Sunset Debris, Icebergs Off Fogo

Turn your iPad into an avant gallery/library/listening station via UbuWeb, where you can watch experimental films, like Annika Ström's "All My Dreams Have Come True" (2004), above, in which her mother and uncle discuss how to say "all my dreams have come true" in English; and download super poetry, like Ron Silliman's "Sunset Debris." May all your electronic devices stimulate versus sedate (except when you are preparing for sleep, coming down from an anxiety attack, and other exceptions).

Recently saw Ron Silliman read at the Poetry Foundation. Best for hearing Ron read from "Sunset Debris," a long poem in questions. I went home thinking about crafting questions, and thinking about what happens in juxtaposing questions. "Sunset Debris" deftly had Kennedy and I in stitches, then pensive, inward-turning, then pulled us back out again, rolling us through a nuanced, diverse gamut of emotions and considerations, love, trash pick-up, sexual function and dysfunction, and other topics popularly and unpopularly handled via language.

I wish everyone in the world could write/dictate a poem in questions, and then all the questions could be compiled, into the longest poem in the world. What a collaboration. It would take a while to catch up with everyone, prioritizing folks on their deathbeds, so that their questions can be included, and finishing up with advanced and post-toddlers, whose iterations could provide crucial sub-volumes' worth of "why." (A real planning problem: where and when to end?) Even if the world population's contributions ran a single page per individual versus Mr. Silliman's fifty we would end up with a massively cool, endlessly intriguing document of human awareness in time and space. And someone or some people could spend the rest of their lives reading the global magnum opus.

"Sunset Debris" also got me thinking about blindness, blind poets, blind poetics. Wondering what the title would mean/feel to a blind reader/listener; and about the experiences of the blind reading/hearing poetry, sightless relationships with literary imagery, "Sunset Debris" relying less on imagery than many types of poems, but the magic of the title occurs in a brainswirl that includes visuals for me.

Devices==Desires. I borrow Alice Fulton's stitchwork in type to lace together post parts A and B.

Thank you, Frame, for introducing me to one of the four corners of the earth, Fogo Island, and the Fogo Island Arts Corporation. The Arts Corp commissioned studios to house artists in residence and Norway-based architect Todd Saunders is doing a bang up job, perching mind-blowing little livables within Fogo's intimidating natural beauty. (If you enjoy architecture at all, be sure to check Saunders' other work on his website.)

The Bridge Studio, Long Studio and
Bridge Studio interior are pictured above.
Check the Arts Corp website to see more studios
and past and current artists in residence.

Awe-inspiring, craggy, coastal, surreality-in-reality landscape? Check. Shelter as work of art? Check. Solitude? Remote-a-tude? Check. Unique local/international community arts interaction/collaboration? Check. Within hours of my first encounter, I started working on a project I hope to complete during a residency on Fogo. . . Poems about a place I have not visited, a series which I hope to complete by marrying them to poems written from that place at a later date. . .


In conclusion, I had to include "Parasitic Mind Control," as recommended by YouTube at the top of my search list of Annika Ström vids.

The Joy of Books, How to Avoid Huge Ships

Book designs by
Rodrigo Corral, above,
and Chip Kidd, below.

Everyone is tweeting the "Joy of Books" video today and it feels like it should have a place here. A husband/wife team live-animated the shelves/stock at Type Books in Toronto.  The piece showcases the eye-candy quality of a room full of good print. And it is always fun to find a new bookstore. Now I have a bookstore to add to my list of destinations for an indeterminate future visit to Toronto. I hope to make it to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)  some year sooner than later. My entire previous Toronto experience comprises one night passing through, feeling lost after a few days in orderly, showy Montreal; still, we managed to find a great meal in one of Toronto's Chinatowns, and stumbled onto a free Lila Downs concert at the Toronto Harbourfront
Centre. Then we slept in the van.

A congruence of animations, animated books, creative couples, and our old friend book design: Last night I was finally introduced to Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Somehow I missed it while 15 million + others were melting in the face of monumental cuteness. If you're like me and you're late to this party, watch adorable Marcel now!!! Marcel might even be certifiably poetic (in my book): "Guess what I use for a hat? A lentil." The word "lentil" is almost a little, round poem unto itself. And maybe the thing we call "lentil" is too.

Naturally, I looked up the people responsible. "Co-habitating couple" Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp created Marcel together, and on filmmaker Fleischer-Camp's website I noticed he had directed an intro for comedian Patrick Borelli's one-man multimedia show, "You Should Judge a Book By Its Cover." Borelli, a former book designer, critiqued bad book cover design for laughs; he conceived the show for a library audience in 2009 [sic?] and took it to American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) conferences across the country. The intro didn't do much for me (perhaps my expectations were too high coming straight off The Shell) but a cool interview clip from Borelli's show (also directed by D.F.-C.) features author/artist/designers Steven Heller, Rodrigo Corral, and Chip Kidd, and the covers selected and comments from the designers evidence the subjectivity involved in pinning down "bad," let alone "good."

In an A.V. Club interview with Borelli, the much-mocked How to Avoid Huge Ships is singled out to exemplify bad bookdom. I found myself taking issue with this particular skewering. There are so many jokes about this book afloat on the internet that it's difficult to find serious references. I get it. But, I thought, if there's a book about it, maybe avoiding huge ships is actually pretty difficult, once you're in a situation where such action is necessary. And if so, then I certainly want the person responsible for keeping me out of collision with a huge ship to know exactly how to prevent the disaster. The cover design is not that bad. Plebeian. Unsurprising. I've seen worse. Okay, I might even feel attracted to it. (At any rate, I hope that author Captain John W. Trimmer benefited in some way from the maelstrom of fun-poking.)

Borelli suggests that a bad concept makes a book design bad, but the two are so different to my mind, although related in a stimulating way in the best books as objects. I have personally owned some pretty bad books, in terms of content, that were just so great to look at that I got suckered in. And then, who are the concept police? In the Borelli/Heller/Corral/Kidd video linked above, Cooking with Pooh is brought out for discussion; I was glad to hear Heller back the idea that the book, though provoking, of course,  chuckles in the adult demographic, is probably effective in reaching young Pooh-lovers.

At the end of the day, I do love what Borelli brings up in his own interview and the interview with other designers, about picturing all the parties involved in publishing a real stinker okaying the really sucky cover/book design. Just last night we were talking about television ads, the good and the ugly, and the corollary visualization in which I picture a group of decision-makers sitting around a table, agreeing, "Yeah, we'll go with that one." Such as the one that could turn a true Pepper off Dr. Pepper forever.