Jacob's Ladder: Platforms

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Platforms
July 31, 2007 File under: Information Technology

Those of you who visit regularly haven't had much to read lately, for which apologies. Let's just say, if it's true there's no rest for the wicked, I might be The Devil's first cousin, 'cause I've been busy, busy, busy. Busy as... (those of you who know me well know what I'd say here).

If a precis may be offered...

The first part of the summer spooled away in the continuing quest for permission to quote a small handful of songs in A Murmuration of Starlings. The end result of that adventure was that, though I got most of the permissions, two publishers finally told me that I could wait forever to hear anything, so I cut the lines in question and in one case completely rewrote the affected poem, making it much better in the process. All the delay had pushed production off schedule, but the fine folks at Southern Illinois University Press and I worked out a new schedule, and it looks like the book may indeed appear in January/February after all.

What did I learn from all this? Well, there's a much longer treatment of that to come, but basically, this:

First of all, never depend on anyone else for some part of your work. As I wrote earlier this summer, I'm drawn to the idea of writing a responsive, even a documentary poetry, but I clearly need to find a way to do that without quoting, from songs in particular. Because...

... the music industry doesn't much seem interested in considering their properties as much more than lines of profit. In some cases, there's no argument you can make to encourage even a consideration of the propriety of the quotation, and in most cases, even two or three continguous words will constitute quotation requirinig license, to the point that the "Fair Use" section of the United States Copyright Code might as well not exist.

Finally, I'm not sure why anyone listens to music anymore. I love it, and I feel, as Nietzche did, that without music life would be a mistake. But at present, the experience of music is a very strictly policed experience. Your encounter with music is going to cost you something, and there's no way to have an active engagement with it that will enable you to capitalize the time you've spend learning it. I'd have thought all artists created in order to encourage not just enjoyment but enlargment in their audiences, but I see that would have been incorrect.

In any case, it's done. At least until the book goes into reprint, if ever...

After all that, I went with S to L.A. for a wedding, and, while there, at the best hamburger I have ever eaten in my life, at a small Santa Monica joint known as Father's Office. Our local guide, a friend of S, made the claim, and reported that the Today Show had named the burger as one of the three best in the nation, a claim of which I was exceptionally skeptical. But, as it turns out, it is true: the burger is the best I've ever had. I've been working to replicate it here. On the same trip, we had a few Key Lime Pie Martinis at the Dresden Room, seen in the movie Swingers, where Marty and Elaine played some old standards for us, including some songs I probably better not name so the copyright police won't be shutting them down.

Meanwhile, I was researching and planning a new series of poems, surely to become the next collection, though who knows how long that will take. I can see some shapes, but I don't know how long it will take me to make them. Hopefully some will emerge before too long.

The latter half of the summer, which is sadly almost done, has been divided mostly between Copper Nickel, The Lab, and a new project, The Colorado Center for Public Humanities.

Copper Nickel 8 is almost done, and we're working to complete our first book as well, a collection of double-exposure photographs and double-exposure writing, all of which will come out on Friday, September 28th, at Matter Studios here in Denver, on which more soon.

The Lab's been a hot-bed of excitement lately. They brought my brother out for Mixed Taste, and he and I presented head-to-head Walt Whitman and Whole Hog Barbecue, followed by a pork-fest hosted by Jim 'N Nick's new Colorado flagship store, headed by Todd and Kim Koone, the best hosts you'll ever meet. Todd and his crew cooked two whole hogs for the event and brought their signature trimmings: mac-and-cheese, collards, baked beans, cheese biscuits and more. You should have been there. Certainly some of the best 'cue I've ever had. It was good to have Joe here. We had a good time.

There's more to report from The Lab, but soon.

The Center for Public Humanities has been on a third burner, meanwhile. I had to get a website up and some press releases out, so I faced again the issue of the blog platform and went back to Movable Type. I spent some time working with WordPress but found that the themes I liked visually were in conflict with the core engine in some cases: I was working with K2, which had sidebar modules that overrode WordPress's new native modules, and I couldn't get them to work together. Lots of headaches. I was committed to making it work, especially since I discovered the Institute for the Future of the Book's new CommentPress. But in the process of upgrading WordPress, I wiped out my entire site and while rebuilding saw that Movable Type had introduced a beta version of Movable Type 4, which, as it turns out, has a lot of the features I liked in WordPress, but with a core I know really well. So, I've started playing with that and soon think I will move everything I run over to MT4 which is now in public release. Again, I like WP's motto "code is poetry," but the poetry wasn't always scanning very well, so it's back to the Gutenberg scenario, for now anyway. Given the CommentPress development, I'll probably always also have a WordPress installation going, too, to use for other types of engagement and maybe at some point all the systems will converge in one platform.

There's more to share, but not today. It's BEER:30, so time to signoff.

I hope you all are well. Drop me a line.

Posted by Jake Adam York at July 31, 2007 4:17 PM

COMMENTS

Good to hear from you, Jake. Gina and I had lunch down here a week (or so) back and we both were talking about how busy you are. I didn't know you had all this going on; busy indeed!

Posted by: Simmons at August 3, 2007 12:01 PM

BEER:30 is right. I love and hate Munich right now for it's wicked seductions. Pork and beer literally.for.days. See you soon, till then I'm just 'Stayin Alive'.

say word.

Posted by: ked at August 16, 2007 8:22 PM