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R.I.P. Precis. Any further blogging gets done on Trackable Hendershot

Lonely Jumbotrons

Remember in The Great Gatsby how there's the valley of ashes midway between the rural West Egg and New York City? It's a lonely, null-zone meridian with a gas station perfect for Tom's affair with Myrtle. Remember the billboard with the watchful Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg?. Remember how George Wilson refers to the eyes as God after his wife's death? The billboard was a terrific symbol for a post-industrial American concept of God. God speaks to us through billboards and Christians know this.

I remember that my mom and granddaddy's picture were featured on a billboard for Wood Presbyterian Home which had a quote from my mother "Dad Couldn't Be Any Happier." Granddaddy passed away that summer and the billboard was imbued with a spiritual aura.

Well, here in the post-modern era, in the oxygen-strangling flanks of Manhattan I have discovered the Javits Center Jumbotron. Yes, Jumbotron is the actual term for those large ad screens composed of teeming reefs of miniscule light-emitting diodes.
. I took this video at around 11 p.m. I had an awareness that I was the only viewer of all these turgid hot gigawatts shot out to entertain and grab only ME. It was like that awful scene in any science fiction movie where the suddenly aware machine addressed the protagonist via a screenhead of some sort. And when I left, it would continue to show its spiraling animation to absolutely no one save the insects wedded to its gleam. When the screen lit up and said "ASK," I actually felt as though I beheld the Great Burning Bush itself. Like the Deus Ex Machina Babyhead at the end of Matrix Revolutions (God, did anyone even watch that movie?) You know, I would say this city needs to shut off some lights at night. Might feed a small village somewhere.





Although for pure Blade Runner cuteness, you just can't beat these 4 little pixies I found in Chinatown at midnight to keep a lonely pedestrian company.

The Revolution Will Not Take Place at ABC No Rio

Things are a sloppy mess of aggression, grilled veggies, and bad plumbing at ABC No Rio, and have probably been so for 20 years, “a collectively-run center for art and activism” (read: Aimless Punk Collective) in the Lower East Side on this blistering heat of the day before July 4th, a humid wave that tests any punk’s commitment to latex and leather. As the bands set up, there’s an obnoxious class struggle in the backyard between the dirt poor kids trying to put on a Saturday Matinee Blowout and their tony soccer apparel hawking neighbors at the Alife Rivington Club trying to watch the World Cup. There’s a big cock-strutting gravel scratch over who threw a brick over the fence or dumped a bunch of green paint on blah-blah-blah, though one of the ABC kids later tells me that the paint was dumped from another building and the brick was thrown by someone from another collective who just happened to be hanging out in the backyard of this particular collective (Wonder how the complex autonomies of self-organizing post-Yippies holds up in the civil courtrooms of Centre Street?)
36 years after The Ramones screamed “Judy is a Punk” at CBGB’s and introduced the world to the power of three chords, Punk (at least this New York punk, not hardcore, nor metal) still seems to come mostly in two varieties--Quoth Lester Bangs in 1982-- Hardcore: “Rolling clods of lumpy excrement with broken bones sticking out” and Oi: “Craters of dribbly gruel with patchy tufts of straw poking up.”
The kids are still handing out buttons that say “Extinct Government” and “Fear is Control” in a rubbled courtyard that plays up to a 90’s era Belgrade aesthetic, but I don’t the hear the biofueled throttle of actual revolution (although they do want to get some photovoltaics, gray water recycling, and a planted green roof if you can spot them $2.6 million, brah). This scene is a cultural favela for millenial Indigo children and people with hyperactive thyroids who need to work out their mondo daddy issues by trapping oneself in a particular decade, sort of like the 40 year-old stoner who still surfs within the confines of AOL because he’s afraid someone will show him, like, a Robotic Pig Heart Jellyfish on Youtube. If you think I’m being hard on the creative output of ABC No Rio, I submit as evidence this stanza from Hobo Bob printed in their zine Stained Sheets (ew).
I have the oil black heart of New York
beating in my breast
I am covered with her street grime
the fuel stench of her yellow cabs
I stopped recording to stop the fight. How's that for gonzo?

My Brief 2008 Career as a Cultural Theorist

Way back in the yesteryears of 2008 I wrote two articles for Boaz Sender's ambitious project The HTML Times (We'll resurrect the sucker one these days, Boaz.) This was my attempt to mimic Bruce Sterling's brand of cultural critique. Anyways two articles, attached to a very defunct del.icio.us (sic?) cloud available here

Battle of the Marching Bands

Living in New York can be a drag because of too many rats in the box--a good half of them terminally insane. I consider myself to be a scene washout after 3 years of beer, bad art, and noise rock when I was living in Chicago. I'm rarely out past midnight because of the poor train service and drunken assholery. Williamsburg gives me an anxiety attack. I'm more comfortable living amongst the Carribeans and Hasidic Jews of Crown Heights where I'm certain I'm not part of its scene.
However, occasionally I stumble on a spectacle as I did last night at Galapagos where The Hungry March Band(A Brooklyn-based marching band and Texas Couscous from France vie it out in a battle of two marching bands. The performers outnumbered the audience, but the line between the two blurred fantastically in a phantasmagoria Moulin Rouge sort of scene. Briefly, my life was a musical last night. I was entranced by the wonderful shadowplay taking place on the walls.
Only in a cosmopolitan megacity such as London, New York, Paris, or Hong Kong could you get this huge consensus of performers. Thanks Josie and Tessa!

