Everybody's Paying Tribute to the Money (aka the fine print)

The iClops toy camera--a microscopic viewer with USB input--never worked as well for me as the Vidster toy camera for this project, even though I imagined it could really get down to the particular. At the very least it could magnify those fine-print prose passages, translating them into another dimension. Here is a piece of data junk from the harddrive of the iClops reading from Book II.

Driving--

Downtown Paterson, especially on a hot summer day, is a driving nightmare. However, I am feeling a little nostalgic for those packed streets, the slow crawl through that knot of intersections where buzz the mysterious commercial convergences between hip-hop clothiers, cellphone wallahs, dollarstore clerks, Peruvian restaurateurs. All more lively than the “dead” industry around the nearby Falls.
Before I left, I wanted to capture (with my Vidster) at least some small sense of one of the more disconcerting elements of this traffic pattern, the way in which pedestrians will walk right out into the middle of traffic—perhaps a form of territorializing, protest, or more simply, impatience. Even parents with baby carriages will make their way in front of slowed cars—of course slowing things down all the more—to get from exactly the point where they were to exactly the point they want to be. And for all that impatience, oddly enough, Paterson comes off as a city of flaneurs.
The soundtrack on the radio seems appropriate now in retrospect, but the sound of Paterson itself has more poetry. I felt almost embarrassed listening to NPR’s wistful, effortless version of poetry while crawling through the Williams’ hard-worked-upon source material as well as through the bodies of the actual hard-working themselves, “Who are these people (how complex/ the mathematic) among whom I see myself/ in the regularly ordered plateglass of/ his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles?” I have no idea who Bob Edwards is interviewing, but the poet on the radio regales us with this bit of stellar scholarship: “You know Whitman was not an English professor. As far as I know, he didn’t have an office or tenure.” Gee, thanks. I’m sure if there were any poets on the streets of Paterson at the time, they would also be able to add that he wasn’t having no Sunday tea with Bob Edwards on the radio, either.

From a Roseate Past

"And there rises
a counterpart, of reading, slowly, overwhelming
the mind; anchors him in his chair. So be
it. . . .
Texts mount and complicate them-
selves, lead to further texts and those
to synopses, digests and emendations. So be it.
Until the words break loose or--sadly
hold, unshaken. Unshaken! So be it. For
the made-arch holds, the water piles up debris
against it but it is unshaken." (Book 3, Part 3)

I picked up a pile of random secondary sources on the poem Paterson yesterday at the library. I'm not sure how many I will get into. I opened one today to a grim but apt description of Paterson as "a city known to itself only as a place of processing raw material and dumping the by-products, material and human" (Duffey 69). We can think, though, that while industry performs this operation in an unwholesome way, that the counter project of the poem Paterson, as well as our own activities--exalted and mundane--are precisely this processing, with hopefully an element of recycling, so the trash heap does not grow beyond human reckoning. In the spirit of recycling, here is a clip not used from an older journey to Paterson.
Recently, I talked to an art group about their like-minded experiments in Paterson, and so while posts will continue to operate an their accustomed distant, recycling remove, I plan to join them in full immersion come June.

