Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

& þe boot was shaggid

I’d never heard of Orange County painter, Josh Agle (aka Shag) until today, but I’ll readily admit I’m not the hippest, lounge-art, tiki-ster (like, e.g., blogging buddy MrBaliHai who has both heard and written). So, it’s understandable that when I found out that my friend Jesse Schoem has a part in a play running down south in Lalaland called Shag With a Twist I started combing the googlized web for more info on Shag and his œuvre. And I must say, I do so enjoy it.

shine, perishing republic

Well, the US presidential election is done and over with, and now we can all return to language, poetry, and a creeping malaise.

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
   heavily thickening to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out,
   and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit,
   the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness
   and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good,
   be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
   shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance
   from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s
   feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,
   a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—
   they say—God, when he walked on earth.

[Robinson Jeffers. Shine, Perishing Republic]

aleatory jackets

sic

Has the digital revolution transformed Dada into data? What features of Dada have become important elements in digital art and net culture? To answer these questions we must first take a brief look at the art movement known as Dada, and then examine several of its key features—simultaneous poetry, manifestos, abstract painting, collage/photomontage, chance, cabaret, audience, collaboration—and how they relate to new media.

[Dada2data by Chris Joseph at trAce Online Writing Centre via wood s lot search on dada2data]

& non

Random number generation is used in a wide variety of cryptographic operations, such as key generation and challenge/response protocols. A random number generator is a function that outputs a sequence of 0s and 1s such that at any point, the next bit cannot be predicted based on the previous bits. However, true random number generation is difficult to do on a computer, since computers are deterministic devices. Thus, if the same random generator is run twice, identical results are received. True random number generators are in use, but they can be difficult to build. They typically take input from something in the physical world, such as the rate of neutron emission from a radioactive substance or a user’s idle mouse movements.

[FAQ 2.5.2 at RSA Security]

faux gâteau

I’ve run across some interesting photographs in the past day or two:

1. Color photographs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii who created them by shooting three separate glass plates of the same scene through red, green, and blue filters, and then projecting the composites through a magic lantern. They’ve now been digitally composited and are on exhibition at the U.S. Library of Congress. [via reflections in d minor]
2. Bee Flowers, a Russian photographer living in the U.S, has been taking bracketed photos and then compositing them in Photoshop while filtering different areas of the negatives. He calls them ambient photographs. [via Richard Friedman during a lunchtime conversation and Google]

[Addendum: Sorry about the gender confusion. Bee is a he not a she.]

i clowns

I’ve been getting back into film (theory, praxis, and watching), and part of the fun has been diving into new websites (like—to me—Jumpcut online) and reading fun articles. (And as a result of which I watched a good little sci-fi flick last night, Cube.) This morning I came across a link for an artist I hadn’t heard of: Cindy Sherman. [via Feministing via Celluloid Summer (a film class blog) via Palimpsest] She’s recently been making clowns. (What is it about clowns, and people’s fear of them? And if you haven’t seen the Citizen Kane of drunken clown movies, you should!) Plus, this entry [at the Heart of Things], and more reading [at the 2 Blowhards] has convinced me that I haven’t been thinking criticially enough about film recently. And so I should.

löwenmensch

By now everybody’s heard or read of the beautiful, 30,000 year old, carved ivory figurines found in Swabia, but I link here just in case you, faithful reader, have not. [via Nature; see also Mirabilis dot ca, Phluzein, and National Geographic.]

ambigrammatically thine

Out of nowhere this morning I thought of Scott Kim and his inversions, or as Douglas Hofstadter called 'em, ambigrams. An inversion is a word that reads differently according to its orientation. Usually, one word is placed on top of its upside down version along a horizontal line. Kim draws the letters in such a way that they can stand for two different letters just by flipping them. There's lots of folks making ambigrams as a quick googling soon proves. Somehow, it all seems to tie in with the jumbled letters thread.

