Knew that if I waited long enough the stuff I never got paid for to begin with would be available for free…
This is not meant as a statement on free use or copyright. Just small bits of fact.
*
1996, super 8, 49:00
[I'm Not Fascinating-The Movie!]
Brace yourselves for one of the most resplendent footnotes of rock ‘n’ roll anti-history ever to grace the silver screen. I’m Not Fascinating-The Movie! chronicles the pointless shenanigans of San Francisco rock ‘n’ roll ne’er-do-wells The Icky Boyfriends and their futile quest for rock stardom. Undaunted by the universal hatred of both their music and their look, the band perseveres, netting themselves a hefty major label contract. But stardom proves elusive as they descend into a world of murder, intrigue, nepotism, consumer research groups, excessive use of caffeine-laden soda pop and death. Who kills the Ickys? You’ll wish you had!
“A Monkees-meet-Hate-comics slice of cinema non-vérité.”
-San Francisco Weekly
“Move over Magical Mystery Tour, take a seat Tommy: San Francisco’s Icky Boyfriends and Danny Plotnick have topped the semifictional rock-drama genre with their epic I’m Not Fascinating The Movie! A weirdly beautiful spectacle of self-defeat. An instant classic.”
Writing on Demand interview of me taped while recently in Los Angeles and hosted by Mende Smith. Couldn’t have asked for a better interviewer.
Here’s a direct link:
Just wanted to give a quick shout-out to Heidi Blanton, info gal wiki warrior and former classmate at Wayne State’s MLIS program, currently living in Birmingham, England. Her blog entry Livin In The D does a great job of pointing to the iconic American crossroads Detroit represents. It’s an exciting if somewhat scary time, fraught with all kinds of possibility. As someone who lived part of her adult life outside the city but still very much identified with it – “originally from Detroit” a badge of honor or courage – I have to agree that it is a place that never leaves you. It fascinates me that I have entrenched myself here again at such a time.
Isn’t it an ancient Chinese curse (or maybe just a fortune cookie) – “may you live in interesting times”?
I am curious how Professor Bergmann’s New Work will fit into all of this. It seems very much a time and place for such an idea, and certainly many of his ideas can be seen at the root of things like urban farming and localized economy and barter. I know he has been very much at work in Detroit but it has been difficult for me to pinpoint, and he has been out of the country most of the time since we began working on the site last spring. Much of the material he has given me is archival more than current. He is a brilliant man and it is important to archive his work, just wish my scanner hadn’t decided to give up the ghost . I have great hopes for the social interactivity of the site, the user provided content, and was thrilled to find a post by David Stevens linking New Work and Detroit Techno.
Much more work done and a new screenshot! This is after crashing the entire site and having to reupload. Which turned out to be a good thing really. It needed a fresh start. Very interesting emails with Thomas Schneider, who is revamping the German site with all kinds of fabulous flash navigation, he has mad skills way beyond mine. We’ve talked a bit about the difficulty in organizing the as yet unclear content, but hopefully a meeting with Frithjof this week will clear that up.
Thinking alot lately about my own new work. The juggling of a variety of part time work seems to be the zeitgeist, and really a good way for me to sort out direction. I am included in a forthcoming poetry compilation being shopped to university (a womens studies angle, interesting), perhaps a reading in SF this fall, want to develop and shop a college level “poetry in performance” class, have another small site build project to do, and will keep applying for library jobs. Somewhere in all this there is certainly a life, and hopefully a living too.
Teaching at Cranbrook Theatre School has me tired unto my bones but it’s a good tired. It is work that I love, feel a deep passion for. Have two pretty talented young actresses doing the battling queen scene from Mary Stuart this week. Big fat juicy fun.
The website is looking much better too.
More work to do on this as well but as Professor Bergmann is out of the country again it will wait.
As I suppose is per usual having gotten over feeling proud of myself for navigating the configs and modules and nodes and whatnot of Drupal I am now completely over the theme/layout of the site. The more content gets added the more that big huge Marinelli banner is a distraction.
And the run of the mill navigational categories are boring. It isn’t a hugely complicated library site and could probably stand more intriguing tabs – something like work: meaningful, culture: self-sustaining – something gleaned from Professor Bergmann’s writing. Quite the creative project and I have been given license. Imperative to use it!
Mostly Unrelated – Cannot get this out of my head.
Screenshot of a work in progress….Drupal based website for Frithjof Bergmann and New Work New Culture. Very exciting work, a bit of learning curve for me, thrilled to be participating in such important and relevant work. And oh yeah, Drupal rocks!
Somehow in the last 24 hours I have managed to stumble upon two very insightful but totally different Scott McLeod/McCloud’s. The first is a cartoonist, Scott McCloud, and I saw his TED Talk referenced in a blog so decided to check it out. I’ve been exploring the TED Creativity themed videos lately – which is how I discovered Jay Walker’s Library of Human Imagination, (one of the few things that truly deserves the modifier “awesome”).
So besides being a beautiful use of video presentation tools, the real “A-Ha!” moment I had watching Scott cartoonist McCloud was his observation that the web environment is not limited to the page. Yeah, duh, but beyond that it is a window to an infinite landscape. So much of how we view text is entrenched in the necessary evolutions of print based environment (like page limitations, the reading of left to right or vice-versa depending based on the physical limitation of a page). It is this visual iconography that is being redefined, and is at the center of how we interpret, well, everything.
Speaking of interpreting everything is Dr. Scott McLeod and Karl Fisch Shift Happens, which emphasizes once again the need to rethink how we see the world (a very Brechtian/Galileo/Thomas Kuhn concept and one I like inherently). The video speaks for itself, but tied in nicely to my stumbling across a HASTAC discussion in which the Global Middle Ages project was referenced. Amazing to consider how ethnocentric most readings of history are.
Perhaps it is an Enlightenment of some sort we are hurtling towards…
Recently I was introduced to Flarf, a concept which is difficult to define since it’s originators refuse definition. I think anyone who likes to dork around on the web, as I do, has probably gone there though. I once used a song title search interface to find all possible permutations of the words ants, pants, and dance, printed the titles out and called it a poem. Unfortunately that example is taped to another computer desk. So for kicks I ran the “About Me” text on the homepage of this site into Google translate for Russian and back again. Here’s what I got -
“My passion for communication has become the exploration on the Internet, and as the exchange of information and creative tools – a request due to my experience as a published writer, artist, and computer science student. I am intrigued by the possibilities of digital technology and new forms of communication and the creation of his inspiring.”
Endless hours of fun. For more on the Flarf community, as it were, visit the blog.
Of course random and semi-random text generation is nothing new. It really harkens back to “cut-up” and collage techniques. The advent of the database just heightens the experiment. There are all kinds of random poetry generators to be found (just Google it), but this Dylan Thomas-esque one from the BBC is kind of fun. And of course, a perennial favorite, The PostModern Essay Generator (be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page).
I’m being a little flip here, nothing wrong with that, but it is fascinating to consider the possibilities and implications of hypermedia and the web as a creative environment – as well as more serious work in that environment. Deconstructed perhaps, but a viable and valid art form. More as I explore…
. I have great hopes for the social interactivity of the site, the user provided content, and was thrilled to find a 
