want that data to be erased, but you wanna make sure you can clear off the operating system and prepare it for the next install, we support that. And you can sort of see that we're trying to reach for both sides of spectrum, the people who need that enhanced support for a single tenant and some people who need that multi-tenant support. So we're trying to make it work for everyone. The last thing I'm gonna talk about in terms of highlights are we've made some improvements for those standalone users I spoke of before. Ironic now supports controlling a DNS mask DHCP server directly. Before this, you always, even if you were using Ironic and standalone need to deploy a neutron or DHCP server of your own, now Ironic's happy to manage that if you're using a standalone. As I mentioned before, we did release two bug fix releases at the two and four month mark of the Zed cycle given the standalone users some early access some of the features we've talked about. And we've also taken some time with those Kickstarter improvements to document how to use it if you're a standalone user. So that's pretty exciting if you're someone who's interested in the hardware provisioning side but is not looking for a whole cloud stack. So finally, we have to kind of talk about things that we removed and deprecated. Sometimes you've got to prune the tree back a little bit to make sure that we're able to support things. Long term and I'm just gonna reference a few of these. We had some things that were deprecated and some things that have been deprecated that have now been removed. So when you're upgrading your Ironic installation think about this. We've deprecated support for Syslinux based bootloaders that includes ISO Linux and Pixie Linux. These are basically becoming unsupported by upstream they haven't been touched since 2019 and they only see BIOS methods booting. And so what this also means is that some of our support for legacy style BIOS booting is gonna have to go away with those tools going out of support. And that means that if you want to use legacy style BIOS booting with virtual media you're not gonna be able to do that for very long as we've deprecated that in Zed. Some things that we previously deprecated that we've now removed. We don't support instance network booting. So to be clear about what that is, Ironic used to support a feature where after you deploy an instance you're able to continue Pixie booting into the operating system you've deployed onto that node that feature's been removed. And now when you provision machines with Ironic they're always gonna be configured to support local boot. And this was already our recommended and default configuration. So unless you specifically ever turned on or relied on this feature it's not something you have to worry about. One of the big reasons that existed was actually support for trusted boot. But with the removal of instance network booting we are gonna remove trusted boot. And again, this isn't to be confused with things like UEFI secure boot or similar technologies. This is a very specific trusted boot implementation. I'll note that we've got some of the folks here who have slides on their topics for PTG or what's coming up next. With Ironic we haven't quite nailed that down yet but I expect next cycle will continue to focus heavily on operator quality of life and particularly making sure our failure scenario around conductors are improved greatly. But thank you very much and hope to see you around if you've got any questions. Thank you so much for all of that information. It's a really sad open sack will feel the loss of Ilya. So dedicating the release to him I think was a good gesture. We appreciate all of the effort and work he put in and we'll miss him for sure. So our next topic, next awesome open sack service is Nova and we have Sylvain the PTL here to talk about that. Hey, thanks Kendall. So very briefly, thanks for joining us. So next slide please. Before discussing about the features that we implemented for that specific cycle, a few numbers. I guess you'll be interested in knowing about how many blueprints we merge. So as you can see, we merge six blueprints from 14 that were accepted. To be clear, the other ones were either not having new changes from the owners or we also had some problems for them. So basically it was not a review issue. It was more like the point that some changes were needed some more time. So about the bugs, I also looked at Garrett. How many bug fixes we merged during this cycle? As you can see 45. And I also looked at Garrett for the previous release which was yoga. And as you can see, we merged more bug fixes. So that's actually very good, I think. Also, maybe you don't know, but every week someone from the Nova community tries to look at the new bug reports that are created at the first week of Zed, we are having 28 of untreated bug reports. And thanks from all the folks that we are looking at them every week, at the end of the cycle, we only have five of them. So that doesn't mean that we merged only a few bugs. No, it just means that when you create a bug report by Nova, you're pretty sure that every week we look at it. And either we say to you, actually you need to provide more points or basically we say, okay, it's valid. So at least you know whether what you ask for Nova was okay or not. So if you find a problem with Nova, just provide a bug report and we look at that. Thanks. As you can see, even if some contributors haven't provided implementation for Zed, we have the same number of contributors. And as I wrote also, thanks folks that, thanks Nova folks, because thanks to you, as you see, the metrics were very good for Zed. Next slide, please. So what we did for Zed, as you can see, one of them was for being able to have Nova supporting new virtual IOMMU devices. So what you can do now is to be able when you create an instance to ask by a flavor or by image to have a virtual IOMU device. And basically the guest will have it. Also, windows instances could have better behavior because now we use new enlightments from Hyper-V. Maybe you also, maybe you already know, in yoga, it was possible to create an instance that was using VDPA port, VDP port, sorry. Now with Zed, eventually it's possible to live migrate that specific instance that will outplug the VDPA port. Or suspend the instance, which was not possible before, or to attach or detach the VDPA port. We also merged something which is nice. When you're rebuilt, it's not possible to rebuild a B.A.V. instance. What we named a B.A.V. instance is basically an instance having a volume attached as a root disk. Now you can basically create a virtual IOMU device now you can basically rebuild it and it will basically ask Cinder to re-image the volume. Now you can also unshell an instance by passing a new parameter, which is basically a host. And eventually also now it's no longer possible to generate a keeper because we had problems with some OSs so we preferred to deprecate and to stop supporting to generate the keepers. You can only import a public heap by now. Next slide please. So we will be discussing at the PTG which is in two weeks about a few topics. I wrote a few of them. We will be also discussing about other topics that are not here by now. But as you see at least what I would like to discuss is about some systemity efforts that we could work for this cycle. At least for example, if it will be possible to modify a CPU state like for example having a core to pass offline. If it will be also possible to integrate SkaFound, you probably you maybe haven't seen SkaFound the SkaFound project at some Berlin summit that we had six months before. It will be providing power metrics from host and for the instance. But that's not only on the only topic that we'll be discussing. We really want to help ironic about the problems they have when other computers are going down. We also want to continue to work on the next steps for the TC effort upstream about secure air back. Hopefully we could be starting phase three. We don't know yet. We still need to discuss about what will be the next steps. We'll also want to discuss how to basically just to be clear by yoga, you haven't seen it, but now we have