Hurt Wit Chu: 3 Favorite New Mashups

I've posted about mashup artist Pheugoo before (9/07). Here's a new favorite of mine: Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails meets Queens of the Stone Age (the video's a still image; embedding so you can hear the song)



You can download the mp3 of "Hurt Wit Chu" free at Pheugoo's site.

BRAT Mashups are new to me (and available as free downloads at BRAT Productions Mashup Page). This one, laying the vocal from the Cure's "Just Like Heaven" over the music and backing vocals from the Commodores' "Easy," is brilliant:

Finally, here's "Time After Romance"--Lady Gaga/Cyndi Lauper/Three 6 Mafia by mochi beats (free download). It's more of a jolt than the above two at first (I like that in a mashup: when it takes a second for your brain to rearrange itself and be able to simply hear the music as it is, not just how it differs from its source tracks), but on repeated listens, I think the mix really brings out the sweetness of "Bad Romance"--it's a love song, fit for a slow dance:

Revolutionary Voices: If You Have This Book in Your Library, DON'T Weed It! Here's why:

The banning of any book hurts. The banning of Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology (ed. Amy Sonnie, Alyson Books 2000)--recently pulled from the Burlington County Library System in New Jersey--will hurt many.

Ten years old, the book remains, sadly, as revolutionary as it was when I reviewed it for School Library Journal upon its publication. That year, I nominated it for SLJ's Best Adult Books for Young Adults list (it made the list, as did the other book I nominated, Naomi Klein's No Logo).

If you aren't familiar with the story of how the book got pulled, though no formal challenge had been lodged, and how it relates to Glenn Beck, please click here for the story at Amy Sonnie's blog, Banned Librarian, and here for the updated story in SLJ . I don't want to summarize it here--though I will reproduce a quick quote:

"[I]n a May 3 email, [Library Director Gail] Sweet told staffers that they needed to 'pull' Revolutionary Voices from library shelves. 'How can we grab the books so they never, ever get back into ccirculation (sic),' Sweet wrote to BCLS staffers. 'Copies need to totally disappear (as in not a good idea to send copies to the book sale).'"

Totally disappear. When library books don't go to the book sale, they get a) put in the recycling bin, if the library is responsible or b) put in the trash. Note: Sweet also referred to the book as "child pornography." Of its 54 contributors, only 11 are under 18 (most are in their early 20s), and of these 11, only 2 mention sex at all (and this in ways totally in keeping with YA novels*, etc). Very few of the pieces mention sex, period.

The banning of any book hurts, but Revolutionary Voices is out of print. Copies remain in only 400 libraries, according to WorldCat. And there's nothing else like it out there. 54 youth contributed stories, poems, artwork, and zine pages to the book. Most also contributed pictures of themselves, along with short bios. Here's a sampling of sentences from the bios:

"I am a 23-yr-old mixed-race queer poet of Vietnamese/Scottish/Swedish descent"

"I am a 20-yr-old Igbo woman from Nigeria…I am trying to find my voice as a Black queer woman living in the United States. Our society tries to speak for us young folks, and it's about time we find and use our own voices"

"I am a triracial, First Nation, Two-Spirit Fairy Trans Faggot activist"

"a 17-yr-old queer Latina living between homes in New Jersey and California"

"I am a poet and queer youth activist about to enter tenth grade"

"I am a 19-yr-old Chinese-American, born in Hong Kong and raised in San Francisco"

"i am 23 years old and active not only in the arab community but also in ethnic/feminist/queer communities"

"I am a gay biracial (Japanese and white), Nissei, male, genderqueer"

"I am a 21-yr-old queer boi of mixed heritage (human-melting-pot-style) and intersexed physicality"

Now: it is hard enough for queer youth to find books about white queer youth, and books about white queer youth that talk about more than just coming out. This book is full of the work of young queer writers of color (it does include white queers, too). It has pictures of the young queer writers of color. And it's about a lot more than being queer and coming out.

