One of my current writing projects involves remixing texts similar to how DJs remix albums. Currently I'm focusing on remixing stage plays into prose poems. Anyway, I began writing a manifesto but then learned that Rick Prelinger had already opened the conversation with a persuasive manifesto of his own for the current issue of
Absent Magazine:
It begins with an outline of his premises:
1. Why add to the population of orphaned works?
2. Don’t presume that new work improves on old
3. Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom
4. The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful
5. Dregs are the sweetest drink
6. And leftovers were spared for a reason
7. Actors don’t get a fair shake the first time around, let’s give them another
8. The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers
9. We approach the future by typically roundabout means
10. We hope the future is listening, and the past hopes we are too
11. What’s gone is irretrievable, but might also predict the future
12. Access to what’s already happened is cheaper than access to what’s happening now
13. Archives are justified by use
14. Make a quilt not an advertisement
I highly recommend reading it and joining the conversation. My hunch is that this manifesto will prove to be a very important text with wide ranging ramifications.
Comrades, I do believe The Remix will be the genre of the 21st century.
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How to write like
Agamben.
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Photography by
Isa Hall:
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Crispin Best has a cool project:
A story for every year since 1400.
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Check out
Delirious Hem, it's "a blog, a journal, a platform" for/about experimental women poets.
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The Measure of Influence: Ryan Murphy
"Murphy can trace his lineage to the juxtapositions in Kurt Schwitters’ angular acts of assemblage, but Murphy is a poet at play in the architecture of his own time, a time when database-driven cultural objects proliferate, objects whose fundamental structure depends, as in Schwitters, on the act of assemblage: montage in film, on television, edited sequences of independent images over which trademarked names, advertising slogans, and scrolling headlines have been superimposed."
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Roger Ebert goes off...
"The celebrity culture is infantilizing us. We are being trained not to think. It is not about the disappearance of film critics. We are the canaries. It is about the death of an intelligent and curious, readership, interested in significant things and able to think critically. It is about the failure of our educational system. It is not about dumbing-down. It is about snuffing out."
[
Death to film critics! Hail to the CelebCult!]
