Freedom For The Culture Worker
Plaasma Box owes it's simplistic "pass" design to "russian constructivism" and the colours simple scheme of alternating black, grey, and red are indicators of this motif also evidenced in the band "Nitzer Ebb's" album/cd art.
Currently a large influence is the group of noise artists and graphic artists (but so much more) called Zoviet-France whose link at the bottom of this page will take you to a fine piece of work if you click on the page until you find a type of lyric sheet, for there are INSTRUCTIONS to using the innovative "gift box" (no relation to Plaasma) such as "hit box with stick" which are really deadpan concept jokes full of good fun as well (the feathers are actually mildy radioactive due to the roosting habits of the birds off Great Britains coasts--crazzyyy).
If you actually view some of the nicely executed projects such as the felt cut ups of old Russian army uniforms/hats from "cold war Russia" and the olden days of "checkpoint charlie" and smuggled levi's caught and trapped in the uber spiffy cd sandwhiches replete with "Stalinesque" and other "Soviet Socialist pins" tagging the design and creating an artifactual archival concrete poem to commemorate "ways of life" which have now passed on by! We hope you find some interest here.
It would be perhaps a nice thing for design fanatics like we. Click and find a space where art meets industry in an innovative way and see some cases where the "proof is IN the packaging" shunning the "No Logo" concept in favour of a more highly coloured "Andre the Giant" type endeavor. In a time where the free expression of "beautiful graffitti speech" (nice design) is prohibited as a quality of life crime and no one would place a bumper sticker on their NEW CAR for a just cause to SAVE THEIR LIFE we feel it's naive to call branding "wrong-headed" without looking into the institutionalization and commercialization of badging, branding, and other "colouring" as has been perpertraited throughout time. One can think swiftly of "heraldry" and the family "coat of arms" sponsored by geneology to attempt to find a simple elegant example of why we "sign ourselves" with more than a signature of even electronic design.
If the logos were as varied as our screen-names and blogs and avatars-- our books, our comix, our anime and video, theatre, music, and sound art production; then we would not feel threatened; what is unpleasant is the MONOPOLY of Windoze and "certian nameless ISPs" to the exclusion of ALL ELSE ONLINE!!!
So how does one approach the commonplace "human interest article?" Do we use the common "5 W's and an H" of "WhoWhatWhereWhenWhyHow" or is that merely a contrivance. Was it ever NOT contrived? Question, and question THOSE questions. When is an article complete? Has the Fatlady sung? When is a magazine "ripe" and how long do attention spans last for a writer on versus offline? We're already wearing thin on time!
A recent interesting magazine release by Adbusters was an excellent example of Articles of Faith and Articles of Disillusion; going by the great "subhead" "Journal of the Mental Environment" with a splashed on logo that says "MAD PRIDE" and means, for the most part "MAD PRIDE" there are some great links, site gags (visit the advertisement which looks to be the real mccoy for "Thorazine" to see what a slim line there is between advertisement, artistic expression, and gag/prank or schema!) and the prosody of dabblers in design as well as wording.
**This is a must read for anyone interested in such subject matters as follows: " the institutionalization of mental health","positive flowchart indicating pharmaceutical viability", "facing the facticity of Prozac's Pharmaceutical Dangers!"
We hope that ALL Freelancers of any ouvre but in particular connoseuirs of the written word will be encouraged by our FREE PRESS stance which led to the creation of the above blocky pass which may be copied so long as the name of the person who inspired the birthing is rubbed out and your own name inserted. We cannot condone stolen identities so for those high school students who may have hit this site through a search engine or while a member of Plaasma Box Collective was online; do yourself a favour and speak to your Journalism Teach...it would be very bad for you to take "The Name of the Plaasma Box Press Pass D-Sign Number One Lady-- Elizabeth Mourant" in vain!!
We have decided instead to give you a very simple and absolutely legal recipe of particular help we hope to offer those that are legitimate freelance writers or even photographers. If you change the words around to concoct your VERY OWN DESIGN seeing as this one may well be a "cool" and "decent" piece of work but there is NO SUBSTITUTE for making a working Emblem to represent YOU and YOUR VERY OWN PRESS CORPS who we imagine to be able to carry and hold interest with a wondrous story, review, poem on the subject of our recent New York Tragedy: 911..as well as our own "culture workers" and members of our "Press Corps" who have thus far embraced yet pressed for the more inclusive future Blogger D-sign to be included for printing or to add to any selfrespecting "Blog" or even Website.