I act like a Starstruck Butthead in front of Sting

I thought it would be really cool to walk up to straight up to Sting at the premiere and shake his hand and record it on my I-Pod. After all I'm a plain Tennessean made somewhat good (but mostly broke) in the awful, big city. A complete shiny-eyed bohunk with one strap of his overhauls unbutt' come up here like Sister Carrie, Madame Bovary, Tom Jones, and that little French critter from Balzac's Lost Illusions. I've got a democratic feeling of equality like the Tennessee farmer who, after hearing Martin Van Buren speak, stepped up, shook the President's hand, and invited him "to come out and r'ar around with the boys." Why not videorecord the whole experience?
Well, first you'll notice that the presence of celebrity causes me to giggle like Butthead, but come on dude's name is Sting.
Second, I completely lose the gumption to stick the camera to the man's face so the screen goes all Stan Brakhage to the inside of my cuff and I sidle up to him as he's talking to Paul Stamets about a revolutionary cardboardbox that not only biodegrades but is laced with tree seeds and fungal spores so it will literally sprout a forest after it decomposes. I actually had this thought in my head, "Wow, I'm going to rescue Sting from this weird shroomy sociopath." Turns out dude is a genius in the movie.
I walk up to him, shake his hand and say, "I will always remember you as Feyd Rautha." He said, "Yes, you remember those flying underpants." What you don't see is Sting gesturing to his bodyguard tremendously. I then started going about Baron Harkonnen and the image being stuck in the basal ganglia, when I realized I was the lunatic he was trying to be rescued from. Well, I had terrible breath anyway.
Then, I read on the Internet that Sting was schoolteatcher at St. Paul's Middle School from 1971 to 1974 before starting a band called The Police and recording "Don't Stand So Close To Me." Now listen to that song and you tell me who you think is the creepy guy.

Terms of Endearment

I said I would make a movie one these days. Here it is. R-Rated language in the vain of total political incorrectness, I'll warn you.

MOMA.

It's January 10, 2010. J.D. Salinger died today. I've read "Catcher and the Rye" twice and the "Franny" section of "Franny and Zoey." Howard Zinn died. I've never read his book. Devin Powers and I went to the MOMA today. The MOMA is kinda like the bohemian equivalent of Chuck E. Cheeze's when you were a kid. Everything, down to the hand dryers to the salad bar in their restaurant has a patina of progressiveness.

I'm going to restart this blog.

((((((Yes, I will. I'm going to picture it via creative visualization. "I've already started a blog." I live in New York City now. I peel dollars off the Empire State Building. Axis Mundi, baby. ))))) The city looks much cooler through the lens of this website, than through my nervous and fractured viscera.
Celluloid Skyline

I love to shoot zombies

((I could literally blow the heads off zombies all day long. I wish it were an actual job. No, wait, actually I don't. Well, yes, I do.)))

Let's carve us some witch.

Things that aren't nation-states

(((Bruce Sterling just posted some notes for a sci-fi novel he's working on. It's a dense annotated child's garden of fringely global politics. This thing deserves hyperlinks. It's like a whole semester's worth of poli-sci 101))

Link
"BEFORE AND AFTER WESTPHALIA: Or, ENTITIES THAT SEEM RATHER LIKE NATION-STATES, but aren't

The United Nations (association of states)

The European Union (post-state economic regulatory zone)

Trading blocs (NAFTA, ASEAN, Hanseatic League)

empires and confederacies (multi-states)

dictatorships (one-man state)

aristocracies and kingdoms (family states)

Communist dictatorship of the proletariat (non-state class rule)

megacorporate multinationals (the global private sector)

moguls (one-man private sector)

mega-cities (city-states)

police and security organizations (police states)

military (military dictatorships, martial law, occupied zones)

espionage (siloviki states, secret-police states) organized crime (shadow governments, kakistocracies)

Classified areas (state-supported labs, weapons-testing zones, secret prisons, Area 51, slave labor areas, puzzle palaces, black money projects that lack official existence)

social classes (capitalists, laborers, creative class, technocrats, white-collar, blue-collar, pink collar, underclass, aristocrats, the super-rich)

religions (papal states, holy cities. theocracies, Sharia, Quakers, Amish)

colonies, territories, protectorates (sub-states)

secessions, frozen conflicts, liberated zones, warlord havens (illegal states)

failed states (collapsed states, hollow states, black globalization, narcoterror areas)

embassies (embedded mini-states)

emergency rescue camps, refugee camps (damaged states)

migratory hordes (mobile stateless peoples)

slums, barrios, ghettos, favelas (under-states)

the international scientific community

prisons (states without individuals)

monasteries, asylums, retreats (antisocial micro-states)

conspiracies (Carbonari, Al Qaeda, Freemasons, Red Brigades)

cultural movements (Modernism, the Enlightenment, feminism)

