I just finished reading an article on Mashable called “A Look Back at the Last 5 Years in Blogging“. For the most part, I think this post  gives a solid overview of these past and very formative years for the Internet. If you’ve just excaped from life under a rock, you might give it a read. Toward the end of the post, you can find the understatement, “tumblelogs have become extremely popular due to their ease of use.” The author  interviewed some guy who is a digital strategist and he said “Blogging tools have made it easier for people to focus on content production rather than the often tedious process of content formatting. If anything is responsible for the popularity of blogging the steady improvement of the tools over the years has to be it,”

It’s that “ease of use” that will probably define the next five years of blogging. Twitter is easy to use. Tumblr is easy to use. Pinterest is easy to use. Facebook is easy to use. (All of these are blog-like, in one way or another.)

In a way, I love it all. There are all these new, fun, easy-to-use ways for pretty much anybody to share what they’ve got. They can share it with their friends, with an audience of millions, and also with the corporations who own these platforms! It’s that last bit that troubles me. Other people’s websites can get crappy or they can die. The aforementioned post about the last five years of blogging history begins with a mention of Technorati, which was once a huge part of blogging, but now Technorati is largely irrelevant to the blogosphere. Will twitter still be here in five years? Probably. Will it be bought out by CNN? God knows, CNN can’t seem to shut the hell up about what’s on Twitter, these days. Whether it’s CNN, Twitter, or not, the question is: will a company buy it and make it crappy? Yahoo bought Delicious and damn near ruined it. Just recently, Twitter bought Posterous. Will the average blogger care which company owns their blogging platform of choice, or whether it dies off? Does it really matter?

Well, I care, not super passionately, but I’m aware of it, anyway. Mostly, I like to have my stuff where I have a larger measure of control over it, which is why I have my own domain. I realize that, in order to have your own domain, you need to have a bit more technical know-how than the average internet user. And that brings me to two more things:

1. tumblr and the others  are easier and more fun to use than wordpress.

2. Shouldn’t my own domain be able to better connect to all that other stuff out there?

These two complaints are mostly based on my own preferences, but I’m sharing them, in case there might be something out there that I’m missing.

First, it just doesn’t seem fair that so many other, closed platforms should be so much faster to innovate and so much more fun/easy to use. Although I have gone to the trouble of hosting my own site, and yes, I can and do spend lots of time tinkering with it, there are times when I want all the fuss to go away and to just rock out some new stuff on the web, you know? Many of the easier, non-hosted options I’m thinking of, they start with a simple question like “what’s on your mind” and/or some very simple buttons that say things like “video” “audio” “link” and so on. WordPress, which is my blogging software of choice, it hasn’t, until recently, offered options like that, and now they’re only half-baked. Can’t I have easy and simple posting options in addition to all the other power that WordPress offers me?

(I should mention that, yes, I am aware of, and I’m excited about, the new post formats for wordpress and I’ve seen the feature begin to creep its way into wordpress and I know about  the WooTumblog plugin (I reluctantly use it despite its faults). These are all things that strive toward something like that simple set of buttons that let you choose things like “audio,” video” or “link” and to quickly and easily post them. I worry a little bit that this functionality will be implemented in much the way that tags were added to wordpress: everybody builds a million ways to do it and eventually the best one wins, which is fine, except that afterwards your data ends us scarred by leftover cruft from previous attempts at getting it right. This is because WordPress plugins are notoriously terrible at uninstalling themselves, in my experience. Remember “ultimate tag warrior” and all its bretheren? Then, there was tagging. Then, nothing had tags. Then, there were hashtags, instead. I digress.)

Second, if there’s so much fun to be had on so many other networks out there, and if there isn’t any sign of that fun stopping any time soon, then shouldn’t I be able to connect my self-hosted website, in an easy and fun manner to all the fun that’s out there? Well, actually, that’s a hell of a lot more easily said than done. At last count, there were something like 35 ways to stream your life, some of which are easier to use than others and some of which are self-hosted. Many of these rely on yet another website to use out there somewhere, which kinda defeats the purpose. Then again, maybe the idea that you can have “all your stuff all in one place” on the internet simply isn’t realistic, even if that “one place” is your very own domain.