We used Adobe Photoshop LE exclusively which is available for under 100 dollars generally and can offer MANY of the prerequisites to the larger Adobe Photoshop 7 software without the totality. We found the ability to include text particularly useful and are a bit sad that the result on this page bled in transfer to this site which it did not do so much when we printed them ourselves for their nefarious purposes which they are undubitably serving: Press Pass, Business Card, Small Advertisement/Flyer, Drink Coaster, and various sundry things as yet unthought of!
In fact, the first pass was taken to a local Target where a layer of laminate was applied over the vending machine sized photo (taken in London's Tottenham Court Station; find photo of such size for you!:) centered in the middle of the design. We then punched a nice hole at the top and bought a neck clip to wear to events as an easy and useful form of identification (when worn with one's OTHER I.D. such as driver's license, and/or Passport which it does not replace but ENHANCE in our eyes) when you want to flaunt your status in a way which others might understand and respond to with their own procedures for dealing with a possible "Peep!"
Now, many 'lancers don't find they need a pass at all and when they do it's often provided by the "sponsors" of the article, show, game, movie, person, topic, etc. Specifically they are correct. If you are a "well known" person, if you have sent "sample clips" and an "idea" and have had an editor give you the go ahead which is a great thing to have; although an advance is the best thing of all at this time; then you may feel this is "superfluous" yet at this time in our Nations' bid for "Homeland Security" it makes me only that much safer in my own head; that much easier to be sure of it and to sleep easily in my bed!
So, sign that contract if you have a "marketable idea" for a particular project which hasn't been covered by another "culture worker" to the best of your knowledge; unless you are a "copyleft" kind of person without even the vaguest concerns for money, acclaim, and a cash crop as well as a filled and flapping rolodex! Remember, the internet is a great place to be "scooped like a nice fresh cup of haagen daz ice cream" out of the mushy miasma and into a nice neat fresh and DIFFERENT container than the one you thought was made for this particular brand X of your own special recipe for XY icecream! It may sound cutesy but there is nothing fun about being "scooped" as it means that a big ole hunk of your work was placed in a boat with two other blobs and some camoflage bananas, whipped cream, and that maraschino and nuts to cover up your ONE BLOB as ESSENTIAL as it remains to the entire taste experience; at the very least!
How much better for you to have your own contents under pressure contained and in a "closed shop" when the other "scoopers" come around with all manner of naiveite with which to convince you they have no more cunning than a simple green garden grass snake when in fact those snake eyes are crafty and hardly simple and some people are still around that believe it was a snake that led us to perdition while others say they roll themselves into hoops!
Keep your structure, everything about your work happily to yourself, and sitting pretty waiting for the content to be executed, finished, scored, poured, shaped, and finally the blueprints rolled up signed, sealed, and delivered to the firm that will beautify that purple prosaic patch yet trim your hedges while they are at that as you may well know if'n you are a earlyworm, a young-un, or a person without VASTS amounts of experience and even if you haven't written recently...and yes, the writing hand when out of use does rust. I may suggest WD-40 and lots of reading, and reading, and still more viewing of art work, and reading, and listening to songs, and copying the structures of others' stories, of their poems, and reading and editing and fixing what is already printed out there (I am frequently found fixing in my head, this sentence, that word, and you know it would often read better, but hey, this is the way they wanted it, and this is what happens when no one wants to lose their originality, so remember that when you get upset with your editor-- if they are a good editor they are priceless as someone crafts those delicate bonsai trees and few writers will be able to render the trees anything more than smaller, but not miniscule, it would hurt too much to take off so many LIVING WORDS in their form here as branches, to exfoliate the bush of all it's lush greenery!
It was nice to "create" a graphically pleasing "business card" which might receive feedback!
We had hoped, speaking for the collective here, that we would be able to design a SIMPLE BOILERPLATE/TEMPLATE which might well give you a design not just, as plain as the more connected "mojowire" free press pass available from mother jones, with no place for photos, yet much easier to use and with a large magazine behind it. This was a different situation and need. The UWA charges 100 to access "members only" (writer's assignment areas) online.
The point here is that: A free press is a free press and a pass is a pass is a pass except when it's the OTHER type of nontangible yet touchy feely pass more apt to be found on "blind dates."