PCI devices in inventories in placement API. By envelope, what we'd like to have is to have the scheduler asking placement for basically scheduling instances asking for PCI devices. And we'll also be wanting to discuss about a few network related features like FQDNINs metadata, mutable MTU for guest, and so on. Also, PTG is not only for this thing about features. PTG is also for discussing about other stuff like you see. As a PTL, I really want to see how we could help contributors to join us because we know that Nova is a huge problem, but if we can help contributors to ramp up, it will be definitely nice. Also, last point, that's the first PTG that will have some specific time slots with operators. So let me discuss that next slide, please. So as you see, we have sessions in between Tuesday and Friday in two weeks from now. But if you're an operator and you really want to discuss with the Nova community, you are more than welcome to attend our sessions because we basically have two of those, one on Tuesday and one on Wednesday. You can find the logistics in the Tepad or you can also look at the PTG schedule. But by the way, Condal, we discussed about the PTG at the end of the presentation. So thanks, folks. If you have questions, just ping me on the, just ping me. Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much, Solan. We will have time for questions at the end. So if you have any, drop them in your chats. Otherwise, all of the project representatives have tried to include their IRC nicknames if they have those for contact and there's always the public mailing list as well. So we look forward to your questions. Thank you. Next up, we have the Neutron project and Laos to tell us about the Z-improvements that happened in Neutron. Yeah, thank you very much, Condal. So hello, everybody. I'm Laos Skotona. I was the PTL of Neutron in the last two cycles. And first of all, I would like to use this opportunity to say thank you for everybody who participated in this release and of course the last few dozens. We really encourage everybody to participate in our weekly meeting on IRC or just come and ask on the Neutron channel or write a mail to the mail list. We try to answer every question or just file a bug or jump into the PTG, of course, as Silvan and the guys previously also mentioned that the PTG is a really good opportunity to meet with the team and discuss any questions which you have. Yeah, so let's go to see what interesting things happened in that cycle. I would like to first highlight that we have again a Neutron stadium project back from retirement. This time it's Neutron fire was a service a team jumped in and they are willing to maintain this project and actually they would like to make it compatible with OVL, so it's really good news that we have life in these old projects and these are still useful for customers. After that, I would like to highlight two news, interesting news from OVL. So from there, the OVL supports minimum bandwidth QS rule and placement allocation for it. So it's now not just SRIOV OVLs, but you can use placement allocation for QS ports with QS policy with OVL. And from Z, OVL support bare metal provisioning with OVLs built in DHCP server for IPv4. So it's another possibility for you to use your deployments for your users. Some SRI news, we have NDP proxy for LZ routers in Neutron. That's actually interesting IPv6 feature and it can be useful to replay as the IPv6 prefix delegation feature in Neutron. Sadly IPv6 prefix delegation is not maintained and actually we set it deprecated in the Z cycle because of lack of testing, lack of and maintain the backend for it. So please check NDP proxy if you need some IPv6 feature like that. From Z, you can use port ranges for floating IP, port forwarding API. So that makes your life much easier if you would like to have port forwarding for your floating IPs. For QS, we have a new rule type, packet per second that's again a kind of a trend. So we have now a new QS rule type in every cycle. This one actually, this packet per second that's for OVS. So if you use OVS driver, you can check out this new rule type. Yeah, I would like to mention here a few things which are not really features, but anyway we've heard on it and it will be useful in the future. So it seems that we finished the SQL Alchemy 2 adoption, not just in Neutron, but in the stadium projects also. So I hope that that will make our projects more future-proof. And actually I just would like to mention here a set news and that perhaps will not be really surprising for you that Linux Bridge driver is not maintained. So we decided in the last BTG that we create a new flag in the config and that we mark unsupported, not maintain the features in Neutron 3.0, with the experimental flag, that's actually a config option. So if you would like to use Linux Bridge driver, you have to explicitly say in your config that, hey, I know that this is experimental, but I want to use this. So that's actually we have no really maintainers for it. There was no contributor for Linux Bridge driver in the last cycles. The CI is lacking resources. So actually there is nobody to fix Linux Bridge bugs. So it's a good opportunity to, if you would like to use this driver, Linux Bridge driver, please come and we are open to help you with the experience and advices and even resources, but come and try to maintain it if you really need this driver. Yeah, but as I continued the beta with data, but I tried to be short with this. So just a few things from the life of Neutron team. So we discussed a little more than 13 RFEs, RFEs for request for and husband, that's a lightweight feature proposal. And for some, we even requested the author to push a specification if the feature was something more difficult. So if you have anything in mind and it seems much more difficult than a bug, please comment and file an RFE on the launchpad so it's basically a bug with the tag RFE and we discussed that during the driver's meeting. We have every week a driver's meeting where we discuss these proposals. We reviewed and accepted five specifications. We have more under review for the coming cycles. We also worked on the secular bug thing in this cycle. So based on the user feedback, we adopted as it was also mentioned by Sylvain and Carlos. So it was also a job for us. And we have the never-ending story of CI rationalization and the improvement. So that's just the background of what we are doing. We are not reviewing your features. Yeah, perhaps a few words for what we are planning for the next cycle. Yeah, so as you heard, we will have the PTG in two weeks. Please come and you can find the Etherpad of Neutron if you visit the Popendewa PTG site. So please check the Etherpad at any lines if you would like to discuss something or just jump in and we can discuss your questions. Actually, we have a few interesting topics already which can be useful for the next cycles. So it seems that Neutron will work on this quota class implementation which already done more or less with Nova and Cinder. So we continue with their experiences to have this feature also in Neutron. There will be discussions for DNS improvements. That's an interesting topic in the last cycles and it's useful for everybody, not just for big but small deployments and edge sites also. And actually we will discuss or we plan to work on the migration from Python Neutron client. Actually, we deprecated the CLI part of Python Neutron client and we use Python OpenStack client but the Python bindings are still there in Python Neutron client and our plan is to move that totally and deprecate that also in the future. I don't know and use OpenStack SDK instead of that. So a lot of projects still use the bindings from Python Neutron client like Heat, Horizon, I think Nova also and perhaps there's others and we would like to start at least in this cycle to move these projects and make them use OpenStack SDK. Yeah, that's it from me. Thanks for your attention. Lots of work to be done but lots of things got accomplished too. So it's awesome to see everything that Neutron did during Zed and will continue during Antelope. Thank you so much for joining us today. Bye. So next up we have the