heaven send a helper
she's tied to iron
too weak to move it
pandora find it
your face
your smile
the noose you love and hold
the key behind
the way out of this hole
your knees in the dirt
too young to know the mold
in the eyes
your wrists
twisted tight as screws
the box
it's maw
yawns in the dark and dust
those things let out
were shaking at our heads
and blood we drew
to keep the devils out
see this tonight
the hope you crave to hold
is behind you
feather your nest girl
with your barbed wire white cotton dress
and all those pretty little things
that your lover used to bring last summer
black and brown feathers girl
are you'll have to sleep on in winter
even linen's blushing to keep you from the cold 'til now
after your penance
look behind
the box's maw yawns
here we see the order
one quiet murder the weapon's inside her
pandora find it
where The Sleepers muse and disclose
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Protection
a wave of bliss
engulfed my thoughts
pleasure pounding down the door
here i soar to new heights
now knowing this
all my words floating out into the world
won't change our frail existence
voices call
come inside
is that vitriol that you hide
the cycles of self destruction
imagine this
no more walls
no more seeking for a door
to lead you to paradise
seek inside
my hands on the pavement
push up slow
my knees scraped open
here we are fighting slow
i will line up empty bottles on the outside wall
i will beg the wind to blow and call out your smoke
lift up my fists it's my turn to strike now
this is the world spinning round
eclipsed with certainties, breaking grounds
between the poles there's no real distance
outside the moths fan our wounds
dirty hot swollen wounds
you drew the line
you drew the line
inside the urgency might burn me hollow
engulfed my thoughts
pleasure pounding down the door
here i soar to new heights
now knowing this
all my words floating out into the world
won't change our frail existence
voices call
come inside
is that vitriol that you hide
the cycles of self destruction
imagine this
no more walls
no more seeking for a door
to lead you to paradise
seek inside
my hands on the pavement
push up slow
my knees scraped open
here we are fighting slow
i will line up empty bottles on the outside wall
i will beg the wind to blow and call out your smoke
lift up my fists it's my turn to strike now
this is the world spinning round
eclipsed with certainties, breaking grounds
between the poles there's no real distance
outside the moths fan our wounds
dirty hot swollen wounds
you drew the line
you drew the line
inside the urgency might burn me hollow
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
The Waning Tide
this is one last stone to the waves
and you'll have our love
november was yours not mine
as we trail over all the details
november was yours not mine
a split second that won't be erased
through the waning tide
a lifetime wide
we sent our beggar's prayers
but they all washed up on shore
oh that was the day
when god had to fall away
if you couldn't stay
he knew he had to give up the game
all our clay is given to break
now watch through the swells
the waning tide
and you'll have our love
you'll have our love
and you'll have our love
november was yours not mine
as we trail over all the details
november was yours not mine
a split second that won't be erased
through the waning tide
a lifetime wide
we sent our beggar's prayers
but they all washed up on shore
oh that was the day
when god had to fall away
if you couldn't stay
he knew he had to give up the game
all our clay is given to break
now watch through the swells
the waning tide
and you'll have our love
you'll have our love
Monday, September 7, 2009
Bye Bye Miss American Pie
I don't know if you've been watching television lately. If you have I'm sure you've seen it, but basically it's Chris De Burgh releasing a tepid album of covers. It makes me shudder every time I see it. Plus it sounds like Mr De Burgh and his ocular caterpillars took the midi to a bunch of overplayed "hits" and sang over them. The "studio shots" included in the insert looks a bit like someone's bedroom.
I used to be quite a fan before Chris went off on a strangled path about the whole healing hands business. But "Spanish Train" is still one of my favourite albums of all time, and looking back now the sci-fi Christianity in "Poor Boy" was not as fantastic to Chris as he made it out to be. A few too many glasses of red wine poring over "Chariots of the Gods" methinks.
But this led me on to thinking about our careers and what senility has in store for us. What would we do to keep our slice of the limelight? These are obviously things we can't predict. I might one day be draped over some piano somewhere, varicose veins a-pumping, doing my helling best to murder some Streisand cover. Who knows.
Losing favour with a previously loving audience is hard (and you will lose them, you cannot please everyone) but you should never bring that bitterness from being cast aside into what you do. Crowds are strange and stranger still are "scenes". They are fickle grey undefined masses. Tastes change. People change. Sometimes they don't. You can't predict.
But,
I don't think I will ever think that releasing my own little vapid version of "American Pie" will ever seem like a good idea.
