More About Hemmingway

I got all inspired by our reCAPTCHA Poetry post, and started wondering what other types of media we could mess with in some new way to create other works derived from the same media. I entered a discovery phase.

At CVS, I saw Hemmingway's "The Sun Also Rises" on audiobook, as read by William Hurt. I grabbed it, figured what the hell. As I walked home, I wondered what to do with it...maybe put it on random and record that, and release that as art, so it would be these three-minute blocks of Hemmingway out of context and with no relation to what came before or after. Or maybe I could get several audio books, and combine tracks at random, or maybe just audio books read by William Hurt, or...

And then I listened to it, and I got all off track. Because William Hurt, Academy Award-winning actor, reads the entire book like this: "The followING DAY...the FIesTA...explODEd. There is no...other WAY...to DEscribe it." Like he's reading it on a boat in rough seas, and inflecting his voice along with the waves, completely irrespective of the contents of the sentences or their punctuation. It's hella disorienting, and as if Hemmingway wasn't choppy enough already...

This got me thinking about William Hurt -- who used to like to punch deaf girls while drunk -- and wondering...is this is what it sounds like in his head when he reads? And if it is, how could he have ever possibly enjoyed reading anything? Or is he somehow channelling Shatner (my next audiobook purchase)?

Vince out.

Collected Twitter, 10.14.08 - 04.20.09

Let's keep talking about Twitter. The thing with it is that it moves so damn fast. You blink and you'll miss a gem- most likely a gem from us. So what we're going to do is present some of our choice tweets here in the only-slightly-more-permanent blog form, starting with our first tweet all the way up until yesterday:

Now we Twitter...

Knock knock. Who's there? Twitter. Twitter who? Twitter dot com. Did you confuse my door with your internet browser again? Yes... del,del...

I guess it's for the best you can't Twitter while you sleep, how many posts do you need that just say "zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz"?

I have nothing to say right now- and with Twitter I am able to express that.

It's a different year now. Is everyone okay? Did everybody survive the calender conversion process?

The sun will be coming up in New York in three hours. I'm in LA. If I can move fast enough, I will stop it. I've been drinking. - Vince

We didn't twitter a single line about the inauguration today because it wasn't surreal- well, other than Aretha Franklin's hat.

Sort of disappointing that Will.I.Am is the unofficial musician for this Inauguration. We would have picked John Zorn, but whatev. #inaug09

Our tweet about the Clintons is now on a list of "Tweets about Hilary Clinton or Clinton" - http://tinyurl.com/akf3f5

The purpose of that last post was to get that list to list my post about their list listing our post, because I think that would be awesome!

Tonight's NBC programming is in 3-D... if you have glasses, if you don't it's just sort of blurry. Just like real-life!

Say what you will about (Michael) Phelps (after the "bong photo" surfaced), but he is a superhero so we don't want him on our bad side- especially when the underwater zombies show up.

I just made a TinyUrl link that take you to TinyUrl.com- I beat the system! Check it out - http://tinyurl.com/u

have found chocolate-flavored Pez. And we find them creepy.

#thishashtagindicatesthattheonlytextinthispostISthehashtagwhichmakessensesinceitsareallonghastag Please everybody, start using that #hashtag

Damn it! We totally forgot to Tweet during the time-change! It would have been like we were tweeting from 1 hour in the future.

BTW, one hour in the future (where we are right now) everyone is totally over Twitter. The new social networking site? PooPictures.com

BTW, I didn't bother to check if poopictures.com is actually a real website (and I won't), it was for comedy only, visit at your own risk.

For future reference, Customers don't like it when you replace the soy milk in their coffee with a muffin... even if you say "#AprilFools!"

IMPORTANT: There's a big difference between an ice pick and a frozen water pick. #advice

This year, Miss USA will have a new "environmentally-friendly" crown. The old crown was made out of styrofoam and precious metals.

If I'm a journalist and I tell your story, your story becomes "my story," plus I've got my own story... Journalists = Story-collectors

If someone died in your arms in the wild west, you would probably be responsible for burying them.

So, hope that wasn't too self-indulgent... or at least not more self-indulgent than having a blog or being on Twitter. Not greater then the sum of its parts in self-indulgence-ness is what I'm saying...

Anyway, as you can see our misc. thoughts are as good as or better than Hemingway's so you should totally be following us on Twitter- because Hemingway isn't on Twitter. He's dead. Sorry to break it to you this way.

Dan

Failed #Hashtags

So, we're on Twitter. Duh. Everybody's on Twitter. (Even our boss- even your Mom, which doesn't come as much of a surprise since, according to the kids in the neighborhood, she's sort of a early-adopter of social networking websites- if you catch my drift.)

Anyway, #hashtags are the cool thing on Twitter- basically they're little subject headings for your little posts so people can search for results based on what you're talking about. Anyway, the really cool ones become memes, and, as everyone knows, memes make you money, and, as our readers know, we need money. So, we've been trying (poorly) to start some #hashtag memes. Here is a gallery of our failure.

1. #twittervandalism
Inspired by our series of blogs about Wikipedia Vandalism, we figured we should apply the same treatment to the micro-blog. Twitter-hijacking is surprisingly common- though the recent Tila Tequila thing may kind of put a damper on it- or at least put a damper on it being "funny" or "art."

2. #knockknock
We thought by posting the hashtag #knockknock, people would respond with #whosthere, then we'd say #bananas, then they'd say #bananaswho, then we'd say #orangeyougladididntsaybanana, then they'd says #lolwot. We thought that would be funny. Apparently it wasn't. Sorry, we wasted your time.