The Internet

social-software networks

gaming environments, virtual worlds

International regulatory agencies and standards boards (WIPO, WTO, WHO, ITU, etc)

supra-national political parties (Communists, fascists, socialists, neocons)

benevolent associations (Elks, Kiwanis)

labor unions

universities and colleges

non-governmental organizations, quasi-autonomous non-governmental associations, blue-ribbon panels, independent prosecutors

private banking and investment networks (Medici, Fuggers, Rothschilds)

private postal systems, private logistics networks (Thurn and Taxis, Wal-Mart, Amazon)

Languages

Ethnicity

Phantom folk-sources of state-like power and authority: The Mainstream Media, the Gnomes of Zurich, the Wall Street Exploiters, the Ruling Class, the Elders of Zion, Secular Humanism, the Old Boys' Network, Jesuits, Freemasons, Illuminati, etc

"complexes": the military-industrial complex, the military-entertainment complex, the medical-industrial complex

tongs, clubs, voluntary associations

Insurgencies

pirates, bandits, gangsters

festivals, temporary autonomous zones

tribes

castaways

hermits

the dead: cemeteries, organized memorials, archives, museums

the unborn

areas devoid of human beings -- high seas, involuntary parks, wilderness, poles, outer space, ocean abysses, deserts, ruins..."

Speech textbook: 1593

(((From Henry Peachum's Garden of Eloquence. If I had two lifetimes, I would learn all the strictures and rules of Elizabethan Rhetoric. Total elegance.))

Link
"SCHEMATES RHETORICAL

Schemates Rhetorical be those figures or forms of speaking, which do take away the wearisomnesse of our common speech, and do fashion a pleasant, sharpe, and evident kind of expressing our meaning: which by the artificiall forme doth give unto matters great strength, perspicuitie and grace, which figures be devided into three orders.
The first order

The first order containeth those figures which do make the oration plaine, pleasant, and beautifull, pertaining rather to words then to sentences, and rather to harmonie and plesant proportion, then to gravitie and dignitie, and the figures of this first order I devide into fower kinds, according to their sundrie formes, of which the first are of Repetition, the second of Omission, the third of conjunction, the fourth of separation.
Figures of Repetition.

* Epanaphora
* Epiphora
* Symploce
* Ploce
* Diaphora
* Epanalepsis
* Anadiplosis
* Epizeuxis
* Diacope
* Traductio
* Paroemion

These are called the figures or repetition, by which one word may with much comelinesse be rehearsed in diverse clauses, and may ten maner of wayes be pleasantly repeated: and likewise one and the same letter by Paroemion may be repeaated in the beginning of diverse words.
Epanaphora

Derive: Pedestrian with paradigm schisms

(((The Situationist critical theorist (read: philosopher with cool edge) Guy Debord invented the concept and exercise of "derive." It's not walking, it's an internal revolution. Echoes of Parkour.)))

"One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: "drifting"], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science -- despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself -- provides psychogeography with abundant data.

The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology."

Link

Project Gutenberg and Secret Technology: Is it all just "digital art?"

(((These are two of my favorite things)))

(((Listening to Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce on Project Gutenberg))
Link

(((Playing Jason Nelson's interactive flash games. This is kind of what I think digital art should be all about. Then, again, in this Warhol era of copied image and plural coding, hasn't it all become "digital art?" Even e-books of Twain and Bierce?)))
Link

Carl Sandburg, Cabrini-Green, and Modernism

(((The mostly demolished, Cabrini Green Projects of Chicago. A triumph of modernism. A majestically failed public works project. An attempt to do good. A hellhole. A Civic Wart. Vertically-developed, dense urban blight.

Where are you now, my Prairie School? Was Frank Lloyd Wright alive to see these things? What about Ezra Pound? Eliot? Dreiser?

I bet Carl Sandburg probably wrote some poem about them on their inauguration in the 1950's that went like this:

"My Cabrini-Green"
by Carl Sandburg
Bilious balustrades of clanking, steam-driven modernism.
The longshoremen in his shirtsleeves.
Oh, you topplers of the beefshares!
Busking and destroying--you

Broggerbankbuock the Abelard!

Wherein the nubile prairie scapegrace tough spits glances at

Huckleberry dames on Halsted who
offer him their ((beefshares)).

Rubberbuckbanktruck! The Stark lad, lo!

Utilitarian majesties and T.S. Eliot
Cackle in their beefshares and the coral cock,
In the walled arch city of the breadbasket
On the wonderful flowing waters
Of the turgid Mississippi.

Gurgleledurd ra ammalagog! Bertrand, the Samovar!

My Cabrini-Green,
My sweet, blonde tit
My most excellent beefshares.
My most excellent modernism imitation.

Omfug.

Pulitzer Prize

((( Ladies and gentleman, the Pulitzer Prize winners. A newspaper-juried commemoration of well-balanced, well-keeled great American Novels with story arcs and impact crisper than a spiraling pigskin tossed by Eli Manning. I bet any critic who went down the list would enjoy exactly half of them and think the other half were crap. Then we would know that each artist was perfectly in accord with hermself when they wrote these.)))

* 2007: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
* 2006: March by Geraldine Brooks
* 2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
* 2004: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
* 2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
* 2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo
* 2001: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
* 2000: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
* 1999: The Hours by Michael Cunningham
* 1998: American Pastoral by Philip Roth
* 1997: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
* 1996: Independence Day by Richard Ford
* 1995: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
* 1994: The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
* 1993: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
* 1992: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
* 1991: Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
* 1990: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
* 1989: Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
* 1988: Beloved by Toni Morrison
* 1987: A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
* 1986: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
* 1985: Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
* 1984: Ironweed by William Kennedy
* 1983: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
* 1982: Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
* 1981: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
* 1980: The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
* 1979: The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
* 1978: Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
* 1977: no award given
* 1976: Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
* 1975: The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
* 1974: no award given 1
* 1973: The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
* 1972: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
* 1971: no award given
* 1970: The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford
* 1969: House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
* 1968: The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
* 1967: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
* 1966: The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter
* 1965: The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau
* 1964: no award given
* 1963: The Reivers by William Faulkner
* 1962: The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor
* 1961: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
* 1960: Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
* 1959: The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor
* 1958: A Death in the Family by James Agee
* 1957: no award given
* 1956: Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
* 1955: A Fable by William Faulkner
* 1954: no award given
* 1953: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
* 1952: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
* 1951: The Town by Conrad Richter
* 1950: The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
* 1949: Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens
* 1948: Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener

The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism

(((Jonathan Lethem's cut-up essay from Harper's gives voice and dynamic insight to the idea of Intellectual Property, literary mixmastering, kicks petulantly at the academic definition of "plagiarism." It's a panaceic unlearning for us lit majors with our modernist critical anxiety stricturing about our noggins. Perhaps googlewriting is motivating us towards a collage method of word assembling i.e. flarfing, and more valid experiments. I predict the cut-up will be king and we'll read history books organized more like "Wisconsin Death Trip" with photos spliced with irrelated newsprint to "enframe" an illogical thematic understanding of a place and era. Meanwhile, novels are just going to keep becoming more and more like novels, poetry more like poetry, and short stories will be printed with movie options attached.)))

((Will TV ever go away? Or will the internet just join it into a corporate-controlled passive entertainment?))

(((Be sure to check out the Appendix at the end which proves this whole thing is true assemblage and that he stole his paradigm shifting pre-teen encounter with William Burroughs' from William Gibson.)))

Link

"

The surrealists believed that objects in the world possess a certain but unspecifiable intensity that had been dulled by everyday use and utility. They meant to reanimate this dormant intensity, to bring their minds once again into close contact with the matter that made up their world. André Breton's maxim “Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” is an expression of the belief that simply placing objects in an unexpected context reinvigorates their mysterious qualities.

This “crisis” the surrealists identified was being simultaneously diagnosed by others. Martin Heidegger held that the essence of modernity was found in a certain technological orientation he called “enframing.” This tendency encourages us to see the objects in our world only in terms of how they can serve us or be used by us. The task he identified was to find ways to resituate ourselves vis-à-vis these “objects,” so that we may see them as “things” pulled into relief against the ground of their functionality. Heidegger believed that art had the great potential to reveal the “thingness” of objects.

The surrealists understood that photography and cinema could carry out this reanimating process automatically; the process of framing objects in a lens was often enough to create the charge they sought. Describing the effect, Walter Benjamin drew a comparison between the photographic apparatus and Freud's psychoanalytic methods. Just as Freud's theories “isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception,” the photographic apparatus focuses on “hidden details of familiar objects,” revealing “entirely new structural formations of the subject.”

It's worth noting, then, that early in the history of photography a series of judicial decisions could well have changed the course of that art: courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print an image. Was the photographer stealing from the person or building whose photograph he shot, pirating something of private and certifiable value? Those early decisions went in favor of the pirates. Just as Walt Disney could take inspiration from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., the Brothers Grimm, or the existence of real mice, the photographer should be free to capture an image without compensating the source. The world that meets our eye through the lens of a camera was judged to be, with minor exceptions, a sort of public commons, where a cat may look at a king.

Novelists may glance at the stuff of the world too, but we sometimes get called to task for it. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. In a graduate workshop I briefly passed through, a certain gray eminence tried to convince us that a literary story should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, and spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English—and further, that fiction he'd himself ratified as great, such as Dickens, was liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references—he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When pressed, he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference. Here, transgenerational discourse broke down.

I was born in 1964; I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo, moon landings, zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was born with words in my mouth—“Band-Aid,” “Q-tip,” “Xerox”—object-names as fixed and eternal in my logosphere as “taxicab” and “toothbrush.” The world is a home littered with pop-culture products and their emblems. I also came of age swamped by parodies that stood for originals yet mysterious to me—I knew Monkees before Beatles, Belmondo before Bogart, and “remember” the movie Summer of '42 from a Mad magazine satire, though I've still never seen the film itself. I'm not alone in having been born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we've both supplemented and blotted out our natural world. I can no more claim it as “mine” than the sidewalks and forests of the world, yet I do dwell in it, and for me to stand a chance as either artist or citizen, I'd probably better be permitted to name it. "

Cock-a-doodle-do in 40 languages

((For some reason I was looking up information on chickens and discovered that the onomatopeia for rooster crowing is sort of 'kukiriku' in most languages. I also discovered that most languages have a literal dual entendre equivalent for "cock"--i.e. a formal word for male rooster which is also slang entendre for the "pecker."--which I guess is also sorta rooster sounding)) From Wikipedia:

"The sound made by the cock is spelled onomatopœically as "cock-a-doodle-do" in English, but otherwise in some other languages, such as: Arabic kookookoo-koo, Bulgarian кукуригу (kukurigu), Catalan Co-co-ro-co, Chinese goh-geh-goh-goh, Croatian ku-ku-ri-ku Czech kykyrikí, Danish kykeliky, Dutch kukeleku, Esperanto kokeriko, Estonian kukeleegu or kikerikii, Faroese kakkulárakó, Filipino Tik-ti-la-ok, Finnish kukkokiekuu, French cocorico, German kikeriki, Greek kikiriku, Gujarati kuk-de-kuk, Hebrew ku-ku-ri-ku, Hindustani kuk-roo-koon or kuk-roo-kroon, Hungarian kukurikú, Indonesian kukuruyuk, Italian chicchirichì, Japanese ko-ke kokkoh, Korean k'ok'iyo, Lithuanian ka-ka-rie-ku, Latvian ki-ke-ri-gū, Norwegian kykkeliky, Persian ququliqu, Polish kukuryku, Portuguese Có có ró có, Romanian cucurigu, Russian ку-ка-ре-ку (ku-ka-rye-ku), Sanskrit काक (kāka), Serbian ku-ku-ri-ku, Slovak kikirikí,Slovene kikiriki, Spanish qui-qui-ri-qui', Swahili KokoRikoo koo, Swedish kuckeliku, Tamil ko-ka-ra-ko, Thai yeki-yeki-yek, Turkish üü-ürü-üüü, Urdu kuk roo kroon, and Vietnamese ò-ó-o-o."

(((I also found a photgraphic print online of what looks to be the fattest, happiest chicken in the world. The print's simply titled "A Buff Wyandotte Chicken with a Bright Red Comb on a Farm in Kansas." Man, it's like these things want to be eaten.)))

Dramapod, Slipstream, and David Milch

((In the Po-Mo dispersion of semantic form--(a clusterfxck of disjointed image, audio, and text. Sometimes I feel as though multimedia savviness (sic) pressures all simple scribes to feel as though they must evolve into Theraminic Octopi--8 armed, panoptically tonal, digital maestros--to remain relevant) I have found two labels which have been very appealing to me recently.))

Genre: Slipstream. Breaks free of the publishing/Barnes & Noble ghettoization of "Literature" and "Genre fiction."

Medium/Form: AudioDrama Podcasts(((A multimedia production that frees the audience's imagination from the digital age obsession with eyeball kicks. Gracefully free from the didactic, confused hegemony of literate culture in a return to the aural purity of human voice. Music and sound effects, too. Hiply unpretentious in a way that TV, film, and theatre no longer are. A rare instance of a technological advance (podcasting) to enable a return to pre-literate storytelling around a fire.)))

P.S. (((Interesting lecture series by Producer David Milch (Deadwood, John from Cincinnatti) on "The Idea of the Writer." Link)))

Monday evening applesauce

What is ablog? What is a journal? What is a chronicle? How are these fundamentally and semantically different?
What's the fundamental difference between invention and innovation?
I write.
I blog.
I journalize.
I chronicle.
I invent.
I innovate.

Ah, curse this accultured language, it's rigid orthography, and endless jargoning.

"I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels most would choose none."--Ben Shahn

Quote from my acoustic notebook (Blue Mead 5 Star--I've decided it's ultimately preferable to write with a notebook in front of a word processor.)

"The pace of population explosion globally and the advance of technology creates with us a sense that the immediate first decade of the 21st Century is exponentially more relevant than the historically cataclysmic 20th Century where we Post-Did everything, slayed millions, and went to the moon. I'd like sometimes to skip it entirely, reach back to the world my grandfather understood and break past it. hurtling past grandfathers towards Adam. Saxon on fire in a slipstream."

JumboShrimp

I'm restarting this blog, dadgummit. A blog updated daily as a 4th dimensional art process. A blog to end all seasons. A blog as a 10 year old literary form, fresh as the novel and that picture-a-day thing that Noah did on Youtube. Not a slur of randomly jumped media. A blog cultivated as a daily eavesdropping of process and thought, not manic fits and starts, tagging metadata as though to build the space shuttle. Yes, yes, I must have this thing.))

The Pulitzer Prize

((( Ladies and gentleman, the Pulitzer Prize winners. A newspaper-juried commemoration of well-balanced, well-keeled great American Novels with story arcs and impact crisper than a spiraling pigskin tossed by Eli Manning. I bet any critic who went down the list would enjoy exactly half of them and think the other half were crap. Then we would know that each artist was perfectly in accord with hermself when they wrote these.)))

