Sunday, March 27, 2011

A SELECTION OF SPOKEN WORD

ANDREA GIBSON

Couldn't get this above poem out of my head while riding through NYC buses in and out of state. Intensity coupled with beautiful yricism is a trademark of Andrea's poetry.
Yes, Andrea Gibson is still coming to RISD, however the date has been postponed to sometime in October, next fall. Sorry if you are a senior and can't make it. HOWEVER, I'm getting Phil Kaye and Sarah Kay to perform and do a workshop the Weekend of May 7-8. Keep your eyes peeled for more details.

KATE TEMPEST

Kate Tempest is a spoken word poet from the UK. She still is pretty underground but her performances go hard.

PHIL KAYE & SARAH KAY (they aren't related or married, funny yes?)




Who said all spoken word poetry had to be screaming and indignant? Sarah and Phil are the co-founders of Project Voice where they teach spoken word workshops to schools and universities as well as perform and tour nationally. They both graduated from Brown in 2010. Sarah did a tedtalk that John Maeda was at a while back, that garnered two standing ovations.

They're coming to RISD this may!

BUDDY WAKEFIELD


I don't know Buddy enough to give an accurate description of his poetry but I know he is one of the more well known spoken word artists and this was the first video that popped up on youtube. He toured with Andrea a while last year.

FRANNY CHOI

Better go see this girl perform at Brown's WORD! (the spoken word club) showcases, and local providence poetry slams while you still can. She goes to Brown and is graduating this year. I went to see her at The Spot Underground on elbow st last Monday and she blew me away. Unfortunately you can't find a lot of her stuff on the internet, but that should change soon.

SAUL WILLIAMS



Saul's poetry puts you through one hell of a spiritual, radical, psychedelic ride. He's also a genius. He also raps to his poetry now, and has a couple of albums out. He also starred in SLAM, a narrative documentary about spoken word.

If you like this, check out "Said the Shot Gun to the Head" and "S/he" two long poems that he wrote in book form.

"We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun.
We are not afraid of the darkness.
We trust that the moon shall guide us.
We are determining the future at this very moment.
We know that the heart is the philosopher's stone.
Our music is our alchemy."

— Saul Williams


BROWN'S SHOWCASE SPRING SHOW IS FRIDAY, APRIL 22nd at RITES AND REASONS THEATRE. GO.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Manifestos regarding Art + Business

These were found a few days ago from the site The 99 Percent

1. The Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Via Gretchen Rubin, we discovered this manifesto from architect Frank Lloyd Wright, written as a series of “fellowship assets” meant to guide the apprentices who worked with him at his school, Taliesin. I particularly love number 10, the idea that working with others should come naturally.

1. An honest ego in a healthy body.

2. An eye to see nature.


3. A heart to feel nature.


4. Courage to follow nature.


5. The sense of proportion (humor).


6. Appreciation of work as idea and idea as work.


7. Fertility of imagination.

8. Capacity for faith and rebellion.


9. Disregard for commonplace (inorganic) elegance.

10. Instinctive cooperation.


2. The Marketer: Seth Godin
The always insightful Seth Godin shared his “Unforgivable Manifesto” with artist Hugh MacLeod a few years ago. His observation about the short-run vs the long-run in point 5 is particularly incisive, as is the notion that we’re all marketers in point 7 – it's just that some of us don’t own it.

1. The greatest innovations appear to come from those that are self-reliant. Individuals who go right to the edge and do something worth talking about. Not solo, of course, but as instigators of a team. In two words: don’t settle.

2. The greatest marketers do two things: they treat customers with respect and they measure.

3. The greatest salespeople understand that people resist change and that ‘no’ is the single easiest way to do that.

4. The greatest bloggers blog for their readers, not for themselves.

5. There really isn’t much a of ‘short run’. It quickly becomes yesterday. The long run, on the other hand, sticks around for quite a while.

6. The internet doesn’t forget. And sooner or later, the internet finds out.

7. Everyone is a marketer, even people and organizations that don’t market. They’re just marketers who are doing it poorly.

8. Amazing organizations and people receive rewards that more than make up for the effort required to be that good.

9. There is no number 9.

10. Mass taste is rarely good taste.


3. The Designer: John Maeda
RISD president John Maeda’s slim book, The Laws of Simplicity, is one of my all-time favorites, with broad-reaching insights that apply as easily to arranging your living room as to designing a visionary product. In 100 pages, Maeda elaborates on 10 laws for business, design, and life:

1. Reduce: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

2. Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.

3. Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity.

4. Learn. Knowledge makes everything simpler.

5. Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other.

6. Context: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.

7. Emotion: More emotions are better than less.

8. Trust: In simplicity we trust.

9. Failure: Some things can never be made simple.

10. The One: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.


4. The Writer: Leo Tolstoy
While they betray a bit of the self-hating introvert, Tolstoy’s “rules for life,” originally written when he was 18 years old, do contain some useful gems. In particular, the notion of managing your energy and prioritizing based on goals (no. 5), and of managing your finances wisely by always keeping a low overhead (no. 9 & 10).

1. Get up early (five o'clock).

2. Go to bed early (nine to ten o'clock).

3. Eat little and avoid sweets.

4. Try to do everything by yourself.

5. Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater.

6. Keep away from women.

7. Kill desire by work.

8. Be good, but try to let no one know it.

9. Always live less expensively than you might.

10. Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer.


5. The Company: Apple
When Steve Jobs went on medical leave in 2009 and financial analysts were making dire predictions, Apple COO Tim Cook boiled the company’s culture down to what was essentially an 8-point manifesto. I love that saying no is one of the key points. It's so hard!

1. We believe that we're on the face of the earth to make great products.

2. We're constantly focusing on innovating.

3. We believe in the simple, not the complex.

4. We believe we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.

5. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can focus on the few that are meaningful to us.

6.We believe in deep collaboration and cross pollination in order to innovate in a way others cannot.

7. We don't settle for anything other than excellence in any group in the company.

8. We have the self-honesty to admit when we're wrong and the courage to change.

--

Samantha Gorman

Since Mairead mentioned Samantha in class today, I thought I'd post this great video of Asimina Chremos improvising with one of Samanta's writing pieces in Brown's Cave.

Canticle from Samantha Gorman on Vimeo.

Twitter poems

There was an article in the NY times this weekend about twitter's potential as a space for creative writing.

They also asked four poets to write "twitter poems."

Monday, March 14, 2011

RISE & FALL

This is a low quality .gif version of the video component of my poem for workshop this week. 
I am having some issues figuring out how to post the high quality version with sound, so I will show that one in class tomorrow as a projection. 

[this may just look like a picture file, but wait 20 seconds.]

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Synchronous objects

I love Synchronous objects! Thanks for posting. William Forsythe is one of my favorite choreographers. He often uses technology and language in his work in a really interesting and innovative way. Here's a link to an except from his piece "Kammer/kammer."

Also, to embed video click the "embed" buttom below a video (on youtube--not sure about embedding from other sources) and copy and paste the code into the "edit html" window on the blog.

synchronous objects

I watched this during lecture today in my visual systems class. i think this is very informing about what choreography is about. And it's very poetic. I don't know how to embed it in the post, but you can go to the link below to watch the videos. They are great.

http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu