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getting excited and making things
Not long ago, I ordered myself one of these shirts:
(I bought it here, if you want one of your own.)
It's a worthy sentiment to keep in mind during the current crisis. For me, it's a way of trying to turn what feels like a depressing indicator of failure—unemployment—into a source of creative ferment. It's a daily practice, that transmutation: it requires work. Sometimes I can manage to stay excited for the entire day and other times I hit the doldrums. But things are getting made. And I'm ready to start talking about some of them. (Some are still secrets.) So over the next few days I'll use this blog as a showcase for some things I made. And I want to know: what are you making? Show me. Labels: i made this, personal |
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
6:28 PM
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blinkout is live on the internet
The first Flash game that Dave and I worked on together throughout the spring is now live on the Internet.
PLAY:
Play Blinkout on King.com
Play Blinkout on Newgrounds
Play Blinkout on Kongregate (with Achievements)
DESCRIPTION:
How good is your visual memory under pressure? You'll have to use both your agility and good resource strategy to navigate your spaceship through an increasingly hostile dimension. How far can you get?
INSTRUCTIONS:
Move ship with ARROWS
Illuminate levels with the SPACEBAR (costs energy)
Find the key and go to the gate
Regain energy by picking up charges
There are 8 levels that will repeat for 6 rounds. The charges are persistent across all rounds, so don't use all of them the first time around...
MORE INFO:
The player will have to use their visual memory as most of the game is played in complete darkness. Illumination of the levels comes through collecting energy charges along the way. The catch is that a charge collected on an earlier level will no longer be available on later iterations. Charges picked up later are worth more energy, so the player will be able to manage their resources accordingly to make it to the harder rounds. In these later rounds the player is faced with greater energy costs for hitting a maze wall as well as greater costs for illuminating the level. The level time limit reduces and the movement speed increases. We realize this game is quite challenging and will likely intimidate at first as using visual memory, keyboard agility, and resource management together may prove to be a new experience for many players.
We are very happy to have gotten the game sponsored by King.com and they have been great to work with.
Enjoy! Labels: game_design, personal, projects |
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
10:55 AM
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wikipedian tag
So I've been busy with loads of project-work this month, but I also had time to invent and playtest a new game. It involves using the vast, super-complicated structure of Wikipedia as a play space, an environment through which one player chases another. I like to think of it as a kind of competitive parkour through the architecture of all human knowledge, but calling it "tag" is a little simpler. It's easy to learn and loads of fun.
I've put the full rule-set on a separate page. Labels: game_design, personal, projects |
Thursday, July 02, 2009
5:03 PM
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playtesters needed
OK, the prototype of the game depicted below is up and running. It won't be live on the Internet for another few months, but we're inviting playtesters to look at a private, locked beta. If you're interested in being added to the beta tester list, drop me a line via the usual channels.
(Note to beta-testers: The level depicted in Friday's post does not actually appear in the current version of the game, so don't knock yourself out looking for it.) Labels: game_design, personal, projects |
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
7:40 AM
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where I've been and what I've been up to (no. 1 in a series)
Those of you who have known me for any length of time know that I've had a long-standing interest in thinking about and designing games.
What I haven't talked about on this blog is that I've been collaborating lately with my good friend Dave Evans of Hybrid Mind Studios on some video-game design. We have a massive list of ideas, and this past month we've been pushing hard on the first of those.
We'll be seeking sponsorship for the game, so I can't say too much about it just yet, but I wanted to say that part of my absence from this blog lately has been due to cranking hard on some level design. It's been a very rewarding creative experience, and I thought I'd share a screenshot:
There are some interesting mechanics we've got in mind, but more about that later. Labels: game_design, personal |
Friday, April 24, 2009
7:22 AM
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best films of the 1980s
So in my spare time lately (I'm underemployed at the moment) I've been tinkering a lot with my Film Viewing database.
Basically what this means is "doing data entry"—entering and rating more and more films. It's fairly tedious work but somehow it's also engaging and engrossing. And the database as a whole is starting to get "robust"—it's starting to reach that sweet spot where I can command it to produce certain types of output, and get results that I feel are reasonably accurate. For instance, just as a test, I asked it to show me all the movies from the 1980s that I've given a rating of 8 or higher to (out of ten). I'm pretty pleased with the results, a list of 30 films which I think I could defend as the "best films of the 1980s."
Anyone want to have a good-natured argument about it? Anything I've left out? Anything I've wildly over-rated?
I chose the 80s more-or-less at random, and will happily present the results of a different decade upon request. Labels: filmographies, lists, media commentary, personal |
Monday, March 02, 2009
12:50 PM
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awp conference, 2009
First full day of the 2009 AWP conference begins today; I'm going to head downtown in the next hour or so. I'm primarily there to promote a new project, the Vivarium Review of Books. Fans of innovative writing (poetry and experimental fiction) may want to check this out.
Handing out Vivarium flyers is my main goal, but I'll be doing lots of other conference-related stuff, too. Predictably, three of the panels I'm the most interested in (for today) occur at the same time (1:30 pm):
R155. Multiformalism: Postmodern Poetics of Form. (Susan M. Schultz, Hank Lazer, K. Silem Mohammad, Annie Finch) Language poetry meets new formalism at last, and the poems fly! Editors and contributors to a daring new multicultural, multiaesthetic anthology talk about where poetry is headed now.
R169. The New-Media Novel: The Intersection of Film, E-Lit, & Story. (Steve Tomasula, John Cayley, Tal Halpern, M.D. Coverley) New authoring tools are allowing a new kind of novel to emerge, one that resides between print and independent film. Often created by a team of collaborators working in sound, animation, and language, these new-media novels involve many of the same challenges and pleasures of working in film or theater. This panel will take up several aspects of this exciting new genre, including its writing, creation, collaboration, and publication.
R172. The Age of Invention: Innovation and Experimentation in Middle-Grade and Young Adult Fiction. (Mary Rockcastle, Liza Ketchum, Anne Ursu, E. Lockhart, Anita Silvey) Very innovative work is being done today in middle-grade and young adult fiction—innovative in form, style, point of view, design, and subject matter. These books boldly satirize and comment on the human condition; they take on taboo subjects; and they interweave fiction, poetry, drama, and visual art. The panelists will discuss artistic innovation in their own work and in the work of writers they admire. They will set this work in a context of the larger field of fiction for young readers.
In any case. Anyone interested in meeting up sometime in the next three days is welcome to contact me at editor@vivariumreview.org. If you simply want to track my movements, try here. Twitter users may wish to note that lots of AWP-ers are using the #AWP09 hashtag; you can see the whole feed of them here. Labels: personal, projects, vivarium |
Thursday, February 12, 2009
8:51 AM
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the dreaded "25 things" virus
Those of you who have logged into Facebook in the last few weeks have very likely witnessed the wildfire spread of the "25 Random Things" meme / virus. I wasn't going to do it, and then last night I abruptly caved in and did it. I was fairly happy with the results so I thought I'd post them here as well.
1) In general, I like people and I like the world.
2) I enjoy making lists, and I spend more time than I probably should tracking data about my own life. For instance, I maintain a database of all the films I've ever seen (you can see the last 20 here)
3) I like having conversations, but I don't really like talking on the telephone.
4) I do, however, like text messaging, and I send several hundred text messages a month.
5) I like "experimental" music, film, writing, comics, and games, but really that just comes from liking music, film, writing, comics, and games so much that I want to experience them in the full variety of their forms. Put another way: I try not to be a snob.
6) I like collecting music, thinking about my music, and organizing and arranging my music. For a period I was buying at least one new CD a week. I've slowed down a bit lately, in part because I'm now involved in trading a lot of music with friends.
7) I am cripplingly dependent on iTunes, especially because of its rating feature, and the way it tracks Play Count and Date Last Played. My music listening is increasingly dictated by the interplay of these particular data-sets.
8) I like to dance, and I like almost anything that qualifies as dance music, from Beyonce to Mouse on Mars.
9) In the mid-1990s, I taught myself how to rap, and I still have a few fairly lengthy raps committed to memory. I intended it to be tongue-in-cheek, but I have actually come to believe that it is one of my more impressive talents.
10) I've been in two bands, and performed music live on stage somewhere around 30 times, although I have no musical training and generally consider myself to have no actual musical talent.
11) I use humor as a sort of social lubricant, and don't believe I could really be friends with someone who didn't think I was funny.
12) I would rather be thought of as attractive than be thought of as smart, although I put WAY more energy into being smart than I do into being attractive.
13) I enjoy flirting, sexual tension, and sexual confusion. If I'm not experiencing two out of three in any given week I will begin to make ill-advised decisions.
14) I think of sex as only one form of a larger category of intimacy, and I think that people who think sex is a particularly unique or special form of intimacy are engaged in a conceptual error. I am not immune to making this error myself, at times, although I try to catch myself.
15) I detest money, and I detest the things people must do to get money. The fact that I care as much as I do about money is one of the things I dislike about myself.
16) I do, however, enjoy teaching, and I believe that I am good at it.
17) I am fascinated by violence, and representations of violence. I don't ENJOY movies that depict torture and violence but I am unquenchably curious about them and will eventually end up seeing them all. (They're always worse in my imagination, just FYI.)
18) From roughly age 12 to age 18, I participated in a program called "Cinekyd," which taught young people the basics of film and television production. I spent most of my Cinekyd time in the "Graphics and Minatures" department, learning about special effects. This is undoubtedly part of where my love of science fiction and horror films comes from.
19) My immediate family has an endearing interest in grotesque stories about things like bodily functions. Hearing a story of this sort around the dinner table is one of the ways that I can tell that I am "home."
20) I don't believe in the afterlife, but I do believe that places can be haunted. I make no real effort to reconcile this apparent discontinuity.
21) I don't really believe in magic, but in the spirit of experiential knowledge I performed a few "spells" just to see what would happen. The results were... interesting?
22) I have many fond memories of playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I still have my polyhedral dice nearby should someone drop by and want to fire up a game.
23) I spent many hours as a young child playing the Atari 2600, and will still occasionally load up a Web-based replica of the old 2600 game "Adventure," a game in which your "character" is simply an unadorned rectangle.
24) I am one of those people who has Opinions About Fonts.
25) I am seldom bored, and am usually at my happiest when engaged in mutiple projects. An old friend once told me he wished that I could have 36 hours in every day, and I still count that as one of the nicest things anyone ever said about me. Labels: lists, personal |
Monday, January 26, 2009
8:52 AM
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away notification
I'm currently in the throes of executing a cross-country move, from Chicago to the Greater Boston Area, and my days these past... two weeks or so have been pretty consumed with packing, purging, and lugging. Thursday (the 31st) I drive halfway to Boston and Friday (the 1st) I go the rest of the way, and this blog will update again not long afterwards. Labels: personal |
Monday, July 28, 2008
8:11 PM
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my movie life
This post is part of Culture Snob's "Self-Involvement" Blog-A-Thon, running July 9-13th. For this Blog-A-Thon, Jeff's asked film bloggers to blog not so much about movies, but about oneself, as seen through the lens of movies. As an example, he linked to an old piece of his writing, "My Movie Life," sharing some key personal details about, well, his life and the movies. That proved too irresistible a model not to follow steal. So without further ado, here's a cool thirty fragments of my own movie life.
1. The first movie I remember seeing was Star Wars (1977), which I saw with my parents at the local drive-in theatre. I remember items in the car (in particular, a Styrofoam cooler) more than I remember anything about that particular viewing of the movie.
2. I feel fortunate to have had that drive-in theatre as a place to hang out in my adolescence, an experience that nothing else really substitutes for. Movies I can remember seeing there: Jurassic Park (1993), Total Recall (1990), Mom and Dad Save the World (1992). The site of the drive-in is now a Target.
3. I can remember having to leave the theatre early during a viewing of Superman (1978), because I was sniveling and crying. (I think the reason for this was because the non-Superman parts were too slow and boring, but I cannot really recall the incident.)
4. The first cinematic nudity I ever saw was on videotape; a friend showed me Risky Business (1983) and the nearly-forgotten My Tutor (1983).
5. The first cinematic nudity I saw in the theatre was Revenge of the Nerds (1984). (I was with a group of young men who went for a friend's birthday party; we were accompanied by his father.)
6. The only R-rated movie I can recall being turned away from at the box office was David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986); it is still one of my favorite movies.
7. I can remember seeing a videotaped copy of Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) in around sixth grade, and I remember the first murder in that film made an astonishing impact on me. I still can't watch that movie without feeling a mix of anticipation and genuine dread as that scene approaches.
8. In the wake of this, I spent maybe five years watching as many different 80s slasher or monster movies as I could get my hands on, most of them not very good. 9. The films that mark the end of this phase, for me, are Bloodsucking Freaks (1976) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978), both of which I saw in 1990 or 1991, and both of which left me feeling depressed and more than a little unclean. My relationship to horror has been love-hate ever since.
10. Around 1988-1990 I saw videotaped copies of Blue Velvet (1986) and Pink Flamingos (1979), both of which, in their own ways, provided the same visceral shock that Nightmare on Elm Street had provided, but both clearly had agendas that were more complicated than mere shock. Each of these dramatically expanded my sense of what cinema could legitimately try to do.
11. I saw Wild at Heart (1990) three times in the theatre. Its prurient mix of sex, violence, and Americana really was pretty ideal for me at age 17. (As an adult, I've come to think of it as one of Lynch's weaker films.) A few years later I saw Pulp Fiction (1994) in the theatre three times. I believe the most recent film I've done that with was The Incredibles (2004).
12. Eraserhead (1977) was a David Lynch film that was legendary in my suburban neighborhood (this was in the wake of Twin Peaks, when David Lynch was getting cover-story profiles in Time) but copies of it were hard to find—there was only one video store in the area that carried it (Southampton Video). That was the first movie that I went substantially out of my way to see. (It is still one of my favorite movies.)
13. Delicatessen (1991) was the first film that I read reviews of when it was still in theaters, and travelled into Philly from my suburban home to see at an art house theatre (the Ritz, where I would later work for a short stint). The second film I did this for was Naked Lunch (1991). (Both of these are still among my favorite movies.)
14. The first film I ever saw that I wanted to watch again the second I finished it was Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985).
15. Movies I owned, early on: I recorded Yellow Submarine (1968) off of television; I bought a copy of Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) when the video store was liquidating their Betamax stock; I purchased a copy of Heathers (1989) in 1990 and began to wear a black trench coat almost immediately thereafter. I've probably seen each of these films at least ten times, and I don't think I've seen any of them in the last ten years, although I still own a copy of Yellow Submarine.
16. The first foreign-language film I ever saw was probably Fellini's Amarcord (1973).
17. The first foreign-language film I ever counted as one of my favorite films was Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963).
18. I owe a lot of my film literacy to my years at La Salle University, in Philadelphia, which had a private screening room in the basement of the library that students could use, and a fairly good stock of freely-available films. This was a great resource at a time when I had little money, and I saw an incredible number of important films in that little room.
19. One of the things I watched down there was Fantasia (1940), which also marks the first time I ever took acid.
20. I took a few great film seminars at La Salle, including one on Hitchcock and one on Coppola, Scorsese, and Woody Allen (a course inspired, I believe, by their pairing in the relatively weak New York Stories (1989)).
21. The first film writing I can ever remember doing I did for these seminars: I remember doing a "close reading" on a scene from Taxi Driver (1976) and one on the dream sequence from Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).
22. Also at LaSalle, some other film geek students and I formed a film club. We were allowed to use one of the screening classrooms as long as we could make the argument that we were using it for educational purposes; to this end, we were required to have a student give an informative lecture about whatever film we'd screened. I can recall personally giving lectures on A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barton Fink (1991).
23. Also at La Salle, in someone's dorm room, I watched my first pornographic video. The name eludes me but I did not find it especially erotic. (I am pretty sure that on the same day and in the same dorm room, I saw Blade Runner (1982) for the first time.)
