Wikileaks, truth unchained

Wikileaks. This is exciting. Well, exciting if you are interested in a truly free grassroots press dedicated to exposing the secrets, lies and video tape of oppressive regimes (including ours) and spanking the muzzled lap dog faux journalists supporting them. You know. All that stuff. Here's a bit from Wikileak's About page. See for yourself:

Should the press really be free?

In its landmark ruling on the Pentagon Papers, the US Supreme Court ruled that "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government." We agree.

The ruling stated that "paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."

It's easy to perceive the connection between publication and the complaints people make about publication. But this generates a perception bias, because it overlooks the vastness of the invisible. It overlooks the unintended consequences of failing to publish and it overlooks all those who are emancipated by a climate of free speech. Such a climate is a motivating force for governments and corporations to act justly. If acting in a just manner is easier than acting in an unjust manner, most actions will be just.

Injustice concealed cannot be answered. Concealed plans for future injustice cannot be stopped until they are revealed by becoming a reality, which is too late. Administrative injustice, by definition affects many.

Government has ample avenues to restrict and abuse revelation, not limited to the full force of intelligence, law enforcement, and complicit media. Moves towards the democratization of revelation are strongly biased in favor of justice. Where democratized revelations are unjust they tend to affect isolated individuals, but where they are just, they affect systems of policy, planning and governance and through them the lives of all.

Europeans sometimes criticize the freedom of the press in the United States, pointing to a salacious mainstream media. But that is not democratized revelation, rather it is the discovery by accountants that is a lot cheaper to print celebratory gossip than it is to fund investigative journalists. Instead we point to the internet as a whole, which although not yet a vehicle of universal free revelation, is starting to approach it. Look at the resulting instances of, and momentum for, positive political change.

Wikileaks reveals, but is not limited to revelation. There are many existing avenues on the internet for revelation. What does not exist is a social movement emblazoning the virtues of ethical leaking. What does not exist is a universal, safe and easy means for leaking. What does not exist is a way to turn raw leaks into politically influential knowledge through the revolutionary collaborative analysis pioneered by wikipedia.

Sufficient leaking will bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality from their peoples. Daniel Ellsberg calls for it. Everyone knows it. We're doing it.

Comics forth coming. I promise.

Talk is Cheap

A hilarious new video by overunderwear.

Talk is Cheap

Bernie does the Comma

Bernie Beauchamp promises his marionette theatre is so edgy that it will "rip the head off of conventional puppetry" but his show at Comma Coffee had about as much edge as a balloon. Of course my own Invisible Theatre productions can hardly be called edgy themselves, including gripping episodes of three heads swinging in a swing to the music of William Shatner, but I make no claims. The low point in the Bernie's Saturday night performance was an ultra boring rendition of, not one but two, hard rock day glow guitar sync numbers but at that point the show went from middling to absurd and so became interesting as I am a fan of the meta absurd.

However on stage, and I suspect off, Bernie is a likable guy with a measure of grease paint for blood so in spite of the fact that no heads rolled, in its own sweet way, the show rocked. The tap dance number was especially nice as were a couple of the Vegas show tunes, perhaps because Vegas is itself a puppet show, just on a much grander scale. Eventually, some people in the audience started singing along, a baby laughed and danced as her mother dangled and bounced her over the floor and the marionettes charmed this particularly charming little girl in the big hat. It is fair to say that, especially for some, Bernie and his troope were a big hit. I just wanted more because his puppets are so darn beautiful, but maybe he toned it down for the Comma.

Bluesy Bessie

00:17


High point for audience

00:46


Rockin' with Janis

00:26

Your next chance to catch Bernie and his friends will be in Reno during the first annual extravaganza Dada Motel, June 28th - 30. They will be appearing at the Studio on 4th, the Trocadero Room in the El Cortez Hotel, and at the River Plaza.



--------------------------------------------------

Ps. I did a quick search at YouTube on the subject and found Scott Land's marionettes. I don't know if they are really "edgy" either but they have interesting head and eye movements and interact with people which adds an extra dimension. As you might have guessed by now, I like puppets.



02:10

Jed's Other Poem

Even if you don't like poetry you might like this video poem or, if you've already seen it, might enjoy seeing it again. It's that kind of thing. It was made by a very interesting guy named Stewart. The music is by Grandaddy. Warning. Their site opens with music.

"Jeddy-3 the humanoid was assembled in the kitchen out of spare parts. Before Jed's system died he wrote poems. Poems for no one." more history here.

Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)

The critique

I finally got the critique of the poems I entered in the Nevada Arts Council Artist Fellowship Program last spring. It took long enough. If you are one of the rare regular readers here you perhaps remember I was not awarded the $5000 grant but you may have been on the edge of your keyboard waiting for the judge's commentary to arrive. Well, probably not. I'd forgotten all about it myself. At any rate, in keeping with my dedication to truth and transparency here at the language barrier, I'm posting the panels comments (there were two judges), as is (including typos) just as I did last year. If nothing else, it's another item for the alien's data bank who cleverly gave us this technology knowing we will freely pour our hearts out into the void.

ARTISTS FELLOWSHIP FY07
LITERARY ARTS APPLICATIONS

Application Number 331
Discipline / Category Literary Art - Poetry


Panel Comments

Found these poems intriguing, mysterious. Especially liked "Skin Trade"


Some strong imagistic details: "an old man...gulping like a fish," the synesthesia of "leathery squeak," "dusty clods of petals and wax." These poems are strongest when centered in image; where rhetoric outweighs image, they become slightly less so. The poems are consistent in tone: ominous, detached. The poet should trust in his/her image making to convey this surreal landscape without the need for flatter discursive passages such as the opening lines of "Road's Eye View" and "Skin Trade."


Interesting since (their misuse of word) of mystery remind me of some surrealist French poems. The musically did not work for me. There was not much effort to create a song pattern that work as part of the package.


Stunning images very surreal, but at the heart surreal there is a process of uncovering a deeper reality, a deeper meaning. I'm not quite sure what the poems were cohesively adding up to. The language was inventive and creative thematically but not quite there.

"Discursive passages"? Okay. But "not much effort to create a song pattern that work as part of the package"? Package? As in word product? I'm glad these guys don't get it.

It's movie time

...but quickly...

here's a great, fun link Fall Down Six Times, get up seven. Hilarious worst case scenario, ridiculous best case scenario and 4 more wacky but oddly compelling points of view. Well worth a read.

Also a little reminder...with summer coming on don't forget your sun block.

Sun lover on Venice beach

Big names, bad poets

Billy Collins was US Poet Laureate from 2001–2003. He was replaced by Ted Kooser, a retired insurance executive. Both men are oozing academic credentials, adoring fans and accolades from all the right institutions. They are also bad poets. Their poems are safe like the dead organisms that inoculate and make people immune to the living ones. Naturally, its easy to take pot shots at famous people. It's a lazy man's sport, like fishing a stocked lake. And it's sad in a blowsy way to criticize the successful. After all, do they not set the bar? Have they not risen above us all precisely because they are more worthy? But the husk also floats to the surface and all too often famous poets poison the art. A few years ago Drunken Boat published a wonderful critique of Billy Collins. Paul Stephens wrote it. I just read it today; a forward from BeatBaby, aka Mr. Lee. I'm posting an excerpt from it here. Perhaps it will help to inspire some someone to risk entering the cold fire.

An Apology for Poetry, or, Why Bother With Billy Collins?

Billy Collins is to good poetry what Kenny G is to Charlie Parker; what sunset paintings at the mall are to Jackson Pollock; what Rod McKuen is to Walt Whitman; what Tori Spelling is to Lana Turner; what the burka is to lingerie; what the Backstreet Boys are to the Beatles; what George W. Bush is to the art of extemporaneous speech; what Osama bin Laden is to women’s liberation; what Dan Quayle is to spelling; Billy Collins is to poetry what the New Age/Mysticism section in the bookstore is to the Philosophy section, assuming that those two sections haven’t been conflated yet down at your local Barnes and Noble.

I could go on with list. But I don’t mean to suggest that Collins is kitsch, for though Collins may sometimes make gestures toward kitsch, he is very much working in a quasi-high culture mode, even if he occasionally tries to hide the fact. Many of his poems are supposedly witty responses to earlier famous poems (e.g. a poem titled "Dancing Towards Bethlehem").

Collins may not be a very learned poet, but he is not kitsch; Collins is much less interesting than kitsch–he is strictly banal, he wants us to know how uncomfortably banal poetry is, and he does a very good job of making us not want to read poetry any more. The banality of the title of his new Selected Poems, Sailing Alone Around the Room, pretty much says it all. The problem is that with his newfound prestige Collins is no longer sailing by himself."

The New York Times recently published a review of Collins's latest book, 'The Trouble With Poetry'. Their articles get archived quickly so I'm including it here in its entirety. It's also worth a read.

Charming Billy
a review by DAVID ORR / published in the NYT January 8, 2006


I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you

is how the first poem begins
in the new book by Billy Collins
called "The Trouble with Poetry."

