More Imaginary Year entries are now available in printable (PDF) form.

Issue Seven [May 2001]

Issue Eight [June 2001]

Issue Nine [July 2001]

Issue Ten [August / September 2001]

Labels: projects

Friday, July 26, 2002
12:56 PM
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James Kochalka's wonderful daily Sketchbook Diary comics are now being posted online daily at James' website, American Elf.

Labels: comics

Thursday, July 25, 2002
11:19 AM
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I woke up this morning and couldn't remember anything of the dreams I had last night. Not a single image, setting or occurrence. I know there are lots of people for whom this is the norm, but I am usually able to remember my dreams very well—usually I can recreate a long narrative arc, and even when I can't I can usually remember at least a few dream-incidents. But last night: nothing.

I feel like I'm keeping something from myself. It is as though I keep finding evidence that I erased my own memory, including the memory of why I decided to do it.

...

Isn't there an SF story somewhere that uses that premise?

Labels: dreams

Wednesday, July 24, 2002
3:33 PM
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About once a year I make up a game for the Games District over at Invisible City, to give Jon a much-deserved break.

My most recent one just went live. It's called Treefort Nations, and it's about a bunch of monkeys that build forts, drive catapults, and, uh, kill one another.

I've been working on this thing on and off for a full year now, and I'm glad to see it done. Special thanks go to Thor T., who not only inspired the game's title (with April W.), but also contributed a great deal to the final game mechanics.

Labels: projects

Monday, July 22, 2002
8:59 PM
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I know that the fundamental unit of the weblog is the link, but I recently realized that I rarely click on the links posted by the authors of the weblogs I enjoy.

I can lump most of the weblogs I read into two basic camps. (I'm excluding here the weblogs I read that are maintained by people I know personally, which I read for, well, personal purposes.)

One camp is distinguished by an alignment I feel with the cultural tastes of the author. "This person likes some of the same stuff I do," goes the logic, "therefore they might also write about stuff that I would like, if I knew about it." For instance, let's say this LiveJournal, run by an experimental / psychedelic music fan. The other camp is distinguished by my interest in the ideas of the author. The author thinks about things in an interesting way, or lives an interesting sort of life, and I'm curious about the way they see things. For instance: Alamut, or Jessamyn's journal, or Synthetic Zero, or Texting. The important thing here is not so much the alignment between my ideas and theirs—I mean, all of these people are at least a bit like me, but my main interest is in seeing the world through a different lens.

Ideas, cultural products. Writing about either of these can be accentuated by links, but the link isn't fundamental.

I guess there's a third type of blog I read, what Jill would call a research blog, where the author (or authors) deliberately makes a point of linking to articles that are relevant to their research. I read the ones that are relevant to my own research, and this is the one case where I follow the links fervently.

Along these lines: Eastgate's Mark Bernstein has a weblog.

Labels: weblogs

Friday, July 19, 2002
12:10 PM
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I've been getting my life organized off-stage lately. Doing stuff like sorting old mail.

I've also been giving my attention to some neglected tasks. Some new zine reviews have been posted over at Invisible City, and I've finally set Adobe Acrobat up on my new computer, so I can hopefully once again begin producing printable versions of Imaginary Year entries. (Here's Issue 6 as a PDF file, if you're interested in what was going on in the story way back in April of 2001.) For the first time in forever, it looks likely that if you were to subscribe, you might actually get something e-mailed to you occasionally.

Labels: projects

Tuesday, July 16, 2002
2:33 PM
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I have kept a dream-log on and off for the past six years or so (ever since I read Rabid Eye, Rick Veitch's book of dream comics). Some of the dreams from the log make it online—I've been keeping a sporadic LiveJournal dreamlog since January.

These get linked from Like Sand Like Leaves, a directory page I set up with a few other dreamloggers I know.

I often dream about media: it's not uncommon for me to dream about nonexistent movies or albums. Recently I dreamed that Number None had recorded a new song called "Plan One From Inner Space." The next day Chris and I got together and I told him about the dream, and we proceeded to record a song with that title. A sort of feedback loop between dreamlife and real life?

Labels: dreams, personal

Sunday, July 14, 2002
9:35 AM
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I am pleased to report that America is alive and well.

I spent the weekend in Minneapolis, checking this show of experimental psychedelic and folk music.

Lots of standout sets, including scouring noise from Wolf Eyes and Heathen Shame, blissful acoustics from Ben "Six Organs of Admittance" Chasny and Joshua Burkett, and drone sets from Double Leopards (who recently passed through Imaginary Year) and Charalambides (who will be returning to Chicago to play a show set up by two associates and me this August).

But perhaps the highlight of the show was the performance of Michael Yonkers, a fiftysomething guy who began his career over thirty years ago by modifying guitars and making crude synthesizers out of test-tone generators ripped out of cheap department-store sound toys. Every youngster in the room snapped to attention as Yonkers played a set of fucked-up blues on his sawed-down guitar, accompanying himself with a voice all blackened energy, part Lou Reed and part Satan. And the expression on his face was one of pure joy, the look of a crank who finds that his time has unexpectly arrived.

And that's America to me. Peace.

Labels: music_commentary

Tuesday, July 09, 2002
8:04 PM
0 comments

Oh the cuckoo
Is a pretty bird
She warbles
As she flies
She never
Hollers cuckoo
Till the fourth day
Of July

I've played cards
In England
I've played cards
In Spain
I'll bet you
Ten dollars
I'll beat you
Next game

Jack of Diamonds
Jack of Diamonds
I've known you
From old
You've robbed my
Poor pocket
Of my silver
And my gold

Gonna build me
Log cabin
On a mountain
So high
So I can
See Willy
As he goes
On by

I'm off to look for America.