3. #onlyats
Okay, now this one I genuinely thought people would dig. It's a game, spell out a sentence by only using valid Twitter user-names. It has yet to take off... Which is really too bad, because unlike those other ones- I really, really believed that #onlyats was going to be the meme-money-train straight to our door.

You know who drives the meme-money train? Rick Astley. True story.

Sorry for all our failures. I guess that's why we're working where we're working...

Dan

Surrealism Around the World: Naked in Paris

This is...well, borderline surreal, I guess. But it's from Paris, where surrealism is also from, and where that little girl told the story about Winnie the Pooh and the crocodile killing the witch in the forest, so I figured we needed to give it a shout out.



French pole vaulting champion Romain Mesnil lost his sponsorship deal with Nike, so he made the symbolic gesture of running through Paris totally naked, apart from his two poles. One of them has a black box over it in this video.

I don't know. I guess it's surreal. But we haven't highlighted any Surrealism Aroudn the World in a while, so it'll do.

Vince out.

ART WE LIKE: Ori Gersht

Here's what Ori Gersht does:
1) he creates still lives, like so many artists before him, then
2) he sets up a camera, like so many artists before him, then
3) blows the shit out of the still lives, and finally
4) records the destruction on a high-speed camera

His video Pomegranate is literally just him shooting a pomegranate with a gun in extrememely slow motion. Enjoy.

Reader E-mail: "Call to confirm !!!"

We've been talking a lot about how we're struggling to make money while making art- and we're not asking for charity, we're just telling you what's what. And we are accepting charity when it becomes available. Like today, when one reader (who wished to remain anonymous) forwarded us basically one million euros in the form of this note:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mrs. Roselyn Gomez. <bristolwestb55@aol.com>
Date: 2009/4/15
Subject: Call to confirm !!!
To:


MICRO WORD.COM CORPORATIONS,
CUSTOMER SERVICE:
MADRID SPAIN/ESPANA.
APARTADO DE CORREOS 48, 28230 las Rozas,

REFERENCE NO: MSFT-0200-X74-RS
BATCH NO: MSFT-2009- GM-0221

OFFICIAL WINNING NOTIFICATION.

Welcome to Micro word.com Corporation annual promotions, We are
pleased to inform you of the released results of Sweepstakes Promotion
organized by Micro word.com Corporations, in conjunction with the
foundation for the Promotion of software products, held this April 2nd
2009, here in Madrid-Spain.

Your email address emerged as one of the on-line Winning emails, in the
1st category and therefore You have been approved for a cash award
1,000,000.00; MILLION Euros (ONE MILLION EUROS) this is from a total cash
prize of TEN MILLION EUROS Shared among the ten International winners in
the 1st category.

To begin your claim, do file for the release of your winning by contacting
our Accredited agent: Foreign Transfer Manager MICRO WORD.COM CORPORATIONS.

Mr. Andy Phillips Cole.
Tel: +34-634-105-922
Email: andyphillipsc@aol.com

NOTE: All the members of Spanish MSFT Word Resource Consortium Software Promotion Companies.

Remember your winning must be claimed not later than two weeks of notification after this
date funds might be returned to the MICRO WORD RESOURCE MADRID, this Internet E-mail draw is held periodically,

And is organized to encourage the use of the Internet users, And to
promote computer literacy worldwide.

Congratulations!!!

Sincerely,
Mrs. Roselyn Gomez.
Promotions Manager.

Og boy! Here's our reply:

Roz,

A friend sent us this e-mail and we are so down. We need the money- Can you buy shoes with Euros? We've got a plan for an art project we can do with our "1,000,000.00; MILLION Euros (ONE MILLION EUROS)," but we're going to need a lot of shoes. A. Lot. Of. Shoes. In fact, forget the money, just go ahead and send us the shoes. Or perhaps it would be in the interest of microword.com to stop producing software and start producing shoes. Seriously- we're going to need that many.

Jesus! You have made our day, here we sit, at work, almost completely shoe-less (we currently have a total of 4- orders from corporate), and tomorrow we will literally be able to swim in shoes. Shoes! Shoes! Shoes!

I've just been talking about us this whole time, tell me about you Roz, we're going to be friends now, after all you did give us 1,000,000.00; MILLION Euros (ONE MILLION EUROS) for shoes- do you like shoes? Really? What kind of shoes?

It's crazy the way things worked out, judging by the amount of extraneous exclamation points in your subject heading I didn't think we were going to get along. I was so naive.

Dan

We'll keep you posted!

Dan

reCAPTCHA poetry

For those of you who don't remember, Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of Dada, used to cut up Shakespeare's sonnets one word at a time, put the words in a hat, select them at random, and reassemble them into Dadaist poetry.

Well, now it's the 21st century, and Dan and Vince are bringing you the play-at-home version. reCAPTCHA, which you've probably all done, is using internet security to digitize books and old issues of the New York Times. So everytime you solve a reCAPTCH to buy tickets to some Miley Cyrus concert or to tell your dumb friends on Facebook what color your poo was, you're helping preserve knowledge! But, if you keep a running tab, you're also creating Dadaist poetry.

Here's one I just made:

60 reply Euston 34
Rader Gatling net Schuman which Reeves Belzner;
Market price result clear-cut
Wassily success
heart hated two

Beautiful! It's like cutting up sonnets, except the interwebs are your scissors, and the whole of printed, English-language knowledge is your construction paper. Create art my friends...create art. Do it yourself here:

http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

Vince out.