Category: Reflections

So I was seeing someone
when I bought the DARNED things.
Now he’s gone

                        And

I’m stuck
with two seats. I COULD try
and sell the one on eBay
and sit there uncomfortably,

by myself,
all night

next to                        
a random stranger. Or

I could sell the one here and sit there with
a random stranger
I would make him talk to me under this guise.

Don’t worry, I’m cute.

You gotta be cute too and-
you gotta send a picture. You want to go because you love Bright Eyes and fun times.

Not because you’re desperate for a date.
 

http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/w4m/110212498.html

(DO YOU THINK PEOPLE SUCK?)

Hey

African American

People all together

Men, Women, Juveniles, Even Infants

I’m a person

I’m back to chill

Now and then

Incredible energy

Need to play low key

Looking to be platonic

Something

Buddy anything

Nice to meet

to know

Screwing focused

working

normal kids get at me

dont be specific

race

dont discriminate

theres no need to be embarrassed

dont worry.

Here is website  http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/w4m/110084733.html

Original from http://www.craigslist.org/sfc/rnr/110211574.html

Reply to: pers-110211574@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-11-10, 6:20AM PST

I cook my own food.I dont want some dirty fat stinky chef jacking off in the can on break and then serving me food.I will buy a ford product tomorrow if I see that wonderful commercial.Fuck you chef wanker, nobody is going to can anyone for what some short order fry cook thinks or worries about.Go home and beat your fat hispanic wife cheffie boy.
no — it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

 
 

110211574

Created Poem:

Cook my own food.
I dont want can food.
I will see that wonderful chef
Nobody is going to can
Fry!
Go fat! 
It’s ok….

This is my attempt at transforming a personal advertisement into poetry.  I found this one on page 132 of the Matches section in the Washington City Paper.  My selection number is 901122; it was titled Green Jacket at Mercury Grill.   You were wearing a green jacket and talking to a female friend.  We smiled and kept smiling long after I passed you.  I wore a red collared shirt and a grey sweater, and was with a friend and her dog.  I came back later and we smiled some more but you were talking to a drag queen.  I finally got a drink as an excuse to meet you but you took off with your friend as we smiled one last time.  I’m ready to say hello.  I hope you will say the same. 

1.  You were wearing a green jacket,
2.              Talking to a female friend.
3.                                      We smiled. 
4.    Kept smiling long after I passed
5.                We smiled one last time,
6.           But, I am ready to say hello.
7.                                       Hope you.
8.                                        The same.

      I played for a little while with Sunshine 69. You pass an interstate sign with a "69" which was symbolic of the project being centered around the year 1969. It starts with the perspective of a car going down road and you are driving it. If you move your cursor over signs passing by, you slow down some to see them. Otherwise, you pass them. I tried to click the other components of the car to see if they work. They initially didn’t until later. The perpspective turned into a swirling spiral with the Golden Gate Bridge. At some point in your drive the radio becomes active and the you can also click what I think are birds. Other parts of the car eventually become active which you can click. Clicking the map, takes you to map. You can pick various locations on the map. Like Afternoon, the narrative changes. There are several journals / diary entries you can read. I clicked through one that focuses on a american soldier’s time Vietnam. He had a girlfriend that had brother that was a Vietcong soldier. 

There are multiple medias in this project. There’s animation, text, and even a paage where you can play songs and recordings also. This piece wasn’t overly complicated. It was easier to understand than other hypertexts that I have looked at. I would say the main theme was of the piece was to give a perspective of life for americans in 1969 or basically the 1960’s in general. 

I thought looking at all of these different ‘poetry generators’ was pretty interesting. I had never thought of a Mad Libs-type generator to be something that would relate to what we’ve been studying in class, but it is, because it requires the reader’s interactivity to function.

Reworking the ‘personal ad’ into a poem made me think again about the importance of form with regards to content. A personal ad seems like a personal ad until you play around with the structure of the lines, the spacing, the indentation, and the formatting – then you can reconstruct it into a poem and give the same words, or content, entirely different meaning.

These ‘poetry generators’ function on a similar concept – they take random words, and place them in a way so that they form poetry. Even "Conversation", which does not use words at all, just sound, can be manipulated in different ways so that it has different ‘effects’ on the reader/viewer.

By using these poetry generators, we are able to play around with how different forms can give the same words entirely different meanings.

On page 36 of Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, the variability of new media is discussed.  I related his discussion of new media back to the recent focus on hypertext based on several key passages in this section.  Manovich writes, "A new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions."  Before new media came about in the form of webpages and "flash" movies, once a literary work was published then the plot and story was finalized.  But often in hypertexts, they are so complex that the structure often mirrors a great circle as to make it almost impossible to discern where the narrative ends.  Therefore, the creator or author can easily add segments connected by images or links into the story with little or no alert being raised by the reader.  As a result, the elements of that hypertext are indefinetly variable.  One of the greatest examples of a new media/hypertext would be Wikipedia where a user can edit the material or update the subject.  This is in direct opposition, to a subscriber constantly having to purchase the Encyclopedia Brittanica every year.  Quite a contrast between 10 years ago and now.

Jason’s Media Analysis #2 

www.angelfire.com/alt2/jaclyn_kennard/thecoloroftelevision.html

http://mason.gmu.edu/~bbey/textualMedia343