View out my bedroom window, with a little license.
(Droll, dull, yah but black & white is fun.)
(Neva mind the parkin' lot, yo hear?! It neva has more'n two cars in it, and it gives me open space, a view of the sky, way better'n facing a house of windows facing you. In my opinion.)
I am very lucky to have a little apartment in my favourite area of Toronto. In the Summer the 200 year old trees really are magnificent, and many of the houses date back a century.
There hasn't been a day since I moved here that I haven't woken up grateful.
To commemorate Earth Day, I took this photograph for the flickr Earth Mosaic 2009 - the street that I live on. Nothing special about the photo, but it is home.
Hours of Thelonious Monk, on earphones, close, intimate, syncopated piano, no-one plays piano like him, trombone, the eroticism of jazz, drums, beat of skins, hours and hours, immersed, deeply, his discography, and I find him unlocking my heart and taking me through the labyrinth of my feelings.
And I remember you. You are there in every note. You are the sensual rhythm. You are at the centre of my heart.
Love.
✵
Thelonious, and wonder why I only came to him now, but realize I have been arriving all my life.
His idiosyncratic complexity particularly appeals to me.
≈ sensuous complicated smooth syncopated improvised rhythms he plays as I like to dance without prediction knots and whorls flow and collapse sweeps passions trills the sweet edge of sex lush dark entering each other over and over passages long lingering ecstasies and sorrows
☯
Monk plays with sensitivity, feels every pulse, nuance of the music of his band, the rhythm of the piece being played, his pianistic response always changing, the room, the audience, the air, the touch of the keys under his fingerprints, the pedal under his toes, his whole body an instrument for the piano, notes, even when in a collection it seems to me notes rather than chords, responding, resonating moment by moment, an inner music singing inside the outer tune, sometimes stopping and standing while the other musicians continue to play, then resuming, but not where he left off, we are at another eddy, another turn, trill, witnessing our journey through his journey of the music of the song.
☯
Monk's extraordinary piano playing has brought me back to the clarity of my heart, exploring the labyrinth of my feelings through many hours of his Riverview recordings.
Monk's syncopated improvisational style is well-known, yet listening to his earlier discography, in the range of 184 songs or so, on a Nano iPod and great earphones, Bang & Olufson, is never boring, it's like traveling a long river to the ocean, the journey through his life of music remains exciting, vital, near.
I cannot say how this music speaks to me - it doesn't speak to me, it speaks with me.
It lets me sing my song even as I rhapsodize through the delicate and complex notes Monk plays.
Moi, moi, and moi, ho hum. Bo-ring! BUT. Cleaning up the spit of postage-sized yard out back, fun! In the Summer, full shade due to a tree. Perhaps throw some seed for grasses or ground cover - all in all, it'll be a nice place to sit with morning coffee or on hot Summer evenings! Happy, happy.
My son, who actually helped, had gone by this time. And my daughter, who didn't, took the photos. I've included one of her in this group.
(click on photos for larger size)
My beauty. A sweetie unparalleled.
Shhh. This one. What's Photoshop for if you can't de-age? I had given myself a bright fuscia pink face but found the muted sepia tone nicer. C'mon, an "art shot" alright!
A restless night, too many of us in crisis. I feel myself falling into the flying apart.
My sleepless but drowsy concerns become like Surrealist images where components split apart, twisting in the distance.
A slow-motion spin of walls, wardrobes, kitchen drawers, bits of conversation, kalaidescope of images spanning years, remembered and loosened, geometric and organic, intersplicing in the distances between molecules.
It is a very tidy universe in magnified microcosm despite our messy realities.
Perhaps the holding together doesn't help; perhaps it's time to let go.
What is the mind if unfettered, uncomposed, freed of nervous culture?
No answers came, the warden was banished, the bars fell away.
In the tumbling of synapses firing randomly,
Was I freed?
Did I sleep? Fitfully, in relapses. When I woke the world was its illumined glossy enlightened place where warm sunlight spreads across bedspreads and there are hugs and warmth, French-press coffee and fresh bagels.
Dark, somber, like funeral flowers. A cold draft about the photograph. Feels like the funerary atmosphere of the death of a loved one, the passing of a life, the memories, even as flowers that will wilt and fade soon. One can almost feel the spirit that is looking back at life being here, in the viewpoint of the image. Though it is a warm, sunny Spring day outside, and my room is sunlit, this photograph definitely has a cold feel to it, as if I were in the house or funeral home where these flowers were laid.
It's disturbing, the human figure looks pale, perhaps dead, and the moth the way nature makes everything sustenance for everything else.
Or perhaps it is a surrealist image in which a moth is emerging from a face. The moth looks like its growing out of tendons in the face, that the skin has been stripped.
In the strange imagery of the dream, it is a rebirth?
What is being reborn out of what is dying?
__ Note: not meant in any way to be a discussion of Friedlova's oeuvre, only some impressions I had of two of her photocollages, neither of which are particularly representational of her work as a whole.
Began exploring Larry Carlson's videos today. There is a driving simplicity to this one. Though there is an overlay of images, mainly we witness a pulsing, throbbing, multi-colored pylon. It's primal - that heartbeat. Powerful, technologized, loud, slicing the air with its sound wave, but steady, organic. A pulsing diamond in a scaffolding, a sacred geometry structure, a pyramid. The light is bright, luminous, visionary, the colours, rich, primary, vibrant, its beating, pulsing is hypnotizing, and encompasses opposites of calming and energizing. The man who holds the pyramid is still throughout. His steady holding of the pulsing, shifting, changing, transforming pylon works well as a framing to the vital energy of the heart-like beating. Something grounding in that steady hand.
Do I hear all of life's pounding pulse here? Even our sun has 'heartbeats' - maybe a dozen a century.
If the universe itself has a 'heartbeat,' it would sound and look like "Pylon."
A short, brilliant art video. A woman in negative appears near the end laughing. The light is an exploding dance of colour. It could become obsessive, beating in our ear like Poe's 'Tell Tale Heart.' Only the imagery in this film is expansive, visionary. The pylon goes through phases of beats, it's got a rhythm to its rich pulsing colours, returning to the simplicity of the original green screen occasionally; and the beat itself speeds up at one point, just like a real heart. It's like a highly-charged powered solar cell, this beating heart.
And what a gift to be able to download this! It's pulsing away in the corner of my iMac. "Pylon" is looped and playing endlessly. Like a bright eye: solar, oceanic; of crystal.
As I watch it, I think not only diamond, but exploding
