Some months ago I created a Google Sites site, Poetry Recordings of Brenda Clews, to host .mp3s of recent poetry recordings. The poems are all available to read as well -that's important.

The hosting site was so that I could post the recordings here, at Rubies in Crystal, as I compose them, and when I have enough I will create an album at Jamendo. While I used to upload recordings-in-progress to SoundClick or SoundCloud, I tired of the limitations of those music sites, and created a website for this purpose instead.

Today I spent some hours creating a usable interface for these recordings of recent poetry at my hosting site. The site is unlisted, invisible to search engines, but is public- and findable, if you have the link.

Below is a screen shot of the site. Click to go to the site.

Thank you, Dave Bonta, for featuring The Wall at Moving Poems on September 7th!

Yes, I embedded his webpage in my blog post. And, not only is the videopoem playable here, but I just left a thank you note for him via this embedded page and it appeared over there simultaneously. Personally, I think it's very cool.

(If you have an email subscription or are on an RSS feed like Google Reader or whatever, you'll have to click in to the post to see this beauty.)

direct link: Joani Paige at Free Times Cafe

Joani Paige, singing "So Fine," with Willie Anicic on harmonica near the end, and Pat Kelly on percussion (not in camera range) at Free Times Cafe on September 16, 2011.

Brenda Clews: camera and video editing. Yes, I took my camera and then spent the greater part of the weekend video editing.

You'll see that around 3:39min, the mask is apparent. The musician leans down out of it and into the light. If you didn't recognize the masking all the way through, you would at that point. It is obvious. I left it in to show the artifice in the art.

Here is a photograph showing my Final Cut filters, and you can see I manually keyed in the lights, their opacities, which took forever. To make sure that you see Joani throughout, I created another layer of her track and masked it. In the photograph, you can see there is yet another track where Willie is also masked.

A theme of masks seems to be running through my work, and this type of masking is yet another dimension to it.

A mask that lets you see the person who is being masked.


click on image for larger size
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Colors courtesy of Free Footage on Vimeo, with thanks.

Look, perhaps I am outrageous, but at my age, seriously. I can do anything. Besides, I'm masked. And, anyway, my daughter was chaperoning me.

From a video shoot in High Park in June.

All this will be obscured in a long videopoem of three nature poems that is 22 minuters long that I may finish one day.



An early version of the central poem in Tangled Garden.

The little prancing figure in the background is what I would like to re-do, and I have footage, just so much work. And either re-recording the soundtrack or cleaning it up, so much work. It's been sitting on my hard drive for months. I'm trying to get back to it by giving myself just one small task to do. Last night I cleaned up the poetry track you hear here, which took hours, but should I record it again, or, if you know me, another dozen times before I pick one reading. The emotion in each of the readings of the poems in the full videopoem is where I'd like them to be - do I go with imperfect because it has the passion? Since I'm stalled, that's my inclination at the moment.


direct link: In the Hands of the Garden Gods (a poem I wrote at 27).

The final poem in of the three is one I posted here when I wrote it in 2006: Slipstream, oh the Tangled Garden, and I'm using the recording I made back then, too.

Anyway, the only way to get a major piece of creative work done, I find, is to take it in 'baby steps.' Rather than thinking a crazy week of no sleep or cooked meals, which no-one wants obviously and hasn't motivated me, I am thinking, 'clean up the poetry soundtrack,' 'fix the filters on the whole footage that you've mapped out.' 'Then start picking what footage to use in the background,' and where (some sections don't need it). Yadda, yadda.

When I finish it I am going to have to subtitle it too, groan, more work. The poems are so dense, the imagery quite rich, and sometimes I let Catherine Corelli's amazing singing drown my voice, that the viewer having access to the text is almost crucial.

