Check out this cool design project, where a designer hand-lettered the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, similar to the infamous video clip/music video precursor featuring Dylan holding up cards with the lyrics on them, as written by himself, Allen Ginsberg and others.

Photo by Leandro Senna, courtesy of www.leandrosenna.com

The designer/artist Leandro Senna says of the project:

Inspired by Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ video, where he flips cards with the lyrics as the song plays, I decided to recreate those cards with handmade type. I ended up doing all the lyrics, and not just some of the words, as Dylan did.

There are 66 cards done in one month during my spare time using only pencil, black tint pens and brushes. The challenge was not to use the computer, no retouching was allowed. Getting a letter wrong meant starting the page over. There are some intentional misspellings and puns on the original song video, so I tried to keep that in a certain way.

Here’s the link to see closeup photos of each individual card, and here’s the link to see the video of these cards flipped through with the song overlaid. Which cards are your favorites?

And of course, if you need a fix, here’s the original video clip with Dylan.

The Kokinshu (ca. 905 AD) was a collection of Japanese tanka, or short poems, that sought to return poetry to the public sphere. The poems demonstrate the change of seasons and the arcs of love affairs, celebrations and goodbyes, and travel. Many are crisp, witty, and poignant today.

There’s a tendency for the poems to the treat the subject within the temporal context, in the passing of time. A moment of glimpsed beauty may read like an “I Saw You” advertisement in the weekly alternative paper, where someone made eye contact at the supermarket seeks out a similar moment in the classifieds—it’s a moment packed with potential but ultimately lost to the speaker.

The only way to hold onto that moment is to recreate it in text, forever hinting at the opportunity. Ancient Japanese poetry concerned itself with the social context of poetry rather than the social subjects. Only in the late ninth century, when the Kokinshu poems were being written did poetry go from being a “social gesture,” bound to the moment of its creation, to an art form.

In this way, the poems remind me of photography. What breaks a photograph out of being bound to its moment of creation, especially now that everyone has a camera in a pocket or purse? How often do we frame shots that will be greater than “social gestures,” records of where we are, who we are with, or what we are consuming uploaded to our Facebook timelines? Read more »

No word yet on the sex of the Kanyashian baby, or if Kim plans to dress it in outfits as ugly as this one.
Photo credit: Denise Truscello/WireImage.com

Powered by the momentum of two recent, critically acclaimed albums, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Watch the Throne, his collaborative album with Jay-Z, the notorious Kanye West has not rested, and is set to release his latest compilation any day now. If you follow those in the know (read: me) on Twitter, you’ll already have been introduced to some of the leaked lyrics, many of which focus on his impending fatherhood. (In case you’ve been living under a rock, ’Ye and Kim Kardashian are expecting a baby in July.)

Rumors that the new album is titled Her Beautiful Dark Twisted Fetus are unconfirmed, and insiders say it’s more likely that West will go with the title No Work for a Child, a take-off of his infectious hit single (with Jay-Z) “No Church in the Wild.” Indeed, the first lyrics we received were from the new title track, which opens the album with these ambiguous lines: “Lil’ babies with their moms / What’s a mom to a kid? / What’s a kid to applaud? / What’s applause to a non-performer, who don’t perform for anyone? / Will he make it out alive? Alright, alright, no work for a child.”

The structure of these lyrics will sound familiar to any fan of “No Church in the Wild,” and the new song certainly relies heavily on its predecessor, with a few notable exceptions. Soft bongos have replaced the throbbing drums that were the signature of the original, and the opening lines, performed by Frank Ocean on the original track, are, curiously, performed by famed children’s singer Raffi.  What West is actually getting at in these opening lines is up for grabs, though it may suggest a certain pressure on his newborn child to perform, only to remind himself (alright, alright) that children can’t be put under the same expectations as megastar rap-gods like himself.

The maturity of these opening lines is almost as impressive as what comes next. Read more »

The most surprising part was the pocketful of grass. I have forgotten what leaves of grass are, recalling instead needles of cactus, burrs of goatheads, and whirlwinds of elm seeds. I kept thinking: where did he nab that green handful? Was it someplace close, or does he garden a tall variety just for this performance?

Thursday night, Scribendi held a unique fundraiser: we invited Bruce Noll to perform his show, Pure Grass, a Leaves of Grass dramatization. Noll has been doing this show for forty-three years, and although he dresses in a Whitmanesque way, he does not like to be called an “impersonator.”

He remixes the work, weaving together excerpts seamlessly and engaging the audience throughout the act. During body electric, he did not hesitant to demonstrate on the crowd much of the “Upper-arm, arm-pit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,/ Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, fore-finger, finger-balls, finger-joints, finger-nails, / Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side, / Ribs, belly, back-bone, joints of the back-bone, / Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root, / Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above, / Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under leg, / Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel[....]” Read more »

“If there is no room in poetry for difficulty, where is difficulty to go?”

