“The point, for me, is to start out subjectless. Why? Because the subject inevitably becomes a straitjacket -” – Gil Adamson
“Writing is about lying, and perhaps the more extreme the lie, the better.”
- Stuart Ross
“It is hopefully clear at this point that Recordism is not an entirely new way of eating cheese. It is instead an entirely new way of eating leftover potato salad!” – William A. Davison
Penny For Your Thoughts?
Can I offer you a penny for your thoughts?
As a matter of fact, how about three?
One penny for you, one penny for me,
And one penny for our minds engaged not so sexually.
Getting intimately closer as we approach the
Climatic altitude of nude, mental, sensational… conversation.
Because Im trying to get to know everything about you
From the neck… UP.
So these are not your typical, sexual, poetical prose.
Im trying to close the door on that all too familiar freaky foreplay game.
With which most guys have chose to approach you.
While they are trying to get deeply embedded
In the fine fibers of your bed sheets,
Im trying to find and define the fibers of which your mind speaks.
I want to engage you
By putting a two karat solitaire diamond on your mind
Marrying your every thought!
I want to lick every inch of every crevasse
So I can get an oral fix from each orifice
And taste your passionate IMAGINATION.
Id rather be naked and exposed, holding you
As we’re lying and you’re crying
While confiding and describing
the tough times youve had in life
And how you dont know
If you can keep a relationship long enough to be somebody’s wife.
I wanna feel the heartbeat of your inner rhythms
As they lead me toward your warm, wet, waterfalls of feminine thoughts.
And ill swim in them.
From backstrokes, to breaststrokes,
Im penetrating every entrance… to your mind.
Taking my time to find out everything about you.
Did I ever tell you about how you
Fell asleep in my presence?
And your mere essence
Kept me awake for hours
As I cowered with this feeling
Of sexually unadulterated mental connection?
And as you lay by my side
I pushed the blinds aside
And took the time in the moonlight of that night
To count 72 eyelashes
On the upper eyelid of your right eye!
Because when you sleep
Your eyes remain open slightly.
And while we probably moves in too quickly into some sexual shit
Ive always cared more about the explicitly illicitness
That came from between you lips, meaning your voice.
So now I am standing here
Ready to trade in all the sexual acts that we’ve preformed
For the chance to reform the very foundation
And the basis of our relationship.
So I reiterate my opening statement
And I offer you another penny for your thoughts!
- Gemineye
Def Jam Poetry
Something that I’ve always found confusing is haikus. I’ve never fully understood how Haikus work. At first I thought that they had to rhyme and that it had to be one constant flowing idea. However there have been many times where I’ve come across poetry that is written in the form of a Haiku and has random words in it, random words that do not rhyme and do not make any sense when placed in the same tiny poem. My question was basically how do haikus work?
So a haiku is a form of Japanese poetry that consists of 17 syllables in three phrases of 5, then 7, then 5. Haikus typically contain seasonal references. An easy way to point out a haiku? It consists of three lines, although the Japanese style would only consist of one. Haiku poets also focus more on showing their readers rather than telling them; they like for their poems to be expressed in one breath.
The one thing that I have always noticed about haikus is that they are short; very, very short. I actually wonder why poets choose this form of poetry. I mean if they are so concerned with showing their readers a poem, shouldn’t they technically make their poems longer so as to do this more accurately? Also I’m still somewhat confused when it comes to haikus so I definitely plan on reading some more and getting a better grasp of their concept and figuring out why poets choose this particular form of poetry above others.
An example of a haiku I found and liked is:
I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.
- Richard Wright
Jacqueline Turner is a poet who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. She founded a literary magazine called Filing Station that has been publishing international writing for the past 10 years. She starts off her mornings with coffee (her one constant) and creates lists of words. They don’t have to mean anything. They don’t have to be her next poetic success; they just have to be words in a list. Next she sits at her laptop and writes, being careful so as not to spill coffee onto her laptop, and every time she gets stuck she looks down to the list and it helps her continue what she is writing.
I first read her book “Seven into Even” in class when Ms. Parrish was handing out these random poetry books to each of our groups. It was the first book that grabbed my attention, maybe because of the odd looking key on the cover, maybe because of the title. Honestly I don’t know why, I just grabbed it. It was interesting from the start and the one thing that I remember catching my eye and sparking my interest was its table of contents. Each separate section of the book had a theme to it, and each theme had a list of words for each poems title. After finding out that Jacqueline actually makes lists of words before she starts writing it all makes more sense and now I actually wish I had the book in front of me so I could read it again knowing a little more about her. I do however distinctly remember one section of the book which had all the days of the weeks as titles and then complementary poems. I really do plan on reading that book again.
