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  • Videopoetry Playlist

    My videopoetry playlist at YouTube is updated whenever I produce something new. Since I only drop into beautiful Xanga now and then, perhaps I’ll leave this post up.

    Mostly I still blog at Blogger’s Rubies in Crystal, but that site is really more of an archive and not so much a commenting site.

    I’m on Facebook, so please send me a note and a friend request if we are not already connected: https://www.facebook.com/brenda.clews.

    I’m also on G+, mostly for the fabulous art community: Brenda Clews - Google+.

  • A little Solstice gift … of Starfire

    direct link: Starfire (33 min)

    Happy Solstice! 

    It last happened 372 years ago – a rare confluence: a lunar eclipse and winter solstice. In the night (at 3:18am EST), a total lunar eclipse, the full moon passing through the darkest shadow of the earth (and at 6:40am EST), winter solstice, when the northern hemisphere’s axial tilt is furthest from the sun, the longest night and darkest day of the year.

    The astronomy of the day is worth pondering on.

    For the last two years, I have released a poetry album at solstice.

    This is so I can offer a little Solstice gift to you (free to download, or listen, as you wish).

    To commemorate light in the beautiful loving darkness.
    Wishing you joy, love, health, success, wealth.

    warm regards,
    Brenda

    Starfire 

    This album began with the first track, ‘Disappearing,’ which I wrote in a hammock in the hot, sultry summer. I recorded it a few times, just for fun. Then layered the readings, added music and became intrigued.

    Thus began an odyssey of readings, recordings. All tracks, except one, are with music of Jamendo musicians, to whom I am so grateful.

    If you wish, you can download any tracks or the whole album.

    A collection of love poetry.
     ___________________

    The tracks:

    Disappearing: Brenda Clews, poetry, voice and mix; Matt Samolis, music, a section from: “Trio for Flute, Cymbals, & Glass”: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/49419 (with permission)

    What Would I Write If I Could Write: for J.P. Brenda Clews, poetry, voice, mix; music, Roger Stephane, ‘Lointain,’ from his album, “Picasso”: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/62258 (with permission)

    Drumbeat: Brenda Clews, poetry, voice, mix; music, Chriss Onac, track “TRANSE” from his album, TRIBAL: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/23954 (with permission)

    Glint: Soundtrack for my videopoem, Glint, which is also a videopoem at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D3vTpxfFuU Backgound music is “Madrox, in my head,” by Arena of Electronic Music, a Creative Commons license: http://www.jamendo.com/track/477297 (with permission from his band administrator)

    Hieroglyphic of Purple Lotuses: Brenda Clews, poetry, voice, mix; music, Ka eN, “Oriental Dreams”: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/42617 (with permission)

    Starfire in the Night: Brenda Clews, poetry, voice, mix; music, Frank Harper’s ‘Moon’s Eve,’ from “Fingerstyle – Set 1″: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/62508 (with permission)

    What Is Underground Is What Holds Us: Brenda Clews, poetry, voice, mix; music, LaiYouttitham’s song, “Alone,” from his site: http://www.laizmusic.com/mp3-download.php (with permission)

    Salt of the Sea: Brenda Clews, poetry, voice, mix; music, Livio Amato’s, ‘Dream Opening,’ from his album, “Sensitivity”: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/62537 (with permission)

    My Body Is A Word: Brenda Clews, poetry, voice, mix; music, Lena Selyanina’s piano solo, ‘Summer Morning,’ from “Snowstorm Romance”: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/73627 (with permission)

    Veils To Clothe Venus: Brenda Clews, poetry, reading, mix; music, Buz Hendricks, music: http://www.somewhereoffjazzstreet.com/ (with permission – a section of a track he created for the Venus Suite of Poems – a track at Jamendo).

    Ink Ocean: Brenda Clews, poetry, reading, mix; music (mixed by me), Alphacore, ‘side_project,’ from “Side Project”: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/33504, and Extra’s, ‘The Quickest Vessel to a Distant Future,’ from “Water Every Full Moon”: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/45140 (with permissions)

    _

    With special thanks to Robert A. for his invaluable advice on recording.

