Rubies in Crystal

Sunday, January 07, 2018

GIFs from performance poems in Tidal Fury

Chthonic - "I can't stop dancing."

Dance of the Sarong - "I dance a life's struggles."

from the Medusa suite

Some GIFs from my performance of poems from my book, Tidal Fury, 6 Jan 2018 at Linda Stitt's Words and Music Salon at the Tranzac Club in Toronto. Thank you to John Oughton for snapping 'live photos' on my iPhone, which I edited and was able to turn into the weird things you see here.

Sorry for the visual overload! They probably won't all load properly on the page - look at each of them in the lightbox by clicking on the first one, that's best. I'd like to collect them in one place.

If you'd like to buy Tidal Fury, click on the image in the footer, which will take you to a page of booksellers, and quotes from reviews, or here.

The performed poems are, in order, Chthonic, Dance of the Sarong, and a Medusa suite (including Medusa slugging beer!). That final GIF is quite strange, almost a visitation of fairy dust, except, it being Medusa's headdress, these would be snakes. Creepy thought! Enjoy!
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Friday, January 05, 2018

Fugue in Green at Indigo Books

Somehow, it's official when you see it in a bookstore. Fugue in Green, my new novella, at Indigo Bay Bloor! Tomorrow, I will read from it and have some copies for sale too. Come out to Linda Stitt's Words and Music Salon, 12:30-3:30pm, Tranzac Club, Bloor and Brunswick, where I am a feature poet, along with a great line-up, Charlene Jones, Glen Gary, John Charles Daly and Sam Sudar-Singh. The Facebook Event Page is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1771706859789879/
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Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Unwrapping First Copies of Fugue in Green!

direct link: Unwrapping First Copies of Fugue in Green!

The first copies of Fugue in Green arrived from Quattro Books today! Guess who helped me open the box! My little darlings! They were so sweet I had to grab my iPhone and video. As you can see, they found the box, rather than the books, of greatest interest.

The Quattro Launch is Wednesday, January 31, 2018, at The Garrison, 1197 Dundas St W, Toronto (Dundas St W, just west of Ossington Ave), 7 pm start time. I am considering doing another launch with another author later on, since the Quattro launch is for eight books and will be packed.
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Wednesday, December 06, 2017

How to Deal With A Block: Never Mind, Draw!

Everything within me has fled since my brother's death, or this is what I think. So how do you work through a block. You draw. Never mind what anybody else might think. Draw because your life depends on it. These are mostly (but not always) extremely short subway drawings, sometimes from one stop to another.

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Saturday, December 02, 2017

Photos of Bloor St in Toronto tonight

Bloor Street in Toronto tonight, and not where'd you think. They are snapshots of the same scene. These images are practically painted with the way that I do them. I'm not an abstract artist, and no desire to go that direction, but it's fun to take the realism of the photograph and push it, and push it, into an abstraction of the scene which it so faithfully rendered in the photostream. Something scantily scandalous about this.
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Wednesday, November 08, 2017

Mini Review of Lisa de Nikolits', No Fury Like That

No Fury Like That by Lisa de Nikolits
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lisa de Nikolits novel, No Fury Like That (Inanna Publications, 2017), is an imaginative, witty, humorous romp through Purgatory, endings of lives, discoveries and recollections in the near afterlife, a redemption novel where vengeance is the redeemer. Other reviewers give synopsis' of the plot, so I won't, but I am intrigued by the architectonics of the structure she creates for her Purgatory, a 3-dimensional maze, a cubist emporium where rooms appear and disappear according to 4-hour windows, and the Viewing Room where virtual reality comes to life. There is a coffee klatch mostly of women trapped in Purgatory not quite sure of how to achieve realizations to get privileges and perhaps promoted to Heaven. There is an entangled mess of relationships on earth that those in Purgatory must work their way through. The number of characters de Nikolits creates and maintains consistency with throughout the story is quite a technical feat in itself. No Fury Like That is a bustling, busy novel that spins and grabs you in all your corners and assumptions as it focuses on the corporate life vs the family life, success in the business world vs loving relationships. The main character, Julia, gets to have her cake and eat it too - she gets a second chance to make pay backs and revitalize her life, to balance it, to find love and family and happiness as well as a solid career. This is not to say that the novel isn't a passionate explosion of pain and anger and vengeance - it moves from a kind of 'Orange is the New Black' to 'Kill Bill' in a dizzying kaleidoscope of different kinds of violence, sharings, realizations and furies. Julia responds to the brutality that she suffered with a brutality that is as fierce and takes no reprieve. And then she shifts her life. I would say that No Fury Like That is about a new era where power relations between the sexes can become more balanced, where success in the world and fulfillment of the heart are eminently possible in a way that is brand new in our world.

View all my reviews
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Sunday, October 29, 2017

A Gif of Smatterings of Galleries at My Website

Please, no intention to drive you mad with repetitive strain images! But here's a gif for my painting page at my website (which is done, except for all the captions/labels). It's a smattering of an image from different galleries. They are slooow gifs! How much can the eye take in when there are three gifs giffying together? Also, this gif has a white background to go with G+'s page colour; on my website, it's black.
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