Friday, May 16, 2008

Othello

I.0.5
Midnightly walking with that fool, Roderigo,
my cool for the heat of his love rightly sought, in
ambulation and conversation did we go
to circling the site of the Senator’s mansion.
Perchance did we spy Desdemona—his daughter
and object of Roderigo’s madcap passions—
flee her fenestrade. Surprised so, we sought her
purpose, purveying ourselves in secret fashion.
Her fever’d pace we follow’d through the darken’d streets
‘til finally we found her footsteps falling fast
upon Othello’s doorstep, where the Gen’ral greets
her with, to our surprise, a kiss! and sighs, “At last.”
As doubtless to the chapel they elope, we must
alert Brabantio, who’ll end this hopeful lust.

I.1.5
We have awake’d the Senator, who doubtless finds
his Desdemona absent from her bed. Alarmed,
he now with Roderigo quick will form alliance
to march against Othello, bearing men well-arm’d.
Brabantio with witchcraft sure will charge the Moor
to make the filial treason more the bearable,
believing nothing else accounts for his allure
in making Desdemona’s fields moor-arable.
I now to this abhorred Moor who still commands
the seem of my allegiance and will him forwarn
that lawful men are come to chain his seasoned hands
and so, by seeming true, will keep my honor sworn.
Persuade him, p’raps I will, to flee and thus admit
apparent fault for crimes he never could commit.

I.2.5 - II.0.5
The Turks ‘gainst Cyprus all arrayed do cause the Duke
to send Othello thence, myself to follow swift,
and his purloined marriage now without rebuke,
his Desdemona fairly follows with in thrift.
In secrecy I Roderigo did convince
she was not lost, and so he to the wars does sail.
O, wretched fool! The reasons I have sent you thence
are not for her, but you my coffers there to fill!
And these embattled ships on stormy seas may yet
prove true my base intents; Othello’s unseen sails
as we draw near may still portend his life forfeit
to passage fraught with tempests fierce and mortal gales.
I disembark, from Montano to hear the scope
of damage done, and reconcile myself to hope.

II.1.5 - II.2.5
The Moor, in jubilation, calls himself a feast
and bids the merriment of all to celebrate
his nuptials and the fortune of the Turks’ defeat
while here I sit, enmasked, nursing secret hate.
And there sits smiling Cassio, Lieutenant for
the war-like Moor, who sleeps upon suspicion of
his weakness for the drink. The guests in faith infer
his goblet’s full, but we’ll ensure he’s had enough.
Just one drink more and Cassio’s gentle temperance
will tested be by Roderigo’s smooth provoke,
with pugilism will reward his insolence
and by the public measure will his place unyoke.
This plot ‘gainst Michael Cassio I shan’t reveal
‘til Fortune helps this Florentine’s good name to steal.

III.0.5 - III.2.5
Oh noble Florentine, how far hast thou fallen
from our lord the war-like Moor’s favor, I know none;
but fight you did Montano, finding your fall in
your fell weapon’s wounding of his worthy person.
How now shall I match Michael Cassio’s harming
with our moor lord’s fall from his fortunes at Cyprus?
Send Cassio calling in manner most ‘larming
t’entreat Desdemona’s fair favors at night’s crest.
For jealous Othello’s a fellow so simple
to trick with swift words, showing no jurisprudence
about him. This flaw I’ll exploit as I’m ample
and silver-tongu’d sorc’ry shall undo his essence.
This mountain of man the foul Moor manifested
will squelch ‘neath my boot when by jealousy’s bested.

