Poem-A-Day #306 : Alien

Alien

I want to go to Mars -

They are sending them in - are going to give them the keys to the place
experiments and the building of bubbles to live in

I dream of the bubble housing the smaller bubbles

The small growing things in the shield of man-made ecosystem

Think about the likes on those selfies -

God this is boring - is broken - there is a sense that a hole in the window would send everything in this world into space

It will freeze there

Lose itself in the not-black not-dark

Why don't we have a word for the color of space - the vacuum of our heads

I want to go to Mars -

Put on that suit - drift in the expanse for years - and come out the other side alone
where I would send cryptic emails and video messages

Where I would piss on the dead sand of that planet and make castles from the mud

Mainly -
I don't want to talk to people anymore

And that is the thing that resonates - the internet has left me not wanting to hear or be heard

I long for a rotary phone that only clicks and never receives but that's not true because Candy Crush -

Here is the buoy in the open wilds of imagination - it blinks seven times
is silent -
is even and calm - it only knows what fingers have touched it tell it to know

It beckons -

Poem-A-Day #247 : Sartre Means Tailor

Sartre Means Tailor

The bag of a thing - it hangs like felt thickly and fort-like
          draw the chalk lines across the dark surface - crimp it in
the drawstrings will pull will shear - the cliff face of a scissor will slice

The internet sends endless photos of cats - of politics with cats
          politicians wrapped in cats - there are cats running for President
your one friend who likes dogs will have to be culled - blood let

Crimp the edges cleanly - find the matter in the matter
          discard - this pile of left overs is a heap of could have
it is the hair on the brush - the egg cracked for breakfast - blooms in November

There could be a burn along the rough edge - fingers working
          along the splitting fabrics the wools trying to resheep themselves
the sheep - for their part - care nothing of what was lost they are fine

There is no meaning here - the internet is a vast mirror in which
          we constantly ask who the fairest is and constantly find only others
a shrink-wrapped bar of chocolate tastes only if we can imagine instagrams of it

Let's not Luddite on this - crimp the edges - find the chalk lines
          eventually a jacket will appear - eventually it will fit form well enough
eventually it will be discarded for another slab of unform

Unform and unform this fine felt in lines of calcified thought
The internet has patterns for it - has plethora of them - has litte rboxes full

The Blank Screen

Jason Shulman - 2001: A Space Odyssey

The above image is a time elapse photo of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It takes a familiar medium, film, and renders it unintelligible. There are objects within the image, but holding them for long becomes tenuous.

English photographer Jason Shulman has been getting a lot of press lately for these images. It began, as far as I could tell, with a piece in Wired on May 9th. From there, the story has been 'picked up' by various reblog sites. This trend of posting another sources news to your own website as if you came up with it is an odd internet for of the Associated Press that I'm both ok and really wary of. But that's another discussion.

J.M.W. Turner -
Rain, Wind, and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1844)

The images are beautiful. They recall the works of J.M.W. Turner, I have professed my love before.

In some of the photos you can make out distinct images from the movies. The above 2001 image, for instance clearly showcases the red light of Hal at the center of the frame.

And while they most strongly resemble Turner or more abstract painters like Rothko or even Pollack, I was immediately struck by an omission from the discussion.

From the Wired article:

Shulman lives and works in London, and typically creates sculptures. During the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics he decided to test an idea he had about photography, which basically involved shooting the Games without going to Russia. He trained a camera on his television and took long exposure photos of athletes in motion. Most of the events he recorded were brief, leading him to wonder what might happen if he shot longer stretches of action.

And I don't doubt that this is the inspiration that Shulman's idea originated from but...

Hiroshi Sugimoto - Akron Civic Theater, Ohio (1980)

This is a photo by Hiroshi Sugimoto taken in 1980. It is a long exposure of a movie screen playing a movie. As a result of the black and white film and long exposure the screen becomes a clean white omnipresent eye hovering over the audience that appear, albeit as nearly unrecognizable smears in their seats. He started this series in 1978. His description:

Different movies give different brightnesses. If it's an optimistic story, I usually end up with a bright screen; if it's a sad story, it's a dark screen. Occult movie? Very dark.

The Guardian ran a great gallery of this series on March 1 of this year.

Interestingly both the National and Tate galleries in London have Sugimoto pieces in their permanent collection. And there was a full exhibit of his work in 2004 at the Serpentine Gallery. Also in London. Where Shulman lives.

Hiroshi Sugimoto - Lightening Fields 128 (2008)

Now. I'm not calling this stealing. I'm not even going to really blast Shulman because artists can and should find inspiration where it lies and I don't think this is malicious or intentional.

