Accept no substitutes

Month: April 2008 (Page 1 of 2)

Painting with Trowels

Summer-BoggessLynn Boggess paints with trowels. Standard issue trowels that he machines into service for applying and removing oil paint on canvas in plein air along the mountain rivers and streams of West Virginia.

Saturday, I was at Tyndall Galleries enjoying a new show of Boggess’ paintings, large oils that more often than not still smelled a bit wet and rich as if you were just in the studio with them. The thick layering of paint means that the shadows on the canvas move as if you were watching the scene through a very clear glass or across a cool mountain creek. The paintings up close are textured pieces of oil paint architecture, but at a short distance they are more real than any photograph and with the shadows alive.

As I left the opening and went to the parking lot, I saw a bunch of folks from the show gathered around a truck. There was Boggess explaining his trowels to other artists. We all got to hold his instruments, then he took out his easel. You can see him using it here.

That easel is a piece of work on its own. It must be strong enough to how a large canvas against the wind and adjustable enough to work on almost any mountain-side river bank. It must be portable and compact. It must expand and hold the paint and tools — no brushes. It must be simple to set up and adjust. Boggess has all of that done well in his homemade contraption.

Primary Fever in NC

This afternoon, Fug singer, author and poet Ed Sanders was singing an ode to Obama — “like the oak tree of Lincoln in the forever of America, someone has come like a giant of promise” [lyrics here in PDF] But Sanders also read a long piece about the last days of Bobby Kennedy saying that was the last time he had had so much hope in a candidate for president. “Robert Kennedy Recites from Agamemnon” [PDF]

About the second that I walked out of the Sanders and Anne Waldman reading/performance, Dave Menconi posted the ways to get tickets to the Obama rally featuring Superchunk and Arcade Fire in Carrboro (at 2 pm on Town Commons). Barak Obama may or may not appear there.

No sooner did I get home then I found from a call that President Bill Clinton would be in Hillsborough at 1:45 p.m. Orange County Baseball Field.

A Republican friend told me over lunch yesterday, “I think I have tickets to the Democratic candidates debate if it happens. I’d like to see them duke it out. Then I’ll feel even better voting for McCain.” No evidence of McCain coming to NC anytime soon though — and the debate? It won’t happen as it turns out.

UPDATE: Just got a Hillary RoboCall to tell me about the Bill Clinton appearance in Hillsborough tomorrow.

Upcoming Week in Poetry

Lester, Beats, Writers Conference and Adcock are all on this coming week.

Patrick Herron will be reading and talking about his poetry and that of Lester on Tuesday April 22 at noon – 1:15 pm at Duke’s John Hope Franklin Center, Room 240. Patrick Herron is a poet, musician, artist and information scientist living in Chapel Hill, NC, USA. His doll Lester is the author of the book /Be Somebody/ forthcoming in March 2008 from Effing Press (a 2003 review from Ron Silliman here). For more on Patrick and Lester see this blog entry

Anne Waldman and Ed Sanders will be reading their poems at UNC’s Bull’s Head Bookstore at 3:30 pm on Tuesday April 22.

Waldman, Sanders, Lawrence Ferlinghetti biographer Bill Morgan and Robert Cantwell will present a panel “THE BEATS AND BEYOND: COUNTERCULTURE POETICS, 1952-1975” on Wednesday April 23 in Wilson Library beginning with a 5:00 pm Reception and Exhibit in the Melba Remig Saltarelli Room followed by the 5:45 pm Program in Pleasants Family Assembly Room. More about that event and very hip poster here.

On Saturday, April 26, from 8 a.m. until 5:45 p.m. in the Elliott University Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro is the 2008 North Carolina Writers’ Network Spring Conference featuring at keynote talk by poet Linda Gregg. The full schedule is here.

Sunday April 27 at 3:00, Betty Adcock and Elizabeth Seydel Morgan will read their poems at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh.

Fred lets Freedom Flow

You need this! I did and I didn’t know it. Fred has released Freedom. Freedom isn’t free — first you must have an Apple then you should donate $10 to Fred. He says:

Freedom is an application that disables wireless and ethernet networking on an Apple computer for one hour at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the internet, to allow you time and space to code, write, or create.

Many studies have found that hour-long chunks provide optimal work flows. At the end of one hour, Freedom re-enables your network, restoring everything as normal. Freedom enforces freedom. If you quit Freedom, you will need to restart your computer to re-enable networking.

