It is good to know that,
if there were no water
nor blankets nor sand,
nor vacuum nor wind tunnel
immediately at hand,
and I was on fire and
you were there,
Showing posts with label hellmark. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hellmark. Show all posts
20120303
apropos
A mixed bag of references today, Dear Reader:
First, Jonathan Lethem's Harpers piece: The ecstasy of influence: A Plagiarism, a moving reflection on the cultural commons of creativity, notable not least for its rare reference to Heidegger's theory of the "enframing" capacity of art, composed entirely of the (attributed) words of others, and recently referred to me by a friend pursuant to discussion of private ownership of things.
If it were all Lethem's original work, it would be a persuasive and thought-provoking essay on some aspects of the tension between notions of property and forces of creativity; it remains at least that in light of it's appropriated and repurposed constituent verbiage, and becomes also an additional work of art beyond its formal structure, a pointillist painting/sculpture/score of such an essay, that, upon inspection, blossoms into many essays addressing a broad range of issues in a variety of traditions and discourses.
It is, however, difficult to cite excerpts according to scholastic form (which is probably as it should be), and so no highlighted verbiage. Go read the whole thing.
That work begins by considering several stories sharing features we commonly attribute to one story by Nabokov, as a way to approach the question of originality, influence and appropriated content. In the lecture below, Slovenian rock-star philosopher Slavoj Žižek also touches on this idea, suggesting that often what cultural forces understand to be the primal version of a story, is just a more polished reworking of other, earlier stories or versions. His example is Antigone, which we non-classicists lamely take to be originally told in the Sophocles tragedy dating from circa 442 B.C.E., but, Žižek claims, the stories of myth of Antigone vary among more primordial sources.
Available courtesy of the Backdoor Broadcasting Company, Slavoj Žižek's very long lecture, entitled "The Wire, or the clash of civilisations in one country," delivered at the University of London last week, can be streamed or downloaded here. Succinctly, Žižek offers a far-ranging assessment of the HBO series, "The Wire" as a cultural phenomenon, as a text, and as a lens into contemporary society, touching on a wide range of contemporary, historical and cultural issues with an essentially Marxist analysis. Much of it is worth quoting, but, as the entire lecture is an hour-and-a-half long, transcription is challenging.
If you thought that was an excellent series, and are curious, like I have been, as to what makes a philosopher a rock-star philosopher, then check it out. Your time (except for those three or four times he plays a scene from the show, which the mic does not pick up, but you know those scenes anyway) will be invested well. Also, like myself, you may find that you disagree with his descriptions -- I don't think he got Omar quite right -- but, try to allow yourself to disagree and keep listening, because if you stop to argue you might not get through it all, and the many fascinating tangents might thereby turn into derails. For those of us who can afford to spend our attention on long philosophical lectures, plenty of time for arguing will remain.
Separately, while looking for an audio clip of a statement made by the President to a Disney journalist in December 2003 (and failing), I stumbled across The George W. Bush Public Domain Audio Archive (as well as this, somewhat more staid archive from the Presidency Project at UCSB), which led me to the Bots' delightful songs, Bushwack2 and Fuzzy Math. I suppose this is not, actually, entirely separate from the foregoing, as I stated at the top of this paragraph, for the search was occasioned by a destructive-writing project and related DJ-Pebkacery involving content repurposing, and I could not locate the target soundbyte, perhaps for Disney-related intellectual property reasons, perhaps just because my search was poor and lazily implemented.
First, Jonathan Lethem's Harpers piece: The ecstasy of influence: A Plagiarism, a moving reflection on the cultural commons of creativity, notable not least for its rare reference to Heidegger's theory of the "enframing" capacity of art, composed entirely of the (attributed) words of others, and recently referred to me by a friend pursuant to discussion of private ownership of things.
If it were all Lethem's original work, it would be a persuasive and thought-provoking essay on some aspects of the tension between notions of property and forces of creativity; it remains at least that in light of it's appropriated and repurposed constituent verbiage, and becomes also an additional work of art beyond its formal structure, a pointillist painting/sculpture/score of such an essay, that, upon inspection, blossoms into many essays addressing a broad range of issues in a variety of traditions and discourses.