Skyline project which is actually a newer service in OpenStack. It's a modern dashboard that we're working on getting in place to replace Horizon actually. But at this point it's listed as an emerging technology by the technical committee. So it's not quite ready to use in production yet but it is full of features already and ready for testing and feedback and more. I'll let Woohoo dive into everything that they accomplished in Zed. Okay, could you back to last page? Okay, I'm from China. My name is Wen Sheng and thank you all. Now Skyline has the first official version released in Zed, very exciting. At the very beginning Skyline is very, very strange to OpenStack. It uses async.io, use sub-modules, use multiple modules in one repo, use Poetry rather than Pipe. And it also didn't use the Oslo libraries. It's hard to say good or bad. It's just different. Different means not simple. So we reflect and reflect. And finally it seems it looks like other OpenStack modules. Okay, so it grew up from a young nine color deer to adult one and next page. Okay, thanks. This is the new logo, thanks for the design and in Zed, we support OpenStack trim and plus way integration with required OpenStack module is keystones, Nova, Neutral, Glance. Without this, you cannot use Skyline. And it also supports optional OpenStack module like single, Octavia, Manila, Ironic, Heat, Zun, Magnum, and Chou. You can enable or disable with the configuration. And we also support integration with the Prom API. We support OpenID SSO logins and we support other system config, let the APIs for Skyline. Skyline is separate to pass a console and an API server. The console is right by React, simple React without Node.js, it's very simple. And the API server is the first API I think, I think APIs. And we removed the adapter layers in Horizon and make it, it could be more simple and more light. Okay, next page, thanks. And for the plans, thanks very much for our developers and all the users, especially we thanks for the TOKY contributors for us. They compute the Zen, Magnum, and Chou modules. And in next release, we will do the colliance for integration. Maybe also have the HM chat, maybe, maybe not. And we want to do some refactor for the Skyline console, make it more easier to develop for other OpenStack modules support like Sahara or others. And we also will do some stress testing different with Horizon. Horizon is very, very successful. And Skyline is, we still move on. And I think, I don't know what to say maybe the more user, the more contributor and the better Skyline can achieve. And welcome for all of the contributors. Welcome for all of the users. Every comments is the help for us. And thank you all, that's all from me. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's really exciting to see this new dashboard and we're excited to see when it gets moved out of the emerging technology phase. It'll be really, really exciting. So if you have any feedback after you go and play around with the Skyline dashboard, please share it with the team. I'm sure they would love all the feedback that they can get. Awesome. So next up today, we have the Venus project, which is kind of your one-stop shop for logging. It's also a new service in OpenSack, but it's been fully released. And it was one of the projects that we added to that OpenSack map back at the very beginning of our show today, if you remember that. So I will let Liye take it away for Venus and Zed. Thank you. And hello everyone. I'm Pong Liye. I'm from Isabel, China. It's a pleasure to introduce the project of Venus. You'll need to go retrieval, storage, and analysis logs on the OpenSack platform. We developed the OpenSack Log Management Model Venus, which provides the one-step solution for log collection, cleaning, indexing, analysis, and alarm with addition, repart generation, and other requirements to help operator and mentor it quickly, so retrieval problems. Zed is the first release of the Venus. The replacement of Venus in Zed is as follows. It supports developing that div stock are classable. When it is deployed, it can be assessed and used in horizon project. We added the horizon display plug here for Venus that named Venus dashboard. We can choose whether to deploy it or not. It supports multi-dimensionals, retrieval, or logs of stack components, such as host level, service, tenant, request the ID, and so on. We add some operation and maintenance ones page, such as the rotation time of the ES data. The background task will be automatically executed according to the config setting on the page. We add the Venus API document to OpenSack document so that users can be better integrated with the Venus project. We have also developed some other future, such as developed the program to show some typical error statistics through the page, such as MariaDB connection errors, Lebanon Q connection errors, and other errors. Another page, the highlight for Antelope. In Antelope, we will focus more on error log in the query and analysis, scenario log analysis, get the error log model for each model and form them into templates, so that it can be prompt when these errors occur. The anomaly detection logs. Algorithms based on rows, such as regular expressions, keyword width, and AC, all to automata are used to realize automatic data query or cloud platform error logs. That's all. Welcome to Venus and looking forward to your commitments and the strategy for the project. My spoken English is poor. If you have any question about Venus, please email me at any time. That's all, thank you. Wow, yeah, that was a lot of information. Lots of things happening in Venus. And obviously everybody is gonna be moving on to the next release, Antelope. So there's a lot of work to still be done. Thank you so much, Leah, for sharing all these updates today. So unfortunately, our next presenter wasn't able to be here today. So I'll just kind of give a little bit of an overview and we will be sharing these slides after the show as well. So any links that people provided in their slides, you'll be able to access and look over what all we covered here today. So the interoperability working group sets a base number of requirements, capabilities, code, and tests that have to pass to be open-sac compatible. So this is something that a lot of our vendor companies are really interested in. But the number one ask from the group is that they need help because this is like an add-on to the regular open-sac services, kind of a different sort of group of people and there's a lot of things that need to be maintained. So if you're interested in getting involved, please contact Martin Kopeck, he wasn't able to be here today, but we appreciate everything he put together for us. And like I said before, the slides will be available so you'll be able to read through everything we just quickly tapped through. But as just about everybody mentioned here today, the project team's gathering is happening in less than two weeks now. It's crazy, it's a virtual event and it's free to attend. I do really wanna encourage all operators watching this stream to attend, particularly those specific operator sessions that Sylvain mentioned during his session or during his Nova update. So all of like anybody involved in any project or open-sac in general, there are definitely going to be things that we would love your feedback on and you can influence the future of open-sac. So come and represent your use case, give feedback and let's forge ahead into Anilope and we look forward to seeing you all there. So I think we're just about out of time today. I don't know that we got a whole lot of questions, but everybody is available offline on the project mailing list. Otherwise, all of the PTLs are available. Please go check out the Zed release. We all worked so hard on it and we're very proud of what we've accomplished. If you have an idea for a future episode of Open Infra Live, we definitely wanna hear from you. Submit your ideas at ideas.openinfra.live. And maybe we'll see you here on a future show. Thanks again to today's guests and we'll see you all in the next Open Infra Live. Thank you everyone.


