I am … unhindered by talent

Why should I sit with a straight back
when there are so many more interesting positions to take up?

Ivor Cutler’s poem “To take” (from his album A wet handle) in its entirety.

I suggested earlier that people should write a strange little poem and have the courage to share it as a tribute to this wonderful fellow. A strange little poem didn’t come to right away, but I decided to instead attempt to realize an photographic idea that’s been rattling around my odd head for quite a while.

These were some pretty weird stocking stuffers that WeatherGirl got for Sub-Evil Boy and I at Christmas. We each got a glow in the dark frog and a pack of the Cat Butt Gum (she was obviously channeling an 8 year old boy). I then got the weird snake/mermaid lady, and he got the “Plastic hut: Educational and funny toy”, which still completely cracks me up every time I think about it.

I’d been thinking about creating a still life with these oddments ever since Christmas, but had never gotten around to it. I figured that Ivor deserved a tribute, and that this would be appropriate in its strange way, so here you have it. For those interested in more traditional tribute images, I highly recommend this wonderful shot by mikey delgado.

The book in the background is Concerto for stray hand on upright piano by Charlie Fowler, who’s a pretty Ivor-Cutler-like character here in Morris, Minnsota. His book Plenty of room between the trees is an absolute classic and most definitely recommended. (I think you can buy copies at the PRCA Gallery.)

I’ll close with this wonderful excerpt from “A pain in the neck”, also from A wet handle:

God: “What’s going on out there?”
St. Peter: “It’s Ivor Cutler. He doesn’t like the set up.”
God: “Tell him to go to hell.”
St. Peter: “But you said…”
God: “Never mind what I said. He’s always been a pain in the neck. He’ll be happy there.”
St. Peter: “Well, you heard what he said.”
Ivor Cutler: “I did. Hey, he doesn’t sound so bad as I thought. A bit grumpy. That’s a good sign. Maybe I should stay. … No, not to sit at his feet. Tell him ‘thank you’. See you. Hell, here I come.”
St. Peter: “Oh, hang on. God’s coming with you. He wants to check out what it’s like. Just to refresh his memory … he says. Here he comes.”
God: “All right Ivor, let’s go.”

Exeunt omnis

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Photo by Mikey Delgado

I am sad to report the death a few days ago of Ivor Cutler. If the character of a nation is measured in part by its eccentrics, then the UK (and the world) is a slightly poorer place for his passing.

Cutler was a multi-talented creator whose work was championed by such heavyweights as the Beatles (Lennon was a big fan, and Cutler appeared in Magical mystery tour) and John Peel. It was through Peel, in fact, that I initially heard of Cutler and came to acquire (at import prices) the brilliant A wet handle, a collection of 83 (obviously short) poems with odd bits of harmonium wheezing at the end of each piece. (You can listen to samples over at Last FM.)

I’ve always loved those poems; they’re wonderfully punk in their lo-fi recording and those crazy poetic gems are like surreal haiku snapshots. Sub-Evil and I used one of these (”Baked beetles”) in one of our KUMM liners.

I never met him (and only ever bought the one CD - I’m not a very good repeat customer, even when I really like the stuff), but I’m sad that he’s gone just the same. Go write a short, silly poem, and then have the courage to share it. It’s the least we can do.

As Charlie Fowler said…

Andy Kershaw was also a big fan and will replay one of Cutler’s sessions for Peel on his BBC 3 radio show Sunday night and that should be available for a week in their Listen Again system. WeatherGirl, Sub-Evil Boy, and I will also play some Cutler on our KUMM show on Sunday (2-4pm, U.S. Central time).

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Lots of good news today on the student research front, with three funding proposals getting the thumbs up. Brian’s MAP proposal was accepted, so he’ll get paid to spend the summer here doing research with me, following up on some very cool ideas at Dagstuhl. Tyler and Andy’s UROP also got local approval, and now go to the Twin Cities campus for final approval.

Congrats to the guys! I’m looking forward to some very cool work coming out of this…

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Today’s the last (week) day of Spring Break, and has my to-do list shrunk like it should have? Not hardly. I got a lot of stuff done, but there was a heck of a lot of stuff not done. I could blame two unexpected server problems in the lab that took up way too much time, but in reality I should probably just be grateful they happened when I was here and had time to deal with them.

We did get our UMM CSci TWiki install upgraded to the new Dakar release (v4.0.1), which I’m hoping is a happy thing. (It certainly looks nicer.) We ran into a few hiccups there, but support info from TWiki.org was ultimately able to save the day.

Now I need to go read the six GECCO submissions that I have to review.