UPDATE: Fred explains Freedom further on his blog.

More networked by the second!

Last night I finally had time to upload my first muxtape! My twitter buddies were kind enough to retweet about it! Thanks to whoever favorited me there.

Now I have Facebook Chat too! I went to test it and 20+ friends were already there and suddenly I had 5 conversations at once. I have to report one that I had with a journalist to the UNC Attys but there is no log function that I can see.

But wait there is more! Muxtapes play on the iPhone too! Kinda in a slow way with a lot of pauses, but still it can hear Courtney Pine where ever I am without having to have remembered to put him on my iPod.

Now i need to test out Blog-it from Six Apart.

What was I going to do today?

Oh Yes: at 4:15 “Challenges at the Public/Private Boundary: Partnerships, Gifts, and Names” (Lew Margolis, Peggy Glenn, Paul Jones, and Julie MacMillan, moderated by David Potenziani) at the School of Public Health in the Blue Cross Blue Shield Auditorium.

Open Source in Information Science?

Today I tweeted “What would you teach in an Open Source track in Information Science?” Since my tweets also get carried over to Facebook, FriendFeed and even to the sidebar of this blog, I want to bring together some of the comments here:

@smalljones Good ?, tons! inventive uses of OS tech to preserve, catalog, and share info. How it can change the way we interact with info…

I think that could be a really good track to add to SILS, there’s tons of great stuff you could do! Which I’m sure you know 🙂

@smalljones: I’d look at OSS tools for building online collections of “stuff” (e.g., DSpace, Greenstone), but then again, I’m biased.

How to drive UX, IA, etc. in FLOSS projects as part of a distributed team

@smalljones is the goal to create experts in open source ideology or in open source technology?

More in the comments below.

Phil Meyer interview in interesting times

Mark Schultz of the Chapel Hill News’ Orange Chat did a two part interview with my colleague Phil Meyer about the Vanishing Newspaper — just as the News and Observer is doing some tough reporting on the Governor and being rumored to be cutting staff. [The rumor as regards the Chapel Hill News turns out to be true]

In Part One, Phil says:

“If you’re looking for a way to do business as you’ve always done it, I’m sorry there isn’t any. The world has moved on, and the newspaper industry has awakened to that fact too late.”

In Part Two, he tells Schultz (and us):

“There will always be somebody to supply the reader the information that he or she needs. It might be something like the Raleigh Chrionicle [sic – so much for quality editing – pj], which is growing right in front of your nose.”

NOTE: Unfortunately, the Raleigh Chronicle isn’t staying independent. This just in:

The Raleigh Chronicle 14.APR.08
RALEIGH – After serving over a million readers in the Raleigh community, the locally owned Raleigh Chronicle will close on Tuesday, as another newspaper purchases the publication. A more detailed story will appear on Tuesday, the final day of publication for the Raleigh Chronicle.

Patrick’s Two Books and his Two Minds

Former ibiblian Patrick Herron has not one but two books out this past week.

First we have “Text Mining For Genomics-Based Drug Discovery” (VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller Akt.ges.&Co.KG, 2008) of which the publisher says:

The present book re-frames text mining as an approach to automate the generation of novel and interesting information, reviews successful exemplary text mining appli­cations, and examines a case study of a leading pharma­ceutical company within the book’s proposed novelty-generation paradigm. The present book is written for a wide range of professionals and scholars, not only for infor­mation scientists, industry analysts, and pharmaceutical executives, but also for those interested in innovation studies and the automated acceleration of discovery.

A bargin at about 57 cents per page.

The other book, a book of poetry, “Be Somebody” (Effing Press, 2008) is credited to a not quite altered ego of Patrick, Lester, a dummy of sorts, a literal literate wooden head. Poet and critic Ron Silliman says of “Be Somebody”:

Like somebody who understands that what makes Moby Dick great is all that stuff about whales, Be Somebody is difficult in the way the very best books are – it challenges our desire for the familiar (and nothing is more familiar than my pronoun, not even my name) & holds on like a pit bull with lockjaw for the entire trip, in this instance 58 pages.

Someday, someone is going to publish this book & then we will all have to deal with Lester’s intimate striptease of the self. Until then, it will remain – like the full-length version of Mark Peters’ Men – one of the great rumors of contemporary poetry. Lester has his website. But you have to read the book.

Is there higher praise?

