New mix CD, The Spaces Inbetween the Stars, now available through the Raccoon Mix Exchange.

Thursday, February 26, 2004
7:28 PM
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The "Death" issue of Clamor is now out; it features an article I wrote about the continuing murders of young women in Juarez.

Tuesday, February 24, 2004
2:11 PM
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This blog does not lend itself particularly well to public performance—I think of it actually as esoteric and fairly dry. So when I was trying to choose something to read at the reading I had some real trouble.

Eventually I opted to use Microsoft Word's inadvertently hilarious AutoSummary feature to summarize all of the Raccoon entries to date.

Long-time readers may remember that I did this once before, about a year ago: this time I did it a little differently, organizing the resulting list into a twenty-item bullet-pointed list.

Here it is:

• Every great game and every great work of fiction ends at some point.
  

• It's about LSD and improvisational music.
  

• So: music is painting plus time.
  

• I wonder if I could organize a Chicago-area letterboxing game.
  

• It's a good time to be interested in avant-garde magazines from the past.
  

• Volcanic glass over time devitrifies.
  

• Being the game dork that I am, I've played a lot of Nomic in this lifetime.
  

• Grade. Grade. Grade. Grade. Read bits of The Two Towers. Grade.
  

• Check out this interesting New York Times profile on Joss Whedon.
  

• I'm working on a secret project. Want to play along?
  

• Ideas, cultural products.
  

• I've been working on this book on and off for a few years now. The book's working title is How We Come.
  

• Other people let themselves take time off, and they spend that time just sitting around doing nothing, and they don't spend the whole time worrying about it.
  

• For a long time I've loved photocopiers.
  

• I've been thinking a lot lately about misinformation.
  

• This reviewer writes: "[This music] becomes difficult on a whole other level than normally difficult music."
  

• Enduro also released Input 64, a compilation of unreworked C64 game music from 1985-89.
  

• Further reading: Brainstorming at Zombie City Hall.
  

• I'll put that in the If I Had Limitless Time file.
  

• Enough stalling—time to grade some student drafts.

More metacommentary: blog writers who read at the blog reading blog the blog reading:

Lauriean Davis: I Survived the All-Blogger Event, And All I Got Was This...

Kevin Skomsvold: A Review of Last Night

Juliet Martinez: I'm A Blumberjack and I'm Okay (no permalink)

Mimi Smartypants takes me to vagina school. (But I have people who will back me up on this.)

Jason Pettus: Catching Up, Part Two (scroll down)

Monday, February 23, 2004
11:31 AM
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Last night was the all-weblogger reading at the gallery space above Uncle Fun. Some observations:

1) The space was filled to capacity—literally standing-room only. The space is admittedly pretty small but I was still surprised—and pleased—to see so many in attendance.

2) The form most on display was probably the "rant." This is well and good: I like rants, and they're fun to hear live. Memorable: Louisa Heinrich on irony, Ramsin Canon on Boston, and Mimi Smartypants on more-or-less everything. I read a rant of my own, from Imaginary Year.

3) One might be forgiven for thinking that this kind of reading might skew towards "geeky-in-a-bad-way"—I've spent enough time with people who are good with computers to know that they aren't always the most, uh, socially proficient. So I was pleased to find that most of the readers struck me as "geeky-in-a-good-way." (Hip geeky, not geeky-geeky.) Most read well, and quite a few had an excellent sense of how to perform: lots of comic timing on display. All in all, an attractive and intelligent bunch. 18 Charismas all around.

4) The SPEC people have an incredible amount of get-up-and-go; they really seem dedicated to promoting indie writers and making events happen. A good crowd.

5) Afterwards I went to Delilah's, to meet my posse, who split when the reading ran long. Looking in the pocket of my blazer I noticed that I had a sheet of gold stars. Offering them to strangers is a good way to strike up conversation.

Labels: personal

Sunday, February 22, 2004
4:02 PM
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Diagram, an electronic journal of text and art, looks well worth exploring.

Their submissions page contains some highly sexy phrases:

"[W]e're interested in representations. In naming. In indicating. In schematics. In the labelling and taxonomy of things. In poems that masquerade as stories; in stories that disguise themselves as indices or obituaries ... We value the insides of things, vivisection, urgency, risk, elegance, flamboyance ... We like iteration and reiteration. Ruins and ghosts. Mechanical, moving parts, balloons, and frenzy ... We want art and writing that demonstrates / interaction; the processes / of things, both inner and outer; how certain functions are accomplished; how things become. How they expire. How they move or churn, or stand."

