Showing posts with label video. Show all posts
Showing posts with label video. Show all posts

2017-04-23

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 18th - Possible taxonomies of the 1957 Yorkshire coast

I went to a writing workshop, some years back now.  One of the exercises was to watch a "British Transport Film" similar if not identical to this:


-and write a poem in response.

It's the "poem" part that may be dubious here.  Sometimes my response to something is more to its style than its content and seeing this I was struck by how much it was unique to the period.  So I started thinking about how people might present the same information in other styles...  and I hit on the idea of an overly abstract and academic study.

So what I am saying is that there may be nobody else in the world except me who gets this...

...but it is a list poem and you could imagine it came from the introduction of some dry-as-bones volume that a tweed clad professor has been labouring over for the best part of a decade..





Possible taxonomies of the 1957 Yorkshire coast
  • those involving sun hats
  • those involving beer
  • those involving knobbly knees
  • those involving simple foodstuffs : apples, sandwiches, cheese
    • as above, but also fish and chips
  • those involving model ships or boats
  • those involving racquets
  • those involving balls
  • those involving young ladies
    • excluding the most popular of all
  • those involving sand
    • with buckets and spades
    • with towels
    • with sandwiches
  • those planned a year in advance
  • those involving dance with various degrees of skill
  • the subset involving omnibuses
  • those involving ice cream
    • the subset with also small children
      • and the subset of those in which a seagull features
  • those involving other creatures:
    • donkeys
    • crabs
    • minute fish
  • those in which you drink too much, and wish you hadn't
  • those featuring special boys or girls
    • appearing at just the wrong moment
    • or where they don't arrive at all
  • as yet to be categorised:
    • sea temperature
    • sunburn
    • chilblains
    • lower back pain in the context of luggage
    • all the grades of rain




2016-11-17

Essay: Future Technology #1


Future Technology #1

(or The Shape of Things to Come)

Future technology, earlier today
Civilisation, back in the '90s
If, back in the 90s, you played Sid Meier's Civilisation, on a DOS computer, and if you were very good (Rosemary regularly achieved Moon landings before 1730) then it was possible to reach the end of the technology tree...

(Aside, for the uninitiated:  a "technology tree" is a set of available upgrades in a video game.  The player typically has some sort of resources to spend on upgrades and chooses which to develop next.  Upgrades give benefits in the game and unlock the later technologies.  It's just like life.)

However, it is a tenet of geek philosophy that there is no end to the technology tree, and game designers are a sub-species of geek, so beyond the end of the tree lay more technologies:
  • Future Technology #1
  • Future Technology #2
  • And so on...
They served no function, except bonus points...

...but I loved this idea ever since I first saw it.  Future Technology #1 is wonderfully non-specific, whilst saying precisely what it means.

FT#1 could be a pocket hadron collider, smartpants (tm), or an ambiguous phase psycho-encapsulator (which we all could use, if you think about it...)

It could be tomorrow, or a thousand years hence.

And if we achieve FT#1 then there's FT#2 (henceforth to be known as FT#1).

So what is FT#1 for poetry?  I feel strongly that there ought to be something: a killer app for the Sonnet that takes it somewhere it's never been before and makes everybody say:  Well obviously I bought one; I can't understand why nobody thought of it sooner!

Which is not to say that poetry-1.0 (poet stands at front and declaims) or poetry-2.0 (words arranged on page) have had their day.  Far from it, poetry-1.1 (poet on radio/TV/YouTube) is quite popular, and 2.1 (words arranged on internet) has a variety of interesting new angles, but neither of those feels like a real FT, they've basically still just words in sequence, or words arranged in a space.

So every now and then I have a go.  I started with an example of animated poetry, but while that was pretty popular, it's basically a movie and as nicely as self-editing text works for that idea, I am not sure it extends to many other poems...  (see however Kinematic Typograthy.)

It ought to be possible to do more than mere animation, and Jenn Zed (of whom more later) has suggested that videos turn the poetry consumer off.  I hadn't realised it, but I recognise it in myself, and I think it is similar to poetry vs. lyrics  An element of time travel is involved in reading a poem the eye tracks up and down the page, effectively forwards and back in time which it can't when listening to a song, as the music proceeds at constant rate.

Something similar applies to videos.  A voice recording of a poem, accompanied by still text, doesn't suffer quite so badly, because the eye can still do a little out-of-order processing but a moving video is really hard to get right, because it is simultaneously distracting the eye, and locking the words into a fixed time-frame.

