THOSE WACKY ARTISTS Passenger takes on Angioplasty BY SAM PFEIFLE

At 11 a.m. this Monday, April 25, something will happen. "It’s going to involve people in uniform," to be more precise. At least so says Alex Steed, head honcho-type of Angioplasty Media, which, along with the Passenger, is organizing the occurrence. Later that night, as part of the same project, the Strawberry All-Stars will play Casco Bay Books. That much Steed is happy to announce.

What will happen on Monday morning? What is Angioplasty Media? What is the Passenger? These are questions we can answer with increasing certainty.

Monday? No clue. Show up and find out.

Angioplasty Media? Well, there’s a magazine of sorts at www.angioplastymedia.com, and they’ve done some publishing of zines, but "basically the idea of Angioplasty is to avoid creating products because we didn’t want the product to become the reason we existed," explains Steed. "We want to be some sort of networking for creation. A facilitator . . . The Web site is our Web presence, but it is not the end of what we are."

If that sounds amorphous, that’s by design. Still, Angioplasty has a "staff" — people who are dedicated to doing Angioplasty stuff, like the Web site and the now-looking-like-it’s-defunct local-music project The People in My Neighborhood are Masterminds of Music, which was to come out on vinyl last year but kind of lost its way. And Angioplasty has designs, says Steed, on four more productions/projects with the Passenger before the end of the year, the last of which will be "something of a winter ball."

As for the Passenger, it’s a project funded by Northwestern University and headed up by Scarborough High grad Nathaniel Wittemore that seeks to "redefine student involvement," says Steed, in everything from the political sphere to the community at large and every part of it.

It "recognizes on all fronts apathy on the part of the student body," says Steed. "They work all across the board, with campus Dems, Republicans, Libertarians — their main point is to eliminate apathy." There are apparently about 200 "members" of the Passenger, people dedicated toward working on similar goals, and you can see their writings and actions manifested at www.iamthepassenger.com. Right now, it’s mostly just an online mag with some collegiate writing about music, art, and what happened to me on my summer vacation.

Will the Passenger succeed in getting students to "turn it on"? Maybe we’ll find out on Monday.