It is a typical Collins beginning -
a good-natured wave
across the echoing gulf that stretches

between writer and reader,
as if to suggest
the poem itself exists

in that uncertain, cloud-strewn gap,
and we, as readers,
are very nearly poets ourselves,

even if we are unlikely
to receive recognition as such
in the form of a generous grant

from the Guggenheim Foundation,
which is not to say
we would turn one down, mind you.

Anyway, it is a tribute
to the former Poet Laureate
that he is able to make us believe,

despite our anxious response to poetry,
that we are participating
in each Billy Collins poem,

and that the humorous touches -
like calling a book of poetry
"The Trouble With Poetry" -

are a kind of knowing salute,
one writer to another.
It is a technical achievement

all too easy to underestimate,
and it involves a special sensitivity
to the nature of reading, of hearing,

which is perhaps the reason
so many Billy Collins poems
are about the process of poetry,

as when, in his poem "Workshop,"
he makes the poem itself
a history of its own unfolding,

a strategy that appears again here
in slightly altered form
as the opening to "The Introduction":

I don't think this next poem
needs any introduction -
it's best to let the work speak for itself,

a suave parody
of the nervous preambles
one hears at so many poetry readings,

and exactly the kind of beginning
that allows us to chuckle gently
as a convention is tweaked,

almost as we chuckle gently
in anticipation when we realize
that the book review we've been reading

is about to turn the corner,
and begin placing a writer's shortcomings
alongside his virtues,

by observing, for instance,
that Billy Collins too often relies
on the same blandly ironic tone

and the same conversational free verse,
loosely organized in tercets
or the occasional quatrain
when an extra line jogs onto the page,

or that his poems often begin well
and then spiral down
into unsurprising images

like exhausted birds
unable to stand for anything
beyond the simple fact of exhaustion,

or that, most important,
he is often humorous
without actually being funny,

a difference that depends largely
on a writer's willingness
to let his violent, comic sensibility

turn its knives on the reader,
on the poem,
and on poetry itself,

which may seem like an odd complaint,
given Collins's reputation
for teasing our stuffy poetic traditions.

But the teasing this writer does
is harmless, really, and contrary
to what some critics have suggested,

the problem with his work
is not that it is disrespectful,
but that it is not disrespectful enough;

it never cracks wise
to the teacher's face,
but meekly returns to its desk,

lending itself with disappointing ease
to the stale imagery
of teachers, desks and wisecracking.

In the end, what we need
from a poet with Collins's talent
is not a good-natured wave

from writer to reader,
or a literary joke, or a mild chuckle;
what we need is to be drawn

high into the poem's cloud-filled air
and allowed to fall
on rocks real enough to hurt.

Poetry fops

Poetry is a hard gig. It attracts snobs, fops, and experts. Most of it isn't and most po-ets aren't. In fact to call oneself a poet is to invite self-delusion, skepticism, ridicule and shame. And clueless critiques. Which brings me to the subject of my current rant.

I finally got the critique of the poems I submitted to the Nevada Arts Council fellowship panel last spring. You may remember I did not make it past the first cut. At the public judging, one of the judges, heaping praise on the winning contestant, exclaimed her socks were detonated by the line, "I have seen heaven and it looks like Paris". How can I compete? Ah well. Perhaps I am just bitter.

It is clear I did not please the judges. They wrote that they were confused and disoriented by my poems which, obviously to them, is a bad thing. I call it a good beginning but what do I know? Oh well. There's no going back. I'm doomed and nobody likes me. All rightie then. Enough throat clearing. On to the comments...

"There are some marvelous moments here. Taken as a whole, though, the poetry here is a bit uneven. There is something of the mystic-poet here; one is reminded at times of William Blake, at other times, of T.S. Eliot.

I sense no real unity in these poems. Their structure and arrangement shift from poem to poem and from moment to moment in some poems. Occasionally there is an interesting insight or moment of wisdom such as "For every prayer / there is an equal / and opposite prayer." The irregularity of the line lengths makes it seem like there is no design. The images in "Road's Eye View" are captivating, but the second stanza is confusing and disorienting. The poet seems to be focused on and oriented towards moments, some of them entrancing, but those moments don't add up to a coherent all-encompassing effect or anything one might call a theme."

Roller Skate Skinny

I just stumbled on a great blog, Roller Skate Skinny. It´s fresh, honest, intelligent, real and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Do yourself a favor and check it out, oh and leave a comment. Everybody likes a nod of encouragement now and then and this girl certainly deserves one.