Okay, thank you. This is our final panel of afternoon. Thank you all for staying with us for what's really been amazing. Thank you guys. So our last panel is moving on from Yuri's into deeper into the 1980s and beyond. So I have the really amazing honor and privilege of being on the stage with these incredible women. So Kelly Jones in the middle, you've already met. Art historian, curator, writer extraordinaire. To her left, her sister Lisa Jones, writer, playwright, journalist. Yes. And I believe that their mother, Hedy Jones, is in the audience. I don't know where you are. She's over there. Also an incredible woman, author, and we're very lucky. Thank you for joining us, Hedy. And finally, Lorna Simpson, photographer, filmmaker, painter. First African American woman to be included in the Venice Biennial in 1990, which whatever, that was not... We don't need to get into that. But these are incredible people and I'm incredibly honored to be here. We're here to talk about the 1980s. They're all New Yorkers also. Just put that out there. The Rodeo Caldonia High Fidelity Performance Theater Collective, which is a mouthful. So we're just going to say Rodeo Caldonia or Rodeo for now on. So the first image we have is this incredible photograph of them that appeared in Interview Magazine in July 1987 in an issue called The Hip Issue, which was profiling kind of up and coming talents in New York. So this was in the stage and screen performance. So you can see Lorna on the right and the white dress. And to her left is Lisa. And many other members of Rodeo, I think, are here. So I'm just going to ask you guys right now, if you were in Rodeo and you're here today, can you please stand up so we can see you? I think they're all right here. And these three women are also all on this photograph. So Alva Rogers on the left with the flower. And Green Young, I believe on the left, Neely, yes. And Candace Hamilton, there you are. Is that you? Okay. Right behind Alva. So thank you all for joining us as well. So Rodeo was, and I'm drawing very strongly from Lisa's book, Bulletproof Diva, which you should buy and read if you have not, was a loose confederation of young black women in New York in the 1980s based firmly in Brooklyn, Fort Green. Artists, writers, actors, dancers, musicians, screenplayers, screen designers, set designers, all sorts of creative people together. And I think something that is, if you were wondering about the name, Caldonia, a blues term, meaning a hard-headed or independent woman, and Rodeo, you know, for the Rodeo, the athleticism and the social space. So quoting from Lisa, they wanted to get out in public and act up to toss off the expectations laid by our genitals, our melanin count, and our college degrees. And so I want to very quickly, what we're going to do, I'm going to read something from Lisa's book that describes their relationship to feminism. Then Lisa is going to read something she prepared and then we will continue through the slideshow. And I read this because in this show we are kind of drawing a lineage from the collective practices and the early days of the 1960s, the Black Arts Movement, et cetera, the women that we've heard from earlier today to the 1980s into the 1990s to today. So this is history, but it's living history and it impacts what they did and what we do today. So I think it's really important to make sure that we understand, A, that feminism is diverse and literally, but also in its meaning, and B, that it's relevant from then to then to now. So the portrayal of feminism as some sort of game sport of man-hating or pulpit of country granola correctness has always read to me like some impossibly cartoonish send-up. It remains so far from the feminism that I've lived, particularly the one I knew in Rodeo. I count Rodeo as my defining feminist experience, even though I've been calling myself the F-words since high school. In Rodeo, I learned that feminism was, to me, stripped to its intimate essentials, a passion for the creative culture of women and a belief that communion with other women was a bread and water necessity. Outside of debates on employment rights, abortion, childcare, and whether feminism serves women of color, and the other big politics of the movement, what has kept me interested in feminism and identifying is the pleasure. The pleasure in women's voices, our dozens, our ways of caring and getting mad, and above all, in the way we love deeply, as some call it, hard. Give me a girl gang, a crew. A zillion sisters ain't enough. To be a girl among girls, I'm at the height of courage and creativity. As an adult, I'm continually trying to recreate these spaces of safety and unconditional love, like my grandmother's house where Grandma, Aunt Cora, and Mom address the world's ills with a little Johnny Walker and a clean dish rag. Like Mom taking her daughters out of the city in her geriatric car, us three singing love songs from the 40s like Bells of the Ball. Like the We Was Girls Together off-campus collective at Renee, Myra, and Maria's, where we took character names from black women's fiction and imagined ourselves divas of myth. Renee was Willie Chilly after the wild child of Meridian. Let Desdemona keep stepping, like Rodeo. So welcome to the tiny, squeaky, shaky voice of Lisa Jones. I was born like this. People made me and they say, you know, I thought you were taller. I thought you'd have a bigger voice. I thought you'd be a bulletproof diva. I was like, no, this is it. This is perfect. So I have the hardest job. I have to be on stage with the genius, the legend, and the visionary. So, you know, I brought some thoughts last night and I just want to share them just riffing off of the title of Rue's panel. Ain't nothing going on but the rent. And this is called When the Rent Was Cheap and the Art Was Everything. Hey there, 1980s. When the rent was cheap and the art was everything. Every once in a while I see you out of the corner of my eye. I see my 20-something self, big androgyny, wearing my grandfather's bowling shirts from the 1950s and rocking those pork pie hats, which I stole from my boyfriend. At least I thought he was my boyfriend. Because it seems now everything began in the 80s, even situation ships. And then there was that pair of canary yellow Suede men's oxfords that I wrote, wore for the entire decade and never cleaned. Because why? Why clean your shoes when you could be making art? Those yellow shoes were my rebel heart, but my most important accessory was a bright red messenger bag because it was the only bag big enough to carry all my documents. And I had documents. I had a day job copy editing at The Voice, but I was also writing freelance for the paper and working on films with 40 acres and co-writing books with Spike and writing freelance for women's magazines, for the extra cash, which I needed to spend on my most serious 1980s addiction of all. The performance pieces or rites of self-discovery, which I called them once, which starting in 1985, I had begun staging with my troupe, Rodeo Caldonia, co-founded with Alvarajas. Let's start and haven't got second wave black feminist theater group in four easy steps. Feel free to take notes. First, it helps to be born into a family where theater groups are a thing. In my case, I remember being around the Spirit House, a black arts movement theater which my father, a Mary Baraka founded in Nork in the late 60s. I remember the kids in the family and around the block would get pulled in to do various theater things. Once we did sound effects where my fathers play the slave ship, this was 67, I would have been six. We had to stand in a makeshift sound booth with a group of adults and make sounds as if we were enslaved people chained to a ship. Naturally, that kind of thing stays in your mind.  America's streets just like Stanley and Durham raising Barack Obama's. My mom was tight with Douglas Turner Ward, the director of the Negro Ensemble Company, I mean New York's legendary black theater company of the 60s and 70s. She had us, me and Kelly, actually on stage, the Negro Ensemble Company when we were seven and eight in a review of black women presenting their original revolutionary poetry. So yeah, that happened. Two, go to an Ivy League college in the early 80s where every black striver is headed to Wall Street for only one of three self-proclaimed black feminists on campus. Commit black treason by being the moderator of the Black Student Alliance but then standing in support of the first campus pride rally then deciding to edit the brackets white feminist magazine too because intersectionality wasn't invented yet and somebody had to invent that too. So apologies to Kimberd Crenshaw.  