Itch Away blog

I’m in Arizona, and have just managed to get myself sorted, hence the period of silence from these realms.

Of Itchworthy news is a surprising music gem I just heard whilst catching up with an episode of Late Junction on the iPlayer.¹

Scarlett Johansson, THE Scarlett Johansson, has apparently made an album of Tom Waits covers with quite an entourage of musicians.  I’ve not heard any of the rest of the album, but her take on “I Wish I Was In New Orleans” is a surprising success.  Surprising not only because of the usual caution with which musical adventures by actors and actresses should be approached but also because of the fact that, despite being at practically opposite ends of the vocal-range spectrum, this song, works.  An excellent song to be murdered to.

You can check out the archived show on the iPlayer (eek — for one more day only!) here.

EDIT: FYI (and should you wish to skip past the Randy Newman - the song is around the 6:30 mark)

1. I had bookmarked this episode in particular, having listened to it in bed.  I woke up the following morning with disjointed drawls of the spellbindingly annoying Randy Newman in my head, and had to convince myself that I had in fact heard them in real-life-electro-acoustic-vibrato-ear-drum-electro-brain-interpre-memory rather than having made them up [↩]

[...T]here seems to be a necessary hope that pointing to language itself (particularly the language of war, media, and politics) is a first step toward action and change. But in what ways is that pointing poethical?¹

In this essay from Jacket 32 (part of the “Pressure to Experiment” feature from the issue), Osman weighs up differing approaches to realising formally procedurally composed texts, prompting questions of the aesthetic and formal (intrinsic to) social placement of poetic ‘found’ texts.

Cecilia Vicuña’s statement that

The media and the [political, social, and economic] powers have found a way to speak about democracy as if it were a given, something that is already here. That’s a substitution of reality. It represents a desire to see an image instead of what is real.²

is interesting given the differences of approach she has to Alfredo Jaar’s work:

I don’t see the point of utilizing the language of publicity to go against publicity. For me, his visual approach simply gets absorbed by the current system of knowledge. Shiny photos of pain do not question pain.³

I’m not so sure I agree entirely with this statement.  Jaar’s images present stark dichotomies with fairly easy-to-interpret implications as a result.  For want of a better word, there’s no ‘trick’ here, which could use absorption to point towards the substitutions of reality Vicuña has discussed.

Can formal and aesthetic contexts too be treated as ‘found’ material in the same way as textual material?  In addition to stripping context (Goldmsith’s ‘nude media’ approach) or creating overtly opposition formal situations, a tweaked kind of détournement comes to mind as another alternative, in which the passive consumption through the aesthetics of new-media-based texts might actually be advantageous when placed in tension with its content. A method of drawing one into the pointing.  Straightforward reactive statements, decontextualised / recontextualised news bytes are all very good, but how might certain levels of subtlety, inviting a culturally specified form of reading, be more effective precisely through a level of formal and implied textual transparency, a (largely false) return to a tradition, as a site for reinterpreting a text in a digital context where collage-based approaches to reading are common, and where one might point to the transparency from within transparency? I wonder how this might too constitute a poethic approach.

1. Osman, Jena, “Is Poetry the News?: The Poethics of the Found Text,” paragraph 8, from Jacket, 32 (April 2007). http://jacketmagazine.com/32/p-osman.shtml (accessed 17 July 2008) [↩]
2. Ibid., paragraph 23 [↩]
3. Ibid., paragraph 27 [↩]

Help break the record for downloads in 24 hours.

Support open source software which is more secure and robust because several million people share the code instead of hoarding it to develop MS BS dogshit. Enjoy more standards compliant browsing than you’ll ever get with IE, the worst browser in the world imaginable.  It’s incredible that 35% of web users are still on IE6, which is like wearing an eyepatch to play baseball.

Do yourself a favour here.  Boycott the blue E and give web developers and yourselves a break.

Even in the 3 years I’ve webmastered How2, I’ve noticed more and more in the way of potential for interaction with some of its features. As of the past few issues, this is not solely possible through writing postcards; Jena Osman’s Public Figures work featured in Volume 3, Issue 1 is accepting ongoing submissions of work, four of which are now up and linked from the current issue.

In this issue, a new piece of work in the new media section – GilbertandGrape’s Lone Ranging Romance 2004-2008 –invites readers to embark on an audio-visual interactive hike, before plotting his or her own route for G&G, through a rather nifty Flash-based freehand drawing interface. Draw it, save it, and your route is saved with everyone else’s.

These pieces, as well as the ongoing postcards, are daring ventures. They rely on the participation of the readership to help them succeed in growing and becoming something unpredictable to the author. But they need you in order to achieve this.

Lone Ranging Romance 2004-2008 can be seen here.

Public Figures can be seen here.

View postcards here.

And pass on the word that with a little momentum, How2 can evolve and expand between issues…!

With a small working note:

These poems will be published in a book responding to the work of Du Fu and Beth Ames Swartz, in November, published by Arizona State University. I’m working on a couple of online settings for the work, which will follow in a couple of weeks.

Rivers to Colour the Snow

a piece of sky
and the fierceness of angels
the talk of power this word has a new disciple –
lady, waiting for sun
the girth of glimmer
memorial girl, a dignified thunder
come back now because I am snow
charm the cold – dance like
the autumn
lustre to their ten thousand unheards

mountain fruit to restore the flesh
drifting by like Emperors‘ rules
we bury the clouds
the sky had banished
their very valour is in not knowing
drew from
intimate and
wealth and fame
in spite of
changes that have come
yesterday, I found smiles, and lips and offices
the marvel of bad luck
how hard it is to be God!

but now I see the distinction
ladies in the duckweed
and here you are
angels before thunderbolt
the fierceness of waters

1. TRANSLATING DU FU, textetc.com - http://www.textetc.com/workshop/wt-du-fu-1.html (accessed 12th May 2008). This article contains a helpful overview of translation issues in Chinese poetry. [↩]

No, not this one.

Nor this one.

Nor this.

Nor this.

No. Sophie is software “for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment.” Sophie’s goal

is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing to redefine the notion of a book or “academic paper” to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins.

Geddit here.

Moved this post to it’s own permanent page……..

Ron Silliman’s blog today highlights a story on chronicle.com in which Guy Debord’s wife is threatening to sue Alexander R. Galloway for his development of Kriegspiel, a war game explicitly based on Debord’s own Game of War.

The irony here is obvious and needn’t be repeated — the chronicle story sums it up adequately enough. It is a bizarre world when the work of a man whose political orientation sought to subvert artistic ownership for bureaucratic ends has his work defended against FREELY distributed software.

A realistic and substantial rethinking of how intellectual property should be approached in terms of digital art / creative writing (which includes any form of coding) is desperately needed to avoid this sort of purely symbolic nonsense. Code is writing, and the development of something which is freely available and not-for-profit, as well as clearly defining its influence in Debord’s original is surely defensible as unique, albeit with heavy influence, work, might be seen as a unique incarnation of an idea. Code is also very often détournement, remixing existing code and subverting existing work, wittingly or unwittingly collaboratively.

I haven’t figured out how to play the game yet, but get it while you can, before they pull it down.

Posting has been difficult over the last week because of restricted time and sporadic access to internets. Plus I’ve been working on a mammoth (by my standards) post which reviews Tuesday’s events in Providence, with pics.  Stand by…