direct link to 1min recording: disappearing

disappear
into a world
of disappearing forms
where figures
refract,
thick viscous glass
melted sand granules

falling into dream

__
Brenda Clews' poetry, voice and mix. Background music, a section from: "Trio for Flute, Cymbals, and Glass" by Matt Samolis - http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/49419


                                                        

Amnesty International calls for security review of G8/20 Summit: "In a statement today (June 27), the organization expressed "very deep concern" that human rights have "suffered considerably" during the protests in Toronto.

Yes, I agree with Amnesty International's questions, reasoning and approach. But would say it's our leadership, our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper himself, who promoted a full-fledged police state for the G8 and G20 Summit meetings. And it is a very dangerous precedent.

I repeat, a very dangerous precedent.

This man must be voted out of office. Don't be wooed by so-called achievements of the Summit meetings - look at he was doing in the back room, to his own citizens, to Toronto, and, by extension, to the country.

We don't mean much to this leader of ours, and if we're troublesome, why he has 20,000 now trained  riot cops at his disposal. Certainly enough of a corps to terrorize a peaceful country.

What if some of those 'perpetrators' of violence in the march were linked to the upper echelon of the Federal government? How do we know in what ways we, the Canadian public, might be manipulated to think certain factions (like the hooded, masked Black bloc mob) are dangerous trouble-makers. I'm not saying groups like the Black bloc mob are not dangerous, but do their antics (only vandalism) justify the operation of a 'police state'?

When I think of Jean Chretien, whose incredible leadership we are still benefiting from in terms of the surplus he left that cushioned this country through the recent recession, and ask, would Chretien have brought out the riot cops in full force with a $2 million budget for security if we hosted the G8 and G20 Summits?

No. Chretien, whatever else he was, was for this country. Chretien's loyalty was to the people of this country. Harper's loyalty, if he has any other than to his ambitions, is to big business, those who bank roll his power. Harper, and I say this with sadness after witnessing the last few days of violence and terror in Toronto, is definitely an heir of Mulroney, only more dangerous because smarter.

And it leaves me wondering what Harper might have acquiesced to to justify the enormous expenditure for what is clearly, after all, a police state in Toronto, if only for a week or so.

Riot police aggressively arrested peaceful protesters at Eastern Avenue yesterday. Since when is the right to dissent a violation of the law? And whose "public peace" were the quiet demonstrators disturbing? Residents in the area said they hadn't know there was a protest until the noise of the police motorcycles alerted them, and the noise the police made definitely disturbed 'public peace.'

A taste of an authoritarian police state to prepare us for what?

Out of taxpayers money rather easily gotten, Harper now has a fully trained and armed select corps of officers.

After all the money spent on this show of force, are these trained men and all their expensive equipment meant to languish? To disappear back into the sleepy Canadian milieu?

This weekend saw armoured tanks in Toronto. Isn't this an over-response to some burned police cars and broken store windows? I remind readers of this article, there was no real run on the fence surrounding the Summit, and certainly no concerted terrorist effort to threaten the world leaders gathered here.

Our right as citizens in a democratic state to dissent, to protest public policy, to offer alternative views and opinions, to gather together in numbers from a few to a march of 10,000 to publicize our protests was undermined by police tactics.

When I say dangerous precedent for Canadian society, I mean dangerous precedent. We might ask in what scenarios Harper's group might consider using this armed force again. And how soon?


                                                        

Direct link to Facebook, where I'm hosting this clip: G20 Protest March, Toronto, June 26th. 
I've made it accessible to everyone.


A clip from some video I took during the march, near the American Consulate on University Avenue. You can see the police have blocked it off to the public (it's on the right in the footage) and the march continues on the other side of the street south.

Yes, that worried and caring police officer was for real. And I took his advice, slipping out through the back streets, re-joining the crowd of protesters later and then avoiding a few spots of conflagration by slipping into walkways and back paths (I lived in the area for 20 years, old stomping grounds) before making my way home.

More violence ensued as the Black Bloc mob hit the streets, igniting a flare to distract (I passed that corner, missing it by minutes), burning police cars, smashing windows of banks and stores.

At the time of writing, it is close to midnight. Where I live in the city it is quiet, except for the constant drone of police helicopters.

All of the G20 leaders are in Toronto, having met earlier. They are safe, I dearly hope. Riots and violence continue through the night at various spots according to the papers.

Most of all, we Torontonians had wished for a peaceful demonstration of our solidarity. A peaceful march would have shown Harper's huge expenditure on security to be a colossal waste of taxpayers money. Out of the 10,000 who marched, the police estimate there were 100 or so troublemakers. They have caused a lot of damage.

Incidents of undue police violence have also been reported.

I don't know what the thrust towards violence is, but it's on both sides. Sadly.

The rally was great. Many people came, even in pouring rain. Our march was strong, caring, determined, and peaceful. Please remember that we were the majority.


a few stills from the video



                                                        

direct link: If I Could Write


for JP

What would I write if I
                         could
                  write?

I reach over continents
                               and
                                       oceans
into the Parthenon
to find you pressing
the shutter on your camera,
the photograph
you sent.