That thing fizzles quick but you end up falling in with this community of young women of color, black mixed South Asian who actually identify as black feminists like the poet Jackie Kay who is now poet laureate of Scotland, a black woman. So Nirvana, you found your people, you found a model.  A meeting because that's what black women do. We call meetings farm clubs and get things done. A fun fact that I read on the University of Iowa website when Elizabeth Catlett went to Iowa in 1938 she wasn't allowed to live in the dorm. It was the Iowa Association of Colored Women's Clubs that found housing for her. So back to that meeting. Alva was there, Selena was there, Candice, Donna, all women who would become part of Rodeo. We talked into the night about black women and images and what was missing in the 1980s from the frame and we decided to do something. Of course that something was still unclear. Would it be art or activism? At first it was going to be a black women's art magazine called Diva de Kooning. But what we did do was make art, begin to make art. So three, have a genius in training big sister who commissions you to write something for an exhibition she's curating at the Longwood Art Center in the Bronx called In the Tropics about the Caribbean and colonialism. So of course you ignore the theme of the show entirely, little sister's prerogative, and write a theater piece called Carmella and King Kong about a young feminist who falls in love with the larger-than-life black literary Kong because after all it's best to stick with personal experience when making art. So that's how all my friends who were artists aching to be came together in 1985 to put on a show in a hallway of an old schoolhouse which is what the Longwood Art Center really was and went on to create the performance collective of roughly two dozen women that became known as Rodeo. Four, find a visionary accomplice, Alvarodgers who would walk into rehearsal one day giving the spiky hair of an Afro-futuristic queen straight out of an Octavia Butler novel and the next day would have long thick braids looking like a daguerreotype of a 19th century woman off to teach colored free school.  So Alvar's vocal styling as I once wrote a blend of opera, jazz, blues, and nursery rhyme always explained Rodeo better than any motto. So Rodeo had a short lifespan and a small repertoire but we were an inspirational force in the Brooklyn-centric art scene of the 80s and 90s. Alvar was the lead performer. Darin Young did the sound collages and musical direction. Donna Burwick designed the costumes. Selena was assistant director. I wrote and directed the pieces. Candace Hamilton, Sandy Wilson, Ray Dahl, Pamela Tyson, Amber Villeneva were some of our iconic performers. Lorna Simpson took photographs. Kelly Jones did publicity. So we took Cardell out of New York City boho tour performing for almost a year in bars, storefront galleries, and church sanctuaries. We expanded it, added music, slides, but the piece always ended in an exorcism because I'm big on exorcisms, which is a collision of love songs and women speaking in tongues. So Rodeo was satirical, experimental, women focused and political all at once, far from crunchy granola and full of multimedia downtown panache. I guess we took our college educated, uppity black feminism and put it into motion and made it sexy and fun just like our lives as if there were a how-to manual for that. This, of course, was a few decades before this array's awkward black girl and hilarious political young black feminist bloggers like Jamila LaRue and Awesomely Lovey. Our next show, Combination Skin, had its first performance at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery in December 1986. There were lines around the block. Every young black New Yorker with freedom hair was in the building that night because Rodeo was getting reviews and small art mags and Alva was now a downtown, a darling of the downtown music scene as well as a muse to black visual artists and filmmakers. So Combination Skin took place on the set of a fictitious game show called the $100,000 Tragic Mulatto, where contestants came on the show to sell their Rachel Case histories for big bucks. Mind you, this was decades before reality TV. Contestant number three, the ultimate crossover queen played by Alva, a brown-skinned woman, wins the title. The piece was an exploration of the Tragic Mulatto archetype brought to us by fiction and film and a send-up of the sugar plums of crossover success that were being offered to black artists in the 80s. For me, it was also a personal exorcism, told you. I felt I had to do battle with the mighty caricature of the Tragic Mulatto so I could clear a space for myself as a healthy, happy, politicized black woman of mixed parentage. This was a few decades before work like Dear White People in Blackish and the normalization of mixed identity. Talking about being mixed, even as late as the 80s, was still very much taboo. It was like saying out loud that you're a product of interracial sex, which is always presented in popular media as being illicit and non-consensual. And this was also a few years before the rainbow baby literary bonanza before lit stars like James McBride and Danzy Senna hit the scene. And before, of course, the age of Barack Obama and our 15 minutes of post-racial utopia. If I was a bit ahead of the curve, then I owe it all to the badassness that I learned in Rodeo. Apart from my Rodeo assistant, it was the black arts movement of the 60s and 70s, ironically, that gave me permission in the early 80s to write about being a black person of mixed race, which I did in combination skin and later in essays in The Voice and in Bulletproof Diva.  Make art that reflects your experience. And even though the movement often put forth narrow definitions of blackness and frowned on race mixing, I was still able to come out of that time as a young person and say, I have to do me. Because that's what you said, didn't you? I have to be brave enough to write about my hybridity. But that's not shameful. It's a common black identity and it's in all likelihood a common white identity, as I've been hearing today. And in fact, it's a fundamentally American identity and all of us in this country are titled to it. So, yeah, that happened. Thanks, Rodeo. Thanks, black arts movement. I wish I was there. I wish there was time today to do justice to all the Rodeo women, to their contributions to the collective. I feel so privileged to have come of age as an artist in their embrace and be privy to their radiance. I see you brilliant, Lorna Simpson. As I wrote in Prutiva, we were smart-ass girls with a sense of entitlement who availed ourselves of the goods of both continents, delight in our sexual bravado, and lived womanism as pleasure, not academic mandate. We were walking tableau of diva complexity, each eccentric self and artistic point of view made possible one's own. I chuckled when Hollywood came calling after combination skin and pronounced Rodeo to be a new exquisite brand of black woman only invented in 1986. Of course, we knew better. We had named ourselves Caledonia, an old blues term for headstrong women, and Rodeo, in celebration of Entezaki's move to Texas, post-color girls, to become a woman who could ride horses and continually reinvent herself. Little did Hollywood know that we were from a long line of art-race women rebels dating back to Phyllis Wheatley and Harriet Wilson. Maybe our first ancestor was Josephine Baker and Moulin Rouge, a blues storytelling of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, or Freddie Washington's over-the-top mulatto tragedies, or were they comedies, or were they strategies? And later in the 20th century, there were our avant-garde dramatist, Adrienne Kennedy, Ayesha Rachman, and