A poem that I found online by Jacqueline Turner and liked is called “A Brisbane Poem”:
dawn is a hazy light
I don’t always get to see
suffuse with the blush on the palms
of the sun slowly rising
here on the other side of the earth
from where we came
earlier the southern cross
emerged as clouds pushed past
hello scorpio’s vivid immensity
across a dark sky rushing
along the river
to get to where we always end up
not home, but welcome
not altogether free, but wanting
to capture what’s in front of us
that will someday be far away
leaning up into a different night sky
a glimpse back
arms out
I am in love, it’s true. The object of my affection is dark and usually roasted and has the ability to make anyone’s nerves go on end causing one to stay awake for hours into the night. On cool winter evenings all I want to do is snuggle up in a blanket and have it with me, warm in my hands. The object of my affection is coffee. Guys may come and go but my one constant love is coffee. I admit it, I am a coffee whore. I have it in the morning when I wake up, I have it at lunch, I have it after school, I have it while I’m doing my homework, I have it before I go to work, I have it when I’m bored, I have it whenever I want. In fact I have it with me right now. Coffee, Coffee, Coffee. Sad thing is despite being so “interested” in coffee I don’t really know much about it apart from the fact that it is delicious and made out of coffee beans. So for this post I decided to learn more about Coffee.
To all you coffee haters out there I’m sorry. Coffee just happens to be my cup of tea.
For my second sound idea I truly did not know what to do. So in order to get ideas I went onto Roeshawn’s blog and I read that she searched up weird sounds on youtube so I decided to do the same. Doing so I stumbled upon a video that has to do with natures sounds and the “weird” sounds that nature makes. In this video what they are doing is basically picking up a couple of random items and throwing it on a frozen lake to see what kinds of sounds are made. I was actually really surprised and found this to be really interesting. Some of the things that they threw created sounds that you would never picture for the item that they used. For example they threw an ice block and created a pinging noise that echoed for a while. The sounds that were made were so interesting and keeping the previous video in mind all I could think of was how these sounds could be used to communicate so many different events and ideas. So many of the sounds made using branches could be used in movies for sound effects to many different scenes. I think that using nature’s sounds in a sound composition would be really interesting and unique because in my opinion nature can never make the same sounds twice as it is ever changing. Also many sounds in nature can sound like something completely different than what they really are. I want to try and see for myself what sounds I can make using nature or even just what sounds nature makes on its own without disruptions.
What we hear affects what we think we see…I never really considered this until I heard this being said in this video. It’s completely true. I mean if we hear something drop and it sounds light and doesn’t echo we don’t really think too much about it and see it as something minor but if we hear something drop that sounds hard and makes a thudding sound all of a sudden we freak out and feel as though we dropped something valuable and something that is going to leave a huge mess. This video showed guys smashing things and going through a whole load of trouble just so that they get the right sound effect for their movie. If the sounds weren’t loud enough, or if they didn’t sound forceful enough, people wouldn’t understand the extent of damage that was done. I found this really interesting as I never really thought about how much work it takes in order for directors to get just the right sound effect for a scene. The example that they showed in this video was a car crash and what they did was continuously smash a car in order to find just the right sound that would leave the desired effect on the viewers. They use a special device that they call Harry and it is actually shaped like a human head. It has microphones in the same places where a human being would have their ears and so it records sounds the same way that one would be able to hear them. The director in this video went through extreme lengths to record sounds like dropping logs using a crane on cars in order to get sounds that would sound realistic and severe enough for the particular scene that he was working on. The video also mentioned how one simple sound can be used to create many different effects. I found this to be particularly useful because I never thought about how just one sound can be used over and over again in a way that it sounds like something else every time. I think that this is something that I definitely want to incorporate into my sound composition because I want to see the different effects one sound can leave. Like a penny dropping on the floor. I wonder how many different things people will think of it to be. The director also mentioned that apart from just hearing sounds you have to be able to FEEL them. In order for this to happen he preferred using a lot of bass. I found this really interesting because I never realized how true this fact was. When you hear something and the bass isn’t particularly evident you don’t get as much out of it as you would if the bass was more evident because then you would be able to feel it. The effect is longer lasting and much stronger. This is also something that I really hope to test out in my sound composition. I want to see how changes in the strength of the bass can affect the same sound. This video brought to my attention the fact that one sound can appear to be so many different things. It also made me realize that sounds are not only heard, but felt. A truly stimulating sound is one that you feel.