Or ordered chaos,
                          but this is my life.

A leaf swollen with rain.
Sleeping in a hammock
in a barge with hundreds of others
on the Amazon River in Brazil.
Sun shining on metal.
How sentences
                                     fold 
                         in on each other
like white rose petals.

Days pass endless
waves in the lake.

I found her,
a spirit in the forest of the lake
in the Canadian terrain
where I fast for days.
She broke the spell.
Unexpectedly,
in the silvery leaves of the
maples standing in water.

Abandon logic for metaphor.

Speak in the tongues
                                     of the poet.
I burn the fire
on your eyelids
in my soul.

Those Ionic columns in the heat
of your Grecian photograph.

                         Mirrors
to hide behind.
My polished earrings,
necklace of reflective stones,
shirt sewn with tiny mirrors.
See yourself seeing me.

Clouds that form
a grammar of understanding
of the sky.

The wine
that sweetens your lips.
The dazzle of a sunset
the colour of
oranges.

__
Piano solo accompaniment: Roger Stéphane, 'Lointain,' from his album, Picasso, on Jamendo.

Response to Big Tent Poetry's prompt (where other entries are linked in the comments).

The recording, for some reason, took unexpected hours, and yet I feel strange including it and hope it adds to your reading of the prosepoem.


                                                        

direct link: An Ecology of Earth. Watch in HD if you can.

A visual poem. The central part, the mandala section, the core. A visual metaphor for earth, the energy of earth. Shot in natural colour.

An Ecology of Earth

we become
what we pretend

what we promote
becomes true

beware of
irreversibilities

earthquaking mandala

how do we evolve

in patterns that connect
without destroying

perhaps the earth is
a fertilized egg

_
I used clips from the last song in "The Dreamer's Paradox," by JT Bruce: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/3317

The mandala sequence and the music matched with little editing, a synchronicity that amazed me. As I worked on expanding the piece, I added more clips from the same song.
_
This is the second video I have made from the same 20sec of original camera footage. It's of the tree outside my window and that is rooted in the urban clip of land that accompanies my apartment. I feel connected to that tree. The first video using the original 20sec footage, One Hand Clapping, a collaboration with AlphaCore, is so different to this one that you won't believe they're from the same clip.

(Soon I'll upload the original tiny clip of unadulterated, raw, unmanipulated footage, too. And post all three together.)

The poem, an edit of Relevant Knots, posted a week ago, is influenced by a reappraisal of the ideas of Gregory Bateson, particularly in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, and Mind and Nature: a necessary unity.



(I think I will use the tiny clip at the end as a 'signature' ending on my future videopoems - have to work on it a bit, see, if maybe, or maybe not, I do like it, though, and edited in the feel of a blinking earth eye.)
                                                        

Happy Solstice to everyone! It's my favourite time of year... may the sun shine on you with golden glorious goodnesses!

She's brightly coloured, in hot rainbow hues, but the neon filter makes her so sunshiny! I started working on her in my hammock yesterday... :-)


                                                        

direct link: One Hand Clapping. Play in HD if you can.

"Often when he collaborated with John Cage, Cunningham would create a dance and Cage would compose the music — separately. Cunningham made no attempt to fit the dancers' movements to the music. Sometimes the performance was the first time they heard the music.

"Given a certain length of time, let’s say 10 minutes, I could make a dance which would take up 10 minutes and John Cage could make a piece of music that occupied the same amount of time, and we could put them together," Cage recalls.

"When Cage would play the piece, there would be moments when in the other way of working, I would have thought there should be a sound, but his sound would come perhaps just after what I had done. And it was like opening your mind again to another possibility. As John Cage said once, 'He does what he does, and I do what I do and for your convenience, we put it together.' I thought that was a remarkable way of thinking about it.""

from "Merce Cunningham: Dance at the Edge," an article by Renee Montagne on NPR.

Two autopoetic systems: my short film, Alphacore's music score, without any reference to each other as we separately created them. Each of our autopoetic systems closed from each other, selectively referring to their own environments.

Mine, abstracted footage of a tree at dusk when the light dims and the camera acts like the retinal cells, the rods, seeing essentially in black and white. Alphacore's a slow, simple, quiet, meditative piano solo with a dim voice in the background whose words we cannot quite hear - or is it yelping dogs or a bird call? To my ear the background chant sounds like 'help me.' The letters falling like rain in my film do, in the slow roll of credits, line up at the end as SOS. An accidental correlation in two separate creations brought together.

I titled our collaboration, without hearing the music, One Hand Clapping, since, I, in Toronto, and Alphacore, in Seattle, each creating our component to an agreed on time span, were like the clapping of one hand - the famous Zen koan meant to sent the logical mind into an impossible spin.

Our final product, the mix, matches in the way all aspects of the universe correlate, by accident. Only this is a designed accident.

And it doesn't match in the way each of us might have originally envisioned.

My video is uncharacteristic of my work thus far - it is abstract rather than figurative; a natural black and white rather than colour; the speed is slowed down to just above frame-by-frame and thus a little jerky while the letters fall so quickly as to be almost in fast-forward; and the letters in One Hand Clapping fall continuously carrying random meanings, unlike my usual work with whole poems or sections of poems.

