Card-Poems

"In the early 1970s, on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, and in complete ignorance of each other, Russian poet Lev Rubinstein and American poet Robert Grenier initiated a series of poetry raids on the fortress of the book: both began composing poems on small cards, a practice that would culminate in Grenier's Sentences (1978), a box of 500 such card-poems, and Rubinstein's own boxes of serial cards (beginning around 1974)."
~ Philip Metres, "Installing Lev Rubinstein's 'Farther and Farther On': From Note Cards to Field Walks"

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"Rubinstein catalogs remarkable speech fragments, disjointed bits of various discourses and staggeringly bad 'traditional' rhymed poetry. These found objects he presents as poems, which the reader or listener feels she must have heard somewhere hundreds of times before without noticing."
~ Northwestern University Press (re: Rubinstein's Here I Am)

Free Meaning

"The practice of making photo albums from found photographs is similar to Surrealist film practices. Both practices rely on fragmentation and de-contextualization, followed by an imaginative recombination that does not respect the intentions of the original owners. For the Surrealists, existing films were 'found objects' to be fragmented and used. Finding obscure details within a film aided in the dissolution of the film, and thus to the interruption of its ideological effects."

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"Is it any surprise, given their interests in fragmentation, that the Surrealists became collectors and exhibitors of found objects? The Surrealists understood that context 'fixes' meaning. They tried to free meaning by destroying or altering context."

~ Barry Mauer, "The Found Photograph and the Limits of Meaning" (Enculturation, Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 2001)

Music #2

"All These Things That I've Done," The Killers

"I Need Love," Sam Phillips

"1979," Smashing Pumpkins (Moby remix)

Music #1

Sertab Erener, "One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)"

Jim James & Calexico, "Goin' To Acapulco"

Fun Boy Three, "Our Lips Are Sealed"