Patrick serves as Research Analyst and Technologist for the Jenkins Chair at Duke University, where he studies innovation networks via the automated analysis of large document collections and teaches new media studies.

Writers Conf, Geek Camp coming up

Registration is open! For the Spring NC Writers Conference and for BarCampRDU:

First up on Saturday, April 26, from 8 a.m. until 5:45 p.m. in the Elliott University Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro is the 2008 North Carolina Writers’ Network Spring Conference featuring at keynote talk by poet Linda Gregg. The full schedule is here.

BarCampRDU isn’t until August 2, 2008 – Red Hat World Headquaters, Raleigh, NC.
But it’s time to sign up and to help organize the self-organizing conference. Wayne Sutton has taken the lead on this one. While is is wonderful and has a pile of energy, BarCampRDU needs you to make it run and make it fun. BarCampRDU Blog, BarCampRDU mailing list, and the main BarCampRDU organizing tool — the BarCampRDU wiki.

TriLUG presents me (this Thursday)

join here with gtalk

Who: Paul Jones speaking on “5 big ideas of ibiblio, 3 laws of ibiblio”

What: Triangle Linux Users Group April Meeting

Where: Red Hat World Headquarters, NCSU’s Centennial Campus Raleigh, NC

When: Thursday April 10
7:00pm — meeting starts
7:05pm — eat pizza
7:20pm — main talk (me)
8:30pm — finish, take questions
9:00pm — Red Hat kicks us out of the building

More: For the past 15 years, ibiblio has remained one of the major brands in the Open Source ecosystem providing services to over 3,000 projects in Open Source and Open Information. A center for collaboration, innovation and service, ibiblio (as sunsite.unc.edu and later as metalab.unc.edu) pioneered website hosting, Internet radio, network-distributed Linux distributions , and other ground- breaking activities.

PaulJones, founder and director of ibiblio.org, will talk about how the Big Ideas are put into practice and how they have played out in such
specific projects as Project Gutenberg, Groklaw, Degree Confluence, eTree.org, The Linux Documentation Project, Roger McGuinn’s Folk Den and other ibiblio-hosted and supported projects.

Beats in the Library – April 23

THE BEATS AND BEYOND: COUNTERCULTURE POETICS, 1952-1975

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

The panel discussion will focus on avant-garde poetry in post-World War II America. Moderated by Bill Morgan, author of a well received biography of Allen Ginsberg, the panel includes Robert Cantwell, professor of American Studies at UNC; Ed Sanders, author of “The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem;” and Anne Waldman, professor of writing and poetics at Naropa University and co-founder with Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. The exhibit showcases publications, drawings, photos, and handwritten items association with well-know poets such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and explores how the Beat movement influenced their contemporaries and writers who followed.

5:00 pm Reception and Exhibit, Melba Remig Saltarelli Room
5:45 pm Program, Pleasants Family Assembly Room, Wilson Library

Loada Links on and about our Minds

Just added to Del.icio.us:

They were smarter, or at least bigger brained, now they are dead and gone and nearly forgotten. “The superintelligent Boskops had small, childlike faces and huge melon heads.” a review and link to Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence in Discovery Magazine.

Revenues at Craig’s List are estimated to have grown 47% last year says CNet. But since CL is privately held, they don’t have to tell us. The charts and reporting may be voodoo but they are impressive. But not taking money at every turn, you can get more market!

In NYTimes Magazine’s The Medium this week
, Virginia Heffernan notices that “The Internet discussion forum with the most subscribers in the world is Gaia Online, a site for people who like to dress up as cartoon characters.” But she quickly moves on to write about Prison Talk, a social networking site for folks in prison and their families.

OK Go‘s Damian Kulash gets the Net Neutrality religion and explains why you should too on the Times OpEd pages in “Beware The New New Thing.”

Why should you blog? To get a blook deal. NYTimes Style section discovers Stuff White People Like (isn’t that all the NYT Styles secton is?) and that the blogger has a big fat book deal. On your coffee table soon, white man.

If you don’t get a blook deal, you could still get rich and still whine about it. TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington is one of several bloggers cited in the NYTimes PANIC! article “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.” He gained 30 pounds in three years of blogging! Everyone knows that other writers everywhere have much healthier habits like drinking, smoking and working in isolation. They, unlike Arrington, would never gain weight.