Don't Give All the People What They Want:
When I call and start on a vague mission, usually by telephone but increasingly made possible on the internet, there are many questions asked, and the public at large is used to seeing writers "on assignment" for instance I grew up with "Lou Grant" and after that it's very hard to conceptualize someone actually writing "freelance" cause you know Murray worked hard for his money and Lou is a "Newspaper man." What about this obscure creature that is responsible for so many stories everyear, in so many magazines, how do they manage to freelance? For starters, many freelancers are the victims or the proud owners of more than one job. Some few freelancers like myself may find writing easier due to a creative bent and a disability (truth or dare). Then there's the card "press" in the cartoon male journalist's hatbands in the early days of animataion.
Press seems to NEED to identify itself. What do we do about ourselves when we ain't a part of no junket; yet we kind of feel that others might like to "see the whites of our eyes?" I can say "raise your hands slowly as you plead with your quarry NOT to shoot you" but beyond that you are going to be identified at some point in the process although there is no tried and true rule and I can tell you that "reverse psychology" is the best generator of a story I have met IN MY LIFE. When people think you are busy (and who isn't, really) and you say "I am press" at a willcall window "but I am on vacation" when you find that you are NOT going to get that comp since you did NOT call ahead and do your own advance in a timely fashion then...and only then will a cloud of musicians, politicians, excons, homeless millionaires, and cocaine cowboys with tales to tell ALL SHOW UP at the same time to show you that they are READY to have their name writ large! Cultivate this attitude I call "the detached writer on sabbatical" as this is not only eaten up by the masses but by the pros and veterans alike as they realize with growing awe that you don't need them, and then by some inverted logic come to the gradual conclusion that THEY might in fact NEED YOU, and when better than NOW NOW NOW. I cannot tell you why this sneak attack works for me, perhaps I am too nervous and put people on edge when I have so much of myself riding on a story
Likewise, it doesn't help you to get overly involved yet to maintain too much distance will give the impression you don't care and aren't absolutely FASCINATED TO PIECES which is DEATH to a great relationship with an only slightly press savvy subject or even a lukewarm subject for a story or part of your story should they feel you don't care. There is almost no way to make up for this sin once committed although with veterans it's a bit different and your aloofness might well be understood as a mutual agreement to keep ALL the cards from being laid on the table AT ONCE; aces up mutual sleeves, and all reasonably HIDDEN.
The only way to learn is to get out there like an actor beating the bushes and being tuned in consecutive auditions and learning all the types of stories and personalities and their motivations and if you thought you weren't going to go to school for a psychiatry degree nor attend theatre school this is still the time to reevaluate; now's the time to decide if that would be a better idea if you are not absolutely sandblasted with vocabulary which sticks to your shapely writing outllines and creates content in the silhouette of your doodling and fiddling around no matter how shoddy you do what you do. If you haven't kissed the blarney stone and been given the gift of gab just shut up and go for that psyche, anthropology or maybe even the degree in political science, and don't look back now!
The Blog:
We cannot beat them. The best blogsite for the ordinary blogger is known as Bloggers online and you might go to Blogspot to find your own page before someone else beats you! This is ABSOLUTELY a case (as with the computer in general) of "if you can't beat em join em" and the quicker you do, the more likely you are of never again needing to! I have a less than perfect blog I run called "Red Velvet Rope" which I hope to tune up like an old mandolin given to me by my Grandpa when he decided to die and play on high and very far. I have also heard great things about "Radioland" which is not only a nerd's tool to use. In fact, if you don't know how to "blog" with a "browser" and the "browser wars" happened in your collective consciousness around the same time the Balkans were happening you are not far off with you timing but you are really wide of the geographical and internet mark. The Blog (WebLog) is a well maintained journal of hyperlinks and journeys through which you map out your basic itinerary in real and hyperspace, which was not around to tool with during the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia or we would have heard more from "the people" who have found a personal way to keep a journal AND have a real voice rather than practicing ventriloquism and throwing one's "anonymity" and "numeral count" in to one of the "public opinion polls" so like STANDARDIZED TESTING in the United States where an essay based on the formatting in Microsoft Word cannot help but be at a disadvantage and any extended poetry or prose can benefit from pre-existing layout and which cannot help but bring back to the essay a dazzling array of gymnastics unfortunate for those that are growing up today, resisting the urge to pirhouette from the high wire despite the existence of the "back" button, "delete" and numerous other ways to erase!
