Category: collaboration

The Allure of “Is She Available?”

Published May 11, 2015 by cgerrish

It’s a book of poetry, although in it’s most complete form, it’s not exactly a book. It’s more of a CD-ROM, if there were such a thing anymore. You could describe it as a multimedia presentation with words, animated images, music, comic strip panels and recitations. Igor Goldkind’s new publication “Is She Available?“, despite its intentional defiance of category, probably should be called poetry.

Full disclosure: I’ve counted Mr. Goldkind as a friend for almost four decades. This reading is of the text, a little of my friend, and the journey of a poet.

Perhaps the best example of poetry making in this mode would be the work of William Blake — the poet, painter and printmaker. Blake was also a technologist. He invented relief etching to combine words and imagery on to the same printing plate. When we read his poetry today, for the most part, we read it extracted from its original context — simplified as though we were looking at a web page in “reader view.” The poem’s text is transformed into its most legible and conservative form. The images are removed and the typography tamed. Although we find it fascinating, critics have trouble producing a close reading of a work that broadcasts on so many different channels. Film, or video game, criticism may come closest to accounting for all the levels.

This reading will focus on the text of “Is She Available?”, but there’s much more in this work that merits investigation. Return visits to view, and review, the work from different angles will be rewarded.

I put these poems into the larger frame of a poet’s journey. Joseph Campbell called it the Monomyth, or the “Hero’s Journey.” The poet leaves home, wanders and experiences the world, and then returns home, both changed and unchanged. For this poet, home was San Diego, California, when it seemed like the city lacked everything. It was a time before the Internet and corporate franchising made every place much the same. Looking outward, the rest of the world appeared filled to the brim — the location of danger, culture, and life. I’m going to examine four parts of the text that bring this theme into relief.

Whatever the format, the reader will be faced, first of all, with the title. The work is called “Is She Available?” Who is this “she?” Is “she” that obscure object of desire? Is she a lover, a daughter, mother, or perhaps she’s the muse of poetry itself. Whoever she is, she’s absent. There’s a separation, an aesthetic distance from which she’s viewed. The phrase also gives us a sense of her allure, her magnetism. At the outset of the poet’s journey, “she” may well be the call of the road — the as yet unfulfilled promise of the wider world.

In the poem “What Peter Said to Wendy” we see the mechanics of desire, and of the journey. If desire were to be fulfilled, then the journey would be over before it had even begun. For the journey to continue, the object of desire must be desire itself — the desire of desiring. In the story of Peter Pan and Wendy Darling, Peter resides in Never Never Land. It’s a place where time idles in childhood reverie. Wendy knows at some point she must return to the world. Peter knows that he needs to give Wendy something she can take back, even if he can’t follow her there.

From “What Peter Said to Wendy”

Fear not my audacity Wendy.
I do not care for your heart, as you might think, I care for mine
And the reflection of truth’s desire I see hiding
in the forest of your eyes

It’s in the journey that the contours of the poet’s life come in to focus. Each of the poems in the volume encapsulate a moment along the path. Textures that were invisible in the youth of small town Southern California are now clearly visible. Family connections received and created take hold with real and vital force. There are battles with daemons both internal and external, and the poet tries on a series of masks to see how they fit. Think of it like a medicine man tasting all of the plants in the surrounding landscape to get of sense of their effect on the human mind and body. There’s nothing more real than this.

At the far edge of the journey, the poet encounters a mirror image of his starting point. For a long time San Diego felt like a very large village. Perhaps, it’s a city now, but it remained a small town for the longest time despite its ballooning population. At first walls were built to keep the poet in, and he had to escape. Now, in this village out in the world, they’re built to keep him out. In the poem “Dry Stone Walls”, he encounters the narrow attitudes that first inspired his journey into the wider world.

