Free Idea Factory

Websites and print publications that review books are uniformly about the new, always the new. In my readings I am continually surprised by books that are excellent today, that stand up to today, that are worth reading today and sharing with others, that weren’t ever reviewed when they came out and are thus somehow disqualified from being reviewed due to the fact that they’re no longer new. But if poetry (and by extension literature in general) is the news that stays new, then there should be a publication outlet that’s friendly to new discoveries of old news that’s still new. A blog devoted to reviews of not-recently-published books would be ideal.

A web-based anthology (so, a blog) that showcases the art of the mis-print. When the digital demons wriggle into files and play havoc, the results are often quite interesting. Two examples below (click to enlarge):

Does everyone share both the irrational fear that others will look in their medicine cabinets when visiting, and, the burning urge to peek inside the medicine cabinets of others when visiting them? How about a blog where users post cell phone camera photos of medicine cabinets anonymously. Visitors could both view others surreptitiously, and, perhaps, happen upon their own and wonder who snapped it.

Products like cigars and wine are extraordinarily complex to shop for as a consumer. The range and selection are so vast, and the subset that any given store carries is so relatively small that it can take decades before the act of shopping can become a comfortable process.

This should be fixable with a web service that would allow consumers to create a profile that would allow them to record, reference, and rate their purchases and then use the aggregate data of all the users to help suggest possibilities for new choices. The web service aspect of it could be further enhanced by an RFID chip in a credit card that could talk to the servers in any given store or restaurant to compare a customer’s total known history with the business establishment’s current on-hand inventory to produce effective recommendations.

Imagine being in a restaurant and having the waiter bring over both a general wine list and a custom laser printed list of suggestions based on the wines you’d already tried, and liked, and the wines others who liked the wines you liked suggested.

Imagine walking into a cigar store and not finding anything familiar. You ask the person behind the counter if he/she can make any suggestions. They ask if they can read your card. You say sure, and they take a look at what you’ve liked in the past and cross-reference those against the products they have on hand to help find an ideal match.

It’s such a massive boon to businesses that membership could be essentially free for the consumer. First businesses get signed on and get their inventory loaded into the database, then consumers get offered free cards and even incentives to start filling in their preferences. Most of the activity could even be passive. The RFID chip in the card announces itself to the POS system and any purchases made get automatically added to the webservice database, and prompts can go out to remind the consumer to rate those recent purchases.

With the ubiquitousness of camera phones these days the time is ripe for a photoblog that consists of documentation of bathroom graffiti. I know there’s blogs out there documenting street art (Wooster Collective is my favorite), but this more behind-closed-stall-doors work is in need of the same treatment.

various textures and colours and words for colours pop up on the screen of a website

you write something based on what you see, what it makes you think of, feel, smell, taste….

especially handy for synaesthetes.

great colour sites:

Pigments Through the Ages

The Colour Experience

Colour Terms from the Phrontistery, a thinking place

note that i am excited and interested in colour and would love to share and exchange ideas, links and references related to colour, creativity and inspiration.

This is an idea for a group blog/ e-journal journal called Photogenesis. The premise would be developing textual content from images. Rather than developing editorial copy and later adding supporting visual material, it would be the reverse. The image would be determined, then the content would be born out of the image.

The notion was born out of the idea of ekphrasis, a form of art that tries to relate to another medium by defining and describing its essence and form. This concept was developed through a discussion with a friend, Jim O’Conell of Resource Media, a branding and creative design studio.

Issue Variations:

-Based on random stock photo’s
-Based on found images
-Based on political ideology
-Based on history
-Based on sexist images
-Literary artists choose images, visual artists write the words 1/2 of issue, other 1/2 is the reverse
-Have psychoanalysts draw images and have children analyze them based on their images
-You get the idea… If you want more ideas, feel free to email me if you choose to take this project on.

This is an open ended project–it would be a series of short Flash films (or Java animations, or or or) all featuring the same character.

This is going to take some explanation, and very little of it will be linear. I just have some broad brush strokes of a concept, and I’m going to need to rely on your ability to connect the dots.

Concept:

“coyote” is a similar character, but Tada is not Coyote, or Loki.

similar in that Tada is potentially archetypal, cross cultural, universal.

Tada is the bellyflop

Tada is that lock or shock of hair that springs up or out

Tada is the first tree to turn bright brilliant red in the middle of a mountainside of trees that are all still green.

Tada is a flamboyant bow before the crowd accompanied by the sound of ripping pants.

Tada is the dive into the empty pool

but Tada is not just silly or comical, Tada is the spirit of boldness incarnate, and Goethe tells us:

Whatever you would do, begin it now. Boldness has a greatness all its own.

Tada is the one ear of corn that’s 8″ above the genetically engineered carpet-even height of the rest of the field.

Tada steals the stone from the masters hand while the master is still explaining the challenge

Tada is the running squirrel

Tada was Minnesota Fats, not Willie Mosconi

What does Tada look like?

Maybe he’s a walking jangle of letters in the shape of a person, but with swagger for sure.

Maybe he lives in a world where all the objects are composed of their spellings:

       c
       o
      ooo
     ooooo
     ooooo
   r ooooo r
    rooooor
    rooooor
     rooor
       N
       N
       N
       N

Maybe he himself is made up of the letters T a d a

Maybe he walks around and his shape is defined by the limits of his never quite stopped motion.

Tada is like a jangle of springs wound too tight and occasionally Tada BOINGS into being in just the right, or sometimes just the wrong, place.

So, what I’m thinking is a series animated cartoons with this character of Tada. I see Tada all around me, every day. I can give as many scenes of Tada at his best as you can animate. We could start with one or two and just keep adding to them. The key would be for there to be as much latitude as possible in what Tada looks like, so Tada can look like anything. That’s why my original thought was a jangle of letters in a world built out of letterforms. But it doesn’t have to be that. We’d just need to capture this essence of the character of Tada in some way that would allow Tada to be recognized in a wide variety of situations. Always different, always identifiably the same. He goes “sproing”, and is slightly unkempt.

Tada is Gene Wilder’s Willie Wonka when you first see him and his cane gets stuck in the sidewalk and he falls….into a somersault.

Tada is the Emcee who pulls back the curtain with a sweepingly proud gesture to reveal the set crew still at work setting up.

Tada is a bit of Popeye and bit of Crocodile Dundee.

Tada is what it means to make a crazy wild guess and be right.

Tada knew it all along.

Andy Warhol once said: Nothing looks cooler than someone completely unafraid of looking uncool.

Tada is beginner’s luck.

Tada is irrepressible.

Tada doesn’t always win, but Tada never gives up.

The key is this Tada-ness is something we see all the time, and it’s this mix of bold, confident, foolish, often right, sometimes wrong, always enthusiastic.

This is an idea for a group blog literary journal called (in my idea) subgenre. It would be built by editors willing to provide content in their chosen narrowed range, but it would be open to a nearly unlimited set of narrowed ranges–if what the editor does puts in them contact with a steady stream of some particular kind of poem and they felt they could manage to select one for featuring every month or so, then they’d be qualified. As a starting point, consider the following: concrete poetry, visual poetry, lyric poetry, formal poetry, haiku, doggerel, digital poetry, poetry in translation, language poetry. But do not
be limited by these. The editor’s ability to provide an example a month would be sufficient to declare it a viable category.

This idea is for a web journal called (in my idea anyway) Instantiation. It would looking to publish statements of poetics, manifestos, mission statements, or even loosely structured goals for the finished pieces side-by-side with examples of poems which realize (or attempt to realize) the statements.