In conclusion, I should say, simply, that it has been an incredible five years for blogging and the history of the internet. I only hope that the self-hosted website doesn’t lose out during the next five, and I think that ease-of-use and widespread compatibility are the two best ways to ensure that it doesn’t lose out.

cool video

“Hypertext.” When I was a college student, I was obsessed with the idea that, some day, we would all be creating and consuming information— not just information, but literature—via portable devices like cell phones, when the hyperlink might become as central to reading and writing as the sentence. Since then, that day has come and gone. There are millions of people out there sporting an iPhone, an Android, a Kindle, an iPad, a netbook, a tablet, what-have-you. This year alone, there has been a doubling of the number of people who e-readers and tablet computers. Since then, nearly everyone I know can communicate with nearly everyone else I know, simply by pasting a hyperlink, sometimes without adding any additional information at all. By all accounts, this seems to be the moment I was waiting for.

On the other hand, I’ve just encountered two accounts that wonder about “why the book’s future never happened” and “the problem of how hypertext poems composed in the late 1990s have aged” by Paul Laforge and Benjamin Paloff, respectively.

What happened?

These two accounts differ in their approaches to that question, but they both agree pretty closely on the problem.

“hypertext fiction is in a tough place now. Born into a world that wasn’t quite ready for it, and encumbered with lousy technology and user-hostile interface design, it got a bad reputation, at least outside of specialized reading circles. At the same time, it’s impossibly hard to create, one of the only modes of fiction I know of which is more demanding than the novel. (And then add to that the need to create a user interface, and maybe a content-management system, and is it going to be an app? Suddenly your antidepressants aren’t nearly strong enough to get you out of bed.)”— Paul Laforge

“The paradox of this proliferation of online information is that, while by no means immune to decay, the information is quickly superseded by new dispatches, which in turn accelerates its aging. As we have seen, a book of poems published on acid-free paper in 1997 can easily look like a book published in 2011; in the United States, it is not uncommon for a book to go through multiple printings with little or no change in design. But a hypertext poem coded in 1997 shows its age almost immediately, whether because its design elements reflect earlier stages of a rapidly changing programming environment, or perhaps because the coding requires now-obsolete software.”— Benjamin Paloff

If the world doesn’t yet have a strong, ongoing body of hypertext literature, could it be because the idea was born before the widespread popularity of web standards? Are the early hypertexts akin to the early attempts at bookmaking, and so will hypertext literature require an element of conservation science in order to survive? Will it be transcribed or upgraded, the way the ancient writing was transcribed from scroll, to manuscript, to book, to database? (Would cloud-based bookstores prove to be the dawn of a new dark age once the power goes out?)

I’m asking many questions here. I don’t propose to answer any of them here, merely to invite conversation.

Is hypertext literature dead? I don’t think so, but I do think it is ready for its “web 2.0” moment, wherein it becomes something easier to do, something everyone can enjoy. I think it might also help to consider the idea broadly, because in many ways it has caught on, and it isn’t aging, if the idea is allowed to include: video games, blogs, net art… the socially-networked/narrated identities of millions of people. I suppose it is possible that the Web 2.0 moment IS the hypertext literature moment. If that’s the case, then there’s just one troubling thing, as Laforge points out:

“And then … nothing happened. The Wikipedia entry for hypertext fiction lists no works published after 2001, and although Wikipedia isn’t the final word on anything, you have to think, if someone had written a hypertext fiction, this is where they’d want to tell you about it. The form’s seeming demise is puzzling…”

(Update: as it turns out, the authors of hypertext fiction don’t seem to use Wikipedia “to tell you about it”. Instead, these authors use things like conferences of the Modern Language Association, a large and growing database of electronic literature sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a series of anthologies published by the Electronic Literature Organization at MIT. So, the work is out there, if you know where to look.)

Maybe it’s just that “hypertext fiction” is the wrong search query. Let’s try another one, which yields some very familiar-looking results. Let’s try “conceptual literature” instead:

“With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography. By that, I mean that writing has encountered a situation similar to that of painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do that, to survive, the field had to alter its course radically.” — Kenneth Goldsmith

The time might be right, after all. I agree with Laforge’s conclusion, “I believe that the promise of hypertext fiction is worth pursuing, even now, or maybe especially now.”

That pursuit: what should it look like, now that it is 2012?

There’s a new app for writing screenplays and scripts, and it’s open source. Read about it. Download it. Tell me what you think.

Social networks for writers come and go, but a new one has come.  It’s called Jottify. Like the ones before it, you can share what you’ve written, find new readers, and have discussions. It also allows you to create a group, but it seems that the group doesn’t have any privacy settings. 