Inspiration comes odd, when it comes. And it's not always clear even to the creator where the seed idea came from. And that's what I'm guessing occurred here.

Shulman can be excused for not knowing a photographer since he works mainly in sculpture. I don't know every writer, so I'm going to give him a pass.

The people writing articles about him on the other hand. These are people paid to look into topics. A quick search online brings up Sugimoto's work. And that work was featured in Wired in 2014. Sugimoto's work has been in Wired at least 5 times, the most recent one in January of this year. So I don't blame Shulman. I blame bad reporting.

Because Sugimoto's work is really well-known. His experiments in photography are diverse and well-documented. He spent a few years shooting electricity at photo-sensitive panels. He photographs wax figures in a way to make them look like living people. He's an odd dude.

Hiroshi Sugimoto - Fidel Castro (1999)

And that's the problem.

In all of this press about Shulman and his movie photos there is not one mention of Sugimoto. A Japanese man who has spent the better part of 60 years innovating and experimenting in his genre.

Let me be clear. Both works can, and should, be praised. They are working towards different ends. Shulman seems interested purely in what each film looks like filmed this way, in the aesthetic of the result. Sugimoto is interested in everything but the movie. He is interested in the rooms, the people, the eeriness of sitting in a room staring at nothingness for a few hours. He is interested in the time it took to film it, what it says about that time.

And this is where I will say something bad about Shulman. One of these artists is creating works that ask us to inspect ourselves and out space. The other is making a pretty picture.

Poem-A-Day #60 : Surf's Up

Surf's Up

It is the age of the octopus -
                    of long form writing -

          The age of golden fingers telling the internet their opinions
and then -

When the oceans rise will the AI still be given feminine names
                    and the faces of dead children?

                                                            In Santa Fe water takes over for the sand

                    There is an impulse to deny this is happening - that
                                                  the leverage of thumbs is just to damn great -

                                                  Suckers are not the grooves in flesh
                                  they cannot feel warmth -

                                  They splat on glass - they are easy to baseball bat into pulp

                    Perhaps it is best to only think-piece on this - we must turn to 4chan for help
the worry on the lips of the USB port cannot possibly convey
          the concern of mountains becoming hills

Visitor

Visitor (Founding of Google 1998) 9/4

So I met you on a dating site
and we are going out to dinner
on a Saturday in September

I type your name into Google
and see what comes up from
your digital closet

How many bodies under your
floorboards what did you steal
from your parent’s house
when you were 16

The first three are some other
person with your name then
your Facebook page

The picture is you
dressed as a zombie

It isn’t Halloween
and I hate zombies

Date cancelled

Generation Why

First off. Go read this:

Generation Why? by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books

thoughts?

My feelings about Facebook and all internet 'social network' sites have always mirrored Zadie Smith's. It's reductive and shallow and kinda boring. It's great for people who like to self-promote. It's a good tool to get people to attend a party or show or rally, but it doesn't actually connect anyone to anyone.

People like to use the line 'I reconnected with so-and-so whom I haven't talked to in decades!' but in reality they 'friend' them and never talk again let alone actually connect or catch up.

I don't like to sound like an old man but here:

Blogging Makes Joan Didion Uncomfortable

That kind of sums it up for me.

It's like talking, but without any of the actual interaction. It numbs us to real human connection. I'm not about to claim that Mark Zuckerberg is a sort of lonely nerd who has created his ideal world and wants everyone to be the same so he feels better but...honestly...if I had the ability to make everyone be my friend, even if it was on the internet, I would do it.

Would I feel better about myself?

No.

Post-human

Post-human 3/5

Will we grow gills - open up red

After the trees have gone will oceans rise
Then what of our internet journals?

Who will tell us what to care about
when Perez Hilton is a fish?

Verizon Sucks and Jojoba

Verizon has taken away my internet. So here is yesterday's poem:

Jojoba 3/3

Radiators
make my skin crawl - that
banging in the pipes rattles
my mind goes enough at night
to keep me up

I rub oil into the cracks in my knuckles
and smooth out my nose before bed

Little can remedy the brain shaking

Frown

Frown (2/12)

In every picture on MySpace I'm frowning
but lit well - but looking stern - This
is why I'm single - I should post happy pictures - sunlit
Me in my tie with elephants on it - Me in purple
I look like some model in a dusty room wearing
something well and looking bored - well
it is boring - MyBoredfacebook
This is what the 21st century brings - we've slid
into an ocean of ennui - we post pictures
of the flooding delta