24. I am seldom aroused by film (including porn); that may be a side effect of being in my mid-thirties, but I can't remember being especially aroused by any earlier films, either. Perhaps it's the mediating effect of cinema, but movies make sex or nudity seem weirdly abstract or stylized somehow (I think it may do the same thing with violence, only to a net positive effect instead of a net negative effect). In any case, film ranks a distant fourth in terms of its erotic impact on me (behind interpersonal interaction, imagination, and language (either written or spoken)).
25. Along these lines, I mostly don't get crushes on actresses, although there are at least a few who have done a scene here or there that is stored somewhere in my erotic memory. I will confess, however, that in early adolescence I found Wendy Schall's character in The 'Burbs (1989) to be the paragon of female beauty. And there was a period where I probably wanted a girlfriend like Beetlejuice / Heathers-era Winona Ryder. More recently, I wanted a girlfriend like Patricia Arquette in True Romance (1993), and I appreciate every moment of her smokin'-hot presence in Lost Highway (1997).
26. The last movie I can remember feeling aroused by while viewing was Sex and Lucia (2001). If anyone's got a more recent recommendation of something that Worked For You, well, that's what the comments box is for. Bring it on.
27. The last movie that made me squirm in my seat with discomfort was Oldboy (2003), and the one before that was Audition (1999). I found the first Saw (2004) to be laughably tame by comparison. Again I'll ask for recommendations.
28. I went through a period where I didn't watch many movies, roughly 2004-2006.
29. I got re-interested in them through a project where I tried to come up with a "canon" of 100 important films for a friend. The final version, as I came up with it, is here, and the set of posts that documents the entire long process of brainstorming it can be found here. This made me realize how much I liked film, and how many important films I still hadn't seen.
30. I keep track of everything I see nowadays, and export the results to a webpage which can be viewed here. I try to do at least a short write-up of nearly everything I see and many of these get cross-posted to Netflix. My reviewer rank at Netflix, as of this writing, is 36,928, and if there's anything more self-involved than monitoring your Netflix reviewer rank, I don't know what it might be. Labels: lists, media commentary, personal |
Thursday, July 10, 2008
10:56 AM
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100 book challenge: part three: religion, new age, fringe science, and science
Still in the process of [at least theoretically] culling my book collection down to 100 key books. Moving on down the shelf takes us through Drama—my drama selection is pretty patchy and under-appreciated; I'm not sure that any of the scattering of volumes I have would be worth including in the final 100. If I had a good volume of Shakespeare's plays I'd take that, but I don't. Moving on.
The next couple of shelves are religion, "new age"-type stuff, and fringe science. Here are my picks from that area:
The Grove Press "Pocket Canons" Books of the Bible box set.
[I should be honest and acknowledge that I'll almost certainly never read the entire Bible, but reading these twelve books every few years is feasible and desirable.]
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, by Gershom Scholem
[This book took me forever to get through, but was incredibly rewarding. There are so many strange ideas in the history of Judaism, and this book is a fascinating overview.]
A History of God, by Karen Armstrong
[Contains just about everything you'll ever need to know about the three major monotheistic religions.]
The I Ching, or Book of Changes (Wilhelm / Baynes translation)
[Carl Jung claimed that this book was alive. Philip K. Dick claimed that this book could not predict the future, but could rather provide an accurate diagnosis of the present, from which probable futures could be extracted. Anything I could add would be extraneous.]
The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, edited by Lawrence Sutin
[If anything, Dick's non-fiction is even more interesting and loopy than his fiction. This book contains a lot of Dick's thoughts on spirituality, synchronicity, and reality: great stuff. I'd also find it hard to part with In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, the book that editor Lawrence Sutin valiantly attempted to carve out of Dick's 8,000 page journal documenting his mystical experience.]
Cosmic Trigger Volume One: Final Secret of the Illuminati, by Robert Anton Wilson
[For better or for worse, Cosmic Trigger changed my life, and although I'm a little more distanced from Wilson these days, this volume is still a real gold mine of high weirdness.]
Let's move on down into the science books...
Metamagical Themas, by Douglas R. Hofstadter
[Godel, Escher, Bach is more renowned, but this book, which collects Hofstadter's Scientific American columns from 1981-1983, has just as many fascinating ideas, and in more digestible form. Language, self-referentiality, fonts, game theory, geometric art... this thing is like a laundry list of geek interests. Plus it is the book that taught me the game Nomic.]
Emergence, by Steven Johnson
[A good, readable introduction to the science of complexity and self-organization.]
Chaos, by James Gleick
[Great pictures of fractals, and still (to my mind) the best introductory book on this particular branch of science. I also own Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature, which is wonderful to look at, but a bit over my head.]
Li: Dynamic Form in Nature
[A tiny little book—basically an impulse-buy kind of thing—documenting "surface patterns" in nature—crystal designs, cat markings, vascular structures in leaves, etc. Those are the kinds of patterns I'm attracted to, so this book is pretty important to me. Since it's small, I'll throw in its sister volume, Sacred Geometry, a similar-sized volume on the harmonic mathematics of ritual spaces.]
This brings me right up to the halfway point: 50 books, 50 to go. Labels: book_commentary, lists, personal |
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
10:05 AM
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100 book challenge
So in the Red Eye a couple of days ago was an article on something called the "100 Thing Challenge"—which caught my eye at first because I thought it was a spin on my long-running 100 Favorite Things exercise.
It is and it isn't. It's an article on one person's attempt to simplify his life by reducing his personal belongings to 100 things. This appealed to me, probably foremostly because I'm preparing a cross-country move in a few weeks, and so the idea of reducing my belongings has been much on my mind lately.
But 100 items only? Sheesh, I thought to myself, I don't think I could reduce even just my books to 100, much less everything else. (It actually turns out, if you look at the original post from the guy who came up with the challenge, that he's allowing himself books as an exception, so that's heartening.)
But it did get me to thinking: if I tried to reduce down to 100 books, what are the ones I would choose? I have a lot of books that I cart around from apartment to apartment to apartment, more for their decorative value than anything else. Many (most?) of them I don't think I'll ever re-read (and if I was struck by the sudden impulse to re-read them, I could probably go get them out of a library). But there are some that I do refer to regularly, or plan to re-read, or just can't bring myself to part with. But is that category larger than 100?
I think I'll make a list of the 100 "must-saves," and see how I feel about the "leftovers." A complete list or list in progress will likely appear here soon.
See also: the LibraryThing Swap this Book feature; BookCrossing; and my own lament, last year, about what to do with all the CDs clogging up my living quarters (a problem I'm still in the process of solving). Labels: personal, projects |
Friday, June 27, 2008
8:55 AM
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100 favorite things (2008 version)
Hi there, I'm back.
While away, I did some interesting things (including a one-day vow of silence). But I also did my roughly annual 100-favorite-things list, which, as usual, I'll post here. It is written in long chain of association, which may be decodeable by the astute reader:
indexes, index cards, card catalogs
taxonomies + lists
notebooks, blank books, composition books
digital search
journals + diaries
weblogs + livejournals
the comic "achewood"
reading
studying
projects
the spring conference
receiving positive attention
giving positive attention
not being bored
feeling competent / feeling powerful
feeling like others perceive me as dangerous / alluring
feeling like others perceive me as caring / kind / nonjudgmental
resisting dichotomies
dancing + dance music
drones + drone music
altered states
listening to music while [in an altered state]
having a beer in the afternoon in an unfamiliar city
travelling
roadtrips with a close friend
the landscape of the american west
forests
trails and hikes
the path between april + thor's driveway and their front door
urban walks
exploring abandoned buildings
tunnels, passages, hidden spaces
mazes + labyrinths
dungeons and dragons + its culture + paraphenalia
games in general: board games, card games, video games
rust, moss, decay, mold
taking photographs
birdsong
the movie "george washington"
the movie "slacker"
conversations
listening
group improvisation
being among a group that is functioning well together
being alone
having ideas
feeling creative
writing
laptop computers
managing my music in iTunes
adobe photoshop + adobe illustrator
del.icio.us, flickr, and other web 2.0-type services
the internet more broadly
katamari damacy
cute shit
the idea of time travel / time travel narratives
grant morrison's comics
the marvel universe + its culture + paraphenalia
jokes and being thought of as funny
fonts
the puzzle-solving elements of graphic design
making everyday activities into a game
self-improvement
receiving recommendations from others
cycles
swimming naked
exhibitionists
touching others
being touched
venus
ganesh
thoth
altars, ritual objects, charms
unitarians + quakers
smokers
greasy spoons
good coffeehouses
free wi-fi
long-form serial narrative
buffy the vampire slayer
subcultures
sleeping next to someone
flirting
long-running relationships
the fundamental variety of other people
sharing food
desserts, esp. ice cream + chocolate
watching movies + having movie-watching projects
being busy buy not feeling behind
having knowledge / the unknown
manipulating data
invented languages
silly songs
coming out of depression / feeling optimistic
epiphanies
good memories / the promise of good things to come
the world
More reflections to come in a bit. Labels: lists, personal |
Friday, June 20, 2008
9:24 AM
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hiatus
I'm off to my annual journey to New Hampshire for Spring, the conference / temporary autonomous zone / adult camp that I've been involved with for the last eight years. Consequently, all blogs will likely be on hiatus until mid-June.
Some of my photos from past Springs are available here, if you want to get some kind of idea of what I'll be up to. Labels: meta, personal |
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
10:40 AM
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artists as writers
I don't know what this says about me or my career as a writer, but the writing that most inspires me to write is seldom writing produced by other writers, but more commonly by visual artists who write.
This happened in the fall of 2004, when I was reading Robert Smithson's collected writings (some scavengings and related riffs here), and it happened again just yesterday, in the John Cleary Library at the Houston Center for Photography, when I was looking at Spiritual America, a collection of Richard Prince's photography, painting and writings. The exact writings in Spiritual America don't appear to be online, but this bit, at Prince's website, is perhaps indicative of the sort of aggregation of narrative fragments, factoids, aphorisms, and plagiarized bits found there. I read this stuff for five minutes and for the first time in over a year I wanted to write something that someone might call "fiction" or "poetry." Stay tuned. Labels: art, personal, writing |
Friday, May 30, 2008
2:49 PM
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film club placeholder notice
It's been a little while since the last Film Club viewing, Sans Soleil... the reason for this is that Skunkcabbage's choice of a follow-up, Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), has been a little bit hard to track down, given that it appears to have never enjoyed a US domestic release. We eBayed a copy, but it's been taking a while to make it from Bangkok to Chicago, so it may be a while longer before we can continue with our normal progression. (Oh, and it is maybe worth mentioning that Film Club views its non-Region One DVDs on the Philips DVP5140 Multiformat DVD Player, an affordable domestic player easily hackable to be region-free.)
As a placeholder, we will likely watch Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell (1995) sometime this week, and I'll write it up, even though it may not be an "official" Film Club pick...
And I've got some other non-Film-Club related content which I'll be posting here soon. For now, take care. Labels: personal |
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
12:59 PM
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track of the week: "ambiguity song," by camper van beethoven
I've never really loved the use of "Indie" as a genre designator: I do use it, in my obsessively-maintained iTunes taxonomy, but its connection to the commercial dimension of the music world has always made it function a bit uncomfortably for me. The R.E.M. that produced Document (for independent label I.R.S.) sounds pretty much the same as the R.E.M. that produced Green (for major label Warner Brothers), so are some of those tracks "indie" and not others? What about the fact that I.R.S. itself was bought by EMI in 1994? And today's climate, teeming with subsidiary labels and imprints, makes it even harder to keep score, and if you were attempting to be rigorous in your use of the designator you'd drive apart bands who were making essentially the same style of music.
The option iTunes suggests, "Alternative & Punk," is another genre designator I've never loved, for reasons that don't require further explanation here. If I had my way, I'd go back to a label that seems to have fallen into disuse: "college rock," which I mainly remember from my own pre-college days, looking over the "Charts" page in issues of Rolling Stone, back in the late 80s.
That brings us to today's track, by quintessential college rock band Camper Van Beethoven: "Ambiguity Song." I'm feeling myself to be in a pretty ambiguous space lately, and so this song nicely captures my head-space some days. Unlike the concepts of "college rock" or "indie rock," the concept of ambiguity is one that does not quickly grow dated. Labels: mp3s, music_commentary, personal |
Friday, April 18, 2008
8:18 AM
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the season of comics
Of the last five books I've read (see sidebar), all five of them are graphic novels. That's the first time that that's happened in the five years I've been keeping a reading log.
I think there are a few factors that might contribute to this, besides the fact that graphic novels are generally pretty quick reads. It's winter, and an especially gray and dismal-looking winter, and the lure of something brightly-colored is appealing. Also, my grading load has increased this semester, and it's hard to want to read more lines of black text on white paper when I'm done with a few hours of reading student drafts. But probably most prominent is that Film Club has begun patronizing comic book / video store / geek haven Brainstorm, and it's one of those local microbusinesses that you just can't help but want to support. Labels: book_commentary, comics, personal |
Sunday, March 02, 2008
10:23 AM
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tiny hopes
I'm actually pretty happy with the slightly fevered tone of yesterday's Virgin Suicides write-up, and am giving some thought to re-tooling it into a piece for the Bright Lights Film Journal, whose self-described identity as "a popular-academic hybrid" feels like a pretty comfortable fit for the film stuff that I've been writing lately.
I've also been giving some consideration to submitting my "ludic failure" paper to Game Studies.
There's also been some behind-the-scenes activity circulating around "the book" this week, the results of which will be announced here as soon as some paperwork settles. Stay tuned. Labels: novel_of_adequacy, personal, projects, writing |
Friday, February 15, 2008
1:12 PM
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the application process
Mostly-complete applications went out today to both MIT and Georgia Tech. I was pretty happy with my portfolio, which is a weird collection of things, including my "Ludological Failure" paper, a 2003 syllabus on the topic of "Digital Cultures," a tabletop strategy game ("Treefort Nations") that I designed for Invisible City Productions back in 2002, my old "Information Prose" manifesto, and all of Imaginary Year. I was pretty unhappy with the fact that my grad school transcripts didn't arrive in time to make it out in this packet. I think USPS might have screwed me on that one: I Express Mailed the transcript request on the 4th and paid for the return receipt, which still hasn't shown up at my apartment. Sigh. When the transcripts arrive, if they ever do, I'll send them along, and their absence until then might not matter that much—I know the work sample and letters of recommendation are more important—but I really hate the fact that I sent out incomplete applications, and there's at least a chance that my whole application will just go in the trash because of the missing pieces.
Yes, pieces: the other thing that's missing is my GRE scores, because the ones I earned when I last took the GRE, in 1995 [maybe 1996], are long expired. I'll be re-taking the exam tomorrow morning and having the scores sent along ASAP. I've been doing Quantitative practice sets all week and am consistently getting around 40-50 percent wrong, which isn't exactly putting me in a positive frame of mind.
Sigh. Labels: personal |
Monday, January 14, 2008
6:21 PM
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where i've been and what i've been up to
A busy week here around Raccoon HQ.
The biggest news, I suppose, is that I'm thinking about returning to grad school, and taking some steps in that direction. Those of you who know me well know that I've been struggling, for years now, with the feeling of being in a "rut" with my academic career: although I enjoy teaching Composition, my interests really lie elsewhere.
If I were going to try to pinpoint exactly where that "elsewhere" is, I'd say it's somewhere around the point where technology and narrative intersect, a point I've explored with some enthusiasm ever since at least 2001 (when I started writing Imaginary Year). There are two programs I've found that seem to focus on that precise intersection: Georgia Tech's Digital Media Ph.D., and MIT's Comparative Media Studies Master's program. I'll be applying to both.
They're pretty competitive programs, and there's of course no guarantee that I'll get into either one. And even if I got in there is no guarantee that I would choose to go: there are a lot of variables to take into account. But it feels good to be taking steps to open some doors.