I am such a perfectionist - probably you are too. Everything is the absolute best I can make it, given my limitations in training and equipment. That's how it is.
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Music, 'First Night (Lilith's Seduction)' from Catherine Corelli's album, 'Seraphic Tears': http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/79547

Delighted Joe Halder included a poem of mine, Drumbeat, in his show, 'The Falling Room,' which aired on CFBU 103.7FM on June 24, 2011. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole hour long show, an interesting blend of musicians, each quite amazing in their own right. The show is available for download here:

http://www.esnips.com/web/The FallingRoom

The Mysterious Poufs (independent), Brenda Clews (independent Canadian Acoustic Artist/Poet), Rain Tree Crow (former members of 1980’s group Japan), Kraftwerk (everyone knows Kraftwerk), Hypnotech 3 (Canadian Soundscape/Ambient group) and Alvin Lucier (acoustic artist).

direct link to videopoem: Mask. Best to watch fullscreen if you can.

"...the mask was exactly what she was searching for, exactly 
what she needed: a face threaded over her face, a light 
threaded over her light. 

You speak, and the mask begins to speak, 
and the listening takes fire."

Dale Favier: Mask (link to his original blog post).

 Slipping away, between
 restraints.

Voices, performance, video, Brenda Clews.
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Dale just had a book of poetry published, 'Opening the World, and while the lines I've quoted aren't from his book, the video is a celebration of Dale's poetry, with its brilliances and depths.


Foraging around my remaining hard drives, I came across a 17 second clip from a dance practice a few months ago that I still find intriguing. In it, I wrap my face in fabric, making a mask.

Starting with that clip, I copied, layered, lengthened - basically played. Then I added a minibit of the thunderstorm you saw in The Wall, looping some footage of lightning flashing through a tree. Last night, on my iPhone, I recorded the poem over and over. Today I imported the tracks into GarageBand and decided the use them all -as a background, a sort of chorus, a room full of people where you might feel the need to wear a mask. But the voices are reciting Dale's poem and my little ending. Then I picked one of those voices to dominate the reading. I hope it works to your ear. At about a minute, it's possibly my shortest videopoem. I enjoyed moving between colour and black and white and layering the figure. All in all, while making this videopoem took far longer than I anticipated, I'm happy with it. And sure do hope Dale likes it, too.
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Update, Sept 12th. Dale posted Mask at his blog, and wrote that I made this mask:

...riffing on a blog post of mine. Amazing.

It's one of the deepest pleasures, having someone take your work and make something new with it. Art to me is nothing more nor less than conversation. I have no interest in making objects, per se: I only want to talk to people: to them and through them and with them and by them.

Elves began it, of course, waking trees up and teaching them to speak and learn their tree-talk. They always wished to talk to everything, the old Elves did."

I'll include my comment here, too:

We all inspire each other. I love the word, resonate, and that's what it is. Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, says the poetic image enters us, our consciousness, our psyches, and resonates in all the depths, and I've always felt that was it, that's what happens. A pebble dropped in a deep well. A tuning fork reverberating. That's how your images in that piece of writing were for me.

The body under your healing fingers, or the feline curl of your cat, or your pulse against her pulse just under her ear, or Ahab, or the slant of light. And then the mask, a face threaded with light, that reverberated deeply. In the videopoem the mask of echoes, reflections, multiples, resonated into Burkas, and bandages, and even how shy I am in rooms of people and how I want to cover myself. Then how our forms themselves are moments, chrysalises, weavings of electricity and earth as the elements move through us, masks for our spirits. The tree that I open and close with and have underneath the room throughout the video, shudders with lightning.

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While I'm copying in comments from other sites here, it's easier for me to collect them this way, I'll add another exchange from Facebook (before it disappears in the endless streaming wall):





It reminded me of everything you've mentioned, and women who wear the 'full veil,' are buried alive in fabric, and oh, head wounds, surgeries, so many things. Something ominous in that head-wrapping, like taking on the strange incantations of an Ancient Egyptian mummy.

But also the mundane - our own daily masks. In a room full of people, the way I made the layered sound track, I disappear into a mask of sorts, too. The clip reminded me of situations in which my shyness was painful.