Pixelvision Redux: A Note on the Technology

Most of the video on this vlog was recorded with the Fisher Price Vidster camcorder, the latter-day digital cousin on the legendary PXL-2000 children's camcorder. This newer version, released in 2005, never acquired the cachet that the original did. Its image is not as immediately stunning, although one eventually discovers the kodachrome-esque things it does with blues and greens. When it came out, the price ratio between it and bargain-basement mini-DV was negligible (greedy retailers upped the suggested retail 40%, perhaps hoping to benefit from the cult following of the original), so it no longer had the charge of a cheap alternative. (However, you can now get Vidster on eBay for $10-20, while the PXL-2000 still goes for $100-500.) The weirdness factor of recording video on audio tape has been replaced by more standard flash recording: cheaper, but no longer outre.
However, I've enjoyed this camera and its charms, from the way it picks up a corner of sunlight (similar to PXL-2000 sunbursts) to its ruggedness. The Vidster gets closer to the idea of "video pencil" than most cameras that I would treat more like "video nice pen that I got for graduation." Since it records at 15 fps it's perfect for a blog--what you see is what you will get, no compression heartbreaks. It retains the black frame of old pixelvision, so that the image reels in its little charm box, an effect enhanced by the way takes are recorded as discrete files opening onto QuickTime moments (recalling Vivian Sobchack's essay on QuickTime, nostalgia, and Joseph Cornell.) It CAN be used with Macs and Final Cut Pro (regardless of what it says on the box) and has good on-board sound, even though I opted for working dual-system on most of the vlog. In the end, though, I don't think I'll use this camera much longer. I documented a good amount of fragments of 2006 with it*, but--as toys go--it is beginning to lose my attention. I am drawn, however, to this new helmet-cam for kids.
I wonder if the same people who created the first kids' camcorder for Fisher-Price--James Wickstead and Associates--had any input with this second camera. Probably they didn't, since Wickstead sketchily hinted to me that a new color version might be released in 1998, and then it never manifested itself. Click here for my unpublished interview with him in 1997 discussing his invention, and his possible future plans, now past.
*I'm having a little tech trouble with creating fields of Vidster video for this link. They all seem to show up better on Safari, but play easier on Firefox. Try reloading a couple times on a fast connection. (Wait, this may indeed turn out to be a compression heartbreak.)

Mystery Mountain, Part Two

If you are following this vlog, way back in September we had Part One of a journey to a inconspicuous-conspicuous hummock that had haunted our guest-drifter Kyle Lapidus whenever he passed it on the highway. Turns out that this haunting led us to Garret Mountain itself, and constituted New Jersey as an Impossible Object's first trip to this place, central to Williams' poetography (a word that--if you force it between a volcano, a tectonic plate, and a word processor--becomes topography). While Williams found ghosts of a German Singing Society transformed into a vengeful mob, and dead babies killed for crying too loud, we found Middle Eastern women posing on tanks for boudoir photos, and plentiful cries of little children.

Mystery Mountain, Part One

Day Six
“In ignorance/ a certain knowledge.” There are places on the highway that I think everybody has an intimate knowledge of, yet knows nothing about. They are those little inconsistencies or changes that mark time or space in an otherwise monotonous forward motion, curves of road that suddenly say “closer” or “farther” or “amidst,” if only to you. For me, maybe for you too, it is the place on route 78 where the highway starts to be walled with tan concrete (sound baffles for bedroom communities?) and promises the approach of New York; there’s the barn that is painted “Vote Republican” where the highway makes a sharp turn taking you that much closer to Chicago on the way from Milwaukee. You might also remember that moment in John Barth’s classic deconstruction of forward motion, “Lost in the Funhouse,” where the boys look for the electrical towers and the standpipe on the way to “Ocean City.” For Kyle Lapidus, it is a hill in Paterson that has this kind of insignificant-significance. He has only ever seen it from the highway but, in his estimation, it is the most important hill or mountain of any he has experienced . . . or rather, despite never having experienced it. We take a closer look. Who needs Pedro? In two parts.

Outside Myself There is A World

Day Five
I set out with Alexis Bhagat and Sahra Walker to try the heart of Paterson once again. I seem to have many mistaken notions as to the nature of this heart. For instance, I have been avoiding the falls: touristy, too easy. After another long, hot day, however, we drive down Ryle Rd. past the old factory buildings and the animal shelter, park the Buick, and take the wooded path to the falls. I am thinking that I have failed to connect to the city. However, in a quiet corner where the falls eddy at the mouth of a mammoth open pipe, we meet Tony, for whom the falls is the true Paterson in contrast to the commercial, violent, and seductive forces of the street. Contrary to what I had been thinking, for Tony, the falls were a site of black power, the psychic center of the city's integrity. The rest was Babylon. The waters of the Passaic seemed to hold powers of self-actualization. You could also probably do drugs there. Tony was both doing drugs and self-actualizing, but using one to pry free from the other. And he was also writing poetry. Here's some of what he recited for us: "She turns over her life everyday, like a hamburger slaving over the heat. Constantly constantly all they want and eat and beat is beef and beef. Cow after cow after cow I ask now, when will they just want milk?" The prostitutes on Van Houten St. seem to be a continuity between Williams' world and Tony's. We leave Tony and end up at the library, where I find out that all the archival Williams materials are in Hackensack.

