Lol! A lovely Mother's Day - a video call with my daughter for an hour, and my son kindly raked and cleaned up my patio and then we went to Lizzie Violet's Cabaret Noir - the best!
That's me reading a complexly constructed piece that will become the opening in a voiceover prose poem in a videopoem - I compacted three different pieces of writing (that I dragged out of the tangles in my mind) over months to create an intricate piece that was edited and re-written a few times and yet it was thought to be stream-of-consciousness writing... which struck me as quite funny (it had been a lot of literal fret-work). But, I suppose, the thing is to make the final version look effortless and a bit bumpy, as if it had been dashed off in a moment of inspiration.
Or maybe it was reading from a Moleskine journal - the place where you usually write the first draft as it comes out. I had written all over the place in a number of different apps and programs on my computer and tablet and actually hand wrote the final edited version from all the computer ones!
I need to write a few more pages before it will work with the clip that I have already edited. If the body of the piece takes as long as the beginning did, it could be many months before it's done!
___
At the Poetry Salon I hosted at Urban Gallery in Toronto on April 26, 2014, I had two fabulous features: Michael Mirolla and Claudio Gaudio. This video is a review I composed after their readings and in which I show an excerpt of a video clip of each of their readings.
Below are their bios:
Novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright, Michael Mirolla's publications include a punk-inspired novella, The Ballad of Martin B.; three novels: Berlin (a Bressani Prize winner and recently translated into Latvian); The Facility, which features among other things a string of cloned Mussolinis; and The Giulio Metaphysics III, a novel/linked short story collection wherein a character named "Giulio" battles for freedom from his own creator; two short story collections: The Formal Logic of Emotion (translated into Italian as La logica formale delle emozioni) and Hothouse Loves & Other Tales; and three collections of poetry: Light and Time, the English-Italian bilingual Interstellar Distances -- Distanze Interstellari, and the just published The House on 14th Avenue. A short story collection, Lessons In Relationship Dyads, is scheduled with Red Hen Press in the U.S. His short story, "A Theory of Discontinuous Existence," was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology, while another short story, "The Sand Flea," was nominated for the US Pushcart Prize.
Claudio Gaudio is a Toronto based writer born in Calabria. Studied literature and philosophy at York University. "Texas" a novel published by Quattro Books, is currently being translated into Spanish and, excerpted, by Francesco Loriggio to be included in an anthology of Italian Canadian writers to be released in Calabria, by Rubbettino Editore. His work has also appeared in ELQ (Exile Literary Quarterly), Rampike literary magazine and Geist.
A long, tortured blog post on the making of the Video Interview of Michael Mirolla's and Claudio Gaudio's readings at my Poetry Salon @ Urban Gallery on April 26, 2014:
While this was meant to be a simple little video, it didn't turn out that way. On Sunday I stapled, clipped and taped bolts of unprimed canvas to the walls of apartment and on painting stretchers and easels to create a little 'nook' to video in. I set a Canon 60D on a tripod, a chair, got all my notes, and gave the talk. Only the DSLR stopped running after 11 minutes (I do use a 90mb/sec Sandisk card but haven't been able to get the 29.9min promised by the manufacturer). By the time I realized that I missed half my talk, I had already taken the 'stage set' down, and put everything away. Out it all came (that 12' x 15' canvas of sewn sections is unruly and heavy) and after setting the 'talking scene' up again, tripod, light, etc., I sat down to finish what I had to say. I took the SD card out of the camera this time and checked it on the computer. All there. So I dismantled my set and had a living room again.
All Sunday night I worked on the footage. The two different clips simply did not work together with the filters I wanted to use. The lighting from the first clip to the later one were different enough that the 'fake' green screening I like to do wasn't consistent across both clips.
The video clips from the first taping, the FCPX Event and Project got trashed.
The next day I made my way down to Queen St W where there are lots of fabric stores with inexpensive prices and procured 10 x 5ft of a nice bright blue polyester sheeny satiny fabric.
I set the scene again, camera on tripod, fabric clipped to a screen, paintings, tripods, a blue scarf for a floor, a chair, a stool for the papers. I tried to 'doll' myself up a bit - something not easy to do at the best of times given my age and really what is a 62 year old woman even attempting to do this kind of thing when no-one wants to look at age and if I'd been into this sort of thing 20 years ago it would have been so easy - yadda yadda - and then the rebel in me says ya know it's an ageist society and finger up against that and I will be who I am and do what I wish to do. Grit determination, in other words.
I had a large clock near the camera. Turned the viewfinder on the camera towards me and sat and began my talk again. Mirolla's section was done in one clip. Then I turned the recording off and started it again for Gaudio's section. So good to far.
Half way through Gaudio's section the doorbell started ringing. Oh la! A few times of at least a minute of chimes. And then loud knocking. I couldn't get to the door as I was trapped in a 'stage set' of blue fabric that had blocked off any way to get to the door so I had to let it go.