You can’t build a wall round a village
You can try
You can stack honeyed stone upon stone, fashion judgement upon judgement,
into a long pretty barrier of decorative limestone
to keep the outsiders out and the insiders in
But you can’t build a wall round a village
the sun and the wind
will always find their way in

In the prototypical “Hero’s Journey”, the hero engages in a climactic battle and emerges victorious. This moment signals the change that allows him to return home. In this work, it’s the poem “Dry Stone Walls (You Can’t Build a Wall Round a Village)” that serves this purpose. The battle that he didn’t wage at home is fully engaged here. And it’s not that Frankenstein’s Creature somehow turns round and defeats the villagers, with their torches and pitchforks, but rather like “the sun and the wind”, the poet can now come and go as he chooses. The walls don’t and can’t keep the wider world at bay. The narrow attitudes of the village have lost their force, and the atmosphere of the wider world has equalized with his point of origin. San Diego has become a part of the wider world; the spell has been broken.

The poem “San Diego Bay” marks the poet’s return. Filled with the experiences of the world, he is gigantic compared to the young man of so many years ago. San Diego Bay is now the size of a bath tub, and the giant poet washes off the dust of the road in its waters.

San Diego bay… Oh San Diego bay
Your leaden toy war ships cast a heavy grey cloud
on my sunlit-blue sky return.

San Diego bay… San Diego bay
You rounded sheet of crinkled foil at six AM in the morning looking out, looking in, at the sheet of this world, I bathe in you now.

San Diego bay
San Diego bay
You’re my Dirty
bathwater
now.

Igor Goldkind’s “Is She Available?” is filled to the brim with sparkling and challenging poetic sketches forged during his travels. The e-book is a thrill ride that’s built up layer-upon-layer on a bedrock of poetic text. This collection of poems isn’t the well-behaved straight lines of text you may be used to; they explode into sound, music and image; refusing the standard-issue poetry container.

The form of this “book” is another dimension of the journey these poems take us on. The physical form of the poems, their inscription on a multimedia surface, stops the reader’s internal voice from assuming an open-mic night, timid, confessional, “poetry voice,” and demands something more. It’s a loud book and may not be appropriate for reading in a quiet library. In fact, one of its more challenging technical aspects is figuring out the dynamic range of the poem’s sound. There may be a temptation to let the “book” read itself to you. But to take in its full effect, you’ll need to perform it yourself, at full volume.

Comments closed

Corporate Team Building: The Devil’s Staircase

Published March 21, 2015 by cgerrish

Fintan O'Toole has a piece in a recent New York Review of Books called, “Beckett in Love.” He starts the piece, not with love, but with failure. Not an uncommon gambit when ruminating about Samuel Beckett. O'Toole begins with the point of contact most familiar to the person least familiar with the author. It's a favorite quote of the entrepreneurial set because it resonates with a strategy of dogged determination.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

The quote is from the late work “Worstward Ho.” In an age where we thirst for “context,” except when it doesn't suit our purposes, O'Toole goes on to explain the larger context of the quote.

“Fail better” (which I recently saw on a recruitment advertisement for a financial services company) is followed a few lines later by a reminder that, for Beckett, the phrase is an exhortation, not to keep trying until you succeed but to keep failing until you fail completely: “Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good.”

The popular form of the quote is plucked from Beckett's “Worstward Ho” in an attempt to turn failure into just another strain of pre-natal success. Beckett, on the other hand, only found his own voice by delving deeper and deeper into failure, loss, exile, and poverty. It's fair to say that Beckett found a form of humor in these depths, but it isn't the free and superior laugh of the successful entrepreneur — the master satisfied with a job well done after several setbacks. Nor is it the comedy of bringing the high and mighty to earth, rather it's the laughter of the lowest when the epiphany strikes that there may not be a “bottom” to hit.

One imagines the corporate team building exercise where the high-priced enthusiasm consultant leads the bright-eyed group of employees through a visualization.

