Category: Video

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Scythes revisited

This entry is part 31 of 31 in the series Odes to Tools

scythes

These scythes are just a few of the old farm tools we found in the barn and shed when we moved to Plummer’s Hollow in 1971. Other gems included a butter churn, a foot-operated grindstone and a chest-high, hand-cranked winnowing machine.

If the photo looks familiar, that’s because Phoenicia Publishing used it for the cover of Odes to Tools. In “Ode to Scythes,” I had written:

The scythes are emissaries
from a country
that no longer exists.

Martin Hardy in Plummer's Hollow, 2012 (1)

In fact, as I learned this past Saturday, that “country” is not completely vanished yet. The gentleman above, Martin Hardy, actually wielded those sythes (and also operated the butter churn, the grindstone and winnowing machine) as a boy back in the 1930s. His family lived in the old tenant house, the same house I live in now, for roughly the first four decades of the 20th century, living here year-round and looking after the farm while the absentee owners were in Chicago. To make ends meet, they grew oats, wheat, and other crops, kept a few dairy cows and sold the milk and cheese once a week in Tyrone. They stored the milk in the springhouse to keep it cool the rest of the week.

Though we’ve met many Plummer family descendents over the years, their attachment to the mountain is mainly a sentimental one. What memories they have are based on the few weeks they spent up here each summer. It was wonderful to meet a former year-round resident who actually grew up on the mountain the same as I did. Mr. Hardy was born in 1922, but he seems as if he could easily be 15 years younger. He recalled taking walks south along the mountain toward Altoona for fun, just as my brothers and I did, and like us, they kept chickens in the shed (the building behind him in the photo, which also houses the old tools). And while I have vivid memories of the Flood of ’72 (Hurricane Agnes), when we stood at a safe distance and watched floating trees slam into the decking of our access bridge over the Little Juniata, he remembered walking home from school during the Flood of ’36 and discovering that the bridge was completely gone. It was his grandfather, a skilled mason, who built the stone pediment that supports the present bridge, he said. It’s held up very well indeed.

I don’t think I ever shared this video for “Ode to Scythes,” the work of the British blogger and Buddhist priest Kaspalita. It was an unexpected gift, and very well executed, I thought — especially considering it was his first videopoem!

Mr. Hardy said they used a team of horses (one blind, the other sighted) to pull a mowing machine, and got out the scythes to mow the edges and the corners. I’ll bet our Amish neighbors in Sinking Valley still do much the same. I kind of question the poem’s premise now, in fact. A few decades from now, scythes may very well be common tools once again, and if any of us manage to live to 90, the tools people inquire about may not be hand tools, but things like iPads and the internet.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Seon Joon on training to be a Buddhist nun in Korea


Vimeo link.

Regular readers of this blog are probably familiar with Seon Joon as a photoblogger and poet to whom both Luisa and I regularly link. Actually, I’ve been reading her since about 2004, I think, though she wasn’t online for several years while she studied at seminary. She graduated in January and received full ordination in April. Now she’s in Virginia taking a summer intensive language class in Tibetan, but she stopped at the Korea Society in New York on June 6 to give this talk about — as the society’s webpage puts it — “the essential elements of Korean Buddhism and the daily life of women training to become monastics in modern Korea through her personal experience and photos.”

Seon Joon is an entertaining speaker, and the video does an excellent job of showing both the speaker and the photos she shared, with only the minor annoyance of some microphone crackle in the beginning portion. I highly recommend this to anyone with an interest in Buddhism, Korea or communal living. But if you can’t spare the full two hours, I’ve transcribed a few favorite quotes along with their start times.

7:00 The monastic life is first and foremost not an ideal, but something that regular people are trying to live. […] People think we don’t nap. We nap! Believe me. When I was planning this talk, one of the foreign monastics said, “You should show nuns using money, because nobody believes that we do!”

25:23 If I had to say that there’s one thing about the monastic community in Korea that defines it, it is its emphasis on harmony. That learning to get on with others and work with them in a way that is conflict-free is probably more important than any other single ideal. A good monastic is someone who creates no friction in the community.

46:37 We typically pickled about 7,000 heads of cabbage [at Un Mon Monastic College]. And that was considered a small amount! […] Even when I was a postulant in my home temple, I asked, “Why is everyone so stressed about this [kimchee making]?” It was really tense. And they looked at me in astonishment and said, “If this doesn’t go right, we have nothing to eat.”

