neomodernist

And the Pain Is Thunder

I just read my brother’s post about Michael Jackson’s death. It’s a brief reflection on Jackson’s influence on music production and well worth a read.

I am not just saying that because my brother wrote it. Seriously.

My sister and I spent several hours last Saturday looking for our favorite Michael Jackson songs and videos on the internet. (Be honest. You spent last weekend doing the exact same thing.) I introduced my sister to this excellent cover of “Wanna Be Starting Something” by Akon. She loved it. As you will.

Now You’re New Like the Springtime

A few months ago I heard the song “Clean Getaway” by Maria Taylor, and I’ve been listening to it obsessively ever since. The lyrics are simple but well-chosen, and the thematics fit all my most pervasive moods — sadness, desire, regret, hope. The song “Time Lapse Lifeline” has a similar resonance, set to a livelier tempo. Both songs explore notions of loss and renewal, and both seem especially relevant to my life and my sister’s life right now.

So, I thought I’d turn this post into a video dedication for her:

Unsaid, Unwritten

An artist struggles to utter the unutterable, to unmake the made, to reveal the world inside the world, to closely examine all the lies beneath the surface of things.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. ~ Anaïs Nin

I am the writer trying to unwrite the world that is all around her.

~ Lynn Emanuel, from “Homage to Sharon Stone”

Rhyme Might Feel Like Murder

Lately I’ve been trying to decide how much time and energy I’m willing to devote to things other than “text-based art.” If you know me, of if you have the misfortune of being one of my four parents, then you know that it’s hard for me to write or make art when I’m distracted by other things, such as a full time university teaching job, a pension, or health insurance. So I’ve spent a lot of my life working part-time and supplementing that part-time income with artist’s residencies or freelance writing. That strategy pays about as well as you’d imagine, and so a few years ago I started thinking about getting a PhD in Poetics or Cultural Studies. I’ve always managed to do a great deal of creative work while I’m in school, and I thought a doctoral program that spoke to my (perhaps too varied) interests would be a good place for me to experiment with new ways of creating and curating poems.

I’ve been a PhD candidate in the Media, Art, and Text program at VCU for eight months now, and I have made quite a bit of text-based art during my time here. But now I’m wondering if I should be devoting more time to poetry and textual experimentation and less time to pursuing a degree which, in all likelihood, will not dramatically alter the way I live my life. I don’t have any particular desire to teach full time. I would like to have enough money to pay all my bills, but beyond that I don’t have any particular desire to improve my quality of life. Also, I do not, in fact, make enough money as a PhD candidate to pay all my bills.

I have always been the sort of person who is good at many different types of things. It seems like this would make life easier, but it often just makes it hard to decide what I want to do. Sometimes I do things just to prove I can, even if I would rather being doing something else. I have a lot of talents and skills, but the thing I am best at — the thing I like doing best — is what the hip-hop songs refer to as “rhyme.” (Or, occasionally, as “rhyming and stealing.”)

I’m not sure why choosing to “rhyme,” to write poems or to make art, on a full-time basis feels so wrong. I’m not sure why it makes me feel guilty. I’m not sure why it feels like a choice I will have to defend through some sort of elaborate street battle or dance-off. Maybe it’s because making poetry for a living (without a degree, without a teaching position, without a Guggenheim) only seems like a viable choice in hip-hop videos.

Places I’m Not

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Today’s Theme Song

Current Obsessions

About nine years ago I ended a profile I wrote for the local paper with these words:

It has been said that all obsession is inherently pure and noble because, at the exact moment of obsession, a person exists entirely outside the self, focused only on the object of obsession. To be sure, we can attribute many scientific, artistic, and technological achievements to the private obsessions of individuals. There is a form of obsession that compels a person to pursue some elusive thing with a quixotic passion.

I still think that most great creations, artistic or otherwise, emerge from individual obsessions. I know my private obsessions provide constant fuel for my creative and academic work. I also know that some of my most persistent obsessions are just plain silly. Of course, it’s not always immediately obvious which obsessions will be productive ones, so I try to treat them all with respect.

Here’s a short list of my most current obsessions:

1. I can’t stop listening to this song “Baby (1971)” by Os Mutantes. It’s a softer, slightly more romantic version of this song.
2. I found this recording of W.B. Yeats reading “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” a few weeks ago. His recitation sounds so different from the way I’ve always imagined the poem in my mind.
3. My friend Darius Kazemi has been building nifty rogue-like games and music makers with a Meggy Jr. I am not the only one obsessed with these tiny diversions.
4. The boy I like sent me this link last Saturday morning. I think I downloaded the M83 album about ten minutes later. I have already lost count of the number of times I’ve watched the video. It’s like achieving your hopes and dreams through the power of dance and ice skating and roller skating and kissing boys. It’s the best 1980s music video I’ve seen since, um, the 80s.

5. I am also currently obsessed with the phrase “text-based art.” So much so that boy I like has started calling me text-based art girl. I kinda like it.

I Want to Do It on Your Birthday

Today my sister turns 29 years old. A few weeks ago she started revisiting her troubled youth by putting all her classic teen angst tunes on heavy rotation: Joy Division, Depeche Mode, the Cure, “Forever Young” by Alphaville, “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” by The Smiths, et cetera. When she asked me for other song suggestions, I decided she needed a special angst-ridden mix for her birthday this year.

I also decided that her mix needed to be as fun and light as possible. This is partly because I have been in a good mood lately, and partly because as teenagers my sister and I listened to horribly depressing music (think Black Celebration by Depeche Mode) because it made us happy. When we wanted to feel depressed, we listened to love songs. Rose listened to that Paula Cole song “I Don’t Want to Wait” all the time in high school. That’s enough to make anyone cry.