Then, to wrap this with another layer of potential meaning, Dale's poetry brings the transcendance into the moving-image, into the video, and I sought to have that paradox evident. An entrapment that is a release. The light is luminescent, like the beautiful lines of poetry.

The woman who hid herself, became herself. The woman who gave up her ego, found release. Reminds me a little of a great book I have been really influenced by, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was became herself.

And sometimes our masks are Masks of God or the Divine. Dale's lines point in that direction for me.

So, between the visual imagery as it moves through its minute of time, I had hoped many divergent and paradoxical aspects of the mask, to paraphrase Dale's lines, like 'threaded light over her face' would emerge in the viewer's imagination.



Perhaps this videopoem has been mulling in my subconscious,
I made this photopoem out of some stills from that footage a few months ago.

Just a couple more comments over at Facebook that I wanted to keep but can't transfer to a comment here without losing the urls, of having the laborious task of linking them again:

• Brenda Clews Facebook will not make YouTube videos a live link. Puts hands on hips, shakes finger at The Book of Faces.
  

  September 11 at 10:38pm · Like
• 
  

  Brenda Clews Oh, but The Book of Faces *will* make it a live link in a comment! Go figure.
  http://youtu.be/dq85uul9V4Q
  

  
  

  Mask

  www.youtube.com
  

  ‎"...the mask was exactly what she was searching for, exactly what she needed: a...See More

  
  
  

  September 11 at 10:40pm · Like · 
• 
  

  Stirling Davenport I really like the voices in this one so much. Makes a very interesting melange of words.
  

  September 11 at 11:38pm · Like ·  1 person
• 
  

  Brenda Clews You know, Stirling, I do these videos off in my own little corner and have no idea if anything resonates.... so I am especially appreciative of your sensitive response to the track of voices, one voice reading the same lines over and over, all put together so it became a party of voices, which I really did work on for far too long. :) Thank you, thank you. ♥
  

  September 11 at 11:55pm · Like ·  1 person
• 
  

  Pierre-Marie Cœdes Very surrealistic Brenda, impressive and awesome to look at and listen to. So much excitement in your creations. Thank you for sharing ♥♥♥
  

  September 12 at 9:02am · Like
• 
  

  Brenda Clews Pierre-Marie, what a sweet comment, thank you! ♥♥ I enjoy layering my videopoems with images that are echoes and reflections and multiples. :) Life is like this, in the unity we are, when I think of you, for instance, I have a welatschuung of your music, comments, photos of the incredible home you grew up in, photos (at least as a presence) on Barbara's trips to France, a nexus of different types of images, sonic or visual or thoughtful. This is my approach in videopoems with whatever images I'm working with. I'm a little uncomfortable using myself as subject matter, but, hey, I don't charge modelling fees, so I'm free to myself! ::laughing:: But it's most fun when it's finished! So glad you came and saw my bit of weekend madness!!!!!!

This is the meditation I am doing daily, the Sodarshan Chakra Kriya, and which I have begun doing a yoga set in preparation for. I find it an extremely challenging meditation, and only do it for 11 minutes. I also made a mala out of rose quartz beads for counting the mantra, so that helps (photos later).

Being obverse to guru worship, and despite being a Certified Kundalini Yoga Instructor, I've never watched a video of Yogi Bhajan before! So I found this particularly entertaining, and the way he describes the mantra far surpasses any other writings I've seen on it. I am so glad I watched!

Towards the end, though, the video goes blank, although the sound continues.




Here are the full instructions for this meditation:

Sit in an Easy Pose, with a light jalandhar bandh. Eyes: The eyes are fixed at the tip of the nose. (This meditation is not to be done with the eyes closed). Mantra: WHA-HAY GUROO.

