It's taken a morning of searching, but I now have a working page for aros, A River of Stones, my mini 140 character pebbles, and an RSS feed to that page (which is a label page):

http://brendaclews.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/aros

You can find the label page for aros at the top of this page (or any page on my site, it's so cool).

Note: I was only able to find this feed, and subscribe to it in Google Reader through the orange browser feed button on your browser bar.

Also I was able to get Facebook to recognize and import the url of the feed into my Notes.


These two great articles by GXG tell you exactly how to do it:

Tranform a Blogger Label into a Page.

How to Add Label-Specific Feeds to Blogger



                                          

direct link: Anansi Hides the Moon

A painting, 'Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones,' hanging on a wall. Sunlight moving through wind-waving branches falls through a window onto it. You can also see the shadows of the window itself. That morning I was absorbed watching the light and shadows dancing quietly over the painting and videotaped it. Then, on an evening walk I came across a light on a patio with a thick white gauzy curtain around it, and shot some footage with my iPhone video camera. Later, playing with the footage, I added the billowing curtain and its light next to the painting of doubles and shadows. Then I cut sections of a photograph of the painting out, animated them and added them to the film. Finally, pondering on what I had produced, I wrote a whimsical poem of the African trickster spider god, Anansi, and wove it in with handwritten notes.

It does have a serious theme - can you guess it?

Take a moment to look at the moon.

(An aside: the video as it shaped itself inspired the poem. I made the video and then wrote the poem over a few days, meditating on each tiny section to see what was emerging/wanting to be said. I swear Anansi, the trickster, was loose in my computer, though, since sections of the video kept inexplicably changing while I was working on the text. Eventually I had to use a video I'd made of the footage only for the trickiest text -the opening title- which had repeatedly, every time I tried to lay it on the timeline, caused bizarre things to happen to all the other tracks, like shortening them or making them speed up for small durations, but chaotically and if you fixed this, that went off. Nothing like this has ever happened when I've edited a video before. It was as if the components of the video had taken on a life of their own. I kept resorting to the earlier versions FCE saves in 'the vault' before using a 'fixed' file, the .mov file I uploaded to Vimeo a few days back. These trickster gods do keep us hopping!)

The painting, from chalk drawing to nearly finished, can be viewed here: Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones.
Flute music a very small section of 'Bodydrama at the Nave' by ARTSomerville.
This videopoem was featured at Moving Poems.


Anansi Hides the Moon

Anansi
the spider
dropped
in from
where
African
gods and
goddesses
hang out

Anansi
hid
the moon
behind a
curtain

The sun flickered

The parchment
figures, doubles,
doppelgangers
and clones
barely
noticed

The days
were
sun bright
and the city
was electric
light
at night

Sometimes
it's
like that
_

From Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones

                                          

Visit Writing Our Way Home


                                          

In-process- Anansi with Parchment Figures, Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones from Brenda Clews on Vimeo.

This bit of fun needs a poem! I'm thinking something with Anansi, the trickster African spider god...

I'd like to handwrite the poem onto the video, if I can figure out how, but won't be able to animate it.

I'm working on a longer videopoem with more of this footage, close-ups and so on, but thought to see what a small section might look like. I'm finding editing in FCE laborious and difficult since the tracks won't run in unlimited RT or lower resolution and only play when fully rendered and that's taking upwards of 2-6 hours for each tiny change! Not sure why.

If I can get to a point where I can see what effects are producing what then maybe I can work by imagining how it might be turning out (since I can't get even a sense in low res if it won't play)?

While the clips are mostly shot with my Canon Vixia HFS100, the curtain hanging by an outdoor patio is an iPhone clip. I did go back a few nights later with the Canon, but in a Winter cold snap I was in a long, hooded black coat and huge Sorrel boots and held my camera over the fence and freaked the owner of the house who turned off the light and sent their dog out to bark at me. I may try again in a few nights, or not- the grainy iPhone clip has its own charm.


