lapsus linguae

POETS FOR RED CROSS: 9/11 FIVE YEARS ON

Nearly 90 poets from around the world have contributed to Babylon Burning: 9/11 five years on, an anthology of poems reflecting on direct and indirect consequences of 9/11. These poems aim for more than pious hand-wringing. The anthology is free to download, but readers are requested to donate to the Red Cross.

nthposition, the London-based website behind the anthology, has listed Babylon Burning on iTunes as a PDF in hopes of maximising the money raised . Poetry editor Todd Swift notes: “Auden said that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, but we think it can, and we’d like to prove it.”

Contributors to Babylon Burning are: Ros Barber, Jim Bennett, Rachel Bentham, Charles Bernstein, bill bissett, Yvonne Blomer, Stephanie Bolster, Jenna Butler, Jason Camlot, J R Carpenter, Jared Carter, Patrick Chapman, Sampurna Chattarji, Maxine Chernoff, Tom Chivers, Alfred Corn, Tim Cumming, Margot Douaihy, Ken Edwards, Adam Elgar, Elaine Feinstein, Peter Finch, Philip Fried, Leah Fritz, Richard Garcia, Sandra M Gilbert, Nathan Hamilton, Richard Harrison, Kevin Higgins, Will Holloway, Bob Holman, Paul Hoover, Ray Hsu, Halvard Johnson, Chris Jones, Jill Jones, Kavita Joshi, Jonathan Kaplansky, Wednesday Kennedy, Sonnet L’Abbé, Kasandra Larsen, Tony Lewis-Jones, Dave Lordan, Alexis Lykiard, Jeffrey Mackie, Mike Marqusee, Chris McCabe, Nigel McLoughlin, Pauline Michel, Peter Middleton, Adrian Mitchell, John Mole, David Morley, George Murray, Alistair Noon, D Nurkse, John Oughton, Ruth Padel, Richard Peabody, Tom Phillips, David Prater, Lisa Pasold, Victoria Ramsay, Harold Rhenisch, Noel Rooney, Joe Ross, Myra Schneider, Robert Sheppard, Zaid Shlah, Henry Shukman, Penelope Shuttle, John Siddique, Goran Simic, Hal Sirowitz, Heather Grace Stewart, Andrew Steinmetz, John Stiles, William E Stobb, jordan stone, Sean Street, Todd Swift, Joel Tan, Nathaniel Tarn, Mark Terrill, Helên Thomas, Vincent Tinguely, Rodrigo Toscano, John Tranter and John Welch. All gave their work for free.

Download Babylon Burning: 9/11 five years on: http://www.nthposition.com/babylonburning911.php
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in-situ Cité so far

1. first steps

I borrowed a mic from a friend who has a one-year-old

the kid kept grabbing the mic so we gave him a toy mic

then we gave him a toy ball

we rolled the ball down the hall and he chased it

when we tried to record our dog running in the alley

the dog thought the mic was a stick with a ball on the end

he grabbed the foam wind guard and ran off with it

in the early stages, children and dog are quite alike

2. by my calculations

if our dog is eight-and-a-half

than we’ve lived in our five-and-a-half for a dog’s age

we walk our dog other places besides our alley but let’s say we don’t

eight-and-a-half years of three times a day up and three times a day down

that’s eighteen thousand six hundred and fifteen lengths of alley

writing for one length of alley is harder than I thought it would be

it takes five minutes to walk from Fairmount to Saint Viateur

six if you walk slowly

seven if you walk as if intent on studying every scent

eight-and-a-half years if you walk as if sniffing for stories

. . . . .

in-situ preview

This summer I’ve been working on an audio narrative walking tour project that will be presented by the Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal during Les Journées de la Culture, September 30 – October 1, 2006. Here’s what the PWM website says:

PWM is proud to present In-situ Cité, five short original environmental theatre pieces, organized as an audio walking tour of the Mile End. Directed by Stephen Lawson, In-situ Cité will showcase the works of of J.R. Carpenter, Nathalie Derome, Skidmore, Geeta Nadkarni, and Rosella Tursi.

From the outset I’ve thought of my piece as a continuation of Entre Ville, with our neighbours as characters and the back alleyway as the terrain. The alleyways of Mile End are a world known and shown to us by our dog. The week we thought Isaac the Wonder Dog was dying (see August posts) I had a massive anxiety attack about In-situ Cité. In the long hours spent sitting and waiting on the concrete floors of vets and animal clinics my whole idea of neighbourhood and community and humanity underwent some major revisions.