1:20:48 For us, spoken words are an action. They have the ability to affect reality. So blessing is not just a good feeling because I like you or I hope you feel better, we actually believe and have the aspiration that if done with a pure enough heart and a strong enough intent, you can affect change in this world.

1:43:18 Most of us ordained because we had some desire to live a more clear life. “Enlightenment” is a really big word. Personally, I avoid it because it carries too many ideas with it, and it’s really hard to connect with enlightenment on a daily level, whereas if you say I’m trying to live more clearly, most of us can understand that. “I’m trying to have a little more clarity in my life.”

For me, living in an environment, working in an environment this intensely, taught me a lot about what mental and emotional habits I have — especially surrounding conflict. […] If you aren’t living in a community like this and you have a fight with somebody at work, you fight, 5:00 o’clock happens and you go home. You let it sit for a day. You may not even try and solve it. The next day you might even be able to avoid this person. And so your conflict and whatever you think about it can actually last a lot longer. But in a community like this, you fight. Then you gotta sleep next to this person, shower next to this person, work next to this person, study next to this person, day in, day out, for months on end. You have a choice, and it gets clear real fast: are you gonna hold on to whatever you think is right, or are you going to do what it takes to create harmony?

1:49:12 Something that I never fail to point out to any monk who will give me five minutes is that when men ordain they do not lose their masculinity. Socially. They are still recognized as men societally. When women ordain, we lose our femininity. And we become a kind of neuter. And this brings some other powers, because you’re no longer in the feminine paradigm, or the female paradigm, but then you also lose what power women do have. And in Korea, you know that women have their own power. It’s not obvious and it operates in sort of back channels, but it’s there.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Dreaming in Red by Howie Good

Dreaming in Red Dreaming in RedHowie Good; right hand pointing 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
Howie Good’s latest full-length collection, his fourth, is the first book issued by the online magazine right hand pointing, and it was produced to benefit the Crisis Center in Birmingham, Alabama. 100 percent of the profits, about $5.50 per book, go to support the center’s work, which includes suicide counseling, services to victims of sexual assault, day treatment for the indigent mentally ill, and other services. You can get it through Lulu.com.

Is the book worth reading, though? If you like spare, haunting poems with dystopian themes and a healthy dash of surrealism, absolutely. As with most of the other books I’ve been reading this month, I read it to Rachel over Skype, which was an interesting experience for both of us. While I’ve read many of Howie Good’s books and chapbooks over the years, this was her first — and the first one I’ve read out loud. My pauses were rarely long enough for the full meanings to sink in. It made me appreciate just how much time is required to absorb Howie’s poems.

Rachel admitted to confusion about some of the leaps between stanzas or sections of poems, but said she was impressed by how well the poems captured the sort of everyday paranoia in which we are all enmeshed. As a volunteer at a similar organization to the Crisis Center, she fields phone calls from true paranoiacs and other highly disturbed people on a daily basis, and said she thought the book did a great job of illuminating the very fine line between ordinary thinking and madness.

I doubt the poems were chosen with the Crisis Center in mind; Good just happens to be a very noir-ish poet. Dreaming in Red is an excellent title, though: blood or the color red figure in many of the poems. 20th-century nightmares mingle with 21st-century premonitions of worse to come. “The city is full of smoke, dust, fever, flies, parading and singing and holding banners aloft” (“History is Silent”), and “To get red, you need dust and haze. Pollution makes the sky so beautiful” (“A Walk on the Moon”).

Instead of a standard review, I thought I’d try an imitation of Howie’s style as a kind of homage to this very distinctive poet whose poetry and work ethic are such an inspiration to me. Following that, I’ll embed a video that the Belgian artist Swoon Bildos made for three of the poems in the collection. Enjoy.

Good Times

after Howie Good

1.
All the clocks have guilty faces because they are being watched by secret police. You show me the new finger you had grafted on in prison, still red and slightly swollen. When we shake hands I feel it twitching spasmodically, a dog dreaming about its previous owner who shot things with it and made it point.

2.
It’s always disconcerting to learn that you’ve been blind from birth, and everything you thought you saw was merely something suggested by the prosecuting attorneys of your better nature. Then again, here on Mars, two colors capture everything. Paradise has been postponed indefinitely due to the shortage of fruit.

3.
The information paradigm followed by the mass media is fundamentally Euclidian, you said. We were cleaning out the rabbit pens with an air compressor. Even the dried blood wanted to fly. The monastery had switched from bells to sirens, so a 3:00 a.m. siren could mean fire, prayer, or both. Time hasn’t been the same since it was used to regulate trains.

