Stone #63

Today I lay under a tree laden with seeds, her arms of wood nurturing sun and rain, her roots, the earth. Her leaves shaking like hair in the breeze.

I lay under a mother tree.

Stone #62

Baking in a humid heat wave with a 425° oven in a small apartment is trashed; instead, we politely eat tea-dipped store-bought donuts.

Memories of Flowers

My spit of a backyard has no water, the main reason I haven't planted anything. It's like an extra room in the summer though!

Pierre-Marie's comment at Facebook about my patio, though flowerless still a city oasis, reminded him of his vast garden, set me off remembering my various abodes - a downtown house with a deck, and a cottage for 10 years... so I created a post of memories of flowers.

At my house at Queen and Spadina on our deck we hung many bags of Impatiens from the fence, planted two Cedar trees (that are quite huge now, I see them over the fence when I walk by), a small Weeping Pea Tree with yellow blossoms in the spring, indigo Iris', white Trilliums, pink Bleeding Hearts and Tuberous Begonias - oh wow, those colours, I still remember them - and two bushes of Weigelas, both bought together, yet one quite pink and the other more white with differing months of blossoming.

The cottage, on Georgina Island in Lake Simcoe, a Chippewa Reserve (we rented the land), which we had from 1989-1999 (sold after our marriage dissolved), was built on fill since it was a swamp (that dried out in the autumn). We had a forest of Silver Maples on one side, and the sun porch we glassed in and turned into an all-year dining area faced it. Simply beautiful, and private. My ex used to strew bags of wildflower seeds out back and so we had an array of flowers, but way too much 'sneeze weed' (Ragweed, Mugwort, probably Goldenrod and Queen Anne's Lace) for him and his family's allergies. I've included some photos from those years.

Now I have a wee spit of land out back, and for an apartment in the city, it's a gift. I haven't planted anything due to the lack of water, and it would not be a good idea to lug watering cans with my knees.

Today my mother and brother are coming for cake and tea, we'll sit on lawn chairs, enjoying the privacy outside. They both live in apartments with balconies. It's not the same. When I moved into my apartment in 2007, I was told the little yard would be mine when the upstairs neighbours moved (that apartment also has a balcony, mine doesn't). A year later they moved. It was such a surprising gift, and I had no idea a little patio was attached to my apartment when I signed the lease.

I'm thinking, if the hot dry weather keeps up, to make myself take paints and a small canvas out, and see if I can do something other than write and lounge about out there!

Stone #61 -a short video of my patio oasis in the city

direct link: Spit of a Backyard Spills Bliss

My meditation today was cleaning my little patio - raking, scraping caked leaves and dirt, sweeping and dragging the paper garden recycling bag that I had filled to the curb. In between I sat back and contemplated the green ash, enjoyed my dog, and, after finishing the clean-up, gazed at the canopy of leaves above me for uninterrupted hours.

_
A spit of a backyard spills bliss into hours, yes it does.

Especially during a heat wave - 32°C/90°F and a humidex of 38, which doesn't describe the vapour pressure and inferno of heat Toronto was today.

A little bit of earth, connected to my apartment by a short walk, can offer lovely rest and contentment on a hot summer's day. A nice place to serve tea and cake to family and friends. Or to write, and I did get some writing that's been hard to do done this afternoon! Last year I put a hammock up, but rarely used it, so this year it's the chaise longe for resting, contemplating. My oasis in the city, and we do all need our oases.

Stone #60

In my fluid relationships, every incarnation of love in my life remains with me and carries me to the next wave, the next immersion.

Stone #59

The fishbowl pushes the air aside. Fish hide in plants that grow underwater. Dart. Slowly slide backwards to the edge of the glass, and watch with one blue eye.

Stone #58

A new country was birthed in the world today. / My day of mundane tasks / the jubilation of the peoples of South Sudan.

