...where Botticelli's Venus, ideal of beauty, the goddess who ushered in the Renaissance, bucks her scallop shell and in pursuit of erotic passion, experiences love in the world with its betrayals, deceptions, rejections... how our hearts of purity suffer like Venus pursuing the intrigues of passion, its tempests, for the love in her life...
...how the poetry of our life is our love...
...this love story interweaves the purity of Botticelli's Venus, and Venus Pandemos of myth, her lover Mars, the story of Psyche and Eros, a personal story, and how we clothe ourselves with shimmering presence, 'translucent robes' of poetry:
beauty, fragile, on the lip of, edges, knowing loss's inevitability, a flower blossoms, scented, fragrant and soft vivid colour of petal drifting away, it can't remain, you knew, Botticelli, and
yet, she is, borne by the Zephyr on the scallop-shell and wrapped in veils of flowers by the Horae
Buz composed a beautiful jazz/orchestral score. I listened in wonder- he is very gifted. He writes: "I started with a piano and just improvised while listening to the poem. The same for all the other tracks, just played to your voice. That's why it was able to ebb and flow with your voice."
After I wrote *the worst* pantoum, I wrote this abstract little ditty to try to explain myself:
I've fallen to
playacting
anger.
Snap, shout, hiss
but the old
hot-edge
gone.
Once a
volcano-
dormant,
spent.
What used
to ignite
fiery torrents
now brings
inconsolable
clouds,
days of
rain.
(oh dear)
__
Ok, ok, onto the truly terrible pantoum (and I do think anger cliché-ridden, that there is a repetitiveness of the trite in states of rage):
Anger is a potent force. Anger is red, explosive, repetitive. An angry person has lost their rationality. Anger is a sword of destruction, a way to hurt. Anger is red, explosive, repetitive. When the victim becomes the oppressor. Anger is a sword of destruction, a way to hurt. To hurt the way you've been hurt. When the victim becomes the oppressor. Anger is a bullet. To hurt the way you've been hurt. Anger is a fire bomb. Anger is a bullet. Anger collects furies to hurl. Anger is a fire bomb. Anger destroys what took time to build. Anger collects furies to hurl. When it erupts, it tears the gaussian blur off things. Anger destroys what took time to build. Anger is a great leveller. When it erupts, it tears the gaussian blur off things. Anger sees the mark darkly. Anger is a great leveller. The raging storm. Anger sees the mark darkly. The roaring wind. The raging storm. Tears the world apart with battering. The roaring wind. The broken homes. Tears the world apart with battering. Anger transforms. The broken homes. Loss of illusions. Anger transforms. Anger is a potent force of renewal.
__ The animated letters, a dancing semiotext throughout:
Ribbon squiggles:
dancing
dancing
dancing
dancing
Standard font:
wild
transmute
transform
dance
-
Scrolling text on inverted (white) screen:
Joe Travesio writes:
Sporadic music is a collection of open techniques of composition where different musical elements (rhythm, melody, tonality, modality, structure) are affected by a constant process of transmutation and instability changing through harmonic relations, games of addition and subtraction, retrogade expositions of previous schemes, logical transformations, sudden ruptures and more crazy things like this. Sporadic music compositions are very creative unpredictable, creating rules to break them, mix new rules, and so on. The result is minimalist, reiterative, expressionistic, and unstable, surrealist sometimes, always interesting.
On 'El Loco y la Nina' (Essay on Sporadic Music, No. 2: The Mad Man and the Little Girl) he writes: The music rides along two musical lines independent of each other. The left-hand - the 'mad man'; the right hand - the 'little girl.' The sporadic speech of the music is based on developing short motives and themes. 'El Loco y la Nina' is composed of minor chords with complex microstructures. A dramatic and hyperactive theme, a mix of violence and delicate care.
__
Poem at end, first screen:
Dance like a
madwoman, or
a madman
in your livingroom.
What is a
security of the self?
Without constraint, unfettered,
who would you be?
Second screen:
If we forget
we are watched,
read, observed, judged,
about the unceasing gaze
of the other,
what would we do,
who would we be?
Quote: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1974), p.xiii
__
I pair the ordinary with the extraordinary. An ordinary woman with brilliant music. Though the figure as I have 'enfigured' her is a bit strange. She's a line drawing of herself, overlapping herself slightly. She seems connected to a doorway, or box. In it is one way, closer to 'the real'; out of it is another, an inverted world that is line drawn with hints of solarized colour (at least in the original, the YouTube version is a bit washed out).
The letters are randomly ordered. Swinging in on a line like a meandering riversnake, growing larger before they disappear. Yet they reverse, gliding away from her. Is she a septre of their energy like a secret Minoan snake goddess? Happily jiving up or down. Become tiny squiggles like a chorus in the corners. Splices of themselves or elongated versions. Calligraphy, semiotext, cartoon. They echo the colours of the room. They make rules to break them. They are Sporadic.
Wittgenstein says, "Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination."