EVER.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
little tiny goldfish
... i read this on BoingBoing who lifted a part of it from here - http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=10297. But this is the whole article.
Michael Erard
A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention
In 1971, the oft-quoted political scientist Herbert Simon predicted that in an information age, cultural producers (that's designers, but also filmmakers, theater types, musicians, artists) would quickly face a shortage of attention. "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients," he wrote. The more information, the less attention, and "the need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
Now we have a wide-ranging discussion about what is and what can't be free (Malcolm Gladwell on Chris Anderson, Virginia Postrel on Chris Anderson), which is basically about the future of profit. Maybe we should be considering a dilemma of a human nature: the future of attention.
Because there's a connection between the two.
Making something "free" is obviously an allocation strategy. "Free" attracts attention. Making things brief is an allocation strategy as well. The problem is that free isn't sustainable, and that brief is underpriced.
We need a Ronald Reagan of attention, someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.
I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets. A festival organized not by the forms of the commodities themselves but of the experience of interacting with them. Not organized by time elapsed, but by cognitive investment: a pop song, which goes by quickly, can resonate for days; a poem, which can go by more quickly, sticks through a season. A festival in which you can see images of your brain on knitting and on Twitter.
I imagine a retail sector for cultural products that's organized around the attention span: not around "books" or "music" but around short stories and pop songs in one aisle, poems and arias in the other. In the long store: 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzles, big novels, beer brewing equipment, DVDs of The Wire. Clerks could suggest and build attentional menus. We would develop attentional connoisseurship: the right pairings of the short and long. We would understand, and promote, attentional health.
I imagine attention-based pricing, in which prices of information commodities are inversely adjusted to the cognitive investment of consuming them. All the candy for the human brain — haiku, ringtones, bumper stickers — would be priced like the luxuries that they are. Things requiring longer attention spans would be cheaper — they might even be free, and the higher fixed costs of producing them would be covered by the higher sales of the short attention span products. Single TV episodes would be more expensive to purchase than whole seasons, in the same way that a six-pack of Oreos at the gas station is more expensive, per cookie, than a whole tray at the grocery store.
I imagine an attention tax that aspiring cultural producers must pay. A barrier to entry. If you want people to read your book, then you have to read books; if you want people to buy your book, then you buy books. Give your attention to the industry of your choice. Like indie musicians have done for decades, conceive of the scene as an attention economy, in which those who pay in (e.g., I go to your shows) get to take out (e.g., come to my show). It would also mitigate one oft-claimed peril of the rise of the amateur, which is that they don't know from quality: consuming many other examples from a variety of sources, even amateur producers would generate a sense of what's good and what's bad: in other words, in their community they'd evolve a set of standards. This might frustrate the elitists, who want to impose their standards. But standards would, given enough time, emerge. (In this I have faith.)
I imagine software, a smartphone app, perhaps, you can use to audit your attentional expenditures. So that before you embark on trying to write a book, you will be able to see how much time you spent reading books over the last month or year. So that before you design a marketing campaign that assumes that people aren't doing much else with their time until you show up, you will be able to see what you yourself were doing with your time, which was something perfectly good. This will show you that you're a savvy allocator of your attentional resources — and so is everybody else.
And yet I can't shake fantasizing about attention that has no price, that can't be bought or sold, but is given freely: a gift. I buy and read books because I want to give the gift of my attention to the attention economy I'm (as a writer) a part of. I'm inspired by Lewis Hyde in The Gift, who says that what distinguishes commodities is that they're used up, but what distinguishes gifts is that they circulate — the gift is never trapped, consumed, used up, contained or confined. That seems like the best basis for cultural production to thrive.
So this is what it's come to: when an attention gift economy seems more practical and sustainable than an exchange economy for information commodities, which is being rotted by the gift's ugly negation: the free.
Michael Erard
A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention
In 1971, the oft-quoted political scientist Herbert Simon predicted that in an information age, cultural producers (that's designers, but also filmmakers, theater types, musicians, artists) would quickly face a shortage of attention. "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients," he wrote. The more information, the less attention, and "the need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
Now we have a wide-ranging discussion about what is and what can't be free (Malcolm Gladwell on Chris Anderson, Virginia Postrel on Chris Anderson), which is basically about the future of profit. Maybe we should be considering a dilemma of a human nature: the future of attention.
Because there's a connection between the two.
Making something "free" is obviously an allocation strategy. "Free" attracts attention. Making things brief is an allocation strategy as well. The problem is that free isn't sustainable, and that brief is underpriced.
We need a Ronald Reagan of attention, someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.
