Ecological Storytelling: Dream, Hallucination and Vision

              Hofmann's Potion by Connie Littlefield, National Film Board of Canada

"I think it's easier than to formulate high ideals, but a few things are more difficult, and to discover the means whereby those ideals may be implemented one has to dream but one has to dream in a pragmatic way" Aldous Huxley, in Hoffman's Potion

Do I hear a tinge of surf rock here and a splash of psychedelic vocals there? And all wrapped up in a damn fine beat! The new Ketamines 7” So Hot! opens with its killer two-and-a-half minute title track. Resistance vibes ebb and flow as they bray and stomp through lyrics held down by the kind of upbeat clutch that makes this Toronto group well worth a listen, if not a full-fledged tracking down.

Released this October, the band’s three-track album buzzes under the genres of punk, garage and power-pop. Spacey breakdowns mood out these catchy and tight musical explorations with extra-hot reverberating guitar riffs smoothed out over ambient and effectively eerie vocals. “New Skull Tattoo,” the second cut on the album, begins with a daze of light-hearted, fifties-era doo-wop rhythms fused together into punk lyricisms.

The Ketamines provide a riot of trickster stylings, as the lyrics carry us through into a stupendous poetic irony. Final track, “Summer Mothers,” sounds off a dream-pop show with the power of good feelings, impressing the listener with a kind of end-of-concert bittersweet rush that takes no prisoners. It reminds us that when the summer or the year ends and all is lost, we should just hold fast to the driving beat and we’ll all be okay.

All in all, each and every song on this new 7” is good listening. Even multiple listens later the songs groove pulse more and more in the veins. Straight to the head, this one’s a gem.

This piece of interpretive writing was published with BeatRoute magazine on November 3, and conceived under the influence of soundscapes by Canadian psychedelic music band, KETAMINES

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The Union Street Y faces the Puerto Rican cafe where I used to sit over a microwaved chocolate chip muffin and hot chocolate, eyeing the clock, readying myself for Hebrew school. The elaborate turnstile reminiscences of the red-bricked Y invited with the flushing scent of chlorinated memory and the erased lunch-hour sweat of youth. There, a mere two jaunt to the fish-gut factory ocean, I spoke to children. Fascinated by the swung heart of musical storytelling, the night awaited patiently, as the fat bosom of American daytime on the human Earth struggled to a peaceful end. 

Lesser Ury: Café Bauer

A story of Massasoit and the unvanquished heads of Massachusetts flesh, spell out the old paradigm loosed from vocal chords, taut with knife-edge reason on a silent beach. Their indiscriminate wisdom emerges from white-skinned pride, to destroy the vainglorious ruse of ego and fate. Mortality ensued in the fading light, as speech lightened the animate Earth with a name, and its meaning. The soil spoke with a tongue of roots, with teeth of stone and and words of food. Saying: where the story is told is equally or more important to the telling. 

A Northern Lake by Unknown

Flown beyond the wellspring of distant knowledge, exotic in its geography, sacred in its ecology, and born of a feverish need in its cartographic attemptation, a single mountain rose as a breach of faith on the plain horizon. Monumental airs shifted and sprang from the glowering mass of insurmountable ice. Formed as from a frozen volcanic fire, the ice lifted with evaporating death, as the cold grip of lifelessness in nonbeing. The frozen hell still beckoned forward the unanswered mystery of longing, as the natural light waned atop its insuperable caracas, a skull of monastic belonging. 

Mer de Glace, in the Valley of Chamouni, Switzerland by J.M.W. Turner

I stepped forward, onto the slippery fall of the sky's over-hastened drop to Earth, as the violated inherent reason of nature, unearthed. The pool fragranced wisps of spiritual air, the will of the unmoving background to all life on Earth, revealed in the deadening cold. As the stone ascended to its paternal source above, each step closer frustrated the nervous system with defeat, failure, and the fatal swoon of all human belonging. The release of the spirit, awake. 

Harlem Valley, Winter by Ernest Lawson

Captured under the fault of a boot, I risked a greeting at the hand of death's blizzard smoke, the craving and seductive flaw of its embrace. Unable to get back afoot, I peered through the ice to see the reigning female of human law. The Queen shone glinting the fixing light, fleeting, yet absorbed needfully. With a hand mobilized by the insane truths of modern life, I sunk below the ice, to finger the freezing metal, and to possess its deathless strength. Ascendance moved to transcendence. The impossible summit slunk beneath my loins, hidden in hoarding pockets and disguised on lusting hands. 

Queen of Coins (Diamonds) from the Visconti tarot deck by Bonifacio Bembo

The line at the cinema began to move. I paid, and saw the unseen. I paid, and mounted the insurmountable. I paid, and lived the unliveable. I paid, and knew the unknown. I paid, and heard the unheard. I paid, and paid the unpaid. And I paid, and paid to pay for the priceless. I paid to pay for the invaluable. I called home the unreachable. I vanished in the light. I stole out on the intractable ice. I rose my shoulders above the limits of atmospheric pressure. I called out above the thinnest trace of oxygenated air the name of the unnameable: I.  

