"The Friends List: a Poem in 292 Parts"--Carolyn Guinzio

I love Carolyn Guinzio's "The Friends List: a Poem in 292 Parts"--a short stanza on each of her Facebook friends. On Facebook, Kathleen Ossip shared it and wrote that it "chimes with affection and connection". I think so, too, but also think some sections capture the slightness and wisp-like surprise, the oddity of some of those connections--it's a poem that makes sense of Facebook, when "Making Sense Of Facebook" sometimes doesn't seem so far from "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All".

A few brief excerpts that I hope it's okay to quote (read the entire poem here*):

1. 
She was worried 
about the phantom
kittens in the grate.

39. 
I was won over
by the fictional contents
of the fictional little girl’s purse.

77. 
I both knew and did
not know that was her
at the next table.

88. 
You can look, but I think
he has already found
all the good fossils.

102. 
Where can she be
at peace?
On a horse.

195. 
Even at the hospital,
I see her in the light 
of chandeliers.



*link may be broken after a week or two--just learned of poet's intention to only keep the page up for a short while

Neon salesman's suitcase

 

 "One amazing relic of the golden age of neon are the suitcases carried by neon salesmen. They contained every color they could make. The suitcases are so beautiful. You open them up, and there’s a little switch for each tube. If you turn them all on—which you’re not really supposed to do—you just get this incredible rainbow radiating out of the suitcase. It must have been so magical when a salesman walked into a little shop and opened up his suitcase, especially when neon signs were first starting to catch on."

--Kirsten Hively, via Collectors Weekly

"Emily Dickinson's To-Do List" by Andrea Carlisle

I'm sure I posted this Andrea Carlisle poem years ago, but when I searched for it this morning, I couldn't find it in the archives. I still love it. (via)


Emily Dickinson's To-Do List

Monday
Figure out what to wear—white dress?
Put hair in bun
Bake gingerbread for Sue
Peer out window at passersby
Write poem
Hide poem

Tuesday
White dress? Off-white dress?
Feed cats
Chat with Lavinia
Work in garden
Letter to T.W.H.

Wednesday
White dress or what?
Eavesdrop on visitors from behind door
Write poem
Hide poem

Thursday
Try on new white dress
Gardening—watch out for narrow fellows in grass!
Gingerbread, cakes, treats
Poems: Write and hide them

Friday
Embroider sash for white dress
Write poetry
Water flowers on windowsill
Hide everything

Ampersands

I could look at this for hours. By soyredo: Ampersands

Cities as Software/Libraries as Software

Two posts that have excited me this morning:

Cities as Software, Marcus Westbury


"[Y]ou need to start by rewriting – or hacking – the software to change not what the city is but how it behaves."


Libraries as Software: Dematerialising Platforms & Returning to First Principles, 
Hugh Rundle [bold his]


"Libraries are a technology for free, large scale inter-generational transfer of knowledge and culture. ... Instead of processing, moving, accessioning and purchasing physical or digital items, librarians are better used to organise and share information and stories. Libraries run like this become creation engines.  They become more about creating and sharing a community’s ideas than providing access to the ideas of others...If we combine the ideas of Westbury with Steven Johnson’s ideas about platforms we can envisage the library as a platform for enabling innovation, learning and cultural development to occur in our communities without the need for capital.  Isn’t that a lot more compelling than a place for lending books to people?"

Pentametron

scans Twitter for tweets in iambic pentameter and combines them into non-rhyming sonnets:

What ever happened to Amanda Bynes! ?

so many people never find the one.

I am excited for tomorrow... ish

I'm never eating waffle house again...

etc.

Pentametron

OdysseyWorks: all your life's a stage (for 24 hours)

Did you ever see the 1997 movie The Game, in which a character played by Sean Penn gifts his brother, played by Michael Douglas, with a wholly immersive experience--a huge Game made just for him, tailored to every aspect of his life and personality, which includes a cast of actors he will not realize are actors, unsafe situations he will not realize are safe, something pretty much guaranteed to be a life-changing if not pleasant experience for the guy who has everything? OdysseyWorks is a group of multidisciplinary artists who create such experiences (okay, maybe not quite like those in The Game, but I was immediately reminded of it) for very small audiences...24-hour experiences, usually for a single person. Not "games," quite, but as they put it:

OdysseyWorks creates immersive, site specific, long duration performances for very small and fully participatory audiences.These multi-site, cross-genre performances radically rethink the artist-audience relationship, resulting in a series of aesthetic and narrative experiences designed for one person. Reconsidering traditional processes of art-making, performative potentials of public spaces, and the nature of human relationships, the work draws from a broad range of techniques in disciplines as ordinarily estranged as poetry and architecture, music and psychology, book arts and theater. The performances deeply and personally affect both audience and artist, incorporating community members not as passive audience members but actors, extras, and assisting artists.

