Finalizing Project 2

I must begin this blog with the unfortunate report that, as far as I can tell, there is NO way to put my video up on the internet. iWeb doesn't allow any movie files except quicktime, and I don't have 500mb of space on my website. Google Sites only allows you to post youtube or Google videos. I even tried to upload it to my old old old DeviantArt site—no luck. Apparently there a member must submit two flash videos and fill out some bogus forms to be able to post flash to the site...

To post the video on blogger, I'd have to cut down 400+ megabytes of my file AND it would key up in a window the size of an ant. To post the video on youtube I have to convert it from a .swf to a .flv, which is *surprisingly* something that Adobe Flash CS4 does not allow you to do. Even Adobe Media Encoder, which is the Adobe program that natively exports a .flv file, does not read the .swf or .html files that Flash produces.

I think this program is giving me more of 'the runaround' than the Kean Bureaucracy.


At any rate... I suppose that I'll just have to bring my file in on my computer =(


I did some neat things with this movie though. I did about 150 screencaptures of Google Map's road-view, then animated a dodge charger squad car so that it's strobes flash, then did the same thing to a picture of a cigarette...

Then comes the best part: Remember how, in the very beginning, I wanted to make the poems scroll across a video of a moving roadway? Well, now the poems themselves become the roadway. It's way cool—and I think everyone will enjoy it.

Here is the text of the four poems inside the piece in order of their appearance:


Quicker than Coffee at 6 A.M.

One Thousand and Sixty-two
automobiles climbed the weathered
junction ramp between
the Garden State Parkway and I-78
on Saturday, November Fifteenth.

The line of cars stretched four miles;

a bronze Cadillac,
(car number Nine Hundred and Seventy)
dove into the left lane,
its rear end skidding sideways as an
Eighteen-wheeler flipped it on its back,
Like a dolphin lost in its pod’s
gang rape game.

The Cadillac’s roof screamed against
pavement,
collision force wrenched its hood away
and flung it into the air.
The hood, carried by the breeze,
swayed forward and back as it floated down,
a fiberglass dandelion fluff,
and came to a rest
buckled in the passenger seat of an
off-white convertible.

I saw all this from my parking space in line,
high up the off-ramp overpass,
while my car slurped the last sip of
gasoline in its tank
and became as silent as the highway below.



Newark, Red Light, Ahead of a Cop

City lamp-lights
gleam zig-
zag
across the windshield.

My eyes tick to the rearview mirror—

flick, flick—

Occular lapping like
Jesus’ footprints on the lake…

My prayers invisible like the
Darkened strobes behind me…

My eyes ticking like
Holy toes tapping Lucite,
Or windshield wipers—

flick, flick—



Insomniacs, Estranged Lovers

You answered your phone this time—
it startled me,
as if the cigarette I was smoking
yelped a greeting and not
the cold plastic pressed to my ear.

Under your words,
buried beneath two blankets,
the crystal ashtray and the cigarette I read fortunes by—
under your words I hear a thin crackle,
the static-rustle of breaths breathed
in anticipation.




Of Sunsets and Armageddon


The nights creep forward now, like traffic in New Jersey.
the sky has turned a murky yellow: today,
if one longs for a starscape
he must crawl a lifetime into Pennsylvania
to pour the Milky Way across the black.

I coast down twisting paths illuminated
by eerie twilight on a worn tandem bicycle.
the leather seats are dried and cracked,
padding escapes in wisps out of seams—
a pedal is missing.

I see concrete turn to dust
and wait for every bridge in America to moan
a weary, grinding cry
before collapsing into waterways;
All roads to the shore are vacant.

When the world ends,
there will be a picture in my back pocket,
A photograph that I fold carefully;
A young woman on the beach,
One pale hand raised between her eyes and the sun.