Mudra & Breath:

a) Block the right nostril with the right thumb. Inhale slowly and deeply through the left nostril. Suspend the breath. Mentally chant the mantra WHA-HAY GU-ROO 16 times. Pump the Navel Point 3 times with each repetition, once on WHA; once on HAY; and once on GUROO, for a total of 48 unbroken pumps.

b) After the 16 repetitions, unblock the right nostril. Place the right index finger (pinkie finger can also be used) to block off the left nostril, and exhale slowly and deeply through the right nostril.

c) Continue repeating a & b Time: for 11-31 minutes. Master practitioners may extend this practice to 62 minutes, then to 2-1/2 hours a day.

To End: Inhale, hold the breath 5-10 seconds, then exhale. Stretch the arms up and shake every part of your body for 1 minute, so the energy can spread.

Comments: This is one of the greatest meditations you can practice. It has considerable transformational powers. The personal identity is rebuilt, giving the individual a new perspective on the Self. It retrains the mind. According to the tantra shastras, it can purify your past karma and the subconscious impulses that may block you from fulfilling you. It balances all the 27 facets of life and mental projection, and gives you the pranic power of health and healing It establishes inner happiness and a state of flow and ecstasy in life.

This meditation balances the Teacher aspect of the mind. It acts on all the other aspects like a mirror to reveal their true nature and adds corrections. You act as a human being not just a human doing. If the Teacher aspect is too strong, you risk a spiritual ego, which becomes too attached to the ability to detach and to be “above” normal struggles. When the Teacher aspect is too weak, you can misuse your spiritual and teaching position for personal advantage. When balanced, the Teacher aspect is impersonally personal. It starts with absolute awareness and a neutral assessment from that awareness. The Teacher uses intuition to know directly what is real and what is a diversion. You respond from the Neutral Mind beyond the positives and negatives. You are clear about the purpose and the laws of each action. A complete Teacher is not an instructor. The Teacher is the expression of Infinity for the benefit of all. You master non-attachment so that you are simultaneously in all your activities and not of them. Treat the practice with reverence and increase your depth, dimensions, caliber, and happiness. It gives you a new start against all odds. “Of all the 20 types of yoga, including Kundalini Yoga, this is the highest Kriya. This meditation cuts through all darkness. It will give you a new start. It is the simplest kriya, but at the same time the hardest. It cuts through all barriers of the neurotic or psychotic inside-nature. When a person in a very bad state, techniques imposed from the outside will not work. The pressure has to be stimulated from within. The tragedy of life is when the subconscious releases garbage into the conscious mind. This kriya invokes the Kundalini to give you the necessary vitality and intuition to combat the negative effects of the subconscious mind. There is no time, no place, no space, and no condition attached to this mantra. Each garbage point has its own time to clear. If you are going to clean your own garbage, you must estimate and clean it as fast as you can, or as slow as you want. Start practicing slowly— the slower the better. Start with five minutes a day, and gradually build the time to either 31 or 62 minutes. Maximum time is 2-1/2 hours for practice of this meditation.” - YOGI BHAJA

Sodarshan Chakra Kriya p.2 The Teachings of Yogi Bhajan ©2008

http://www.pinklotus.org/KY%20KRI/KRI%20KY%20meditations/SodarshanChakraKriya.pdf

direct link: Painting of Vision Trees

This is the video I subtitled. Press Play, and then click on CC that appears below the video until it goes red. Let the mouse hover over the CC and a menu will appear that gives you access to "Translate Captions." Click on the first one, Africaans, and a drop-down menu will open and you can scroll down to choose another language. Google Translate automatically translates the captions into the language you chose, albiet mechanically, and not always accurately, but for someone who doesn't speak English but would like to know what is being generally said, what a wonderful option to offer. I am totally chuffed. Way to go, Google!

How did I subtitle it? Read on!

It required hours searching via Google, reading instructions and watching a few tutorials on subtitling. This article was most helpful: Adding and Editing captions / subtitles at Google Help Center. My blog post explains, as best I can, what I did, and I am writing it so that if you wish to subtitle your videos, you will have a better idea of how than I did.