Isaac walks us up and down the alleyway three times a day. He introduces us to our neighbours and befriends children – things we would never do of our own volition. We’re not crazy about our neighbours. We’re dog people, not children people. But we make the best of things. We try and look at things from the dog’s eye point of view. Which is how I am now aproaching my In-situ Cité piece.
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Ball in Hand

Isaac’s famous on our street.
He’s the dog with the orange ball.
A medium ball for a medium dog.
An orange ball is also good for street hockey.
Isaac the black dog swallowed a black ball.
A small ball for a small dog.
He didn’t eat the ball.
He swallowed it.
He couldn’t help it.
He’s a champion ball-catcher.
It was someone else’s ball.
A small dog ball inside a medium sized dog.
A small ball is still larger than a small intestine.
Now Isaac has no ball but quite a few stitches.
When the stitches come out he’ll get his orange ball back.
When he gets his orange ball back he’ll get his bounce back.
Already he’s two years younger and raring to go.
Never throw a small ball for a medium dog.
Absurd things happen.

. . . . .

Isaac the Wonder Dog

It goes against all the rules of story telling, but I’m starting this story at the end: Isaac is back home and making a spectacular recovery.

Early Sunday AM he had diarrhoea, stopped eating and started throwing up water and bile. Monday he stopped puking but didn’t start eating. Tuesday, still no eating and he started twitching and getting stiff in the legs. He’s only eight and a hlaf years old, but by the time we got him in to the vet Tuesday afternoon he looked like he was a hundred and eight years old.

Dr. Judy said: Your dog is as sick as a dog can get. She had no earthly idea what was wrong with Isaac, but she got it through our thick and emotional heads that he was dying. She got him on antibiotics and narcotics and got him through the night. Wednesday AM she got him into The Animal Health Clinic in NDG for x-rays. They had no idea what was wrong with him either but Dr. Elkin and a slew of totally dedicated honest realistic and really funny women got Isaac though x-rays, IV re-hydration and an emergency exploratory operation to see what in the hell was going on in there.

In a twenty-four hour period we heard every possible diagnosis, from lymphoma to meningitis to acute rheumatoid arthritis to liver cancer and lots of other even worse sounding things that I happily can’t remember the names of. The definitive moment came when two different veterinary surgeons looked at Isaac’s abdominal x-ray and said: That’s totally bizarre. Well, then, we knew they were on to something.

Waiting is the worst thing. We don’t like waiting for the metro to come. We certainly don’t like waiting to find out if our dog is going to die. We have learned that the best place to do your waiting is down at dog level, on a blanket and towel pallet on the concrete clinic floor.

Turns out that Isaac had a ball in him. To quote our friend Rosella: “Wow. A ball. It’s crazy. A ball almost killed sweet Isaac.” Two years ago he was running in a pack of dogs at the park and, being a champion ball catcher, he caught a smaller dog’s ball on the run and swallowed it and was still in him, even though the vet we had at the time laughed at us and said it would break up and pass though him. On the contrary. Dr. Elkin found the ball lodged in the entrance of Isaac’s small intestine. A litre and a half of gastric acid accumulated in his stomach. Now wonder he couldn’t eat or walk and was shaking all over.

Dr. Judy called the Clinic while Isaac was still in surgery. We told her about the ball. She couldn’t believe it. She asked if it was a large ball. I said: It’s larger than a small intestine. When we told the story of the ball to all the people who work at the Clinic the story was much more believable because by then we had the ball in hand and the ball still had its bounce in it.

Isaac is recovering amazingly. He spent the night at The Animal health Clinic and we were allowed to take him home late the next day. Yesterday. We’re so grateful and relieved and stunned and exhausted. And in debt, but we’ll deal with that later.

One of the many things we discovered during this ordeal is that animal clinics go through vast amounts of towels and blankets every day! They rely on donations. Spread the word on this so people know – everyone had old towels and blankets! And just about any animal clinic or shelter or hospital would find them useful.

Another thing we realized is that vets treat people too – for shock and fear and indecision and emotion. A whole extended community of people helped us make the long string of difficult decisions that eventually saved Isaac’s life. Our love and thanks to:

All our friends, neighbours and colleagues who sent good wishes Isaac’s way.

Kavita, for sending us to Dr. Judy in the first place.

Joseph, for driving us around and around and around town.