Deadlines are January 15th, so I've been spending a lot of time this week getting my applications ready. This process has not been without some frustration: yesterday I learned I need to re-take the GREs, which wasn't exactly news that made me clap my hands with delight. But preparing my writing sample was actually kind of fun. I took some material I wrote for this blog a while back—my post(s) on frustration in games—and rethought the phenomenon a little more carefully, and wrote it up a little more formally. End result?: a 20-page research paper on the topic of what happens when games aren't fun, called "Frustration, Anxiety, Boredom: Towards A Typology of Ludic Failure."
It's nice, every once in a while, to remember that I actually like being an academic. Labels: game_commentary, personal, projects |
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
2:33 PM
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track of the week: "if we can land a man on the moon, then surely i can win your heart," by beulah
As you might imagine, I've accumulated a lot of CDs over the years, enough that storing them has become something of a challenge. This problem is accentuated by the fact that probably 98% of my music listening these days is on the iPod, and so the actual CDs go mostly unused: their cases serve as room decor at best and extraneous wrapping at worst.
At this point, I've run out of room for more CD racks (plus I can't get to Ikea) and so I've been forced to begin the process of packing them up into boxes and putting them into storage. Choosing which go and which stay is something of a challenge, although I'm aided by the fact that since 2001 I've created a top-ten list of albums released that year (for the curious: 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006). This provided a sort of happy solution: there's not enough room to store everything I buy, but there's definitely enough room to store a measly ten a year... plus those are the ones I most want to have at the ready / on display anyway...
But it got me to thinking about those pre-2001 years... the Nineties (and beyond). In order to properly follow through with this project, I should, in theory, need to go back and figure out a list of the Best Nineties Albums.
So I've spent some time, over the last few weeks, looking over the shelves, and trying to make some preliminary list of 100 CDs. It's a decade with a lot of good music: including (for me) canonical college-soundtrack stuff (Nirvana's Nevermind, the Beastie Boys' Check Your Head; Beck's Odelay); landmark electronic / dance albums (DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works, Portishead's Dummy, Tricky's Maxinquaye); a really strong selection of albums from labels like Matador (Pavement; Liz Phair; Yo La Tengo; Cat Power) and, later in the decade, Thrill Jockey (Tortoise; Oval; Town and Country). Then there's the rise of the Elephant 6 Collective, who released some albums that were pretty key for me back then (Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea). Today's track, "If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart," is from the lesser-known Elephant 6 project Beulah, from their very fine album When Your Heartstrings Break (1999). It's perhaps the best song ever written on the topic of "selling out," a topic which as of today seems, in its way, very 90s.
I'm eager to receive additional suggestions for great 90s albums: feel free to use the comments field.
Cross-posted to Raccoon Audio. Labels: audio, mp3s, personal |
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
1:06 PM
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windy city drone
The new issue of Signal to Noise (#47, Fall 2007) has in it a long-ish write-up on the Chicago "drone scene," taking as its fulcrum the festival I helped to organize this past summer, Fugue State.
Below are scans of a few pages, for those of you who ever wanted to see my picture in a magazine (click for full size).
Also please note that the Chicago debut of Flux Bouquet, a duo made up of Chicago melodic dronesters Chris Miller and Steve Fors, will be this Thursday night, at Schubas. Over and out. Labels: music_commentary, personal |
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
4:28 PM
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willful obscurity
So I've been playing around with Last.fm enough now that it's begun to serve up recommendations for me... But take a look at this list:
The near-total lack of signifying language here delights me, even as it reveals something about my lifelong pursuit of oddity.
It is also perhaps worth noting that I recently took something called the "Eclectic" quiz, which uses a script located here to take the top 20 artists in your Last.fm profile, and then collect the top five "similar artists" of each of these 20. Combining any duplicates, the resulting number of unique artists is your quote-unquote "eclectic score." Since this post is obviously shaping up to be a brag, I don't hesitate to post my results here:
87/100
The script is kind enough to print out the full list of "similar artists" that pops up: the 87 related artists for my profile are:
!!!, Aaron Dilloway, Aen, Aki Tsuyuko, Animal Collective, Antony Milton, Avarus, Belle and Sebastian, Ben Reynolds, Birchville Cat Motel, Boards of Canada, Braspyreet, Broken Social Scene, Burning Star Core (2), Caribou, Cat Power (2), Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, DJ Danger Mouse, Daft Punk, DangerDoom, Dialing In, Diplo, Directing Hand, Double Leopards (2), Feist, Fonica, Four Tet, Fourcolor, Fursaxa, Go Home Productions, Hala Strana, Hot Chip, In The Country, Iron & Wine (2), Islaja, Joanna Newsom (2), Junior Boys, Keijo, LCD Soundsystem (2), Lady Sovereign, Lau Nau, Lenlow, M. Ward, M.I.A., M.I.A./Diplo, MF DOOM, Madlib, Manitoba, Massive Attack, MoHa!, Mouthus, Naph, Neutral Milk Hotel, Noah Opponent, Okkervil River, Paavoharju, Peter Wright, Phonophani, Pilchard, Quasimoto, Ratatat, Rilo Kiley, Röyksopp, SPUNK, Sack & Blumm, Sawako (2), Seht, Sogar, Spank Rock (2), Spoon, Sufjan Stevens (3), Svalastog, Taurpis Tula, Taylor Deupree, The Arcade Fire, The Dead C (2), The Decemberists (3), The Knife, The Rapture, The Shins, Thievery Corporation, Viktor Vaughn, Wolf Parade, Xiu Xiu, Zero 7, dj BC, of Montreal
Boldface means I never heard of them. Labels: music_commentary, personal |
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
6:03 PM
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where i've been and what i've been up to
Busy week.
Spent the last three or four days down in Houston, with K., holed up in a Sheraton near the airport. Got out for a bit and walked around, taking photos of the concrete drainage systems and ruined parking lots surrounding the airport. Think of it as a way to renew my FOVICKS membership (that's Friends Of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures, for those of you following along at home).
There's a whole Ballard-esque novel waiting to be written about the rings of strange infrastructure that airports extrude, and perhaps another one about Houston infrastructure more generally. It is a city (like LA perhaps) which is designed to be nagivable only by automobile: it is almost incomprehensible when on foot. If we really have moved into the downslope of the peak oil bell curve, then Houston will one day be nothing more than a cryptic artifact. You heard it here first!
When I wasn't wandering around making doomsday prophecies, I was mostly surfing the Internet. It was costing me $9.95 a day at the Sheraton (bastards), so I decided to make it Worth My While, which included making a Facebook page (which you may or may not be able to see through that link) and setting up a Last.fm / Audioscrobbler account. Whoa, Last.fm is very cool, by the way, I did not know it. It is not exactly del.icio.us for iTunes, but that is the way I would begin explaining it to someone:
I like it more than the music-criticism aggregator Critical Metrics. I've found some good music through Critical Metrics, but aggregating criticism in that way leads one towards the "predictable imbalance" inherent in power law distributions (link for math / stat geeks only). There are various ways to avoid this problem in Critical Metrics, but it's a lot easier to avoid via Last.fm. That is all! Labels: city, houston, personal |
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
10:31 AM
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away notice
Leaving tomorrow for a few days in the Great Northeast; if any readers of this blog happen to be in the greater Boston area and have a free lunch hour tomorrow or Friday, let me know and we'll hang. Otherwise I'm going to the Coop to blow some money.
Because of my trip, film club for the week is canceled, and I probably won't really be upping the blog posting pace, but I will leave you with one observation and one question:
The observation: Charles Stross' Accelerando is possibly the best science fiction novel of the last, oh, let's say ten years or so. I am stone-faced serious when I say this, although to get some idea of why, you might want to read some of what I was saying about science fiction last year around this time
And the question: does anyone know of a good way to defamiliarize prepositions? E-mail me at "projects," at imaginary year (all one word) dot com. Labels: book_commentary, personal |
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
4:03 PM
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back
Back from two days of mind-expanding drone festival action, two days of on-the-road hijinxs with Harvey P., and five days in Houston, Texas with K. and a rotating cast of guest stars.
Needless to say, I emerged from the far end of it having been pummeled by enough good times to have rendered me nearly insensate. Some highlights, ordered in rough chronology, include: attempting to summarize all of Seasons Two and Three of Lost to Harvey, who indulged this act on my part with a preternatural patience; exploring an abandoned motel in downstate Illinois; listening to the generative music produced by pan-African automated whirligigs designed by polymath George Lewis (currently on display at Houston's Contemporary Art Museum in conjunction with this exhibit); getting caught in torrential rain with old-school compatriots Jon and Sharon; enjoying salmon grill-out with the whole Court of Charleston group; laughing nearly to the point of internal rupture at a story K. told about attempting, when quite young, to make a steak tatare.
Then there was the fest. Saw some fantastic music, felt proud of my own performance as part of The Number None quartet formation, took a handful of decent photos—these are the good things. The bad thing is: we lost money on it, which has resulted in some lingering post-fest complications best left unrecounted here.
Aside from fest music, I've also consumed some other media in the last week, including the Transformers movie and the first two Harry Potter novels, which I'd not read before. Both were surprising: I didn't expect the Transformers movie to be as funny as it is, and I didn't expect the Harry Potter books to be essentially mysteries, complete with clues, red herrings, and big reveals. So many people talk about Harry Potter as a big fantasy epic, but I found them—at least these first two—to be much closer to the tradition of "boy detective"-type novels, set in a fantasy milieu. In any case, they are quite charming, and the Transformers movie was worth my $9.50, even though it adds yet another branch to the messy thicket of Transformers continuity.
Has anybody out there read The Boy Detective Fails? Labels: book_commentary, media commentary, personal |
Monday, July 09, 2007
12:16 PM
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tonight / tomorrow night : fugue state
Yee-haw—Fugue State happens tonight!
Clicking on the above image will take you to a PDF of the poster, sized at 8.5" x 11", if for some reason you want to see it larger or make a print of it.
It should be a lovely time. If any Chicago-area readers of this blog are able to make it out, I'd love to see you and say hi.
And hey: we're in Time Out: Chicago! Labels: music_commentary, personal, rebis |
Friday, June 29, 2007
8:09 AM
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advices
Maybe I'm just in a sentimental mood, but here are a few scraps that I've been holding close to my heart this week:
Two bits of horoscope text, courtesy of Free Will Astrology's Rob Brezny. First up, from the week of June 7:
"Remember a moment, after an argument with an ally, when the first tentative spark of reconciliation flowed between your eyes and his or hers. These are good metaphors for the kinds of experiences you should seek out, cultivate, and concentrate on[.]"
OK? And then, from one week earlier:
"Here are a few of the fine improvements I expect you to have accomplished by the end of June: tips on how to live well in two worlds; an addition to the reasons why people find you attractive; a crash course that helps you become more fluent in the language of intimacy; richer, more interesting feelings than you've experienced in a long time; and practical insights into how to avoid being flustered by paradoxes that have driven you crazy in the past."
By the end of June, eh? Tall order. But sometimes quasiangelic assistance can come from everywhere, even, for instance, from Chris Stangl's brief write-up of Park Chan-Wook's Vengeance Trilogy, which I am 2/3rds of the way through. Stangl writes that the films are less about revenge than they are about "learning that your Right may conflict with someone else's," and "the difficulty of evaluating your motivation and responsibilities in light of knowing everyone is in the same predicament." These are topics I've been thinking about a lot lately, and I'm thankful to Stangl for crystallizing them conceptually. But in terms of advice, I turn my attention to these sentences, Stangl's way of articulating the enduring message of the trilogy's final film: "Revel in your ability to create opportunities for redemption. Be grateful for the instances when you greet a second chance having learned a lesson. Bury your face in them and dig in." Labels: advice, personal |
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
9:30 AM
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fugue state
Back in May I made some brief remarks about "Fugue State," a two-day festival curated by Rebis (the record label I co-operate). I thought I'd take the time to post the full details here for readers of this blog who are into the experimental music and might be interested in visiting Chicago in two weeks...
These details live permanently here.
FUGUE STATE
June 29-30, 2007
Empty Bottle, Chicago
Purchase advance tickets at www.emptybottle.com
On Friday, June 29th, and Saturday, June 30th, Rebis will present Fugue State, a two-night festival of expansive experimental music taking place at the Empty Bottle club in Chicago, IL. Fugue State is a celebration of the drone in all its many manifestations, as interpreted by some of Chicago's most innovative musicians. An eclectic array of approaches to soundforging will be represented over these two nights, ranging from harsh noise to gentle melodicism and from crafted composition to spontaneous improvisation, often within a single set. Five acts will perform each night.
A visual art component of the artists' choosing will accompany each act. Some acts will present visuals of their own creation, while others are collaborating with a visual artist to provide accompaniment to their live set. A variety of media will be represented, including film, live video manipulation, and other forms of visual expression.
schedule
Friday, June 29 (6/29):
DRMWPN
Haptic
Goldblood
Matt Clark
The Number None
Saturday, June 30 (6/30):
David Daniell
The Fortieth Day + Noise Crush
Good Stuff House
The Zoo Wheel
Estesombelo
artist bios
Friday, June 29:
DRMWPN
Over the past 2 years, DRMWPN (aka Dreamweapon) has gradually evolved to become the premier band operating at the nexus of the many divergent strains of experimental music in Chicago. Originally intended to be an outlet to showcase the more Dionysian improvisational impulses of the core members of Town & Country (Ben Vida, Jim Dorling, Liz Payne, Ben Abrams), DRMWPN has grown into an amorphous collective that at any given show may include Michael Zerang, Emmett Kelly, Rob AA Lowe, or any other number of Chicago's free rock/jazz/experimental luminaries among its ranks. Drawing on a shared knowledge and love of minimalism, ethnic devotional music, jazz, rock, and improvised ecstatic sound, DRMWPN's sublime live sets are augmented by the flickering hallucinatory generations of their Bryon Gysin-designed dream machine.
Haptic + Lisa Slodki
Haptic is a Chicago-based trio consisting of Steven Hess (Pan American, Dropp Ensemble, On, Fessenden), Joseph Mills (Jonathan Chen, Dropp Ensemble), and Adam Sonderberg (Civil War, Dropp Ensemble) that creates dense, drone-based works that can range from a rigorous minimalism to violent, carefully directed chaos. Initially conceived as a vehicle for live collaboration, Haptic has incorporated a different, rotating fourth member for each performance. Formed in the spring of 2005, Haptic has since collaborated with a diverse group of luminaries, including Tony Buck (The Necks), Olivia Block, David Daniell (San Agustin), and Mark Solotroff (Bloodyminded).
http://www.myspace.com/hapticmusic
For Fugue State, Haptic’s floating fourth member will be Lisa Slodki (a.k.a. Noise Crush). Noise Crush combines generative and found media to perform live video manipulation. Through the use of digital and analog mixing, her work engages with human gesture and dissonant emotional states. Seamless looping and overlapping junctures between images are the focus of her live performances.
http://www.noisecrush.com
Good Stuff House
Good Stuff House is the collaborative project of Matt Christensen and Mike Weis (Zelienople), and Scott Tuma (Souled American, Boxhead Ensemble). Starting with rock elements (drums, guitar, keyboards) and augmenting them with other non-standard instrumentation (harmonica, electronics, reeds, salvaged carillon bells and string and percussion instruments of their own design), Good Stuff House turns these raw ingredients into a psychedelic stew flavored with just a hint of raw Americana. Atmospheric folk drift that lulls one moment, then menaces the next.
http://www.zelienoplemusic.com
Matt Clark
Matt Clark is a mainstay of the Chicago rock/psych/improv circuit, having paid his dues over the past several years in many of the Windy City's most feted bands, including Joan of Arc and Pinebender. Matt's tunefully psychedelic guitar leads have most recently been parsed out among his current collaborative projects Ambulette, White/Light, and White Lichens. For Fugue State, Clark is going it solo the first night, and lending his talents to David Daniell’s headlining ensemble on the second.