Stone #57

In my bedroom curtain, that I was sewing, a small dead fly fell out. Deep teal sheen under wings of sheer grey symmetry, vacant gaze of compound eye.

Stone #56

Tonight I dug out of storage and heaved upstairs 30 years of private journals: these are my stones tonight.

Stone #55

The hum of fans all over my apartment busily spinning hot air. 

Stone #54

My green ash is hermaphroditic and functionally female, knobby brown flower clusters, bunches of seed pods, a Niun among maples and cedars.

White Petal

direct link: White Petal

Experimenting... always learning! Trying this and that with the footage. Having fun, and it shows in the humour of the piece.

I wanted to do a voiceover, a narration — thinking a Wong Kar Wai style. You will see there are sections to this visual poem. Doubles, single, shifts in colour and style as the yoga dance continues.

Here are a few scribbles, that perhaps will or won't work:

I live in a city in a small apartment. Fabric covers a doorway and shelves. I'd like to see myself dance before it is too late.

Faded opulence. Over-the-edge-of. Yet floral abundance. The flowers are the stars—beauty, that edge of fading.

Doubles. Who are we? Repetitions of ourselves. Our memories create us in our fragmentary identities. I fold into who I was or who I will become. Uncertainty is confusing. People flee from my uncertainty.

White Petal

Look into a dissolving mirror
bones, skin, neurons

the self-image.

This poem is not neat as intact
petal veins, mysterious as garden
fossils.

The poem writes,
rises from ruminations, dried
flowers on my spine
bursting seeds.

_
Danced, videoed, edited by Brenda Clews; background music by Gabrielle Roth and the Mirrors, from an old favourite, Initiation: ​http://gabrielleroth.com/​

More Stills from White Petal

More stills from White Petal, which I've continued working on. It was just a test dance session, but I like working with clips where there is no pressure to produce anything. Sometimes merit blossoms out of such unintentional projects. Playing, experimenting, learning... as usual, the stills are better than the flick.









Flowers are from video I took in my neighbourhood specifically for White Petal.

Stone #53

A old frock, barefoot, every inch of warm summer air welcoming to the skin which sinks into it; in the warmth, I am innerly pliable.

SELF FIGHT by Eduardo Cuadrado

SELF FIGHT on Vimeo

Despite the struggle to remove it, the cutting and the blood, the mask does not come off. This leaves me with many thoughts about the ways we construct ourselves -the social constructionists would say we are entirely constructed through reiteration of performatives. Repeating our models. Perhaps the mask is who he pretended to be that became more who he was than his, ...his original configuration. Stunning short piece. A visual poem!

Stone #52

Note on street over potted plant that is later gone-

free to a good home

a cedar where birdsong can one day take shelter

White Petal (clip 1:35min)

direct link: White Petal (it's unlisted, so won't show at my public YouTube site)

On mornings when my adult children aren't around, I have begun to try to dance. It's a small space; there are kilim carpets and furniture. I have a 24min tape which is short enough to convince me to go ahead, and which you can hear a little of here. I've videoed a few of these exercise sessions to see what sort of moves I make, never having seen myself dance before beginning to make video dance poems recently. I am trying to choreograph two long pieces for tracks composers and musicians have sent me to work with.

This cut was 'live,' as is, though I did layer it with filters. And then I went out late afternoon to video white flowers in the neighbourhood for it. I have layered a few of those beauties in - not sure if this works the way I have done it, or not. I added a touch of flicker to the white rose at the beginning and think maybe I should carry it through to the hibiscus-like one at the end. If I wanted to make a proper video out of this piece, I would need to re-do it I think - because with the flowers added, the table and chest in the corner are visually distracting. In my morning practice, I put on the music and begin moving (ok, not with the outfit, but that's to see if it works for a future video), and I do not, repeat, do not move furniture!

Danced, videoed, edited by Brenda Clews; background music by Gabrielle Roth and the Mirrors, from an old favourite, Initiation.