Background music, a tiny section of 'Bodydrama at The Nave,' by ARTSomerville: jamendo.com/​en/​album/​53543

Painting, still unfinished, is mine: picasaweb.google.com/​brenda.clews/​ParchmentFiguresDoublesDoppelgangersClones




                                          

Anansi took the heat and put it in a pot and hung it in the silk cotton tree. That's why we have winter storms, I am sure of it.


                                          

Hey, cool! A promo player with 4 sample tracks (though it looks like it doesn't travel by RSS feed or email subscription).

From my latest poetry album: Starfire.

                                          

A lit, white, outdoor patio curtain billows, and I, videotaping it, frighten the owner in my black hooded coat and huge Sorrel boots. The night blasts.

Spring generates below the frozen ground. The green, the brown rising. Darkly.


_
The stone, drawn from the stream-of-consciousness writing in the drawing.

In the endless greys, browns, taupes and whites of winter, I seem to be deeply missing the green! My subconscious offering compensatory imagery - or that's what it seems. Buried in masses of green.

While working on this drawing, I spilt half a bottle of olive green India ink, a colour that I had mixed from a sepia and a bright green, onto my La Cache tablecloth (the store no longer exists). That was a disaster. India ink is extremely permanent. Did I get it rinsed before doomsday in green? About 10 separate squirts of dish soap and rinses and me scrubbing with my hands. Finally I put it in a bucket with laundry detergent to soak.

Green floods my life.

I would say there is a black and a white sister here. They are a study in contrasts. Two very different lives and takes on life. Yet they are the same woman.

The drawing is overdone, I think. I began by using some pens that contain archival ink but work like markers and discovered that I don't really like them. At least now I know I prefer the more unsure and difficult ways ink flows from the nibs of fountain pens or dip pens. So much of what happens when it doesn't begin quite right is that you spend a lot of time 'saving' the work - a process that is sometimes successful, sometimes not. I added eggshell-coloured framing digitally. I like the close-up in the last scan.

_
Dark Women, 2011, 20cm x 28cm, 8" x 11", India inks with dip pen and various fountain pen inks.

Scrawled, embedded words:

Who are we in our shadows? Explore a darker terrain. Welcome complexity, seething underbed where spring is already generating below the frozen ground, snow-filled land of ice. The green, the brown rising. Darkly. Look at the half-seen and explore the invisible. Does mystery make us apprehensive? Go deeper. Plunge.

Wrote the words that are embedded in the drawing next to it so that I would remember what they were. Yes, could be edited down, but later. The eggshell framing lines are drawn digitally.




I like the detail, click on it - it looks better larger.

...when the light casts two shadows, and you hear footsteps within footsteps, and you realize you're following yourself...

Your clay-whitened bodies covered with cracks like dry riverbeds on the surface of the moon.

Cracked and dry as a desert. Denuded of identity, warmth, flush skin tones. No bright highlights, no glamour. Bodies risen from clay pools, an earthen pottery.

No colour, erase difference. Frozen white ghosts on the edge of time, a sea of pale mud, a genesis.

You are Adam and Eve, the beginning of all beginnings, or the end of all endings. Face each other, relinquish your loneliness.

Your skin hardened like living statues in a dissolving Garden of Eden, the smeared powdered rock, breathing clay, imprisoned in your own beauty.

Or Butoh dancers, the anguish of the bomb that whitens into ash,
pain rising as dying reeds sway in the blackened river,
encase yourselves with white wet dust,
obliterate yourselves

In it, roll in it, emotion, explosive,
hidden in those primal masks,
naked in your ghostly forms,
raw spirits rising.

Pass beyond the eye
of my camera

To the dark side of the moon.

Sink into your bodies,
into each other.




(background music, a tiny section of 'Bodydrama at The Nave,' by ARTSomerville)

Statues in Profile (photograph will open in a new tab)

photo by Marko Kulik


In response to a Big Tent poetry prompt: Write a poem about a portrait photograph that you did not take yourself: "The strategy this week is that you will imagine the photographer and write about the subject as if from the point of view of the photographer."

As a photographer, I am a director of the shot as I describe the poetry of the scene to the actors so that they can become what I am looking for.

See here for the prompt and links to the other poems.