The Number None
Number None is the duo of Chris Miller and Jeremy Bushnell, who force an ever-shifting variety of instrumentation (analog electronics, violin, harmonium, children's toys, found records, metals, thumb piano) through bewildering arrays of scavenged effects pedals and homegrown digital patches until they reaches that zone "where even open-ended words like 'free' or 'drone' are limiting." (Scott McKeating, Stylus Magazine) The Number None is the moniker they adapt when they incorporate a third player as a random element; for the Fugue State performance they will be joined by Andre Foisy, one half of the up-and-coming drone/noise act Locrian.
http://www.myspace.com/numbernone
http://www.imaginaryyear.com/rebis/number_none.html
Saturday, June 30:
David Daniell
Recent Chicago transplant David Daniell (Antiopic, Table of the Elements), formerly of improvisational out rock trio San Agustin, has in recent years become a favorite guitarist of the minimalist rock/drone set, collaborating with stalwarts such as Rhys Chatham, Jonathan Kane, Thurston Moore, Loren Mazzacane Connors, and Tim Barnes, as well as releasing several sublime solo albums. For this performance, Daniell has assembled a contingent of stellar local musicians mining similar veins of deep sound, including Jim Becker (Califone), Tim Kinsella (Joan of Arc), Matt Clark (White/Light, Ambulette), Ben Vida (DRMWPN, Bird Show, Town and Country), Josh Abrams (DRMWPN, Town and Country), Steven Hess (Haptic, Fessenden, Pan American), and Kevin Davis to help him actualize an extended, big band version of the piece "Sunfish" off his most recent Xeric/Table of the Elements release, Coastal.
http://www.daviddaniell.com
http://www.myspace.com/davidwdaniell
The Fortieth Day + Noise Crush
The Fortieth Day is the duo of Mark Solotroff and Isidro Reyes, both key players in the power-electronics outfit Bloodyminded, a local unit known for its confrontational live shows. Here, Solotroff and Reyes show off their kinder, gentler side, using guitar, bass, and synth to improvise "sustained, withering blasts of high-pitched noise that are as distinct from one another as spotlights sweeping across the night sky; jackhammer clatter, jet-engine whines, and forlorn keyboard melodies dart in and out of those huge sounds with the grace and impunity of plovers picking a crocodile's teeth." (Bill Meyer, Chicago Reader)
http://bloodlust.blogspot.com
Video artist Noise Crush will perform a second night, adding real-time computer-manipulated visuals to The Fortieth Day’s live set.
Goldblood
Formed in 2003 out of a dual concern with illumination from ecstatic improvised sound, Goldblood is the core of experimental filmmaker and musician Amy Cargill and psychedelic Svengali Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow of Plastic Crimewave Sound, Galactic Zoo Dossier). Call it what you will--imaginary soundtrack, sun-blindness music, noise-ambient, or the new new age--Goldblood’s treated keys, guitars, samples, drone-machines and wordless voice ebb and flow and merge into walls of sound that can turn suddenly inside out at a moment’s notice. Goldblood have performed with Peter Walker, Eugene Chadbourne, Jah Wobble, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Magik Markers, Sightings, The Coughs, Lichens, DRMWPN,, among others.
http://www.myspace.com/goldbloods
The Zoo Wheel
The Zoo Wheel is the solo project of multi-instrumentalist Liz Payne (Town & Country, DRMWPN, Pillow, Everyone(d) ). As The Zoo Wheel, Liz builds hybrid pieces of acoustic timbres using voice, field recordings and various musical instruments (stringed and otherwise), coaxing them into complex and shimmering patterns with a life all their own.
http://www.luckykitchen.com/tar/lk032.html
Estesombelo
Estesombelo is a contemplative collective based on ambient soundscapes along with minimal drone. By creating unique compositions for each subsequent performance, Estesombelo seeks to challenge not only themselves as composers, but their audience's listening capabilities. Live performances range from intensely abrasive to delicately lulling sounds, while at the same time keeping the overall aesthetic fittingly referred to as 'this beautiful sound.'
http://www.myspace.com/estesombelo
Labels: music_commentary, number_none, personal, rebis |
Saturday, June 16, 2007
9:34 AM
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100 favorite things : june 2007
I wonder how many times now I've made these lists. I remember doing the first one in 1991 or 1992.
positive attention giving and receiving affection teaching thinking through an idea writing narrative + non-narrative poetry + poets chapbooks + small presses fonts graphic design + visual composition adobe illustrator + photoshop feeling competent feeling competent enough to acknowledge the existence of things I still need to learn photography abstraction complex irregular forms abandoned buildings + ruins taking walks trails + hikes the woods the ocean mysticism + devotional practice the drone making music audiomulch laptop computers itunes + the ipod databases + indexes index cards libraries the internet del.icio.us, flickr, etc. gifts and gift economies the spring conference letters + journals dreams + dreamwork the films of david lynch stanley kubrick's 2001 richard linklater's slacker ensembles and character networks network diagrams conversations bonfires candles altars + shrines things my friends have made for me making things for my friends collage william s. burroughs david foster wallace earned sincerity playing playing games rule-systems and constraints strategies and plans making lists + taking notes the boundary line between knowledge + non-knowledge BDSM collaboration taking inspiration from other people's work completing a project an ongoing project dark chocolate ice cream biscuits + gravy diners + greasy spoons roadtrips mix tapes + mix CDs unexpected things discovered while traveling vernacular signage book darts reading reading in the bathtub keeping a reading log blogs + blogging zines dancing feeling confident about my physical appearance / level of desirability flirting + the thrill of reciprocated flirting jokes + puns things that are cute Japanese aesthetic systems mazes + labyrinths dungeons and dragons + its trappings graph paper new sketchpads pigma pens the tension between permanence and ephemerality "this too shall pass" / "perhaps" ecclesiastes myths + mythic systems paul klee mark rothko + the rothko chapel robert rauschenberg marcel duchamp grant morrison the marvel universe watching movies having broad tastes not being bored
That's my list. I also love collecting these from other people, so write 'em up and send 'em to me. Or post one to your own blog and send me a link!
In other news: thinking, thinking, thinking, about self-pity, self-loathing, growth, responsibility, desire, love, trust, etc. More soon. Labels: lists, personal |
Friday, June 15, 2007
10:20 AM
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back
Just got back (late last night) from a two-week New Hampshire / Vermont / Massachussetts trip, which included the seventh annual Spring Conference, which is either a summer camp for adults or a utopian cult, depending on who you ask. It pulled its normal sort of polarity-reversing mojo on me, this year most especially in the form of a letter- and journal-writing workshop that my longtime collaborator Lulu S. and I co-ran. We organized our writing prompts into a particular sequence which was designed to lead people into some challenging emotional space; this worked a little bit better than expected, leaving us pretty raw and vulnerable-feeling by midweek: fortunately we'd also designed a second arc designed to get us back to safer territory in the second half of the con. DIY therapy can be a chancy thing (cough), but when it works, it's great.
Some other highlights: naked lake swimming (last year was too cold and I skipped the swimming entirely); powerfully reconnecting with two old old friends from whom I'd recently been estranged; bonfire action; dusting off the Spring Dance Party iTunes playlist and successfully sneaking in some new tracks among the old favorites (Spank Rock's NSFW "Lindsay Lohan" perhaps being the best new addition); playing new games (most notably the simple/diabolical Blokus); etc etc etc—too many to list.
And sad bits: the critical illness of Kiwitayro's dog Fianna (RIP); the one-two punch (hard drive death / dislocated shoulder) that kept sweet Catling from having an exemplary week; continued tensions simmering between people who I love.
Output: the 47 best photos I took are here in a Flickr set (completists may also want to check out the sets from other years: 2006, 2005, and 2004). Also, as part of my journaling thing I did a new hundred-favorite-things list, which I will type in and post here sometime soon. Labels: audio, mp3s, personal |
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
11:19 AM
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some things I've been up to
Sorry there hasn't been much activity over here on the blog lately. I've been keeping busy with a variety of things, including (in no particular order):
1. Doing paid copyediting on an academic manuscript on the topic of conceptions of time in African-American science fiction (Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Jewelle Gomez). As some of you might guess, this is a pretty satisfying gig for me.
2. Designing the "visual identity" of "Fugue State," the two-day festival of "expansive music" that Chris M. and I are putting on this summer. I need to write more about that here, later, and it should probably have its own dedicated webpage over at the Rebis page, but suffice it to say that if you like drones and other experimental music, and you're here in Chicago or can get here, you might want to reserve that last weekend in June. Current draft of the poster lives here, if you want to see what I'm up to in that regard.
3. My band, Number None, has been playing a couple of sets around town lately, including one tonight at the Flower Shop(pe), along with Emeralds, Druids of Huge, Bongripper, Bloodyminded, and my old friends the Birds of Delay (now is a good time to once again link to this ridiculous photo).
4. Selling a bunch of shit on eBay, including early printings of six Philip K. Dick books, if anyone's interested in that...
5. Watching my way through the stockpiled third season of Lost, and trying to decide if I want to commit to watching the show through to 2010
6. Researching literary agents who might be interested in the more-or-less completed novel. The dreaded Guide to Literary Agents lists about a dozen people who are openly interested in "experimental" work, so that might be a good thing.
7. Photos, photos. Taking lots of walks with the camera, shooting dozens of shots and then posting the best to Flickr in a pretty steady five-a-day pattern. The fifty photos that the computer tells me are the best are here.
8. Eat, sleep, read, try to remember to pay bills occasionally Labels: number_none, personal |
Friday, May 25, 2007
8:16 AM
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fear and the freedom from fear
Grades went in on Monday, so now I'm beginning to work out a plan for my summer. I have a few goals, including to begin sending the novel out to publishers. It's now in its third draft, although still not exactly "completed." But done enough that I might be ready to send out a few chapters to see if people were interested.
This is the part of the writing process that I hate the most, and the part that I always vow to do well and then lose interest in almost immediately. Will it be different this time? Stay tuned.
In other news, I had a nice conversation last week with a few colleagues and friends about next year's Presidential election. At some point the conversation turned to the question of how/whether a Democratic president might be able to fix some of the damage done by eight years of Bush Administration policies. (I mean here both the damage done in the national/global context but also the "damage" that I experienced personally. I doubt I am alone in experiencing events in the wake of 2001 as a strangely intimate kind of emotional violence, a kind of trauma. And the often nightmarish intervening years have proven, unsurprisingly, to be a poor context for my personal recovery, so much so that I feel like I've had to perform certain sorts of psychic self-amputation in order to even survive.)
In any case, not long after that conversation I saw that the new issue of Harper's has taken as its cover story the question of "Undoing Bush," with eleven mini-essays on the topic. An interesting one is Earl Shorris' one on repairing the "national character," in which he describes America as a country in the grip of fear. (Note the related book.)
It's easy, though, when thinking of fear and the national character, to think only in terms of the fear of terrorism, which drove and continues to drive people to wildly seek safety/revenge in in catastrophic ways. And it's easy to look at the ways in which this fear has been deliberately stimulated and to reject this, to refuse to be terrorized and declare ourselves done with it. But courage means not only refusing to be afraid of manufactured evils but also being willing to seek out and confront real ones, whether they be in the offices of our own government or in the uninspected dark corners of our own selves. If we balk at the task then we, too, must acknowledge that we are fearful people, and when Shorris writes "a fearful person is unlikely to be temperate, prudent, or just" we must acknowledge that he is not just writing about Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld but about us too.
In closing, Shorris writes: "To the three basic questions written by Immanuel Kant at the height of the Enlightenment—'What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?'—we must add another: Why am I so afraid? It is a beginning." Labels: fear, personal, politics, war_on_terror |
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
9:05 AM
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amazon recommends
I call this "running the gamut."
Real content returning soon, I promise. Labels: personal |
Friday, May 11, 2007
12:26 PM
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business / busy-ness
I've got shit coming at me from all directions this week, most centrally a pile of grading that's about the size of an unabridged dictionary, so the quietude that's afflicted this blog since I finished the big canon-making project will likely persist for another week or so. After that things will start wrapping up and I'll have a little more room to breathe.
If you're desperate for content, you could take a look over at my photos on Flickr: the nice weather of late has pushed me out of the house and into the city, and I've been making a lot of use of my camera to take pictures of, well, mostly trash and assorted disrepair. But if you like those kinds of things, there's lots of new pictures to look at. Try the Notebook on Cities for a taste.
Also, any readers of this blog who are in Chicago, or who can get here before 9 pm tonight, might want to come by to see me perform at the Lakeshore Theatre tonight with my band, Number None: we'll be debuting a new, as-yet-untitled piece. We're in the middle slot: Ben Vida will be opening, and Mike Tamburo will be wrapping the night up. Labels: meta, number_none, personal |
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
9:51 AM
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recent visual output
Over at Flickr, my "Mold Patterns" set has been updated with a few photos of a revolting / magnificent spore colony in an old thing of leftover soup; the "Notebook on Cities" and "Notebook on Entropy" sets have also seen some activity.
And I also thought some of you might enjoy seeing some of my recent stabs at the art of poster design. As you can see, I'm all about the yellow lately:
Chicago-area residents who love the drone may want to note that the show the first poster is advertising is still yet to come. Labels: design, output, personal, photography |
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
8:35 PM
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Houston 2007
Tiger
Originally uploaded by jbushnell.
Just got back from having spent a few days of my Spring Break in Houston. I had a good time, not least because I got to dust off the (new!) camera and take some pictures. Houston has some lovely rusted surfaces which made nice additions to my textures pile, but for those of you interested in seeing the Houston pictures that are more along the lines of the sorts of things normal people photograph (people, buildings, sculptures), I've arranged them for you in a Houston 2007 set. Labels: output, personal, photography |
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
12:00 PM
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where i've been and what i've been up to
It's been a pretty busy couple of weeks around here: between teaching, personal commitments, work on the novel draft, and a cluster of Number None shows, my free time has pretty much been maxed out, no time to create much in the way of substantial new blog content.
I haven't even mentioned, for instance, that the first draft of the "Novel of Adequacy," now titled Meanwhile, is completed. If you want to see how complicated it got by the end, you can check out this crazy interactive diagram I made with IBM's fun little data visualization website, Many Eyes. (Make sure to zoom in by clicking-and-dragging or the thing will just look like an undifferentiated dense heap of datapoints.)
Parts of the novel are still pretty messed up (for instance, there's one cluster of characters who haven't yet been integrated into the main mass) but it's getting close to the point where it is maybe ready to be put out there for comments. I'd like to get all the chapters through a second draft first, but in any case, if you're interested in reading some of it, just ask.
The other thing I didn't manage to get around to mentioning recently is that Number None got a nice mention in Time Out: Chicago, as part of an article on the Chicago "drone scene." It has a photo and everything (I'm the guy with his head cocked in the back row). It's nice to finally be mainstream, I guess.
I've also been quietly posting more book reviews over at LibraryThing, I'll post a bunch of those here tomorrow. Labels: novel_of_adequacy, number_none, personal, writing |
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
2:56 PM
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today's horoscope
This morning, for the first time in a long time, I did a divination from a random passage from a randomly-chosen book.
The book was Dodie Bellamy's Pink Steam, and the passage was this:
"William Burroughs was timid and thin as a young boy, he was in his 70s and Mark in his teens and it felt like two boys in bed, I'm going over to his place this afternoon for a tarot reading, he drew two cards on my phone machine, the first card he said meant chaos but it's just temporary because the second card said that, cosmically, things are going really well for me."
Well. I hope so. Labels: advice, magic, personal |
Saturday, March 10, 2007
2:45 PM
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raccoon audio
I've decided to spin off the MP3 posts into their own blog, over at Blog*Spot: Raccoon Audio. The reason for this is mainly because I want to start getting indexed in the Hype Machine's database, and I thought they were more likely to index an all-MP3 blog than this one, which I think could comfortably be descrbied as "eclectic" in its focus.
MP3 posts will still be cross-posted here, so you don't need to do anything or even think about the new site unless you're only reading this blog for the music-oriented posts, in which case you might want to switch to reading that one, which has a nice syndication feed and all that jazz.