There can be no coincidence that EARLY literary hypertext from Eastgate Systems attempted to address the urgency with which fiction lovers might NAvIGATE the Web with "maps" and orchestrate a book which might play out over space and time in various boxes or "lexias" or clumps of freshly laid writing like clods of earth with new growths of Florida crabgrass! The idea was fantastic but it wanted for an ability to reflexively "post" a "stream of consciousness" style work in threads by ANY WRITER in a way which would not take the heavy added meta-element of the need to "code" as part and parcel of it all without BURYING that heavy plumbing and giving to "authors" the SAME WONDER that "graphic artists" and all visual persons experience with the abundance of tools mainly existing all at once in Photoshop 7 and available in the short form in LE and countless software platforms for music tracks and with loops and with all sorts of readymade workable items; leaving only the written word underdone, and still not made uncommon; beyond the "Blogger's Delights..." or the "Flash Artists" visionary fonting and loading methods with their bold individual experience meter, showing how much is loaded, everything measured, everything calculated, all of it syncopated but for our humblest of words!
Sadly while "slicing and dicing" became available right quick for sound and vision and moving pictures moved themselves jerkily and tinily the perspectives for the written word were handed over to Browsers without the taxing capacity of the email's jet propulsions flying them over the snail mail with its' real time delays...
The hypertext was meant to form links between consenting words; the things which moved the words and links not coded but moving like slices of the clipped soundfile, or picture file, if needed small scissors and more motions and rotations at hand... "meta-parts" within first allowing them to metastasize while the mind free with floating feelings made supersonic connections without "signalling" before turning left on RED!
And it can hardly be a coincidence that EastGate was quick to throw out a Geek's wetdream if only Geeks felt the need for anything like Blogs...For the record, those that are keeping blogs may have a little geek inside but by and large they are more adventurous and less "writ large" than those that have mastered the multiple languages (speaks five languages and codes in everything) NEEDED to use the new Eastgate tool which nevertheless we will name here "Tinderbox." If it were only a Tinderbox there might be something to it that would give an ordinary blogger both "boxes" for content and "tinder" for "kindling" the magic story line.
This takes so long to set up it's along the lines of software that you need a class for and if it's not there YET it likely won't be there. My guess is that some Professor out to overtech the next Professor of E-Literature (an actually shrinking field) may well incorporate a blogging class with "RadioLand" "Tinderbox" and liberal helpings of the "starter menu" such as Bloggers and Pitas (if Pitas is still going strong).
So you have a Blog, Do you need a Blog Clearance?
We think you do. We have not yet come up with the perfect "Blog presence" to advertise to the world that you DO intend to make your way along the highways and byways next to the larger press packets and immersive immense political junkets which have left you out with the Protestors which is where the action is; yet also left you in the cold. What's a good Blog Netizen to do? It would behoove you to begin writing some of your blog with an eye towards notoriety if you are good and aim for future as well as present excellance in publishing whether for hype, for pleasure, for moola, payola, or a combination of corporate and public donors like the John T. and Catherine B. Macarthur Foundation or more likely BAM (in New York).
The parts of real life to hyperspce are obviously a changing quantity and quality with the individual and the parts per square inch of additions such as photos and in the case of Vogs (Video weblogs) small video movies or connections to your other online endeavors which you can easily organize all on one Blog platform. I think the ease and the content specificity-- the language inherent nature of the Blog is easily viewed as a backlash to the overvisualized and overly advertized realms of cyberspace where spyware annoints the weary downloader and like so many thistles in the garden caught in a trouser hem or the cuff of a rolled pant leg are just so much lint, thorn, and detritus all around. Yet, blogs themselves are always a matter of individual negotiation and a key source of learning to use a writer's toolkit and to write for a webready public who are genuinely interested in one another's vehicles of informatting and journaleering which are often more "spectacular" if that word seems to apply than the stodgier and more solid cousin known simply as "article" and "periodical" attributed of course to that newly celebrity of creatures "the pundit/journalist!" whether online or off as of today). today we have "Blogs" of such power, scope, and individual vision they put many articles written in the New Yorker to shame, for sheer brilliance, wit, and high falootin talent poolin not to mention the ocassional expertly woven links page of living footnotes, now elaborately kicking and pawing under the mouseover action and taking the pieces places the young zealous and animated talents of today have swiftly found yet which many never learned of from the lands of yesterday. We couldn't begin to guess ALL THIS would exist in the 80's, how sad for those that miss the "abundance" and real "revolution" in this for their old overpaying analog jobs! True there are" "the new people" as the Japanese call those born after 1970 with their sometimes solipsistic standpoints and born in an essentially egoistical generation who laud their symbiotic human/machine cyborgian reality and as adepts; are different people in some ways substantially!