III.3.5 - IV.0.5
Forsooth, my plan to full fruition comes, as’t must,
far swifter than, in fullest faith, I’d thought it might:
the invocation of her father’s fair distrust
brings fairly Desdemona’s fealty false to light.
With this small sapling’s fruits I’ve sewn seeds of dismay
within the moor lord’s bridebed of contentedness,
with lies of Michael’s boasting in his bed to lay
brought forth foul’d proofs of kerchief’d fruits she’d feign possess.
This handkerchief was gifted as a token true
to prove his smoothly spoken love. I’ll use its lure
to show the Moor that something sordid’s broken through –
her lack when Cassio has’t, his ‘spicions will ensure.
A simple stitch of strawberry will here provide
the subtle, shifting fruits of my intentions snide.

IV.1.5
The wretched Moor’s rigidity enhances my
malfeasance while perniciously my plans makes space
for subterfuge malicious. Michael chances by –
Othello hid – now shows unknown his lady’s lace.
With harden’d heart enflam’d to hatch the murder of
the fair Venetian dame and vapid Florentine,
Othello’s jealous hate springs nat’rally from her more purer love
to burst its virgin bounds, surfeit a sordid scene.
Since Signior Lodovico’s fresh commission sets
the Moor apiece, deputes young Cassio in’s place
as Gov’ner o’er the Cypriot state, the Moor abets
barbarity: with breakneck speed collects life’s debts.
My meddling, most malicious, makes for murd’rous sport
by mixing quick calamities with false report.

IV.2.5 - V.0.5
The temper of the Moor revealed in full before
the form of Signior Lodovico leaves to be
desir’d but little: else admir’d had been his pure
and noble countenance, now count on’s sense t’unseat.
What says my wife Emilia to quick unfold
the fine seams of my fowled fleece? Though she’s pluck’d out
the plot without protagonist, still can this hold
much hazard – seems by semblance make of me quick doubt.
Quick now, t’accomplish Cassio’s conclusive end,
no surfeit of contrivance need I to convince
young Roderigo, sans remorse, to roughly send
the Florentine to’s fate, maintain my innocence.
With circumspection cautious must I now proceed
dispassionately, else self-sovereignty I’ll cede.

V.1.5 - V.2.5
It all revolv’d on Roderigo’s faculty
in bringing Michael Cassio to’s bitter end:
I, seconding, expected I’d unshackled be
by bearing down ‘pon whosoever’s life sustain’d.
But wretched, rash, and hateful Roderigo, how
your failure here to follow full in force unveils
the worst of my most well-laid schemes. Go now
I to my fate more foul than moor’s or mademoiselle’s.
Still lie both stiff on sanguine sheets made murderous
by my fell words, no further trust to place in my
mendaciousness. Emilia, spiting my duress,
sings truths unseen, and for it’s slain by none but I.
And Cassio, resplendent, now in Cyprus reigns
whilst honest Iago festers still in Cyprus’s chains.

Friday, May 2, 2008

The Story of Stuff

So tonight my friend Katie Sue Deucey showed me this video, The Story of Stuff.

I have more to say about this, but for now I just want people to watch it.

Friday, April 11, 2008

The Black Shift

A few months ago I made an argument for using Blackle because it saves energy. Willy, who appears never to have posted on inner nets, made a comment about his preferred use of Darkoogle.

So it appears that Darkoogle is no longer active because the person behind it was convinced its premise is wrong. The Wikipedia article on Blackle makes note of this controversy and links it to technology inner nets journalist Darren Yates. The test results sound convincing, but unless liquid crystal display monitors function according to pigment color instead of light color (which I find hard to believe), it would make more sense that black consumes less power by emitting less light.

I'm still continuing to use Blackle any time I don't need a specific function of Google like Image Search. Either way, the continued research that came out of this testing process suggests that simply reducing brightness levels from 100% to 70% saves roughly 10W per hour. I've been dimming my screens to around 40%, as a result. Except when I need them brighter, of course.
It looks like someone was really enjoying fried apple pies from McDô one night on Wikipedia.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Jump on in to ARTpool! Circle: Y/N