It is, however, difficult to cite excerpts according to scholastic form (which is probably as it should be), and so no highlighted verbiage. Go read the whole thing.
That work begins by considering several stories sharing features we commonly attribute to one story by Nabokov, as a way to approach the question of originality, influence and appropriated content. In the lecture below, Slovenian rock-star philosopher Slavoj Žižek also touches on this idea, suggesting that often what cultural forces understand to be the primal version of a story, is just a more polished reworking of other, earlier stories or versions. His example is Antigone, which we non-classicists lamely take to be originally told in the Sophocles tragedy dating from circa 442 B.C.E., but, Žižek claims, the stories of myth of Antigone vary among more primordial sources.
Available courtesy of the Backdoor Broadcasting Company, Slavoj Žižek's very long lecture, entitled "The Wire, or the clash of civilisations in one country," delivered at the University of London last week, can be streamed or downloaded here. Succinctly, Žižek offers a far-ranging assessment of the HBO series, "The Wire" as a cultural phenomenon, as a text, and as a lens into contemporary society, touching on a wide range of contemporary, historical and cultural issues with an essentially Marxist analysis. Much of it is worth quoting, but, as the entire lecture is an hour-and-a-half long, transcription is challenging.
If you thought that was an excellent series, and are curious, like I have been, as to what makes a philosopher a rock-star philosopher, then check it out. Your time (except for those three or four times he plays a scene from the show, which the mic does not pick up, but you know those scenes anyway) will be invested well. Also, like myself, you may find that you disagree with his descriptions -- I don't think he got Omar quite right -- but, try to allow yourself to disagree and keep listening, because if you stop to argue you might not get through it all, and the many fascinating tangents might thereby turn into derails. For those of us who can afford to spend our attention on long philosophical lectures, plenty of time for arguing will remain.
Separately, while looking for an audio clip of a statement made by the President to a Disney journalist in December 2003 (and failing), I stumbled across The George W. Bush Public Domain Audio Archive (as well as this, somewhat more staid archive from the Presidency Project at UCSB), which led me to the Bots' delightful songs, Bushwack2 and Fuzzy Math. I suppose this is not, actually, entirely separate from the foregoing, as I stated at the top of this paragraph, for the search was occasioned by a destructive-writing project and related DJ-Pebkacery involving content repurposing, and I could not locate the target soundbyte, perhaps for Disney-related intellectual property reasons, perhaps just because my search was poor and lazily implemented.
20110708
amidst the distressed texts
(pursuant to the continuing efforts to elucidate the notions of destructive writing and antihumor, here are more evasive descriptions, along with some select milestones in how i, oomph cavilrest, came to hold my cavils here, and also rest, at Hellmark Press excerpted from recent note to a mentor. we join it already in progress):
... I am shamed to admit that [career] does indeed occupy a lot of my attention.
Attention that would be better spent on family, friends, music, literature, food, coffee and tobacco! And often is so spent: One of the great benefits of being in a (semi)professional milieu where one may feel one has no status or significance, is that thoroughly embracing that statuslessness can give one a great deal of freedom, provided one can nurture enough ego through to enable one to exercise same.
Recently, in a fit of silly dejection over my professional trajectory, I started to blog. . .
. . . after a youth as the son of an early-adopter fascinated with computers, and through those heady days when networking became the Internet and all that it promised -- I am somewhat of a grudging, late-adopting Luddite insofar as social networking media and communications technology are concerned. I have endeavored to maintain no Internet footprint. In 2007 I got my first cell phone (pay-as-you-go); I just began my first contract with a mobile service one billing-cycle ago; I used dial-up to access the Internet until December 2010; also I joined Linked-In.
As a writer, over the course of almost 20 years, I have written a lot of stuff, a lot of fragmentary stuff (perhaps intended as part, or a sketch, of something larger), and a lot of different versions of the same stuff, without ever developing the will-to-publish sufficiently to impose some order and finitude on the collection. I even wrote a poem about it: [citation omitted: see another revisionary testament]
But, well, honest assessment concludes that no executor or -trix would have such interest and patience, and that those bundles of letters no longer exist.