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We’re now into the last week of the EGA National Exhibit being here in Morris. This weekend (Saturday, 11 March) is the last big day of events, and the last day all this wonderful work will be on display is next Friday (17 March). Check out the PRCA website for the skinny on the various events happening this weekend, and make sure you get over to see this great exhibit while you still can!

I’ll also put in a particular plug for Jess Larson, who will be giving another (and from the sounds of it, more elaborate) talk on her way cool art girdles. Her talk several weeks ago at the opening was highly amusing and informative, and it’s way spiffy that she’s going to reprise this talk. These are incredible pieces of work, and people really need to get out there and check these out while they’re still up.

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A very funny spoof movie showing what Microsoft might have done if they’d re-designed those wonderfully elegant iPod boxes. Hee, hee, hee…

Courtesy of John Naughton.

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Bear with me - the title will make sense in a bit…

I’ve been posting images on Flickr for about 10 months now, and (as regularly readers will be all too aware) quite like it. One could argue that I like it too much and that a busy person like me shouldn’t be spending so much time playing with photos, but it helps keep me sane so I do it anyway.

In the time since I started, I’ve been fortunate enough to receive some positive responses to some of my images, but I’m hardly a Flickr superstar like Helga Kvam or Thomas Hawk (and rightly so - their stuff is truly amazing). There are lots of ways to measure “popularity” on Flickr and, like all such attempts to assess on-line “popularity” or “success” or “importance”, they have some merit but are by no means definitive. One is counting the number of views an image gets, which is essentially the number of times someone (other than me) loads up that image’s page. This (sort of) measures how often someone was sufficiently interested by a thumbnail to go visit the image’s page to see it larger, read the comments, etc. This can be manipulated in a whole host of ways, though. Some of my more viewed images, for example, have those views because I’ve used them to illustrate posts here, or because they were used on the PRCA website to illustrate events or items there. And, as far as you know, I spend my lonely nights going around UMM’s Computer Science lab loading up my photos on one machine after another to crank up my view count.

Well, if that’s what I’ve been doing, I’m not very good at it, because in nearly a year my most viewed photo has just over 200 views, and only 15 have at least 100 views (out of 331 photos posted as of today). And every one of my 20 most viewed photos (with between 93 and 204 views) has been up for months collecting views. (In contrast, Kvam and Hawk have multiple images with multiple thousands of views and over 100 “Faves”.)

But today something really weird happened.

I’ve been wading through old images from, for example, our wonderful sabbatical year in the UK in 2000-2001 and our associated travels in Europe, cleaning a few up now and then and posting them. This morning I posted four shots of Sub-Evil Boy in Milan and Florence. One of these is the picture at the top of this post, where he’s happily chasing pigeons in front of the Duomo in Milan, presumably in homage to Mr. Lunch. Another is this crazy thing to the left, which I think is much cooler and which has (mostly) gotten more attention than the others (as I expected).

I posted these pictures in the morning and watched their “progress” as I sorted out other stuff in the office. I was fairly pleased with their slow accretion of views (but, sadly, no faves) and wandered off to class a little before noon. I came back roughly an hour and a half later to find that the picture at the top of this post no longer had the 1 or 2 views I’d left it with, but had 1,030 views!!! (I was really tempted to make the number blink to show my complete amazement, but decided to spare us all the horror.)

I just don’t get it.

It’s a nice enough photo, but hardly spectacular. And it has an order of magnitude more views than anything else in my posted photo stream? All collected in the space of an hour or two? I was actually quite alarmed - the traffic was so out of the ordinary that it felt like I’d been “hacked” somehow. If it had been a particularly cool photo, and there were a lot of comments and faves, I might just count my lucky stars and move on. But there was only one comment and no faves. It just doesn’t have the profile of a really popular image on Flickr.

My guess is that someone, somewhere posted it on some heavily visited site, but that it was only visible (or at least was only on the front page) for a brief period of time. It got all those views very quickly, and has only gotten four more in the 6 or 7 hours since. And the posting must have been in a very high traffic area that probably doesn’t have a high proportion of Flickr users. Assuming at most one in ten people that see such an image on something like a blog will click through to see the Flickr page (and I think that’s probably being generous) that means that something on the order of 10,000 people saw it wherever it was posted.

So, anyone know where that might have been? My attempts to find the link have so far failed, but that may be in part because even the mighty Google takes some time to update its view of the world, and this is all very recent. Consider this an electronic version of putting the photo on a milk carton. Anyone seen it around?

Thanks in advance for any info you can provide.

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