Tuesday, February 21, 2006

depressing reading, exciting listening

sorry for my silence, oh you my faithful reader(s).

look, i just read this:

"The number of online weblogs has reached an estimated 27 million, a new report has found. According to blog search and indexing site Technocrati, around 75,000 new blogs are created every day. US-based Technocrati said it tracks about 1.2 million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour." here

i'm just so thankful to have my slice of that enormous pie - isn't it great? (depressing?)

well, to aleviate our collective depression at being tiny numbers in a very large and exponentially growing equation, go and visit the jamie strange page in the music section of download.com. there are three tracks to download there - two are happy and one is more pensive. jamie, as i've mentioned before, is a mate of mine making catchy pop rock and aiming for world domination (we are soon to start work on some tv commercials for him).

on the headphones: 'hymn of the big wheel' by massive attack, from the album 'blue lines'. www.massiveattack.co.uk

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

some changes a-coming

i've got a few new ideas for my website coming up.

i'm planning to add a 'favicon' to the site so that when you visit or save my website in a favourites list it'll have a nifty little icon beside the address. excitement!

the program i'll be using to create the favicon is iconomaker 3.0, which has just been released by icon empire. it's a cool little program that lets you do all kinds of effects to create real nice windows icons. it occurs to me that icon creation might have potential as a full-blown art project - tiny little pictures that you click on reveal something else...

anyway, check out iconomaker by visiting www.iconempire.com

also coming up on my website is a new postcard project which will involve quite a bit of design work on the site - but more on that later!

on the headphones: '8:45 PM on a rainy friday' by christophe e. download it for free here

gig booked

i've been booked in for a poetry performance at the courtyard gallery in parnell, auckland, at the end of may. this is for the opening of my brother's photography exhibition...

so put that down in your diaries...

on the headphones: 'in a state' by unkle, from the album 'never, never, land'. www.unkle.com

group poem

as promised, here is a group poem that joy, anna and i did the other night - a nice process where you write two lines each and then fold the paper over so the next person can only see your second line. you end up with some pretty cool juxtapositions...

Poem 240106.1 (joy, anna and andrew)

Beautiful, big, round eyes
but it’s what’s in them that makes them so
vulnerable to words that we said when we were less wise
and before time taught us to guard our thoughts
and mind our tongues
and partake of soap mouth wash.
Maybe you could even try
Just being nice to her, having a decent conversation?
making synapses spark and flicker
electrical pulses that carry signals full of meaning
discarded and disregarded then slowly taken up again
as the realisation grows that they are essential to
his survival, as essential as his
need to breathe.
The air seems clearer somehow at this altitude
and we can see for mile as we circle
what once was prey
but now is our salvation.
Now we will be redeemed
now we can look each other in the eye and say what we
really mean
what you really mean to me
and what it means to be alive and real
to grow and feel
to shed sorrow
and heal.