Here's a paragraph from the Introduction:

"What's so revolutionary about these voices? The young writers in this collection, like so many revolutionary thinkers of the past and present, are moving toward a radical consciousness by questioning heteronormativity and positioning themselves as young and queer in a world that tells us queerness and teen sexuality are discrepant. We think critically about regimes of gender, race, class, ability, and age. We see that we live under a system of heterosexism, white supremacy, misogyny, and capitalism--where homophobia is wielded as a weapon of sexism; where most of us are taught a Eurocentric version of history in school; where young people, especially young people of color and poor people, are being tracked into prisons. This is a system that justifies spending more money on the military than on education and health care combined; a system where foreign business interests control peoples and nations of color and the United States bombs and sanctions whoever it pleases. This system makes possible a society that packages queer identities with rainbow ribbons and sells them to the highest bidder. A society in which Pride has been commodified… Unlearning mainstream society's teachings is a difficult process requiring visible alternatives and open dialogue. This collection is our attempt at opening this dialogue. We share our work to counter our own invisibility, to become allies to one another, and to demonstrate that we believe in ourselves enough to take up a pen, paintbrush, or a camera in our own defense."

This book should be in print**; this book should be in libraries; this book should be in readers' hands. If you own it at your library--we are lucky here; our library system owns 2 copies--please don't weed it, ever. It's ten years old, yes. But it reads like now, and tomorrow, and probably many tomorrows after that.

*as commenter "Josh" wrote in the comments section of the SLJ article: "No one is removing books marketed toward preteen girls in which 150 year old men eating the placenta out of their new wife so that the baby that is devouring her from the inside can be freed. Nope, they are simply further marginalizing an already shaky and oft oppressed teen demographic.

**I've contacted the editor to see if she's interested in trying to get it back into print, or creating an ebook version

Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Jesus Inspirational Sport Statues--Just $21.95

Always with the sports. What about Jesus Inspirational Arts Statues? Theatre: Jesus tenderly holds bottle of spirit gum out to child as child puts on wig. Painting: Jesus holds the palette and beams at the canvas. Writing: Jesus pats child's shoulder encouragingly as child stares at computer screen, shot glass in hand.

Clay Shirky re: Publishing

From Cognitive Surplus:

"Scarcity is easier to deal with than abundance, because when something becomes rare, we simply think it more valuable than it was before, a conceptually easy change. Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we're used to, it can be disorienting to the people who've grown up with scarcity. When a resource is scarce, the people who manage it often regard it as valuable in itself, without stopping to consider how much of its value is tied to its scarcity. For years after the price of long-distance phone calls collapsed in the United States, my older relatives would still announce that a call was "long distance." Such calls had previously been special, because they were expensive; it took people years to understand that cheap long-distance calls removed the rationale for regarding them as inherently valuable.

"Similarly, when publication--the act of making something public--goes from being hard to being virtually effortless, people used to the old system often regard publishing by amateurs as frivolous, as if publishing was an inherently seriously activity. It never was, though. Publishing had to be taken seriously when its cost and effort made people take it seriously--if you made too many mistakes, you were out of business. But if these factors collapse, then the risk collapses too. An activity that once seemed inherently valuable turned out to be only accidentally valuable, as a change in the economics revealed."

(Shirky elsewhere discusses how, yes, being able to publish at the push of a button means we'll see a lot of crap published--but we'll also see more experimentation and variety in what is published, as publication is no longer tied to the need to make a profit and appeal to a large swath of consumers; a book doesn't need to be a "guaranteed bestseller." Before movable type, the average book was a classic--only canonized "great books" saw paper, because they weren't a risk. Movable type paved the way for cheesy romances, throwaway lit, etc--but also for more risky writing. Same with the "publish" button on blogs or elsewhere on the web. Poetry has long been in this kind of model, I think--to some extent it seems, now, as if all the world's not a stage--but a small press.)

Eat. Pray. Spray. Delay. Then Walk Away.

Nice post at the New Yorker's book blog in response to the news that Fresh is launching fragrances named "Eat," "Pray," and "Love" (after Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray, Love) in which New Yorker bloggers offer their own literary-inspired fragrance suggestions.

