CD-ROM for Mac and PC, Faux Press
Edwin Torres: Concept, Writing, Design & Production
Despina Papadopolous: CD-ROM Engineer
Fred Stesney: Recording Engineer
Character Generator: Video Transfers
Gina Bonati: Narration
Additional music: Sean G. Meehan, Miguel Algarin, DJ Un Caddie Renversé Dans L'Herbe, Mike Bade, Ladislav Czerneck, Marc Dale & DJ Posse Pause

review by Ron Silliman/Silliman's Blog
Please is an ambitious multimedia CD, one of three issued thus far by Faux Press (the others are Wanda Phipps' Zither Mood & Peter Ganick's tend.field). You put it into your PC, not your CD player. Once you go past the opening screen (with its own text, a much longer voiceover by Gina Bonati & title graphics), you arrive at an ideogram with links in each of its strokes. Depending on where you click, you will be led to one of five series of poems ("City," "Boy," "Remote," Time," and "Love"), a play in twelve parts (plus a prologue & epilogue) or section entitled "Media" that contains documentation of eight Torres performances plus his bio.

Each section of the CD, each set of poems, the play & "Media," has an opening screen, a logo with its own set of links. Each set of poems as well as the media section also begins with a voiced over text read by Bonati. For the play, we get a little bit of music in a truncated marching band vein. Most though not all of the poems seem to have their own sound tracks, a few of which can be seen as readings of the text. If Alicia Sometimes' music seemed to play against, rather than with, her own text on the Soft Fuse CD, Torres actively explores the entire range of push-pull juxtapositions between sound and written language. Often these are quite wonderful. Always, they're playful & optimistic, qualities totally consistent with Torres' poetry. As writing, Please is at a higher level, or perhaps at a high level with greater consistency, than any of the other CDs I've considered on the this. It's a shame that there isn't a collection gathered in a liner-note booklet - as a book's worth of work, they're more straightforward pieces than the typographic extravaganzas of his big Roof collection, The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker: the texts work just fine on the screen even with the PC speakers shut down.

Like almost any web- or screen-centric work, Please invites bouncing around from link to link – while there is an order, the project seems set up to undermine it. One doesn't so much read as browse, homo ludens in total evidence. Overall, though, it can be as engrossing as any front-to-back text imaginable. In fact, the one piece that doesn't fully work on the CD is the play, precisely because it requires the participant to go sequentially.

There is an old rule of thumb with technology, one that I first learned watching Jackson Mac Low struggle with tape machines some 30 years ago: something always goes wrong. There are inevitably a few "gotchas" on the CD – the apostrophe often shows up as an umlauted capital O, there is at least one link that doesn't go anywhere, opening a dialog box in vain search of a missing file on the CD. & the images are consistently too small throughout (a consequence of another of my rules of thumb: QuickTime sucks). But these are nits when taken in the context of the total project.

Overall Please pleases. It demonstrates the gazillion different ways Edwin Torres' poetry (& mind) can move simultaneously, always interesting, always in the ballpark with something of value to add. He's one of our great talents & we're lucky to have every manifest-ation we can get of his work.