I knocked one on the head today, over at trendtrekking.com, which is the best job I’ve ever done at a complete Wordpress theme construction. Page recognition (for navigation styling which is dependent on the current page / category), thumbnails and summaries in grid structure site-wide except for pages and individual posts, cross-browser compatibility and graceful degradation in IE6 and below. Hurrah! It’s not my design, but it’s my programming.

Check it out at trendtrekking.com - cos it’s a cool site, too, if you like to consume. Like I do. I’m consuming right now.

Luckily for everyone, Charles Bernstein has proposed the largest poetry bailout since the Victorian era. Maybe these poems I started which turned out to be TOXIC will finally stop burning holes in my pockets.

Click image to enlarge

Link

Anyone who thinks McCain’s choice for VP is anything but a cynical attempt to woo women voters in what is actually an insultingly token decision is living in a dreamworld.  The Mail had previously reported that her presence in the presidential running was a gleaming example of how a woman had risen above the establishment, which conveniently avoids the detail that it don’t get much more establishment than RUNNING FOR FUCKING GOVERNMENT.

How else to have an overly simplistic and shallow sense of feminist power whilst actually reinforcing archaic female stereotypes? By claiming that the beehive hairdo of the pitbull in lipstick is empowering to women!  Go for it ladies, rise above your patriarchal oppressors.  Get a f*ckin beehive do.

The sad thing about this is that I’m actually regularly reading the Mail’s website at the moment specifically to irritate myself. I can’t help it. It’s kind of like the journalistic equivalent of the acting in Days of Our Lives: so bad it’s kind of good.

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 [↩]

My favourite part:

Polonius thinks this curtain looks like a good thing to hide behind.

Polonius is no longer online.

• fiction
• soccer
• topic
• motion
• beaver
• freedom
• suspect
• poem
• mailbox
• perfume

Triumph

• power
• story
• writing
• woman
• public
• platoon
• hunting
• wisdom
• fashion
• summer

Greed

• instinct
• patchwork
• buyer
• Britain
• duty
• desire
• damage
• control
• traffic
• picture
• company

I’m currently working on three separate projects in Flash.  With two of them, I’ve been able to bury my head in the sand and pretend that my knowledge of ActionScript 2 is up-to-date.  With the third one, I’m having to take a partial plunge into ActionScript 3 to avoid complete headaches and stupid lines of code.

Anyone familiar with AS2 might know about the setInterval(); method which ties itself to a function, called after the timer reaches the appropriate time.  The problem with this is that it’s hugely cumbersome to combine timers (for example, in my Flash setting for Jena Osman’s Public Figures project, each text transition combined two timers - one a delay, and one a combination of two transition effects, in and out).  This can soon lead to very complicated embedded timers in which timer names (which mudt be individually named!) are nastily close to each other on the line.

Check out this code, in AS3.  It calls the utils, creates a new variable (in MS) for the timer, tells it to call a function after the time is up, and then defines the function.  Sounds similar to the AS2 method above, but importantly the function itself is a lot tidier and makes more sense semanitcally.

import flash.utils.*;

var myTimer:Timer = new Timer(1000);

myTimer.addEventListener("timer", timedFunction);

myTimer.start();

function timedFunction(eventArgs:TimerEvent) {

trace("Event " + myTimer.currentCount + " triggered!");

if (myTimer.currentCount > 5) {

myTimer.stop();

}

}

It also loops by default, so adding the if conditional inside the function says that once it has looped in this case 6 times, stop looping.  Changing the 5 to zero will make it happen just the once.  Or, you can tell the function to go to another keyframe. Or whatever.

Practical applications in an e-poetic sense?  Textual transitions, for one, but importantly, adding a Math:random variable and replacing the timer value with this means that you can easily create randomly timed transitions with only a few lines of code and a more logical-looking layout.

Lee Brimelow’s post on Timers is really useful, and how I learned this.

Most stunning, however, is the quality of the online resources available.  To my knowledge (i.e. of all the books I’ve browsed so far) the site hosts books for viewing online in their entirety, using a clean and intuitive Flash-based interface for zooming and moving about the page.  The physical quality is truly astounding.  Obviously, many material aspects of the works so fundamental to their appreciation are lost in online viewing, but the fact remains that finally one can take a more thorough look through some highly innovative typographical / mixed media books, in colour, in high quality.

It’s a treat to see so much of Drucker’s back catalogue up here.  Narratology (pictured), of which I had only ever seen a couple of poorly photocopied black & white pages, is there, and a fascinating work to explore if you are interested in collage, space on the page and the impact of carefully chosen aesthetic qualities (such as font size and weight) and how this affects readings.  This is something also explored in the famous The Word Made Flesh, also up here.

The catalogue can be found here.  If you find any work of particular interest, go ahead and comment about it!