So, a moment of mortality-colored realism with respect to the ol' oeuvre led me to imagine some server at some blog service somewhere -- and the internet archive -- as the place to commit all the revisions to one copy that would be, more or less, under my control, while sure to survive any catastrophic hardware or software failures here at home.
Also, as a writer-cum-snarky-absurdist-gadfly, I have been working on distressing found language in various ways, and then seeking numinous implication of meaning or beauty amidst the distressed text, which in aggregate I flippantly call "destructive (unsaid: as opposed to creative) writing" so that I don't sound naive. Sometimes someone asks me what destructive writing is, and I am hesitant to make conclusory statements about it, but don't mind sharing examples with the very patient interested party. One thing almost all destructive writing has in common is that it is hard to read.
(unlikely that any executor or -trix as imagined above would have any idea what to make of the various destructive writing projects in various stages of distress and numinousness there in the bequested drives).
Also there is a similar(ly absurdist) notion of "antihumor" that I am loath to explain, but I know it when I see it. I don't mind sharing illustrative examples, but have a hard time putting my hand to one. Old vaudeville tropes like "take my wife" and "boy are my arms tired" recontextualized and merged into shaggy-dog stories. ("Antihumor? I hardly knew her!")
Separately, another alter-anima had made some music using some audio sources that were public domain and some that were not, and craved an easy way to share it, and other collections of sounds.
And separately-separately, I have been, for some years, through the cafepress.com DIY-shop service, making t-shirts and cards, mostly for myself, under the name Hellmark Press, which, in turn, has been affiliated with the People's Peaceable Assembly Line, who, as you'll recall, dutifully "reported suspicious activities" in regular letters to dear norm.
So, when, in March, a visiting friend, glancing at a doodled cartoon on a scrap of paper, said she'd buy the t-shirt that featured that cartoon, it all fell together. Except for the technical aspects, which I soon learned in the usual fashion. And, since then -- don't tell anyone -- I've been Oomph Cavilrest, who runs Hellmark Press (your best source for the hot educational hip-hop beats of DJ Pebkac!)
. . . Disclaimers aside, that's pretty much where I am. To some degree it gives me comfort to be done with a lot of the individual writings, and the blog format offers some interesting organizing options. As a great deal of the ethos of destructive writing lies in a sort of hostility or antipathy to the traditional bourgeois reader, and, as narcissistic (and bourgeois) as blogging is essentially, I haven't given much thought to pleasant navigation for the reader, but the labels are a pretty good way. . . .
... I am shamed to admit that [career] does indeed occupy a lot of my attention.
Attention that would be better spent on family, friends, music, literature, food, coffee and tobacco! And often is so spent: One of the great benefits of being in a (semi)professional milieu where one may feel one has no status or significance, is that thoroughly embracing that statuslessness can give one a great deal of freedom, provided one can nurture enough ego through to enable one to exercise same.
Recently, in a fit of silly dejection over my professional trajectory, I started to blog. . .
. . . after a youth as the son of an early-adopter fascinated with computers, and through those heady days when networking became the Internet and all that it promised -- I am somewhat of a grudging, late-adopting Luddite insofar as social networking media and communications technology are concerned. I have endeavored to maintain no Internet footprint. In 2007 I got my first cell phone (pay-as-you-go); I just began my first contract with a mobile service one billing-cycle ago; I used dial-up to access the Internet until December 2010; also I joined Linked-In.
As a writer, over the course of almost 20 years, I have written a lot of stuff, a lot of fragmentary stuff (perhaps intended as part, or a sketch, of something larger), and a lot of different versions of the same stuff, without ever developing the will-to-publish sufficiently to impose some order and finitude on the collection. I even wrote a poem about it: [citation omitted: see another revisionary testament]
But, well, honest assessment concludes that no executor or -trix would have such interest and patience, and that those bundles of letters no longer exist.
