Out walking my dog early yesterday evening and rounded a corner by a park. Blinding light imprinted my retinal nerve. Hurried home to get my video camera. A huge moon tangled in autumn leaves.

The moon over Toronto. These are untouched images straight from the camera's eye.


Click on any image below, and a black lightbox will open for optimal viewing with all the images like moon stamps along the bottom.

direct link: outside my black hole by Steven McCabe

outside my black hole (2011) is a visual poetry film juxtaposing urban traffic, ink drawings, and dance. It features the poetry and drawings of Steven McCabe, who is a Canadian visual artist, poet, filmmaker and arts educator.

Steven works with a team to produce his superb film poems. However he manages this collaboration financially, hopefully with grants and backers, the results are nothing short of magnificent. Steven McCabe's film poems are among the best works in this genre being produced in Canada today.

If you would like to explore the film poetry of this multidisciplinary, multi-media Canadian artist and poet and director, check out his channel at YouTube; all his films are also listed at his website.

I would urge you to watch outside my black hole, the filmography is stunning, and then to play it again, but close your eyes and listen.

Steven McCabe is a poet at the height of his powers. This poem interweaves a lifetime of reflection, writing, feeling, and, listening to it, I think, it can't get any richer than this. Or more simple.

It is as if a mythopoeic poet has introduced the simplicity of Zen meditation into his oeuvre. The cascade of images that collide and separate, echo and reverberate, from prehistory through to the fast-paced, urban computer-literate world of hyper-speeds, terrorisms, and space travel is read without drama in an even voice paced to the accompanying visual images and is as mesmerizing as it is breath-taking.

In the film, the drive through the city at night where the lights take on the quality of dream images of inner light opens with translucent circles that feel like we are entering a tunnel. The mysterious dancer in red echoes the kinetic qualities of the poem's images. She is often partially presented, for instance she is dancing with her arms, or as the vivid red petals of a dancer who we don't see all of.

The most stunning aspect visually for me is the way Steven's drawings are presented. If you cut out an image in Photoshop and save it on a transparent background as a .psd file, you can layer that image into Final Cut Pro. Perhaps this was the technique used here.

The drawings appear and disappear like icons in a hallucinated reality, as if they have come directly out of the symbolic unconscious. They are presented exactly as they are, only cut from their pages, and collaged into the film. They appear as tribal totems, inscribed with hermeneutic symbols, the dense black India ink lines layered sometimes into cave-like forms where figures appear.

I've seen some of these images at sites where Steven has posted them and have been awed by their resonances with ancient Greek myth, Indigenous Native American myth and spirituality, the archetypes of Jung's depth psychology, Surrealism, and their impenetrable raw emotive power. The scenes they depict are ones of rupture, hope, connection. Despair, yes, but it transforms into the living moment of now.

Nothing remains as it is in McCabe's work, but is always transforming, as he uncovers layers, exploring the self as an archeology of personal and collective memories.

In outside my black hole, we find a central metaphor of seeing, in our rushed modern lives, caught in a black hole that sucks the promise of our ancestry into its high speed vortex also becomes the black pupil of our eyes, yours and mine, that crucial tunnel that enables us to see the world, and where the world enters us.

Our pupils, black holes, are enlarged at night, to let in more light, and we see this echoed in the nighttime shots, the glazes of hypnotic lights just on the edge of blur. We are immersed in a "poetry noir," as he writes in his notes, and see with our night vision.

And yet, as he quotes Eliot's The Hollow Men,

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars

In an email, Steven wrote, that, besides his Artist's Statement for the show at Propeller (reproduced below), "the video of course also deals with a rather grim assessment of where we are at in this time of history as a species."


outside my black hole was screened at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts (Toronto) in Oct/Nov 2011 as the installation component of Steven McCabe's exhibition A Cathartic Document showing 66 new ink drawings created during 2010-2011.