The most recent issue [3.6] came to my attention because it's an "all-audio" issue: which means that it features both sound-related diagrams (can I get a T-shirt with this on it?) but also a wide variety of experimental soundwork selected by "sonics editor" Shannon Fields, whose own list of sexy interests includes "accidental congruencies, inexplicable structural mappings, territorial failings, feelings without soundtracks, silences."

Thursday, February 19, 2004
3:59 PM
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I like browsing through some of the weird categories in that famous taxonomy, the Dewey Decimal System.

Some favorites:
Books notable for bindings (095)
Prohibited works, forgeries, hoaxes (098)
Occult methods for achieving well-being (131)
With respect to kinds of persons (408)
Verbal language not spoken or written (?) (419)
Insect culture (638)

Someone once told me that 999 was the Dewey Decimal classification for "library science," which I thought was a cleverly "meta" way to end up one's taxonomy, but 999 actually belongs to "extraterrestrial worlds."

A little more searching reveals—aha—it's the Library of Congress Classification Outlines that end with Library Science. It's the government that's meta, not old Dewey after all. (Hardly surprising: let's not forget that we are ultimately governed by a self-modifying document.)

Some lovely subcategories there in Subclass Z:
Bookmobiles (Z686)
Shelf preparation (Z699.7)
Anonyms and psuedonyms (Z1041-1121)

Wednesday, February 18, 2004
1:45 PM
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Stumbled upon this great Lyn Hejinian passage in Sight, her collaboration with Leslie Scalapino:

"In a series of 'experiments' 'at a window' I am watching a number of appearances which provide me with a biographical sequence of experiences but may not among themselves appear to have 'real' order. They seem 'arbitrary' to each other; a woman in black being tugged after a blond dog on a long leash toward the corner is not 'with' but 'in addition to' a meter maid in a loose uniform tucking a parking ticket in a vivid green envelope under the windshield wiper of a dusty red car; a heavy boy repeatedly riding his skateboard at the curb in the parking lot and attempting to jump it is not 'related to' the sikh in shirtsleeves lounging with a cigarette in his fingers at the kitchen door of the unpopular Indian restaurant across the street. But they are joined by an almost-invisible swift but rational 'and' — a flowing conjunction, 'transitions in our moving life' — which it is my goal to see"

Monday, February 16, 2004
10:44 PM
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Browsing through the archive of reviews of lowercase / computer music over at Incursion.org, I came across this article, which thoughtfully reviews five records made utilizing Cycling 74's Max/MSP software (and released, in fact, on Cycling 74's in-house label).

Cycling 74 has also recently released a DVD of sonic material which appears to be intended as the audio equivalent of a disc of stock photography images: i.e. full of material intended for re-use by designers (multimedia designers in this case, I guess). Mildly depressing.

Sunday, February 15, 2004
11:47 AM
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Philly-area Raccoon readers who don't already have Valentine's Day plans should consider going to see Scott Rettberg and Nick Montfort read from their serial novel Implementation:

This description touches on loads of my personal hot-points:

"Implementation is a novel about psychological warfare, American imperialism, sex, terror, identity, and the idea of place, a project that borrows from the traditions of net.art, mail art, sticker art, conceptual art, situationist theater, serial fiction, and guerilla viral marketing. ... Its initial incarnation is as a serial novel printed on sheets of stickers that are being distributed in monthly installments."

Info on the reading.

Stickers for download (PDF).

Friday, February 13, 2004
1:19 PM
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As I've mentioned here before, I'm teaching an Intro to Lit course this semester. This is the first time I've taught Intro to Lit, and it's been an interesting experience so far. The really interesting thing (for me) has been that this course marks the first time I've attempted to teach poetry. I read a decent amount of poetry, and I have a rudimentary set of thoughts about what makes a poem "good," but I've never before been faced with the need to formalize those opinions into something that can be understood by a room full of teenagers.

As a result, I've spent the new year reading poetry, almost exclusively—when I've been reading prose, it's mainly been prose written by poets. A particularly exhilirating read has been Charles Olson's Collected Prose, especially the volume Human Universe, which is written in a urgent visionary style that recalls some of Philip K. Dick's loopier nonfiction writings—Olson, like Dick, has the ability to compel me into believing (temporarily) that everything in the entire modern world is crucially predicated on some ancient secret that is both utterly esoteric yet somehow in plain sight all the time.

