Sampler of Videopoem-in-progress

direct link (it's unlisted): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TciSPbfRLQk

A tiny sampler, an unfinished cut, of a new videopoem I'm working on (already the little piece of lettering floating over the screen has burgeoned four-fold to staggered layers and the colour is now a deep dusty magenta).

The crazy woman dancing in her baggy shorts in the living room sometimes with her dog is NOT how I would imagine a video for 'El Loco' but somehow it works - there is a resonance.

I'm pairing a crazy dancing episode with a brilliant ecstatic piano solo, where Jose Travieso explores avante-garde music in what he calls, "sporadic music." Sporadic music, he writes in the notes to the album I drew this track from:

is a collection of open technics of composition where the different musical elements (specially rhythm, melody, tonality, modality and structure) are affected by a constant process of transmutation and instability, changing everytime by means of harmonic relations, games of additions and substractions, retrograde expositions of previous schemes, logical transformations, sudden ruptures and a few more of crazy things like these. The composition based in ´sporadic musicª is a very creative and unpredictable work, creating rules, use them and later break them at all to do and mix new rules and so on. The result is minimalist and reiterative, expresionist and unstable, surrealist sometimes, always interesting...

'El Loco y la Niña,' or 'The Madman and the Little Girl,' by Jose Travieso - http://www.josetravieso.org.

                                                        

A Lascivious Tray

For my housewarming you arrive with a cooler on whose ice a bottle of Moet and Chandon Brut Imperial champagne waits, and a power drill to hang my curtains.

While you hang, I toss organic baby spinach, fat green leaves, sliced large white button mushrooms, raw and thick, thin wheels of hot red onion, peeled sliced sweet mango, a handful of ground walnuts, slivered almonds, flax and sunflower seeds in a raspberry vinaigrette.

On the sectioned tray I lay ripe strawberries sweet as jam, green grapes, sinful fresh figs.

From its wooden case, I lift fresh smoked wild Sockeye salmon and lay it down.

Large green olives stuffed with garlic nestle beside the focaccia embedded with olive slices, sun-dried tomatoes, chopped onion and herbs.

Around balls of sweet honey dew melon I wrap ribbons of proscuito.

Peeling the papers from the cheeses, I uncover Isigny Sainte Mère, a creamy Normandy Camembert, Pont-l'Evêque, a soft cheese, pungent white Cheddar, tangerine-coloured rich Mimolette, and from sweet sheep's milk a soft Italian Percorino Toscan Fresco.

It is a steamy June day.

We take each other's clothes off in the enrapt way way lovers do. We feed each other with our mouths, teeth, fingers. We hold strawberries between both our lips and bite them.

We sip long crystal flutes and drizzle champagne into each other.

I'm sure I lap-dance, it's becoming a blur. Leonard Cohen's woman, that beautiful Anjani, sings soft, sultry songs of his poems.

Lust breathes us.

Later, drunk, I dance in the living room, a naked middle-aged woman.

The curtains are drawn tight.





This morning I videod my exercising, dancing, and then layered so many filters on the footage Final Cut Express says it'll take 4 days to render a 12 minute section! I'm currently trying to circumnavigate that by saving to QuickTime, but that's a 20 hour process! Oy ya. These stills may be all that there is to show of my afternoon's work. Let's just say, three years later, not naked.

It was a memorable night, perhaps our best, but our last. I’ve kept the empty bottle of champagne on my shelf since then, knowing I had to write about it. In the Winter I received a letter from his other lover and then we discovered each other, though I had ended my relationship with him not long after the evening I write of here. This is a section from a much longer prosepoem.

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This prosepoem piece was written for Big Tent Poetry's May 28th poetry prompt: aphrodisiac.


You can read the response of some Big Tent contributers and readers here: Rubies In Crystal at WordPress.

                                                        

Glint

(watch at fullscreen in hd, if you can -quality is excellent) direct link: Glint

He indicated that the video was ok, but uploading to YouTube? I said there are lots of CATS on YouTube. (Featuring our 13 year old family cat, Tiggy. I told him he was going to be a YouTube cat - that's status.) :-)

In writing this minimalist poem, I thought to present it in the video as the murmur you overhear that is a poem. I wanted an 'art film,' something composed of shapes and sounds open to interpretation. Ghostly, sensual, colours and light and shadows in a flux in a landscape that's a little ambiguous, a bit Surreal. The music that I found for this piece was so perfect I edited the video's rhythms to the song.

This writing is drawn from a much larger manuscript which interweaves science and poetry. Three quarters of the energy of the universe is dark energy. 'Glint' calls on the metaphor of dark energy to shape a love poem. Words rise and sink in the marvelous soundtrack, which I didn't want to disturb above a murmur.

The music is "Madrox, in my head," by Arena of Electronic Music at Jamendo: http://www.jamendo.com/track/477297

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My dear and long-time friend, Stephen Hatfield wrote a beautiful comment in an email (posted here with his permission):

For my taste I thought "Glint" was one of your most successful video pieces, in part because the text grew out of the visual textures in a very pleasing and enticing way, as opposed to setting a pre-existing poem to a video accompaniment.

I thought that it was very sensuous, but in a very polymorphously perverse way. I did get some suggestions of skin-like textures, but nothing in the way of specific organs or body parts. Instead the textures I saw made me think more of giant underwater anemones, brains, sea sponges, that sort of thing. It was sexy, but in a completely indirect way that stimulated all sorts of associations of ideas and sensations.

I liked the ritual slashes - cat claws - across the canvas of the screen - which also suggested the slots through which one watched those early forms of moving pictures - which also suggested a kind of connect/disconnect that was the overall ethos of the piece.

I also thought the way you read your text worked. That character pulled me into the video more than the tone of voice with which you have "incantated" some of your other videos. This is entirely a matter of taste, and I do not use "incantated" in any ironic or denigrating manner.

                                                        

'Glint' is coming...

Glint is on its way.

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