BIO
librarian/museum educator.

complete biography: texas, brazil, mexico, venezuela, china, india, london, new york, saudi arabia, boston.

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DISCUSSION

Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: nOdalisque


uncomposed: pixelation, clouds, blinking, the background and the foreground of a painting by "big george" and/or titian: red fabric with golden trim in a checkered pattern, a tree stump, a complex of thatched buildings in the distance (a stables? an inn? the gateway of a village?) all of these structures being tucked under a looming structure of half-ruined masonry, columns and arches with grass growing at the tops of them (a roman auditorium?) and the woman is a substitution and the sky and the pixels and the sounds have all been added; and i wonder about the original woman sleeping in a gallery in dresden when the lights go-out, and i wonder if titian meant to transform her into big-george's tombstone, perhaps by adding that tree stump, and i think about the old peasant tradition of simply burying folks in the orchard where the ground will not be tilled, dreaming of adam and of christ cursing the tree that would not bear fruit, and i wonder about those buildings and the pixelation and what sky specifically (does it matter if it were an american sky, or australian, or south american or european, or if it had been filmed through the window of a jet-liner?) and i think about the woman blinking with her breasts bobbing and her wooden fingers waving, and most of what i feel is sadness. i see an etruscan lady leaning on top of a tomb, with a slightly vacant smile; i see the isabella stewart gardner museum with its terrible lighting and its founder being carried around in ten feet of gauze in an antique litter; i see a post-card of sleeping beauty, as a musical on ice, and i see a time square peep show, also as a post-card and as a musical; i see the sky, i see myself blinking, i see clouds like pixels and paintings like peep shows and theories and and criticism and attributions and substitutions and traces of roads and tree-stumps and human beings.

machina: shadows of hands, the shadows of her neck; the sudden directness of her gaze, which then turns away, either accepting our presence or dismissing our significance; which reminds me of the invention of morel, and of the fugitive. but we now inhabit the epoch of funes the memorious, which will culminate in an apocalypsis of the lungs (and all this time when we should have been shouting, or chanting sutras, or at least humming to ourselves like a mother trying to put its child to sleep)

love is all: sex at the surface, dissolving our purpose (here we are, in this "age of the machine", still trying to teach ourselves and each other how to be human) and the bit-mapped courtesans and the murderous king of kings in 1001 nights; obelisk and the veil of stars, real and apparent brightness, tremendous distances that are gradually revealed by systematic observation, powers of magnification, transits of venus, etc. flesh of my own flesh rendered unto euclid and osiris and reddit. there is a statue of an aging, roman prostitute, who is carrying a basket of fish, on her way to celebrate her patron god, dionysius. she is going to meet her god-- the woman in amsterdam who sits inside a red-lamp window, looking tired in the morning and sipping her tea, is sometimes going to go to meet her god-- perhaps in a dream or a metaphor or in some dodge at tradition, or perhaps in the fullness of time, beyond what we now understand to be true about ourselves. 1001 binary, number nine dream.

opsieme: how are particular and distinct opsiemes /graphemes / phonemes combined in the brain's lateralized structure to produce qualities of experience "--at the level of language"?; if we can have the visual equivalent of a sound and a word, can visual experience also have a "connective grammar"?; will the movement of the eye shift to a predetermined pattern on a given set of opsiemes, once it has "recognized" a "known object" corresponding (more or less) to a known word?; pursuing the theory that schizophrenia is a mis-function of language in which the lateralized structures of the brain are moving out of sync, would the visual patterns and experience of a schizophrenic subject display a similar and related manner of "out-of-sync-ness"?

DISCUSSION

An Interview with Superlative TV


interesting parallels to the US State Department's "shadow" internet project (aimed at providing foreign dissidents with the components of a mesh network, to evade the inherent choke-points that exist: fiber-optic backbones, traffic-exchanges, data-centers, etc)

i almost wonder if you could apply for funding/sponsorship.

but how are you going to get around the fact that all of these newly available wavelengths will soon be auctioned and owned by private industries, mobile companies and etc? i imagine they will be quite ruthless in enforcing that ownership.

but in the meantime, i love the idea of people reinvesting in analog networks. maybe in the long term it will develop into your own version of the mesh. good luck!


DISCUSSION

Poems by Steve Roggenbuck


there are true and false stories that will never be spoken.
there are good and bad poems that are only half-written.
there are cities buried in the sand, and new cities rising,
which ash, sand or snow will someday bury.

there are good and bad poems, places, occasions,
incantations to help or hinder,
ideas that are mistaken, visions that are forgettable,
and perhaps one noble error,
in limping pursuit of truth or love.

prayers at the crossroads, prayers to household gods,
prayers to the wind far from shore or in the high passes:

bless us and keep us, silence and sound.

DISCUSSION

Poems by Steve Roggenbuck


let's say there's an abstract painting in a gallery--busy brushwork, and perhaps a few pasted clippings.

one person looks at it and says: this is garbage, doesn't deserve to be here, an insult to my time, an insult to art and the history of painting, an insult to eyes, an insult to my mind as it is thinking otherwise very important and beautiful thoughts, the work is derivative, the work is clumsy, the work is an expression of all of human badness, the work is anti-proletariat, anti-god and truth and goodness, i hate it, let me tell you how much i hate it, i hate it so powerfully much.

another person looks at it and says, say, i like the clipping anyhow. sure, i can think of ways i might have liked it better, but i'd say it isn't a question of good or bad, right or wrong--it's a question of, is this interesting? does this reveal something about human nature and the time and place i am living in?

and then the first person says to the second one, you are an idiot, you also don't know what eyes or your mind is for, and also how dare you question my opinions and so on and so and the second person shrugs and they go their separate ways, and the painting remains in its gallery and thousands of people hate it and perhaps only a few people smile at it and perhaps at the end of the day only one or two people remember anything about the matter, after they take the painting down and put it away in a vault which is forgotten, and the tragic thing is, they don't even remember the painting really, they just remember how they reacted to the painting which is to say they remember themselves, but then again that's the way life has always been. of course a more interesting painting might have stayed in its gallery or gone to auction and fetched a million dollars or might have been stolen or vandalized and endlessly photographed and touched like the fingerbone of st. peter or paul, and this is what amounts to fame and power--but that's a different story, although interestingly with the same characters voicing largely the same opinions.

but of course, that's a story about painting and here we had been talking about poetry, which is different in that everybody writes poetry, yes? everybody writes poetry all of the time and they spill it out like dutch holland when they've been shot in the gut, or when they are fifteen or else they are trying to hear themselves and the waver of their voices and choices and it's nothing at all like painting, which only a few people are called to, with the smell and the mess and the maze, although words are their own maze of course and we are all of us wandering.

DISCUSSION

Poems by Steve Roggenbuck


excellent video. i suppose poetry is the immediacy of a voice and its hesitations and the grass in your face and everything you believe and everything that you might try to believe in the moment of contact; romance, patriotism, power, and all the other words we hope to shake-down on every awkward encounter, like pixie dust or acid or applause.

as for death: we inscribe names and numbers for the unnameable, because we can never know the full shape of what we are and what we will collectively become, yes? a friend of mine likes to look at old pictures and remind himself that everything that he might find there is already gone, even the dust is gone--it is different dust.

there's was an old-timer whose traces you might like to have a look at: he called himself bingo gazingo, and he spoke poetry in a frantic, semi-comic voice, and was himself a lovely poem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ5M-MRXsX8&feature=related