Paterson: When You Know!

A true "cover" version of Paterson if there ever was one, this Patersong by Rama is in the spirit of the poem and she didn't even have to crack open the book! Call it overture, call it pre-epigram, call it hokey-pokey . . . that's what it's all about. "If you know that it has a name, you know that there's a name!" Knowledge rolling itself out, and on to Paterson (along with the rabbits.) An envoi from Book Zero. Recorded in NYC and the Wave Farm in Acra.

A Dissonance in the Valence of Uranium

Day Four
Desparate to get some Paterson footage, even if it is ersatz Paterson, I convince Max Goldfarb to be the next special guest, even though our main objective was to explore a Wal*Mart parking lot in Hudson, NY for wormholes into another dimension. We ride out to the site in a red step van, M-49, a mobile unit once used by the fire department in Stockbridge, now a mobile vehicle for radio experimentation, but maybe also literally still a "fire" truck, since the heat from the metal floor is melting my flip-flops and it only gets worse outside where the air is dead from heat. Fire, tar, dead grasses, Queen Anne's lace, rotted palettes, birds, and (somewhere, like the angels) money: where is Paterson in it all? Again, we are nowhere near Paterson, but closer to an idea of ruins that might be more mid-industrial, Pennsylvanian, quaint. The Patersons proliferate: loose copies of the Platonic mess; yes it is a paradox, since the inner city and this particular poem are in general considered the opposite of the luminous form. But there is an ideal even in a mess. Radio mics give out, hypotheses fail. The real Paterson shames our senses.
Max will be broadcasting an evening of live talks and performances from his van on August 4 in Hudson, NY. (Among others, I'll be giving a talk/tour called "The Theogony of the Parking Lot"). Email argot@mit.edu for more information.

Look for the Nul

Day Two
The problem with approaching Paterson, is that it shoots you out as soon as you get to it. I had the bright idea of taking a side trip to Paterson last week while stuck in Friday rush hour and weekend shore traffic. Which just meant more traffic, but for art's sake. A stop at the falls only felt like cheating. All-in-all, an eight-hour trip thru the impossible object, with nothing gained.
The next day, in Baltimore, I'm taken to a festival with a ride called the Scatter, or the Splatter, or the Skooter. It looks like some very old but charming model of how the universe moves, spinning under the overpass. Is this road overhead the same road I crawled from Scatterson on? Incidently, Williams uses the term "scatter" fairly frequently in Paterson as a term of opprobrium. The Skatter, however, is a fine species of people-moving, and in comparison to the turnpike, as celestial as its design promises. I don't think it's G-force that holds you in, more like a D-force; it's certainly not the chain they lock between you and the void, insubstantial like the strap on a Chanel handbag.

Pat(t)erson: Two T's or One?

Day One
In search of the elusive Paterson--both the poem and the city--we find ourselves not in New Jersey but in Patterson, Georgia, about 40 miles north of the Okefenokee Swamp. Our special guest drifter, Clark Lunberry, has a good sense of the pith and essence, the quiddity and je ne sais qua of Paterson, yet has never been there. This Patterson was conveniently at hand, perhaps too convenient compared to the chaos of Paterson, NJ where the falls--once the unmanageable, excessive, flowing-matter against which the poet would fail to measure--is now a quaint vignette compared to its environs. Clark talked about how Williams at one point started to hate the poem and its failure. I found it hard to believe that Williams didn't start the poem knowing full well his barrel was heading for the Passaic River's misty plummet. We found a dead library, a rocket to Jesus, and a very good cafe with a jangly piano in the next town over, where Clark requested I play "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" (he's from Kansas) and I obliged with an approximation.
Clark's work on Williams and Robert Smithson, "So Much Depends: Printed Matter, Dying Words and the Entropic Poem" can be found at: http://www.unf.edu/~clunberr/research.html