Tag Archives: DJ Spooky

Starting: Source Materials

Is it just me, or do other writers and artists get this giddy and anxious feeling about starting a project. What I have in mind is barely fleshed out, but a few contributing factors to this thing I want to/have to write are these:

(1) Thomas Merton on silence, on a poet’s living in silence, on living a life of poetry rather than “ridiculous” editorialism. This is something I really need to take to heart, in the deepest way possible.

(2) Grace Nono‘s recent Bay Area visit, performance, and conversation. To read: her book The Shared Voice: Chanted and Spoken Narratives from the Philippines. And again, as she told us during her recent visit, she’s only scratched the surface of Philippine oral traditions after 15 years of finding her way in and immersing herself in it. I have noticed (it’s hard not to notice) how much tighter and focused, how cohesive as a project or cycle each subsequent CD is. Imagine what Nono’s work will be like in another five years, in another ten years. Just phenomenal.

Continue reading →

DJ Spooky 2: Intellectual Property

Continuing on with yesterday’s thoughts on DJ Spooky’s talk, another point of discussion was about intellectual property/ownership, as well as independently producing and distributing our art. This is where “gift economy” comes in, with the CD mixes he gave away, and his encouragement to trade with others, barter systems, swaps. In literature, in addition to actual physical trading of product between artists, or even the exchange we know as the “review copy,” think of the e-(chap)book, the online journal as examples of gift economy.

So Creative Commons then as perhaps a better way of protecting your rights to your own work, while still allowing for use and distribution of it (speaking of which, I have moved my Creative Commons info up the side bar of this here blog). I remember in college, how expensive course readers became due to the copyright fees of all the publishers (and writers?) whose works were included in the course readers. As a broke ass college student, I didn’t appreciate those rising costs at all. It also just doesn’t make sense to me that for educational purposes, that is, free of profit making, we can’t just photocopy a text and hand it to a classroom of students to read and discuss. As an author, I really do appreciate book sales due to course adoption, but I also know that can limit access to the work. And I truly do prefer students being able to read my work online, and via Xerox copies from their teachers, when the alternative is that no one will be reading and discussing it.

Regarding recording artists, DJ Spooky brought up Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead, for their much publicized free album downloads, as well as Saul Williams’ album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, produced by Trent Reznor (who is NIN). Again, something I’ve brought up here a few times before (for example: here and here) regarding being independent artists, i.e. not beholden to major record labels, producers, folks who can potentially compromise an artist’s vision in favor of overproduced commodity. I say all these things knowing how idealistic it all sounds, full control over your own product, and full control over distribution of said product.

Oscar has reminded me of Prince, who bypassed that whole record label industry early on, selling directly from his own website, and however well done or not well done it was, these days, perhaps he’s considered a visionary. Certainly, previous to this, his much publicized previous name change to “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince,” showed us that he refused to be beholden to the industry. Now we see folks like the new Journey, whose recently released Revelation was independently produced, negotiating directly with distributors. The whole business model is changing. It’s a myth, DJ Spooky says, this being plucked out of obscurity, signed on a major label, produced by a big shot producer, and having all your recording dreams come true.

I still think we poets have much to learn from the music industry. I say these things having relatively smooth relationships with my publishers, again sentimentally attached to the artifact that is the book, and knowing full well that this e-space and other e-spaces are more far-reaching than any one print publication in which I am included. And really, the two are not independent of each other. The good news is that since Oscar and I have acquired some basic recording equipment, you will continue seeing more poet mp3′s and poet YouTube videos coming out of us and folks around us. All this, as I continue to work out my digital to analog book project.

As poets, as artists, we ought to remember to be creative about all aspects of our work, how to get it into the world, how to share it with others, how to ensure access to it. That is our responsibility before it is anybody else’s. And I suppose that’s my last bit for now on intellectual property and ownership; if it really is ours, then we will do everything we can for it to get into the hands of readers, we will take responsibility for that, and we should have some savvy and some fun about it. And we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be beholden to, enbitched by the Poetic Industrial Complex.

Rainy day here in Oakland, and the garden is loving it. It’s also All Saints’ Day, which means we will be back at the Oakland Museum to get a better look at the Día de los Muertos exhibit there. This also means some Ibarra hot chocolate at some point today. As well, we are fully contented being tapped into the West Oakland community food justice organization the People’s Grocery, and the amazing phenomenon known as the Grub Box!

What DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid Taught Me

Some points from DJ Spooky‘s talk yesterday evening at City Lights Books, for the release of the book Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture:

  • Remix: fragments reconstructed to create a new thing.
  • Portability.
  • De-materialization of art.
  • Enacting of diaspora.
  • Containing multitudes.
  • Gift economy.
  • Emphasis on fluidity, hybridity, and access.
  • Digital literacy.
  • Cycles, repetition, looping versus linearity.

