Multiples, cut-outs, ghost images

No, no, it's not that. Truly. Just what's 'left-over' from creating the banner. A quiet evening after coming home early to sleep all afternoon, staving off a cold, achey, hot & cold chills, and tonight Nuit Blanche! in Toronto, an exciting night, ah sigh, playing in Photoshop Elements before turning in... with multiples, cut-outs, ghost images, un peu de fun!

                                 

Blog Banner (Dancing Tweaks)

Stills from a dance video that I tweaked out of the room in which they occurred and onto my banner (hey I used to play with faeries as a kid, wee folk, nature spirits, great fun and beauty - sorta like that):

Autumn, and 'Shortest Route Between Two Dots Is A Circle'

riot of tendrils, vine-like, green waves, spiking, lingering in green valleys of the mind where watering

irrigates, irradiates, irrideems

veins in our bodies    green blood beating    chlorophyl    sunlight living dust    our hearts of death

Julia Butterfly Hill leafy boughs swaying in skyward wind

red fire bursts fiercely
         burning    wood    and    oxygen

combustion

'Shortest Route Between Two Dots Is A Circle,' 8" x 9", coloured india inks
Brenda Clews, 2009


(A year later I finished this piece - you can take a look if you you like: Lip of the Volcano.)

           

Some Favourite Websites and Blogs

Just for fun, created a little mosaic on my 'Links' page at my website - the websites displayed here are just like being on the real pages, you can browse, read, even leave comments! Click on the names above each site, which I've hyperlinked, if you're tantalized and would like to go to their websites.

Stephen Hatfield

Stephen Hatfield

John F Walter

John F Walter

Dance Our Way Home - Erica Ross

Dance Our Way Home - Erica Ross

           

Paintings in the Sand, Blowing in the Wind

Here's a fun widget... drag your mouse over the white space in the box below;

each time you click, the colour changes... viola! your own drip painting.

No way to save your masterpieces, however. Paintings in the sand, blowing in the wind.

Except by a Print Screen on a PC or Grab on a Mac, perhaps.

Jackson Pollock Art Widget

Honouring Erica Ross Honouring Us

Erica Ross is composing an 'About Us' page at her website: Dance Our Way Home. She asked me to contribute. I share only to encourage you to go, browse and pour over her site, its beauty.

“I've known Erica for many years and witnessed her blossoming into the teacher she is today. Her dance sessions incorporate the power of mythology to give us direction in our transformations through the mystery and magic of our own rhythms, the creativity we call on in our lives. Erica's DOWH sessions are always well researched, and carefully planned with open dance, partner exercises, a flow between movement and resting while Erica guides our visions towards integrating a greater whole within ourselves, in the relationships in our lives, our harmony with the forces of the universe. It is her loving care for the gentle and deep nurturing of women, our often fraught and splintered self-images and connections in an ever-changing world, in a safe and welcoming space that drew me to her Dance Our Way Home practice. In this practice I have found compassion and a celebration of us, as we are, as well as support for who we would like to become, the realization of our dreams.”

Brenda Clews, Writer, Artist

Brenda Clews is a poet and painter living in Toronto, Canada. Born in Zimbabwe, and having spent a childhood in the jungles of Zambia, she embraces the dance of shamanic healing that DOWH offers. She is a developmental editor, a tutor, a certified Kundalini yoga instructor. Published in literary journals, her work shown in art shows, she is developing an aesthetic of multiplicities, of our beings as prisms, in which dance is a central metaphor for living and understanding our lives. Read Brenda's poem "Bramble Rose" and writing "Erica's Dance Our Way Home". A small videopoem she created after the Solstice Ecstatic Dance in June 2009 may be seen on her Celestial Dancers page of her website, Art & Writings.

Dancing on Poetry - a video calling card

brendaclews

The 140 character Twitter tweet, and now the 4 second Robo.to video calling card. Or the madness of repetitive movement. It's all fun!

'Behind the Veil: An intimate journey into the lives of Kandahar's women.'

A Globe & Mail series, forthcoming through the next week. I found the first two disturbing, painful. Life is not just worse than ever for women in Kandahar, but life-threateningly dangerous. How, after the short period of optimism and hope, some shedding of the burka for the veil, bravely venturing out to schools, to work, did things turn back into a life that the women say is worse than that under the Taliban? Then there was 'a reason' for the attacks & torture, now there isn't - just a whole city become psychopath. Scary. Sad. Tragic.

Grünemusik's 'Nyx' - experimental music for inner journeys...

Direct link to Grünemusik's 'Nyx' on Jamendo - 6 tracks, about 30 minutes.

You can download this album for free if you wish. It carries a Creative Commons License.


Profound experimental music for inner journeys...

A large vision. I listened to 30 sec of the first track last night and downloaded without reading the notes. This morning, out with the dog in the morning air, I listened.

And I thought how far some of our musicians have moved from 'traditional' music, though I was not thinking of the Orient but of the European concert. Melody and rhythm don't exist in this album in the traditional sense.

There is a beat, but it is organic. As if we are moving through a deep underground cave. Echoes. Stalagtites. Distant water where diving is so deep as to be depthless. Strange sea creatures in those black waters of the lakes in the underground caves. Ecstatic diving, bubbles, cool pure water.

As we move through the dark cool chambers of the cave, its damp limestone walls, light cascades in occasionally. Ebullient. Nourishment for our earthbound bodies.

The woman singing is ethereal, like a Greek siren calling, or an angel healing, she is both, and a vocaloid who is aesthetically crafted.

We move through Nyx as if in a movie. I felt an archetypal narrative unfolding in my depths. The "Primordial goddess of the night"... wow! Yes! I felt her, strongly, in my first listening, before referring to the notes.

The drums throughout hold everything together for me. They are my link to traditional music, tribal music, and the power of the Orient beats here too.

Fukataku's drumming anchors the subterranean journey of this soundscape. This soundscape in 6 sections - organic sonic world of strange sounds and energies and things sweeping, by, close, far, ebulliently, darkly, it's almost a ghost world, and yet more primal than that. The human and the animal and the synthesized all co-alesque in this deeply mythological, archetypal music that is ambient and trance and has flavours of traditional Japanese music which takes the listener through a deep inner journey in the dark and mysterious places of the soul.


Photo of cave from David Darling.
_________________________________
From Nyx's album notes:

Album description

The primordial goddess of the night. Dark ambient atmosphere with Miku-dub.

Notes on tracks:

1) Melisma singing of the vocaloid Miku in the eastern Asia flavor.
2) Electric ambient dub in three parts with vocaloid's chant.
3) A dub version segued from the previous track.
4) Aether is the elemental god of the "Bright, Glowing, Upper Air." Minimal sequence of electric piano diverges.
5) Nyx, the goddess of the night, appears from the bottom of dark ancient Chaos. Based on a session with Fukataku, the drummer.
6) A short sketch in five. The vocaloid Miku sings the last one verse to fade out.
___

Grünemusik is the name of a unit owned by hikaru (nankado). He's been publishing experimental-pop tunes since 2000 in Japan.

Original CD-Rs internationally available on-line at his official website.