Wednesday, February 01, 2006
We’ll be here exactly six more months, and plenty to do, although today was another day when campus was like a ghost-town because of extended holidays, so worked in peaceful solitude in my office after scavenging for medication for the baby with Stella in Putrajaya this morning. Glad to report that with some effort - including a stop at the Putrajaya Hospital - we were successful, and the baby is doing much better today.
I’ll be consulting soon with various faculty members about sound projects, web design, and databases, but for now – since everyone’s still on holiday – conducting independent research. So I visited Myspace for the first time, to visit the home page of my old friend Eric Curkendall, who’s now living in Bangkok. Yesterday he sent a message saying that he’d posted some new files, that should be listened to while reading the Will Alexander and Ivan Arguelles poems he’d also posted. For those of you who don’t know Eric’s work (and most of you probably don’t), I’d have to introduce him as a prodigious and wild poet, also a great lyricist (Box o’ Laffs, Wrestling Worms, Camper van Beethoven), who I had the great fortune to spend 2 or 3 years working with in Santa Cruz circa ‘88-’91. Not only was he an inspiration to me, but also taught me quite a bit about surrealist poetry (and kundalini yoga). I haven’t actually seen him since we performed together at the Poetry Project New Year’s reading during an east coast tour a few of us did in 92/93, but published his work on the first The Little Magazine CD-ROM and in the online version of We Magazine (1993). Anyhow, if you’re looking for something interesting to listen to, check out his site, which is still in a formative stage. In his blog Eric asks an open question about use of computers to produce recordings (his teeth, like those of so many of us poet/musicians, were cut using analog gear). Though the question wasn’t meant to be rhetorical, is there really any question at this point?? I remember my own confrontation with this dilemma, shortly after we built our studio in late ’03, so I did a test: I set up the analog gear and made a demo, then recorded an identical version with software, noting the time the recordings took to produce, sound quality, etc., and I guess it is probably unnecessary for me to report which equipment ended up in a cardboard box (perhaps for good) under the desk.
Through Eric’s Myspace site, I tapped into a beautiful subculture of old friends of ours, mainly musicians who were in and around Santa Cruz during the same period. I was interested to see how each of them set up their sites, with sounds, pictures, blog entries, etc. I had to join Myspace to access the files, but cannot imagine setting up yet another virtual space at this time—maybe I’ll use it as a portal that connects to the other blogs, or possibly cultivate it more once the Malaysian gig (and thus aisyalam) is over.
Besides virtually visiting old artist friends and finding out what they are up to now, I had to fix a couple of tiny problems in the manuscript: 5 words in the translations from Barbosa’s program, and the copyright date for the Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton image. I hope the editor doesn’t get too mad when he sees the replacement files. Fortunately, I don’t think there’ll be too many more of these fixes.
I decided to spruce up the blog slightly, by adding reciprocal links [“weblog feedback mode”] to blogs that link to aisyalam (look to your left).
I got a letter from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, P. R. China, which asked me to review a conference paper titled “Shape Matching Based on Fully Automatic Face Detection on Triangular Meshes,” but had to write to these good folks and tell them that they were probably looking for Princeton U’s Thomas Funkhouser, who is one of the great computer graphics scholars of our time. More legitimately (and flatteringly), Philippe Bootz sent an email over the weekend, asking me to be a member of the international scientific committee of a new review he is creating (“that will focus on hypermedias and, more precisely, on literary hypermedia”) at University 8 in Paris, which I will gladly do.
Another really terrific find today—which again isn’t new, but is to me—was checking out Harvey Bialy’s blog, http://www.bialystocker.net/. Though I couldn’t get the mp3 sound to work (like the “alternate theme music” by Harry Smith), the visuals were totally mind-blowing. Wow. And there seemed to be multiple layers of work, which one accesses via search engine—I don’t even think I began to scratch the surface of what is there because I was so wrapped up in the front page visuals. I’ll further attempt to sleuth out all of the different areas, get inside his complex, again before long.
I ended up at Bialy’s page as a result of communication with a fellow named Michael Harrold, who has posted four books (.pdf versions) at Bialy’s site. As I mentioned before, Harrold had written to me because of his interest in ergodic literature. The book of his I began reading, Red Moon (http://www.bialystocker.net/files/redmoon.pdf), blends poetry, prose, mathematical equations, and more. I haven’t quite figured out the cybertext angle of it yet, but will spend more time with it, look at the other books, and correspond with him. I’ve also downloaded Harrold’s book Art and Technology (http://www.bialystocker.net/files/art_and_technology.pdf) which also looks interesting.
Finally, time is finally opening up so that I can make contributions to various projects I’ve been neglecting, and today at last worked on preparing and posting a couple of sound poems to the truly remarkable PennSound site. During the past couple of years, Prof. Bernstein has invited me to be involved with the project on several occasions, but I’ve never managed to make the time to do it. Now I am. While I do not have access to the 100s (if not 1000s) of hours of recordings I’ve made and collected since the late 80s, I do have a few things on my laptop that I want to get out there (even if similar materials will be included on the CD-ROM that will be included in Technopoetry Rising). During my last two trips to Brazil I’ve had the great fortune to collaborate in impromptu studios with two fantastic musicians, Marcus Salgado, Rodrigo Lira, making electronica type sound poetry recordings (some more techno than others), and a couple of those tracks will be up on PS soon if all goes well.