I still haven’t picked out the definitive examples of what interests me about this eclectic and silly genre of music called “space age pop”.

Meanwhile, I like that I’m able to download dozens of sample albums from the space age pop era.

I saw the movie “Close Encounters” tonight. I think I must have seen it before, maybe when I was a kid. It has some things in common with the idea I’m working on. It’s something to think about.

Check out the ziggy stardust ipad with the extendable, um, dongle thingie.

Tonight, I like to think that the fireworks are celebrating the launch of my latest project: to raise funds to support Infinity’s Kitchen the publication that I started a few years ago. Please take a look!

I had a lot of fun making this video. I did it with Microsoft PowerPoint, since I don’t have a video camera. I think it worked out nicely!

I think that a recent article in PC magazine makes an interesting point about Google+, the new social web app from Google. One of the new features is the ability to group your friends in to what’s called “circles”.

Among all the interesting features of Google+, one of the most heavily touted is Google Circles. Circles are what Google calls the various groups that you can organize your friends into. Once you’ve got them set up and populated, you then can pick which circles get to see the stuff you share. Your thumbs-down review of the latest episode of Glee? Probably just your friends. A chat about the company picnic? Work colleagues only for that one. Pics of your three-year-old niece? Strictly family. You get the idea. This YouTube video explains further:

Although Google holds it up as a differentiator, Facebook actually has a similar feature that lets you pile friends together in specific buckets—although, importantly, the “share only with these guys” isn’t nearly as convenient. Google+, however, puts Circles front and center, playing up the premise that you don’t want to share everything with everyone. And that idea is certainly true, but Google Circles is still the most misguided feature of the new social network.

The main problem with Google Circles is that it’s tedious.

It’s so tedious to do, with Facebook, that I’m sure many users don’t even know that they have the ability to control who sees what. It’s an important feature, and it needs to be simple.

Offline, if I want to hang out with sports fans, I go to the sports pub. When I want to talk about books and literature, I go to a reading. It’s easy to move around among various circles.

Online, I’m expected, by default, to say everything I say to everyone I know, reardless of why I know them, whether they’re interested, etc. That’s no good, and somebody should fix it, and fix it well.

If this article is still to be believed, we’ll have to wait for a feature like that. This new one isn’t any easier, either.

I’m looking to replace my very favorite notebook, which is all filled up now. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to make these anymore.

I’m posting this in the hopes that someone can help to point me in the right direction. I contacted the manufacturer, whose website suggests that they no longer make these, but they never replied. I’ve done all this because I loved that notebook so much and I want another one.

It is a hardbound book, with a cloth covering of some sort. The spine is sewn such that the open book lays flat. The paper is smooth and thick and white; it is acid-free (I think) and does not bleed through when I use a pen. The paper is narrow ruled (1/4 in (6.35 mm) spacing between ruling lines), with no vertical margin line. It measures 8″ wide by 10.5″ high and 1″ thick.

This is my favorite notebook.

When opened, my favorite notebook lays flat.

I have filled my favorite notebook with words and drawings

It has a hardbound cover, with cloth on it

Here’s another interesting book companion site. This one lets you download a free copy of the book, if you tweet about it first. It seems like an interesting way to get readers. The book is called OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED AND WHAT SHOULD I DO?

For a while now, I’ve been collecting examples of what I call the “book companion website”. The new “pottermore” website is probably going to become a very popular one, and if this intro video is any indication, this site will take the whole idea to an interesting new level.

This summer, I hope to have published e-book versions of my novella. Today, I happened upon some good advice for anyone engaged in e-book publishing. I thought I would pass the advice along. It comes from Levi Asher, over at Literary Kicks.

It’s simple advice, really. I’ll paraphrase.

1. Make it look good. A lot of e-books look crappy.
2. “Formatting an e-book manuscript is a bitch.”
3. Make an e-book for kindle, then make versions for the other devices.
4. Be sure you can find an audience. This is easiest if you’ve written something you already know people will want.

I’m sure I can handle most of the points above, with the probable exception of number four.

Stephen Dedalus is my name,
Ireland is my nation.
Clongowes is my dwellingplace
And heaven my expectation.

He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry.

Lately I’ve been readingA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It isn’t poetry, but on occasion, as in the quote above, it reads like poetry.

I’ve been wondering, too, about stream of consciousness writing. I’m sure that Joyce isn’t simply writing down whatever happens to come to the top of his head (that’s called automatic writing). I think that good stream of consciousness writing has to be crafted, so that it flows as easily as thoughts do, and in the way that certain thoughts do.