*

Watch on Vimeo

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Scruggs, Rich

We lost two great American artists today, Earl Scruggs and Adrienne Rich. It’s odd, isn’t it, how chance sometimes brackets two dissimilar lives like this, leading us to ponder each of their legacies in light of the other’s: the revolutionary banjo player and the radical feminist poet, he perhaps more influential in his field than she in hers, but not by much. I’ll let others write the tributes, but I do want to pause for a moment and remember.

And here’s another odd thing: when poets and musicians die, it changes the way we hear their work somehow. The recordings are suddenly colored by our awareness of the fact that there will be no more from them, and what we have is all we’ll get. Such recordings are part of history now in a way they weren’t before, even if they had already been hugely influential. Which is to say, I suppose, that they gain a mythic dimension, since now they connect us to the dead, whose voices or instruments remain as bridges between being and nothingness. Whatever else one may find when diving into a wreck, I think the sound recording is the eeriest of all artifacts, the ultimate in evanescence made nearly permanent.


Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs – Foggy Mountain Breakdown

Diving Into the Wreck – poem and recitation by Adrienne Rich, video by U2bianSynic

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Heart

This entry is part 17 of 29 in the series Conversari

Watch on Vimeo.

This almost belongs in the Manual series, but for the fact that I didn’t write it. The text, and the object to which it refers, came from the pen and knitting needles of Rachel Rawlins, and you can see both at twisted rib. While there, you can click on the conversari tag and browse her half of our on-going, inter-blog conversation in words and images, originating in more quotidian exchanges via email, IM, etc.: one of those sprawling conversations that just keeps sprouting new, sometimes grotesque branches and digressions, grows ever more firmly rooted, and seems as if it might go on forever.

I shot the footage of the garter snake ball yesterday morning, while rushing back and forth between the houses to bake bread. (A mention made it into the Morning Porch, whence, curiously, Luisa also derived the image of a heart.) I felt I had to make the film fairly abstract, since I already made a videopoem with more straight-forward footage of a garter snake mating ball two years ago. On that occasion, I also uploaded an 8-minute video of the orgy. This time, I grabbed my regular camera and managed to get one half-decent still photo:

garter snake mating ball

It was a thing of beauty, albeit hair-raising as always. Incidentally, I’ve probably said this before, but our robust garter snake population in Plummer’s Hollow is, I think, a direct consequence of our decision to stop mowing the lawns. If you like reptiles and amphibians and want to encourage them around your own home, the best thing you can do is transition to a less-managed landscape. Call it Daoist gardening if you like.

Garter snakes usually form mating balls immediately after emergence from hibernation in spring, but sometimes they mate in the fall, too. The great American poet Stanley Kunitz wrote about encountering one such coupling — “that wild braid” — in his iconic poem “The Snakes of September.”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

How to mourn, Belgian-style

This entry is part 19 of 39 in the series Manual

Manual: How to mourn from Swoon on Vimeo

Swoon’s fourth video for my Manual series takes a different tack. “No more bacon,” as he puts it in his blog post, “but peace, contemplation and coffee.” In an email, he explained the associations of coffee for Belgians in this context:

We have a thing called ‘coffeetable’ (koffietafel), when someone is burried the family invites friends and relatives to the ‘coffeetable’ after the burial and serves them coffee and sandwiches.

I wanted to have an absurd, yet subdued, take on that fact. It needed different sounds too.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

How to listen: the movie

This entry is part 13 of 39 in the series Manual

Manual: How to listen from Swoon on Vimeo

This is the third and final video in Swoon’s “bacon triptych” (my term, not his) — see the other two here, if you missed that post. (He does say at his blog, however, that there’s a good chance he’ll be making more videos for my Manual series.)

In an email exchange, I told Swoon I thought he had a real gift for absurdism. He responded, “Absurdism is a Belgian thing I sometimes think… so it comes naturally.” Which immediately made me long to hail from a country where something like absurdism could be a general predilection of its citizens, rather than, say, self-righteousness and extreme credulity.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Manual: How to make videopoems, courtesy of Swoon

This entry is part 8 of 39 in the series Manual

Manual: How to wait from Swoon on Vimeo

Manual: How to walk from Swoon on Vimeo

If you follow my poetry video collection Moving Poems even a little, you’ve probably watched more than one videopoem by the Belgian video-artist and soundcreator Swoon — and I haven’t even posted all his work. Not only is he prolific and (obviously) fast-moving; he’s one of the most inventive and interesting artists working in the medium. I like the music he composes as well. So I was thrilled when he asked me, this past week, if I’d mind him making some videos for my new Manual series.

