Week #51 Poems for New York Times Headlines from the First Decade of the Second Millennium - Poetry Book

Here’s a project I’ve actually been working on for years but for some reason took me this long to post to the blog.

The title pretty much says it all. I’ve been writing short poems based on the headlines of the New York Times for the past nine years or so.

I figure this will be my last year since I wrote the first one in 2001, here it is:

6/4/01 “New York Greatly Altered By AIDS”

No more dancing in the streets

No more fucking at the turnstiles

Now all we’ve got is the straight dope

Hookers who faint at the sight of blood

And the soldiers who love them for it

I want to have one poem for every season of the last ten years. An even forty at the end. A perfect size for a book.

I’ve given up on this project a few times then picked it back up so I’ll have to go back and fill in a few seasons. Good thing we have the internet!

Week #49 The Spam Mail Coffee Table Book - Book

So this weeks project comes straight from the brain of the illustrious James Hughes Call.

The idea is to make a glossy, thick coffee table book that contains the best spam-junk mail sent to either his or one of his associates emails.

The book would be about 30 to 40 pages with the text from the Spam on one page and the an illustration inspired by it by Adam Beebe on the page facing it.

I think this would be a pretty awesome object to have exist. I’m not sure if any of us have the actual motivation or money to get it printed but I’m sure it will be mentioned in my book “Greg Travis James Call Greg Travis” and in James’ one man show we’ve been working on.

Even if we never make a large run it would be worth it to just make a few now that places like cafe press exist.

My favorite piece so far is one I just got the other day in my very own inbox:

show me the way

What's going on

I knew that I stuck my focus particularly on the local store that I failed to take you into consideration. But it's not very late for me as I saw through the http://docs.google.com/doc?id=dcdn4kwd_0dfb8mrfq you insisted about last time. For another time you are accurate...I was able to benefit from the same quality of tablets at a much practical charging.


Defined insurgencies Veteran hindsight opening Cascade Jersey, reporting mountain Intelligence Griffin or Revenge.
Read image release warehouses mis, escalate.



I'm look forward to talking to you later
Otman

Week #45 James Call’s World - Conceptual Art

So I didn’t have any idea what to post for this week so I asked James Call if he had any ideas this was his response:

"Yeah I think the backgrounds in Super Mario Brothers 1 and other famous video games should be filtered out (like, filter out blue or black, etc.) and replaced with congressional hearings, documentaries about torture, etc. I also think old episodes of Love Connection should be randomly interspersed in the middle of any given television show, especially news programming, like someone needs to invent a machine that does that. I also think occupying an entire city block and populating it entirely with cats and dogs - only humans allowed are caretakers, who can only visit - should happen.”

My idea would be to either work this into my ideas for project #25 (The James Project) or #37 (Greg Travis James Call Greg Travis).

Either way I think the best way to do it is to document these ideas as if James had already done them complete with pictures of there completion and critical/popular responses to them.

Week #37 Greg Travis James Call Greg Travis - The Emails from New York During the First Decade of the New Century - Book

Recently I received this email from a guy named Greg Travis who I’d only met once or twice:

Vermont

Will you write a song called vermont

Or will you waste your FREE TIME.

What an opportinity you have and you don't even realize it.

Make something. CREATE SOMETHING.

Draw a picture and give it to someone.

Take your time doing it.

Make it PERFECT.

Call someone on the telephone.

Remember These?

.

Make it a priority in your life to make it to Vermont at some point

To bask in the colors of the leaves.

-GT

Oddly enough Greg has a half-brother also named Greg Travis. This Greg Travis I know much better I got this email from him recently:

Dicko Asscock & The Mind Police
> Live @ The Paladium
> $8

Dr. Wehrner Milliner And The Atrocious Techniques
w/ opener Tilly Jones of Magna Carta Cumshot
http://com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com/index.htm

At the Williamsburg Hôpital, corner of Wythe & Tégument

(2,000 P.M. Twentieth drink free. May-December love affairs get in
free. Special all-night shows on quarterly tax deadlines. Sixtieth
drink free. Space heaters available on request. No clapping. 2.5
baths, eat in kitchen, access to good schools. Murder, she wrote.
Tilly Jones appears courtesy Children's Television Workshop. Caution:
earplugs. Four dead in Ohio. I can't believe it's not yogurt. What
the hell is up with Jarmusch these days? You can't find good help
anymore.)

That email was forwarded to me from James Call. Both Greg Travis’ where in James’ band at one time or another.

James sends me things like this:

July... a time when people's thoughts turn to hot eggnog and presents under the tree. But did you know that July is also Rick James Awareness Month?

Rick James was born in a city we call Buffalo, 30 degrees below, but he didn't remain there long, soon entering America's hearts and minds as one of our premiere recording artists.

Rick James recorded several of his finest records at the Record Plant in Sausalito, CA (in my very own Marin County, back before the yuppies took over), where later Huey Lewis & The News would record the album "Sports"*. He was famous for simply dictating his assorted bass, horn, guitar and synth lines to his backing band, a la "No, it goes duh-doodledoodledoodledoodle-duh-duh-duh-DOOT," etc. From such non-traditional directions, Hits were made.

Though James is well known for capturing a 24-year old girl in his basement, typing her up for 6 days, forcing her to perform sexual acts, and burning her with a crack cocaine pipe, often overlooked is his even more horrific torture of Motown group the Temptations. James kept the Temptations in an environmentally sealed chamber and would only release them to bark terrible commands at them, such as "TEMPTATIONS SING!" It is alleged that James kept the Temptations alive by feeding them the flesh of lesser Motown groups, including the Spinners and the original Bar-Kays.

