'Ruminations on Consciousness' (9:41min) as I prepare to write a prose poem to be called Colour of Near Death for a forthcoming videopoem.

I'm so sad! I hope Joe Halder develops another venue for the minimalist and avante guard music he filled The Falling Room with. The Falling Room introduced me to many artists. I found his perceptions often so brilliant, and his taste in music echoed my own. Far out, funky, strange, moving, so many ways of describing it, and then the spoken word/acoustic artists, wow, his show was an example of transgenre music!

I deeply appreciate his support of my poetry and music productions, and wish him the best in all his endeavours.

Here is a show, Female Acoustic Artists, from The Falling Room:



From Joe (on March 25, 2012):

Hello all,

I wish to inform you that The Falling Room has come to an end and will no longer be broadcasting from CFBU 103.7FM.

It is time to say goodbye and to move on to different projects and other ideas.

Unfortunately, with the onset of new projects and other opportunities I no longer have the time to devote to the program.

My intention was to finish the currently 12 programs I have in pre-production and end The Falling Room in June 2012, but sadly I do not have the time to finish those programs and produce them for broadcast.

During its existence The Falling Room broadcast 113 shows and introduced over 140 independent artists to the acoustic art community.

You need to know that your art, has been heard in China, Poland, France, USA, Italy, England, Ireland, Russia, Finland and Australia via the internet download site and the distribution of copies of the show over the last 2 years.

I am extremely grateful to the artists who have supported the show and so readily have allowed me to broadcast their material to the community.

I wish you all the best in your endeavors; you are a very talented group of people.

My special thanks to those artists who demonstrated consistent support for the program over the last 2 years, they are;

Michael Chocholak
Brenda Clews
Mickey Zero
William Schaeffer
Richard Dunlap
Mickey Zero
Kraftim
Cometa (Angelo Secondini)
Dr. Memory (Marlon Kempman)

As to the future? I am not sure. I am sure that my passion for your music and art remains strong to give up on it completely. (another program, in 6 months via the internet titled “The Labyrinth”?) who knows, what I do know is that now, its time for a rest and other things.

Again, much thanks and best wishes to all.
Joe (aka Halder)

Woman of the Sea Far Inland is finished. I painted a beautiful model at a non-instructional drop-in session at TSA on Friday night. Last night I whipped up the energy of the painting with some oil sticks I had bought at Gwartzman's. Looking at it, I think it might be a painting to go with a poetry manuscript I am in the process of compiling for submission.

I'm still working on the second painting below, Woman Seated, Waiting. She does look like a woman caught in thorns, a jagged and perhaps dangerous situation, doesn't she. There's something Pre-Raphaelite about her, and Medieval Christian saint.

Last night I went to TSA (Toronto School of Art) drop-in painting session (it only took a year to get there). Many fine artists. Perhaps these capture an essence. I'm considering going at the painting with oil sticks, and the pencil drawing on the canvas is going to get an ink treatment.

A very simple sketch of a Saluki (smooth variety). Saluki are the oldest domesticated dogs. Saluki-like dogs have been found on Sumerian seals dating back to 7,000-6,000BC; they are in pictures in ancient Egyptian tombs from 2134-1650BC. They are also called Persian Greyhounds, and are an Egyptian desert dog, and often travelled across the Sahara to the Caspian Sea with nomadic tribes. They are extremely thin, sleek, fast, and intelligent. No idea how I'll finish this sketch - design, or paint - but sharing a little scan. No, not my dog, but an extraordinary animal.

Guess what I was watching tonight... actually I watched Tarkovsky's Solaris last night, along with the American re-make with that just-arrested at Sudanese protest, the arresting George Clooney (while a great sight better to look at, sorry George, and Steven Soderbergh, the director of the re-make, Tarkovsky's film remains a small masterpiece). Tonight it was the interviews with those who worked in and on the film with Tarkovsky. Amazing insights, and I couldn't grasp it all and will watch again. I completely fell for Tarkovsky many years ago, when I first saw Nostalighia, which became my favourite film for the next 20 years, and is still among my all-time favourites.

To say something about Solaris? What in death doesn't die...

( a line from my prosepoem, Whaleskin, sorry, it rose, so I said it)

(What is poetry to you...? In this prose poem, I indicated the craft, what wordsmiths poets are, as well as what the essence is to me, but realize that I made poetry sound perhaps rather sweet when there is also grunge, slam, anger, pain. Yet again, as a long-time meditator, I find writing poetry is like the deepest meditation, so the anger and pain are like storms on the ocean, a froth of waves, while the ocean itself is full with steady presence.)



We speak in tongues of poetry, rare spun silk woven into our raw edges.

And echoes, cadence, melody of image, for whom detail, hidden or overt, reveals breadths of vision.

Finesse, complex filigree patterns, considered interlacings of feelings in the verbal clusters of stanzas.