"Ian" suggests

“White Noise” Musk. Have the long hours and high anxiety of teaching Hitler studies turned you into a one-man “airborne toxic event”? Try White Noise, a cologne that contains extracts of the new wonder drug Dylar! You’ll be the sweetest smelling Frankfurt School prof on campus, and that fear of death might go away, too. (Product note: Side effects include complete inability to “distinguish words from things.”)

Madeleine:

Zola’s “The Belly of Paris” Solid Perfume. Rotting fish, pungent cheese, lots of dirt, and a note of desperation in a petroleum base.

Nick:

Kitty Kelly’s “Oprah” Biography Mist. This has a lavender twist, but mostly smells like walking through a Michael’s Crafts parking lot.

and my favorite:
Eileen:

“Grendel” Musk For the Monster in You. Apples, shocked grain, a swampy mixture of sulfurous dragon smoke, and the blood of thanes. Notes of existential yearning and a hint of regret.

Read the whole post at Book Bench.

What would you do if you didn't need the approval of 15 committees??

Put another way: what would you do if your library system wasn't wasting your talents?

The lightning-speed rollout of the Old Spice/New Spice videos, the fun of the Librarians Do Gaga video (and, to a lesser extent--but probably only because flash mobs have become fairly common--the Seattle Library Flash Mob), JoCo Library's Read to a Unicorn April 1st post...all have me both excited

and

frustrated about libraries run by committees and the compartmentalizing of library jobs (that is, you have your social media people, and only your social media people work on the library's social media presence; you have your communications department, and all communications with the public have to be run through it, etc.) If you work in a medium to largish library system, you are a part of a crowd of workers. And chances are, your library system isn't crowdsourcing within its staff...your library system isn't making use of everyone's talents. A big shame, because libraryfolk tend to be a pretty talented bunch.

I think of what, for ex, David Lee King does for Topeka & Shawnee. David has lots of talent; David has lots of gear...but a lot of folks who work in libraries have lots of talent and lots of gear. What ultimately matters most, it seems to me, is lots of permission. David has that, I think--at least it looks like it from here--and most of us don't. Many of us don't need to be told or taught at conferences how to engage with patrons via social media, how to market our libraries via YouTube or Facebook, etc--we need our administrators to be told or taught that they should allow us to do so. In the largish public library systems I've worked in--all good systems, and none of which I mean to complain about here, as I'm pretty sure it's the norm (which I do mean to complain about)--you can barely post an Out of Order sign on a bathroom door at your branch without getting the font approved by someone in PR or communication. You can't do spontaneous programming, as all programs need to be approved (so they can be officially promoted, when promoting at the branch level would probably yield as high a turnout) at least 6 months in advance. You can't seize the moment; you can't seize the day; you're lucky if you can seize the year. Old Spice/New Spice practically seized the nanosecond.

Part of me wants to propose a place for library workers to post their ideas, ideas of stuff they would do if their library systems let them--so that other library systems, perhaps systems more willing to take risks, can run with those ideas if they want to. Free Library Ideas. "Use our brains, 'cause our employers probably won't, and we care about libraries, and we want good library shit done, even if we can't get it done at our own libraries."

Here are a few of mine:

If your library has a Facebook page, slap together a gift app. It takes about an hour. Create fake book covers in Picnik or wherever, covers that say things like "Pulse-Pounding Thriller" or "Savvy Historical Romp." Patrons can send them to people, and each should come w/the attached message: "For 10 Great Pulse-Pounding Thriller recommendations, call _____ Library at XXX-XXXX" [or insert ask-a-librarian's email, etc]". Boom. Facebook gifts. Reader's Advisory promotion. An hour or two of work. (Facebook quizzes are also a piece of cake. Have *something* fun & light to offer aside from your library's info, at least. Local history quiz? How Well Do You Know Your Library? quiz?) Quizzes and Facebook gift apps are kind of "yesterday," I know--but today's yesterdays are most library systems' tomorrows, so hop to.