Though most well known for his super-hit "Superfreak," which would later be sampled by Stanely "M.C. Hammer" Burrell in the form of "U Can't Touch This," Rick James has produced countless hits along similar lines. Today, we present to you two quality examples of Mr. James' more frenetic work. Enjoy.

* August is Huey Lewis awareness month.

I’ve been receiving emails like this from the three of them for a long time. I’ve been keeping them in a little folder on my computer called “web art”. I wasn’t sure what else to call it.

After receiving Greg’s “Vermont” email I was inspired to put them all together as book for the rest of the world to enjoy. I thought I’d bind it and market it sort of like one of those books of letters between famous people.

The fact that two of the people where named Greg Travis just made it that much better.

All I’d really need to put this together would be copies of illustrator and photoshop and maybe someone who actually knows how to use them. Then I just need to wait until the end of the decade and I’ll print up some short runs of them.

Week #30 Reviewing the Reviewers - Website, book

I was pretty swamped last week with the Mishap Prom so that's why there was no post. But now I'm back (if maybe a day later than I would have hoped.)

This week's project is one that's still very much in it's larval stages. I came up with it a while back when I was looking for the phone number for the Li Po Lounge. The Li Po is a drinking establishment in Chinatown very close to my heart; after all this is where my theatre company Sleepwalker's Theatre was essentially formed. Still it is not a place oozing with swankyness, nor does it try to be.

It is my belief that all forms of criticism should be based on whether a project or place succeeds in what it's attempting to do. Therefore I was a little peeved when I saw on the Li Po Yelp page, next to some glowing semi-ironic ones, a few reviews disparaging it's dingyness, criticizing it's bathroom and even one that mentioned the "pervy chinatown ruffians".

After my initial irritation I began to wonder a little about the people who wrote these things. Where did there impulse to criticize come from? Where does that impulse come from in any of us?

To answer these questions, as well as give reviewers a little taste of there own medicine, I thought it would be cool to create a website where we review the reviewers. As a start I thought we'd review each person who's posted regularly to Yelp in a very methodical way. Read all their reviews and point out recurrent themes and make thesis's about where there impulses and quarks came from.

The natural extension of this would be to write a small book where you review famous critics in mainstream media the same way they review movies, books, food and music.

I'm not sure how hard this would be to do as a website but I do know the amount of work it would take to actually write the reviews might not be worth it. Still if this website existed I'd read it.

Week #28 Better Biographies - Book

This weeks project is one I just thought up but I'm kind of exited about it. Three separate things inspired it:

1) When I was in New York recently I bought a tiny little hard cover book from a street side book seller about Sarah Michelle Gellar. Despite my deep love for buffy, the mere existence of the book was ludicrous. Also Sarah Michelle Gellar had just about the most boring life story ever.

2) I was reading my book of short film biographies, the biographical dictionary of film, and I came across of the director “George Stevens”. He directed Fred and Ginger in Swing Time, Montgomery Clift in "A Place in the Sun" and the story of christ in the Greatest Story Ever Told. He also shot some of the 16 mm footage of the liberation of Dachau.

3) Recently, with my Cultures of Wonder project and a few others in this blog, I’ve gotten more and more interested in creating fictions and presenting them as part of the real world.

I thought “what about writing fictitious biographies for real people?”. That way we could make Sarah Michelle Gellar as interesting to read about as George Stevens. After all public peoples life stories are usually told with an eye for entertainment, why not just cut out the editorializing and invent the entire thing.

I’d want to do about 20 of them and present them as a book. I’d love to have twenty different writers work on it, one for every celebrity. Maybe I’d even get someone to illustrate it with portraits supposedly commissioned by the celebrities, although that might be too silly.

Week #22 A Biographical Dictionary of Comic Books - Book

Anyone who’s ever lived with me or spent a long period of time at my house is familiar with the Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomas. It’s been in my bathroom for about 10 years.

For those of you not familiar with it. It’s a book that covers, in alphabetical order, everyone who made there life in films. These lives are covered as sort of critical biographies. There criticisms more than they are lists of facts from peoples lives. Therefore of George Lucas’ later Star Wars films he has this to say “maybe someday robots will watch them” of Michael Bay he has opens thus “In the summer of 2001 there was a story going around hollywood that Michael Bay was seriously depressed.” and ends like this “We may respect his suffering, but we know this: ours is greater. And he has millions as medicine.”

There’s positive ones as well. Some beautiful writing on Welles and even Chronenberg. But the nasty stuff is really the best.

My idea is to create the same thousand page epic but for lives made in comic books. Create a true critical analysis of comic book creators from Stan Lee to Art Spiegelman to Rob Liefeld.

Just like the film book I’d attempt to cover everyone who’s really made there life in the art form. Naturally I couldn’t get everyone but there’s easily over a thousand I could name right now who’ve made the medium what it is.

There’s already a great book by called Slings & Arrows: Comic Guide, a critical assessment of over 2500 titles. But there’s nothing out there to cover the people that made these comics.

Naturally this is a huge undertaking and also a rather expensive one. I’ve read more comic books than most people on earth but still there’s some major gaps in my reading. It would make sense to have a partner or partners but what makes the film book so good is that it’s all writen in one voice. Maybe we could get away with two distinct voices.