Other times, I think it can be a happy accident that the writing comes out like raw thoughts. I’ve had that experience before.

One of the tracks on Strange Punctuation has a sort of stream of consciousness feel to it. It’s a collage, actually, made out of parts of several other recordings. My friend Curt made the track out of the material that hadn’t yet made the cut. This resulted in one of the more interesting spoken word recordings; it has a dreamlike mood to it, I think.

I’m (slowly) writing the script for a stage play. During my first draft, I sampled the various software apps that are designed to help a writer to produce a stage play, screen play, comic book script, etc. I thought I would blog some of my thoughts, in case anybody else out there finds them interesting.

Here’s what I’m looking for

When I’m writing, I want a comfortable, intuitive interface. I don’t want to fuss around with a bunch of complicated interface controls. I don’t want to spend my time on the formatting of the script; that’s the software’s job. This is very important to me, because I want to be comfortable when I write. It’s worth noting too, that in an age when I can buy a beautifully designed and intuitive app for $1 on my phone, I’m really not impressed by a $30 program that looks like it was designed when I was in High School (i.e. Windows 95). Design is a small point in this case, I know, but it matters to me.

I also want to be sure that whatever I’m writing in this special software is “portable” so that I can export it to an industry standard file type, change the margins and typesetting, or edit the document in another software application altogether. More technically speaking, I need my software to import/export file formats like Final Draft, Microsoft Word, Movie Magic Screenwriter, PDF, TXT or RTF. Why? Because I’m just now drafting my script, and I’m unsure what I’ll need to do with it later. I want my options open.

Scripwriting Apps

I tried out a lot of different apps, with help from demo versions and from friends. Here is a list, in order of my preference.

Celtx

This one tops the list because it is basically free, and totally usable. Celtx is designed to help you write a variety of scripts, including two standard formats for stage plays. The basic package is free. Plugins to add extra features are reasonably priced. In addition to basic scriptwriting, Celtx also has features for storing notes, visualization, formatting templates… This thing does a lot for free. The interface is simple and easy to understand. What it won’t do is import/export to very many standard file types, at least not out of the box. They probably make you buy a plugin for that. I haven’t looked into it. They also have an iphone app, but I don’t want to write on my phone, thanks.

Scrivener

I had a lot of fun using this application. For Windows users like myself, though, it is still in Beta, so there are some glitches. In addition to “word processor” mode, Scrivener also has tools to help you organize your notes, scenes and even the other documents you might be using as source material, etc. I found those extra features to be very helpful with my first draft. The Mac version of this is $50, but the beta for windows is currently free. You will want to go through the tutorial on this one, to learn all the useful features, but then you can get right down to writing with a nice interface. Be warned though: once the beta expires, you’ll have to upgrade, so save your work often or be prepared to upgrade. The beta can export to most, but not all, of the usual file types.

MovieMagic Screenwriter

Despite the irrelevant name of this app, I liked it. The word processing features are easy to use. The support for file formats is good. MovieMagic Screenwriter handles notes and scenes fairly well. It also integrates with Dramatica, so you can start there to hash out a rough outline. I found that this app, of all of them, gave me the best ability to write dialog quickly, while preserving format. Unfortunately, it costs $245.95, but if you’re going to spend hundreds of dollars on scriptwriting software, I think this is the best investment.

Dramatica Pro

Dramatica Pro deserves mention on this list. It isn’t going to help you write dialog, etc. but it is a nice brainstorming tool. It’s user interface is in very bad need of a complete and total overhaul, but once you get the hang of it, it might be useful. The software walks you through a sort of plot philosophy that seems to be designed to help you write a Hollywood blockbuster, but I found it to provide useful prompts for thinking about character interactions and plot complexity. It ain’t cheap, though.

Adobe Story

This is more like a web app. It supports standard formats. Adobe Story is easy to use. It works online and offline. It’s definitely worth a try. It’s free, for now, I guess?

Final Draft

Final Draft is one of the “industry standard” scriptwriting apps. It’s also very expensive. For your money, you get a word processor with minimal features to make it unique for writing scripts. The features that are there are very powerful. For example, the large number of formatting templates, the character names database, and collaboration mode. You’ll be able to dive right in, here and get the work done. It’s also worth noting that this app’s native file type is a very popular one.