* 2007: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
* 2006: March by Geraldine Brooks
* 2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
* 2004: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
* 2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
* 2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo
* 2001: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
* 2000: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
* 1999: The Hours by Michael Cunningham
* 1998: American Pastoral by Philip Roth
* 1997: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
* 1996: Independence Day by Richard Ford
* 1995: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
* 1994: The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
* 1993: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
* 1992: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
* 1991: Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
* 1990: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
* 1989: Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
* 1988: Beloved by Toni Morrison
* 1987: A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
* 1986: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
* 1985: Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
* 1984: Ironweed by William Kennedy
* 1983: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
* 1982: Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
* 1981: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
* 1980: The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
* 1979: The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
* 1978: Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
* 1977: no award given
* 1976: Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
* 1975: The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
* 1974: no award given 1
* 1973: The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
* 1972: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
* 1971: no award given
* 1970: The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford
* 1969: House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
* 1968: The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
* 1967: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
* 1966: The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter
* 1965: The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau
* 1964: no award given
* 1963: The Reivers by William Faulkner
* 1962: The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor
* 1961: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
* 1960: Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
* 1959: The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor
* 1958: A Death in the Family by James Agee
* 1957: no award given
* 1956: Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
* 1955: A Fable by William Faulkner
* 1954: no award given
* 1953: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
* 1952: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
* 1951: The Town by Conrad Richter
* 1950: The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
* 1949: Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens
* 1948: Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener

WPA Guide to Tennessee

((Published in 1939. Magnificent))
Link

All-star "Dead Flowers"

(((Come on, America. We can do this.)))

Martin Arnold

(((Judy Garland as you've never seen her.)))

Lester Bangs

(((If you ask me who I would like to write like, I have to say, "Lester Bangs."
Link

"...I'll admit in front that I have a special affinity for things that don't quite fit into any given demarcated category, partly because I'm one of those perennial misfits myself by choice as well as fate or whatever. By profession, I am categorized as a rock critic. I'll accept that, especially since the whole notion that someone has a 'career' instead of just doing whatever you feel like doing at any given time has always amused me when it didn't make me wanna vomit. O.K., I'm a rock critic. I also write and record music. I write poetry, fiction, straight journalism, unstraight journalism, beatnik drivel, mortifying love letters, death threats to white jazz critics signed 'The Mau Maus of East Harlem,' and once a year my own obituary (latest entry: 'He was promising...'). The point is that I have no idea what kind of a writer I am, except that I do know that I'm good and lots of people read whatever it is I do, and I like it that way." (Lester Bangs, "An Instant Fan's Inspired Notes: You Gotta Listen," 1980)

"...I’m really schizophrenic about that, because on the one hand I would say, yes there is, there’s something inherently, even violent about it, it’s wild and raw and all this. On the other hand, the fact is that ‘Sugar Sugar’ is great Rock 'n' Roll, and there’s nothing rebellious about that at all. I mean that’s right from the belly and heart of capitalism..." (Lester Bangs in 1980 on the rebellious nature of rock 'n' roll. Taken from a 1980 interview)

"What this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews." (Greil Marcus, editor of the first Bangs anthology Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, on the second anthology, Mainlines, Blood Feats and Bad Taste. Taken from the cover of the paperback original.)

"Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation." (Lester Bangs, "A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise", 1980)

"I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette." (Lester Bangs, "A Quick Trip Through My Adolescence," 1968)

My favorite band

(((If you know Eric Unger and me, you know we love us some Souled American. We've seen them live in Chicago 3 times. This makes us very fortunate people.))
Link

CMYK Magazine

((((Pretty awesome design/marketing magazine))))
Link







And a nice contest/ portfolio social networking system for creative types)))
Link

Review of Ian Curtis biopic

((The review claims "Control" is better and less of an inside joke than "24 Hour Party People." I positively heart Joy Division.))))

"Control"

This picture about Joy Division's Ian Curtis is one of the most beautiful movies ever made about rock 'n' roll.

By Stephanie Zacharek Salon, October 10

Link to whole review

"If you're over 30 -- or even if you're not -- you know what happens next: You can't hang onto youth, but you can hang onto music, and so, at least in some small way, most of us do. The trick is to guard against blind nostalgia, to open yourself to the possibility that the music you loved when you were 20 can still mean something when you're 45. Perhaps it can mean even more.

Anton Corbijn's "Control" tells the story of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the revered Manchester post-punk band Joy Division. Joy Division -- its other members were Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris -- made only two albums before Curtis killed himself in 1980, on the eve of the band's first U.S. tour. Before Curtis' death, Joy Division was virtually unknown in the United States, even though their following in the U.K. had been growing steadily. By the time most people stateside started paying attention to them, Curtis was gone. But both his story and the band's music -- darkly glittering songs that sounded majestic rather than self-indulgently world-weary -- were compelling enough to earn Joy Division a passionate following. The fact that the band's surviving members had regrouped as a very different band, New Order, made the saga even more magnetic."

The Complexity of Songs

(((Math studies pop music, or vice-versa.)))

Link

"The Complexity of Songs" was an article published by Donald Knuth, an example of an in-joke in computer science, namely, in computational complexity theory. The article capitalizes on the tendency of popular songs to evolve from long and content-rich ballads to highly repetitive texts with little or no meaningful content.

With a grain of truth, Knuth writes that "...our ancient ancestors invented the concept of refrain" to reduce the space complexity of songs, which becomes crucial when a large number of songs is to be committed to one's memory. Knuth's Lemma 1 states that if N is the length of a song, then the refrain decreases the song complexity to cN, where c < 1.

Knuth further demonstrates a way of producing songs with O(\sqrt N) complexity, an approach "...further improved by a Scottish farmer named O. McDonald" (priority disputed).