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Writing: The Child of Art and Music

Wood Mountain Poems, National Film Board of Canada

"My grandfather Dolmic dreamed that three coffins floated through the door of his brother's house. So, he rode to the next village to investigate, and found his brother, his sister-in-law and their servant girl dead of cholera. The baby, still alive, was sucking at its mother's breast. He built three coffins and arranged the burial, and returned home with the child in his arms. And they say dreams don't come true." Ukrainian Grandmother, Wood Mountain Poems

On May 3 of 2012, Copenhagen welcomed the largest sustainable fashion conference yet seen in the contemporary world. Sustainability and corporate social responsibility are buzzwords in the consumer industry, and are integrated more and more into every sector of the economy. What was once merely one percent of the fashion industry in 2007 – when estimated global sales of the sustainable fashion market were at three billion dollars – would increase exponentially, culminating in the 2012 Copenhagen Fashion Summit with the investment of over one thousand key industry stakeholders. 

One of the largest industries, fashion product lines contribute to the spread of over eight thousand chemicals and twenty five percent of the world’s pesticides into the natural environment. Not only that, most of the environmental impact is made after the consumer has purchased the materials. Yet, sustainable fashion is one growing eco-trend that is challenging the largely unsustainable fashion market by employing alternative textiles with less carbon footprint. 

Organic cotton is effectively transforming one of the most commonly grown crops, and so in doing, is spearheading the eco-fashion movement. Other cellulose materials include hemp and bamboo. Materials, however, are only part of the eco-equation. Renewability and source factor, as does labor conditions. The idea is to create what Rossella Ravagli, Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility Manager at Gucci, proposed during the 2012 Copenhagen Fashion summit, as a “good compromise between style, quality and new material.”   

Arguably, bamboo fiber is especially capable of meeting the demands of the new eco-fashion market. With an absorptive quality that captures greenhouse gases, bamboo grows in abundance without irrigation or pesticides. As the fastest growing woody plant in the world, bamboo holds a unique place in the fast-paced consumer market. Although, there is controversy regarding bamboo’s claim to fame in the eco-fashion market, as the process required to turn bamboo into wearable fiber, also known as Rayon, is marred with chemical-intensive labor. Yet, relatively speaking, bamboo as a source material for clothing is a more sustainable option than most. 

Yet another alternative textile, hemp, is potentially more eco-friendly than bamboo. Also easily grown, hemp clothing is often a composite of other organic materials. With such diverse uses as building materials, paper, jewelry, and fuel, hemp is largely responsible for complementing the greater trend of sustainable fashion with style. Hemp clothing is often designed with respect to traditional eco-fashion trends, opening interest in ethnic-inspired lines.     

This piece of commercial writing on eco-fashion was originally written for a client in China, and is also published as a blog on The Media Co-op

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dusk fall

full equinox

hell's door

lonely crossroads

still bells

way back

world tree

______________

The week began with the resonant mergence of harmonic mastery still ringing in my ears. A meeting with contemporary legend, Amir Amiri opened my mind to the brilliant challenge of a distant sound's arrival. The shores of my thought curled and folded in a slow tide as I acquired the bittersweet taste of a traditional music's refinement into the beautiful wholeness of world.

The quick hum of the Persian santur danced behind my eyes with the lifted personification of an artist's temptation to unite with the all-breathing life of unity. Yet, nostalgic and principled, remained steadfastly earth-bound to the homely traditions of mother, father, and self. At once, another meeting with the unbound truth stared me in the face through the transfixing metallic song of the HandPan under the voice of LIRON MAN. 

After Man's show, Puertas, at the Calgary International Flamenco Festival, I then met the opening musicians, one of whom, Tamar Llana is featured in the video below. She sings next to her mother, Judith Cohen - an ethnomusicologist with a special focus on Sephardic music - playing the frame drum. The joyous union of ancestry, tradition, and contemporaneity through music led to a revelation of harmony as the voice of continuity, belonging and meaning.

Flood of Creation: A Photo Essay on the Art of a Natural Disaster

The Waving Surface of the Autumn Flood by Ma Yuan

Here, I've posted a selection of photos in gathering a visual essay on the Bow River's recent flood through the city of Calgary from Summer Solstice to the closest Supermoon in two decades. Again, as in the previous post, The Poetics of Resistance: Myths of India and Freedom,  I cite from the brilliance of Telugu poet Varavara Rao, whose words resound with chilling truthfulness and direct one towards reflection, even over the muddiest and swiftest, and most inhumane, of currents. 

"…Quite amazing, the moonlight that

Floods this room—

I cannot even see the moon outside.