For lyrics, the fix was to adjust the words, you fit them into the experience already created by the music...

However for poetry-FT#1 I want the reverse.  What happens when we fit the medium as closely as possible to the words?  If the user (reader) needs to control time, then why not let them?

Well I don't know.

I'm still working on it.  It isn't easy.  It's not that poetry's difficult (I think that goes without saying) or that technology is hard to master (although certainly it can be awkward.)  The real problem is, in a world where:

this or this or even this
are easy to achieve...

...what do they mean?  It's more or less a brand new medium, so it doesn't have any established rules.  I'm basically inventing everything from scratch, albeit with wanton theft from books, films, video games and comic books.

Anyway, a new attempt on FT#1 is under way.  I am working with the aforementioned Jenn Zed (who has poetic inclinations and is an accomplished artist...)  This is "mixed media" by which I mean "words and images and Javascript and HTML and CSS and mp3 and anything else that seems to fit..."

It's not huge, but it's slow going...  It will probably take at least another six months, but until then:

Installing FT#1
25%
Please Wait

2016-04-26

To the Sky...

You haven't heard much from me about my on-going collaboration with German Rock Musician Hallam London.  Partly this has been because we had a bit of a slow period (as documented here) and partly it has been because I've been busy changing my job, delivering the kid to/from University, saving the World from killer rhubarb (don't ask) etc etc.

Also another reason is I've been busy with the songs themselves.  Hallam and I just had an amazing six week burst of creativity during which we finished five songs.  (For a given value of finished, music production goes through many, many stages such as arrangement, performance, production, mixing etc etc...)

However, it is not of these songs that I wish to speak.

In January this year, David Bowie died.  Hallam and I were just starting a new song when we heard the news.  We had some cause for introspection.  We'd never discussed Bowie, but as you can imagine he was a formative influence for us both.  We thought about doing some sort of song as a tribute, and then we had to wrestle with the question of how hubristic that was.  After some soul searching, we realised that all of our music comes from a very Bowie place anyway: it's all about gender and sanity and slices of everyday or unusual lives; we're also frequently a bit SciFi; often trying to push some envelope or other; and as every song is very different, I think we're reinventing ourselves even faster than he did!

So anyway, we got on with the song.  Unusually we reversed of our usual way of working.  Hallam recorded the musical idea first, and I analysed the metrical structure of his "na naaa nah" place-holder lyrics.  Then I wrote a prototype chorus.

So far so good, but we had to decide what the song was about, and we kept cycling back to Bowie-like (Bowiesque?  Bowiesian?) ideas.  In the end we were drawn strongly to the ideas in Major Tom and Space Oddity—and who doesn't want a space launch in the middle their song?and a love story, obviously...

And now it's finished.  It's partly a Bowie tribute, but obviously also has to stand as a song on its own.  Hallam has gone beyond the mere "teaser" quality of our previous releases with this one.  He's hired a great drummer, and an engineer to do the mixing and production.  He's currently finalising the artwork.

It's called To the Sky, and next week Hallam will release it as a single!

Yes, you do have to wait until then...  but in the meantime here's the play-list with our previous two teasers Anger Bob and Identity...







And BONUS! a recording of The rain in certain car parks (yes I did call a song that).  This live recording isn't polished as Hallam's studio recordings, but it does have a live band and audience...

 

2015-07-02

The Rain in Certain Car Parks (live performance video)

Here's a video of yet another song from my collaboration with Hallam London and one that's going into the pot for consideration for the album we're steadily grinding our way towards.

This was one of the earliest lyrics I wrote for Hallam.  It was the 4th that I completed, but the 3rd that Hallam completed the composition for—we have asynchronous parallel processing.  I am including the lyrics below, so you may be able to detect our style evolving (I can't, I'm too close to it...)

So, anyway, let me transport you to a secluded corner of an inner-city car park, where it is a dark and stormy night...





The Rain in Certain Car-Parks 


I'm standing in some car-park with a case
that I can't open.  I've no plan, it's dark,
and raining and my shoes are leaking slowly
and I know the man I'm meeting: he's a shark.
The clever fish keep clear.  I'll do the deal,
but watch the larger shadows as they flow
between the BMWs.  I'm numb
but there is so much that I owe.

If I can just survive...
if I can just survive...
if I can only live...
through these next moments,
I swear it all will change...