Video editing & technical support @ A Cathartic Document by Konrad Skręta
Poetry/drawings/narration Steven McCabe
Dance Paula Skimin
Music composed and performed by William Beauvais & Barry Prophet
Director of Photography Eric Gerard
Editing Konrad Skręta
© 2011 Steven McCabe



from Propeller's website:

Steven McCabe

A Cathartic Document

(image from my videopoem, the dancer's backskin)

This week we grapple with the boundaries of what a film or video poem is. I almost called these articles, Videopoetries. SHED is a videopoetry. It is an art film about light and drawing through time in a shed that is as high as it is long.

Christina McPhee's drawings were filmed over two years and edited as a video montage of screens with varying opacities and speeds. The drawings are like inscriptions. They remind me of free-form pictograms, dream writing, glyphs of an inner symbolism. They are an occult calligraphy, a concrete poem-in-motion, scrawling into being under the artist's brush. The sound in the film is the artist's brush creating the drawings. She writes:

I make very large scale drawings using white rolls of watercolor and drawing papers. The drawings are usually created in a horizontal orientation working from right to left, like writing without backtracking or extensive editing. When not executed horizontally, the drawings are also created in a vertical orientation and worked from top to bottom like a scroll. The markings are calligraphic and topologic and do not represent content. They consider intensities and nodes. I consider depth of field from point to point moving from the implications of the last move into a new territory. Each drawing gesture generates the next.

This is an automatic writing. A poetry. I consider SHED a genre-crossing piece that brings together a poetry of drawing and video editing. It is a multiplicity, a place of vectors. The nodes and intensities are democratic, without hierarchy; they are nomads drawn into being by the brush of India and acrylic ink and red paint encrusted on the paper by the artist.

Christina calls her drawings Teorema, after the Pasolini film of the same name which she speaks about in the video below SHED. Of her studio space, which reminded me of a stark meditation cabin, she writes:

A shed is a barracks, a shelter and it is hermeneutic (pertaining to its own secrets). The shed is a place of elemental becoming and the drawings develop the space of the shed just as the shed develops the space of the drawings. Mutually they create a performative condition for video installation as drawing. The accumulation of layered montage in multiple takes gives rise to a series of videos.... the video creates drawing as architectural event.

direct link: Christina McPhee's, SHED / cinema clip / 2011

At her website, we find further clarification:

During two year’s time, SHED CUBED traces the heliotropic movement of drawings across diurnal passages of light and darkness in an austere interior of concrete floors and white walls. SHED CUBED is ‘shedding’ drawings. The drawings accumulate, re-materialize, and melt away in the space of the shed….

SHED CUBED reflects on the materiality of video as a drawing medium and architectural body.

SHED regards the effect of transverse light, as the sunlight moves through the space from early morning onwards… The video footage captures the slow changes of the light and the rapid changes of the drawing. In post production, the video format becomes a long strip, rather than the typical rectangle– a sequencing and serial effect. The footage is compressed up to a limit of 900 percent. The shed is hermeneutic (pertaining to its own secrets) but the transverse light inside the shed explodes the intimacy of such a secret space, brings it into the light. Effectively the light exposes the drawings as a writing process that iterates line after line in accumulations, refrains, recollections and recursions. Following the drawings, the video montage sheds time in layers, in a profusion of moments…the installation recapitulates the shed.

You can view the full series of SHED's "drawings as writing process" at her website, where she calls them a teorema of glyphs, nomads, aplophorids, chromogenics, lightjets. They are also reminiscent of marine life (she speaks of shrimp being thrown on the deck of a boat by the sea during a marine ecology project) and insects, of the underpinnings of larger living ecosystems.

I hope you enjoy my choice for this week's featured videopoem, and as you watch SHED, and the articulation of its processes and some of the inspirations and aims that Christina offers at a presentation below, you are inspired.


direct link: Christina McPhee: Shed


-

What I wrote last night, exhausted after a long day, so tired I could barely keep my eyes open, not 2000 words, but I'll catch up today.