    Starfire album cover is a painting of mine.

    I composed the html in a blog post, and left the icon links to each page of my Art & Writings website below:

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  • How to create a custom YouTube video player for your blog or website

    selection of my videopoems. As a painter and poet, I, like many, are drawn to the video medium, where I experiment with delighted abandon.

    After a fruitless hour of searching for and trying out widgets, and then discovering YouTube itself offers the ability to create a custom video player for your website -though you won’t find this handy feature in any of the drop down menus at your YouTube site- I created this one for my website!

    This is how you create one of these neat players:

    1. Sign in to your YouTube account.

    2. Paste http://www.youtube.com/custom_player into the browser.

    3. Create your embeddable player. Note: you can create a ‘playlist’ selection of your videos for use in this custom player, or use any of your other playlists, or simply include everything you’ve uploaded. 

    To create a custom playlist, I backtracked. I clicked on the videos I wished to show in my player one at a time and added them to a new playlist that I called “My Videopoetry.” Then I returned to the custom player page and made that playlist my choice for what videos to show in the player.

    4. YouTube will create the html you can embed in your blog or at your site. Copy and paste.

    5. Later, when you want to find that page again paste http://www.youtube.com/my_players into your browser.

    Currently using these urls is the only way to access this neat feature of YouTube – so be sure to favourite them for easy access in the future.

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  • Ravishing Light: A Solar Videopoem

    watch the YouTube video embedded here… you can also download

    from the Internet Archives, click this link: Ravishing Light, a Solar Videopoem

     

    After watching many hours of NASA’s amazing SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) footage of the sun at the Internet Archives, I downloaded some short videos and from them distilled the clips you see in this video. I am delighted to find this footage and to create a solar videopoem.

     

    A vision of such power that what went before falls away in a rapturous death. A rapturous death of the ego. An unerasable enlightenment. That Rubicon. I was inspired to write this piece after seeing the movie, ‘Sunshine,’ which also uses footage from NASA’s SOHO Observatory:


    on that day explosion of ravishing light infiltrated all crevices of the abode no shadow only a few seconds but transformed everyone’s consciousnesses neuronal synapses exploding in rapturous light retinal cells lighting up firing laser stunning flashing images into the brain marked by the event the way a flood line is gauged by how far inland the water traveled all those who witnessed the event scattering of the light bore the mark like a rare sedimentary flare layer in the archeology of the mind or a moment when everything saturated overflow of light expanded beyond outer limits of comprehension remained engraved luminosity in the cells at any moment to spill forth when memory activated the sequence of that day when the sun cosmic storm blazed without heat only light brilliant

    -

    prose poem written in July 2007 (also available at the Internet Archives as a separate recording); videopoem created April 2010.

     

    These are the videos I finally chose and downloaded. I used clips from some of them for my short videopoem:

     

    wave- archive.org/details/CIL-10079

    SOHO_TRACE_Intro_YouTube- archive.org/details/GMM-10421

    recon- archive.org/details/SPD-SOHO-STRIPreconSTRIP

    quiet20010310ntscarchive- archive.org/details/SVS-2766?start=4.5

    EITflameszm- archive.org/details/SPD-SOHO-STRIPEITflameszmSTRIP

    304blow- archive.org/details/SPD-SOHO-STRIP304blowSTRIP

    archive.org/details/SVS-3286

    EITbulb- archive.org/details/SPD-SOHO-STRIPEITbulbSTRIP

    flarezoom640x480- archive.org/details/SVS-2496

    helio_fleet_v1.1- archive.org/details/SVS-3570

     

     

     

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  • The Lady and the Chimera

    Click on this link to go to a slideshow of the stages of painting this image: The Lady and the Chimera


    The Lady and the Chimera
    , 12″ x 9″, 30.5x23cm, oil on canvas, 2010.

    fish live in a ribbon of river in the sky

    nor do I sprinkle specks of strands of saffron stars

    bouquets of red poppies bloom in paper ice

    the soul, a chimera, who gave moments

    never to erase

    lived words, acts

    seeing flying angels makes me laugh…

    or you can delete

    what’s in your heart

    we are gifts
    waiting
    to give

     ___

    I am really wanting to move onto something else, so am going to consider this little painting done. I have painted it with a very small palette knife, really a dental instrument, and a sable brush with about 5 hairs. The paint is very thick – and I held it over the scanner for this image which I’ll replace in 6 months when it’s dry with a better one. The painting has taken far longer than I could have imagined.