There are others…

These were listed on Wikipedia but I haven’t tried them out yet. Your results may vary, so I’ll simply list them here.

• FiveSprockets
• Montage software
• Movie Outline
• Page 2 stage
• Plot Builder
• Plotbot
• Scripped
• ScriptTeX
• WriteItNow
• MovieWriterPro

If anybody knows of any others, or has reviews to share, please do post them in the commetns. As you can tell by now, I’m a windows user, but I welcome my Mac friends to share any notes about the software they like to use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musique_concr%C3%A8te

I’m gearing up to start another project with Second Land. To help with that, I’ll be gathering some useful bits, here on NoCategories, so I can more easily share project notes. The first one: “concrete music“.

Musique concrète (French for “concrete music” or “real music“) is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as “musical” (melody, harmony, rhythm, metre and so on). The theoretical underpinnings of the aesthetic were developed by Pierre Schaeffer, beginning in the late 1940s.

source: http://iwdrm.tumblr.com/post/2911978211

from Space Science Fiction, February and March, 1953

Boredom often serves a useful function: as an opposite to excitement and as a means of bringing emphasis to what it interrupts. ~ Dick Higgins , See essay "Boredom and Danger" (Summer 1966).

I’m interested in adding audio equipment to my writing toolbox. So, I think I need some gear. I’m posting this to solicit any advice from musicians, technicians and writers: what works and what doesn’t? How can I do these things sufficiently well, on the smallest possible budget?

• I have a decent XLR microphone. I have a computer with a decent sound card. What is the best way to connect the two?
• I want to manipulate voices. Is that done with a vocoder? Do I need hardware or software for that?
• I want to be able to edit recordings. I’ve used Garage Band, and it’s nice, but I don’t have a mac. Is there something that is comparably user-friendly for the PC?
• With all of these things, I don’t want to get overwhelmed by tinkering with equipment. The point, for me, is to get down to creative work.

I’ve been working up to this for a while, now. When I interview people for articles, I always bring along my handheld MP3 audio recorder. I just love that thing. Sometimes, I also use it to record spoken word performances. The spoken word album, of course that required the use of some (more advanced) audio equipment. Recently, while working on the script for a play, some friends of mine used an iphone to record a cold reading of the script, which will allow me to “hear” the characters for the first time. Also for that play, I’ve been listening to a lot of strange music, to give myself a sense of setting.

About four years ago, I lived in a “live-in studio space” a warehouse loft in a Baltimore building they call The Copycat. I had so much space! I actually had several spaces while living there, but the last one was about 800 square feet and I devoted most of it to a writing studio. Now, I live in a very different space, and I am not so interested in the space itself as I am with tools that are available to me. In particular, I’m interested in adding audio tools to my writing toolbox. Even so, I think it will be fun to figure out how to set up a more audio-friendly writing space.

I got the idea for “writing with audio” during my visit to New York a couple weeks ago, I learned something interesting about The Wooster Group. I have a friend who works with them. They’re an experimental theater group who incorporates video into many aspects of their lives: they take direction in some sense from video of all kinds, they video blog during creative retreats, their vlog has all kinds of stuff in it, the performances are recorded by video and in some sense the performances are also a response to all this video. So, for these guys, video opens up a lot of creative possibilities. I think audio would be the thing for me to open up creative possibilities.

Look, we’d hear the unheard,
a lay boy could
preach a little,
preach a little now:
gypsies, tramps, men, catastrophe
futures where nothing will trump

but every night for all the while
blasé men people of the town
bored arena crowds designing havoc,
with their smooth southern “could”
their out-of-date dragons
we’d hear it from the unheard
every night all the while
we’d hear it from angels:

neither pleas nor the knight,
the gypsies, courts, doctor thieves,
never the money they’d conquer
shall coax from doom’s bottle
the people of the gospel
cross the gypsy’s palm

http://www.mit.edu/~ruchill/lazycurator.html

Now, at the push of a button, you can make up the title of your very own art exhibition, with a real colon and everything!

Mine was  Postcolonial Dreams: John Waters and Too Many
Dinner Parties. That sounds nice.

http://vidaweb.org/the-count-2010

Incendiary headlines aside, take a look at this research. They counted authors and book reviews in most of the major literary publications. The results show that men get published and written about more often than women do.

How do we fix this?