You know that dream where you're falling? Take yourself to that place right now. You're falling and falling. You begin to panic. Surely you'll stop soon. Perhaps you'll begin flying. But no, you fall and fall. What happens when the bottom comes? Terror sets in. It will be the end. It doesn't come. The exquisite disorientation of falling continues on and on. Numbness. And then, a moment when the absurdity of your situation emerges. You smile inwardly as you consider the notion that there may be no bottom to hit.

Comments closed

Environmental Theatrics: Top Secret Crypto

Published March 1, 2015 by cgerrish

I'm not saying there is such a thing, and no one could prove otherwise. But if there were some sort of new underground forming, it would have a “Fight Club”-like motto. The first rule of the new underground is that you don't talk about the new underground. In fact, no one even calls it that because it doesn't have a name yet. It may never have a name. Forget I even mentioned it.

Of course, this particular incident was revealing, but only if you were able to tune into the hidden channel it was broadcasting on. Now that the event itself is safely behind us, I can tell you a few details. It was a series of performances by a unit called “The Collected Works” in San Francisco. Untethered to any particular performance venue, this group commandeered the Old Mint building for an environmental theater performance of Jean Genet's “The Balcony.” This information is on a need-to-know basis and should not be passed on to anyone.

The Old Mint's basement was the site of the play's opening three scenes featuring the Judge, the General and the Bishop. Underground, hidden, locked away from the revolt happening at street level, these characters obsessively repeated their fetishes in strict rituals performed in various chambers of the brothel. The audience wandered from one scene to the next feeling as though they'd walked in on the middle of some very private moment. Then, just when a sense of comfort and rhythm was beginning to take hold, an alarm bell rings. An alarm clock, a wake-up call, a harsh reminder that the time for this session is up. It's time to leave the underground cells and return to the real world upstairs.

In scenes unfolding in grand room after room, the audience witnesses the business of the brothel, the protection provided by the police, the unfolding revolution surrounding the building, private fantasies transforming into public power, and finally the birth of the Chief of Police into the canon of fetishes. Like the others, the Chief of Police is an expression of a desire that wishes to remain unfulfilled, and thus remain desire in the form of “desiring.” The Bishop, the Judge and the General are all medicines that cause the illness they are meant to cure. Preserving the capacity to repeat a ritual in the private chambers of the brothel is echoed in the public halls of government, society and power. The play attempts hold up a very large mirror.

The performance was breathtaking in the sheer size of its conception, and in the difficulty and risk of selecting Genet's text. The performers and the performance inhabited and transformed the dusty and neglected space of the Old Mint building. In environmental performance, there's a tricky moment as the audience moves from space to space to witness the next scene. There is no break in the action, no pause for the logistics of movement, the performance continues even as the audience gathers in the next space. The key rhythmical moment is when the moving audience isn't fully settled in the new location. They aren't sure where to stand or sit, they may not even be clear in what part of the room the action of the play will take place. Suddenly the performance sparks to life and the scene begins. The audience, not yet feeling itself to be an audience, is transformed and pulled into the urgency of the narrative. These performers were masterful in creating each new performance space as the play progressed.

Let us assume that you didn't witness any of the performances in this particular series. For the most part the local arts and entertainment media, to the extent such a thing still exists, was oblivious to the event. While this performance of Jean Genet's “The Balcony,” by The Collected Works was a public performance, it was hidden in plain site. It occupied two floors of a large public building in the middle of downtown, but was largely invisible. The two week run sold out every performance, with some people returning several times. For work like this to prosper, it's important that you keep quiet about it. Don't tell all your friends, don't share this blog post, and don't hope that this goes mainstream.

If we were to talk about this theater collective and it's performances, we'd have to acknowledge that plays by Gombrowicz and Genet are not mainstream. They aren't supposed to be for everybody. Any future performances are on a need-to-know basis. Attend only if you must.