While I agree that this is a good idea and a good space, I can't shake the feeling that I have a minor ethical issue with the basic premise of this space and the fiscal elitism it engenders and enshrines. While I think it's a better turn than most of the so-called 'Moneyism' that is supposed to be so post-post-modern and actually is so post-Warhol, it still smacks of the Plato's Republican classism that characterizes politicians like Charlie Christ, Rick Baker, Arnold Schwartzenegger, and to a lesser extent John McCain. Do I disagree with most of the iterations of 'Moneyism,' however that term is applied? No. Not most of them any more than with these politicians: primarily the disagreement about reasons and method is fundamental and the basic practice is close enough that it's hard not to understand the validity of the experiment being undergone. I mean it certainly provides a venue for artists who have the money to spare on a gamble of return or the gumption to jump on in anyway and deal with the damage, come what may.

But I know I don't have enough money to rent wall space.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Football Fever


Images of a football game on a cycling laptop computer screen saver taken with a cellphone camera: originally from digital images taken of a cathode ray tube television. Click for the rest.



*tag*

Cartoonists of Color Sit-In

So the idea is that Check Your Head cartoonist Cory Thomas wrote a comic script about the way minority artists are treated in the syndicated newspaper comic strip industry, his version of which is below:

No it's not, the link is dead.

On 10 February 2008, several cartoonists - most of them colored folk in some sense - decided to run their versions of Thomas's strip. This was primarily done in advance, and there was a St. Petersburg Times article about it roughly a month ahead of time, so there was some effort to get the word out.

Now I recognize there is a meta comment here about what is happening with the industry regarding shrinking comics pages and shrinking print-media readership in general, but I'd rather not go into it.

The results are gathered in a few different places, notably here and here, and there is some very good commentary going on in many different areas, well worth checking out.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Letter to Social Foundations of Education Professor

Professor Johnson -

I would like to meet with you tomorrow before class to discuss the peculiar educational challenges I am running into with your course and perhaps come to a mutually-ameliorable agreement about how to tackle them. Your regular office hours should be fine, especially if you would be wiling to allot the entire hour to the proceedings if it becomes clear that it will be necessary; I hope however, to take far less of your time than that. I offer below a brief description of the problem, that you may begin to consider it; if it seems to you our meeting will run long, please feel free to phone me into the office earlier at the number to follow.

In brief, I come to this class from the intellectual heritage of New College of Florida. As such, I find it terribly difficult to do even the smallest reading or writing assignment in a cursory fashion. Where this turns into a difficulty is that NCF raised the minimum bar so high for me that I have no concept of how to get the quantity of writing assignments expected of me done. I am flabbergasted as to how, for example, to skim the material, get a grasp on the ideas, and post a quick one-paragraph summary. I am unable to dedicate less than my full attention to the text, and as such I can treat it as a student might only through the lens of a scholar learning from and responding to a text. Examine any of my posts for evidence of this; I'm not showing off, I simply cannot do less without feeling disingenuous to my own education.

To make matters worse for this particular course, one of the consistent strains in my studies at New College was educational theory, so I'm familiar with conservative, progressive, and radical educational theories from the ancients through the oughts. We are being asked to read, analyze, and respond to between 50 and 150 pages of text per week on top of whatever other classes I'm taking. I was reading this much at New College, but the expectations for output were less often and more focused. You can, I'm sure, see my dilemma.

Thank you for your consideration, and if I do not hear from you sooner I will see you at 1230h in COQ 236D.


Unaluminally,


Joe McCue

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Red Shift

So as you approach the speed of light, the things you're approaching begin to take on a bluer cast. Things growing more distant from you begin to look more red. This latter is known as the red shift, and it is used to measure our distance from far-off cosmic entities. This is pretty heady science stuff — and was intuited by artists decades before it was known to science.

So as we approach the speed of light, we also approach the optimization of energy use. To celebrate, I've changed the background of this template to a minimal, primarily black style ... for black, you see, uses no energy on a computer screen, and thus optimizes energy use.