That's also the place to look if you want the whole top ten all in a single post, specifically here.
I took some liberties with the dates, don't look too close. Labels: audio, meta, mp3s, music_commentary, personal |
Thursday, February 08, 2007
10:38 AM
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six methods for five films
I've been spending much of this weekend watching films and thinking about my syllabus—I go back to teaching next week, and am writing a new syllabus from scratch instead of repurposing one of my older ones.
I'll be teaching three sections of Composition this fall, and the thematic center of the course is "writing about film." With that in mind, I'm using Timothy Corrigan's A Short Guide To Writing About Film as the class text (thanks to BB-A for the recommendation).
The real "meat" of this book, as far as I'm concerned, is Chapter Four, "Six Approaches to Writing About Film." I'm spending four weeks in the center of the semester focusing pretty intently on these six methods, and the rest of the semester is basically going to involve the students trying out these methods for themselves.
The six approaches are as follows:
historical analysis (putting the film in the context of film history or other historical narratives)
national analysis (thinking of the film as a product of its culture)
genre-based analysis (looking at how the film conforms to / defies / subverts genre conventions)
auteur-based analysis (putting the film in the context of other works by the same creator(s))
formalist analysis (looking at the technical features of the film, mise-en-scene, etc)
ideological analysis (analyzing the underlying values of the film; looking at it in terms of how it approaches race, class, gender, etc)
I've been trying to come up with films that are reasonably accessible to college freshmen but which can also be "read" interestingly through any of these six approaches. I've narrowed it down to a list of five finalists:
(Semi-finalists? David Lynch's underrated The Straight Story (1999) and Paul Thomas Anderson's underrated Punch-Drunk Love (2002), both a little too off-beat for my students, I fear.)
The dilemma is this: there's really only room in the semester to screen two films, so I need to narrow it down further before the end of the weekend. If anyone wants to argue for or against any of these films, well, that's what the comments area is for. I'm also taking suggestions for any other films that might also be interestingly read through these six lenses for the next time I teach this course... Labels: media commentary, personal, teaching |
Friday, January 12, 2007
9:06 PM
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in no particular order
Highlights of Thanksgiving weekend in New Hampshire / Vermont / Boston: dogs in varying sizes, friendships developing new layers of intimacy and candor, hard-won consensus and the relief associated therewith, David Foster Wallace's Oblivion on remainder at Harvard Book Store, Josh W. listening to Bad Company's "Feel Like Makin' Love" in the car and loudly declaiming "What is this song even about?" Thanks to Craig for the Joanna Newsom tracks, and to everyone else for the crash space, food, conversation, and birthday well-wishes.
Back home now. My hard drive now has an extra 40 GB of disc space, so I've been able to upload backlogged CDs to iTunes and resume my normal "media diet" of downloading shit from everywhere. This happy development has occasioned the retuning of some of my "smart" playlists, in the hope that Play Count and My Rating can be algorithmically combined in some perfect way that will reveal to me, as if by magic, exactly what it is that I actually like.
Year-in-review CDs being composed in my head as we speak. Anybody else making one this year? Labels: personal |
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
5:43 PM
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news from the east / stuff that people do
Good news from the east: Manchester airport has free wi-fi. The bad news is that I arrived while everyone was busy with their respective Thanksgiving dinners, and will probably have to wait here for a few hours. My Thanksgiving dinner may be a jelly donut from the Dunk, which investigations have revealed to be the only establishment open in the entire airport.
I'm out here on this coast for a Spring Conference staff meeting, and it will be good to see everyone... I'll be sticking around for a couple of days, and may even get to see the Antony Milton / Peter Wright / Geoff Mullen / Area C show in Boston on Monday (details here). The Milton / Wright US tour is skipping Chicago, hewing (as it is) close to the two coasts, and I feel lucky that it coordinates so tidily with my own jaunt this way.
2004 Blastitude interview with Antony Milton located here: interesting in many places, but especially for the description of how Milton came to name his CD-R label "PseudoArcana":
"[T]he name itself was intended as a critique of what has often seemed to be an elitist and high-brow perception of 'experimental' music. It is so often represented as an arcane and privileged discourse, and I guess I found that kind of problematic. The name is therefore a reflective way of saying that 'this is the type of music that people say is trying to be arcane but which is really just 'stuff that people do''."
Labels: music_commentary, personal |
Thursday, November 23, 2006
4:57 PM
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where i've been and what i've been up to
Been keeping a pretty low profile over here on the blog; hope nobody was too disappointed. I've been busy lately with band stuff: playing a few shows, recording a lot, making notes on archival recordings from the past year, and finalizing a few upcoming releases (one on Paha Porvari and one on Apostasy).
Also have managed to happily host a few travelers. First up was D. Bauler, aka Medroxy Progesterone Acetate, the King of Iowan Noise, who we collaborated with (via post) on last year's Damp and Damned cassette-only release. Hot on his heels was the theremin-weilding Gwyneth Merner, aka The Opera Glove Sinks In The Sea, who contributed a wonderful track of tenebrous drone and insect-song to our two-disc Lead Into Gold comp from earlier this year.
During each of these visits we had some time for a little sit-down, where we could play for a bit and produce some collaborative recordings, both of which yielded some intriguing material which may find a home someplace (or it may sit in the archives alongside the super-secret Number None / Skaters jams).
What else?: writing, teaching, reading novels, reading comics, the usual. Enjoying new(est) issues of Cabinet and Kramer's Ergot. Changed my e-mail address and my phone number. Stay tuned. Labels: number_none, personal |
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
1:40 PM
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Happy Halloween
happy halloween
Spent last weekend out in Michigan, as part of the annual Number None getaway. I brought the digital camera and monkeyed around with the long exposure time setting. A good subject was this large bush, enterprisingly converted into a jack-o'-lantern by the liberal application of strings of orange lights.
I've been pretty lame this Halloween: no costume, no parties. This autumn I lost two people who were close to me, and I think that's cost me some of my normally festive spirit. Thanks to everyone who has been looking out for me, though: it means a lot.
Labels: personal |
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
12:15 PM
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where i've been and what i've been up to
Not a lot of activity here on the old blog lately, sorry about that. It's been a combination of a lot of factors: the semester shifting into high gear, a weekend spent out of town, and some emotional stuff that has frankly sucked but that I don't want to go into here in any degree of detail.
I'm also still writing a book. People who have been following the progress of the new novel on this blog know that it involves a rather complicated network of characters, that in fact part of its very reason for existence is to try to give a powerful sense of the diverse human experience happening simultaneously, attempting a fragmented version of the "super-omniscience" that Don DeLillo shot for in Underworld.
Yadda yadda yadda. Point is, the cast is up to about 100 characters now, and such a big canvas has allowed me to turn to give brief cameos to some of the Imaginary Year characters, as a sort of "what are they doing in 2006"-type thing. I doubt I'll get to all of the characters, and some of the ones that have made appearances in the novel served more as bit players in Imaginary Year (for instance), but I know some of you readers of this blog served double duty as Imaginary Year readers, so if there's any character who you'd like an update on, I am happy at this point to take requests. Labels: personal, writing |
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
12:55 PM
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returning
The full story of the past ten days will not be told on this blog, but suffice it to say that it contained many events that fall into the category of "Might Make A Funny Story Someday When I'm Not Quite So Stressed," such as: attempting to fit a large sectional couch into a house through a window, waiting on a curbside to give something away for free to a no-show Craigslist flake, levelling a stream of uncharacteristic invective at the carefree grifters at the U-Haul Fortress, getting a speeding ticket from the Texas Highway Patrol (75 in a 65-at-night zone), bursting into tears while trying to rearrange items in the trunk of a Toyota, and attempting to find a spot between Bates County, MO (pop. 16,653) and Memphis, TN that could photocopy five copies of a 200-page document before the close of the business day (special thanks to Blythesville, AR's Post Impressions for being that place).
In any case. It's good to have those ten days behind me, even though it really only marks the beginning of something else, which may well prove to be strange and difficult in its own ways. Wish me luck. Labels: personal |
Friday, August 04, 2006
11:08 AM
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what i've been doing
There haven't been too many substantive posts on this blog lately, sorry about that. A lot of my online time has been spent doing research for an attempt to write the so-called "novel of adequacy" that I first started talking about back in October. At the time I was feeling pretty down about my ability to write such a thing, but in March, coming back from the East Coast microtour, something suddenly "clicked" in my head and I thought "I know how to do this."
We'll see if my intial confidence is borne out by the actual thing itself, once it comes into the world. I will say that the writing process is going remarkably speedily: I've been working on it for only about a month and I've finished six chapters, or what will be probably about a quarter of the book.
Anybody who wants to read it as a work-in-progress, don't be afraid to get in touch.
In other news, Chris and I have been working on finishing the new Number None release: the fifth "official" full-legth, to be entitled Edison | Orison. I'm not exactly sure when it will be released (we're thinking of shopping it around to other labels instead of self-producing it) but it's good to think of the thing as almost done. We're working on track order this week, and when we're done I'll post a listing: hopefully the track titles will seem appropriately provocative and cryptic. Labels: novel_of_adequacy, number_none, personal, writing |
Thursday, May 18, 2006
4:47 PM
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self-promotional IV
Oh, yeah, almost forgot to mention: Chicago-area readers of this blog might want to know that Number None (my band) will be playing tonight at the Empty Bottle. We'll be premiering a new piece entitled "Bilgewater and Nitrogen."
Actual content returning soon. Labels: number_none, personal |
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
5:39 PM
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ur-music
Back from the East Coast tour, alive and well. Most of our sets went fine, although I accidentally took one down into a wretched oubliette from which there was no suitable escape: a personal low point. But the rest of the time we ran around and had fun, reconnecting with collaborators and co-conspirators far and wide (including some I didn't expect to see, such as the Skaters, who appear to be expanding a ramshackle tour into something approaching a semi-permanent way of life).
About half the bills we played on were starting to swell to the point where they functioned almost as micro-festivals: the smallest one included four bands, with the biggest bill including somewhere around... eight? Although this made for some long evenings, it also enabled me to see a ton of great sets, including guitar-drum improv freakouts from Vampire Belt and Lambsbread; spastic drool-rock from Hardline Elephants; a teeming, chittering theremin-and-iBook drone from The Opera Glove Sinks in the Sea; drifting/pulsing Casio strangeness from Eva Van Deuren (aka Orphan Fairytales) and NYC outfit Watersports; and a couple of truly killer slabs of noise from our touring partners Birds of Delay, who just keep getting better and better, somehow. I think these guys are really at a turning point, on the cusp of supreme greatness.
I picked up a huge ton of CDs on the road, and will maybe blog some MP3s once I begin to digest the pile a little bit.
Oh, also, while we were gone, this Number None interview appeared on the Foxy Digitalis site: check it out if you want to see a picture of me wearing a funny hat. Labels: number_none, personal |
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
1:58 PM
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tour details
Next week, Number None (my band) will head out to the Great American Northeast to join Birds of Delay and Son of Earth for a handful of shows. Those of you in that part of the world who are into drone music / noise music / general weirdness should definitely come check it out.
The info, right now, looks like this:
Saturday, March 25 - Northampton, MA (afternoon show at Gallery TK)
Sunday, March 26 - Providence, RI (AS220)
Monday, March 27 - NYC (Eat Records, Brooklyn)
There's likely to also be a Friday, March 24th show, possibly in Brattleboro, VT or Amherst, MA but that date is not currently confirmed. Labels: number_none, personal |
Friday, March 17, 2006
10:46 AM
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east coast micro-tour
Exact details are still being fixed, but the Number None / Son of Earth / Birds of Delay tour is beginning to come together.
It is looking like Number None will be joining the other two bands for the following four (4) dates:
Fri, Mar 24 - Boston, MA
Sat, Mar 25 - Northampton, MA
Sun, Mar 26 - Providence, RI
Mon, Mar 27 - NYC, NY
There's also a Fairly Good Possibility that I'll be performing a solo set (as Noah Opponent) with these guys in Philly, at Big Jar Books, on Monday, Mar. 20. Hope to see some of you out there in the country... Labels: number_none, personal |
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
10:02 AM
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rebis news
It is looking increasingly likely that Number None will be doing a micro-tour of a few (3-4) US cities this March, joining up with drone minimalists Son of Earth and UK noise lads Birds of Delay (on their first US tour). Will we be coming to your town? Stay tuned.
Here's a somewhat dubious photo of yours truly with the Birds chaps, from this summer, when we were over in the UK and touring briefly with them:
You can tell what kind of time I'm having, I think. (Hint: drunk)
The forthcoming Rebis comp, Lead Into Gold, features tracks from both the Birds and Son of Earth, hopefully we'll get it out to the plant soon so we can have copies for sale on the tour.
Also: a very kind review of the Damp and Damned tape-collaboration (of which we are now sold out). Labels: number_none, personal |
Monday, January 23, 2006
10:10 PM
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welcome to the pleasuredome I
I've been enjoying my East Coast Tour, despite the fact that I haven't been able to do much in the way of blogging. It's been a bit of a whirlwind—yesterday Lex asked me how many different beds I've slept in on this trip and my count came to nine.
So much experience in so short a time has left me with a lot I want to write about; I'll try to handle it a little bit at a time over the next couple of days rather than doing one big "recap" post. (I'm also hoping to do my normal end-of-year year-in-review posts sometime soon, probably not until I'm back in Chicago next week.)
Anyway. One of the most fun things I did on this trip was go out to Asbury Park, NJ, with my old friend Cathy. Both Cathy and I have been spending a lot of time this year posting photos to Flickr, and we really wanted to take a daytrip to someplace where we could do some photo-trawling. Asbury Park is a good choice: it has a boardwalk that has fallen into a state of disrepair, including, at one end, an enormous pleasure palace, which has been abandoned and fallen into grandiose ruin.
My photos from the day will be living on the flash card until I get back to Chicago, but Cathy's put forty-three up in a set. It may interest Raccoon readers to note that I am the figure in the mask in the Arbus-inspired photos at the end of the set. Labels: personal, photography |
Friday, December 30, 2005
11:24 AM
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buyer's remorse
I bought an iBook G4 about a year and a half ago, and I find that I still regret not buying a PC laptop, nearly every single day. I can't think of a single thing that this Mac does better than a PC: it's only given me a half-dozen inconveniences that I have to circumvent with clumsy workarounds. None of that is particularly rant-worthy in and of itself, but there are technical problems of a whole other order that I've been struggling with lately. (People who maybe didn't come here to hear me complain in detail about a fairly technical problem might want to tune out right about now.)
Shortly after I bought the G4, it began crashing, usually during booting or in the first few minutes of use. I tried various "fixes" including Disk Utility, Archive + Install, the hardware test, deleting preferences, uninstalling different drivers, etc., but nothing seemed to work. Eventually the problem somehow corrected itself and life went on as normal.
Recently, though, the problem has come back, worse than before-- sometimes it'll take me 10, 20 tries to get the computer to boot successfully. I brought it into the Apple Store, and they said "do Archive + Install." I did that before and it didn't solve the problem, and I told them as much, but they urged me to do it again. So I did, but the problem still remains.
To me, the "last resort" was to erase the hard drive and start over fresh. This will require some tedious backing-up and a lot of tracking down application installation discs and serial numbers, ultimately a small price to pay for a computer that doesn't cost me an hour of my life every time I want to turn it on. The last sticking point was the problem of how to back up the precious, precious metadata in the iTunes Music Library.
The good folks at the Apple Store told me that I could back up the whole iTunes Music Library on an external drive and that this data would be preserved (provided that I also preserve the .xml file, the file where the play-count and ratings data is actually stored). OK, no problem: but now that I've gone to the trouble to wipe the whole hard drive I can't figure out how to *restore* the library from that backup.
This page suggests that copying the entire directory and dropping it in my new Music directory should work, but no, iTunes just sits there blithely, insisting that the library is empty. What gives?