More ingenious approaches yield songs of complexity O(logN). Finally, progress during the twentieth century—stimulated by the fact that "the advent of modern drugs has led to demands for still less memory"—leads to the ultimate improvement: Arbitrarily long songs with space complexity O(1), e.g. for a song to be defined by the recurrence relation

S_0=\epsilon, S_k = V_kS_{k-1},\, k\ge 1,
Vk = 'That's the way,' U 'I like it,' U, for all k > 0
U = 'uh huh, uh huh'

Paul Sharits Flux film

((If you're epileptic, you may not want to watch this))

Bat for Lashes

(((Let's just sweeten the the somber nature of those last 2 articles articles with that cool Donnie Darko-ish video widna' trick bikes. Happy Hallow'en.)))

Seymour Hersh says we're probably going to invade Iran

(((President Bush is going to try to lame duck a New World Order in his last year.))

Link to entire article

Shifting Targets
The Administration’s plan for Iran.
by Seymour M. Hersh October 8, 2007 New Yorker


"In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . . The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

Interesting environmental article

(((Salon newsfeeds be stacking up on my doorstep. I don't even know if I like the writer's point or not. It criticizes James Howard Kunstler whom I once saw speak at Bennington. He's a crabby super-cynical fellow; a self-described "gonzo journalist for Rolling Stone in the 70's," and he thinks we should all live in upstate New York. He got up in my grill during the Q&A session.))
Link

Researching the Moneta Theater

((The Moneta theater's reopening its doors this Saturday and I just wrote a small press release on its history. I think I'm stuck on an alliteration kick. Here's what I wrote today, culled from microfiched newspapers. Will someone please edit it? Thanx.)))

"A nearly century-old Sweetwater institution is reopening its doors. (Insert lead paragraph)

In 1915, the census bureau announced that the U.S. population had reached 102 million. Columnist J.C. Jessen of the nationally-syndicated "Motion Picture News" boasted that everyday one in ten of those people attended movie theaters to witness a burgeoning new industry being born on the California coastline. D.W Griffith released the first cinema masterpiece, "Birth of a Nation," which President Woodrow Wilson described as "writing history with lightning." Hardly any town was without a nickelodeon palace located in its center. Sweetwater would be no exception.

In the February of that year Frank Johnston opened the Moneta Theater. Ads promising "photoplays that please" ran in the Sweetwater Telephone alongside ads for castor oil and grippe relief medicine. The theater was an almost immediate success--attendance doubled in the course of its first five months as young and old alike went see the very first romances, horrors, and westerns. "The variety of Comedies and Dramas, will pleasantly relieve tired nerves and better prepare children's minds for study," one ad promised. A 7 year-old debutante, "Little Miss Margaret Bradley," treated her entire Sweetwater primary school class to a "Matinee party" at the the Moneta with movies followed by ice cream at Childress's fountain parlor. The baseball league hosted benefit screenings of "The Rosary."

In the year when Americans and British rallied around the cry, "Remember the Lusitania," the Telephone would implore its readers in a single column blurb each edition to "Remember the Moneta."

I want life to be slow motion

(((The only thing cooler than a water balloon exploding in xtreme slo-motion, is one not exploding.)))

I heart Extreme slow motion

(((First person to create a TV channel that's just this stuff 24-hours-a-day will do quite well))

M.I.A- Bamboo Banga

(((The most danceable track since, "Hey ya?" Perhaps. The only difference: "Hey ya" couln't sustain the ballsout magnitude of its first 45 seconds. "Banmboo Banga" releases increasing steam for about 2 minutes to the point it just couldn't possibly get any better.)))

Weird Bennington Dream

(((I had a dream last night that my old Bennington professor David Slavitt held me down in his class gave me an elegant blue yakuza-style tattoo over my back.)))

((Now that I'm actually reading what I just wrote, it seems pretty weird. Whatever, are your dreams normal?)))

(((Slavitt was seriously the best writing instructor I ever had. A vicious editor. Apparently he ran for local office recently and wrote a book about it.)))
Link

"

What I like most is his on-the-money descriptions of local pols and personalities, and his unique take on the milieu of Cambridge and Somerville. Slavitt, writes honestly about his fears running for office: after all he is no spring chicken, he has an ongoing flirtation with prostrate cancer, and like anyone who has lived any length of time he has a few skeletons in his closet. Slavitt ruminates;

“ What if Toomey or Green goes to the library and looks into my literary career. The “Exhibitionist,” my pseudonymous potboiler of 1967, was widely attacked as a “dirty book,”…. Worse than that….there’s an elegant little joke that poet and small press publisher Robert Wallace put out in 1987: “ The Cock Book: A Child’s First Book of Pornography…” None of this puts me in the same league with Paris Hilton, but she is not running for office.”

(((Benningtonites: Did you ever have a dream at school where the entire campus was in a church-style lock-in inside a gymnasium? I know two other people who used to have that same dream.))))

Having the sex and drugs talk with your kids

((This reminds of a Joe Frank radio sketch))

Sex, drugs and my 15-year-old

When I had The Talk with my son, it didn't go quite the way Nancy Reagan drew it up.