I was clued into this concept through Blackle, a Google search engine with an entirely black interface. It doesn't have a Google Image search or any of the other bells and whistles of the standard Google site, but for your standard web search, it functions as a Google search. There's even a Firefox Searchbar Add-On for it, so you can restack your search engines within the bar to have it at the top.

Plus, being confronted by a large swath of black every once in a while can only be both good for the eyes and for the mind, right?

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

An American Tradition of Dynasty

An article about the dynastic nature of Bilawal (formerly Benazir) Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party appeared in the Los Angeles Times recently. Written by Georgetown University Law Center professor Rosa Brooks, it makes a comparison to the dynastic nature of the last 20 years of American politics. In particular, it warns of the distinct possibility of having had two families share the most powerful post in the country for 20, 24, or even 28 years. What a frightening thought for an American to have. That is not how we run our country! It certainly looks like we are turning into a dynastic state, and that bothers me only because of the tacit assertion that America hasn’t always had a long history of dynasty politics … an assumption that is patently false. For evidence of this, allow me to say the following names: Adams, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Bush. Among others.

This is not an endorsement of Hillary; I just voted for Barack Obama. Nor is it an endorsement of family politics; just a reflection that we are a country built on the idea of freedom from aristocracy … by aristocrats … for aristocrats. This is a problem our country needs to address, and one it has been addressing for a long while, but not one that will be fixed in the next few months. And while my reasons for disliking Hillary are growing broader by the minute as she campaigns in a dirty and unethical manner, I hope the two-headed (and Janus-faced) nature of her campaign becomes one more nail in the coffin of her presidential ambitions.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Open Letter to Red Stripe

* burp *

Dear Red Stripe –


I was up late at night talking with some friends about beer and I revealed to them that I have never really found a light beer in a green bottle that I like: I don't like Heineken or Grolsch or (ugh) Rolling Rock and I just recently learned to like Yuengling OK. And while I know enough about brewing beer to know that different colors of glass allow in different wavelengths of light, I also know enough to realize that the brewing process doesn’t expose the fermenting beer to much light. Thus the influence of the bottle must approach the infinitesimal.

Giving examples of this, a friend said to me: “Red Stripe.”

Conjuring the image of your beer in a green bottle, I spat back at him, “Yeah, but only around Christmas.”

I suggest to you the following: around Christmas you release your beer in a green bottle and milk the holiday-related cash-cow, as long as it’s already there. Don’t bother to make a special holiday beer, just use a green bottle for thirty or sixty days.

In return, I would ask you for a hundred bucks or a case of your beer in recognition of my contribution. Of course this is not a contract and you wouldn’t have to do anything at all, but it would be kind of nice if you did.

Thank you for not making a shitty light beer in a green bottle,



J.P.P. McCue
110 19th Avenue S.
St. Petersburg, FL 33705
joseph.mccue@gmail.com
941.685.4845

Appellation et Traduction

For the sake of clarity, this is the title of the Marcel Duchamp piece:

Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage

This translates, with great accuracy and decent precision, as:

Given: 1st the waterfall / 2nd the gas in the lamp

Those of you with greater acuity en français, I would welcome a correction.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Twit History

Several months ago, at the persistent entreaty of the Reverend to give it a whirl, I joined Twitter. Twitter is the bastard child of a text message and a blog entry, with a limit of 140 characters per post and browser-optionality that extends to being able to post through IM or text message.

I thought I would hate it, but it turns out I'm a big fan. It provides just enough brevity and flexibility to be an exercise in the spirit of haiku and has a strict enough limit to both encourage eloquence and eliminate the intimidation to inaction stemming from white canvas anxiety.

It's most easily labeled a social-networking site because you can follow friends and be followed yourself and whatnot, but true to form I've not used it that way. Instead it has become for me an expressive tool to encourage creation and ideation.

Here's a tiny URL link to the first chronological page: http://tinyurl.com/3c7rnb
http://tinyurl.com/2624mw