I was interested to see that poet Matthea Harvey is now or has been part of the group.

Via this MetaFilter post, which also includes a link to an article describing an experience designed by Matthew Purdon and Abraham Burickson, two OdysseyWorks members, before (it appears) they took the name OdysseyWorks. A film about OdysseyWorks, The Midden of Possibility, will be showing at Cannes in May 2012. Here's the blurb from the web site:

Midden of Possibility follows conceptual performance group OdysseyWorks over the course of three months as they develop a 36hr performance for a single person--Kristina, a woman in her thirties who lives in midtown Manhattan and went through an extensive screening process to have the group make a performance for her. From New York City to Ithaca--on trains, in caves and in old farmhouses--through the pages of a novel, in a poker game (played using cards bearing archaic text and 19th century lice removal recipes), and over radio broadcasts across the Hudson River Valley,she moves through this world as the a star without a script, gradually discovering her own agency. Ready for change, and looking for a different approach to her life, Kristina has no idea what is about to happen to her. Actors are infiltrating her life, articles in the New Yorker are suddenly very personal, and everyone she knows is in on it, or seems to be. The filmmakers lived with the artists for three months as they attempted to find a way to transform their work from conventional to transcendent, and to transform themselves along the way. 

"Walking Home From the Grocery Store"

Ezra Jack Keats/Maurice Sendak mashup made with GIMP.

Quora: What is the most hauntingly beautiful song?

Quora users respond to the question, "What is the most hauntingly beautiful song?" (with lots of YouTube links for listening)

I've been haunted by Kate and Janelle's cover of Neko Case's "Star Witness" since it first saw and heard it about a month ago. I made an mp3 of it with this useful tool so I could listen to it in the car, but I know seeing them perform it has colored all my listens since, the way they look and smile at each other, check in with each other, and the way Janelle (on the right) looks off into the ceiling:



I think part of what haunts me is that I'm afraid they won't sing together forever.

Another I might choose--one that I've been listening to a lot longer--is Meredith Monk's "Gotham Lullaby":




Several folks on Quora chose Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings", which is so devastatingly beautiful I always want to bawl about 30 seconds in. But "devastating" and "haunting" are different for me, thankfully...if this came haunting me I don't think I could stand up in the morning:



How would you answer the Quora question?

Resource: the Community-Led Libraries Toolkit

Yesterday, via the Library Success wiki, I came across Working Together and their (link to pdf) Community-Led Libraries Toolkit. I'm less than a third of the way through reading the toolkit, but it's already the most valuable resource I've seen on working with diverse and socially excluded populations in libraries. I love how it acknowledges that good intentions, open minds, and talent aren't enough (aren't much at all, really) right in the beginning, and moves on from there. I'm linking it here for later reference and because I recommend even the little I've read so far (not just to library staff, but to school staff, nonprofit staff, etc). Below, some brief quotes to give the gist (bold mine):

-----------------

[on involving community members in planning] "This process is not just about offering a service or developing a collection: it is about building and strengthening the abilities of socially excluded community members to engage in the library--not just as service recipients, but as active and confident community members. Sometimes, the most important outcome of community-led service planning is not the actual products or services, but the change in socially excluded community members' sense of their importance to the library, their right to be involved, and their ability and confidence to engage...

...Overall, it is always important to keep in mind that our role in the community is not to tell community members what they need or identify the best service for their needs. You probably have creative ideas, special skills, knowledge, experience, and abilities, all of which could achieve a tangible service output immediately. However, your solution might not be the one the community would have chosen and developed if involved collaboratively, and you will have missed the opportunity for capacity and confidence building. Instead, use your expertise, skills, and knowledge to facilitate the discussion and implementation of the community's self-identified solution.

You will really have achieved the goal of inclusive service planning when socially excluded community members feel that the library is their library and that they have a voice and sense of belonging...

...Many barriers to accessing library service result from the differences between how libraries and library staff perceive the needs of socially excluded people and how socially excluded people perceive their own needs."

[on feedback-gathering methods libraries and other institutions traditionally use, like polls, comment cards, surveys]: "Traditional consultation techniques favor existing library users and/or economically-advantaged, engaged, and confident non-users."