I stopped the camera. When it was quiet again, I re-started it and finished the talk, but, of course, I wasn't in exactly the same position as before, a little closer to the camera, and that's even worse to look at.
Never mind. I got the talk videoed. After, I checked the clips - all there - before dismantling my set and getting to the door to see who it might have been. The postman had left a small parcel at my doorstep (that is another story and it is something I did not order).
Ok, so now we are on the cusp of Monday evening. I had agreed to have the video interview into to KJ Mullins by that evening for her on-line Toronto newspaper, newz4u.net (her Arts section is one of the best in Toronto - she covers lots of events the big papers don't go near).
With the amount of footage, the green screening, popping in bits of the clips of the writers' readings that I did, the challenge with Mirolla's clip (in 3 fragments as the clip-on mic on the main video camera malfunctioned and there was no sound from that camera, only from the 60D I was walking around with), and how to put the videos of their readings behind me while I talk about their work was, to put it quaintly, challenging. I wanted faded out, not 'in your face' background footage. The first few versions were a purple colour that was quite hideous with the green linen skirt I was wearing and so I stripped colour from it. The video has so many layers and effects that it takes 7 hours to render and another hour or so to save out a 1080p version and that has really slowed everything down.
On Tues morning I worked on the video for about 6 hours before rushing off to see the Bacon Moore show at the AGO with a friend. I had set the video to save a version but my cat must have gotten into the cords since the external HDD had come loose and when I returned home around 9pm, so there was no saved video. I began the process of saving again. It was around 2:30am before I had a version and then I began uploading to YouTube, and that went through around 5am. I was quite sick that night, probably the tempura fried shrimp and vegetables I had had for dinner and didn't get to sleep until about 5am. At 8:30am the painter arrived to fix the holes in my ceiling from the flood I had in early December due to my upstairs neighbour's portable washing machine, which had come loose from the tap while he was out. I was still feeling nauseous and so cancelled a poetry performance I was to do that night. I worked on the video between resting all day.
The biggest problem was that on the second day that I videoed the talk the sun was not shining. So I used a 300W tungsten camera light (that is 30 years old! and still rumbling) and a daylight bulb in a clamp lamp. My face is whitened out. I tried so many different techniques and filters to correct the colouring to no avail. It was very orange because I wanted the red flowers in the top to pop but ultimately pushed the spectrum towards the yellows. I also removed the purple in the background so the whole image is easier to look at (that dull grape and the green honestly were not complementary) but that meant that there was a halo in the green screen effect that, try as I might, I was unable to remove due to deciding I had to keep the differing opacities of green screen and background video clips and therefore could not ultimately pull a clean screen.
Then rendering - it took 7 hours, and after beginning that lengthy process, I discovered how easy it is to do masks in Colour Correction in FCPX and did try but even that didn't make much difference to the washed out pallor of the speaker (which is what my simulacra becomes when I edit - just another old face that has long since stopped being 'me' to myself).
As of this point, I have not watched the whole video all the way through - scared to. I might see some major boo-boo and have to take it down and correct and spend another full day rendering and saving and uploading. The video review has taken days and I have other projects to work on, a life to get back to.
At the end of it all, though, I certainly hope the viewer learns something, gets something out of this video review.
But, really, I think it'll garner like 5 views - KJ Mullins, who owns and edits the newspaper I was doing the review for; the two authors (who will say little, being mortified I imagine by my work, but will thank me); me, who will have to sit through it again once more because it is on-line and I should see what I finally posted; and maybe a few partial views by interested parties... mostly people who work for or with the two writers.
It really wasn't worth the effort I put into it, and the production quality is not where I would have liked it to be, but it is okay, if it wasn't I would not post it, so I stand behind it, however that is. And, anyway, it'll float around the NET in the years to come and folks looking to write reviews, papers or theses may find some interesting tid bits in it, and then, it is also a historical timepiece, a lady poet in the 21st c who videoed her Poetry Salon and formulated a kindly 'review/introduction' of and to these two fine writers' work.
The video I took of Claudio Gaudio's reading at my Poetry Salon at Urban Gallery last Saturday. In the introduction I talk a bit about his novel, Texas, a book I really grokked.
What I did visually in the video is pretty wild, I guess. I mostly had two cameras running and left both images in the video. Yeah, 'art-house' stuff!
The changes in video effects are like visual piano notes that mark his natural breaks in the passages he read of the excerpt of his new novel-in-progress, 'I'll be,' with variations of the same visual piano notes throughout to help carry the viewer through a longish reading (of 15min).
It was quite fun to explore doubling, and the use of different textures, colours and lighting in the effects aligned with his 'breath pauses' - in particular, I was intrigued editing this way since I found his excerpt to be very much about 'subjectivities.' So the multiple angles and reflections worked visually as an accompaniment to the reading of the writing.