Chapter II

Across town, red and yellow fallen leaves were swirling in a whirlpool upwards towards the open palms of a figure in a black woollen cape.

Out of the swirl of leaves a spirit seemed momentarily to emerge, a deva, a nature sprite, only rather than playful, as she might be in spring, she had a sharpness, was fierce, pointed.

The leaves swirled like the nose of a bullet, or a sharp beak.

Then they fell back into the heaps of reds and golden fallen leaves the wind collected from under the trees and flung in banks across the yards and streets.

She smiled, her pale grey hair visible under a tweed flat cap. Her black flat-heeled leather boots as high as the knees, and black leggings under the woolen cape were visible across the street, where he was watching.

“Good!” he shouted. “Another take?”

“No!” she shouted back. “Not now. That... was enough. Sorry!”

“Okay, take a break.” And he turned to a thin young woman whose hands were resting on a large camera on a tripod that was locked on its wheels, and said, “Cut. That’s it for today, Clare. You can go if you like.”

Clare looked at him warily, then abruptly dropped her hands from the camera. She left without saying anything.

“Come back tomorrow, same time,” he called after her. “You’ll be paid for the whole day.”

Standing beside the camera, almost guarding it, he waited for the caped woman who was walking towards him. “Shall we take a look?”

The woman shrugged, murmuring indefinably. He opened the viewfinder, clicked some buttons and the caped woman was seen to be standing before a drift of fallen autumn leaves. They did rise like a whirlpool under her palms. Clare had zoomed in when the leaves formed their sharp point. But they did not appear as a sharp object coming to a head. The director and the actor stood, gaping, at the image in the viewfinder.

Rather, the leaves formed into the face of a woman.

The leaf woman blew with sharp breath on the outstretched palms of the woman standing over her. Then, like a genie returning to her bottle, she shrank back as the leaves fell into a heap joining the leaf encrusted garden.

“I can’t create a character for this,” the actress said, her face framed by her hat and flying hair - a wind had picked up catching the silver grey hair around her shoulders.

“You don’t need to, Madge. It’s all there. No more takes on this one.”

“What’s there, Jeb? I’m sorry if I’m a little spaced out - I experienced something in that shoot that I’ve never felt before.”

“What, Madge? If I may ask?”

“Oh..." she wavered, and then as if finding her voice in a deep canyon, slowly said, "For a moment I felt a presence, a flutist of the Maenades of the leaves approached under my hands, drawn by them. She was like a koi coming to the surface of the pond and looking at me before disappearing back into the depths of her world. I heard a bamboo flute in the wind.”

Jeb was listening carefully, but said in a calm, practical voice, “Let’s see how tomorrow goes, because that sounds really interesting, Madge, and I believe Clare has captured something of that mysterious moment in her filming.”


(a bit of a drawing of mine,
just to add an image)

Doing NaNoWriMo this year again. This will be my 4th novella. I like to write without knowing where it'll go or what will transpire. I am always amazed at the coherence of the final manuscript, though I haven't edited any or sent any out or even shown any of them to anyone else. They just pile up on my hard drive, whole books that I am quite proud of. Each one, a teacher.

The last time I wrote a novella in the month of November, and it was erotic fiction, and I'd be embarrassed to show it to anyone, was in 2008. I like to set a 2000 word a day goal. That 2000 words usually takes about an hour of straight writing. It is hard work, no denying. But wonderful when you find you have a whole manuscript, a story at the end of the month.

Usually I just write. While I have a general theme in mind, and a genre, I don't pre-plan the story, or map it out beforehand. That wouldn't work for me. Each day's writing is, rather, a discovery of the story that is unfolding. The characters form themselves and create their situations. It's a great way to let writing pour through you.