So, a moment of mortality-colored realism with respect to the ol' oeuvre led me to imagine some server at some blog service somewhere -- and the internet archive -- as the place to commit all the revisions to one copy that would be, more or less, under my control, while sure to survive any catastrophic hardware or software failures here at home.
Also, as a writer-cum-snarky-absurdist-gadfly, I have been working on distressing found language in various ways, and then seeking numinous implication of meaning or beauty amidst the distressed text, which in aggregate I flippantly call "destructive (unsaid: as opposed to creative) writing" so that I don't sound naive. Sometimes someone asks me what destructive writing is, and I am hesitant to make conclusory statements about it, but don't mind sharing examples with the very patient interested party. One thing almost all destructive writing has in common is that it is hard to read.
(unlikely that any executor or -trix as imagined above would have any idea what to make of the various destructive writing projects in various stages of distress and numinousness there in the bequested drives).
Also there is a similar(ly absurdist) notion of "antihumor" that I am loath to explain, but I know it when I see it. I don't mind sharing illustrative examples, but have a hard time putting my hand to one. Old vaudeville tropes like "take my wife" and "boy are my arms tired" recontextualized and merged into shaggy-dog stories. ("Antihumor? I hardly knew her!")
Separately, another alter-anima had made some music using some audio sources that were public domain and some that were not, and craved an easy way to share it, and other collections of sounds.
And separately-separately, I have been, for some years, through the cafepress.com DIY-shop service, making t-shirts and cards, mostly for myself, under the name Hellmark Press, which, in turn, has been affiliated with the People's Peaceable Assembly Line, who, as you'll recall, dutifully "reported suspicious activities" in regular letters to dear norm.
So, when, in March, a visiting friend, glancing at a doodled cartoon on a scrap of paper, said she'd buy the t-shirt that featured that cartoon, it all fell together. Except for the technical aspects, which I soon learned in the usual fashion. And, since then -- don't tell anyone -- I've been Oomph Cavilrest, who runs Hellmark Press (your best source for the hot educational hip-hop beats of DJ Pebkac!)
. . . Disclaimers aside, that's pretty much where I am. To some degree it gives me comfort to be done with a lot of the individual writings, and the blog format offers some interesting organizing options. As a great deal of the ethos of destructive writing lies in a sort of hostility or antipathy to the traditional bourgeois reader, and, as narcissistic (and bourgeois) as blogging is essentially, I haven't given much thought to pleasant navigation for the reader, but the labels are a pretty good way. . . .
20110321
got my new spring line from hellmark!
i orderedthe new t-shirts,
morbid and wry alike,
and they arrived
today. yay!
wry first. (left)
then morbid. (right)
maybe you've seen "i bought 200 shares of Apple today, adam..." and "hang in there!" before.
i also refreshed some old standbys:
20110221
gallows humor
so, the question: is a skeleton hanging by the neck from a noose
any more evocative of death than either a noose or a skeleton alone?
20080801
Why Hellmark Press?
Why Hellmark, you ask? It is kinda like Banksy says in defining "Brandalism":
Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It belongs to you. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock that someone just threw at your head. -- Banksy, Wall and Piece at 196.
And it is kind of different, insofar as the parodied brand is not so much of a public-space advertiser as an insidious parasite replacing genuine interpersonal pathos with product.
20060307
. . . not war!
Because the deterrent effect of "love" seemed a bit impotent by contrast.
Now available as bumper sticker or t-shirt at cafe-Hellmark Press!
20041219
hope springs eternal
not to suggest that there is a new job on or about this date for Oomph;
there is not. in fact, on or about this day, you might say, Oomph Cavilrest's
shiny new credential, acquired at some expense, first went into effect.
('m just tryin' to be ready, come that great day).
In related news, if you or someone toward whom you experience a dizzying and baffling array of emotions from the available spectrum of same, has recently gotten a job, or is considering having a job, or seeking a new job, or merely contemplating a change of positions within the general career trajectory, or a change of career, or if you know a precocious child prodigy with an entrepreneurial penchant and knack for capitalism, why not send that special someone an original hellmark press disconsolation card!
yay, jobs!
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