By Gary Kamiya

"A few years ago, I took Zachary to a Steely Dan concert in Concord, Calif. He was a month shy of his 15th birthday and had just started high school. We had a fine old time, although as with all these dinosaur-band shows, it was humiliating to look around and see how bad we aging fans all looked. Toward the end of the show, lots of people crowded down into the first few rows and started dancing, and we did too. That was when the guy boogeying next to me offered me a very large joint.

I hesitated. I smoke dope on occasion, but I had never done it in front of Zach before. Was he old enough to handle it? Was it time to end this faintly hypocritical charade of "protecting" him from something I didn't think was dangerous or wrong? Yep. I accepted the joint and took an enormous hit. I glanced at Zachary. He was rocking happily away, but he definitely saw me. The Dan -- who, by a strange coincidence, derive their name from a stainless-steel dildo in a William S. Burroughs novel -- rocked on through another encore or two. The joint came around again and I took another major hit. The band finished their last song and left the stage, and we all began to file out, an inglorious army of balding men in shorts, Tevas and Costco Hawaiian shirts, and soccer moms losing the battle of the bulge.

By the time we had walked the mile or so to the car, I realized that I was extremely stoned. Which probably had something to do with at least part of the conversation that ensued.

"So, Zach," I said as I pulled out of the parking lot, "we should probably talk about drugs. Since you saw me smoke that joint back there."

Link to whole story

Some nice orgone accumulators for sale

(((I need to sit in one of these. Straight from Orgonon, Maine.)))
Link


See whats available now:
3 Ply ORAC
5 Ply ORAC
7 Ply ORAC
10 Ply ORAC
20 Ply ORAC
Orgone Accumulator KITS

Designed for an individual to sit inside, the orgone accumulator attracts energy from the outside atmosphere, concentrates it on the inside where it comes into contact with the users' energy field and the two fields luminate, creating an even stronger charge. The body easily absorbs this energy as it is the same bio-energy that permeates everything, giving life and vitality: what Wilhelm Reich, it's discoverer, called "orgone energy". Using an orgone energy accumulator will expand your energy field, increasing the amount of energy in all your cells and tissues and improve your immune system; it will melt away stress and impart a feeling of well-being.

The large, sit-in, life energy accumulators are made in an energetically clean environment and from natural, high-quality materials. Much time, care, knowledge, and attention goes into the making of every orgone accumulator.

YOU SHOULD KNOW: Please read the section "WHAT IS ORGONE ENERGY and Who Can Use an Orgone Accumulator" to learn about the restrictions on using an orgone accumulator. People with the following conditions should not use an orgone accumulator device, or only with careful monitoring by a health care professional:
chronic high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, decompensated heart disease, brain tumors, skin inflammations, conjunctivitis, people who suffer from apoplectic attacks and people with ALS or MS should use caution.

Because orgone energy is "allergic" to strong electromagnetic fields and certain forms of radiation, orgone accumulators should also not be placed near operating CRT TVs, fluorescent lights, CRT computers, microwaves, x-ray equipment, electric heaters, sparking motors, strong fumes, radioactive smoke detectors and within 25 miles of a nuclear power plant. The new flatscreen TVs and computers do not seem to have the disturbing energy fields.

Orgone accumulating devices are for experimental use only.
They are not medical devices.
If you have a medical problem, please consult a health care professional.

NYC Gov hosts design an evacuation contest

(((Come on. Design something. Or study it.)))


Link
"Letter from OEM Commissioner


What if New York City were hit by a Category 3 Hurricane?

In New York City, over eight million people live on land that has 578 miles of waterfront. By 2030, the population is expected to reach nine million. At the same time, global climate change has put New York City at an increased risk for a severe coastal storm. In recent years, storms have become more intense, occur more frequently, and continue farther north than they have historically. The city would face many challenges during and after such a storm; one of the most difficult is the possibility that hundreds of thousands of people could lose their homes.

With financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation and in consultation with Architecture for Humanity-New York, the New York City Office of Emergency Management is sponsoring an open competition to generate solutions for post-disaster provisional housing. "What if New York City..." is a call for innovation and an opportunity for designers and policy-makers to collaborate on one of the biggest challenges facing densely settled urban areas after a disaster: how do we keep people safely and comfortably housed while reconstruction proceeds?

A jury of experts in the fields of architecture, design, urbanism, and government will choose ten entrants who will be awarded $10,000 each and technical support to develop their proposals into workable solutions. These solutions will provide support for New York's most vulnerable communities and be a precedent for dense urban areas all over the world.

This design competition will rely on a fictional but realistic New York City neighborhood devastated by a hypothetical Category 3 hurricane. How will residents resume their lives? How can they be provided safe, comfortable living space? How can this housing be quickly deployed and adapted to different site conditions? How can it be reused in subsequent emergencies, environmentally sustainable, and cost effective?

I invite you to dedicate your talents to meet these challenges, in hopes that together we can build a more resilient New York City.

Joseph F. Bruno, OEM Commissioner

jacuzzi on summit of Mont Blanc

(((This looks like a lot of fun)))

Link

Google adds Chicago to Streetview

(((There are no words to describe how I feel about this google app, right now. I'm impressed and hope dearly google isn't evil.)))
Link

Iranian policewomen

(((Way to go, ladies.)))