Alphacore's music is usually the product of computer-generated transformations of text or images into sound - they are sonic landscapes of various sounds and instruments that form unusual experimental and avanteguard abstract soundscapes - in One Hand Clapping he plays the piano meditatively note by note, a scale ascending and partially descending, we hear the touch of fingers. He is more of an embodied musician than his more usual 'Deleuzian machine' music. Deleuze writes, in Anti-Oedipus, "A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks," and this is how I might describe Alphacore's music on the whole. He creates tracks where there is no subject or object, where the sounds interact with each other in nodes, in a series of interruptions that create a syncopated flow in a minimalist rhythmic space, like the famous metaphor of rhizomes we associate with Deleuzian philosophy.

In the final product of our collaboration, One Hand Clapping, a film with music/music with a film, we have two self-referential autopoetic systems, visual and auditory, interacting. How the viewer perceives this deliberately accidental pairing will refer to yet another autopoetic system whereby the collaboration of two artists becomes one experience.
__
* A defnition of autopoesis: "The generic term denoting the organization characterizing autopoietic machines / systems. The term "... simply means processes interlaced in the specific form of a network of productions of components which realizing the network that produced them constitute it as a unity." (Maturana and Varela)



                                                        

My hunger,
...........pacing.
Dark battlements
of earth and stone.

No
..........milk
of kindness
here.

In my dull stare
I watch you.

You seek a
comfort of stars
I can only imagine.

Do not praise me, fool.

The maze in which you are lost
is my lair.

_____
Words from a wordle, Big Tent Poetry's prompt (where other entries are linked in the comments):



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direct link: from the Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems

a love story...

...where Botticelli's Venus, ideal of beauty, the goddess who ushered in the Renaissance, bucks her scallop shell and in pursuit of erotic passion, experiences love in the world with its betrayals, deceptions, rejections... how our hearts of purity suffer like Venus pursuing the intrigues of passion, its tempests, for the love in her life...

...how the poetry of our life is our love...

...this love story interweaves the purity of Botticelli's Venus, and Venus Pandemos of myth, her lover Mars, the story of Psyche and Eros, a personal story, and how we clothe ourselves with shimmering presence,  'translucent robes' of poetry:

beauty, fragile, on the lip of, edges, knowing loss's inevitability, a flower blossoms, scented, fragrant and soft vivid colour of petal drifting away, it can't remain, you knew, Botticelli, and

yet, she is, borne by the Zephyr on the scallop-shell and wrapped in veils of flowers by the Horae

washes of colour, seaspray of roses,

translucent robes

poetry we weave ourselves with

...

Writing is a deeply
meditative act.

A language of love.

A listening.

__

This recording is a collaboration.

I recorded a poem drawn from my manuscript-in-progress, The Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems, and sent it to Buz Hendricks (whose track, 'Because' I had paired with my prosepoem, 'Light Catches Diamonds').

Buz composed a beautiful jazz/orchestral score. I listened in wonder- he is very gifted. He writes: "I started with a piano and just improvised while listening to the poem. The same for all the other tracks, just played to your voice. That's why it was able to ebb and flow with your voice."

I have a videopoem planned for this piece, too.

Buz Hendricks' website: www.somewhereoffjazzstreet.com

Buz on Jamendo: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/Somewhere_off_Jazz_Street

The cover is a detail of a painting of mine.

From Women In Summer - the process of painting

                                                        

After I wrote *the worst* pantoum, I wrote this abstract little ditty to try to explain myself:

I've fallen to
playacting
anger.

Snap, shout, hiss
but the old
hot-edge
gone.

Once a
volcano-
dormant,
spent.

What used
to ignite
fiery torrents
now brings
inconsolable
clouds,
days of
rain.

(oh dear)
__
Ok, ok, onto the truly terrible pantoum (and I do think anger cliché-ridden, that there is a repetitiveness of the trite in states of rage):

Anger is a potent force. Anger is red, explosive, repetitive. An angry person has lost their rationality. Anger is a sword of destruction, a way to hurt. Anger is red, explosive, repetitive. When the victim becomes the oppressor. Anger is a sword of destruction, a way to hurt. To hurt the way you've been hurt. When the victim becomes the oppressor. Anger is a bullet. To hurt the way you've been hurt. Anger is a fire bomb. Anger is a bullet. Anger collects furies to hurl. Anger is a fire bomb. Anger destroys what took time to build. Anger collects furies to hurl. When it erupts, it tears the gaussian blur off things. Anger destroys what took time to build. Anger is a great leveller. When it erupts, it tears the gaussian blur off things. Anger sees the mark darkly. Anger is a great leveller. The raging storm. Anger sees the mark darkly. The roaring wind. The raging storm. Tears the world apart with battering. The roaring wind. The broken homes. Tears the world apart with battering. Anger transforms. The broken homes. Loss of illusions. Anger transforms. Anger is a potent force of renewal.

__
A response to Big Tent Poetry's June 11th prompt: write an angry pantoum (and where you can read the other entries in the linked comments)

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