The 140 character Twitter tweet, and now the 4 second Robo.to video calling card. Or the madness of repetitive movement. It's all fun!

A Globe & Mail series, forthcoming through the next week. I found the first two disturbing, painful. Life is not just worse than ever for women in Kandahar, but life-threateningly dangerous. How, after the short period of optimism and hope, some shedding of the burka for the veil, bravely venturing out to schools, to work, did things turn back into a life that the women say is worse than that under the Taliban? Then there was 'a reason' for the attacks & torture, now there isn't - just a whole city become psychopath. Scary. Sad. Tragic.

Direct link to Grünemusik's 'Nyx' on Jamendo - 6 tracks, about 30 minutes.

You can download this album for free if you wish. It carries a Creative Commons License.


Profound experimental music for inner journeys...

A large vision. I listened to 30 sec of the first track last night and downloaded without reading the notes. This morning, out with the dog in the morning air, I listened.

And I thought how far some of our musicians have moved from 'traditional' music, though I was not thinking of the Orient but of the European concert. Melody and rhythm don't exist in this album in the traditional sense.

There is a beat, but it is organic. As if we are moving through a deep underground cave. Echoes. Stalagtites. Distant water where diving is so deep as to be depthless. Strange sea creatures in those black waters of the lakes in the underground caves. Ecstatic diving, bubbles, cool pure water.

As we move through the dark cool chambers of the cave, its damp limestone walls, light cascades in occasionally. Ebullient. Nourishment for our earthbound bodies.

The woman singing is ethereal, like a Greek siren calling, or an angel healing, she is both, and a vocaloid who is aesthetically crafted.

We move through Nyx as if in a movie. I felt an archetypal narrative unfolding in my depths. The "Primordial goddess of the night"... wow! Yes! I felt her, strongly, in my first listening, before referring to the notes.

The drums throughout hold everything together for me. They are my link to traditional music, tribal music, and the power of the Orient beats here too.

Fukataku's drumming anchors the subterranean journey of this soundscape. This soundscape in 6 sections - organic sonic world of strange sounds and energies and things sweeping, by, close, far, ebulliently, darkly, it's almost a ghost world, and yet more primal than that. The human and the animal and the synthesized all co-alesque in this deeply mythological, archetypal music that is ambient and trance and has flavours of traditional Japanese music which takes the listener through a deep inner journey in the dark and mysterious places of the soul.


Photo of cave from David Darling.
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From Nyx's album notes:

Album description

The primordial goddess of the night. Dark ambient atmosphere with Miku-dub.

Notes on tracks:

1) Melisma singing of the vocaloid Miku in the eastern Asia flavor.
2) Electric ambient dub in three parts with vocaloid's chant.
3) A dub version segued from the previous track.
4) Aether is the elemental god of the "Bright, Glowing, Upper Air." Minimal sequence of electric piano diverges.
5) Nyx, the goddess of the night, appears from the bottom of dark ancient Chaos. Based on a session with Fukataku, the drummer.
6) A short sketch in five. The vocaloid Miku sings the last one verse to fade out.
___

Grünemusik is the name of a unit owned by hikaru (nankado). He's been publishing experimental-pop tunes since 2000 in Japan.

Original CD-Rs internationally available on-line at his official website.

I didn't like what I wrote, so didn't post daily as I thought I'd do, and didn't write more... But that's how it is. Writing emerges in the way it emerges. While we can shape it a bit, mostly we have to accept what is manifesting. Trust it. The artist stands aside to let the work emerge in its fullness. Are we guardians of the creative impulse? Gatekeepers. Filters. Beacons. That which flows through us, from our fingers, in our words, or the strings of our instruments, or the brushes we hold full with paint, through our heartminds. We struggle to give form to our visions, yes. It's work, yes. But we still have to stand aside to allow the shining.

What I wrote, which didn't please me:



Less is more. I forget this on the short ride in the elevator.

The self is contained in its demeanor.