But..that's no excuse. It's not a reason to stop us ALL as WRITERS from seeing what might well be an amazing renaissance in bloom. So we may not be young enough to be in en media res (or, in the middle of it) but rather perhaps more situated towards the more comfortable grownup edges...yet look really closely and you'll find the BEST OF THE BLOGS are written by fully grown persons who have melded and blended the zeal and authenticity of youthful vision with the mediation/meditation of the grown up sensibility (Yellowglees, Barger's "Robot Wisdom") and the shameful admission of the news people to having to rely on Blogs for breaking news; shameful ONLY because the Blogs and the sometimes highly insightful and coordinated folks at Indymedia, often offering something DIFFERENT in essence, are still looked at "askance" due to the "uneven-ness" which would be so smoothed by editorial eyes and hands, some of the more rough hewed edges would lose their blogginess and become another piece of essentially neutered "Captions" and "Filler" that has become so much of broadcast journalism.
Personally, I love some periodicals and live for them: Third Text, Cabinet, and others that delve in adroit and adept writing by provocative authors really interested in words on paper (in this case) and when online in pixels whether in motion or still on the screen.
It would be a real tragedy if the big players eliminated the "amateur" and "growing" talent pools from the playing field because they got jealous of a minority of peoples enjoyjment of these new waves and manifestations of talent. It would be unconstitutional and it would be a shame. Worst, there would be no one to teach them "the new ways" which while morphing regularly are certainly here to stay!
So, keep your consitutional right to a free press alive by commemorating your own freelancing with whatever you feel comfortable MAKING at your own pace, in your own way, and presenting with your own name (Please, for God's sake, let's not create a situation where we must take down the simple site), as well as photo, smack dab in the middle unless you'd prefer placing an avatar (for online writers) such as...Akira, Aeon Fluxx, Sailor Moon, etc.
And don't be confined to the digital...we are just showing you at Plaasma Box that it is a very "professional looking" way to design things that might well be interesting decisions in a world based on appearances rather than fly without a "jolly roger hoisted" or even a "flag of defeat" to bolster one's confidence and to brand oneself and alter the general public's opinion! All pundits are NOT created equal or even after the same TYPE of story...
This just seems like a better way to deal with something missing in the moment and if we receive enough feedback then certainly, we will think of setting up the website which we abandoned in lieu of this one "homepage's" real pure guileless PR simplicity!
The preceding was an assignment from the rtmark.com online site at the "Media" division headed by Andrei Cordrescu's "CMEX" (where the CMEX stands for the "tag" sent soaring across the silicon valley "Nasdaq" index) when you scan the options for "artistic" and "cultural" investment. It seemed like a good idea, at the time... This was an assignment Plaasma Box took up from a post at Rtmark. Perhaps we will be able to enjoy the boon of a fancy link, since we here they generally don't pay in kind. Meanwhile visiting Rtmark keep an open mind. These are the pranksters with a lineage back to before the Beatniks!! The "Pranks" (Re)search series by V.Vale was never my favourite but I do think Satire such as Jonathan Swift employed about the edibility of Irish children during the potatoe famine was a stroke of genius which never left the space of my head. That said, there are some read duds here, be glad, in some cases it's better a dud than something more menacing. It must be said, the site has virtually mellowed out since 9.11. In fact, likely since Silicon Valley's bubble burst the Rtmark site hasn't had as much of a reason to be; still, there is still a heavy computer industry and a Nasdaq continues to click on it's merry way. So, if nothing more than historically, to think of how frivolous many pursuits were before and continue to be, it's a great way to watch minds which might well be solving the problems of aerogels or brokering like Bono with countries keeping the fires of dissent however small and specific and for whatever elite an audience-- awake, eternal, and vigilant. It's helpful to have "the fools" to keep the others, the king, "nuncle" on his proverbial presidential toes! :)