Dr. Judy and all her staff at Clinique Vétérinaire Plateau Mont-Royal, for being honest, for getting us through the first difficult round of decision making and for sending us off with an extra towel, which we sat on in a lot of strange places during the subsequent rounds of waiting.

Dr. Elkin and Allan and all the amazing women at The Animal Health Clinic, for being honest and human and fast, for bringing us pizza and for being so funny even whilst working their asses off doing six or seven surgeries a day!

The animals on staff at The Animal Health Clinic who made the waiting easier: Molly the bow-legged mini daschund, who minds everyone’s business. Honey the sexy tabby cat (who needs a home). And Kiwi the parrot who talks to the dental machinery.

The Animal Health Clinic runs an un-official animal shelter full of perfectly good pets. People bring them in to be put down. Dr. Elkin and Allan just can’t do it. If you’re considering adopting, enquire with them. A woman came in and adopted a kitten just after Isaac came out of his surgery and we feel this a good omen.

Dr. Judy @ Clinique Vétérinaire Plateau Mont-Royal – 514-842-5490
127 ave du Mont-Royal Ouest, Montréal QC H2T 2S9

Dr. Elkin Seto @ The Animal Health Clinic – 514 369 9119
5601 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montréal QC H4A 1W4
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Post-Inter-Hyper-Active

Back in Montreal. After a week of wall to wall presentations, performances, pitches and heated discussions in the chill windowlessness of the RICE Television Studio.

Saw every imaginable kind of work (and some unimaginable kinds of work) that works on screens of every size from 800 x 640 to HD to mobile phone. Sold photocopied mini-books to the most digital people. Got pre-cursive with Daniel Canty. And navigated all kinds of interactions, digital and social and nature-related. Hiked the Hoodo trail without the aide of GPS. Bought a touque and stumbled through a string of glittering cold nights. Mingling of new friends and old at sunset BBQs by glacier-fed rivers (two in total), dance parities (impromptu or otherwise), with djs (Mama Fatou or otherwise), live cinema performance from SOLU (Finland via Barcelona), Notsosimpleton Flash art whisked from the wall, Props Pub shenanigans, and whisky in the Leighton Studios. Made it to breakfast all of once, which is one time more than in all of the seven weeks of Babel Babble Rabble, and the construction site outside Lloyd Hall 119 brought new meaning to The Loudest Room.

Clutching a bundle of business cards collected from a cross-country cross-section of business and art world sheer raw talent, and a DVD from the super solid Randy Knott, I left the high sky and hay fever sun sometime yesterday afternoon, in a muddle of loose-end packing, all-at-once good-byes and off campus brunching. Drove to Calgary in a carful (a word like careful, but moving faster down the highway) of some of the best people I know, who I was loath to leave, my dear friends: Girl at Work Sandra Dametto, that Monkey Michael Boyce and Alexis O’Hara of Filthy Lies and movie star eyes. And brand new friend the mad and mighty Clauda, whose name probably isn’t spelled that way at all. Flew through a few time-zones with the irrepressible Matt Donnelly for entertainment. Happy to return to rainy Montreal late last night. Stepped out of the mountains into the heat and humid and wet. And slept, and slept, and slept well for the first time in a week.

photo by alexis o'hara
The Three Wicked Witches of JPL

photo by alexis o'hara
Feeling the Love, and the dancehall, from Mama Fatou

[both photos from the kooky kamera of Alexis O’Hara]
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Interactive Active

It’s strange and wonderful to be back at Banff so soon after the Babel Babble Rabble residency. So many memories of so many people in so many unexpected places. I’m am eternally grateful to Emily Page and the BNMI for this opportunity. There are amazing people presenting and performing all day and night and I have to shake my head sometimes to make sure I’m not dreaming, but too hard because a) I don’t want any of this stuff I’m learning to fall out, and b) I’m extremely hung over.