As usual, some stills (click for larger) (I always think my work looks better in stills from than in the video:) (posted these in a previous post too, impatient with waiting for the videos to upload:):

Each of those boxes is a video layer - 

to give you an idea of the construction of the piece. 

The footage of white flowers in the neighbourhood worked

quite well, I thought. Though perhaps it looks too 'pasted' in?

I did add a little flicker to one to make it less static. They are not 

stills but actual video - shot using a monopod on the sidewalk.

Stone #51: Canada Day

A crackling dark: sleek streamers of light, flashing strobe-lit exploding jellyfish, flying thunderbolts, fountains of neon flowers.

July 'River of Stones'

Lots of people are joining, about to toss pebbles of poetry --- haiku-like moments of noticing, meditating, writing --- into the river. You should too:

Why you should join the river: Because having a notebook, or a blog, and a vow to write one small stone in it each day can help you keep a sense of wonder about the world. Deciding to take part in the July challenge, to notice something each day and write about it, sets in motion that willingness to reach out - that willingness to really look and listen to the world - and to stand in awe.

On the black river,
a pair of great-crested grebe nod
towards the ceremonies of spring.

Kate Noakes

Kaspalita Thompson and Fiona Robyn, beautiful, newly-wedded couple, are the inspirations behind River of Stones.

Documentary: "Call of Life: Facing Mass Extinction"

View this movie at calloflife.org

Watching this, while of course I already knew, but the summer heat, the late hour, half in the dreamtime, I understood at a deeper level. While a pessimistic part of me does not believe that we can change the path of destiny that we are creating for ourselves as the world-force we are, as a species, the speakers in this video offer hope at the end. Already the facts and issues raised in this video has brought into focus a deep anxiety, a life-threatening worry, something indefinable, troubling and thus Call of Life is a life-changing video for me. I urge you to watch it.

And, though we are not world leaders, nor run vast multi-nationals, we are the grassroots. Dance, drum, meditate daily on mass extinction...on unimaginable numbers of species dying out, life force, soul fleeing an uninhabitable world...

And march when there are marches, and sign petitions, and write letters, emails, and post in all the places you can.

Synopsis of the documentary:

Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction

Director: Monte Thompson | Producer: Chera Van Burg
Genre: Documentary | Produced In: 2010 | Story Teller's Country: United States
Tags: Ecology, Environment, Global, Globalization, Spiritual Awareness

Synopsis: If current trends continue, scientists warn that within a few decades at least HALF of all plant and animal species on Earth will disappear forever. “Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction” is the first feature documentary to investigate the growing threat to Earth’s life support systems from this unprecedented loss of biodiversity. Through interviews with leading scientists, psychologists, historians, and others, the film explores the causes, the scope, and the potential effects of the mass extinction, but also looks beyond the immediate causes of the crisis to consider how our cultural and economic systems, along with deep-seated psychological and behavioral patterns, have allowed and continue to reinforce the situation, and even determine our response to it. “Call of Life” tells the story of a crisis not only in nature, but also in human nature, a crisis more threatening than anything human beings have ever faced before.

From my blogroll:

Mass Extinction Math

by Timothy Morton

So if the previous mass extinction 55 million years ago took two thousand years as a result of 2 gigatons per year of carbon being released:

Does that mean that this one, given 30 gigatons per year, will take fifteen times faster, namely about 130 years?

Does anyone know how the math of mass extinction works?

Silver-Tint Photo

...the mask was exactly what she was searching for, exactly
what she needed: a face threaded over her face,
a light threaded over her light.

You speak, and the mask begins to speak,
and the listening takes fire.

Dale Favier

                  Slipping away, between
      restraints.

_
(click photos for larger size)

Dale's Mask slightly paraphrased, a change of pronoun

Stone #50: Is Rosette's

After the rain, roses everywhere, their thorn-bitten thick lips, petals falling like tricks, lipstick red pistils around their bushes.

...