Environmental, or site specific, performance creates a very rare aesthetic experience for these times. In this age of screens and couches, it's a given that a certain kind of distance and separation is required to create an aesthetic experience. The fourth wall is institutionalized in the form of a sheet of glass separating you from the “content” on your device. Interacting with a performance is limited to backchannel snark inscribed on to a real-time social network stream. Alternatively, performances like “The Balcony,” if there were such performances, are strangely intimate. A performance space is shared by the audience and the performers and divided up on the fly in brief moments of stasis before transforming and renegotiating the territory all over again. There's a give and take that demands a conscious creation and recreation of aesthetic distance from moment to moment as the play moves through the site.

I'm counting on you to keep this secret. It's not as hard as you might think. People see what they want to see. Sometimes the simplest mask will keep hidden what seems perfectly obvious and public. Remember, this is top secret crypto. Your eyes only…

Comments closed

2014 and After: Ten Thoughts

Published January 2, 2015 by cgerrish

In no particular order, here are ten thoughts about technology and society at the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015. This past year might have been the one in which it was acknowledged that the ecological catastrophe and the destruction of the biosphere has passed the rubicon. Scientists are beginning to understand that the most important battles will be fought within rhetoric and not science. The Pope may have a greater effect on the future of the planet than any climate scientist.

Sony Pictures Hack

All computer networks are always already hacked. Once you have both the requirement that networks interoperate in a network of networks and that humans be able to simply and easily use software on the system, the system is compromised.

What this hack tells large corporations (and other organizations) is that if they become the target of a sufficiently strong hacker, they will be hacked. Certainly there is better and worse security, but there's no such thing as perfect security.

This problem is too frightening to contemplate as we put more and more of our transactions and records into hackable systems. At some point in the next five years there will be a hack that will change the way we organize and think about networks. In the meantime we will pretend that everything is just fine. Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.

Cameras on Police (Google Glass)

What's bad about Google Glass for ordinary people turns out to be what may eventually be forced on police officers. In this era, it's always a question of who's watching the watchers. Total surveillance of the police is an interesting turnaround in the dynamics of power. Assume that it will turnaround again and the only unambiguous video evidence will be on the side of law enforcement.

Oddly even the police will ultimately decide that Google Glass style total surveillance is a bad idea.

Library Collections and Live Events

Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, Pandora and HBO all provide membership access to their libraries. Each has learned that the way to spice up your library is to produce exclusive content that makes your collection unique. It's also a way to get the first release window for a new property. Traditionally these kind of libraries are very late, if not last, in the release cycle.

We're starting to see promotional events around the deletion of items from a collection. See it before it's gone. Initially there was a sense that these libraries had an infinite amount of content. There was so much more than you could ever watch or listen to. After spending a little time with them, Sturgeon's Law comes into effect. Turns out the 90% of everything in the library is crap, and you've seen the other 10%.

At some point someone will figure out that quality is more important than quantity. It might be HBO. They are well positioned to stake out that ground.

YouTube will be exposed as a file-sharing site and the true heir to Napster. The creative class will rebel and bring massive lawsuits against the theft of their work. The technologists at YouTube will claim that they are a machine and a medium; that they are not responsible for their users actions. This excuse will be seen for the cynical ploy that it is.

Live events are the other main category type in broadcast media. News, sports, awards shows, talk shows have dominated. The return of live television will continue. The live productions of Peter Pan and The Sound of Music were tests. Live television demands a different kind of talent. That means there's incredible opportunity for the Network has the vision and takes the risk. Broadway and live theater will be pillaged for talent.

Live Mix, Daniel Lanois

This was the year that Daniel Lanois downsized his operation. He took the live groove mixing and treatments that he was hearing in his studio and put them on small stages in front of a few hundred people.

This is a return to the days of Brian Eno live mixing and treating Roxy Music shows. The recording studio became a musical instrument for the recording studio. That technology is migrating back to the stage as more players emerge who know how to handle it in a live context.

