Rhythms; fifty seconds. No editing save for a fade in and out; call it a found soundscape.
The Mulligan-Snodgrass Wedding; Bryan, Texas; October 2009.
(Or was it the Snodgrass-Mulligan wedding?)
Either way, congratulations to a perfect couple. And thank you both so much for letting all of us into your lives, both this weekend and over the years.
Lit Break: House of Leaves
A couple of weeks ago, when I finished my site redesign, I rewarded myself with a book. For at least a year and a half now I’ve been on a nonfiction binge, and I really wanted to read a novel. So I ended up with a book called “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski. It’s developed something of a reputation for its occasionally esoteric layout and multiple frenetic voices, but at its core it’s a good read. For me it was one of those books you can’t put down; I devoured it in two days. I also think it has some very important implications for photographers, journalists and anyone interested in conveying information — but more on that later.
Ostensibly written in the tone of an academic paper about a (nonexistent) film called The Navidson Record, there are at least three “authors,” who tell their stories concurrently in footnotes that comment on and argue with each other. If you flip through it in the bookstore you might end up on a page like this, with a list moving forward and another backward, footnotes right side up and upside down, a note from the editors disclaiming responsibility and the story itself relegated to a small corner of the page, where it sinks into the book’s gutter. “How is someone supposed to read this?” you might wonder.
In truth, it looks more difficult than it is; subliminally, the book teaches you how to read it with every turn of the page. At one point I was doing acrobatics around the book on my kitchen table; the text was set at a 225 degree angle. The thing of it is, it’s not without reason. The author’s choices change the way we read the story. For example,
if this sentence
had been set on just one
line
you would have read it
quickly.
Butbymak
ingyouwo
rkforthe
sentence,
an author can put you in a maze, force you to stop and look around. He can change your relationship to the text by playing with your relationship to the medium.
I was struck by an old interview with Danielewski, which I read after I finished the book. The interviewer asked him about the unconventional structure of House of Leaves. Here’s what he said:
Really the only thing challenging about my book is the idea of a book itself. Older generations — despite the fact that they’re multi-processing their morning breakfast, a train wreck in India and thoughts of an ailing friend — will find House of Leaves difficult because they’re prejudiced. They’ve been taught what a book should look like and how it should be read. Ruler-wielding didacts have instilled in them the notion that a book must start here, move along like this, and finish over there.
But books don’t have to be so limited. They can intensify informational content and experience. Multiple stories can lie side by side on the page. Search engines—in the case of House of Leaves a word index—will allow for easy cross-referencing. Passages may be found, studied, revisited, or even skimmed. And that’s just the beginning. Words can also be colored and those colors can have meaning. How quickly pages are turned or not turned can be addressed. Hell pages can be tilted, turned upside down, even read backwards. I’d love to see that. Someone on the subway spinning a book as they’re reading it.
But here’s the joke. Books have had this capability all along. Read Chomsky, Derrida, Pinker, Cummings. Look at early 16th century manuscripts. Hell, go open up the Talmud. Books are remarkable constructions with enormous possibilities.
What notions are we holding onto? Are there ruler wielding didacts in our heads, telling us what a photo essay should look like? Telling us that a a well-written story needs to start here and end there? If so, we need to exorcise those demons, because new forms are the only thing that can save us. Apple, for example, is trying to liberate the liner notes from the CD case. A flash designer named Jonathan Harris is taking the biggest thinkers of our time and letting you mash them up. What new forms can emerge when we liberate creative work from the confines of comfortable forms?
Answer that, and cool things start to happen.
SoundBoard
OK, as promised, a brief overview of the cool thing I created for the site. It’s the thing at the bottom right of the website, a little widget called SoundBoard.
SoundBoard is a controller for sounds; it can fade them up and down, it can remove them and add them, load them, etc. The reason I like it is, it reveals something visual about what you’re hearing; it takes an invisible design element and turns it into something visual, something that offers information. For a while I even experimented with having my movie projects do this; a prototype still exists at this link, where if you allow it to load, it will actually play you a video, and show you the individual activity of each track.
As it turns out, while this is possible, it’s not really advisable in that form. Anyway, the more exciting use for SoundBoard isn’t just showing things. It’s reacting to things. I’ll give an example:
In part 1 of the India story, I start out writing about the Dhobi Ghat, then move on to other globalizing forces in Bangalore. Later, I transition back to the Dhobi Ghat, with an image of one of the dhobi wallas scrubbing a shirt. SoundBoard can detect that the reader is nearing that point, load and cue the audio of the man scrubbing, fade it in as the reader approaches that image, and fade out other sounds.
It could be used just to put sound behind something, but I like to think of it like leitmotifs for a story. By fading in sound from the dhobi ghat, I can subtly bring the reader back to another place. And it’s totally dynamic; it’s not like I have you on a linear timeline, you can take the story in at your own pace, and the sounds will follow you.
I spent a lot of time at News21 imagining new ways of telling stories, new tools. I think this is new; I’ve never seen it done before. Anyway, there are two more chapters of the India project coming in the next few weeks. Stay tuned…
Department of Website Redesigns
Finally! After a couple of false starts and more than a few headaches, my website is done.
The notable new project is India In Between. Previously, there was a story about a community of basket weavers in the northeast; it included a large pile of text and some photos. That was never my “complete” India project. The complete project only existed as a book I made and passed around; but then it got destroyed in a fire. True story.
Anyway, the point is, I hadn’t figured out an interesting way to present the complete project online. Until now. So far only the first chapter is up; I’ll put the rest up throughout the month of October. Serializing it gives me time to polish, and keeps people from having to digest 5,000 words at once.
Anyway, more on this tomorrow, but there’s something fun and innovative about the presentation of the India project — something I don’t think I’ve ever seen done before. It involves Flash and Javascript and pushing the technology to do new things. I promise that post tomorrow. For now, the site is best viewed in a modern browser (Firefox or Safari). The neat audio features will function in Chrome, but the typography will look crappy due to Google not trusting Microsoft.
One from the show: two kittens’ chocolate kisses. NBD.
Bonus footage: Five seconds of video from last night. It’s password protected, but the password is 12345.
on the waterfront
Three from the Girl Talk show that went down there yesterday.
Bonus: my Twitter review of the show. Only took 113 characters.
Department of Experimental Flash Interfaces
I spent most of the last month at News21 working on a new sort of interface for video stories. Before I go any further, I want to stress the limitations: 1, the video runs too long; 2, I didn’t get most of my stills into it by deadline; and 3, it’s still a bit buggy; when the coordinators get back from their break I’m going to push out some fixes.
Having said that, I think it’s a cool idea. The premise of it is to blend linear and nonlinear storytelling methods; up top there’s a video that you’ve shot and edited, and down below, there are supplemental items — photographs, videos, maps, etc. — that enhance your sense of the story. For example, my assigned topic was Latinos in Allensworth, a town that was founded in 1908 to be an all-black community. But the sense of history, of electing a black president in 2008, was inescapable. While I couldn’t convince my editors to make that angle a part of the main story, I did ask people about it, and was able to include a couple of their responses in the supplemental view below.
There are some other bells and whistles; there’s the speaker bio module, which lets you discover who someone is without resorting to “My-name-is-X-and-I’m-the-Y-at-Z” clip in the video. There’s a cool timeline reader that shows when different people are speaking — it basically shows you where the cuts are. And there’s a cool animated closed captioning widget suggested by Nick, my reporting partner.
Lots of code in the past few weeks; I wrote this all from scratch. But yeah, this is what I’ve been doing. In a couple of weeks I head back to Texas and contemplate what comes next. I have some new skills under my belt, I suppose.
Texture break: Rusting dumpster, Philadelphia PA, July 2009.
Alternate View: Go here and zoom in a bit.
face up
As a side thing in the News21 project, I’m shooting photos for a group reporting on trends among mixed-race Americans. Here are four.
party break
Took a break to dance my ass off. Special thanks to Drew and Charlie for dj’ing a kickass set.