Labels: cryptic

Thursday, July 04, 2002
7:28 PM
0 comments

Hypertext & Hypermedia.

Okay, hypertext isn't exactly a "new trend," but it is a form that's key to thinking about the other types of electronic writing, so it's worth discussing here if only to round out my taxonomy. To many of you this will be old hat.

A hypertext is a text broken up into several chunks. Traditionally the various "chunks" are textual in nature, although they can be images or sounds as well (only then you'd properly use the term hypermedia). George Landow, probably hypertext's most important academic booster, uses Roland Barthes' term lexia to describe these chunks, although they're also referred to frequently as "nodes," and the Deleuze and Guattari fans out there might prefer "rhizomes."

These chunks can be traversed in a variety of ways, and the traversing mechanisms are generally refered to as links. The various connections between the nodes and links can be represented as a web. If you're reading this page, all of these terms are no doubt familiar to you, and one could argue that the World Wide Web is in fact a single gigantic multi-authored hypermedia work.

To qualify as hypertext, there should ideally be a degree of interactivity involved, and the work should ideally have a certain nonlinear dimension. After all, one could argue that a traditional novel, broken into chapters, is organized into lexia, but since those lexia are designed to be read in a linear manner (links are notably absent) any interactive element is essentially negligible.

Some people treat hypertext and electronic literature as essentially interchangeable. Early attention given to hypertextual electronic authoring tools such as StorySpace or HyperCard helped to cement this conception. But I think it's inaccurate, and certainly some of the other types of electronic writing that I've outlined in the past, such as computer-generated narrative or language films lack one or more of the key elements of hypertext.

Examples of hypertext abound, but well-known hypertext narratives include Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story, Shelly Jackson's Patchwork Girl, and Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden. (All three of these were written using Storyspace, and require a CD-ROM to experience, although an abridged version of Victory Garden has been adapted for the Web, here).

Forerunners include: Choose Your Own Adventure books; Robert Grenier's Sentences; B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates; Robert Coover's nonlinear short stories (such as "The Babysitter"); Cortazar's Hopscotch; Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths;" Ted Nelson's Literary Machines, Dream Machines, and Project Xanadu; Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think"; tools for non-linear access of traditional texts, such as indexes, page numbers, concordances; early ergodic or non-linear texts such as the I Ching.

Labels: electronic_literature, hypertext

Wednesday, July 03, 2002
3:35 PM
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I remember hearing a while back about a Japanese movie where a group of schoolchildren are taken to an island and are forced to fight to the death. I forgot the name, and forgot where I heard about it, but the extremism of the premise stuck with me.

Thanks to Google, I have my answer. The film is Battle Royale.

"In Japan in the near future, unemployment rates are soaring, as are levels of teenage delinquency and truancy. In order to address these issues of teenage rebellion, the Government introduces a new law – the Battle Royale Act – to restore the rights of adults and to attempt to re-educate school students. Under the terms of the Battle Royale Act, each year, one randomly chosen Grade 9 (15-year-old) class is chosen from the thousands in Japan to take part in the eponymous survival game – Battle Royale.

All the classmates are transferred onto an abandoned island, and have three days to kill all of their classmates to win the opportunity to return to society. If more than one classmate is still alive at the end of the last day, everyone dies. Each player is given a backpack containing water, a little food, a map of the island, and a randomly selected 'weapon', which could be anything from a gun to a scythe."

Featuring Takeshi "Beat" Kitano as a seventh grade teacher.

This and Series 7 might make a good double feature.

Labels: media commentary

Tuesday, July 02, 2002
12:40 PM
0 comments

Yesterday I went to go see Minority Report, and I enjoyed it, although not without some reservations.

I found just about every escape that Tom Cruise pulls in the movie to be implausible, even by action-movie standards. (If you want details, check out the fake memo drafted by Jane over at Umami Tsunami (thanks, Judith)).

I also found that the film failed to put forth a coherent ideology about the future world it depicted. The film seems to almost function as a critique, but it always then seems to step back. The messages that the film communicates most strongly are "it's good for people to love one another," "it's good to love your children," and "killers are bad," none of which are especially provocative, and all of which are particularly, uh, Spielbergian. My concerns in this regard match up roughly with those put forth by the Chicago Reader's film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, in this lengthy, intelligent piece on the film.

Rosenbaum comments about the tendency of this film to cram the visual field with active details—he describes trying to concentrate on all the details as being akin to trying to concentrate on all three rings of a circus. This is something that this film shares in common with Attack of the Clones (which I also saw and enjoyed, although with a separate set of reservations), so I've been thinking a lot about the way that films are starting to do this. As an audience member, I share some of Rosenbaum's irritation—I hated the digital revamp of the initial three Star Wars movies, the way gags or gimmicks (or what Eisenstein would have called "attractions") were stuffed into spaces that formerly served as neutral background. (Rosenbaum traces this aesthetic back to Mad Magazine, which is interesting.)
But I wonder if these attractions are not being designed to appeal to people in the DVD / videotape market. These creators, notoriously forward-thinking, may be beginning to think about film not as something that unfolds in a temporal line but rather as something that can be broken into segments which can be independently accessed, frozen and inspected frame-by-frame if so desired. Think of the jokes in The Simpsons that go by faster than the eye can see. I would not be surprised if these were early peeks at the future of filmmaking.

I have to admit that the interfaces in Minority Report are a delight to look at. Alex Wright calls the film "interface porn" (and he also got his hands on Katherine Jones' original prototype sketches; thanks to BlackBeltJones for the link.)

Labels: information, media commentary, science_fiction

Monday, July 01, 2002
1:14 PM
0 comments

Egad, it's hot in Chicago.

All I want to eat are chilled salads.

Here's a simple rotini-and-tuna salad that's chilling in my refrigerator right now.

Labels: recipes

12:00 AM
0 comments