On the Creation of my Dadaist Poem "The Last Words of a Los Angeles Pimp..."

A brief word on my method--I chose to use the stage play as my form, and generated the lines in the following way: I went to the online music station Pandora (www.pandora.com) and set all of my music stations to shuffle. The first line of the first song played became the first line of my first block of dialogue (in its unaltered state; alterations will be discussed shortly), the second line of the second song that shuffled up became the second line of my first block, etc. When I either ran out of lyrics (a song had less lines than the song that preceded it) or came upon an instrumental song, that marked the end of that block. I would then repeat the process for the second block, third block and so on. Because I was using Pandora, commercials often popped up in between songs. I integrated lines from the commercials into the monologue as well, dividing the advertisement into lines where it seemed most logical.

As far as the randomization of the text goes I used a fascinating website called TranslationParty (www.translationparty.com) which takes blocks of English text, converts them into Japanese, converts the Japanese translation into English, converts that new translation back to Japanese and so on until the text reached an “equilibrium” in which no words are still able to be changed and the statement is exactly the same in English and Japanese. I did this translation line by line for each poem, taking one lyric at a time, and ran the result through the n+7 machine (www.spoonbill.org/n+7/) plucking various lines from various iterations. With the results I trimmed excess/unnecessary words or parts of words that impeded upon the message I was trying to attain, and altered punctuation where it felt necessary.

In editing I applied both the “cut and paste” technique with the mashing up of different lyrics from wildly different songs and I also used two algorithmic text generators as forms of word association, as well as heavily refining the drafts repeatedly to sharpen my focus. It became clear quite early--even before I ran the lines through the translator--that the lyrics were already eerily revolving around the central theme of isolation and detachment from one’s self and one’s feelings. I chose to pursue this in my editing, believing that this sense of loneliness would make itself apparent through careful editing. The coming about of Man-eater and Backhander was merely serendipitous--they grew from the text as I edited it--but quite welcome and entertaining.

In the 'Comments' section of this post is the original collection of lyrics and the musicians who wrote them. Poetic entirely on its own, and eerily cohesive in its message, this served as my starting point and it is these lines (sans bracketed information) that were run through both TranslationParty and n+7.