A Kora of Blossoms

a fragrance of bouquets of petaled crabapple flowers



into a pink florae of wild apple-scented beauty



feathers of blossoms pass us by



do you see what deeply peers?


These are stills from a video where I gently shook the camera - manually, no Photoshop filters. The final one is my favourite. (Click photos for larger size)


I also experimented with Picasa's 'slideshow movie' capabilities and was impressed. I uploaded this .43sec video directly from Picasa to YouTube, and you'll see if you play it full screen that the resolution is excellent.



direct link: A Kora of Blossoms

Walking along a Toronto street in Spring, I came across a tree of dancing bouquets of crabapple blossoms.

Music from 'Zaman,' by Myriam Matoussi & friends: http://jamendo.com/en/album/57325 (used with permission)


 Doggles and I walked 6 kilometers today through Toronto neighbourhoods unexplored before. With a thermos of Earl Grey tea, steamy, redolent with bergamot orange, and kibble and water for her, we stopped at three lush parks while I sipped and she sniffed, nibbled grass and chewed sticks. I took a shaking-camera video of a crab apple tree in blossom. Music from Mali the whole way -yeah I was wired, that kora, man it's beautiful. We came home after 3 hours. She's 11 this Summer and aging extremely well, I must say.

                                                        

Gulf Oil Slick

Gulf Oil Slick, 2010, 13" x 10", 33cm x 25.5cm, mixed media on canvas (click for a very large size)

no birds, insects, or animals,
nothing but the sludge-brown sea
singing
smacking under the red sun
a rotted post that was once a dock

can we sacrifice our oil-hungry cars, our plastics,
the petroleum
of our lives

for the fish to frolic
the birds diving
while children build buckets of castles
on seafoamed sand?

(photo to right from NASA, satellite image May 1, 2010)
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We need to rant. We need to get good and furious with ourselves, with manufacturers, with oil companies. These accidents are so huge that they continue to decimate the eden that is the birthright of every creature on earth. When I painted the sludge, I knew it was the oil slick... bubbling up in my vision, so far inland, so many thousands of miles away.

The painting is oils (oil paint is made from pigments mixed with linseed oil, which is from flax seeds), except that brown slick which is acrylic. Crude oil is used in the manufacture of acrylic polymers. While I know that there are many additives for acrylic paints that enable different effects so that it can look like watercolour or oil paints, I don't particularly like them except for underpainting because they dry quickly. This image was composed of leftover oil paint, scraped on with a palette knife, except at the end when I painted in the sun, so of excesses on my palette. The sludge of brown that represents the oil spill devastating the Gulf ocean and the coastlines of Louisiana is a scraping of acrylic paint, a plastic polymer which requires crude oil in its manufacture. It is what it represents, we could say.
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And what if: "What has happened in the Gulf of Mexico is about to open a direct link to the molten core of the planet that we may not be able to control; much as the fallen being above, having become paralyzed by his obsession with the weight of his excessive dreams, now finds himself starring down into the unknown abyss of his own creation-the world may soon find itself nearly powerless before the primeval forces that we have allowed BP to disturb in the unholy name of private-profits over the survivability of this planet." Jim Kirwan, Declaring War on the Universe?

                                                        

The Notebook of the Maternal Body

Yikes, trying to post the piece that I just added to my website Birth Paintings page did not work in Blogspot! I spent many hours composing it in Google Docs in a table, but cannot download it in a readable format, Word or even PDF, to my desktop. The 'public' page "url" is not properly formatted and to my eye unreadable too.

Hey, wait, this might work. A way to 'view' the Google Docs document with a 'read only' permissions to anyone who arrives there:

The Notebook of the Maternal Body

                                                        

A Journey to Each Other

Free music for professional licensing
direct link: Creix, Journey at the corner

This is a single track, 8:21min long.

So many indications to me of the virtual world... it's such a rich world, traversing site after site, endlessly exploring, channel after channel, the musical landscape keeps changing as we move on, visiting worlds, disturbed, inquisitive, conversational, dreamy, the instruments sonically layered indicate the experience of the virtual traveler.

Yet I feel a longing within, under the surface of the beauty of this music, a longing for touch, to meet, to speak, to see each other. For us to come out from behind our screens and meet in some large emporium, a clearing in a forest, a beach, a huge tavern in the city, and hug and laugh and dance and jam the hours away with our music and embraces.

It is as if the musician loves the world that allows his music to be played many thousands of miles away, anytime, and yet misses the contact with the audience. This is the loneliness I feel most strongly in this exquisite track. It is such a rich track it needs no others to accompany it.

The message is clear. It's impossible, but beautiful. Like all desire - a longing that opens us, for we need to be opened.