A poem of many voices, strands, cross-currents, opposing winds, and I prefer this to a single slant on, say, Rumi-esque love, or American violence.

Just as the ocean forms each spilling wave wetting our feet while the sand dissolves beneath us, poems should be carefully crafted with total emotional disclosure.

The surfaces, smooth, but buckled.

A self-consciousness of style, a sensitivity, the art of writing fine poetry.

Poetry emerges from our secret words to join the ocean of language through which we communicate. Poems play with grammars. The speaking voice is a tessitura, offered, sung in all its ranges.

Poetry is not only about your feelings; it is about the possibilities of language.

A poet, a jeweller of words, creating a cloisonne of images, a vessel of many colours and opacities like a turning shadow lamp.

If it is not alive, it isn't real.

Not to forget the dissolution of us.

The best poetry is the writing appearing and disappearing at the edge, on the precipices, of the known world.

Sketch of a Sketcher, from my Poetry Salon in March, of Jennifer Hosein, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, graphite, India and acrylic inks, Moleskine folio Sketchbook A4.

While I had thought to do wild, expressionist colours, to lose the form somewhat, my muse urged me in the direction of delicate restraint instead. Over many hours I created the colours stroke by stroke with a dip pen. Once I started working on this drawing, I knew I wished to keep the original sketch intact, that there is a softness that could not be rendered in ink. Jen's artwork is full of bright passionate colours, and she is a bold and talented writer, and yet, her gentleness, she is a kind, warm, compassionate person.

Sketch of a Sketcher, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, graphite, Moleskine folio Sketchbook A4.

For the first time in the 5 years I have lived in my apartment, I made dinner for some friends. Really I am a recluse. I cooked curry, my usual fare. I had a tiny poetry salon/birthday celebration on Sunday night... 4 of us only, and while each of us read fairly lengthy pieces, the others drew. Thanks Brandon Pitts, Iddie Fourka and Jennifer Hosein for standing by me.

 My little sketch of Jen, not so good - but sharing anyhow. I will paint this one, and it will look very different when finished I hope!

(It was nice, but I don't think I will peep out of my shell too often. Family, though, come for gatherings at least once a month or more often. Two children in their 20s, with their partners, often here. A busy little spot. Guess at heart I'm a family person. :))

Well worth watching for the origins of International Women's Day, and for some Danish history of the building where it all began....



Videoed and narrated by Bent Lorentzen, uploaded on March 8, 2012. Direct link: A Danish House United, Divided, then Destroyed.

"This short documentary captures US street-artist, Frank Shepard Fairey (famous for the Obama icon), working on a mural in the hot Copenhagen sun in August, 2011.

Shepard Fairey attempted to evoke "transformative" healing upon a 3-story facade overlooking the rubble of the historic 69 Jagtvej (Hunter's Road) property in Copenhagen's Nørrebro borough. He certainly did not expect the "extreme left" violent response to his kind, generous and "repeated" artistic efforts, including graffiti that stated, "Go home Yankee," and later being assaulted near a Copenhagen night club. Through interviews, the video also brings in a bit of the extreme left POV, as to why some found it offensive.

Sadly, what seems to have gotten lost in that drama, except through Shepard Farley's efforts last summer, includes how the demolished building holds a history far deeper than the recent decades it served as Ungdomshuset (The Youth House).

Towards the end of the 19th century, the building was called Folkets Hus (The People's House), and functioned to coordinate Denmark's emerging labor movement. And in 1910, 130 women from 16 nations met to to plan Women's Suffrage and demand their natural right to vote, and to establish March 8 as "International Women's Day."

In 2001, the building was purchased from the city by a corporation that sold it to a fundamentalist Christian sect, called "Faderhuset" (Our Father's House), and in 2007, following an exhaustive legal battle, the mayor of Copenhagen demanded that the remaining youth squatting there leave.

Though mostly peaceful, the protests then escalated, especially after the police used lethal-level tear gas to storm and evict the remaining youth. Riots then broke out on the city streets of Copenhagen, and the police arbitrarily arrested anyone without cause other than a guess that they could potentially disturb the peace. The Supreme Court later called ruled many of those police tactics illegal.

A follow-up video will focus more of the women's deeper perspective on the subject.

More about Bent Lorentzen, his books and work:
http://www.amazon.com/Bent-Lorentzen/e/B001JOZZAQ

http://www.facebook.com/people/Bent-Lorentzen/1198146266
Musical score by Aborada, traditional/interpretive native Inca music from Peru, is with their permission.

This work is dedicated to all the women in my life who've made me a better human being, including Mette, Ginger, Danusa, Kali, Anjani, Maureen, Joanie, Judy S, Susan, Sharon (thanks for your brilliant critique), Brenda (Happy Birthday!), and most significantly my Ma."