It begins officially tomorrow, on Nov 1st. I've managed it working temp jobs as a single mother - often I wrote through lunch at work because my kids were so demanding at night - so really it's simply a commitment to write. I can't write on my desktop because the 'inner' editor would kick in. I need something small and intimate. The first two novellas were written on a small old laptop, the third on a now defunct netbook, but don't have any of those anymore. So this year it'll be on the iPhone via a wireless keyboard. Cute huh? ::smiles::

Today I wrote about 300 words, and discovered what the story this year is to be about. While I don't think it's a good idea to show something new and nascent and in the process of forming, below is what I wrote. It's going to be a surreal novella this year!





At last she sat still, still like a bullet in a gun ready to fire. She floated high over the tree tops. But only for a moment - as long as it took to blink.

Shadows were watching, in each stalk of grass. Fields of watchers. The grass was rising, murmuring, rebelling. Then the grass flew. Tufts of green following her over the hill tops.

No, that didn't happen. She was on the ground. The blades photographed her image in the photosynthesis of each plant cell and thus followed her hologram through the sky.

Each blade screamed in green bleeding joy, blowing in the wind, rootless, free.

Then it came to an end. The grass fell on her head. When her mother came to get her, she was covered in grass. Her mother screeched the way some mothers do, and shook her daughter and brushed the grass off roughly with her hand, but some of it still stuck. She smelt like a freshly mowed lawn. Scuffs of green razor cuts covered her clothes and skin like a painter had daubed her with virescent green. She was a holy plant child of the holy green earth.

How do you imagine a consciousness so wholly natural that there is scant distinction between the landscape and the mind? The outside was in her. The sky that is blue with its dark clouds. The soaring dipping diving birds. A fossil alive. A woman from pre-history who was the future. A surreal madwoman.

The dreamscape is real. She was untameable. Wild in her abandon to the forces. She danced with trees and sang with brooks. I'm not saying it was bucolic, or a pastorally nostalgic vision. Not utopia. Rather, a reality.

This is a story of the greening fires, the ones you see in people's eyes when they are elsewhere.

Let's say it is surreal, so it's going to be a crazy write where logic is twisted, braided, looped and denied. Abandon yourselves, dear reader, to the mad sensibilities of a storyteller's dreams.

Midnight Sun: Wind Over Grass, 28" x 22", 71cm x 56cm, oil on canvas, 2011.

When the river runs in bands, water ribbons her arm. Or she dances on rocks across. Those who support uphold everything in the underpainting. What is there to say of wheat fields or grass curling flames? Under the midnight sun strange dreams dance with intent. 

A painting depicting contact dance - which is... out of the dance studio, for sure, and into the dreamtime! And a solar eclipse, which reminds me of the black light, the midnight sun of the mystics.

Finally I have finished this painting! It's a strange little painting, but I quite like it now.

Here is a slideshow of the studies and previous versions of the painting:



Or a direct link:

Midnight Sun: Wind Over Grass

Coins spread over the steel counter as she moved nickels and dimes with her fingers towards the cup of tea. Counting out $1.75, the woman wearing the white net over her hair slid the coins with the swoop of one hand into the other held below the counter. The tea was watery and too hot.

As the train's steel wheels spun along the electric track, she sipped, and thought how easy it is to slip away, become obscure, become a negative image of oneself, join anti-matter and disappear. She pulled her hat low over her eyes.

An old woman huddled in a seat, eyes closed, a form, a dark coat, some white hair, the veins rising on the skin on her hands like pale blue rivers, an absent person, someone no-one notices.


The world is an ever-deepening place. I marvel at the richness of my life, my inner life. Everything is enfolded in everything else and grafts and buds unfurl constantly. Sometimes I find the bleak corners, the impenetrable sadnesses, and they're hard, but it doesn't last. The sun comes in through the lattice work of leaves and pulls me to another screen of my life where I see different scenes playing. Then other connections happen and other ways of approaching the moments that compose my life and I find new reflections. The enfolding continues, enriching more each day. Nothing passes, everything remains, adding to the whole art piece that my life is.