    The chimera is half human and half lion, yes, but originally meant to
    be a cuddly stuffed animal chimera. His expression is a little more
    lusty though, isn’t it. And that hat!

    I
    painted the canvas black first as an
    underlying nod to the void, emptiness, what all form arises out of.
    Rather than painting from a white canvas I thought to begin from
    Śūnyatā, from a blackness. To allow imaginal form to manifest from
    there…

    And I got a lusty little chimera! And a floating figure, a woman in outlines, who you can make of what you will…

    Oh, I hope it makes you smile as I do! The painting is whimsical, fairy-tale, yes, a little bit mythic, and my first attempt at Surreal, also from the imagination, no life models.

    I think of this as a jazz composition, a riff in paint.

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  • Dance of the Solar Wind – short album (16min) of 5 prosepoems with music…

    &nbsp&nbsp

    direct link: Dance of the Solar Wind

    5 tracks … 16:41

    1 Dance of the Solar Wind …  2:29
    2 Light Catches Diamonds … 4:33
    3 Love Letters on Sand Mandalas … 0:59
    4 Roses and Hands … 0:33
    5 Meridians of Culture … 8:07


    Album description
      rich text with pleasing undulating voice and music”  - Brenda Clews’ poetry performance pieces 


    1. Dance of the Solar WindI wrote this prosepoem in 2007, and recorded it that year. In 2009, I added some Garageband piano loops.
    2. Light Catches Diamonds was composed 2007; recorded 2008; in 2009 paired with ‘Because,’ from “Go Away Blues,” by Buz Hendricks of Jazz Street Trio, with permission.
    3. Love Letters in Sand Mandalas. Originally recorded in 2005, I added a background of ocean and shells to the recording in 2009.
    4. “Roses and Hands”
    In the dream, her hands
    felt like flowers.
    She couldn’t explain it.
    In her palms, flowers,
    like roses, only immeasurably
    enfolded, multi-petaled,
    deep dusk rose-pink,
    soft and fragile
    and intricate
    and very, very
    sensitive.
    5. Meridians of Culture. Experimental avantguarde music in the background: ‘Lambkins Black,’ by Gabriel Garrod of Alphacore, with permission.
    _
    Image, Pulsing Hea(r)t, Eye of Ra, one of my paintings – click on cover for larger size



    Dear beautiful readers,

    A Solstice card, New Year’s wish, and gift if you like it, you can download it…

    May your dreams become real in miraculous and mysterious ways in the New Year that ushers in a whole new decade…

    In this deep dark, may the light shine on you.
    You are radiantly beautiful.

    Wishing you the best
    in all ways.

    Much love, Brenda ♡xo♡xo

    ‘Dance of the Solar Wind’ – a short album of poems with music that is Creative Commons licensed, free to download, with light and blessings.☼

    (All these pieces are at SoundClick, so you may have heard them previously. Hope you enjoy!)




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  • Poetic of Light/ Poétique de la lumière

    Poetic of Light/ Poétique de la lumière uploaded by Brenda Clews to YouTube.

    My videopoem is finished. After a week of nearly nonstop work, most nights till 3 or 4 am and up again at 7 or 8am and working right through, I am happy with it. For your enjoyment, I have uploaded both the final version with poetry, and the silent version too.

    I searched through my writing for nearly a whole day to find what might work. I decided on White Fire since I had been vaguely dancing with that poem in mind on the day that I taped this, and had printed it on fine paper and threw the pages in the air and danced on them during the videoing of my dance session last June.