He’s also kindly provided an English translation of his blog post about the videos as well as a short bio, which I have tweaked just a little with his permission:

Poetry, words and dreams form an important basis for the work of Swoon. As a stranger in our midst he recycles “virtual” internet images, shoots his own, creates soundscapes and makes dreamlike, moving paintings out of it all — a dream made real out of vague bits. Swoon’s work has been selected for several festivals around the world. He’s an autodidact.

Swoon writes:

For “Manual” I wanted to create, first of all, a track that I could later adjust with each new episode.


Listen on SoundCloud

For images I wanted to do something with what Dave said on Facebook: “My biggest influences on the writing in this series, by the way, are the Serbian poets Vasko Popa and Novica Tadic. That’s the level of absurdism I’m trying to mine — a challenge for my somewhat too-logical mind.”

So I needed to go away from my usual way of setting up a project. I was not going to use layers; the feel of the films needed to have a slight touch of absurdism.

For “How to wait,” I wanted to film two bare feet standing/waiting. When I used a piece of bacon (lying around, waiting for lunch) to set focus and I looked at the test-footage, it struck me. This works. I love it when coincidences like this take a lead.

All I had to do was follow my trail of thoughts. Keep it simple. Film at home with what you can find in the kitchen.

For editing, I created three “storylines” of film for each text. Then I edited three different versions (backwards, …) of those three into a “nine-screen.”

*

Swoon adds that more videos will probably follow. How exciting! I think the bacon works in part because of the English expression “bring home the bacon” and related phrases such as “save one’s bacon” and “chew the fat.” According to the U.K. site The Phrase Finder, “bacon has been a slang term for one’s body, and by extension one’s livelihood or income, since the 17th century.” So to me as a viewer, the bacon in these videos seems to symbolize the generalized object of striving or attention. In any case, I think Swoon’s use of it is a good demonstration of the Zen dictum, “first thought, best thought.”

Listen to Swoon’s audio compositions on Soundcloud, watch his videos on Vimeo, follow his blog and visit his website.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ladybugs, houseflies and porcupines

I don’t look at my video stats very often, so I had no idea until tonight that the most-watched videopoem I’ve ever made is also my longest: “Fly Away Home,” for a poem I wrote called “Harlequin Ladybird,” has been played 915 times, despite being over five minutes long.

As I note on Vimeo, it’s as much a music video as it is a videopoem. I imagine the music (by Polish composer efiel on Jamendo) has a lot to do with its relative popularity. One thing I don’t mention in the notes is that I subsequently realized the last phrase of the poem — “small, bad heart” — was involuntarily plagiarized from Louise Glück. Which isn’t a big enough deal to make me want to take down the video altogether, but it will certainly keep me from ever adding it to a print collection.

In second place, with 648 plays, is the video I made with my translation of Lorca’s “Gacela of Unforeseen Love,” starring a housefly.

I chalk that up to the popularity of Lorca and searches for that poem by name. It also helps that both videos have been up for almost two years. In two more years, I imagine my videos for poems by Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral will lead the pack.

Just to keep this in perspective, my most popular video upload of any kind is “Argument with a Porcupine,” which has been viewed 129,806 times on YouTube.

And just to keep that in perspective, I call your attention to “Porcupine who thinks he is a puppy!“: 2,474,271 views. Which may not have anything to do with poetry, but warms my heart nonetheless. Hurrah for porcupines!

Posted on by Dave Bonta

A-shantying I did go

Watch on Vimeo – watch on YouTube

Here’s an example of the sort of shenanigans we get up to around here. Well, O.K., this is not perhaps a typical Central Pennsylvania party — but sea-shanty sing-along potlucks are happening twice a year now, thanks to the planning skills and infectious enthusiasm of Steven Sherrill, whom I interviewed for the Woodrat podcast a while back. (And speaking of the podcast, I hope to present a lengthier selection from our sing-along in audio form here at some point.) Songs included in the video, in all or in part: “Haul Away Joe,” “Hanging Johnny,” “Haul on the Bowline,” “South Australia,” and “Wondrous Love” (not a shanty, but it has the same tune as “Captain Kidd,” which we also sang). The somewhat disturbing paintings in the basement are all Steve’s work. The drink of choice was mulled cider spiked with rum.