Today, always today. It's never any other day but today. All the days might become this day, but this day is not all the other days. It's unique. Singular.

I should get to the news because it's a historical day. Every day is historical. Every day has its news, is noteworthy. We can look up the events of each day if we keep journals or blogs, and if we search news sites.

Mostly, the sun is shining and it is a cool, crisp Autumn day, a day before the leaves have crumpled on the trees and fallen, a day when the leaves are considering turning because temperatures were near frost last night. How can leaves turn? They die in bright reds and oranges, in yellow flames. They dance out of life, falling like crumpled browning jewels as the cold encroaches.


It wasn't a very long journey, but it took a long time. The train lurched to the rhythm of its metal wheels, steadily, then screeching when braking into a station.

Her mint green and opaque grey cart's wheel got caught in the space between the car and the platform and there was a moment of panic as she struggled to free it. But it came loose just before the doors closed.

The shaved bald man sat facing her, black pants, grey jacket, staring, and she could see his dark pupils, black, impenetrable. The round younger man in the beige corduroy jacket with the brown mustache stared and yet she didn't feel seen. Neither had risen to help loosen her cart. Nor had the Chinese woman, who bleakly stared with disinterest, a glacial disinterest.

She held onto the green cart stuffed with a pimento of bananas, bread, tofu, vegetables, pastrami, butter and a large bag of dry dog food. She wedged her foot into it so it wouldn't slide down the car as the train accelerated.

She was exhausted, having shopped late in the evening after a long day. She closed her eyes against the three people who were staring dully at her. She closed her eyes, listening to the beating whir of the metal wheels striking the electrical charge, the screech of brakes as it reached stations and slowed and stopped and opened doors and whistled and closed doors and then the acceleration through the underground tunnels of the city.


The way the cotton undershirt, nearly ice blue it was so white, where the seam is serged, how it creeps around the shoulder in a thin crescent moon, that lit up as he walked towards her in the dark. Frame by frame, slide the film so it blurs its motion with cross currents. Black grass waving under her sandaled feet. The air crisp yet carrying bruised plum muscles of warmth. A midnight roar of voices from a nearby party falling into the shadows of dark trees, rebounding, then rising in moth encircled streetlights. She smiled enigmatically, and slowly shifted sideways, then away.


On the ceiling, lying against the baubbled white plaster, she noticed a spot of light. It was blueish white. Delicate shadows on the surface of the ceiling which had taken on the qualities of snow also had a blueish tinge. She imagined painting the white ceiling, filling it with the blues and the yellows, purples and dusty greys that revealed themselves before her eyes. White is never white, she thought.

The white is an afterthought, the highlight that casts its presence over the whole.

Our white thoughts are likely daubed attempts to paint our lives in pristine colours too.

As evening moved into the ceiling planes of taupe and grey spread, the distinct colours of earlier falling into the shadows, deepening them.

direct link: Shadow Cave.  [The video is subtitled, so you can read along if you like, or have Google automatically translate the text into one of 25 languages. The option appears after you press play. If the cc in the play bar is red, the subtitle track is on; if black, it's not. Mouse click to toggle. Click on this image to see the steps to opening the subtitle/caption file:


How to discover what your splits are. What you've repressed in yourself. The shadow isn't necessarily 'Dorian Gray' -but can contain positive aspects that you've buried. In this video, the woman goes on a trance journey into the cave of her imagination where she discovers surprising selves. A Paleolithic artist, a woman-child, an angry reflection. The video is about integrating the shadow into the self during a shamanic dance.

Some comments on Shadow Cave:

"...your dancing is simply incredible. Poetic, visceral, physical and spiritual. I love it. Simply, I love it for the energy you are and the feelings it evokes in me. Makes me want to go out and dance to the moon." Kathryn Esplin

"After my first view "shape changing" seemed to stick in my mind. That is a pretty deep level of connecting/shifting." He calls it an "expressionistic masterpiece." william d.