I was absolutely taken aback by Jim Roche’s piece “Hippy’s are living proof”. It was retardedly offensive and to be quite honest I do not understand how he can even be considered a sound artist. Sure, the way he sounded was kind of weird, sure the beginning had weird funky sounds, but how can someone who is just talking and spreading a whole bunch of redneck ideas be considered a sound artist? While I was listening to him I was just trying to figure out whether or not he was serious, whether or not he would make a joke out of what it was he was saying and whether or not it was ever going to end. Yet all I could hear him saying, sorry, singing was “Hippy’s are living proof that a nigger will fuck a dog”. He is a racist and a sexist and it actually took me some time to find websites who would give me some more background information on him. During my furious search for an explanation as to why he would compose such a piece I found out that he was a performance artist from the deep South (explains the racist comments) during the 1970’s. He moved his way up towards New York where he apparently would go into trans-like states and channel redneck characters from the south. Whatever his explanation may be I was actually disgusted by him. God knows what influenced him, maybe it was his experiences from the South maybe he was just trying to be weird. I don’t know. What I do know is that he is completely different from all other sound artists I have encountered thus far. He is one of few who actually uses words. He is one of few who is sending out a message that we can all interpret in the same way. He is one of few who is not helping us to hear sounds in a different manner in order to discover that sounds can be beautiful regardless of whether or not there are actual notes involved. I guess maybe he can be similar to other sound artists because he is technically doing something different with his music: he is screwing around with his voice and pissing everyone off. Jim Roche is a hateful man and I completely understand why many people are furious with him. For those who enjoy his work…good for you.
http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/roche_jim/Roche-Jim_Learning-To-Count_01_Hippys.mp3
While listening to the piece Youth Scream by Sonic Youth all I could feel was this weird sense of paranoia. At first one is confused because of the drumming sounds but as it goes on it turns out only to be a composition made up purely of people yelling. I was honestly confused by this and could not figure out why they would do this. My initial reaction to this composition with screaming people was shock, however afterwards I actually started to enjoy the effect it had. It sounded almost like they were telling a story of some sort. Sonic Youth is an American band that has been associated and described as No Wave music and has ironically enough been influenced by composer John Cage whom we investigated earlier on this week. I found that after knowing their sound was inspired by John Cage I understood more why their sound did not have any play on a strict set of notes and instead was more inspired by harsh yet free flowing sounds. They have also been inspired by other rock bands and individuals such as The Stooges and Minor Threat. Sonic Youth is similar to other sound artists because they aspire to be something different; they want for us to hear sound in a different manner and are less concerned with the musical association of their compositions and are more focused on the genre itself. This is also perhaps what sets apart Sonic Youth from other sound artists because despite the fact that they are sound artists and do not use notes in the musical sense, they are concerned with genre of rock music and keeping it alive through the usage of different sound techniques and styles. I actually found this really interesting and different because I didn’t realize that sound artists could consider themselves to be a part of any singular genre, the way I saw it they were a genre all on their own. The fact that Sonic Youth actually considered themselves to be a rock band and associated themselves with other bands seemed really different to me but at the same time I really respected that because although they are doing something different with their sound they are not looking down upon those who choose to follow the norm. Sonic Youth definitely has a weird sound but it is something that I personally found to be quite interesting and weird.
http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/tellus_1/Tellus-1_03_Sonic_Youth-Scream.mp3
John Cage
John Cage is a man of great intellect. In his opinion sound is beautiful as is; it doesn’t need to be composed into something greatly musical, it doesn’t need to contain lyrics to touch our souls, it doesn’t need to speak to us; sound is sound and it is perfect the way that it is. I found this thought to be highly intriguing, after all out of all the sounds we hear today which ones would we go to the extent of calling perfect; beautiful? John Cage believes that sounds are actors, that when put together create a sculpture that remains intact forever. In his opinion music is sound that doesn’t mean anything. I found this thought to be quite different from what most people believe. After all if music is sound that doesn’t mean anything, why do so many people listen to music in order to find something in which they can relate? His thoughts on this have been influenced by the philosophical idea that the two things that don’t have to mean anything in order to give us a deep sense of pleasure are sound and laughter. Until I saw this video clip of John Cage I never really thought of how sounds lend us with a sense of pleasure. After listening to him though I found this to be quite true. We never really think of it but simple sounds can provide us with an immense sense of satisfaction. He says that where music is usually the same, sound is different. Therefore by being a sound artist he is providing his audience with something different and unique; something they haven’t heard before. In his composition 4’33” John Cage creates three movements of sound without ever playing a single note. I found this to be fascinating in the fact that although he is similar to sound artists in the sense that he is creating sound, not music, it is completely different because he does not play a note at all during his entire composition. John Cage is also a man who believes that sounds should always be different; perhaps this is what his fascination with traffic is all about. Traffic is something that in his opinion changes from day to day. But whatever Cage may choose to believe he is definitely an intriguing man with ideas different from many.