(a wee note to myself, if you ever want to see them, just email me for the key)

Breathtaking Poetry Theory

In a book review, Ali Alizadeh reviews Maria Takolander and Claire Potter | Cordite Poetry Review, I found this paragraph:

Badiou’s strategy for a philosophical investigation of the arts – and of avant-garde poetry in particular – relies on a belief that art is one of the key conditions for the emergence of universal truths. Accordingly, a poetry capable of hosting such an exigent possibility must negate both the mimetic impulse (to represent/express emotions, images, experiences, etc.) as well as the lyrical demands of conventional prosody such as form and sound, the unity and cohesion of an authorial voice, poetic subject matter, etc. As Elie During has recently written in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts (Acumen, 2010), “Badiou’s underlying poetics is at once anti-mimetic and anti-lyrical. Hermeneutics and aesthetics are thereby rejected in the same stroke.”

It's been awhile since I read any breathtaking poetry theory, so this hit a good spot. I'm in the middle of Deleuze and Guattari's, Thousand Plateaus, a text that surely by anyone's standards becomes poetry at times, and is full of breathtaking poetry theory (though incidentally, or by inference, or by who it inspires), at least it keeps sending my imagination into its outer limits, even on second and third reads, which may take me into the Fall at the rate I'm going, but Badiou is on the list for next.

Cryptic Messages to Self

Cryptic messages to self. Do you do this? It's so easy with a cell phone to send memos back to yourself for later. I sent this message to myself by iPhone at the end of January, so it must mean something. But what? Clearly I was using the app, Dragon Speaking, which sometimes is a bit strange, and didn't correct the writing. Was I meditating? Did I just wake up from a dream?

Who knows. Seems to be instructions of some kind for recording a speaking, perhaps...


Now I know was thinking over in between the molecules recess voice and then become waves and then let it pass through and then let themselves to be become part of the speaking a care in the sound of the passes through the M waves like wave as you like service that glass that means of angels

Untitled(2) by Eduardo Cuadrado

direct link: Untitled(2) by Eduardo Cuadrado

Eduardo, I am moved beyond comprehension by your Untitled (2). Your sculptures? Realist, the realism of poverty. Yes, I know this world. A beaten world; people who are usually ignored in the busy city. The shadows. The shadows who you have given solid form to in metal and other materials appear everywhere, as sculptures. Magnified. They are worthy of focus. They have their stories. People stop and look for a moment. It is strange. They are the poor, lost, downtrodden, forgotten; it is as if they call to their gods in the moments of silent suffering you have represented. They ask the existential questions. Why? Why me? How did this happen? How do I rise from this place of despair? I am in tears. I want to protect all of these beautiful people from the harsh life they have been cast into by circumstance, drug abuse, violence, or a soft incessant falling away of belief in the status quo until there is only raw existence left.

This is a great video. You disabled comments, so I started writing a response here...

Besides the stark, troubling opening shot, a video of an installation on the street with a doorway, the figures are all male. They wear suits or trench coats: perhaps they are white collar workers who have fallen through the cracks in culture. Some of them are installed where they might have worked before getting laid off or fired for whatever reason; or perhaps it was bankruptcy. The men in Cuadrado's film, his sculptures, have intellects, you can see that. They are conscious of their predicament. They are worn down by life. But they have not blown their minds out with drugs or alcohol; they are fully aware of where they are. In their faces of despair, desperation, futility, humiliation, sorry we see a deep grief.

That grief burns in my soul; whether it does in all viewers, all of those who witness these works, I don't know.

Solstice Photos

Two Druids on Salisbury Plain at Stonehenge at Summer Solstice. I love this photo! They are wild; their outfits quite something.

A silly photo from yesterday's re-take of dance footage in High Park - taking a water break. My daughter, unseen, sits in a Director's Chair, reading.

Wishing you a beautiful Summer Solstice

direct YouTube link: "Green Goddess" Masque

Wishing you a lovely day as spring turns into summer! Midsummer Night's Eve, or Summer Solstice is a magical time!