Here are some Interactive Screen and other BNMI URLs:

The Banff new Media Institute
http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/

Interactive Screen O.6 Wiki (scroll to bottom for ongoing list of URLs referenced in the conference)
http://iascreen06.wikispaces.com/

Anne Galloway’s very up-to-date blog on the event
http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/

PRE-CURSOR (my presentation)
http://luckysoap.com/is06/

photo by SOLU: http://www.solu.org
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PRE-CURSOR

It’s great to be back at Banff. It feels like I never left, only managed to not eat at the dining hall for a few weeks. Interactive Screen 0.6 – Media: Margins: Migrations is well underway. Saturday evening we meeted and greeted in the bracing mountain air. So many amazing people here. Yesterday was our first full day of think tanking. Yesterday evening I went into town to buy a touque because it’s so cold here at night. I presented this AM and am now free to listen, learn and roam. More information on the presentation I just gave and on the conference/think tank in general: http://www.luckysoap.com/is06/
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IS 0.6 Abstract

Interactive Screen 0.6 is fast-approaching. The agenda is firming up and abstracts will soon become less so. I present on Monday, August 14, 2006 at 10AM along with Vancouver/New York based artist Kate Armstrong in a session called Creative Commons: Art, Activism, and the Database. Here’s the abstract I sent in moments before yesterday’s deadline:

Pre-Cursor: A discussion of political and pragmatic aspects of independent production, online publication, fabricating fiction and recycling code. J. R. Carpenter will chase narrative threads across media and trace technological continuities between her hypertext fictions and their precursive forms, which include: the book, the zine, the lab report, the slide show, the guide book, the bulletin board and graffiti.

Sound abstract? Here are some specific examples:

The Zine: Fishes & Flying Things

In 1995 I tried to start making zines with a computer instead of a photocopier and wound up making my first website instead. I still make zines with a photocopier.

The Slide Show: Send More Than Words… EVERYBODY LOVES PICTURES

In 2003 I found this sequence of captioned photos that my uncle took and sent to my grandmother 40 years ago and the forgot about. A borrowed slide-show script brought them back to life.

The Lab Report: The Cape

The images, diagrams and maps in The Cape are culled from a hard copy of an Environmental Geologic Guide to Cape Cod National Seashore published in 1979, which happens to be when the story is set.

The Guide Book: How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome

The cluttered interface of How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome is inspired by the pedagogical style of the modern guide book and a 500 year history of travel writing.

Graffiti: Entre Ville

Entre Ville is an amalgam of the graffiti tags, gardens, garbage and gossip of my back alleyway… You can’t make this stuff up.

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Interactive Screen

By my calculations I’ve yet to be back from Banff for as long as I was away at Banff for the Babel, Babble, Rabble: On Language and Art residency. And now, thanks to some strange twists of fate, some hustle, and some just plain good fortune, The Banff New Media Institute has invited me to return to participate as a Senior Artist in Interactive Screen, August 13-18, 2006.

Interactive Screen is a new media development think tank now in its 11th year, which is long, in Internet years. Canadian and international new media types converge at Banff each summer to ponder, study, workshop, present, perform, mentor, share, discuss, collaborate and reflect on the current state of new media art and the shape of things to come.

A think tank is not a think tank without a subtitle. This year’s is: Interactive Screen – Margins: Media: Migrations. “Margins can be taken to mean ‘profit.’ They also point the way to the ‘outside’. These terms provide us with a means to turn and twist the meaning of media. Media forms have the power to migrate through the boundaries that define our experience – turning them inside out, and outside in. At the interface, it becomes possible to make ‘profit’ share in the values that we choose to make ours.”

For more official-sounding writing like this please visit the official-looking website: http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/interactive_screen06/

And a think tank needs to be stocked with every size fish. As an independent producer of mostly free art, I fall within the “outside” meaning of “margin” rather than the “profit” meaning. I am extremely grateful to BNMI and the Banff Centre for inviting me anyway, and for paying my airfare, because otherwise I would never in a million years be able to attend, benefit from, or contribute to such an awesome event.

One of the things I was reminded of during the Babel Babble Residency at Banff is that I make really low tech high tech art, and I persist in doing this for some pretty stubborn yet specific reasons. So at Interactive Screen I’ll attempt to address their general theme: High Tech/Low Tech/New Tech/No Tech: innovating, recycling and sharing technologies in a culture of wealth and waste. I’ll talk about artists and independent orginizations and producers near and dear to my heart; indi-publishing and zine culture; how and why I re-use and recycle found images, found texts, and found code; and how I’ve used the web to remain independent and sometimes circumvent certain cumbersome institutions.

I’ll post more as I sort through the ideas and issues of this theme. In the meantime, here are some of my other Internet Writings on related themes:

“Responsa Literature: Partial Replies to Scattered Questions”
“Ingrid Bachmann: Digital Crustaceans v.0.2: Homesteading on the Web”
“A brief history of the Internet as I know it so far”
“A Little Talk about Reproduction”

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