Travesio's song, produced sporadically, like a Dada sound tone poem, he calls an 'essay.' The notes of the musician's piano are words in the imagination.
Quote: Ludwig Wittgenstein, from 'Picturing Reality,' in Philosophy of Language, edited Andrea Nye (Victoria, Australia: Blackwell, 1998), p.87
__
I find myself embarrassed by my video. It's dull, boring. The music is incredible - a tour de force by José Travieso, ecstatic, experimental, Sporadic. He is a virtuoso. An amazingly talented musician. The scroll of writings from his album cover as a visual element in the video works for me. My book-lined over-stuffed livingroom isn't fun to see. But the worst is me.
Why am I showing you this video at all?
Because, you know, 'get up and do it!' Because middle-aged women dancing in their livingrooms like crazy ladies. Because it's a take on Reality TV, and that approach to us. Because you can tell I haven't danced in 6 months and am gung ho about 'getting back in shape.' Because I've put on weight and I'm trying to 'exercise it off' (with reduction in daily food intake too of course). Because I'm happy to be jumping around like a banshee with a lit firecracker. Because I don't mind using myself as subject, in baggy around-the-house dog-walking shorts, no make-up or jewelry, everything unplanned - the video a last moment thought. Oh, yeah, tripod, the standby. And because I think my dog is adorable.
Since this video she has figured out how to participate when I roll the carpets up and begin my crazy stuff. She gets her rope with a rubber toy on the end and we play tug of war to the rhythm. I hold it high and she jumps to the beat. When I slide to the floor and begin swinging my legs and whatnot, she is very cute and quite happy to roll around too, letting me do a little contact improv with her.
(Though I gave the musician, whose music I found on Jamendo, full rights to having it pulled if he doesn't like what I did to his music, so it might disappear, return to being un-shown.) :)
(It took days to upload, no idea why, uploads kept freezing, but finally watching it on YouTube, I can see that my cut at the end, where the letters disappear and the music stops, isn't quite right. For unknown reason, when all the letters were cut in a vertical line, some had an echo, an extra flash a second or so after they were 'gone.' Who knows why? The ensuing lines were clean, empty, I couldn't figure it out. So I cut those flash dancing letters back a bit, to end just before. Of course, then they didn't echo. And the sequence is almost ok, but not quite. Some disappearing before others. But, then, that's Sporadic isn't it? :-)
__
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
F. W. Nietzsche.
Been watching YouTube instructional videos on rendering in FCP. I think I get it. Why it's taking so long is that I have brought together different types of files - audio, text, stills, as well as my video footage. What I should have done was batch edit everything to a single file type, which, if possible, I can't at present test this out (as my video's been rendering for almost 24 hours and I'm not interrupting it near the end!), would mean no rendering at all. Wow. Yes, taking courses would help with learning the video editing software but this I cannot afford at present. Other ways of learning, by trial and error, reading the manual (at 1200 pages!), watching instructional videos (yes, some great ones at YouTube, very helpful) can get you there, if in a zig zag slower fashion. Mostly, with the 'just do it' 'trial and error' method, is that when you hit a snag or a problem you go looking for answers.
The Internet is a vast storehouse of information, isn't it. How did we ever live without it?
I use FCE (Final Cut Express), the cheap version of Apple's video editing software. It's $199. versus $1,199. for FCP (Final Cut Pro, in Canadian prices). Besides sometimes having to use a drop down menu rather than having a button handy on screen, I haven't found anything missing in FCE compared to the FCP version. Apple has been good to us home users. FCE is a full system that more than meets most of our video editing needs.
About all I've found is that FCE only ships with one extra program, Live Type, and that's probably pared down; whereas I believe FCP ships with a whole bunch of programs. Also FCP is stronger, more of a power tool, faster. Which isn't an issue with me as a homeuser. My clips are short and the videos I make are mostly under 10 minutes.
Tonight I watched instructional videos on rendering in FCP. When my FCE finally finishes rendering the video I'm working on, I'm sure I'll find that everything the pros were talking about is possible in my version.
My state of rendering tonight - 26 layers, right now at 50% so I can see if it'll work. It takes nearly 3 hours each time to render so that I can watch it. I edited the prosepoem posted earlier for possible inclusion, as an audio recording, but I don't know if I'll add it or not. Jose Travieso's piano solo is so amazing, I don't want to disturb it with spoken words. If I do add the prosepoem, it'll be at the very end, and will push the video to about 9 minutes. As a boring art video, probably an extra minute or so won't matter, but I'll see. I just spent a few hours making a mini movie of two layers so that I could import it into this video and crop it to cover a thermostat, a crop that changes with all the colour variations of the video through its duration so you'll never know the thermostat was there. It is I who has to be satisfied, ultimately. I don't expect much feedback on this video, or high view counts.
Instead, I focus on making the best video I can given my level of expertise, my aesthetic standards and the material I have chosen to work with.
Creating takes time, and I accept that video-making, especially for someone like me who creates the palettes of the moving image as one would a painting, is a long and careful process.