For those of you who might like to read a longer post on the process behind making this video poem: "Green Goddess" Masque.

Terre Verte

Pale green stretch lace, shimmer of embroidery, like Japanese watercolours catching the spring sun through pale green trees.

-
A Wedding Stone for Fiona and Kaspa's nuptials today.

Note: Besides 'Green Earth,' Terre Verte is a painter's paint colour.

Treats on Bloor Street

Since I may return to High Park to dance before the camera again, with the track of the video, Tangled Garden, on a speaker - the movement would embody the words of the poems in my own idiosyncratic way, I decided to go to Fabric Land for some notions, patterns, fabric.

On the way, on Bloor Street in Toronto, I passed some young, gorgeously dressed people, men in grey business trousers and white shirts and a woman in a small tight red dress giving out boxes from cartons on the street.

Naturally, I joined the line. The man behind me wore a purple T-shirt and cool mirrored purple sunglasses - I laughed that he looked appropriate for 'Mink Mile.' Never mind, he didn't understand either. Though I asked people in front and behind me, no-one knew what we were lining up for.

It was so Beckett. So Godot. I loved it.

"Perhaps a glass," a woman said.

I had to show my ID (haha) to the gorgeous lady in the tight, short, red dress, and she stamped the top of my hand with red ink.

Then I received a packaged bottle of Stella Artois beer in its own bag, which I'm enjoying now.

In the Hands of the Garden Gods

One of the poems I'll be reciting in the video poem I am still working on, "Tangled Garden." I wrote In the Hands of the Garden Gods when I was 27 years old, and it fits beautifully. I guess I've been working with the themes of a Tangled Garden most of my life. It will be the poem in the middle, after A Floral Opera, and before, Tangled Garden. The video poem is 21 minutes long, and I have been working on it for quite awhile. As many hours, days, go into it I see it emerge slowly, slowly.

You'll have to email me for the password.

Encrypted poem:

In the Hands of the Garden Gods

Still from my video poem, Tangled Garden, which I'm currently working on.
(click on image for larger size)


A draft form of the video is up at YouTube (update Thurs June 16th).


direct link: Garden Gods

This video is not finished. It has no title or credits and is 'Unlisted' at YouTube. The final version will be much higher resolution. I've posted it for critique purposes only.

It is a clip from a long video poem, Tangled Garden, that is 22 minutes. The footage is mostly all like this cut. There are three poems: 'A Floral Opera,' which I recently wrote; 'In the Hands of the Garden Gods,' which I wrote when I was 27; and 'Tangled Garden,' which I wrote in 2006. This clip is the 'Garden Gods' one. It's still quite raw. I am seeking feedback, critique.

From my perspective - the dance in the background needs to be re-done. I need to get my costume and myself back to High Park for another round, perhaps without my daughter. Though can I go and dance alone? I'm hesitating. There are very few people I'd feel comfortable with doing this. If I manage it, it'll be like the one here, only perhaps a little better (I hope).

The voiceover poem was done one night, reading straight from the journal I wrote the poem in so many years ago. It probably needs to be re-done too. I'm not sure about the saturation of the voice and whether it distorts. The reading itself, though, is just about right in emotional tone, so I'm not sure I should do another.

Since this is an 'art' video I am not worrying about catering to any kind of popular taste. Um, I guess I move to my own drumbeat, or something like that.

What I am looking for are responses, and ideas that I may incorporate into the final version.

Thanks.

_
Music, 'First Night (Lilith's Seduction)' from Catherine Corelli's album, 'Seraphic Tears': http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/79547

Another update:

I realized it's better full screen, also 720p. Tonight I walked by the house where I rented a small bachelor's back when I had the dream that became this poem. And as the dream itself comes back, I realize that the way I've done the footage of the Garden God (or goddess) is incredibly close to the dream I had so many years ago. That was a wow moment, on the street corner tonight.