Also... the video is self-consciously an 'art-house style' with the accoutrements of videoing left in along with the videoed subject who is shown in multiple images - sort of like the thought processes of the narrator of 'I'll be' - the big philosophical ideas and that he likes yogurt, for instance - both the filmed and the filmer, or, in the writing, the thinking, witnessing mind and the experiencer of those moments.
I certainly hope the video works. I do love his philosophic, poetic writing. It's been an interesting challenge to work on this 'art video.' I hope you enjoy it as much I did his reading that afternoon and then working on a 'simulacra' of it.
Last Saturday afternoon's Poetry Salon at Urban Gallery was lovely! Except for some equipment malfunction (a video camera mic did not work and so I missed my main feature, Michael Mirolla and two of the open mics), it went beautifully.
Here are some photos and the videos of one of the features and the open mic-ers I managed to salvage (yours truly included). Michael Mirolla and Claudio Gaudio featured, and they were followed by Andrew McLeod (in the blue cap), JD Kruger (in the touque), Margaret Code (with the purple scarf), Jacques Albert (in the leather jacket), Norman Allen (with his painting beside him), and moi.
My Video Review of the Readings of the Two Features, Michael Mirolla and Claudio Gaudio:
Ok, yeah, I dance in my living room during or after yoga sets a few times a week. My preference is classical music to get the old bones moving and the energy up. When I mentioned in a comment on Facebook to Pierre-Marie that I was planning to dance to his latest concerto, N°13, he replied, "wow, I'm anxious to see that." So I set up a camera and put on his music and with nothing planned, started moving. There is no sound because I inadvertently turned it off when I was attaching an external mic. I downloaded his Concerto from SoundCloud and added the track.
A sweet young feline joins me - she is so adorable! My Aria. Usually she stalks and attacks my ankles when I dance but Pierre-Marie's music seems to have calmed her and she mostly purred.
I added some lighting effects to diminish the busy background and seem to have faded myself out too. Lol. And I left in the times I quizzed the camera. It's all a bit embarrassing. But neva mind!
In the spirit of fun, good exercise, and deep listening, a woman can tromp however she likes alone in her living room.
Pierre-Marie's music is beautiful to dance to. I hadn't heard this Concerto before and so nothing was pre-planned - simply allowing the music to move me.
My cat goes for a twirl! She's adorable and loves to get in on the action when I dance.
___
Pierre-Marie posted the video to his Facebook page with the comment: "Painter, poet, performer, among other things, and she dances too.
My Friend Brenda Clews is a thousand facet woman, but first, she is a complete artist, expressing herself from head to toe, and even with her guts if it is necessary to achieve her goal. Nothing stops her… well… no, nothing up to know or to my knowledge.
It is he second time she uses my music, just for pleasure here, and I had a 25 minute smile looking at her dancing, her cat wanting to be part of the fun. You are so full of life Brenda, I love you my Friend."
So, like whew! I didn't want him to feel embarrassed that a woman was prancing around her living room/studio to his finely wrought music! And was about to un-list the video, but...
I wrote: "I'm ever so glad you found the video charming in some small way, Pierre-Marie. Of course it doesn't do justice to your music, which I love! I posted it publicly though despite how dumb I look not just because of your beautiful and moving Concerto, but because little Aria stole the show. She is so cute! And I know you love cats... !"
What I did rather late last night. Suddenly jumped up from my books, poems, drawings and created a scenario - metal leaf background, black cloth, stool, lazy susan, sculpture. Set my DSLR on high speed shooting, started twirling Clay Lady, and then I had a whole bunch of .jpgs. Earlier I had found a YT tutorial on how to make timelapse in FCP X, so imported the photos, fiddled with settings, did some cropping on one series, and ended up with this, which I am quite happy with. Having purchased the cheapest keyboard a local music store sells on sale last summer, I have, now, made myself compose two 'sonic tracks' for videopoems. I can't do music like a musician; I can only create sonics like a poet - thick sound streams full of the unsyncopated. The FCP X titles (which I normally don't use) were a bit of a strain since the background was white but I found some instructions by Googling that explained how to send a title to Motion to adjust it and so managed to delete the white background altogether and then imported it back in. It all took hours of course. I ran out to see the Tanaquil Le Clercq documentary too. Hopefully tonight I can try shooting video and turning that into .jpgs for timelapse just to see how reversing the process might work. I am, in these small projects, working on composing different visual elements for the videopoem I am working on, 'Clay Lady.'
monochroma #1, Brenda Clews, 11.5" x 16.5", India ink, Moleskine sketchbook.
Last night I finally released myself to drawing or perhaps doodling in my big Moleskine, whiling away the hours while I browse the NET, watch art house films, chat with family or friends. This self-permission has taken about a year and a half. Don't ask why. I don't know.