As Richard Blanco moved to the podium to read his inaugural poem “One Today,” I felt tremors of excitement, and fear for the significance of the moment. Any poet will tell you that poetry is not dead, but that it is often forgotten, except on this one day when the whole world watches a poet read a poem written specifically to honor the induction of a new President of the United States. The pressure on the poet to most people is obvious, but to most poets the pressure is almost unimaginable, so I sat on my bed with hope in my breast.

I was disappointed. Immediately, there was a self-reference of the poet & the poem. For those who don’t know what I mean, I will directly quote the line. Read more »

Sorry, Ken. We still love you.

One of the most identifiable settings in Ron Howard’s 1995 film, Apollo 13,is Mission Control. The room full of scientists and engineers sitting behind ancient computers. Cigarette smoke swirls in the air as the men wear skinny ties, white button dress shirts, and black-rimmed glasses. These guys were hipsters before hipsters could roll their eyes.
Obviously everyone had the same reaction as me when they watched the film, right? We all saw that room and thought “Man, how great would it be to sit around in there and/or make out with someone in there?” Amiright?

On Thursday this happened.
Well, the “sit around” part happened.

Last week multiple friends notified me of a new advertisement in town, one that announced in large font: Apollo 13: Mission Control. Can you bring them home?

That’s all.
So naturally the following conversation kept occurring:
Me: “Is it an exhibit?”
Friend: “I don’t know, but it’s about Apollo 13!”
Me: “But what is it exactly?”
Friend: “I just said I don’t know!”

What it is exactly is a living-history-like play that places the audience in the middle of the show. And it’s rad. Read more »

I’m in Japan for a wedding. So here’s some Kokinshu and Basho tossed onto some old photos. May your winter break be restful and may you find the scent of early plum in the wine cellar.

 

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I’ve been blogging compulsively Tuesday mornings Washington State Time for almost three years. I’m afraid I’m losing my bark.

I imagine from time to time I’ll get it back, but I seem to be recovering from compulsivity.

For now, I’m thinking about interactive and prankish art.

First is a slice of German mischief:

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I have a question for you, Bark readers. So let’s crowdsource it and see what we come up with. Why do we publish hardback original editions of books? As in, why do we publish novels or memoirs or even, occasionally, short story collections in hardback form? Why shouldn’t all new editions, which are currently released in hardback form, just come out in paperback form on their pub date? Related question: does this make me a socialist?

In the current model, some, but nowhere near all, new releases come out in hardback, and then are released later in paperback. The books released in hardback supposedly carry more prestige, and are able to generate more buzz and more reviews, which can lead to better sales, consideration for awards, and so on. However, many books are released in paperback, and the conventional wisdom is that it’s harder to generate national publicity for those books, because hardback first editions usually come from big publishers with a lot of marketing muscle, and thus it’s harder to get reviews for first edition paperbacks.

A hardback short story collection? It’s like seeing a unicorn!

The obvious answer is that hardbacks make more money, for both the publisher and author. My understanding is that the profit margin is significantly higher on hardbacks, but I’d be curious to know exact figures. What I’m wondering is whether, if all new releases were in paperback, the sales (in terms of revenue, not units sold) would be the same or greater than our current system. This is one of those situations where I’m ignorant about the business side of publishing, so if you have answers, please share.

Here’s the thing: I love books, and I buy way more of them than my income should allow for. I support buying books, and buying them often, and buying the books of people who are hardworking and good literary citizens and wicked awesome people. However, I actually cringe upon seeing that a hardback novel is $30. Thirty dollars? That’s two weeks worth of gas; nearly a week’s worth of groceries; ten lattes; three pairs of men’s jeans; 2-3 months worth of cat food; a nice bottle of whiskey to last through Spokane’s 4-6 months of winter…you get the idea. Do I value art more than I value those things? Maybe. But I could also buy two brand-new paperbacks for that price. Read more »

Ingredients: Peanuts–as defattened peanut flour and natural peanut butter. It is, in fact, both peanut butter and better’n peanut butter.

As December approaches, I find myself terrified by the prospect of seeing yet another year come to its end. The days are getting shorter, projects are piling up, and in the face of having less time to get things done, I suddenly have all the time in the world to obsess over the things I’ve had to miss out on in 2012: Drinking binges with friends, drinking binges with classmates, drinking binges alone, holidays. Why, just this month, I had to watch literally dozens of holidays slip by, unobserved. I ask you, what bougie bastard expects someone to find time for Carl Sagan’s birthday, Scrapple Day, and Chaos Never Dies Day on the 9th? And when, I ask, was I supposed to observe Operation Room Nurse Day? On the 14th, you say? Really? A Wednesday? Are these “nurses” going to send my emails? Write my blog entry? Stare at my pile of dishes? November 22nd is Thanksgiving and Start Your Own Country Day? Piss off.

Luckily, someone is looking out for the time-management challenged. That’s why the entire month of November has been designated as Peanut Butter Lovers Month. That’s right: 30 whole days to figure out some way to express undying love and appreciation for peanut butter. I might have missed the first 3 weeks, but I’ve got 7 days left to make it count. To start, I’m going to share with you my list of …

Other Stuff You Can Do with Peanut Butter.

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