Laurie Carlos. So, no, we were not new at all, but squarely in the tradition. I interviewed Rachman once and asked her how she managed to say goodbye to realism, but later, I never said hello to it. Thank you, black girl surrealism, for giving me life! Thank you, Rodeo. Thank you, 1980s. Glad I was there. Thank you, Lisa. Like, thank you, Lisa. That was incredible. Thank you. I don't even... I don't know what... Okay. We're gonna keep going, but that was amazing. Thank you so much. The first image that I picked to be up here is this beautiful photograph that Lorna took in 1982 in Mexico of Carrie May Weems, another artist in the show who is not here, but her work is upstairs. And so I wanted to ask you, Lorna, so another coincidence, I went to UCSD. So did Lorna. So did Carrie May. That's the only reason why I made it through, because they did, so I could, too. So I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about your before... out of New York inter-regnum period, because you came from New York, and then you came back to New York. But can you talk a little bit about being on the West Coast and being in San Diego briefly? Well, I first have to say it's quite an honor to be today, and, like, you're reading that, it's almost gonna make me cry. I think every... It means so much, so thank you. Thank you. That really defines the spirit of that particular time, which is quite beautiful. And I would say, in kind of even listening today, and particularly listening to Howard Dina Pindell, I mean, I'm an art child. I was brought up by parents who love the arts. I was taken everywhere, to museums, to play, stuff that was way over my head, and went to the Art Institute. I'll get to what you're saying. Why San Diego? But I'm studying at the Art Institute while I'm going to Art Camp in Chicago. But always in these situations of being one of very few black people in any condition since I can ever remember. So I always felt, and I think as an American, in this way as a young black woman, that there were all these different worlds that I would travel and navigate in. And so I met Carrie May Weems when I had gotten out of SVA in New York early, and I was just doing graphic design in a whole kind of analog way, which was very slow, painstaking, and a lot of knives and cutting, and text, out-text, and wax. And she, I think it was at Jules Allen's home, and there was going to be a meeting of photographers later, but of course I wasn't invited because I was young, and I was just barely out of school, and I was like, oh, well, I'm going to leave. But before I left, she said, well, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm just working. And it was February. And you know how February in New York is? It's never-ending. It's cold. It's raining and sleeting. And she said, why don't you come to San Diego? And I had grown up in Queens for most of my life. Born in Brooklyn, but raised in Queens. And my friends, because my parents were kind of appreciation of arts, and my mother would sew some of my clothes. So I had bell bottoms. And everybody thought I was a very hippie in a certain way and that California would be the place that I would end up. So, yeah, San Diego. It's like, and I literally, like, never heard of it. Although I had been to Los Angeles. I've been to Northern California, but I hadn't been to Southern California as a child. So I said, well, what's there? She goes, it's a half an hour from Tijuana. I said, really? It's near the beach. It's even more interesting. Tell me more. So I applied. I did not care who taught there. I was just ready for an experience of, and my experience of going to SVA, and during that time I met Kelly Jones, because we were both interns at the studio museum in Harlem, was that there was this bifurcated experience. Like, I would go to art school, and I would learn about history photography. And there was nobody black or very little, maybe one, maybe Gordon Parks. And then I would go to art history class. And that was kind of an absence of talking about African-American or even African or African Caribbean or anybody of color's contribution to art history. But then I found myself in Harlem with friends from college. And then I found myself at just above Midtown. So I think from my generation I was aware, and became quickly aware of different arts, like Howard Dina Pindell actually threw Kelly and her writing and kind of traveling along with Kelly. Like, I'm going to go interview Howard Dina, but can you come help take a photo? I don't know what I was doing, taking photographs, I don't know what I was doing. But I learned that. But I had this assumption like, oh, they've been doing that for a long time.  And SVA doesn't know any idea of what's going on in Manhattan, but that this seemed to be a cultural life to me that I was drawn to and thought, this was amazing. And spoke a language and created this entire world that helped balance my idea of what living in New York and wanting to be an artist was about. So going to California, you know, kind of going west and like, who knows what that's like? I really didn't care. And it was strange because I was, in arriving, I mean, as you may all know, like, Carrying Me Weems is about six feet tall, maybe six feet two. She's very statuesque. And maybe five, seven. And there was this other woman named Robin who was maybe five feet tall. And they would confuse all of us. I would be Robin. Sometimes Robin would be Carrie. Carrie would be me. And so my experience in San Diego was quite one that was the most, you know, coming from New York, where I just felt that segregation in terms of community was far more apparent, like you had to drive, get in a car and drive to find a black community that was over on the other side of town in downtown San Diego. Or the Mexican community was on the other side. And that was new for me in terms of kind of transversing a landscape and the way segregation kind of happened in that way. But in speaking to your experience at UCSD, and I kind of always felt like, okay, this is great.  Just take it as this time to understand myself. So I would travel back and forth to New York a lot and kind of go back, touch back home base. And also my family and my parents were alive at that time. And found myself going back and forth. But in terms of the production of my work, I was very much isolated in San Diego. I was very kind of just working and trying to figure myself out. I mean, I felt that in one class, which we discussed before, I was in a film class that was being held by Jean-Pierre Coran, who's a filmmaker and worked with Giddar. And he developed this amazing course where we were all supposed to have found material and that found material would be work that we, as a class effort, would edit together this found material, thinking that it was all by one director that was unassembled. And we would assemble it with the idea that in finding this material, it would be the language of one filmmaker. So of course, with myself, thinking that, oh, that's a really interesting idea. You know, like from what I've learned about French New Wave, okay, let's do that. I mean, this will be interesting. So video was gonna, analog video was gonna kill me because I couldn't take that. But I was happily ready to kind of jump into this venture. It was hopefully somebody else would be editing and I would just be making selects. And as we were putting things on the table in terms of people had super eight, super eight footage or found photographs, and I had a whole bunch of found photographs that I had brought back from my last trip in New York, maybe around December. And I put them on the table and sat back and one of the students who was kind of from the Midwest somewhere said, yeah, but Lorna, I mean, if we use your photographs, and that means the director's black, doesn't it?  