My video is 8 minutes long. And, man, did I talk fast -meaning cram a lot in. Last night I subtitled about a minute and a half using a text editor while watching the video on my desktop but wasn't able to copy the time codes directly and found entering each one manually not just onerous but I made too many mistakes. It also took hours. I had to find an easier way.

This video by rewboss was helpful. I used the Third Party APP, CaptionTube, recommended in this instructional video on creating captions.



YouTube offers translation of captions/subtitles, albiet mechanically, in 25 languages, Hindi among them. It is definitely worthwhile to spend some time subtitling your video so that it's more accessible for people around the world. Google is making the world smaller by enabling us to communicate globally. I ♡Google.

Once you have given CaptionTube permission to access your YouTube videos, you can open your video in CaptionTube. Below is a screenshot of what the CaptionTube interface looks like. You play your video, listen, start a Caption at the beginning of each phrase or sentence, type it in, decide how much time it takes, and save the Caption. Then you play it again to make sure it more-or-less fits where the words are, and how long they take to be spoken. It takes some time at first, but you get better at figuring out how much time to give for phrases, clauses or sentences. Too many words fills up the screen and makes it 'too busy.' You want to achieve the best balance you can.

My video was a challenge because I spoke so fast and said so much. Most videos won't be as full of speaking as my painting of my vision trees was. I had a story to tell, and at 8 minutes, it was a bit long. Because I rushed through much of what I had to say, for a 'non-English speaking' viewer, understanding it proved challenging. I was asked a few times in different postings of it if I could offer the text by people whose native language was Urdu, or Punjabi, or Hindi, or French, or Spanish. Some of what I related had been posted in my blog and then included in an unfinished manuscript some years ago, so that was easy to post in the comments at Facebook or other sites on request, but in at least half of Vision Trees I was speaking off the cuff. I had no text. Last night and this morning I generated text from the verbal track by creating subtitles, which make me, honestly, very happy.

I bookmarked the CaptionTube subtitle file I was working on for my Vision Trees video and was able to re-enter the track where I left off. This helped since making subtitles out of densely crammed spoken text requires breaks now and then. Oh, and I needed to sleep for a night, too.


(click on images for larger size)

After you finish subtitling your video with CaptionTube, and you click on Publish, you are offered a few options. I chose to download the file as a subtitle file, an .srt file.


On my desktop, I opened the .srt file in a text editor and saw what you see in the screen capture above. I opened the video in VLC, but you could use any video player, and loaded the subtitle file, and watched the video with the subtitles I had made, making corrections to the subtitle file in the text editor. Sometimes subtitles overlapped because I hadn't given enough time between them, and there were some repetitions, so I corrected that in the text editor. Then I re-saved the file as an .srt file and uploaded that to my video at YouTube.

To add a subtitle file, open your "Videos" in the drop-down menu under your account name. Beside each video you will see a downward arrow; click on that, and a menu opens, and you see 'Captions and Subtitles,' open it, and you are given the option to upload a subtitle file. You can upload more than one subtitle file, if you have different languages. Google will offer these files to viewers of your video. So, for instance, you can upload a subtitle track in English, and one, if you are bilingual or a polyglot, in Spanish, or French, or Urdu, or whatever languages you like. The subtitle/captions option is fantastic, and Google can also offer mechanical translations in 25 languages. How cool is that?

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The music in Painting of Vision Trees is by Pierre-Marie Coedes, 'City night hubbub (instrumental)' from his album, "Lapses of Time." Pierre-Marie's music is a complex, sensitive interweaving of instruments and rhythms, and while eminently listenable, reveals riches on closer listening. Do check out his oeuvre at Jamendo.

If you're interested in the process of the painting, including a little photo of my set-up videoing it, I talk about it here: http://brendaclews.blogspot.com/2011/06/vision-trees.html.