Car-parks, darkness, rain and cases,
silent men with folded faces,
eyes that swivel in their sockets,
metal objects clutched in pockets,
I do this for the wad of green,
the wish that I can fall out clean.

What was it years ago, decisions made,
that brought me to this day without a choice?
But I at least can try a better deal,
a wilder card, a last throw of the dice;
and surely it's my life to gamble with?
I shouldn't meet this man without a soul
around to witness what goes down.  He's here
and nothing now seems under my control...

If I can just survive...
if I can just survive...
if I can only live...
through these next moments,
I swear it all will change...

It's always dark and always raining,
it helps me hide, I'm not complaining.
It's heartbreaking, but it's my trade:
the way my little money's made,
so do the deal and walk away;
I'll live to deal another day.



2015-04-22

By the book...

Funny isn't that easy to do in poetry, and sometimes isn't productive.  Amusing is easier to achieve, and I think less likely to get in the way of the poem.  That's what I've done here...  or so I think.  I hope you agree...

Kidderminster is a town in Worcestershire.  Croydon is a place in London.  The British Museum is where we keep our loot, and well worth an afternoon's perusal if you are in London.

In this there are two characters, represented by being left justified and right justified, respectively.  There's also a occasional narrator, who is centred, but then aren't they all?

Feel free to read it in three distinctive voices.

I had forgotten, but this was another poem from Making Contact...








By the book

She reads books,
this is where it all begins.
"Planning the crime of the century,"
was just a way to pass a rainy day
in the library
in Kidderminster

but here she is
leading Crusher, Sparks and The Countess
through the British Museum at three a.m.
with a silenced pallet truck.

He reads books
this is how it all begins.
He read "Lives of The Real Detectives,"
which seemed harmless enough
waiting for the 7:15.

The radio coughs nervously,
a glance at Constable Granger,
a nod to Dave from the Art Squad.
They've all seen the shadows moving
behind the glass.

She's read: "Alarm Systems Explained."

He's studied:
"Weakness of the Criminal Mind"
at some length.

"Transport of Art Treasures."

"Traps—their design and construction,"

"The Great Escapologists."

"Anatomy of a Manhunt."

"Losing Yourself in London."

"Forensics for Beginners."

An abandoned factory in Croydon—
armed police converge.

But she's memorised:
"Victorian Sewers Revealed."

And he's left
flipping the pages
of "Sealed Room Mysteries,
Volume 4."

She opens a small bookshop.

He's in there buying
"Should you Trust Books?"

They nod.

2015-03-11

Loose change (with video)

A Collection of Old Indian Coins I've made the effort to resurrect and revamp this old one of mine.


This is my single poem that attracts the most attention, and this is because I originally created it as an animated GIF and placed it in posts on poetry forums.  As people on those forums were unused to a poem that suddenly edited itself while they were reading, I managed to catch quite a lot of people by surprise.



You can see the original, e.g. here on Poet's Graves or you can just play the video below, where I've reworked it with narration.  The original plan for to release it as a niche art-house film fell through when my backers realised the niche was less than an atom's width across.







2015-02-25

Jesse James Off Broadway

Jesse James, late of the nineteenth century

I was on a poetry course, and we were given a paragraph or two about Jesse James and asked to write a poem.


The single two things that struck me most about him were the manner of his death, and:

"...much of what was written about him
was made up, and toured as a stage show
within weeks of his death..."


I only hope when my time comes I can be remembered as creatively, and that somebody sells tickets.










Jesse James Off Broadway

...murdered by a man who is in turn murdered
by a man who is murdered by “an outlaw”
about whom countless they say films insist
on the quote marks and who robs, not steals, trains
whilst representing as a Robin Hood
all Lincoln green and tights and neckerchief
carefully deployed, but... of the man himself
little now is known. A bounty is offered
and a stage show hurriedly prepared, the script
penned by a man, himself in patient line
for the scaffold where the hangman struggles
to get the whole damned chorus neatly dropped
before the interval. He needed shooting—
to keep the drama tense—and his cousin
Bob “Robert” Ford is just the man you'd choose
for a low-living, lily-livered coward's
excuse for a plot flourish. The date was set
for Saturday, the matinee, and Jesse
(as was his name) was lured to audition
for the part of his life. He takes the part, steps out—
is gunned down in cold blood and ironically
the part turns out a whole. Bob himself is...