Community-Led Libraries Toolkit

Star Wars Uncut: Director's Cut

"In 2009, Casey Pugh asked thousands of Internet users to remake "Star Wars: A New Hope" into a fan film, 15 seconds at a time. Contributors were allowed to recreate scenes from Star Wars however they wanted. Within just a few months SWU grew into a wild success. The creativity that poured into the project was unimaginable...Finally, the crowd-sourced project has been stitched together and put online for your streaming pleasure. The "Director's Cut" is a feature-length film that contains hand-picked scenes from the entire StarWarsUncut.com collection."

I was never a big Star Wars fan, but four minutes in, I'm already hooked. What a fantastic homage, idea, and collaboration. Like the YouTube choir performing Eric Whitacre's "Sleep" and The Johnny Cash Project, Star Wars Uncut is a massive-scale art project created by folks who are strangers to each other, made possible by the web:





Read more about the project at Star Wars Uncut.

When the world is your instrument: Mogees

Mogees is, according to the website, "an interactive gestural-based surface for realtime audio mosaicing". The video demonstration is thrilling:


Mogees - Gesture recognition with contact-microphones from bruno zamborlin on Vimeo.

More text from the website:

In the video we show how it is possible to perform gesture recognition just with contact microphones. Through gesture recognition techniques we detect different kind of fingers-touch and associate them with different sounds. In the video we used two different audio synthesis techniques:

- physic modelling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws;
- concatenative synthesis (audio mosaicing), in which the sound of the contact microphone is associated with its closest frame present in a sound database.

The system can recognise both fingers-touches and objects that emits a sound, such as the coin shown in the video.


I don't understand this, or what's happening in the video: is the microphone simply massively amplifying the almost inaudible sounds your fingers make while tapping and riffing on objects? But I think it's amazing, would go nuts to get my hands on the technology, and wish one of the "objects" in the video had been a living thing.

[via Kottke]

Bruce Sterling Closes the 2011 Art + Environment Conference

Author and futurist Bruce Sterling gives a smart and entertaining talk about where we are now and where we might be going, both climate change-wise and art-wise. Watch below or just press play and listen while you do other stuff (I know 28 minutes seems like a long time to sit and watch--at least it does to me--and the talk doesn't depend on visuals. Sterling's an animated, worthwhile speaker even when you're just listening).

"Call Me Hope"--from Mama Hope's "Stop the Pity. Unlock the Potential" campaign

This is great:




From the YouTube description:

"This is the second video in Mama Hope's (http://www.mamahope.org) Stop the Pity. Unlock the Potential Campaign. At Mama Hope, we believe that the essential first step in changing the world is telling the story of connection instead of contrast and potential instead of poverty. People everywhere have talent and capacity, and people everywhere share a desire to be able to use those gifts to improve their lives and the lives of the people they care about. To learn more about the projects we undertake to unlock this potential and get involved, visit us at ‪http://www.mamahope.org

Directed by Joe Sabia (http://www.joesabia.co) and Bryce Yukio Adolphson (http://www.bryceyukioadolphson.com)
Shot and Edited by Bryce Yukio Adolphson
Post-Production Sound by Matt McCorkle (http://www.equalsonics.com)
Produced by Nyla Rodgers (http://www.mamahope.org)"

Hot Drinks: Wendy's training videos from the 80s

Well do I remember being shut in a windowless room at 16, first day on the job at General Cinema, to fumble a training cassette into a sad VCR and awkwardly learn what my work would entail (all the while feeling like I was being watched). In retrospect, I wish I had sought work at Wendy's, if only to be locked in a room with these. Many more on YouTube.






"Then hand that drink to the Coordinator, and tell the guest you'll see him later."

"Vittles" by Aaron Belz

[My favorite poem from Belz's Lovely, Raspberry.
More Belz, including this poem, at ucity review]


Vittles
--Aaron Belz


Considering how little new there is to say about varmints
perhaps one can write something new about vittles,
or if the mood of the room in which one is writing
is cast perfectly for such an occasion one might even
venture to write something new about vittles that also
discusses or touches upon the interests of varmints,
for varmints are known to prefer certain vittles over others
and to reject some vittles entirely, such as anything leafy.

Leafy edibles might not even be properly defined as vittles,
in which case one inevitably turns one’s attention to parsnips.
Rumor has it that there is a certain kind of varmint that,
while unilaterally rejecting leafy edibles, will in fact partake
of a parsnip if the mood in the room is cast perfectly
for such an occasion, or indeed if the white china is so white
as to remind that varmint of the moon and set him to baying;
he might even partake of bay leaves if that is the case.