To relieve this solitude

I draw out my blood

And transfuse it

With poetry that is heavy

With the sound of handcuffs.

Chain them if you will…

The birds of freedom

Will break into flight

To the sound of pioneer songs."

(Varavara Rao, written while in solitary confinement

in Secunderabad Jail 1985-89)

hints

hints (flooded)

silent

silent (flooded)

upstream 

upstream (flooded)

memory 

memory (flooded)

pathless

pathless (flooded)

preposition

preposition (flooded)

project

project (flooded)

peacemakers

peacemakers (flooded)

patients

patients (flooded)

lone

lone (flooded)

solitude

solitude (flooded)

between

between (flooded)

lightless

lightless (flooded)

homebound

homebound (flooded)

underground

underground (flooded)

isolation

isolation (flooded)

underworld

underworld (flooded)

leaving

leaving (flooded) 

tomorrow?

tomorrow? (flooded) 

rush

rush (flooded)

entranced

entranced (flooded)

history

history (flooded)

exile

exile (flooded)

solstice

solstice (flooded)

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The rainforest breathes of a drear & lush death. The ashen phoenix is all too quiet in the underbrush of dying embers. I see the dying earth breathe a hot ash of distrust and shame, the blood of broken faith runs as from a bone broken clean from the hip. Earth brews a harsh truth, of the fallen creation, yearning to return to the skyward dust. 

Phoenixes by Paulownia Trees by Kano Tan'yu

A spiritual lament turns and writhes like the roots of an upturned tree, cracking and spewing, breaking and rattling the final rattle of reconciliation. I mourn for the beings of ground and light. And of my throat, a burning rush of silence, the ignorant flicks of pain resound, shot through the echo chamber of an empty heart. I see through the body, holed with holy flesh flecked with wounds of impalement and rape. 

The Wawona Tree, 1887

Lungs, tethered to each branch, as I, see, soot-blackened, flushed with discolor and the pangs of mortal addiction. Now, every branch leaved and flowered with lungs of inanimate flesh, long dead and yet left unscavenged, to petrify, as if the air itself were evading the decomposition and decay. Time orbits in the long yawn of solitude. 

The Smoker by Édouard Manet

The more motionless I become, the more the world swirls and the dead sigh their long heaving sigh of memory and remorse. As each uncolored tree cowers lowering into graves of roots from whence they came, the thinning forest reveals a final stand. 

Büssender St. Jerome by Albrecht Altdorfer

A wild trunk, gnarled with the character of age, endures as a thick mark of life ahead. Its neighbor, a trunk straight and smooth, glimmers under the swarming azure. Yet not a single leaf of green rustles in the faraway vale. Pink, earthy and glowing with a bloody, purple pulse, a healthy lung of earthly flesh, as an undiscovered bloom of willow, breathes out the purest air. 

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art & writing & all activities of the creative, while demonstrably flushed with the economic downturn of a costly natural disaster, remains invaluable, and reveals itself as one of the only true & sound Values of human life, beyond the impermanent trespasses of consumption and trade. creativity & art & writing & the wisdom that ensues & issues from the blank page of authentic thought and pure action are only strengthened under the taut and tested strings of emotion & trust in the depth of the human soul.   

I, Internalize My Body

my stomach,
stained with blood and coffee,
and I drink with a consumptive gaze
greedily at the tip of the root hanging from Earth's core,
the Indian tree,
swelling as it sways
to the rhythmic tuning of the cordial universal spring,
and so the strung chords of the world's birthing are plucked
duly, with grand motion over the starboard ocean rains
tunneling into a thunderous vision,
the pierced hawk
eyeing ground from atop the archaic skies of timeless dream,
the soundless above slips beyond the social canopy,
and Confucius prays for love
in the Taoist grave of Saturn's eyeless pupil
memorizing the pages of our life's trunk become engraved
with a stoned ape's tug,
at the hairless chord,
our once upraised wilderness
now chained
to European drug lust

forced, evacuated from my home, surrounded with flooded streets & powerless, transitioning from house to house among hospitable friends, i've been unable to find the space & resources to dream up a new original musical - narrative sound art - piece accompanying the forthcoming chapbook, "Understanding our Meaning" - although I have posted a video from one peace-loving afternoon among friends, in celebration of the presence, in all its magnificence & luxuries of life, breath and harmony. may we all find peace in the ground & space of the moment!

music, as a predominantly community-based art form, teaches us how creativity & art, especially in times of facing a natural disaster, reaffirms our basic humanity, teaches us that despite the angry gods, as metaphysical personifications of the suprahuman forces of nature, and their crashing display of power over death and rebirth, we overcome from within and for each other, through the human triumphs of creation by our hands, through our tongues and in our shared smiles, languages of communal warmth, embrace & gentle touch of especial human beauty, grace & Love.

a special thank you to all those who give help & promote compassion with artists & their communities in times of need