So instead of a “teen angst” mix, I put together a “tween angst” mix. The songs fall somewhere between sadness and happiness, and they’re intended to appeal to an audience that inhabits a world somewhere between teenage innocence and adult disillusionment.

Twenty-Nine Types of Tween Angst

1. Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem) by Jay-Z
2. Bed of Roses by The Indians
3. Kiss Off by Violent Femmes
4. Winning Is For Losers by The Soviettes
5. I Love You ‘Cause I Have To by Dogs Die in Hot Cars
6. He Doesn’t Know Why by Fleet Foxes
7. Talk Talk by Talk Talk
8. Debra by Beck
9. Anytime Lisa by Was (Not Was)
10. Ada by The National
11. Black Mirror by Arcade Fire
12. Hanging on the Telephone by The Nerves
13. You Wreck Me by Tom Petty
14. Take On Me by A.C. Newman
15. Ride Like the Wind by Christopher Cross
16. We Used to Be Friends by The Dandy Warhols
17. Ch-Check It Out by Beastie Boys
18. Saturday Night by Kaiser Chiefs
19. All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem
20. Weekend Without Makeup by The Long Blondes
21. Creep by Radiohead
22. Take the Box by Amy Winehouse
23. Just Like Heaven by The Watson Twins
24. Baby (1971) by Os Mutantes
25. Kim & Jessie by M83
26. Sunday Girl by Blondie
27. Superstar by Lupe Fiasco (feat. Mathew Santos)
28. Downtown by Petula Clark
29. Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa by Vampire Weekend

Library Bus

I have written three poems since the semester began. That’s three poems in eight weeks, which may not seem like a great deal of progress unless you know that I spent the first month of school working on a major project for a class I took an incomplete in last fall. Now that I’ve finally finished last year’s work, I hope to have more time for text-based art.

Those who know me know that I tend to do a lot of research when writing a poem. I’m not sure why or how I developed this habit. I do know that odd things strike me as good poem material. Often these odd things fall outside my realm of expertise or experience, and so I find myself bookmarking web sites about dead bachelors who still need brides or colossal squid. This process works well for me, but it means that it often takes me a week or more to write a decent draft of one poem. Sometimes it takes months.

When I was younger, my poetry came from a more emotional source. An idea would hit me, and I’d write a poem. A fast, simple process. Of course, when I say “younger,” I mean significantly younger. I mean adolescence. I have destroyed the vast majority of that poetry. I’m just saying.

Every now and then I will sit down to write a poem about a visceral response I had to something. This requires no research, no trips to the library, no internet searches, no painstakingly compiled inspirational playlists. It makes for a nice change of pace.

I wrote this poem, inspired by a very sad girl I saw on the shuttle bus that takes students from the main campus to the medical school and back again, without doing any research whatsoever. It still took me a whole weekend to write. I’m slow.

Things I Didn’t Say to the Sad Girl on My Bus

Even among strangers the old platitudes
disappoint. Kind but familiar lies fail us,
always. Time is only a theory, a system

used to sequence events. It cannot heal.
It cannot restore what has been lost.
I will not speak to you of time, or fate.

It’s late in the day. I can tell you are tired.
Your body aches with it. This sadness
is a weight, exerting a force that far exceeds

the mass of your heart. Try to remember:
the heart is a muscle. It’s built to break,
set to scar. You were made to survive

a myriad of hurts. Your hand shakes now
as you pull your hair across your face to hide
your tears. You drop your head, lean into

the bus’ next turn, let the lines of your face
fall slack. You don’t want anyone to see
you crying. I am the only one watching

you. After the turn, you close your eyes.
It’s nearly dark. The fading light flickers
through the windows as the bus loops

around buildings and trees. You may
never know how lovely you looked in that
intersection of sun and shadow. If I could,

I would tell you. I would try to show you
how everything you feel, every moment
of this slight, clumsy sorrow is beautiful.

The Architecture of Science

My friend Leah recently started an intriguing new project called Monitoring the Architecture of Science. Each week she uses a specific set of scientific data to create a drawing and then emails a high-res PDF file containing both the drawing and a handwritten transcription of the information used to generate it to a list of subscribers. I find the drawings and their scientific inspiration equally fascinating.

You can download PDF files for the first three four weeks of the project here:

1. Week 4: Diagramming Earth’s Orbits: An Investigation Prompted by NASA’s NOAA-N Prime Weather Satellite Reaching Its Polar Orbit (2/6/09); the Proliferation of Orbital Debris as Two Satellites Collide in Low Earth Orbit (2/18/09); NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory’s Failure to Make Orbit (2/24/09); And Two Launches – by Norway and Canada Respectively – of New Communications Satellites into Geostationary Orbit (Thor 5, 2/11/09 and Telstar 11N, 2/26/09), 3 Mar 2009 [PDF]
2. Week 3: The National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, CA Will Use 192 Focused and Energy-Amplified Laser Beams to Create a Mini-Star for a Fraction of a Second, in Hopes to Generate Useable Energy, 24 Feb 2009 [PDF]
3. Week 2: Seventeen Radio Telescopes Jointly and Simultaneously Observe Three Quasars Using the Technical Process of Electronic Real-Time Very Long Baseline Interferometry (E-VLBI) for 33 Hours on January 15-16 2009, 17 Feb 2009 [PDF]
4. Week 1: Celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope’s Orbit Around the Earth, 10 Feb 2009 [PDF]