Any suggestions you might have, gentle reader, would be greatly appreciated. I'm hoping to avoid having to resort to a third-party program like CopyPod, although I have to admit it's looking pretty tempting right about now. Labels: personal |
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
6:34 PM
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reading, talking
I should know never to type phrases like "Expect a write-up here over the weekend, or Monday at the latest" into Blogger, because they never come true. Predictably, I gave up on Friday's poetry reading because we'd had a fairly substantial snowfall the night before, and the subsequent street-plowing had half-buried the car in a bank of gritty municipal slush. The prospect of digging the car out only to return an hour or two later to find "my" spot "stolen" by some other driver couldn't really compete against the prospect of sitting at home, drinking cocoa, and watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Does this make me a bad person?
So, in substitution for a poetry write-up, I'd instead like to point your attention to this great talk by cartoonist / visionary Jim Woodring. It is practically a poem, ripe with fabulous phrases like "It can be difficult to resist the bizarre allure of furniture that is not ours" or "that one yellow leg was as perfect as a column of poured paint."
The talk is "about" something but I'm not entirely sure what. It could be "prayer, knowledge, and biology." It could be "design, capitalism, and madness." People who are familiar with Woodring's work shouldn't really be surprised to find all these things melting together until they form a single cryptic concept.
Postscript: While writing this post, I stared at this for a while. Labels: personal |
Monday, December 12, 2005
12:16 PM
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mpls
Tomorrow afternoon I'll be headed out to Minneapolis, MN, with CJO, to generally slack around in the cold. (Aside: I really kind of like the Rand McNally Trip Planner.)
We're most excited about visiting the revamped Walker Art Center, which has a lot of nice-looking exhibits right now, including the Minimalism retrospective "Elemental," a Warhol exhibit on "Stars, Deaths, and Disasters," and "Quartet," a set of installations by Matthew Barney, Robert Gober, Sherrie Levine, and Kara Walker.
Raccoon / Sleeping JPB readers who are familiar with the Minneapolis area are invited to suggest additional destinations using the old "comments" link below. Labels: art, personal |
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
10:49 AM
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tonight!
Special note to Chicago-area Raccoon readers:
Expect a manifestation of bad drone magic tonight at Chicago's famed Empty Bottle, as Number None (my band) opens for the semi-mythical White/Lichens (Jeremy Lemos from White/Light in collaboration with Rob AA Lowe aka Lichens).
Also on this bill will be The Zoo Wheel, the solo project of Liz Payne (from Thrill Jockey minimalists Town and Country) and Maths Balance Volumes, a "black-clad teenage cult" from Minnesota. And, oh yeah, lest I forget, it's free. Stuff starts around 9:30.
The Zoo Wheel, White/Light, and Lichens will all be contributing material to Lead Into Gold, a compendium of alchemical confusion which should be available from Rebis sometime around the dead heart of winter. Labels: number_none, personal |
Monday, October 10, 2005
1:22 PM
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their mountains so lofty, their treetops so tall
Over the last year, some of the music I've enjoyed hearing the most is weird, delicate folk from Finland (visit the Fonal website for a taste, they've got loads of MP3s if you sniff around a bit). So when I learned that Clay Ruby (of Madison psych-folk outfit Davenport) had organized a US tour for some of the new crop of the Finnish psychedelic scene, I was pretty excited.
The show was Monday night, and it featured Lau Nau (who have put out a release on Chicago's own Locust label), Kuupuu, and Jan Anderzén (ringleader of Kemialliset Ystävät), who was playing with Spencer and James of the Skaters.
I ended up putting most of these people up at the Blood Dorm that night, and the Skaters stayed with me until this morning. It was nice to spend some downtime with them, just lying around with them watching obscuro 80s horror (Xtro, New York Ripper), but the real highlight of the visit was the Skaters / Number None jam that happened yesterday. We got some recordings of the session; maybe some of it will come to light one day. Labels: number_none, personal |
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
12:39 PM
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the postal archives
I spent a lot of time this evening looking through and organizing mail. And I'm talking mail that dates back to probably around 1988 or so, when I first started writing letters regularly. I almost never throw a letter away: I still have mail saved from people I haven't been in touch with for a decade or more.
There are some people who I stopped corresponding with more-or-less by accident, and some of them I don't know how to track down: Amanda Doimas? Mark Davis? Lauryn / Lauren Rose (the one from Bucks County, PA, not any of these other fakers)? If any of you are out there Googling yourself some night, and you should stumble upon this, think about dropping Jeremy Bushnell a line [jeremy, at invisible-city dot com projects, at imaginaryyear dot com].
Other relationships represented in my box(es) of mail ended more consciously, or mutually, or whatever, just ended for one reason or another. But I can't seem to let go of the letters. If we ever cared about one another enough to write back and forth rest assured that I still have the letters and I remember how it felt to care about you that way; if, later on, I came to hurt you, rest assured that I remember the way that that felt too.
Because this is a blog that's often about archiving rather than about weepy quasi-sentimental recriminations, I should say that the organizational process went smoother than I expected; all these old letters are actually stored in a fairly orderly way. That said, I could probably use an organizational scheme that's better than my current one, which involves nestling letters inside of brown lunchbags which are then further nestled inside of boxes. Digital scanning is flat out, and I can't think of a good way to scrapbook them: anybody out there on the Web have any especially clever mail-archiving ideas? Labels: indexing, personal |
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
8:17 PM
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half-decade
It is with some sadness that I have to announce that as of Thursday, September 22nd, the autumal equinox and the five-year anniversary of its first installment, my serialized fiction project Imaginary Year will go on a hiatus which will (most likely) be permanent.
I've enjoyed having Imaginary Year as a project, but I've grown increasingly interested in writing other things, and attempting to write two pieces of short fiction a week, hopefully pieces which are of decent quality, doesn't leave much time for writing anything else. I've written basically the equivalent of a novel a year for the past five years: it seems like now might be a good time to take a breather. I don't know, yet, whether I'll spend my time writing something new, or whether I'll spend it revising Imaginary Year and sending it out for publication, but it'll be nice to be able to think about my next move without a deadline for new material always just four days away.
I don't want to say that I won't return to these characters at some future point—I've worked so much with them that it's hard for me to imagine trying to make sense of the world without making use of them as my front-line tools for interpretation. But if I do return to them it probably won't be in short format pieces like those that make up Imaginary Year—there's only so much they can do in the constrained space of a couple of pages. It'd be nice to have a little more room to let them breathe.
That said, over the last year I've tried to get each character to a point where you can more or less feel like their story has “concluded,” at least inasmuch as the events in people's lives ever conclude. They don't, which is why I wrote this story this way. I hope you've enjoyed it.
If you want to be added to a mailing list to receive news about future writing projects or Imaginary Year news, just send an e-mail to “projects” at “imaginaryyear.com.” If you want to make a donation, feel free to use this button:
But I've never really been in this for the money. It's been great having you guys as readers: I certainly would have given up on this project years ago if it hadn't been for the thoughtful and kind responses I've gotten from people who were enjoying it. That's really all I have to say. Thanks so much,
Jeremy Labels: personal, writing |
Sunday, September 11, 2005
1:05 PM
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validation(s)
Well, I'm safe and sound back in the US, and almost re-accustomed to Central Time.
In my ego-driven web-surfing this morning I was pleased to notice that someone did a thoughtful and generous write-up of the Number None / Jazzfinger / Espers show we played in Nottingham.
In other validation news, the new Wire contains a positive write-up of our new release, Urmerica, and also one of the Time and Relative Dimensions in Space compilation. If anyone's curious, I've posted the full text of these reviews on the product pages (Urmerica; Time and Relative Dimensions in Space; scroll down).
And finally, I picked up the new Chicago Reader and learned that the Number None / Keenan Lawler / Mike Tamburo show coming up on Tuesday is a Critic's Choice this week. (We'll also be playing shows this week in Madison (Wed 17) and Bloomington (Fri 19); if there are any Raccoon / sleepingjpb readers out in either of those cities, stop by and say 'hello.') Labels: number_none, personal |
Friday, August 12, 2005
8:42 AM
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the secret crannies of yorkshire
The last two days have been an amazing coda to an amazing trip. Phil has been a wonderful host and guide, taking us around on long day-hikes to a bewildering variety of sites: tor formations, druidic sites, flowering abysses, moors, eerie pine forests, etc. Today I was in both a cave and an abandoned mineshaft.
None of these trips would have been possible without the UK convention of "permissive routes," trails by which hikers can cross privately owned land. I'm not sure how the rule of the permissive route came to exist or why there is no real equivalent in the U.S., but we've really found it to be a blessing.
I've taken tons more photographs--over 300 in all.
We've had an opportunity to play a bit more music: aside from jamming with Phil on flutes in the pine forest, we also went over to the apartment of another Phil, Phil Todd (of Ashtray Navigations), and had a little hour-long four-man jam in his basement. It's been really good to get the experience of improvising with new people, and I've been pleased with how successful it's been. Labels: personal |
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
12:09 PM
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manchester, leeds, nottingham
All is still going well with the Number None / Jazzfinger Mobile Action Unit—better than I had hoped, even. We're not selling a ton of merchandise but each show has been increasingly well-attended (playing with Espers last night definitely helped) and there's always people who want to come up afterwards and talk, which I take as a sign that there's at least a segment of these crowds that are enjoying what we're doing.
Last night I saw someone sending a text message on their phone at the show; I looked over their shoulder and read the message "Just watching Jazzfinger ... amazing." Score!
In Leeds we were joined onstage by Phil Legard of Xenis Emputae Travelling Band, which may have been the highlight performance of the tour for me. He has a homemade theremin which is all Day-Glo and organic-looking, super-cool; he also has the Line 6 Modular Delay pedal, which I covet most egregiously.
There seem to be no tensions among the main group of travellers, which is great, considering all the other ways that it could go, this business of five people in the same van all week. And we're not too rushed—each morning we've been able to lounge around wherever we've stayed, getting showers, eating good vegetarian food and watching DVDs (I just got done watching Bill Hicks).
Chris and I are both attempting to work UK slang and phraseology into our daily speech, which always sounds hilariously wrong coming out of my mouth somehow.
Taking tons of photos, although people expecting a normal roll of holiday snaps will be disappointed; I'm mostly doing the normal sorts of texture-collecting that I like to do, taking close-ups of crumbling walls and toilet graffiti.
Two more tour performances: London tonight and then a festival on Saturday, where we'll be performing with Jazzfinger as a noise quintet. Can't wait! Labels: number_none, personal |
Friday, August 05, 2005
5:50 AM
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hello glasgow
First leg of the trip is completed safely: I flew into Machester yesterday. After a breakfast of the finest British cuisine (black pudding is not as bad as you'd think, although I avoided the stewed-looking tomato) we hopped on a bus and rode five hours up to Glasgow. It was a nice ride through country hills dotted with sheep and goats.
Observations on UK freeways: very few SUVs, even fewer signs of any sort of truck-line transport. The "big rig" culture of US freeways appears not to exist here in any way at all.
Glasgow, so far, is beautiful, and our hosts, David and Heather of Taurpis Tula / Volcanic Tongue, have been extremely kind and gracious. Their apartment is full of psychedelic records, religious icons, and Dr. Who memorabilia: I'd have a hard time imagining a place where I could be more comfortable.
First show = tomorrow night = Number None, Jazzfinger, Taurpis Tula. I'll be the one wearing the boa which will likely be drenched in flop-sweat. Labels: number_none, personal |
Sunday, July 31, 2005
6:34 AM
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hiatus
So now, after a week of whirlwind activity (in which, among other things, I wrote a chapbook of 36 poems in 24 hours) I'm off to England, to join up with the other half of the Number None Mobile Unit for our micro-tour of the UK. UK readers of this blog, if there are any, consider checking out the tour dates on the Rebis page if you think you want to come out and see some ecstatic drone.
So anyway, although I might attempt some blog posts from the road, I think it's likely that updates here will be minimal until after August 11th, which is when I'll be returning home. Hope you're all well~ Labels: meta, number_none, personal |
Friday, July 29, 2005
7:52 AM
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upcoming rebis performances
Just a reminder to Chicago-area Friends of Rebis: there will be two shows from guitar dronesters White/Light this week: tonight's free show at the Empty Bottle, with Odawas and Zelienople; and then tomorrow night's performance at the 3030 / Elastic Revolution space, where they will be performing a special "quiet" set with Rob Lowe of Lichens and a few extra guests. Fursaxa and Dreamweapon will be rounding out the 3030 bill.
Bring a little extra cash if you want to pick up a copy of White/Light's debut CD...
My own band, Number None, will be promoting our new release Urmerica with Chicago performances at the Blackspot Gallery on Tuesday, August 16th (with Keenan Lawler and Mike Tamburo)—and we'll be playing a free show in October at the Empty Bottle.
This kind of information can always be easily found by looking at the sidebar on the Rebis news page, which is now a little calendar of upcoming events. Labels: number_none, personal |
Monday, July 11, 2005
12:54 PM
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working, reading, living
OK, so I've had no time yet to put up the vacation photos; they're still on the slate of Things To Do.
A lot of my time lately has been going into honing (with Chris) the Number None live act. Did I mention that we're going to be touring the UK in August? See, these are the things you miss when you don't read the Rebis news-blog.
(I should also point out here that the Time and Relative Dimensions In Space compilation we put out has been getting some nice reviews, including this one at Foxy Digitalis.)
So, anyway, with the tour coming up we're stripping down our instrumental palette to the bare minimum so that it can be easily portable, and for me this means that I won't be using a computer in the live set, which is a pretty profound departure for me. I'm gaining confidence with the small circle of drone-technologies that I'll be using, though, which is looking like: two portable CD players pre-loaded with noise-textures, an AM radio, a flute, a small Yamaha keyboard, and (!) voice. We'll see how it goes.
Reading-wise, I've been taking on Gershom Scholem's Major Trends In Jewish Mysticism, which is great, and more magazines than normal. I'm still looking for the magazine that is perfectly tailored to my interests, and I'm still unable to find it, which may mean that I need to create it. That said, Cabinet Magazine is really superb, everything that The Believer would be in a more ideal world.
I had an intention to put a rant about New Age magazines here, but that may turn into a rant about New Age culture in general, so I'll have to save it for another time. I'm trying to figure out why so much New Age stuff is so bad in execution when it is (maybe?) not fundamentally bad in concept. More on this later.
Also: just noticed that the headings on these blog-posts look different than they once did, and I can't say that I feel the change was for the better. The fault lies with Blogger, who have inserted new code into their templates this week which forces a line-break and overrides my own stylesheet; this affects the look of the headings. I've tried a few workarounds that other people out there have suggested but no luck so far. Hopefully this will be a temporary state of affairs but I can't lose more time on it today. Labels: personal |
Monday, June 27, 2005
11:03 AM
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brief notes
1) Last night's show was fantastic. East Coast readers, I implore you to make it to the NYC Boredoms show happening in another couple of days.
2) Today's the last day to bid on a bunch of CDs I'm selling through eBay.
3) Most excitingly: the new Number None album, Urmerica, is back from the pressing plant and now available for sale. You can download an MP3, "Suggestion For A New National Anthem," from the Rebis sounds page. Labels: number_none, personal |
Sunday, May 22, 2005
12:19 PM
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spring "break"
Well, the cold hasn't killed me, although I've had symptoms in one form or another for over fifteen days now.
Despite the cough and fatigue, I've been keeping busy—partially on school stuff (I am snowed under by student papers, as I am every March) but partially on fun projects like finishing up the new Number None album. It's to be entitled Urmerica and we should be sending it off to be pressed sometime around April 1st. We've been working this week on mastering the finished tracks and I'm also working on an intensely complicated Photoshop collage for the cover.