In the show I saw, the drummer Brian Blade was keeping perfect metronymic time. This allowed Lanois to mix in samples and have them mesh exactly on the beat. It's early days for these kind of experiments, but it fulfills the promise of the recording studio as musical instrument.

The Permanent Record / Stain

The digital remains unforgiving. One wonders if there will ever be an artificial intelligence that understands forgiveness. We have a digital record of all our triumphs, failures and transgressions. Our flaws, errors and mistakes become a permanent record and an eternal stain on our character. Despite the much-hyped advances in technology, computers and artificial intelligence, there is no mechanical understanding of propriety or forgiveness. The algorithm doesn't know, and isn't programmed to understand, whether it's appropriate to gather up highlights of your year out of your social stream and show them to you.

This was the year we began to understand that technology is cruel, ignorant and inappropriate. The current crop of technologists are ill equipped to handle this problem. They've been told as long as it makes money, morality and propriety are unimportant.

In the Shadows

The gaps in total surveillance will be sought out and become more valuable. We will begin to prefer the digital shadows, where we exist unrecorded. Time and its “it was” will have a cultural resurgence.

The hollowness of live broadcasting your “real life” 24 hours a day, 7 days a week will become obvious. Simple recording or broadcasting of a personal event will no longer be considered the best way of memorializing something.

Marcel Duchamp and Art

The idea that anything can be “art” if the “artist” says it is will lose currency. What started out as a joke has become a dominant mode of understanding (or not understanding) art. In our nihilistic age, if anything can be art then nothing is really art. The devaluation of aesthetics and art begins with the inability to distinguish art from any other object.

The anthropocene and the general visibility of the finitude of the earth and its biosphere ends the concept that human imagination can turn a thing into any other thing. There's a corollary to this idea which states that in the interpretation of art or literature, any reading is acceptable. Anything can mean anything.

The sixth mass extinction and the end of a biosphere that will support human life isn't an event that can be interpreted as meaning just anything our whims desire. It's strange that it's only after the end of the world as we knew it that art may re-emerge.

Non-Digitally Reproduced, Object Interaction

There's a theory about the resurgence of vinyl records that states that it's the physicality of the experience that's the main attraction. Commodities give the illusion of exact duplication of an industrially produced object. But my record has peanut butter and jelly stains on the cover and the 4th track on side two has some crackles during a quiet part. One of my copies of Milton's “Paradise Lost” has some notes in the margin and a couple of underlines. The type is small, but readable and the paper is old.

The digitally reproduced is identical or it malfunctions. We've been sold the idea that we're getting the essence of recorded music when we listen to the digital file. All the excess has been peeled away. We might even think that the digital file is more environmentally friendly.

The process of listening to vinyl pressings of recordings introduces a physical set of interactions that change the experience of listening. There's nothing necessarily essential about vinyl records, liner notes and album art. But the physicality of the experience is vastly different than the unspooling and decoding of 1s and 0s by a small computer.

Hard Drive + Air Gapped

This seems unlikely, but non-networked sharing may return. Local files, hard disk drives, and computers unconnected to the network. Like the acoustic guitar, which required a new name when the electric guitar made the scene, the air-gapped computer will require a special moniker.

A kind of network will be created in these sneaker-net exchanges, but it will be between people with something to share. Because these networks wouldn't be between anonymous nodes over long distances, they would create a different kind of community.

True Sharing Economies

Because technology is firmly located within, and at the service of, Capital, it's incapable of sharing. Sharing means gifting use of something you own. As has been widely acknowledged, the so-called “sharing economy” is the rental economy.

With wage growth stalled, and the great recession still a strong presence, many people have taken to renting out rooms to make ends meet. We should just call this business what it is. The utopian technological dream has been unmasked as a sweatshop inside a panopticon.

If you're looking for a sharing economy, you'll need to move outside the boundaries of capitalism. Sharing has a different morality and a different goal. Technology has a role, but the implementations look very different. Check out the p2p Foundation to get a sense of what a “sharing economy” might look like.

Comments closed