Brenda Clews, poetry, voice, mix; background music, zero-project, 'Forest of the unicorns,' from their album on Jamendo, Fairytale.

My very first 'found' poem ever! However, the lines are all mine. A poem I composed from lines found in three of my tightly written, packed journals from 1980. I may or may not make a video poem, but if I do, having made a recording will help.

La Luna

Razors of lightning press my eyelids.
Your white love, the pearl shell seas.
The sky peels back like a scroll.
You are mine, unsplitted, fleshless.

Cornucopias, hot-bed undersea growths of things
joined to other things in sections, in shell lines.

Mad shadows. My blood is full of alcohol.

Memory is internally roused, without evasion.

I open the door to your shadowed face, dark hair, beard-
those fluid sea-algae, jade-green eyes.
Do they absorb or reflect light?

Light is a tumbling ball.
The moon is a lunatic.
There is a lady on the telegraph pole.

Each man or woman who enters has to leave
their personality behind like tossed clothes.

Pastel lightning crosses the sky.
The moon is a fetish.
A fat, marshmallow moon.
The moon contemplates itself,
a blood moon.

Words are a wash of waves;
waves of a ceaseless alphabet.

My throat is a silent, howling hyena;
the illness of passion.

I've been caught.

Where is the land; where is the vessel?

Lapped wind and frothed cloud;
mutant moon
- a glowing field of electrical fabric -

Vision is dangerous.

This fragile moon letter of white light.

The white imagination that you have to travel
through the prism to get to.

When I'm in love I'm outside of what
I'm inside of the rest of the time.


I follow the moon
am nothing but motion
...............following
streets marked by lights
as round as moons

am nothing
but shadows of light

as the moonlight
careens drunkenly in the sky

shrouds hide me
while the moon dances

a hallucinated ball

of white wind

shorn of darkness
dance naked night
my eyes flutter
in the tops of trees

spirits gather and flee

you have gone

Where did the early night go? I'm still beading. Mantra beads, counters. Though when do I seriously meditate by counting mantra anymore? It's because I bought some lovely pink silk beading thread and am finally fixing a rose quartz necklace that broke on the street last year. Really I'm zoning out after finishing and posting another video poem, I'll call it a poem because it's about an image that carries the weight of the speaking, music and footage. Is it because I am such a private person that these videos knock me out? I wait like a worried mother hen when they're uploading, and then the deafening silence. Ah, video poetry, a fairly new and difficult form for most people. Most people prefer to read their poetry on the page. Poetry is dense and difficult and composed of compressed language and it is hard to follow a poem in a few minutes of a video, but what else are poetry readings? I've explored many ways of presenting a verbal accompaniment to visual footage. This one was a voice memo after a yoga set, still flat on my back, that I had intended to turn into a prose poem. But, hey, it wasn't 'a reading' -which is fraught with difficulties anyway, how to be the words that you speak, what do you dramatize and how, and all those questions. Ok, I'll post the video I'm talking about in this post - it's about "the wall," an image for many things, and likely we all have a "wall" of some sort in our lives. The video is a little dark, though. But I really enjoyed making it, with the storm footage, and the lights, and even found the camera shake, the hand-held quality, worked. Like brushstrokes in a painting, I guess. I sit here, tying knots between each large pink quartz crystal bead and each tiny pink white pearl, knots that will ensure if the necklace breaks, as it will, as they all do eventually, the beads won't fall over the road again. :)

The sound track is a midi file of the text that I generated at http://www.p22.com/musicfont/ and yes, I used copters, and gunshot, and a pad4choir from the music text generator (I did have to copy the sound files from the site one by one and mix them later) and ethereal sunrise, smooth clav, whirly, and nature sounds from GarageBand, plus the original track of thunder and lightning, so it is meant to be a bit, well a bit of a war zone. It works, but it's not for relaxation, obviously!

Back to quietly beading now.... :)

The video, The Wall:




(it looks better big, though, so go for fullscreen)