National Poetry Month promotion for kids (or adults, really): run weekly drawings for personalized poems. You've got a poet on staff, or on your teen advisory board, or in your local literary community. You make up forms, or have a web form--kids write in 5 things they want included in the poem (give them suggestions: a sport, Harry Potter, a favorite color, toad guts, etc), and check whether they want the poem to be silly or serious. Draw one name a week, or 5 names a week, or 10 names a week during National Poetry Month--whatever your poet/s can handle. Poets write poems, type up poems on nice paper, give/mail poems to kids. Kids' parents frame that shit & never forget it.

What else? Some kind of free reading-type content to download to e-readers/iPhones/etc. A free ebook, courtesy of the library. That's right; your staff puts it together. A selection of our librarians' favorite short stories in the public domain, if no one on staff wants to write original stuff. A compendium of library-related humor. An anthology of literary mash-ups (Pride and Prejudice and Librarians) by staff. Our Library's Got Talent. Anecdotes. Whatever. People LOVE free ebooks. I slapped up an e-chapbook of previously published poems--poems! who reads them (unless they're personalized [grin]--on feedbooks (cover designed in 30 min on Picnik) in May, and it's seen almost 1500 downloads. Yeah, I know that isn't tons. But I didn't promote it at all--not even on my blog. I gave it one tweet. People are downloading it because they want free ebooks. But you, you promote your library's free ebook via your library's social network presences, your library's web page, etc. Boom. You've given people something different, for free, and folks, it really wasn't much work at all.

If YouTube and blogs and LOLcats have taught us nothing else, they're taught us that sometimes the little guys, the guys who may otherwise have gone undiscovered, are damn smart, talented, and funny. You new page may be a sharper writer than your senior PR person. For goodness' sake, don't let some other library learn about that before you do.

If anyone from any library system that will approve it wants to work with me on any of the above (especially the ebook), let me know.

What are your ideas? What aren't you getting to do that you'd do in a heartbeat if you could?

If The Giving Tree Had a Sassy Gay Friend

Wii Golf against Jordan Baker, anyone?

Aw, yeah. You know I'll be downloading the free trial of this when I get home. It's The Great Gatsby: the Video Game, by I-Play:

Spend a summer on a jazz-fueled adventure based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s legendary novel. Experience the Roaring Twenties first-hand as you uncover secrets behind the richly decadent facade. Explore one of the most tragic tales in literary history.

Here's hoping the eyes of Dr. TJ Eckleburg shoot lasers.

What a great idea: a small theater company in Portland, OR performs "Trek in the Park"--"a live performance of a classic Star Trek episode." I'd happily perform Golden Girls episodes in a Minneapolis park if I found some willing costars.

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I wasn't able to get into Justin Cronin's The Passage before I had to return it to the library, but the epigraph stood out for me: Shakespeare's Sonnet 64 with the final couplet lopped off. I like reading and writing sonnets, but find the turn in the final couplet (or sestet) often feels dishonest ("All sonnets say the same thing"--William Carlos Williams). Sonnet 64's final couplet doesn't feel as forced as others, but I think I agree with Cronin that the poem's stronger without it. I had a professor who theorized that Shakespeare wrote the first twelve lines of his sonnets, then farmed out the final couplets to an apprentice.

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From Victor Dover's "Retrofitting Suburbia":

"On crude functional levels the postwar suburbs have failed. One can measure, for example, the miserable rise in vehicle-miles traveled, up 40 percent in just the past decade, with all the associated problems of energy, pollution, time and stress. Or one can watch the annual budget scramble in which unsustainable municipalities attempt to provide services to far-flung citizens or to maintain an inefficient, non-compact infrastructure...On a less crude, human-nurturing level, sprawl does not measure up either. We are only beginning to discern the social entropy that results when 'sense of place' vanishes. Participating in self-government has become a low priority for many because they've lost the sense of belonging to a local culture."

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New research from Harvard indicates that doing a good deed can temporarily strengthen your physical endurance--and doing an evil deed may give you an even greater boost.