I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets. A festival organized not by the forms of the commodities themselves but of the experience of interacting with them. Not organized by time elapsed, but by cognitive investment: a pop song, which goes by quickly, can resonate for days; a poem, which can go by more quickly, sticks through a season. A festival in which you can see images of your brain on knitting and on Twitter.
I imagine a retail sector for cultural products that's organized around the attention span: not around "books" or "music" but around short stories and pop songs in one aisle, poems and arias in the other. In the long store: 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzles, big novels, beer brewing equipment, DVDs of The Wire. Clerks could suggest and build attentional menus. We would develop attentional connoisseurship: the right pairings of the short and long. We would understand, and promote, attentional health.
I imagine attention-based pricing, in which prices of information commodities are inversely adjusted to the cognitive investment of consuming them. All the candy for the human brain — haiku, ringtones, bumper stickers — would be priced like the luxuries that they are. Things requiring longer attention spans would be cheaper — they might even be free, and the higher fixed costs of producing them would be covered by the higher sales of the short attention span products. Single TV episodes would be more expensive to purchase than whole seasons, in the same way that a six-pack of Oreos at the gas station is more expensive, per cookie, than a whole tray at the grocery store.
I imagine an attention tax that aspiring cultural producers must pay. A barrier to entry. If you want people to read your book, then you have to read books; if you want people to buy your book, then you buy books. Give your attention to the industry of your choice. Like indie musicians have done for decades, conceive of the scene as an attention economy, in which those who pay in (e.g., I go to your shows) get to take out (e.g., come to my show). It would also mitigate one oft-claimed peril of the rise of the amateur, which is that they don't know from quality: consuming many other examples from a variety of sources, even amateur producers would generate a sense of what's good and what's bad: in other words, in their community they'd evolve a set of standards. This might frustrate the elitists, who want to impose their standards. But standards would, given enough time, emerge. (In this I have faith.)
I imagine software, a smartphone app, perhaps, you can use to audit your attentional expenditures. So that before you embark on trying to write a book, you will be able to see how much time you spent reading books over the last month or year. So that before you design a marketing campaign that assumes that people aren't doing much else with their time until you show up, you will be able to see what you yourself were doing with your time, which was something perfectly good. This will show you that you're a savvy allocator of your attentional resources — and so is everybody else.
And yet I can't shake fantasizing about attention that has no price, that can't be bought or sold, but is given freely: a gift. I buy and read books because I want to give the gift of my attention to the attention economy I'm (as a writer) a part of. I'm inspired by Lewis Hyde in The Gift, who says that what distinguishes commodities is that they're used up, but what distinguishes gifts is that they circulate — the gift is never trapped, consumed, used up, contained or confined. That seems like the best basis for cultural production to thrive.
So this is what it's come to: when an attention gift economy seems more practical and sustainable than an exchange economy for information commodities, which is being rotted by the gift's ugly negation: the free.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Hey hey!
As this is my first entry into our blog I thought I would give you a small glimpse into one of the days of being Steven Gary Jacobson.
Mondays, Mondays, Mondays (I wrote this on Monday) not the favourite day of the week for most people, the idea that you have no more weekend left, the drudgery of traffic and back to seeing the colleague that you would prefer not to see… ever!
I on the other hand don’t mind my Mondays, too much. I start work at 8am in Melkbos Strand (only on a Monday, as every day I am in a different part of
This months CD is by a band from the late 60’s called The Turtles, best known for their single, ‘Happy Together’. If you have a moment, take a listen one of their other tracks, ‘The Guide for the Married Man’ and ‘You Don’t Have to Walk in the Rain’. The Turtle are one of my favourite bands and one of the many bands that I practiced to as boy and that have influenced my style of playing. They are very old school but fantastic! Let me know what you think.
Now that I have my window open, the crisp morning air flowing in and the music blasting, I get that ‘holiday’ sensation. That ‘no worry in the world’ feeling, which is even further emphasized by my first stop, Melkbos beachfront. The smell and sound of the ocean, the cold breeze and the random people either fishing or taking a jog. I get out the car, sit on the bonnet, stare out at the waves and wonder away for a moment …
Then about fifteen minutes later reality sets in and off to work I go…
So just as quickly as that reality hits me on the back of the head with the force of a ten ton truck (if you need a better analogy just ask Adam, he is full of them) let me remind you that you have work to do and that you are not on holiday…
Thanks for reading, more to come soon. Have a great week and I hope to see you at our next gig or whenever I see you…
Ciao
Steven Gary Jacobson
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