I haven't yet managed to tackle the first volume in the book, a long exegesis of American incantation Moby Dick, but what I've read so far has been a lot of fun.

I want to write something about William Carlos Williams here, but that's going to have to wait for another time.

Labels: poetry_commentary

Thursday, February 12, 2004
5:37 PM
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New Macs are coming bundled with GarageBand, a piece of loop-making / multitracking / music production software.

Predictably, the ease-of-use of the product has led some to question whether GarageBand is "truly" enabling creativity or is "just" allowing people to enjoy the experience of being "artistic" without the hard work and discipline that we normally associate with the actual making of art. (See, for instance, this parody of GarageBand: a fake Apple product called "AtticAuthor.")

The parody is admittedly clever. And it's true that, like many other easy-to-use production tools, GarageBand may enable some users to hurriedly produce formulaic output which appears superficially "professional." But I believe in creative amateurism, and so I come down on the side of cheap tools for cultural production every time. I'd defend the point more extensively in this post if I hadn't already done so in a very similar argument almost two years ago, and if Jean Burgess hadn't been doing so quite eloquently over at Creativity / Machine. Visit this archive for five thoughtful posts defending GarageBand, as well as other posts on the topic of "vernacular creativity" (great phrase!).

Labels: amateurism, creative_process, technology

1:13 PM
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My old pal Brian S. sends along one link to this social software weblog and one to an article on Club Nexus, an online social network at Stanford. (The article is co-authored by Orkut Buyukokkten, the Orkut that gives Orkut its name, and Club Nexus appears to have inspired at least a few of the Big O's quirkier features, including the sexy/trusty/cool thing that I hated on last week.)

The bulk of the article is dedicated to a variety of statistical observations made from sorting and sifting the data-sets of user information in various ways. For instance, correlations can be observed between the way users describe their personalities (via personality-descriptors selected from a menu) and what those same users describe as their interests. (Appendix A, which begins on page 14, entertainingly records these correlations.)

This is an interesting use of the technology, although it's worth noting that this view of the "big picture" is only available to the system administrators, those who have the access and the tools necessary to organize the big picture into meaningful data.

Question: is there a social networking website that offers total information openness, by which I mean a site that allows all of its users to access, navigate, and sort all of its accumulated information? Because it's worth thinking about not only the value that these sorts of systems provide for their users, but also the value that they provide for their administrators. I would bet that the information that these sorts of systems may yield will turn out to be worth actual money, and as a result it's worth trying to develop a sense of exactly how much of a gap exists between what the administrators can learn from the system and what the users can learn from the system. Reading this article gave me the feeling that we may all be merrily participating in the world's largest market research scheme, and for the first time it made me think that there might be a political point to feeding noise into these systems.

Labels: internet, networks, rants

Tuesday, February 10, 2004
11:13 AM
0 comments

New year, lots of new interesting records.

Futatsu is a duet between guitarist Taku Sugimoto and trombonist Radu Malfatti, two improvisers who have taken to playing as minimally as possible, even if this means playing nothing for minutes at a time. I don't know that I actually want to own this record, but it's interesting watching reviewers attempt to review a disc that consists mostly of long silences: Ed Howard, writing over at Stylus, does an excellent job. I enjoyed this review so much I read it out loud over the phone to a friend, long-distance no less.

The tiny Mr. Mutt label (run by Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli, who record for Apestaartje as tu_m) is releasing a series of limited edition CD-Rs from artists I like, most notably Apestaartje labelmates Minamo.

Speaking of Minamo, they now have their own imprint, Fabric. The first release is a compliation (details, including short excerpts); expect beauty.

And, finally, over at the Seattle Weekly, Douglas Wolk reviews the new Philip Jeck and the new His Name Is Alive. His Name Is Alive fell off my radar about six or seven years ago, which apparently looks to be about the time that HNAS frontman Warren Defever began disappearing into a set of hermetic studio experiments: the new (tour-only?) release, Brown Rice, is the result.

Labels: music_commentary

Wednesday, February 04, 2004
7:31 PM
0 comments

Follow-up to this post: Brian Eno has contacted Matt Jones. I admit that I'm impressed, although they haven't actually had the sit-down chat yet, and until they do I'm not convinced that the project has been successful. (My interest in the project is strictly to see how well a data-exchanging network can provide an experiential pleasure: one that is not exclusively data-oriented. Having Brian Eno post a comment on your blog is undoubtedly pleasurable, but it's a data pleasure, only one order of magnitude above the sorts of pleasures that the Web already excels at delivering. (If one is prone to thinking of all experience as being data, processed by the mind, then one could possibly argue that all experiential pleasures are also data pleasures, but I'll argue for the distinction, given that the data involved in an experience like an actual sit-down face-to-face conversation is massively richer than the data involved in a blog exchange.))