It seems to me that [spiritualism] encourages self-involved people to become more self-involved. Spiritual types often talk about the “universe” in the same way that a certain kind of Christian or Jew sees the hand of God in every banal event, or a certain kind of New Yorker broadcasts every little conversation he’s had with his shrink. And while these examples may show that narcissists are drawn to whatever feeds their narcissism, I do think that spiritualists are more likely to confuse causality with their own egotism. I’ve never heard of anyone visiting a psychic in order to learn how to be more generous with other people. ~ Gordon Haber, The False Science

This is a recipe for a poem I wrote. Now you can write a similar poem. Enjoy!

1. Choose a word at random. (Maybe a noun?)
2. Using that word, generate a set of “is” statements. (For example, if your word was “boredom” then these would be phrases that begin “boredom is”.)
3. Copy the phrases and paste them into a word processor.
4. Do a find-and-replace to replace all instances of the randomly chosen word (“boredom” etc.) with a new, meaningful word of your choosing.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 above, selecting different words, until you have 100 lines or more pasted into your file.
6. Read all your new phrases.
7. Keep the ones you like.
8. Make up new phrases to replace the ones you don’t like.
9. Shuffle the lines. Or order them however you like.

WORMS

If you don’t know what WORMS is, you’re about to. WORMS is an interactive literatary magazine in 3D. WORMS is The Champagne of Beers of Literary Readings. Do I have to spell it out for you? Ok. It’s spelled W.O.R.M.S.

Anyway, the next installment of WORMS is next Wednesday. It will feature the words, faces and voices of Erin Gleeson, Jesse Heffler, Ashlie Kauffman, Robert Schreur.

That’s WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 16 at The Bell Foundry (1539 N Calvert) in Baltimore. Admission is free, but you’ll want to have some $ on hand to buy independent publications, concessions and the like. Oh yeah. Wear a nice coat.

This weekend, I saw a performance of Tennessee Williams’ “Vieux Carré” by The Wooster Group. The Wooster Group is an ensemble of experimental theater artists. They are based in New York City at The Performing Garage in Soho, and their productions tour nationally and internationally.

The video, from the groups video blog, is a mashup of text from reviews of the play, script and stage directions.

The text below is their description of the play (I’ll try to add one of my own to this post sometime soon).

Like Williams’ first big success The Glass Menagerie, Vieux Carré (1977) is a “memory play,” set in the boarding house in New Orleans where Williams himself stayed as a young man during the Depression. The young writer, as narrator, remembers his artistic and sexual awakening there. Inhabitants of the house swirl up out of the writer’s mind as archetypal Williams characters, longing for release and haunted by thwarted dreams. In The Wooster Group’s version of Vieux Carré, the Group experiments with new modes of expression for Williams’ lyric voice.

I want to figure out this crazy “space age pop” look. These aren’t the ten best album covers, but here’s a start. My source for this list was an article calledTen Basic Space Age Pop Albums. It claims these albums set up the definitive sound for the genre. That might not be exactly what I’m looking for either, but I’ll save that for a different post.

The images are linked to more good stuff.

Sun Ra  had registered as a conscientious objector when drafted to fight in the Second World War, citing the absence of African-Americans on the draft board as his reason.  After witnessing endless post-war civil rights abuses from his vantage in Birmingham, Alabama, Sun Ra came to the conclusion that Earth was a no-win situation for Black people, and that the future would inevitably see a new African diaspora—in outer space.

More daft, less punk.

I’m working on a play. It is inspired by this kind of silly “space age pop”, so I’m collecting examples of it. If you have any of this kinda stuff, I’d love to see it.

A video interpretation of William S. Burroughs’ “Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin Hear Us Through The Hole In Thin Air” created by Eclectic Schlock.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." ~ Lewis Carroll -- Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6

http://www.slate.com/id/2262214/

This article gives an overview of the way people without cars are depicted in movies: as broke losers without social skills who never get laid. In a society where automobiles are basically an extension of our gentiles, I guess either you have a car or you’re a mutant.

Play Audio

Spoken word, cut-up text, by William S. Burroughs

In this photo, the guy on the left seems to have an opinion about the guy on the right, but look who’s talkin’!

<>Dad says, “It’s time you know.”
“One more bad tattoo,”
“and streets will run with blood.”
He’s gonna “kill both of you.”

“Speaking of cars, don’t go on-board
That god-damned contraption, that pink Cadillac
It gives your poor father a heart attack
And we both know very well we don’t want that.”

“Whatever you heard, whatever you learned,
from that soul-sapping, toe-tapping blue jukebox,
You should consider that your mind is littered,
You should ignore that no-good jock.”