The smudge for the day came when I saw on the WWW that Nam June Paik had passed, so had to mourn his loss a few moments. As a sucker for innovative television and televisual art, his work always gave me a charge…
More in the mo(u)rning CF
I’ll be consulting soon with various faculty members about sound projects, web design, and databases, but for now – since everyone’s still on holiday – conducting independent research. So I visited Myspace for the first time, to visit the home page of my old friend Eric Curkendall, who’s now living in Bangkok. Yesterday he sent a message saying that he’d posted some new files, that should be listened to while reading the Will Alexander and Ivan Arguelles poems he’d also posted. For those of you who don’t know Eric’s work (and most of you probably don’t), I’d have to introduce him as a prodigious and wild poet, also a great lyricist (Box o’ Laffs, Wrestling Worms, Camper van Beethoven), who I had the great fortune to spend 2 or 3 years working with in Santa Cruz circa ‘88-’91. Not only was he an inspiration to me, but also taught me quite a bit about surrealist poetry (and kundalini yoga). I haven’t actually seen him since we performed together at the Poetry Project New Year’s reading during an east coast tour a few of us did in 92/93, but published his work on the first The Little Magazine CD-ROM and in the online version of We Magazine (1993). Anyhow, if you’re looking for something interesting to listen to, check out his site, which is still in a formative stage. In his blog Eric asks an open question about use of computers to produce recordings (his teeth, like those of so many of us poet/musicians, were cut using analog gear). Though the question wasn’t meant to be rhetorical, is there really any question at this point?? I remember my own confrontation with this dilemma, shortly after we built our studio in late ’03, so I did a test: I set up the analog gear and made a demo, then recorded an identical version with software, noting the time the recordings took to produce, sound quality, etc., and I guess it is probably unnecessary for me to report which equipment ended up in a cardboard box (perhaps for good) under the desk.
Through Eric’s Myspace site, I tapped into a beautiful subculture of old friends of ours, mainly musicians who were in and around Santa Cruz during the same period. I was interested to see how each of them set up their sites, with sounds, pictures, blog entries, etc. I had to join Myspace to access the files, but cannot imagine setting up yet another virtual space at this time—maybe I’ll use it as a portal that connects to the other blogs, or possibly cultivate it more once the Malaysian gig (and thus aisyalam) is over.
Besides virtually visiting old artist friends and finding out what they are up to now, I had to fix a couple of tiny problems in the manuscript: 5 words in the translations from Barbosa’s program, and the copyright date for the Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton image. I hope the editor doesn’t get too mad when he sees the replacement files. Fortunately, I don’t think there’ll be too many more of these fixes.
I decided to spruce up the blog slightly, by adding reciprocal links [“weblog feedback mode”] to blogs that link to aisyalam (look to your left).
I got a letter from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, P. R. China, which asked me to review a conference paper titled “Shape Matching Based on Fully Automatic Face Detection on Triangular Meshes,” but had to write to these good folks and tell them that they were probably looking for Princeton U’s Thomas Funkhouser, who is one of the great computer graphics scholars of our time. More legitimately (and flatteringly), Philippe Bootz sent an email over the weekend, asking me to be a member of the international scientific committee of a new review he is creating (“that will focus on hypermedias and, more precisely, on literary hypermedia”) at University 8 in Paris, which I will gladly do.
Another really terrific find today—which again isn’t new, but is to me—was checking out Harvey Bialy’s blog, http://www.bialystocker.net/. Though I couldn’t get the mp3 sound to work (like the “alternate theme music” by Harry Smith), the visuals were totally mind-blowing. Wow. And there seemed to be multiple layers of work, which one accesses via search engine—I don’t even think I began to scratch the surface of what is there because I was so wrapped up in the front page visuals. I’ll further attempt to sleuth out all of the different areas, get inside his complex, again before long.
I ended up at Bialy’s page as a result of communication with a fellow named Michael Harrold, who has posted four books (.pdf versions) at Bialy’s site. As I mentioned before, Harrold had written to me because of his interest in ergodic literature. The book of his I began reading, Red Moon (http://www.bialystocker.net/files/redmoon.pdf), blends poetry, prose, mathematical equations, and more. I haven’t quite figured out the cybertext angle of it yet, but will spend more time with it, look at the other books, and correspond with him. I’ve also downloaded Harrold’s book Art and Technology (http://www.bialystocker.net/files/art_and_technology.pdf) which also looks interesting.
Finally, time is finally opening up so that I can make contributions to various projects I’ve been neglecting, and today at last worked on preparing and posting a couple of sound poems to the truly remarkable PennSound site. During the past couple of years, Prof. Bernstein has invited me to be involved with the project on several occasions, but I’ve never managed to make the time to do it. Now I am. While I do not have access to the 100s (if not 1000s) of hours of recordings I’ve made and collected since the late 80s, I do have a few things on my laptop that I want to get out there (even if similar materials will be included on the CD-ROM that will be included in Technopoetry Rising). During my last two trips to Brazil I’ve had the great fortune to collaborate in impromptu studios with two fantastic musicians, Marcus Salgado, Rodrigo Lira, making electronica type sound poetry recordings (some more techno than others), and a couple of those tracks will be up on PS soon if all goes well.
The smudge for the day came when I saw on the WWW that Nam June Paik had passed, so had to mourn his loss a few moments. As a sucker for innovative television and televisual art, his work always gave me a charge…
More in the mo(u)rning CF
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 6:35 AM 
