Tag: monument

Decade

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments

This, THIS, is what it feels like to celebrate a 10th blogiversary. And how it feels to read an entry on a ten-year-old–hang on a second…feeling overexcited…now catching my breath…blog. And how it feels to leave a comment on a ten-year-old blog (c’mon, people, when was the last time?). Also a glimpse of how well (or poorly?!) Movable Type has aged.

Well?

Seems like I should be able to come up with somethinganything important sounding, some epideictic gloss on all that blogging has been and all that it will be, on how blogging has died and come back and died again and come back so many times since about 2006 that it’s hard to keep track of whether it is alive or dead right now. Let me guess: alive. Proof enough that blogs, until deleted or lost in upgrades and platform roulette or suspended in an ambiguous cryogenic limbo, are their own dead-living monuments.

Exactly ten years ago I was applying to PhD programs. Owned a house on Missouri 9 Highway in Kansas City. Coached Ph.’s 7th grade basketball teams (Stampede Green and Stampede Blue). Taught as a part-time lecturer. Now am going up for tenure. Own a house in Ypsilanti. And I wear an old Stampede Blue winter hat when I jog the neighborhood in sub-50F weather. Turning over from a 9-ending to a big-0 birthday, myself, in a few months, blog.

I know the entries aren’t evenly spread across these ten years (nor are they likely to be for the next 10 years, although I promise a much bigger celebration in 2024), but thank goodness EWM marked off and has therefore helped me remember what happened, and happened, and happened. Just ten years in, I’m thinking, whatever else this is, it’s memory.

Living Portrait

/ Derek Mueller

I suppose The Johnny Cash Project is as close as I will come to a Grammy nomination. Seems the crowdsourced sketch-video put to Cash’s “Ain’t No Grave” has been nominated for Best Short Form Music Video at the 53rd annual Grammy event coming up in February. In case you haven’t heard of it, here’s a bit of background on The Johnny Cash Project, including a recent version of the piecemeal video.

As far as I can tell, the video is continuously redrawn, with new frames entering into circulation and with old frames dropping in rank as participants assign a five-star rating to existing frames. Many months ago I spent a whopping thirteen-plus minutes sketching frame #1271. Whether or not it was my finest (or even a remarkable) artistic moment may take many more years to determine. My efforts have been rewarded with an average rating of two out of five stars (.400 is kicking butt in baseball and in drawing, right?). Anyway, ratings are not what is important here (ignoring momentarily that the Grammys are a contest).

Grammy win or no, the Cash Project has a pedagogical double that I remember each time it turns up again in this or that RSS stream–the class-drawn music video pieced together from snippets of lyrics and whatever drawings they motivate, all spliced flip-book-style into an on the fly music video. The rawness of DIY; the investment of “I did that.” D. has done this a couple of times with first and second graders who illustrated “What A Wonderful World.” Before the Cash Project, I hadn’t given too much earnest thought to a corresponding compositional project worth pursuing in the classes I typically teach. The Cash Project is a far more mature (i.e., serious-seeming) digital monument, and, that being the case, it has pushed me to reconsider possibilities for small-crowdsourced projects, maybe by adapting something like this and incorporating Google Docs-Drawing (with placeholder images and layers).  I like the way these music video projects link (implicitly collaborative) crowdsourcing and gestalt; the summative experience is more forceful than, say, reading a wiki entry, although, ideally, their logics could be linked–with one used to illuminate the other. Maybe.

Undoubtedly, I’ll be too tired to stay up and watch the Grammys. And that’s if I even remember when it is on TV. But I’m hopeful that The Cash Project gets its due. Here’s a glimpse of the competition.