Closer to home but also in the NYTimes, neighbor and author Lee Smith writes an article “In North Carolina, Really Outsider Art” about even nearer neighbor Phillip Brubaker’s documentary on Art and mental illness “Brushes With Life: The Journey of Art.” Included in the article are great insights from Peter Kramer critiquing the failures of North Carolina’s pathetic attempt to “reform” mental health care.

Also in the Sunday Times’ Unboxed column, NYT that is, Janet-Rae-Dupree gets on the MFA vs MBA vs CS degree debate with “Let Computers Compute. It’s the Age of the Right Brain.”

Upcoming Copyright Talks at UNC and Duke

Copyright Limitations and Exceptions: from access to research to transformative use

Saturday, April 12, 2008, 9am – 4:15pm
Room 4047, Duke Law School, Durham, North Carolina

This international workshop will focus on the introduction of new – and the use of old – flexibilities in the copyright system in order to promote greater access to scientific and scholarly knowledge, particularly in the digital environment. It will also explore ways to foster creative or “transformative” uses of digital content.

“Amending the Copyright Act for the Digital Environment: A Panel Discussion.”

Friday, April 11, 2008
3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
209 Manning Hall
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Libraries, archives, and museums find copyright law fails to address many situations in the electronic information age. A March 2008 report by the Section 108 Study Group proposes solutions that could be the subject of new legislation.

This panel will review the new report and provide unique insights from within the Study Group, from the field of academic libraries and scholarly publishing, and from the European perspective.

Panelists include:
* Lolly Gasaway, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, University of North Carolina School of Law and Co-Chair of the Section 108 Study Group
* Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer, Duke University Libraries
* Javier Hernandez-Ros, Head of Information Market Unit, European Commission Information Society Directorate

T-Bone Burnett and Callie Khouri – twitterstream

t-bone burnett today at 11 in Wilson Library!
@profdebock Mr t-bone hisself with Callie Khouri who wrote “Thelma and Louise” and directed “Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”
bill ferris intros t-bone burnett Who started by building recording studio in his home at 17 leading to the Dylan rolling thunder to brother
t-bone sez music is too much about attack on the ears and less about resonance – bands act like shoemakers who cut off peoples feet
he wants to max tone and min attack
T-bone loves those overtones They are incontrollable
digital recording is a disaster but earlier hifi as defined by riaa curve gave us an std to follow he doesnt like copies! CDs in particular
need to tell him about SHN and FLAC
t-bone allows no plastic in the room when he records say civil war music. No parallel walls either
he loves plastic disks tho. Hear Beatles on LP sez t-bone. He has company called code spelled XODE where D = delta
talking about Walk the Line and Oh Bro. how to be authentic and accessible. Sound is more like Traffic (with Stevie Winwood) by adding bottom
all CDs are over bright and in the top 25% of the range. So they suck and don’t fulfill the promise of CDs – t- bone
same as 1965 no digital post process (really?) using 2 inch tape but admits using protools. no fan of remix culture -unless its him
but an mp3 could sound better than a cd -sez t-bone. Give listener choice of good copies.
audience wants him to talk about DRM. He says no DRM
best listening environment – two hifi speakers on a room. need special mix for earbuds. Xode will provide that
on current country music trad is taking over and country is a branch of trad that took an odd turn. Only 5 country side men in Nashville
allison krause and Robert plant collabos best two singers since the Beatles. On tour soon including Raleigh and Asheville
t-bone hands podium to thelma and louise author callie khouri
movie biz doesnt know what’s up. She on the writers strike and how creators have become workers for hire. She hates this. She is a writer
studio films sux. Cuz studios make product instead of films. So films with strong females don’t bring in the dudes
Talking movie marketing. I ask not put loud: why mass market target audience films? Its expensive and doesnt pay
khouri sez American comedies don’t play international and vice versa. But blowup films like Rambo bring in the euros
callie had not read The Awakening before she wrote Thelma and Louise. Thank gawd sez she.
“something to talk about” callie sez I write pictures not words! Don’t explicate; visualize.
callie on directing ya ya sisterhood and adapting a novel to film.
callie on first trip to NYC: you mean all this was out here and I spent all that time in Paducah KY!! (she was 21 and now misses KY) some

Great talk sponsored by the Center for the Study of the American South. Tweets don’t cover all the good things said — especially about T-Bone’s company, XODE, and the processes involved some of which is secret to me too nor do they capture the energy and passion that Callie brought to her discussion. But there it is real time for those of you who don’t tweet. Sorry not to #tag; the iPhone makes that a pain.

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