DJ Spooky blew my fucking mind with his talk/presentation, which was in many ways an affirmation for me and everything I’ve been thinking about this book project I am trying to work on. The thing about digital media is that it deemphasizes the actual physical (material) product, or that it places a different “value” on the artifact which is the book, the record (33′s and 45′s!), the cassette tape, the VHS tape, the CD, etc. Think about, for example, the albums we buy on iTunes versus the records and CD’s we used to buy. I am thinking also of the mix tapes we used to make, then burning mix CD’s during Napster et al times, pre-iTunes. Now it’s playlists on the iPod. Oscar tells me he used to have a 6-CD changer in the trunk of his car back in the day, which speaks to the above item, “portability.” Now, how many hours of playlist does one have on a teeny tiny little iPod shuffle? And think of how some folks say that’s just not enough music.

How this relates to my book project. It’s the transfer of digital media into analog. What elements of the digital media can remain intact, or how can we approximate that experience? As DJ Spooky was reading through the table of contents for us, he told us to imagine these as hyperlinks. He’d read a chapter title which sounded intriguing, then he’d flip to that page and “sample” it for us, that is, read from the opening section. And then he’d move on to the next chapter title, and so on. So as I am sifting through the digital media which is my blog, I am finding that tags and categories are really very helpful. I am also finding that the way I/we update a blogpost (say, our ideas are changing or amending themselves over time due to the time we spend thinking about a particular issue, or due to new/additional information to consider continues coming our way): rather than actually editing/amending an old blogpost, we hyperlink back to that original blogpost, and then we simply write a newer blogpost, referencing the previous one.

I am thinking of how Audre Lorde mined her journals (pre-tags, meaning she most likely had to go paper page by paper page rather than performing a search as we know search engine and search function) as she was writing and constructing the published work we know as The Cancer Journals. She included excerpts from her private journal, and she made sure those were dated. So in a way, she had created an Audre Lorde remix. So I refer back to and rephrase one of my original questions: If Lorde, if Gloria Anzaldúa were alive today, what would their analog to digital to analog writing look like?

So I think I am asking a question about digital literacy. How do we read and write in the digital age? How does the shape of the work change? How do we disseminate it? And if you are like me (as I am like, for example, Captain Jean Luc Picard), which means you are still very much in love with and are sentimentally attached to the physical artifact that is the book, then how do we approximate the experience of digital reading and the experience of the book without privileging one medium over another? Another thing we’d discussed in Robin Tremblay-McGaw’s poetry class at USF was the line break, and the suspenses and anticipations, the expectations you set up as you are creating the line breaks for a poem. You are also controlling the pacing; even if a reader is barreling through a poem, s/he still must pause or shift as s/he reaches the end of the line. Think of an old school typewriter’s manual return. Even a small fraction of the time it takes to manually return is a shift for the reader. Reminds me: Back when I was diagnosed with computer use related repetitive motion injury, my occupational health doctor told me that in the olden days, the women typists who worked constantly at the typewriter generally did not contract repetitive motion injuries due to that simple act of the manual return, i.e. not the return key, but the actual return handle. So this tells me our bodies are also learning to adjust themselves to digital culture.

Controlling pacing also happens with white space, the caesura within a poem on a single page, but also this is true of the page break for a poet, and perhaps this applies much more so to the poet who is writing the long poem, the epic. I do think this is an experience specific to or at least more common to the experience of the book, as the pacing of a reader through the caesurae in poems published online – that is controlled by the reader’s ability to scroll down the e-page, and as the previous text (above the caesura) disappears as a reader scrolls down, then the spaces between the texts also disappears.

I’m not sure yet how the above applies to my digital to analog transfer, but I think it does somehow. For sure, this means I can remix my own writing, breaking and restitching to affect looping and progressive cycles, i.e. with less regard for linear time. Ideas, memory, and associations don’t really work in linearity.

Finally, for now, I dig very much DJ Spooky’s relating the remix to the enacting of diaspora and of transnationalism. Consider the fractures in language, in cultural practice, caused by (forced) migration. Now imagine the stitching together of drumbeats (both organic and computer synthesized), traditional song lyrics, over a loop station, now add a rap to it: the result is not one of these single elements but all of the above, hence something new, something transgressing various imposed borders, something new containing multitudes.

[And this I relate back to myself! Because yesterday evening I found a copy of Verse Magazine, which contains such a well-thought and well-written, positive critical review of Poeta en San Francisco. This review was written by one Andy Frazee, who does discuss the multivocalism in/of Poeta, the multiple personae, the multiple languages in operation. In the tradition of, or containing elements of Whitman and Ginsberg, Poeta en San Francisco contains multitudes. Amazing amazing review. I am grateful to Verse and to Frazee. I may put up a pdf of it soon.]