[Addendum 10/30/03: Typographica had an entry on ambigrams a week before this one, but I swear I hadn't seen it. Oh, well. Via mirabilis dot ca.]

paint & words

Just got back from the Chagall exhibit at the SFMOMA. It was great. A really nice collection of his paintings. I wasn't that familiar with his work, excepting some of his later watercolors and a set of beautiful stained glass windows in the cathedral at Metz. So it was a treat to see so many of his works stretching out over a period of 70 years. Some of his earlier paintings incorporated text in Hebrew and Russian. One of the bulls in one of his murals for the foyer of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater bellows out his name in Yiddish, while he signed himself in Cyrillic. I also got to wondering how his Hassidic family felt about the overt Christian themes in some of his paintings (e.g., White Crucifiction). And some of his goats and cows looked quite pig-like. I'll have to get a biography and read about him.

schreibmaschine

As Walter Benjamin was in the middle of writing his famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Dresden, his typewriter broke. He took it to be repaired, but after two days it still hadn't been fixed, and he simply bought a new, English typewriter, and continued writing. Here's the complete story in German.

papier mâche senectitude

Jon Haddock has a new art piece called 98/107 that depicts the 98 senators who voted for the US Patriot Act. Pop quiz: who voted against it or abstained?

ella wheeler wilcox

I was going over some reading on Heloise and Abelard over the weekend and was enjoying a translation of their love sonnets by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. She was quite prolific and a good old-fashioned romantic poet. Her fansite has digitized most of her poetry, and you can judge for yourself.

opening night

Opening night of Sub Pontio Pilato was last night. It was nice to see old friends and meet some new ones, too. The opera's name on the marquee was worth the trip. We got a great pre-review article in the Bay Area Reporter by Mark Mardon. (Sadly, not available online, but I'll scan it for a link later.) The singers were all splendid and it was nice to see the whole thing through with just one break in the action for intermission. The stage crew were marvellous, too, and the look of SPP was fantastic.

a timeless parable of political life

It's just a couple of days until the opening night of Sub Pontio Pilato, and I ran across this great quotation:

The intriguing thing about Pilate is the degree to which he tried to do the good thing, rather than the bad. He commands our moral attention not because he was a bad man, but because he was so nearly a good man. One can imagine him agonising, seeing that Jesus had done nothing wrong, and wishing to release him. Just as easily, however, one can envisage Pilate's advisors telling him of the risks, warning him not to cause a riot or inflame Jewish opinion. It is a timeless parable of political life.

It is possible to view Pilate as the archetypal politician, caught on the horns of an age-old political dilemma. We know he did wrong, yet his is the struggle between what is right and what is expedient that has occurred throughout history. The Munich Agreement of 1938 was a classic example of this, as were the debates surrounding the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Corn Laws. And it is not always clear, even in retrospect, what is in truth, right. Should we do what appears to be principled or what is politically expedient? Do you apply a utilitarian test or what is morally absolute?

[Tony Blair, interview, Sunday Telegraph, 7 April 1996]

Gedankenexperiment: imagine an American President speaking like this. What is his name?

cc1071

cc1071 is a small site with tiny pix but worth a look none-the-less. Got there contemplating the Shavian and 12480 alternative alphabets on the Omniglot site. The bridging site was IKEMI spotlights after a proper googling. Bradley Tetzlaff is the lad who invented 12480.

noodling round

I'm giving war a rest. Instead I've been looking around on the web at poetry and art blogs. Tom Raworth has a nice take on the au courrant and politically correct Francobashing in his Vive le France I. I've been interesed in modern, post-modern, and post-nauseum poetics since my high school years. There's something just so abstractly tactile and satisfying about getting your mind dirty up to its elbows in the greasy machine that is language. It's a blast to read through some of the poetics blogs out there: Ron Silliman and Jonathon Mayhew both have fun, dense, and (post)-literate [c|s]ites. I met Silliman years ago at Sonoma State University through a mutual friend, David Bromige. There were meetings, real and virtual, with language poets, Oulipans, and sundry others. Also, just stumbled across l-systems via a link at the Arras website. It's run by Brian Stefans who has a soon-to-be published book: Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics. Looking forward to it.