    White Fire now has a web page at my Art & Writings website, where you may read the prosepoem in its entirety. In the video I have only used a few quotes on the creation of the universe out of light. I wrote this prose poem nearly a decade ago, and at that time I was invited to read it on the radio and it nearly became a performance with 8 dancers and musicians!

    The celestial and ecstatic piano is from “Spring” in the album, ‘Piano Paintings‘ by the brilliant Russian composer and pianist, Lena Selyanina. It holds a Creative Commons license and may be listened to, and downloaded freely, at Jamendo (it’s also available on the Internet Archives, and as a torrent on Mininova). Lena came by my website, since I had left a note at her site on Jamendo that the music in my videopoem, Venus Enroute, is hers, and wrote: “I am impressed by your art and happy that you have found inspiration from my music. I am looking forward to see how the Spring dance will evolve….with warm greetings from Helsinki, Finland, Lena.” How wonderful.

    One of the challenges I set myself in this videopoem was to create a self-contained movie. I have, therefore, included the text of the prosepoetry being recited in the movie itself. You will see that I have worked very hard to produce this video in a way that the text becomes a design element in the video itself.

    Except at the end, where I felt darkness was most effective.

    I hope you enjoy viewing it as much as I have enjoyed making it.

    Earlier version without words: Poetic of Light/Poétique de la lumière (a poetry without words) at Vimeo.

  • Venus Enroute

    Venus Enroute uploaded by Brenda Clews to YouTube.

    The poetry is an excerpt from my “Botticelli Suite of Venus Poems“:

    She stopped to rest. Momentarily, in the field of pure possibility, her position unfixed, indeterminate.

    Without hovering, or insecurity.

    It was an image of being in the vast field of life.

    Without knowing. In a position of unknowing, positionless, I suppose. Existing without location or momentum. Vibrating with possibility. It wasn’t exciting or fearful, just what is.

    Nothing is fixed or certain, though there are always solutions to problems.

    Then she continued on.

    She didn’t doubt her certainties.

    The music clip is from Lena Selyanina’s ‘Sarah’s Dance,’ from her album, “Piano Poetry,” which carries a Creative Commons license and may be found here: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/45056.

    The chair sequence and the poem added to it had no original connection. I cut the clip from two hours of footage as perhaps ‘workable.’ Then I searched for a poem. It’s amazing how the poem ‘fits’ the movement, huh? Creatively perhaps we are a gesture, a gesture where here poetry and dance are an aligned fusion.

    Albeit, the resulting video is a bit comic.

    The tag on the back of my dress? As soon as I saw the footage I grabbed the dress and cut it off. The other camera? Ahh, I’m still just learning how to make videos and don’t have a clone plugin to remove these elements. Enjoy the humor!

    (Or perhaps, in context of the poem, since Venus has swung her scallop shell around to enter the world of experience, we could say the tag on her dress reads: ‘If this Vintage Venus is found wandering, send her back to “Mount Olympus”!)

  • Dance of the Solar Wind (2:28min)

    A recording of a prosepoem. While I made the recording in 2007, I never
    posted it. This morning I played with it in Garageband, adding loops
    (actually, this is the first time I have ever done this – a new
    direction perhaps). Surprisingly, I like it. Not sure about the image,
    oh, not the sun, the sun is beautiful in its golden fields of fire,
    but, hey, I don’t have a whole lot of images of myself.

    Read the text here.

    ________________

     DSL or Cable

    Dial-up

  • (4:16) On Butoh-based Dance: A Saturday morning amble…

    Butoh, strange and surreal as it is, is about intimacy.

    YouTube URL here for Butoh-Based Dance talk and poem

    Ok, so. Posted my first iMac video on Butoh-based dance with a poem in my white flannel nightgown this morning on YouTube.

    Even
    before coffee. I leave as is. Though I did add the poem later this
    evening and you might have to increase the volume since, though I
    re-recorded a number of times much closer to the computer’s built-in
    microphone than the original clip, I wasn’t able to arrive at the same
    volume levels.


    Strange and surreal as it often is, Butoh is about intimacy.
    __

    Video YouTube: Poetry Performance Pieces

    hugs xo