Like it didn't even, I was like, what kind of question is that? But in realizing that, I was like, okay, this is the last time I'm coming to this class. Like fail me, I don't care. This is not a collaboration that I want to continue. And kind of went back to my own work. But I kind of found myself in those kind of, certainly that was kind of the usual thing. Even to the point of the work that's here, which is Gesture and Reenactments, was my thesis project at UCSD and my, I guess what you call my show, which was in downtown San Diego and I had chosen like a storefront. So I had two photographs that were in a kind of closed storefront. Oh, okay. If you can imagine, like, so that it was open to the street. It wasn't in a white box, so to speak, that you could see it from the street as you passed by. And I remember really being nervous in terms of my critique with my quote-unquote professors. And they were just like, well, you know, it's interesting. And I was really like, are they going to fail me? Is this, like, not good enough? And they were like, well, it's interesting.  I'm kind of like, okay, we'll see what you're doing. And I kind of left and then came to New York and then started showing in New York. So I was kind of surprised a little bit of the attention of my work, and I kind of realized that I had, within all of that, a lack of acceptance or lack of diversity of the structures in which I had chosen to enter, I kind of really focused on what it is I wanted to make and was dedicated to that. So I kind of just said, well, yeah, that wins, doesn't it? When you want to do what you want to do, you just do it. Regardless. And so in that, it was amazing. I did go back and forth a lot, and by 85 I was back in New York, and it had met Kelly again, and then through Kelly met Lisa and then Alva, and kind of it then became this really interesting collective of women I don't perform. I wasn't part of any of their performances, but to watch rehearsals and to be part of this language, and to be part of this time of women kind of telling their own stories in their own ways, whether it be Kelly and who she was interviewing that week. I mean, I think, and I may have the dates wrong, but I think she was interviewing David Hammons for one of the books that she did, like a monograph on his work, and I remember sitting in a bargle house where she goes, girl, I'm almost done with this David Hammons interviews. I just needed to let, let his attention long enough just to finish. And that, you know, artists are not always forthcoming in their information in the way that they want to talk about work, but I was surrounded by people who were driven about what they wanted to do with the kind of unabashed arrogance of that I am going to do, regardless if it's received poorly or with accolades, what it is I want to do, I'm very grateful to have had that at that moment in my life. Yeah. Thank you so much. And so the next, so we saw that Justin Green's work that Lorna spoke about, and so I skipped ahead, so you saw the slideshow. Sorry, surprises over. But now I'm just showing behind you some of the test prints that I was privileged enough to unearth in Lorna's studio. So Kelly on the right and Lisa on the left. And so just to show kind of these early portraits of Lorna's that I don't know if they ever became official photographs, but they are upstairs as test prints. So I want to move now to, we heard a little bit about Carmella and King Kong from Lisa and in the tropics. So on the left, we have a flyer from a performance of Carmella and King Kong at somewhere called Blackbirds. I don't know where that is, but y'all probably do. And on the right, we have I guess kind of, yeah, also a flyer for a performance of Carmella and King Kong but at the Longwood Arts Project in Kelly's show in the tropics from 1986. So I wanted to chat with Kelly a little bit now about your work in this time as a curator, as a writer. We also have, I'm just going to show very quickly this issue of the Black American Literature Forum from 1985 that you co-edited with Camille Billups. So the table of contents is on the right and on the left, we have a beautiful photograph by Karine Simpson that shows a very multi-generational crew. It's Faith Ringgold, Emma Amos, Whitfield Lavelle, Camille Billups is in it, Vivian Brown, who is a member of where we are as well. Let's see, who else is in it? There you go. I'm trying to read on the right, but you were there. Bruce Nugent. Karine Jennings, who we heard from earlier, heard about earlier, excuse me, so yes. Well, I just want to say only Ru and Catherine could get me to open and close a day, so you all rock. And this is fantastic, right? Can we say? Yeah, they're doing it. Yeah, they're doing it. And just a privilege to be up here with my sister friends. Of course, I've been with this one for many, many years. This one almost as long, just not quite. But I just want to say, you know, one of the things to think about that both of you said before jumping into Mimi is that, you know, thinking about, you're talking about rodeo as a kind of a short-lived thing, but if we look back at other women's collectives or groups and thinking of Gallery 32 in Los Angeles, Suzanne Jackson is only open for two years. And so this happens. I mean, Smela Lewis had a million things going on. They were all short-lived, right? Basically, as she told me, I said, well, how did you do films, books, galleries, a museum all in ten years? She said, oh, I collaborated. And so that is actually something that has been done, has a history, so it's not like something bad, short-lived or whatever. But also the other thing is, you know, lines around the block, and this is the other history, that is the hidden history of black cultural production that is always popular. And anybody who's going to tell me it's not, show me the archive that said only two people came. Because if they came for the first time, only two people, then next time everybody was going to show up. So, you know, I think those are two things that we always have to think about in terms of the vanguard that these type of groups are in history. You know, and we thank Ru and Catherine for reminding us that we're part of this long history. So I thank you for that. Thank you. Very moving. And we did this so that you can do this, so we can step off the stage one day and be happy. But in terms of the Longwood, Longwood project in the tropics, I think that was my second show, my first show actually, Elizabeth Murray helped me do it. It was a collective that she had been a part of on Christie Street, and she said, you know, do you want to generate a show there? And I was like, yeah, you had to pay for everything yourself. But you did it. And I'm going to, I think Jamila Jennings was in it. And I'm not going to remember, I'll have to remember for the next time and get that and get that. But in the tropics was like my second show, it was much bigger, a lot of artists in it, including Lorna's piece, and that's upstairs.  And gave her some of my little bit of money here. You want this? You want to do it? And so that's how it happened. And I think, you know, this kind of collaborative ethos is part of what drives that.  No, you were just doing the work. You know, you're just doing the work.   And then, you know, didn't quite work out.  Of course, there were not too many black people there. And, you know, you're in a men's school, basically, why I decided to do that, I can't tell you, but I like the people there better. And, you know, you go into classes and you're not the person that the professor is looking for. And, you know, so you say, okay, let me rethink this. I kind of, I didn't want to be an artist, but having grown up with the arts, you know, I was familiar with it. And I was always shocked that people didn't know living artists. What? All the artists I knew were alive. And they told me, most artists you're supposed to study are dead. I was like, really? Wow. You know? So then I had to, you know, I realized I, when I couldn't kind of, I had to rethink my French, not my Spanish so much, but my French, I started doing research basically on the artists that I knew and on African American artists and realized this was a thing. And that's what kind of drove me to that. But we had, you know, other people that helped us along the way, working with Camille on guest editing this. I had forgotten that I had guest edited that issue. I just remember being an essayist and then I wrote about Whitfield, my high school friend, Alva, of course my high school friend. So there's all these, you know, what my students have told me are genealogies. You know, the connections between all these things. But also the other connection is that Fred Wilson was the director at Longwood. And he and Whitfield were together then. And so, you know, it was just one of these things.  