direct link: White Petal (it's unlisted, so won't show at my public YouTube site)

On mornings when my adult children aren't around, I have begun to try to dance. It's a small space; there are kilim carpets and furniture. I have a 24min tape which is short enough to convince me to go ahead, and which you can hear a little of here. I've videoed a few of these exercise sessions to see what sort of moves I make, never having seen myself dance before beginning to make video dance poems recently. I am trying to choreograph two long pieces for tracks composers and musicians have sent me to work with.

This cut was 'live,' as is, though I did layer it with filters. And then I went out late afternoon to video white flowers in the neighbourhood for it. I have layered a few of those beauties in - not sure if this works the way I have done it, or not. I added a touch of flicker to the white rose at the beginning and think maybe I should carry it through to the hibiscus-like one at the end. If I wanted to make a proper video out of this piece, I would need to re-do it I think - because with the flowers added, the table and chest in the corner are visually distracting. In my morning practice, I put on the music and begin moving (ok, not with the outfit, but that's to see if it works for a future video), and I do not, repeat, do not move furniture!

Danced, videoed, edited by Brenda Clews; background music by Gabrielle Roth and the Mirrors, from an old favourite, Initiation.

As usual, some stills (click for larger) (I always think my work looks better in stills from than in the video:) (posted these in a previous post too, impatient with waiting for the videos to upload:):

A crackling dark: sleek streamers of light, flashing strobe-lit exploding jellyfish, flying thunderbolts, fountains of neon flowers.

Lots of people are joining, about to toss pebbles of poetry --- haiku-like moments of noticing, meditating, writing --- into the river. You should too:

Why you should join the river: Because having a notebook, or a blog, and a vow to write one small stone in it each day can help you keep a sense of wonder about the world. Deciding to take part in the July challenge, to notice something each day and write about it, sets in motion that willingness to reach out - that willingness to really look and listen to the world - and to stand in awe.

On the black river,
a pair of great-crested grebe nod
towards the ceremonies of spring.

Kate Noakes

Kaspalita Thompson and Fiona Robyn, beautiful, newly-wedded couple, are the inspirations behind River of Stones.

Watching this, while of course I already knew, but the summer heat, the late hour, half in the dreamtime, I understood at a deeper level. While a pessimistic part of me does not believe that we can change the path of destiny that we are creating for ourselves as the world-force we are, as a species, the speakers in this video offer hope at the end. Already the facts and issues raised in this video has brought into focus a deep anxiety, a life-threatening worry, something indefinable, troubling and thus Call of Life is a life-changing video for me. I urge you to watch it.

And, though we are not world leaders, nor run vast multi-nationals, we are the grassroots. Dance, drum, meditate daily on mass extinction...on unimaginable numbers of species dying out, life force, soul fleeing an uninhabitable world...

And march when there are marches, and sign petitions, and write letters, emails, and post in all the places you can.

_
(click photos for larger size)

Dale's Mask slightly paraphrased, a change of pronoun

After the rain, roses everywhere, their thorn-bitten thick lips, petals falling like tricks, lipstick red pistils around their bushes.

(a wee note to myself, if you ever want to see them, just email me for the key)

In a book review, Ali Alizadeh reviews Maria Takolander and Claire Potter | Cordite Poetry Review, I found this paragraph:

Badiou’s strategy for a philosophical investigation of the arts – and of avant-garde poetry in particular – relies on a belief that art is one of the key conditions for the emergence of universal truths. Accordingly, a poetry capable of hosting such an exigent possibility must negate both the mimetic impulse (to represent/express emotions, images, experiences, etc.) as well as the lyrical demands of conventional prosody such as form and sound, the unity and cohesion of an authorial voice, poetic subject matter, etc. As Elie During has recently written in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts (Acumen, 2010), “Badiou’s underlying poetics is at once anti-mimetic and anti-lyrical. Hermeneutics and aesthetics are thereby rejected in the same stroke.”

It's been awhile since I read any breathtaking poetry theory, so this hit a good spot. I'm in the middle of Deleuze and Guattari's, Thousand Plateaus, a text that surely by anyone's standards becomes poetry at times, and is full of breathtaking poetry theory (though incidentally, or by inference, or by who it inspires), at least it keeps sending my imagination into its outer limits, even on second and third reads, which may take me into the Fall at the rate I'm going, but Badiou is on the list for next.

Cryptic messages to self. Do you do this? It's so easy with a cell phone to send memos back to yourself for later. I sent this message to myself by iPhone at the end of January, so it must mean something. But what? Clearly I was using the app, Dragon Speaking, which sometimes is a bit strange, and didn't correct the writing. Was I meditating? Did I just wake up from a dream?

Who knows. Seems to be instructions of some kind for recording a speaking, perhaps...


Now I know was thinking over in between the molecules recess voice and then become waves and then let it pass through and then let themselves to be become part of the speaking a care in the sound of the passes through the M waves like wave as you like service that glass that means of angels

direct link: Untitled(2) by Eduardo Cuadrado

Eduardo, I am moved beyond comprehension by your Untitled (2). Your sculptures? Realist, the realism of poverty. Yes, I know this world. A beaten world; people who are usually ignored in the busy city. The shadows. The shadows who you have given solid form to in metal and other materials appear everywhere, as sculptures. Magnified. They are worthy of focus. They have their stories. People stop and look for a moment. It is strange. They are the poor, lost, downtrodden, forgotten; it is as if they call to their gods in the moments of silent suffering you have represented. They ask the existential questions. Why? Why me? How did this happen? How do I rise from this place of despair? I am in tears. I want to protect all of these beautiful people from the harsh life they have been cast into by circumstance, drug abuse, violence, or a soft incessant falling away of belief in the status quo until there is only raw existence left.

This is a great video. You disabled comments, so I started writing a response here...

Besides the stark, troubling opening shot, a video of an installation on the street with a doorway, the figures are all male. They wear suits or trench coats: perhaps they are white collar workers who have fallen through the cracks in culture. Some of them are installed where they might have worked before getting laid off or fired for whatever reason; or perhaps it was bankruptcy. The men in Cuadrado's film, his sculptures, have intellects, you can see that. They are conscious of their predicament. They are worn down by life. But they have not blown their minds out with drugs or alcohol; they are fully aware of where they are. In their faces of despair, desperation, futility, humiliation, sorry we see a deep grief.

That grief burns in my soul; whether it does in all viewers, all of those who witness these works, I don't know.

Two Druids on Salisbury Plain at Stonehenge at Summer Solstice. I love this photo! They are wild; their outfits quite something.


A silly photo from yesterday's re-take of dance footage in High Park - taking a water break. My daughter, unseen, sits in a Director's Chair, reading.