It's a lot of fun to be concentrating on some visual collage-work again, and I hope to do more after the album art is finished. I've been thinking a lot lately about ways that my visual collage-work could be wedded to my linguistic collage-work (of the sort that I wrote about in the previous post). There are all sorts of useful pointers in this direction, not least Geof Huth's fine weblogs dbqp and Visual Poetry Clippings. Offline, I'm reading Figuring the Word, an excellent collection of essays by visual poet and letterpress artist Johanna Drucker, and this Mysticism and Language book I blogged earlier, which has an incredible amount of material on the conception of alphabets as spiritual technologies, not merely because they can express spiritual thoughts, but because the letterforms are holy unto themselves. Labels: personal |
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
9:14 AM
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upcoming events
Chicago-area Raccoon readers may want to come out into the cold to check out either or both of the following events:
1. Tomorrow (Sat 18) Chris Miller and I, performing as Number None, will be debuting a new drone piece, "Pacific Metals," at Hotti Biscotti, 3545 West Fullerton in Logan Square. We'll be performing with improvisational vocalist db Pedersen and Madison-area psychedelic collective Davenport.
2. On January 9th, 2005, I'll be doing a reading as part of the Sunday night Myopic Poetry Series. I plan to read some Imaginary Year entries, as well as some more experimental writing, maybe even some poems. Save the date! Labels: number_none, personal, writing |
Friday, December 17, 2004
2:25 PM
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100 favorite things
It has been over a year since I last made one of these lists, so here's a new one:
abandoned spaces acoustic guitar adobe illustrator & adobe photoshop altars & shrines audiomulch barns being introduced to something new blogs body awareness bonfires brian eno cafes card catalogs chocolate coffee collaboration collage & juxtaposition comics & mini-comics consciousness corrosion & decay cycles dada databases diagrams dreams & dream-work drones effects pedals engineered cuteness fantasizing femininity fluxus & conceptual art games getting letters / writing letters grant morrison having a conversation having a meal with friends hooking up with someone for the first time hooking up with someone who’s been my lover for a long time hybridity & variation ice cream improvisation independent bookstores index cards indexes infinity & paradox iTunes & the iPod japanese aesthetics john cage laptop computers libraries making music making things for my friends manifestations of the sacred minimalism mix tapes & mix CDs moss & lichen my dinner with andre noise nonmonogamy patterns pennsylvania & jersey platonic affection playing centipede at the empty bottle plot & narrative poems public transportation pumpkin pie reading richard linklater’s slacker roadtrips science fiction seasons self-referentiality sexuality in its million variants singing spending the night in bed alone spending the night in bed with someone synchronicity taking a bath taxonomies teaching the comfort of habit the dictionary the dungeon master’s guide the golden nugget or other greasy spoons the idea of role-playing games the idea of zines the internet the marvel universe the ocean the spring conference the woods things my friends made for me time machines unusual books or bookforms venus walking william s. burroughs writing xerox machines
Here's the one from 2003 and the one from 2002. I enjoy getting these from other people, too, so if you want to send me one, jeremy (at) invisible-city.com is the address to use, or put it up online somewhere and post a link in the comments section. Labels: lists, personal |
Friday, December 03, 2004
1:29 PM
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phrases in arrangement
I've sent a packet pitching The Collected Imaginary Year out to the first publisher on my list. Cross your fingers for me.
#
I have been thinking a lot lately, every day actually, about new methods for my writing. Most of the ideas that I'm coming up with are still incubatory and don't really feel ready to be "floated" in this blog, although they are mostly extensions and developments of the list of guiding principles that I posted here a year ago. And they're also extensions and developments of the questions that I've been asking myself for the last several years about the relationship between literature and information. At one point, I thought Imaginary Year would be a work which would allow to explore these questions, but even in the first year it only adhered tangentially to the polyphonic noise-collage cut-splice aesthetic laid out in the Manifesto, and in the last three years it's drifted even further away.
I've been writing some pieces this summer that are more fragmentary and strange, and although each of these pieces, upon completion, felt like a dead-end, I feel like they're enabling me to "zero in" on the kind of fiction that I want to write, to slowly develop a style that investigates the questions I've been asking myself.
Some of these questions include:
How much discontinuous information can be fit into a story before it ceases to function as a narrative?
What is the extent of the mind's ability to invent or "fill in" a narrative from the merest scraps of narrative material?
What is the extent of the mind's ability to integrate discrete, varied chunks of material into a single arrangement?
Can any two pieces of data, however disparate, be understood as being "in relationship" to one another simply by virtue of being placed side-by-side on the page?
The films of Kenneth Anger and the comics of Grant Morrison use an occult logic of visual juxtaposition to create startling (magical) effects: is there a way to do the same with the written word? (Is this Burroughs' project?) Would such a thing still be a "story?"
The Internet is a pool of collective language: what would a fiction that uses the Internet's open-access structure look like?
#
Poets are the contemporary writers who seem most interested in these questions, and my own poetry makes some attempts to approach these ideas (albeit obliquely). But I still think of myself predominantly as a fiction-writer, and I can't help but feel that the structure of fiction is supple enough to produce work that takes on these questions. But the vast majority of fiction writers still adhere slavishly to the model of the novel formalized over a hundred and fifty years ago, with superficial variations in topic, style, and genre accounting for most novelty in the form.
What happens when we think of the novel (or the short story) as a technology for creating effects that go beyond the dramaturgical?
Labels: personal, writing |
Saturday, September 18, 2004
2:53 PM
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attention elsewhere
This has been a terrible month for Raccoon updates. With only two updates in the past seventeen days, August 2004 looks like it's shaping up to be the most thinly-updated month in this blog's entire existence.
I'm not even exactly sure what's been keeping me so busy. I've taken no trips in August (except for a jaunt this weekend out to Madison/Baraboo to help various relocating friends) and I certainly haven't been working on my syllabus for the looming fall semester...
Let's see... I spent a bunch of nights attending Steve Krakow's brilliantly-conceived Million Tongues Festival, and a bunch of days hosting K's mom, brother, and half-sister who were in town... I've been continuing to enter index cards into the database... writing some poems... working on a few odd pieces of fiction...
Does that really account for half the month? Labels: personal, writing |
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
10:24 PM
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the summer of technical difficulties
So first there was the hard drive crash, two and a half weeks ago, which involved me losing a ton of data (although all the really important stuff was backed up in at least some form).
I had just barely gotten the computer set up again when I managed to fuck up one of its cables, severing the lines of communication between the monitor and the CPU. Not such a big deal except for the fact that this happened about an hour before the debut Number None performance, and I had planned to have samples and feedback loops constitute my primary contribution to the evening's set. It's hard to use your computer as an instrument when you can't actually see the interface. I spent a pretty awful hour feeling like I was in that dream where you're about to give a speech, and everyone you know is in the audience, and just as you're about to go on you realize with blood-chilling horror that you have nothing prepared. (The day was saved by my roommate Harvey P., who let me draft his laptop into service.)
So now the new cable's been obtained, and the computer's working fine (knock on wood), but the new fun of the summer has been the fusebox. We're tripping the circuit breaker at least two or three times a day (four today as of this writing), even though we're not using any heavy-load appliances aside from the central air (and the refrigerators, I guess, although they've all been turned down to the lowest setting).
I'd started composing a little write-up about the Pasture Fest highlights but I lost it when the power cut out. Maybe tomorrow. Tonight I just want to whine. Labels: personal |
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
9:53 PM
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one of those error messages you never want to see
"The hard drive could not be found."
O-kaay. My rudimentary preliminary investigations (wiggling cables, etc.) have made it pretty clear that if I want my computer to ever boot again I'm going to require the aid of a repair shop; if you're noticing over the next couple of days that I don't seem to be on the Internet much, that's why.
Most of the really major data on the drive is backed up elsewhere (the mastered version of the recently-completed Number None CD is at the duplicators as we speak) but there's a decent amount of everyday stuff that would suck to lose or that would be tedious to recreate. Keeping my fingers crossed.
What a way to really sour my day.
On the up-side, earlier today I found a box of CDs that I previously thought I'd lost in the move. Also on the up-side, let's not forget tonight's Sunn O))) show— Labels: personal |
Saturday, July 03, 2004
5:51 PM
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currently
Thinking about lots of stuff, most of which doesn't fit comfortably into the format of this weblog.
Reading Robert Graves' The Greek Myths and having strange dreams.
Finishing up the packaging for the third Number None CD, Ways of Sleepers, Ways of Wakers, which will be available next month.
Also, there's this:
Elastic Arts Foundation
Elastic Revolution Productions
3030 W. Cortland Chicago Monday, June 28th
Another Chicago Magazine
43 : music + sound issue
Release Party 7PM $10 suggested donation (includes magazine) words by : Jim DeRogatis, Jeremy P. Bushnell, Mary Biddinger, Kristy Odelius sounds by : Josh Hight w/ Ryan Rapsys; David Boykin
For Directions and more Information :
www.elasticrevolution.com
Hope to see some of you Chicago-area Raccoon readers there. I'll be reading an excerpt from my short story "Lo-Fi" (which appears in the new issue of ACM) and one of the music or sound-related entries from Imaginary Year.
Labels: personal |
Friday, June 25, 2004
4:48 PM
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unexpected blessings
So I get back from two incredible life-altering weeks in the Northeast only to learn:
that I've been invited by ACM to read next week at 3030 that due to some sort of error my tax refund checks were even larger than I thought they would be, and that UIC's giving me a $2500 raise next year
So I'm back from the hiatus and doing well. More on the vacation soon, including photos.
Labels: personal |
Thursday, June 17, 2004
11:47 AM
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attention elsewhere / taxonomies
I've been spending a lot of time lately working on various non-weblog projects: Chris and I have been mastering the new Number None album and finalizing art, and I've been revising old Imaginary Year entries, as well as beginning to orchestrate a much-overdue beautification of the first two volumes of that project.
In addition all of us here have been continuing to get the new apartment organized—we're deep in the project of unifying the book collections of three people who have been lifelong readers and book-buyers.
So far, these are the books that we have in triplicate:
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault
Literary Theory, by Terry Eagleton
I think it's likely that a few more will emerge before the shelf organization is all over.
Organizing bookshelves shelves is a project that I enjoy because it involves the creation of taxonomies, which for some reason I never tire of thinking up. We're currently using this as our organizational system:
» Fiction
» Poetry
» Drama
»Theory / Philosophy / Literary Criticism
» Reference / How To
» Cookbooks / Health & Diet
» Comics / Design / Art / Children's
» Assorted Nonfiction
The "Assorted Nonfiction" section will probably undergo further subdivision. As it stands, this taxonomy is considerably more coarse-grained than my last one, which was subdivided perhaps to the point of obsession. If I recall correctly, it looked like this:
» Art
» Graphic Design
» Comics
» Children's
» Fantasy
» Horror
» SF
» Slipstream
» Fiction (American, subdivided by region, beginning with NYC)
» Fiction (South American)
» Fiction (European, subdivided by country)
» Fiction (Asian)
» Fiction (African)
» Fiction Anthologies
» Essay Anthologies
» Memoir
» GBLT
» Erotica
» Drama
» Poetry
» Myth & Religion
» Psychology
» Science
» Theory / Philosophy / Literary Criticism
» Urbanism / Architecture
» Media Arts
» Pop Culture
My favorite thing about that particular taxonomy was the way that each category gradates smoothly into the next; there's always at least one book that sits exactly on the boundary between categories. (For instance, Jung's books sit on the border between Myth & Psychology, as, say, "A Wrinkle In Time" fits between Children's & Fantasy.)
I now conclude this enormously indulgent and self-congratulatory post. Labels: personal, projects, taxonomies |
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
5:14 PM
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regarding survival : questions 7-9
The last three of the Oliveros questions:
How do we get them to fund us?
I'm presuming that "them" here means government institutions, corporations, etc. A government that's spent sixty billion dollars on missile defense programs over the past twenty years might appear to be the proverbial fool easily parted from its money, but I know that poetry doesn't have the cultural cachet of weapon technologies, and I'm not going to pretend that that can easily be changed.
Corporations may be easier, as there is some degree of interlock between an institutional emphasis on innovation and novelty and an institutional desire to finance artistic experimentation; in Wednesday's post I pointed out that many corporations are indeed currently financing the investigations of a sizable number of cultural producers. I have no idea, however, how to compel them to do more of this kind of work.
There's an entire set of caveats that circulate around any kind of artist-patron relationship, of course. I would stop short of saying that all artist-patron relationships are inevitably compromised, but in our attempts to increase the amount of funding that "we" receive from "them" we need to remember that safeguarding artistic integrity is equally important. We do not want to find ourselves in a situation similar to that which reportedly is currently afflicting the "hard" sciences, a situation where work with obvious commerical application receives funding while "pure" research tends to languish.
How could we strengthen our position in the social fabric of our country?
I am not certain that this is either possible or desirable. The problem with the "strong positions in the social fabric" is that those positions bring with them substantial secondary rewards (power, celebrity, wealth) and thus attract people to them who desire the secondary rewards over the rewards of inherent in doing the work. (This is, I would argue, why so many young people want to be doctors or lawyers.) I write or make sounds primarily because I enjoy the process of doing so, and I feel like this is the way it should be. People who make art primarily because they want to be famous or rich generally make bad art (which does not necessarily prevent them from getting famous and rich). There is enough of this happening already: strengthening our position in the social fabric is likely to exacerbate this problem.
Who do we need to speak to or wake up?
I agree with DB when he writes about the elitist assumptions inherent in the phrase "wake up," so I'll be focusing more on to other half, the question of "who do we need to speak to?" And my primary answer is that we need to speak to one another. I believe that increased communication between artists is good for art.
Artists are commonly chided by insiders and outsiders alike for being insular, or courting "inaccessibility"—for writing poetry that mostly appeals to other poets, or music that mostly appeals to other musicians, etc. But I don't think that this is a bad thing. The main audience for a specialized field should be other practicioners in that field. This appears to be the case in most other specialized fields: we do not, for instance, think it would be particularly virtuous for most scientists that they write their scientific articles in a language that will be accessible to the layman—I think most scientists would view this as a colossal waste of time and energy. (This is not to say that there aren't scientists who do occasionally write for a lay audience: there are, and I'm grateful that their books exist, I just think that culturally, we understand that whatever value we might get from all scientists striving to do this all the time would not match the value that we get from scientists speaking to one another in their own specialized language.)
We need to interact more, support one another's events more, buy one another's work more. And I think the kind of dialogue that takes place on and between poetry blogs is a very healthy sign. Labels: personal |
Friday, May 21, 2004
11:41 AM
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regarding survival : questions 1-3
Made it to both the Discrete Series event and the Myopic event over the weekend: writeups will hopefully appear sometime this week.
But first I want to try to tackle some of the Oliveros questions:
As an artist, how have you survived?
I should preface my answer here by saying that I don't comfortably self-identify as an "artist." I'm more comfortable with thinking of myself as "a person who makes art," or, even better, as "a person who writes" (or draws, or organizes sound, or whatever). This may be a case of the narcissism of small differences, but the idea that capital-A Art is something made by capital-A Artists has always been anathema to me.
But in any case. As a person who makes stuff, time is really the key necessity. Consequently, I've tried organize my life to maximize the amount of time I have for making things, which means trying to avoid the 40-50 hour work week, which means having to live pretty frugally. I could list a bunch of small sacrifices here but I want to avoid the martyr's litany. Suffice it to say I've kept my vices affordable.
What is your current situation?
Like many writers, my current situation involves an uneasy relationship with academia. I currently exist at the low rung of the adjunct lecturer, which means bad pay and low job security (both of these things have been partially mitigated by the fact that I've integrated myself into a special program at the university which is moderately well-funded, although whether this program is permanent or ephemeral one remains to be seen).
I continuously grapple with the question of how much energy I should expend on advancing in academia—I hate the "publish or perish" mentality. Unlike many artists, I have been unable to conceptualize of the scrabbling for tokens of "achievement" as an extension of my creative process. Additionally, advancement in academia is likely to require relocation, which would mean severing (or at least diluting) the relationships between me and my collaborators and intimates in Chicago, not to mention my relationship with the city itself as a substantial source of creative inspiration.