Do you want to have another show? I think you're interested in curating. And he basically gave me the space to do that. And, you know, just been doing it ever since with these wonderful people and others, and others who are in this audience today. Can I just very quickly ask you specifically about, because Rodeo was a very particular generational moment. And I think a really kind of decisive different kind of moving through the world differently in your generation in that time. But, you know, this photograph belies that and the intergenerational nature of just even this issue. But also we have, I assume we can extrapolate further to the other work that you were doing. So, and actually that's really a question for all of you in when you were young and even kind of moving for the intermingling of generations. I think for me, you know, interviewing David, and I think that was probably that interview, you know, that I spent so long on. I would never spend so long on something like that now. But, you know, interviewing the person over days, and if you know David Hammons, it probably took weeks to interview him. And then it took weeks for me to transcribe that all myself and then, you know, edit it. But it slips on because of that process. I think, you know, the reason why I became interested in the California artists that are part of my new book, South of Pico, including Marin, who's here, singing in Goody, David, is because those were the artists that I met when I came back to New York after college at Jam. It was a real hub. Dawood Bay, Candida Alvarez, meeting people there. And so it was, you didn't even think about it as intergenerational. You know, it was just, these are people who were doing the stuff. It was really interesting. The people were, you know, fascinating. And you met a lot of great people hanging out there. And, you know, that's how you did it. And there were older people. There were younger people. Of course, for me, I'd always grown up with artists. Jack Whitten, Melvin Edwards, grew up with these people. William T. Williams. And so that, Al Loving, you know, that was already a given and you didn't really think, like I said, I always thought artists were alive and people who were my elders, you know, my mother and father, you know. And of course, there's poets and artists, just a whole lot of people. And also being on the Lori side, right? Nothing but artists over there. So it was always, you never really thought about, just like you never thought about being famous.  Some of them are older. Some of them are younger. That's the way I felt it. You don't want to add anything? No. No, no, it's fine. So then I would like actually now to ask Lorna about Water Bearer. So I didn't know that this was in the tropics. I have the whole book. Well, somebody will probably try to kill me if I add anything else to this show. Another show, another show. It probably will be Catherine. I don't know where Catherine is. So we'll just look at it. But thank you. But just to hear about, yeah, Lorna, this has become such an iconic and incredibly beautiful, it is an incredibly beautiful work and so evocative. And I think that I know that that is Alva. Yes. And I would love to just hear a little bit about this piece. Well, I think in making it, I will say this, that it was taken in a place that I was acting. I was working as a secretary because I returned. I got out of graduate school and I called up Kelly and I said, oh, I'm coming back to New York. She goes, you don't have a job? I said, I don't have a job. Oh, I'm working at this museum that hasn't really started yet but they need a receptionist. Why don't you interview? I was like, okay. So Colin, I interview, I have an interview with Joan Simon, who I use years later now work with as a writer and a curator. I get the job and it's in this loft and so-ho that's kind of a workspace. And I meet amazing people at that job through Kelly. And at night, Kelly would give me the key and I would use it to photograph. And so in the middle, back and forth, I would say, Alva, okay, what are you doing? Okay, I got this thing. I got the black velvet up. It's going to be two jugs. Would you pour the water? I did it. Alva said, okay, cool. But you got to take pictures of me because I got a show coming up and I need some pictures. So it was this kind of exchange, photographic services. And so that's how, and unbeknownst to everybody who worked at that, at the, at the, at Broiton Museum that had kind of never took off, but was interesting. And so it was kind of, you know, I would work. And I think at that time, which is a different economic time than now for artists, but you know, I'm overeducated. I have an MFA. I've been undergrad with school. I've been a graduate school. But I don't want the kind of job that's going to require my full, full attention that I think answering the phone I can do, work for a few months, save up that money, quit, make some art. And then I was, as I would say to Kelly, okay, and then get the stockings and the outfit and then kind of go back in, get another job. And like, it would go in those kinds of cycles. And Ward of Barra was one of the pieces of my coming back to New York that I made kind of in this kind of cycle of working and taking off time from work to make art. And came as an idea about memory of kind of family stories and kind of put, I guess, in part of what we are saying or even in the world that we live in now, the discounting of what we remember or the histories that we have or presence or discounting even, the invisibility factor and amnesia factor in terms of either art history or in terms of American history. And that Ward of Barra kind of speaks to that as in kind of many subsequent pieces about memory. Thank you. And I'm going to close by showing this also incredible image that you took of Alva, Sandy Wilson, Candice Hamilton, Darien Young and Lisa Jones. And I'm going to ask Lisa because you are there in that photograph. Can you tell us about this day? Can you tell us about your outfits? You can, this can be a collaborative answer. I have no idea. Williamsburg. Do it together. I have a question for anybody who recalls. My loft in Williamsburg. Yeah. And I think it was, again, I think it was in preparation for maybe something of publicity, of something that was coming up. But that there was this, I mean, from my perspective, it was a desire like, well, why not? That's what I do. Why not photograph the people that you know, and they're so amazing and so beautiful that I would kind of take the opportunity to photograph you guys and kind of to make portraits. But it was also kind of for something. It wasn't just a kind of vanity project. But that's what I believe it was that moment in the summertime. I mean, I have no idea what I fashioned myself as. You know, later I described it as a kitchen table surrealist playwright. I think it was around Carmella and King Kong. That's what I think. Yes, definitely. It would have been that. That's what I think, the kind of motif. Like the skirt that Alba has on is a Fiorucci skirt that was mine. They should borrow it for the shoot. Maybe the mud cloth is also mine. Yeah. The Christmas lights are mine. Yeah. But it was this kind of impromptu kind of costume. But it's a performance group. It's a performance troops. And in some ways there was this flexibility about appearance and kind of creating personas. What stands out for me is the joy. And I think that's what's different about this generation. You know, we were coming from this wonderful moment in Black women's fiction in the 70s and 80s where the work was very powerful but also very heavy. And I think a younger generation of women were looking for the Black girl joy. And that's what comes out here.   So that's what comes out, the joy. Thank you. Well, that is where I want to leave it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.


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