“Damn t.v., it don’t know, it only shows
apocalypse, the end times, civil unrest
every bit there, I tell you, it’s all unclean.
Don’t listen to that. Please listen to me.”

Dad says, “It’s time you know.
One more bad tattoo,
and streets will run with blood.”
He’s gonna “kill both of you.”

I’d rather have fun than be wholesome, but father know’s best
I’ll come by, on a loud bike, you’ll wear a dress.
My bike likes Ike. I like Ike. I’m jumping the shark.
Dance Watusi and the hand jive. Batsui in the dark.

It’s an impossible mission that we’re on.
We’ll have espionage just like James Bond.
Baby hold on, hold on, we’ll both self-destruct.
Let’s get away with disorderly conduct.

We can beat the A team, steal all their cash,
Spend it on black clothes, dress up like the clash.
Empty out the bottles and fill up the flask,
and we’ll both help out when Mars attacks.

Dad says, “It’s time you know.
One more bad tattoo,
and streets will run with blood.”
He’s gonna “kill both of you.”

Oh no! The bad news this week is that one of my favorite web apps is going to be shut down. Delicious, true to its name, was a yummy way to store bookmarks, to sort them, share them and to keep them safe — until now. Yahoo bought the website five years ago, let it languish, and are finally giving up on it altogether. And so, my bookmarks need a new place to live, where I can share them, etc.

I’ve decided to import the delicious links into my browser, but now I’m going to import delicious links into wordpress.

The good news is that soon I’ll have a big ol’ links page on here, full of stuff that I think is good on the internet.

Tonight, the flamingos will be flying with Baltimore’s best “Death in Hampden” poetry, along with bands Midway Fair, Baltimore String Felons, and Vib!

Come out to Frazier’s on the Ave at 7:00p.m. for A Flamboyance of Flamingos. Hear a flock of poets and three stellar bands, all while supporting the city’s Health Care for the Homeless. At $5 at the door, we’re an evening of gloriously kitschy entertainment!

Wear your best Boh, Utz, Hon, or flamingo impression and rock the joint with your awesomeness. Participate in our flamingo-calling contest–don’t know what a flamingo sounds like? Neither do we! Make one up, toss back a shot, and have at it, hon.

I wish I could just make you turn around.
If you don’t like it you can get on with it.
take a look at me now!, she said
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
Take a look and see me, turn around, cry
if you don’t like to walk, take a look.
others can choose to remember nothing
well, with that, there’s nothing left here for you
you ought to hurry
hurry up, but, she said. who really knew, look,     time.
and then there’s now, cos there’s something telling.
the odds, and time, and that’s a chance I gotta face…
I need to say,
leave.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
cos we’ve shared the home
it’s there and that’s just all
it’s only dinner, please.
hurry up, you getting me me into dinner, she said,
is against all odds
so the memory of you can’t please
and you asked me in, away, just to let you leave
so you really knew me
just, please, it’s even.
just take a look at me now
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
How can you just walk away from me,
I’ve never been the proper sweet ladies, good children?
hurry up, them pills I took, she said.
then I’ll know goonight. Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
good turn, wait, laughter and the, pain, good night.     take.
and it won’t breath with you,
empty, and it would be, it’s time now,
well, be for the lack. Don’t give now.
I wish I could just make you.
If you can’t come here to remind me now
You are a proper fool, I said.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

I was also absent from Speak Your Piece last night, but I hear they made up a game. The exercise is to write a poem with the title “Death in Hampden” and the first line “I want to be impaled on a pink flamingo.” Here goes…

“I want to be impaled on a pink flamingo…”
Narrator: In a strange city, a grid of streets named for trees
without trees,
streets lined with cars, bars and wannabe rockstars,
A wildman dares to make a bold fashion statement:
“If I see one more bullshit tattoo, I swear to god I’ll kill you all!”
Narrator: this summer. The streets are lined with cars, bars and wannabe rockstars…
Pop legend “Plastic Centaur” stars in an epic film…
and the alleys run with beer and blood…
this summer…
Whoosh…
“Get away from that jukebox!”
sounds of explosions…
gratuitous breasts, beehive hairdos, more breasts, sex, inexplicable running…
this summer…
Death.. in Hampden…
Coming soon, to a theater near you

I think I found a Gertrude Stein poem about Mick Jagger. It’s called “Negligible Old Star“.