"An interesting combo of creativity - the dance and choreography, the words and rhythms, the story and the feelings of motion rounding up the darkness becoming light ... in self-realisation." Bernard C.

"I love this video in more ways than I can say...

I love the leafy screen overlay-- that places the story squarely in the wilderness. I love the flashes of color that appear at key moments. I think the visual climax is probably when the dark shadow self emerges and sometimes follow the movements of the self but sometimes does the opposite. Excellent!

Lastly, I love that you've challenged the idea of Plato's cave, where one can see only external shadows. Internal shadows are much more important, and I'd like to think that Jung would also have seen his internal shadows within the cave." Ann Marcaida

"OMG, this is so beautiful, and I know someone in deep crisis right now...  who would benefit from viewing/listening to this... except [their] grasp of English isn't good. You know, you brought tears to my eyes with this one... It's so light, even with a light/sly sense of humor instilled here and there in the most appropriate of ways, yet I don't think I've experienced anything so deep and profoundly essential and so healing from you yet. It's as though you almost let all veils down, briefly and safely, and then bring it all together. Brings a whole new meaning to "mother and child reunion." And there's so much more. Love the symbolism of the snake... and the fat man. This is so well done, a real masterpiece, of describing a journey of integration." Bent Lorentzen

[I did mention that the subtitles can be translated by Google into other languages, maybe not perfect, but enough to get the gist.]

Also, I have been deeply moved by responses to this video by young women struggling with eating disorders, cutting, and other self-harming strategies to maintain an 'acceptable social self', or I would say, sanity in an insane world. And a young man dealing with alcohol addiction said it was kinda kooky but he understood it and understood that you can accept and live with all the parts of yourself.

direct link: Ground

Written & Narrated: Alastair Cook
Directed & Edited: Ginnetta Correli
Soundtrack: Pierrepoint’s Epitaph by Dirk Drieson

Ground has an impenetrable quality. The film imagery, poem and reading approach each other without quite meeting. In that circle of visual and verbal imagery and the emotion of the voice of the reader, we witness a flame dancing without knowing who lit it, who blows on it, or why it goes out, if it does.

Something profound happens. But what? Is the poem notes on death and what resurrects us through life? Or the dream of a life?

At the end, the man... but you must watch to see this.

I am reminded of Médem's Lucía y el sexo, where the island rests on a cacophony of unmappable caves that constitute its base and that are not attached to the seabed, but float, and where one of the characters disappears forever into.

As in dream, the images in Ground are vivid, strong, and reveal something important if elusive. The images of the poem and the film are are strewn in a landscape of inner symbolism. A motorcycle. An empty road. The shadow of a figure, perhaps the filmmaker filming the scene. A small white snake lying in the road. A man holding onto the lip of rock in a cave hole. A gloved hand picking up the poisonous snake and placing it carefully on the shoulder of the road. An abandoned hut where the outside seems inside, empty save for the crumpled paper of the poet, a bed of rocks and light.

This is a surreal filmpoem; it has a European art film feel to it. Like when watching an Almodóvar, forget logic, for a rational approach to understanding won't reveal anything. As you seek to embrace the meaning of the film, you find mindfulness here like a Zen koan.

You can't quite put it together. Rather, feel the deep angst the film produces. That's where the film is unfolding in your consciousness as a message, a predicament, a riddler of the paradoxes of life.

Or the immanence of death.

Ground is hauntingly beautiful, in a disturbing way. In the embracing mindfulness, a poetry of poison, death, loss, and beauty, all of which is natural, found in the natural world, amidst a surreality. We feel cross-currents, disambiguations, and yet the over-arching journey metaphor of Cook's minimalist poetry, and the bond of love he speaks of, yes, living is like this. Simply a superb film.

Do watch. The two minutes and 35 seconds will become a dream you are having.

_

Ginnetta Correli's blog: beatie's journal.

The poem is composed of haiku written by Alastair; his blog, written in my hand is well worth exploring too.