Bay leaves, however, and in fact parsnips themselves,
have traditionally been associated with critters,
what with the diet of critters being almost entirely leafy
and not at all thought of as vittles. It is almost comical
to imagine a critter munching on vittles. Let’s say,
however, that you’re stumped for ideas for your writing;
in this case, you might try picturing in your mind
a critter eating vittles—or a varmint eating leafy edibles.

Such fancy performs the function of a mental crowbar,
that is to say, it can if you allow it to perform that function:
you will suddenly remember three or four really sucky
moments of your childhood that you had suppressed,
and they will arrive in your mind with their own lexicons
and their own contextualizing power that is so overpowering
as to recontextualize even your recent thinking about vittles
and all the new things you had hoped to write about them.

Nina Simone, Harlem Cultural Festival, 1969: "Ain't Got No/I Got Life"

I love the joyful ways she sings boobies--a departure from the original lyric.

Hennessy Youngman's "ART THOUGHTZ"

This Metafilter post on Hennessy Youngman's "ART THOUGHTZ" has been sitting, starred to watch later, in my Google Reader account since May. Glad I clicked through. "ART THOUGHTZ" has cracked me the hell up all morning.

On Post-Structuralism:

ART THOUGHTZ: Post-Structuralism from Hennessy Youngman on Vimeo.



On Bruce Nauman:

ART THOUGHTZ: Bruce Nauman from Hennessy Youngman on Vimeo.



On the Female Gaze, with guest host Tamara Suber (slightly offensive, wholly pretty great, and very NSFW):

ART THOUGHTZ: The Female Gaze, with Special Guest Tamara Suber (NSFW) from Hennessy Youngman on Vimeo.


More:
Hennessy Youngman on Vimeo
Hennessy Youngman on YouTube
Hennessy Youngman on Tumblr

Complaints Choirs

Via Brain Pickings, an article about Complaints Choirs around the world. I'd never heard of these before, but the earliest iteration seems to have been in 2005. From the Complaints Choirs Worldwide site:

It all got started during a winter day walk of Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen in Helsinki. Perhaps it was due to the coldness of the day that they ended up discussing the possibility of transforming the huge energy people put into complaining into something else. Perhaps not directly into heat – but into something powerful anyway.

In the Finnish vocabulary there is an expression "Valituskuoro". It means "Complaints Choir" and it is used to describe situations where a lot of people are complaining simultaneously. Kalleinen and Kochta-Kalleinen thought: "Wouldn´t it be fantastic to take this expression literally and organise a real Complaints Choir!"


The Helsinki Complaints Choir:




From the Complaints Choirs of the World FAQ:

HOW DID IT ALL STARTED?

We just realized that people complain a lot, no matter what their life circumstances are. Whether they live under socialism or capitalism, whether they are rich or poor, young or old. We wanted to tap into this unending source of energy, we wanted to transform this complaints energy into something else, something surprising. The idea itself stems from the Finish word "Valituskuoro" - which means Complaints Choir. We wanted to see what happens if one takes this term literally. We tested the project in Birmingham (UK) in 2005. The song "I want my Money back" created during a complaints workshop at Springhill Institute became an instant hit on the net.

DID YOU WANT TO COMBINE SINGING WITH POLITICAL PROTEST?

Complaints Choirs are not intended as protest choirs or an agit-prop revival. The political complaint is only representing a small margin of the wonderful world of complaints. Why should such important issues as broken underpants, boring dreams or spying neighbors be excluded? On the other hand the private, the personal, can be very political at the same time. If somebody complaints "I have too much time!" it can be seen just as a personal tragedy, but it also points to a major defect of the capitalistic society, which sidelines people because they are of no use in the production cycle.

HOW DOES A COMPLAINTS CHOIR COME INTO EXISTENCE?

All citizens of a particular city are invited to complain about anything they want and to join the choir. At the first meeting the freshly formed choir decides democratically on the content of the song. A local musician composes a tune for the text which is then rehearsed in 4 or 5 meetings. In the end the choir performs their collective grumbles at different locations in the city.

The Complaints Choir of Copenhagen:




You can see lots more complaints choirs' performances here. It doesn't appear that Minneapolis has one (yet).

"So, you think you can kern?" --Kottke

Playing Kern Me, the beautiful kerning game, is like scratching a wonderful itch. Test your kerning skills against a typographer's.