Good News - one of my pieces is showcased in the Spring 08 Issue of the New River Journal of Digital Writing and Art. The New River Journal was founded in 1996 - one of the first journals devoted exclusively to digital writing and art. It comes to you from the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech.
My piece is called Dandelion Chance; it’s a 3-minute video and flash piece about indecision and moving forward.
We’re excited to say that BookGlutton is a finalist for a Webby Award in the Community Category! There are a lot of smart, driven people who also applied (apparently 10,000 of them), so we’re honored to be considered. Vote for us here (you might need to sign up to vote…but it’s quick and painless): http://pv.webbyawards.com/nominee/entry/350581339
Here are a few lines from the Webby Awards Site:
Hailed as the “Oscars of the Internet” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobile Websites. The Webby Awards is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-person judging academy whose members include Internet co-inventor Vinton Cerf, R/GA’s Chief Bob Greenberg, “Simpson’s” creator Matt Groening, Arianna Huffington, and Harvey Weinstein.
Dunno if you’ve come across schmap.com, but it’s a web-based travel guide that integrates dynamic content (restaurants, tours, museums) with google maps. You can then use this information to customize an itinerary and share the schedule with fellow travelers. You can print it, look at it on the web, or run it from your handheld.
I come in on the photo front - they somehow came across one of my photos that I took of Old Krakow Restaurant, arguably the best Polish Restaurant in California (by my rating anyway). Doesn’t it look cozy? The pierogies are fresh and outta sight!
I was pleased to see my project 30 Days of Rain published in Drunken Boat’s 9th and most recent edition. Check it out here:
http://drunkenboat.com/db9/index.html
I’m in the Web Art section.
You never know what you’ll run into tromping around Ireland. This Neopoleonic Tower was across the street from the bus station in Drogheda. Apparently there’s a 13th Century poet buried in the hill, to boot.
We found a cozy pub to wait for our bus connection, and dine on the oddest bag of bar snacks I’ve ever had: Bacon Flavor Fries (which look like little uniform strips of bacon, btw).
Newgrange Tree, as one might expect, forgotten by time.
Newgrange is amazing; it’s sturdy, huge, beautiful, enduring. But the eeriest thing about it is how time forgot it for so long — how there are no real records of the civilization that built it. No shred of language or culture remains, no clue as to why people built flimsy little huts to live in but poured all their resources into this giant, and no doubt warmer, building. I know I’m oversimplifying things, but there must of have a good story. Most people think it was a tomb. There are 50 or so smaller mounds scattered around the area, and some of them contain bones. But it was the center of the society; it obviously goes beyond a graveyard. The question of “why” looms large for me.
The Newgrange abandonment is the inevitable end of all civilizations, but it gives me pause. And it makes one appreciate the enduring nature of art.
The history of Newgrange goes something like this:
- Built 5,000 years ago. Abandoned after a few hundred years.
-Reinhabited 4,000 years ago. These people put giant stonehenge-type rocks in a circle a few hundred feet from the mound, but probably didn’t ever use it. There are grave-sized burnt offering spots all around the circle, too.
- Initial quarrying began around 1699. The owner didn’t realize it was a historic site and started taking stone out of the back for building materials. He stopped when he found out that it might be a tomb, but he left the darn thing open for people and animals to wander into for 250 years. That’s how all those people from the 1830’s carved their names into the wall. That also means anything left there, including bones, was probably taken.
- The mound was investigated and restored in the 1960’s - this is when they found the roofbox and alignment with the winter solstice. They initially uncovered a piece of quartz that acted as a shutter and found that the alignment coincided with the seasons. None of this is obvious when you’re standing inside, particularly because the entrance walkway is 20 foot long “S” shape bounded on all sides by giant slabs of stone (so you can’t just look in from the outside), and the skybox “hole” itself can’t be seen from the center of the room (which makes it all the more amazing when the light streams in - they did a fake demo for us). You can see a short clip here (tourguide clip) and here (straight video of the solstice in 1996). The sunrise event lasts about 15 minutes.
You can also watch this guy’s vacation video for a nice little walk up to the Newgrange mound.
You can only take guided tours inside the mound - an effort to keep people from vandalizing things. Unfortunately you can’t take photos, either. I can tell you that the ceiling was about 15 feet tall in the center and the interior was the size of a large bedroom (giant when you consider it’s made of stacked rocks, but small considering how large the mound is on the outside). There are three nooks, square with the entrance (so that the mound had a cathedral-type layout), with additional geometric shapes carved above them in the rocks. The way it is built is fantastic - giant stones stacked slanting down, so that water that falls on the mound flows outside and down - the thing doesn’t even leak! Here’s 30 seconds of video someone took of the ceiling from the inside.
The stone at the entrance is carved with triumvirate swirls. The symbols were probably religious, but who knows. Maybe it was a calendar, or a history, or someone’s name for that matter. There was no other written language left behind to explain.
It’s worth pointing out how giant these stones are. They didn’t have wheels, but its presumed that they were rolled uphill (!) from the river on treetrunks. They were quarried at quite a distance (some may have come from Wales) and moved via boats to get here, which points to an advanced trading system and a serious commitment to getting things done. After all, the people that built the mound had a life expectancy of about 30 years at the most, so the successive generations that took time to build this meant business.
You walk behind this giant, carved keystone (bottom, foreground) to get inside the Newgrange mound. The dark square at the top is the “skybox,” which is a fancy term for a hole in the ceiling where light comes in during the winter solstice. The rest of the time the center of the mound is pitch black.
The light that comes in does so at dawn for a few days surrounding the solstice, and hits the center of the room, Indiana Jones-style. Interestingly enough, the floor slants up from the entrance to the center, so that the light and the ground meet at just the right spot. That probably took some serious math.
