Video poetry by Swoon: 'Welcome to hard times'

direct link: Welcome to hard times

What a haunting, evocative video poem... the footage quite perfect, it contains the emotion, buried in black seawater and suffused, washing up to the shore like an oil spill, an edge of threatening, and we must imagine the events as they occur in their surreality. Poem by Howie Good and reading by Nic Sebastian, amazing of course.

Swoon wrote (in response to my comment above, with his permission):

"It was a struggle to make though... I couldn't get the atmosphere right at first. Too much... In the end I stripped down a lot and stayed with only the 'washing' tides, the washed up seaweeds and stuff and the wood. I kept the 'foggy footage off course, that was the first idea."

Which caused me to elaborate a little:

Nic's reading is understated, and your video is understated, but wow, the emotion spills out in ways it wouldn't if the video were a more dramatic enactment of the poem. I think you've caught the dreaming, imagining mind at the crux where the river flows into the ocean, where emotive images become part of a thought-process, and the visual and verbal metaphors continue to work at that subliminal level after the video is over.

Stone #78

Our tongues fork into each other. The undersides of clouds splatter slithers of rain meandering down the panes.

My back-up hard drive, 1Terabyte LaCie fried

In a state of shock. My LaCie 1T external hard drive is dead, fried, the data irretrievable (in my budget range), and it was my back-up. I've lost all of my original files for video poems, Final Cut files, Garageband files, Photoshop files, music, I am too numb to remember everything that was on that dear drive.

My cheap drives are all doing fine. Maybe a message in that?

I have it in to a repair shop. The drive, even in another casing, attached to another computer, is not turning. Dead. Like, in the spirit world. Likely the data is still on it, but unaccessible. It would cost a lot to retrieve it (and that shop doesn't offer that service).

And I nearly did Backblaze a few months ago, or CrashPlan, I can't remember, but I am an anti-credit card type, and they don't accept any options to pay cash.

C'est la vie. I've lost so much stuff over the years as computers have died or I've moved and lost all my emails with a service provider, so....

On with the new.

The Science Behind Dreaming: Scientific American

"...participants who exhibited more low frequency theta waves in the frontal lobes were also more likely to remember their dreams... This finding is interesting because the increased frontal theta activity the researchers observed looks just like the successful encoding and retrieval of autobiographical memories seen while we are awake. That is, it is the same electrical oscillations in the frontal cortex that make the recollection of episodic memories (e.g., things that happened to you) possible. Thus, these findings suggest that the neurophysiological mechanisms that we employ while dreaming (and recalling dreams) are the same as when we construct and retrieve memories while we are awake."

"...dreams help regulate traffic on that fragile bridge which connects our experiences with our emotions and memories."


The Science Behind Dreaming: Scientific American

Stone #77

out of the continual hum, I grasp my fragmentary words, speaking, momentarily, before they slide into the murmur that is everywhere

Stone #76

Slow, meticulous cutting of patterns, sewing. Each second is a stitch; each hour a finished seam. Our lives are the garments we wear.

Stone: #75

In the Annex's wealthiest areas, the streets are empty. No cars, no porch-sitters, no children, no-one out watering their front gardens. My dog and I walk. Unencumbered silence.