November 2014 Poetry Salon at Urban Gallery -final one for this year!

Adam Abbas hosted my final Poetry Salon at Urban Gallery this year on Saturday Nov. 29th from 3-5 PM EST. Talented, charming and ever-generous, thank you Adam for all the hard work you put into this Salon! Featured were Anna Veprinska, Dave Hurlow, Rasiqra Revulva, Neal Alexander Shroobacca Armstrong and Nyla Matuk. Thank you for such fine poetry and readings! Norman Bethune Allan, John Oughton, Areta M., and I also read on open mic. Adam arranged for the licenses and brought beer and wine. It was truly a wonderful afternoon! Many thanks to all who came out!!! xoxoxoxo

Anna Veprinska's new poetry collection Sew with Butterflies was released by Steel Bananas in 2014. She is a poet who is currently pursuing her PhD in English at York University, researching empathy in poetry. Her writing and photography can be found in various Canadian and British publications. She also plays the mandolin in the Toronto Mandolin Orchestra.

Dave Hurlow's first collection of short fiction Hate Letters from Buddhists was released by Steel Bananas in 2014. He is a Toronto-based writer and musician. He studied literature at King’s College in Halifax, and plays bass in the Toronto band The Darcys. Their second album Warring was released by Arts and Crafts in 2013.

Neal Armstrong is an artist and performer who splits his time between Toronto and the dream world.

Rasiqra Revulva is a Toronto-based writer, multi-media artist, editor, musician, and performer. She is a founding member of the synth-punk/electro/glitch/industrial music and visual art collective The Databats. Her writing has been published by The Incongruous Quarterly, Cordite Poetry Review, ditch,, The Feminist Wire, and The Quilliad; and exhibited at the 2014 PULP: paper art party, the 2014 BIG on Bloor Festival, and IMG Forums at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts.

Nyla Matuk’s first full-length collection is Sumptuary Laws, published in 2012. A chapbook, Oneiric, appeared with Frog Hollow Press in 2009. Her poems have appeared in, or are forthcoming in, The Fiddlehead, The Walrus, Hazlitt, Canadian Notes and Queries, The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012 and PN Review, among others. She was a finalist for the Walrus Poetry Prize and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.

Please go to my Poetry Salons at Urban Gallery album at Picasa to see who's who - the album starts at the first salon and goes to the latest.

                                                                                           

The photography on the walls is by KAREN SILVER, whose show, Otherworld, was up at Urban Gallery when we had our Poetry Salon there.
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Life-Drawing at Bampot on Oct 19th 2014

Finally got around to photographing, cropping and whatnot the life-drawing session at Bampot Bohemian Teahouse on Oct 19th. Not terribly.... not. But, ok, let's post. The final drawing, which is the first here as they are in backwards order, was what keyed me into thinking, Why don't I take a little canvas for that last pose... (which is supposed to be 40min, though it's often a lot less than that because the break is a lot longer than the time allotted but I can insist that the model do the long pose right after break and then whatever short one might fill in to 5:30pm, yes I can).

You'll see my little canvas, which will be in a Group Show at Yellow House Gallery, in my next post, whenever that is.

Hope you're all well!

                           
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Life-drawing at Dr Sketchy's Anti-Art School Reloaded in Toronto, Nov 7th

I've been absent for a bit ...not off having fun, but working on a videopoem that I had on my list for 6 or 7 months and which I finally finished because I wanted to submit it somewhere and had a dead-line. I pushed myself through a gruelling week and a half of 18hr a days and towards the end found myself out every single night at different poetry, dance and drawing events. Sleep was less than minimum (2-3 hrs a night, I was approaching break down). However, I got a complex poem written and edited, edited the video footage, did about 6 readings of the poem before getting one I could live with, and created the soundtrack for the background with a small cheap keyboard and GarageBand - and also I did subtitles. The videopoem is about 7.5min, and was a feat. I am happy with the result, though I don't hold out too much hope for its finding acceptance where I sent it (this is the norm for me - my first choice never says yes, but if I keep submitting, where it is accepted is always better for my work and me).  So I will be sending it elsewhere, whenever it comes back. Due to the requirements of previously unpublished works, I can't publish it or share it with you now.

I have been drawing, though. And today finally had some sun and time to do the arduous task of photographing. One set is ready....

Life-drawing at Dr Sketchy's Anti-Art School Reloaded in Toronto, Nov 7, 2014. Model: Obskyura; theme: 'Over the top, pop star decadence. Excessive glamour. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.' ©Brenda Clews, 18" x 24", graphite, Inktense black (and sometimes red or pink) blocks with a water brush pen on Strathmore 70lb archival drawing paper.

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Happy Halloween, spooks!

And a completely silly video that I threw together on a whim last night in an attempt to deal with my talking head syndrome...

direct link: On the talking head syndrome...

Testing some umbrella lights and neat video effects, I thought I'd take on my difficulty with doing the 'talking head' thing when I do video reviews of poets who have featured at my Poetry Salons at Urban Gallery in Toronto.

Ok I got a bit carried away....

(Maybe going to return this mask - the studs really aren't me, though it is a very comfortable mask otherwise.)

The titles in FCP X that looked best did not give me room to add the music credit: Collegium Musicum De Minas - Regina Caeli, Chiquitos (Anônimo jesuítico, séc. XVIII) found in free downloads on Last FM.
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Out of the Closet

Gettin' ready for Halloween! And I did get a small black mask for the eyes. Oh hoho... way too much light in the iPhone photo and it washed away the years. Lol!

She wistfully remembers her vamp days.... (ok they were very short and a very long time ago. but.)

(got ma first corsets this year, or, properly, bustiers, which have resin or plastic stays and are very comfortable, unlike corsets proppa, which have bone or steel stays)

Leather lady!

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Deep in the Cyanean Surf: for Nik Beat (videopoem 3:11min)

direct link: Deep in the Cyanean Surf

...cast myself in shadow in this video... for Nik Beat/aka Michael Barry... written within days of his death, in remembrance and love. Miss you!

There are subtitles that can be translated into many languages... just click on the CC.

Because the raw clip was not in focus, I cast myself in shadows in two different 'copies' or 'projects' with different approaches to the textures and focus of the poem. I kept trying this and that on each project to see what resonances with the poem might work - one, for instance, had a film noir effect; in the other I used a background generator. The editing took me to many mysterious places until one of the clips, the latter one, emerged more fully as a 'videopoem' and became what you see here. This is when video editing is like writing a visual poem or painting with the possibilities offered by multiple video effects. The background sounds, which are quite dimmed, are of waves lapping.

I rarely get into cutting of scenes and images, preferring the integrity of a single clip, the cleanness of it, and allow it to build like a painting around the poem.

Someone in film would be aghast at this, but it built as a series of carefully calibrated approaches to the raw video clip over a whole day and removing any of them changed the whole look. Only regret: I didn't de-interlace for the YouTube video, though did for the Vimeo edited upload.

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Shadowed Poet - photos from a w-i-p videopoem

As I begin working on the video from my Poetry Salon at Urban Gallery last Saturday, I thought, waiting for responses from some of the readers who were sent raw video clips for approval (even simple editing takes quite a bit of time, and I don't want to do it if that person will nix the final edited video as others occasionally have done), that I would work on the poem I did (the one I wrote for Nik Beat). Well, my. Many hours later I think it'll work. I blotted myself out altogether -

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