Other tidbits: Crystal sends along a Memepool link to an interesting essaylet about the social networking technology used by French dove breeders of the 17th century, complete with karma mechanisms and fake profiles.

The "state of the state of social software" posts on this blog and elsewhere have mostly been occasioned by the launch of Orkut. I've been fooling around with Orkut for the course of the past week, and I've made some observations:

On the plus side, Orkut does one thing well: it provides me with the meaningful-blurb-under-the-photo that Friendster doesn't give me (This is the third of the three "things I want to do that Friendster won't let me do." Orkut doesn't allow me to do the first two, but at least they're managing one out of three.)

On the drawback side, Orkut has what strikes me as a truly useless friend-ranking mechanism, where you can rate friends as "sexy," "very sexy," or "super sexy." (Also cool / very cool / super cool and trustworthy / very trustworthy / super trustworthy.)

First off, this mechanism bizarrely makes ranking someone as merely "sexy" into kind of an insult... my guess is that this will lead to the kind of inflation known to characterize EBay's feedback reports, where people are unusually free with the perfect scores, because anything less seems critical. (Orkut attempts to minimize this problem by making the rankings anonymous, but, still, I find it difficult to visualize myself giving my friends anything less than the highest rankings.) If everyone in the system ends up being 90% cool (even typing out such a stupid phrase makes me gnash my teeth) then the listing that indicates a person's "coolness level" is meaningless, noise in the signal.

There's the germ of a good idea here, though: in order to provide meaningful data, social networking websites need to allow you to rank the people you're connected to. But rating them in terms of coolness or sexiness is absolutely the wrong way to go about this (not least because of the vagueness: what's the difference between "very trustworthy" and "super trustworthy" anyway?).

What would actually be useful is to be able to rate my friends in terms of the intensity of the bond between us. There are eight people currently listed as my friends in Orkut. I am, indeed, fond of them all. But two of them I've never met. Two more I've only met on one occasion. One is a casual acquaintance who I haven't had contact with since he moved away from Chicago six months (or so) ago. Two are people who I enjoy some degree of intimacy with, people who I could call on the phone just to say "how are you?," people who I have had dinner with (once or twice) within the past year. And one is a guy who's been my friend for fifteen years. This information has obvious relevance to anyone who's trying to make a meaningful use of my network, but to Orkut (or Friendster or Tribe) all of the bonds are of equal intensity, creating a picture of me and my network of friends which is weirdly distorted to the point where it is practically a fiction.

</grouchy>

Labels: internet, networks, rants

Tuesday, February 03, 2004
10:36 AM
0 comments

A Steven Johnson post on the decline of the Dean candidacy. The third paragraph is a good example of why I read Johnson: he explains the interrelationship of complex forces so reasonably and with such clarity that you feel like he's articulating something that you've actually known all along. Which of course you haven't. Or at least I haven't.

Monday, February 02, 2004
3:41 PM
0 comments

This week, with a friend, I've been discussing desire and need. Somewhere in the middle of the discussion I came up with the following list of "things I need to be happy":

1. meaningful personal projects (usually art-making) and the time / solitude to pursue them
2. meaningful collaborative projects (art-making, event planning, political projects)
3. meaningful employment
4. good sex
5. play (games or otherwise)
6. art / exposure to art (music, literature, movies)
7. good conversations about 1-6
8. good food
9. regular rest
10. physical / emotional health
Bonus: ritual

Before making my list, I tried to recall a similar list that I found in Pat Hartman's zine Salon about eight years ago. The list moved me at the time, and I copied it into my journal and reproduced it in the diary-zine I was doing. Ever since, It's operated quietly in the background, informing the way I think about success. I couldn't remember the exact list, just the tenor of it, but today I dug the old diary out and found it:

"At one point in my twenties I sat down to take stock. There were eight things I liked to do, and as long as I could do them, and even if I never did anything else but the eight things, I would be happy and my life would be successful. My chances of success were enhanced by the fact that many of the eight things could be done alone, and most could be done without money. The eight things were: read, write, think, hear music, converse with friends, do art, get stoned, and make love. This definition of success has remained true and achievable for many years."
—Anne Alexander

Sunday, February 01, 2004
10:14 AM
0 comments