untitled, 24" x 30", 61cm x 76.2cm, acrylic bone black base, chalk sketch
Titled, my 'next painting' until the images become clearer and I can see what is emerging. The first figure has been sitting on my easel for a week or two now. I hadn't intended to draw a male, or a figure like that, and it's taken some time to accept what arose in the chalk. Today I thought to add another similar figure, so traced the original onto parchment paper, cut it out, and quickly chalked the edges in to get what you see in the second image. Waiting for a title to make itself known.
This episode of Joe Halder’s ‘The Falling Room’ on CFBU 103.7FM aired on February 5, 2010. Brock U/public radio: cfbu.ca. It's an hour.
I found the pieces Halder collected and wove into a radio show inspiring, enthralling and just plain wonderful to listen to (though I have to admit the first piece was my least favourite - keep listening, some jewels to come). A short piece I recorded back in 2005 (1½min) is included.
His show features experimental, minimalist and avant garde music from independent artists. He came across my work at SoundClick. From our little bit of correspondence, he strikes me as a perceptive, brilliant guy. He engages in conversations with the artists he airs; quite young, my bet is that he will shape some of the independent music he plays. Already he is giving me ideas for how to develop my future poetry recordings, enabling me to see his ability to potentially shape a vision of independent music firsthand.
Here is the production sheet/playlist he sent me:
The Falling Room - February 5, 2010
ARTIST - ALBUM - SONG - LABEL - CANCON - TIME - TRACK
0 Minutes:
Steve Hansen Smyth - Internet Release - SUNDAYALYSIS - Independent - X 5:16 - TK 16
Elaine May Bowling - Internet Release - EAT MY WORDS - Independent - X 1:54 - TK 6
Brenda Clews - Internet Release - MARCH 4, 2005 - Independent - X 1:29 - TK 3
Indian in the Machine - Internet Release - TRIP ON MY FLUTES - Independent - X 7:25 - TK 3
Omni toner - Internet Release - GHOST DANCE - Independent - 2:39 - TK 3
20 Minutes:
Phenotypo - Internet Release - THE # 3825, PLEASE RECEIVE A MESSAGE - 7:46 - TK 6
30 Minutes:
Mickey Zero - Alphabetical Orders NAMES LIKE, SONGS LIKE Mickey Cohen - 3:30 - TK 4
Earth 2 - Internet Release - EUROPA SIRENS - Independent - 4:13 - TK 4
40 Minutes:
Tom Parsons - AZURE SPARKLE ON THE WATER - Parsongs - 4:40 - TK 1
Dance is an ecstatic, uplifting, enlightening experience. I hope this little video imparts some of the warmth and joy of the connectedness that occurs during these wild and nurturing dances. After last Summer's Solstice DOWH (Dance Our Way Home) session, some women kindly stayed to dance. The camera taped us for dance stills for an article I was writing. The footage was so sweet, however, that I created this little videopoem. You can read the prose poem here: Amaterasu.
Dancing Women: Erica Ross, Laura Nashman, Angela Greco, Jade Niemczyk, Linda Robinson & Brenda Clews. Event: Dance Our Way Home (DOWH), June 20th, 2009, at Dovercourt House in Toronto: danceourwayhome.com
Background music from *Collection Hapa* by Keli'i Kaneali'i & Barry Flanagan: mountainapplecompany.com
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It's important for those in the entertainment industry to create smart, cool, sexy, funky, daring, glitzy videos to be noticed, to make a name, to become famous.
I'm not trying to call attention to myself except as one of the participating women; I have nothing to sell; I am not attempting to make money on this; I am not trying to impress anyone.
I'm promoting the creative self-expression of women, ordinary women, in unfacilitated dance. No choreography. It's all about feeling comfortable with who you are and flowering as yourself.
This video was shot on a tripod with a democracy whereby no-one got close-ups or special attention. No cuts were made to the footage, the music is uninterrupted, but some filters were added. The stop motion filter, for instance, was done frame by frame, about 7 hours. It took probably 20 hours to produce something that looks like almost nothing was done to it, that's perhaps slow and ordinary to the eye used to action and special effects.
Makes me think of Wordsworth's language of and for the common man, or Courbet's determination to paint the ordinary, stones, roads, fields, farmers.
An aesthetic: the beauty of the ordinary. How the ordinary is dreamy. How enlightenment flows out of the ordinary. How what is truly marvelous is the unassuming, the everyday, expressions of joy in everyone simply because they are. What is most surreal is the real. I hope to convey some of this with the way I chose to show the footage.
Yasar's Crepusculo, or Twilight, consists of 3 songs from an opera based on Lord Byron's poem, Darkness. Yasar, in his album notes, offers the first lines:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
[My response based on notes written while listening to 'Crepusculo' by Yachar]
Yachar has tackled a massive tableaux and offers us a grand and deep and lonely cry for life. The soprano sings as the angel of our heart. We call to the soul of the universe for forgiveness. We love. Love sings in the tragedy. Our spirits sweep on love's beauty.
The Celtic harp, acoustic guitar, and other delicate instruments, complex rhythms upholding the operatic voices, the music Yachar has composed, it's uplifting joy, offers a distant flame of hope in the dark dream of ending.
A calamity overwhelms before which we are helpless. This is the power of the dream - a nightmare from which we cannot awaken. A spectre of unrelenting darkness, loss, loneliness. In the midst of the desolation of everything, the loss of the sun, all life ends, the stars wander in the void, even the waves of the ocean die, people become savages before everything expires into eternal death. Only darkness has no need of aid, and it is darkness that remains, as Byron writes in his great poem, "Darkness...-She is the Universe."
Though throughout these songs there is a relentless, inexorable movement, something unstoppable, a great dark shadow that travels with the beauty, as Byron relates his apocalyptic dream, "The world was void...seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless- a lump of death- a chaos of hard clay," and so I hear perhaps marimbas in the background of the last piece that sound like delicate bones rattling, a reminder.
Death is ever our accompaniment in this beautiful graceful gift of life. Yachar's musical art sings of this truth with great passion, sensitivity.