What information or services would help you continue to survive?
In terms of financial survival? More arts funding is an obvious answer. Also better information on the funding that's already out there (the Internet has helped—I would not have gotten my grant last year if not for the easy availablity of the information through the Internet).
Better public funding of universities, so that to choose the adjunct path is not to choose to make quite as many sacrifices.
Cheaper groceries. Cheaper and more expensive public transportation. Cheaper technology. More access to expensive technologies (perhaps in the form of technological co-ops).
Separate from the things that might contribute to my financial survival are the things that might contribute to my creative survival: that is, things that might help to further inspire and stimulate me and other artists, such as:
More short-term arts colonies and retreats.
More quality reading series. More events like Oakland's house readings. More events that combine the local and the out-of-town like Nomads and Residents. More cross-disciplinary events: more bills that combine both experimental music and experimental writing (or experimental dance, or experimental puppetry, or whatever). Better coverage of performances.
More parties where people get together with the specific goal of reading/making poems or playing/making music.
Less apprehension in general about collaboration.
An Underground Railroad of crashpads and performance spaces in communication with one another, enabling interested artists to quickly throw together independent roadtrip-style tours. (I'd like to be able to say "I'm going to Milwaukee in July—I wonder who can I get in touch with about doing a reading there?" and be able to get an answer.)
More people setting up online PDF/MP3 distros. Better coverage of the PDF/MP3 "scene."
More independent reviews. The New York Times Book Review, if not irrevocably corrupted, is essentially irrelevant to the tribal culture of poetry, and Rain Taxi can only cover a fraction of what's out there.
More temporary autonomous zones.
I'll do the other six questions later. Labels: personal |
Monday, May 17, 2004
10:57 AM
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regarding survival : nine questions from pauline oliveros
As I mentioned earlier, I have a concern about "the mass amateurization of nearly everything," which is that it (further) complicates the question of how artists can make a living. I think it's good that books can circulate as PDFs without needing to go through the homogenizing publishing industry or, in fact, needing to enter the "market" at all, but as an academic my ability to advance beyond the adjunct level hinges upon my ability to convince what Clay Shirky would call a "professionally skeptical system" to publish my writings as a book, even if those writings are in a form that isn't a natural "match" with book technology.
Raccoon reader "Jenny" suggests: "Work an easy job as little as possible to maintain life, save as much time as possible to do your 'real' work." If I were to follow this strategy, I could just decide to camp out permanently at the adjunct level—the work is hard (at times) and often tedious, but it does make me enough money to eke out a frugal living, and it does lend me enormous amounts of free time (I am writing at you from my summer vacation). But ultimately I can't quite surrender the ambition to at least attempt to advance.
In any case, I'm interested in how other artists negotiate these issues, and I was reminded of a series of nine questions that experimental composer Pauline Oliveros circulated among a group of experimental composers, on topics "regarding survival." I've revised these questions slightly to be applicable to artists more generally (mostly by replacing "composer" with "artist," and "music" with "art") and I'd be interested to hear answers from any readers of this site, particularly poets or other writers. My own answers will be posted soon.
As an artist, how have you survived?
What is your current situation?
What information or services would help you continue to survive?
Is your art functioning in your community or beyond?
What happens when grassroots art spreads to large venues?
How do we respond to the continual rip-off of our research and our art by commercial interests?
How do we get them to fund us?
How could we strengthen our position in the social fabric of our country?
Who do we need to speak to or wake up? Labels: personal |
Friday, May 14, 2004
12:50 PM
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individualism / collectivism
Noticed the following passage in Tony Kushner's Afterword to Angels In America, and I thought it was relevant, given that in May I'm going to be entering my first long-term collective living arrangement in five years, and will also be embarking upon a collaborative writing project with poet Eric Burger. More on that later, for now here's the quote:
"Americans pay high prices for maintaining the myth of the Individual: We have no system of universal health care, we can't pass sane gun control laws, we elect presidents like Reagan, we hate and fear inevitable processes like aging and death. Way down close to the bottom of the list of evils Individualism visits on our culture is the fact that in the modern era it isn't enough to write; you must also be a Writer, and play your part in a cautionary narrative in which you will fail or triumph, be in or out, hot or cold. The rewards can be fantastic, the punishment dismal; it's a zero sum game, and its guarantor of value, its marker is that you pretend you play it solo, preserving the myth that you alone are the wellspring of your creativity."
Labels: personal, writing |
Saturday, April 24, 2004
12:16 PM
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people who are good with computers
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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five questions
I'm taking part in an interview game introduced to me by Angela. The rules:
1 - E-mail me, saying you want to be interviewed. (My e-mail address is jeremy [at] invisible-city.com.)
2 - I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 - You'll update your journal / blog with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You'll include this explanation.
5 - You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.
So: what follows are Angela's questions for me and my answers.
1. How often do people you know (besides me) react to "seeing themselves" in Imaginary Year chapters?
Not as often as I steal from them. I'm a scavenger by nature, and the lives of the people who are close to me are a great source of raw material. Sometimes I just lift huge chunks of experience and put them in the work almost verbatim, but more commonly the act of reflection that's going on is more indirect. It's more like the lives of my friends represent to me a (enormously broad) pool of "believable" experience, and so when imagining the lives of my fictional characters, I know that if I draw elements from that pool the characters will seem more believable. I'm especially concerned with wanting my female characters to seem believable, because I don't have firsthand experience of what it's like to be a woman in this culture, and I don't want to "get it wrong." To a certain degree I can imagine what it's like, or infer it from how it feels to be a man (I don't think the two "subject positions" are completely alien to one another), but I also rely heavily on the experiences that women have told me about in conversations (or have written about in their novels, poems, blogs, LiveJournals, zines, etc.)
How do you respond to them?
I'm always pleased to hear that people are reading, so when someone remarks about seeing themselves in the work, I feel complimented. Usually what I most want to ask is whether they feel like I got the tenor of the experience right, whether I described it in a way that feels true to them.
2. If you had the power to change one person's mind about one important thing, who would you pick, and why?
I think it is unethical to (forcibly) change other people's minds. So I'd have to find an instance where I think the eventual benefits might be worth violating my own ethical stance. This probably means making George W. Bush a pacifist.
3. Would it be better to be a popular writer with lots of money but lukewarm critical response, or a writer who makes just enough to live on but is critically acclaimed? Why?
I have very little interest in being popular. I am clear-eyed enough to know that the topics I personally feel most interested in are relatively unpopular, and the works of art that most speak to me—the ones I would most like to emulate with my own work—are ones focused on unpopular themes, perhaps to the point of indulgence. Any work that fits this bill is unlikely to attain major mainstream success.
Critics, though, also tend to be people who are deeply interested in relatively unpopular topics, and, inasmuch as this is true, they tend to be people who are more like me than the average person. As a result the opinion of a small number of critics is more important to me than the opinion of a large number of anonymous people: it feels more like the judgment of people who I would consider to be my peers in a meaningful way.
As for the money question: there are so few fiction writers that even make enough to live on directly off of their writing that I treat the financial dimension of writing as entirely negligible.
4. I know you have said you're not interested in raising children. If you had a female friend who wanted you to father her child but take no further responsibility, how would you respond?
I don't feel very comfortable with this idea, for many reasons. The primary one is that I'd feel highly curious about how the child was "turning out," and I imagine that this would translate into a strong impulse to take more responsibility, probably in the form of meddling in some way—I think it's clear that all the ingredients necessary for some hideous boondoggle are present here. Even if I could resist the impulse to interfere, there is no guarantee that the child would not thrust some sort of responsibility upon me once he or she got old enough to do so. The only possible safeguard is to deceive the child in some sort of enormous way—which I think is powerfully unethical.
5. If you had an extra day a week, what would you spend it doing?
Probably the same things I'm doing now: reading books, hanging out with cute girls, and trying to make art. Labels: personal, writing |
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
9:25 AM
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all hail the southwest
Tonight's reading got a nice write-up in the Tucson Weekly. (Scroll down, we're beneath the "xtreme fighting" cage match.)
Over the past few days, I've seen dust storms and grain silos and forest fires. I've held a live chicken and made a potato curry. I've eaten at about a dozen greasy spoons and had long conversations with at least two strangers. I've been pulled over for driving 43 mph in Utah and I've run out of gas in the Texas panhandle.
It is worth noting that the Mountain Goats' All Hail West Texas is, indeed, an excellent soundtrack to driving through Texas. You can locate the place names on your map. I remember that once Laura sent me a link to a strange Mountain-Goats-related website: it featured a map of Texas that you could click on to be rewarded with weird little fiction-like chunks of John Darnielle's writing. I can't find it again, so instead I'll send you here, which is equally good.
My heart is also breaking a little bit this week, but that is a story that will probably not be told on this site. Ask me over a beer. Labels: personal |
Saturday, July 12, 2003
6:23 PM
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going II
No updates for a week? Well, I have been having some exciting adventures. I will write about them later.
For now, more Go links:
Toriyama's World (information about Hikaru No Go, a go-themed manga)
Go Problem of the Day
Thanks to Nancy P. for these links.
PS: Arizona Raccoon readers, take note: I will be reading from Imaginary Year on Saturday, July 12, at Biblio, 222 E. Congress St., Tucson, with poet Deborah Bernhardt. 7 pm.
Labels: personal |
Thursday, July 10, 2003
4:09 PM
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where i've been and what i've been up to
I've been really busy doing fun summer stuff lately. Here's a partial list:
I saw The Fall on Saturday, and last night I saw psychedelic metal band Comets on Fire, with psychedelic folk singer Ben Chasny (aka Six Organs of Admittance) opening. Tonight: the White Stripes.
On Sunday I went out to the Lakewood Forest Preserve with Ray to make field recordings for our audio project, Who Loves The Forest. You can read her write-up of the day's activities here.
Sunday night I had a letter-writing party. This is something I've been doing for a while, an idea that my good friend Lulu Savage came up with. The basic idea is that everybody wishes that they spent more time writing letters, but if faced with a choice between staying at home and writing a letter, or going out and socializing with friends, everybody will choose the option to socialize. So we decided to set up an evening where writing letters was part of the socializing. It's met three times now, I think, and each time it's worked out pretty well. I've also been making decorative envelopes again; I really should have scanned scan some in before I sent them all out.
I've been playing (and losing) lots of games of backgammon, and thinking (once again) about learning how to play Go (so that I can finally use the Go board I bought two years ago).
I've been listening through a pile of great CDs sent to me by various people participating in the Mix Exchange.
I contributed a set of sound files to the Opsound Sound Pool—they are downloadable here and are licensed under a Creative Commons License.
I've been reading Karen Armstrong's exhaustive A History of God, and thinking a lot about theology and mythology.
I've also been thinking about love, and desire, and the different forms that relationships can take, and I've been trying to answer the following question: what does it mean to say that you love someone? Labels: personal, writing |
Wednesday, July 02, 2003
11:06 AM
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children
When I returned from my recent roadtrip I found in my mailbox the newest issue (#19) of the East Village INKY, a zine about raising kids (ages 5 and 2 as of this writing) in New York City. I've always liked EVI (you can read my reviews of older issues over at Invisible City—here and here) and anybody interested in children should check it out. (Send $2 to Ayun Halliday, PO Box 22754, Brooklyn NY, 11202, or subscribe online.)
I've been thinking a lot about representations of children lately, in particular because I want to start writing some kids into Imaginary Year. (There's one floating around at the fringe of the narrative right now, but so far he has been entirely offstage.) I realized recently that I'm hard-pressed to think of any novels that prominently feature a realistic child anywhere between the ages of two and twelve. Where is all the good writing about children?
Online, we could look at the entertaining Raising Hell (don't miss the cautionary tales of the Unfortunate Little Boy, in particular the one about The Little Boy Who Didn't Brush His Teeth) (thanks Laura). There's also It's all going to be OK over at Whygodwhy (thanks Ray). Labels: personal, writing |
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
5:05 PM
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names and magic III
A lesser banishing ritual, which features a discussion on the use of god-names in ritual. Intriguing. Thanks once again to Brian.
As for the side of myself that's received a new name? Well, I've been working lately, with Chris, on assembling the new Number None CD-R (Chicago readers stay tuned: we may be having a CD release party in the very near future). But in culling through the recordings we put together over the last year, I noticed that I had amassed a sizeable body of ecstatic noise experiments that didn't fit in any obvious way with the Number None project. I decided that the side of myself that was producing these pieces deserved to have an identity of its own (and thus a name).
Hence: Noah Opponent.
(Those of you who participated in the dream-recording project should be receiving a copy of the disc very soon; the rest of you can download an MP3 version of the completed collage of dream narratives and somnolent noise from this page (the track title is "in the lake of dreams").) Labels: personal, spirituality |
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
10:08 AM
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future output
Chris and I have been spending a lot of time lately poring over the recordings we made over the past year, trying to make selections for the second Number None CD-R release, due sometime in April. There's a lot of interesting material stored up, and I think the new disc will stand as a pretty dramatic leap forward for us as a band.
During this process of sorting and reassessing (and cleaning stuff off the hard drive) I've also been looking over some noise experiments that I've done on my own, one-offs which are essentially "finished" and can't really be introduced into the Number None collaborative process. I think there's about enough material there to make up a solo disc, so I'll probably finish that up in April as well. This disc will include "In The Lake Of Dreams," the completed version of my dream recordings project. The disc should also include some of my recent experiments with low-input systems, experiments where I introduce a single sample or test-tone into a sonic contraption that feeds back on itself. It's a variation on the no-input experiments of Toshimaru Nakamura or Rafael Toral.
Labels: number_none, personal |
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
1:06 PM
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what I care about
A lightly-edited version of something I wrote elsewhere on the Web, in response to the question "what do you care about?":
At the top and most abstract part of the tower I care about a complex of things that I can only really categorize as "communication." A lot of things I care about intersect there: honesty, interpersonal kindness, empathy, love, conversations, articulacy, sexuality, art, writing, word-of-mouth, democratic media.
I care about playing and experimenting and improvisation.
Less abstractly, I care about the Spring Conference, I care about the well-being of the people around me and people in society at large, and I care about my creative projects.
I care about winning a game while I'm playing it (but not afterwards), I care about the characters on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I care about Oolong the bunny, who recently died.
So what do you care about? Labels: empathy, personal |
Thursday, January 23, 2003
12:17 PM
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network culture
Here's my description for the course I'll be teaching next semester:
This course will examine some of the contemporary trends that have emerged as a result of new communications technologies, such as the Internet and
cellular phones. Particular developments that we will examine may include: peer-to-peer and file-sharing networks, weblogs and warblogs, the LiveJournal network, net art, electronic literature, online trading, online personals, message boards and listservs, massively multiplayer online games, MOOs and MUDs, homepage cultures, "smart mobs," and the Global Positioning System. This course will also investigate some of the writing that comments on network culture, including criticism, ethnographic analysis, and science fiction. Participants in this course will be asked to produce a research paper looking into a particular trend of the culture, as well as several smaller projects.
If anybody has any good suggestions for readings, well, you know how to use the "comments" feature. Labels: personal |
Wednesday, November 20, 2002
5:19 PM
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halloween
Here are all of my past Halloween costumes that I can remember, in roughly chronological order.
vampire (or something else requiring black cloak)
knight in armor (mistaken repeatedly for robot)
the Red Skull
woman
Sloth, as part of Seven Deadly Sins group costume
Jesus, as part of Jesus / Virgin Mary / Satan trio
post-suicide Kurt Cobain, as part of Kurt / Courtney duo (Tip!: pink cake frosting matted into hair simulates shattered brain reasonably well)
Minos from Dante's Inferno
Morton Salt Girl (Was catcalled by both women and men: personal high-water mark)
a tree (Comment from crowd: "that's a good look for you")
I can't remember a single costume from junior high or high school—I know I dressed up some of those years, but I can't remember any of the costumes. Labels: personal |
Friday, November 01, 2002
6:37 PM
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