The demeanor in the business suit in the high security corporate world in the role. It is professional, underplayed. Wealth glitters everywhere in diamond rings, Rolex watches, talk of trips, events. Hinted. Happily. Less is more; more is more; a code for what is secure, safe.


A way of sitting, like a bird on a branch, sleeping. Upright. Aware, awake, lucid dreaming.

Allowing strange logic. Deep inner mind unfolding dream image sequences.

Rushing past the moment catching up with us.

Faint etchings of the body on the back of the eyelids, like bird scratchings. Strange, thin stick things in suits.


In the park at lunch, a man shouting, furious anger. People placidly watching. His emotion rises like a maniacal tide in him and unfurls spitting salt on the other man, who stands before him.

And again, he is asked to re-do the scene.

The park, lunchtime strollers, people sitting, birds pecking crumbs from the ground, fountain spraying into the air, sun, the film crew at a distance, the camera like a voyeur, the actors alone on the path, a light held by someone, a reflector by another.

That emotion found in his depths, brought curling in fury to the surface and spitting out his mouth.

I don't know how he does it.

Willing it, summoning inner dreampower, the believing heartmind, imagination.

When we watch the movie, we will be suspended in the reality of the dangerous narrative filmed in the sunny gentle park.

Even if I am working full-time, have kids, a dog, a cat, too busy, too tired, etc etc, I'm considering beginning a "found poem" of my days. Crazy, packed writing. Allowing impressions to form words that form thoughts and images. Keeping a tiny notebook, smacking keys at lunch on my netbook, buying a new Nano iPod with a voice recorder to record impressions; however I can do it, doing it. Letting it grow in its own unpruned ways. Snippets. Definitely snippets. Trusting the heartmind. Trusting the instinct to poetry. Snippets of what the intellect is grappling with. What the senses are detecting. The poetries of living. Awkward sometimes. Knowing other times. Ambiguities. Allowing the heartmind its impressions, the way we feelthink. Not superseding the raw data of living with a determination to present a nice face with nice smiling theories (though some days are like that), and certainly with no "lesson" to teach (never, it's make your own), no agenda. Not trying to show it's a good world, or a bad one. Or that there is an answer at all. And then again, some days there is, and it seems to click and work. Allowing.

Perhaps this is the first paragraph.

Perhaps I've already begun.

Letting it stream.

I want to save how we have developed while I revert back, delete the versions, the revisions, to the origins. To come to first appearance, where the hesitant beginnings are, to re-discover the faint sketch of what is to come. To undo backward to the untouched data as it would display itself now to my worldly eye. To find the first uncut, un-enhanced, unedited draft. Where it is unfocussed and unformulated. Before the narratives tidy it up. Where we dangle freely, a cluster of possibilities.

I sit in a sculpture that is architecture. White-painted iron arches and ribs repeat over the walkway like a riot of infinite regressions in a mirror. Distorting glass windows over the archways bounce light and reflect the architectural columns in permutated ways. Looking at the rounded arch of white ribs through the glass which is divided into sections by frames it feels as if we’re in the skeleton of an old boat, itself a rendition of a ribcage lit from within the belly of a whale, a huge beast basking in the sun pouring through the glass sky as it rolls through the waves.

The sound of French café music, slightly jazz, sensual, romantic, and a fountain spraying, pouring add to the surreal experience.

Rich forkful by forkful I eat a Napoleon, vanilla cream custard, flake pastry, fresh strawberries, with a smooth yet bitter coffee. My dessert swims in its vanilla cream on a large platter on an outdoor iron table and I am seated in a wicker chair that rests on a floor of polished field stone tiles. Large planters holding Ficus trees and other foliage line the edge of the patio - like a street café in Valencia, or any cosmopolitan European city. There are green and red and yellow canvas umbrellas over some of the tables.

Is this decoration, or does it serve a purpose in the glass-filtered sun? The sun that makes my netbook screen almost impossible to clearly see. The same dancing light is on my lap. I take cell phone photographs.

Santiago Calatrava, a Spanish architect, sculptor and engineer designed Brookfield Place in downtown Toronto. There are resemblances to the Eaton Centre, and I discover in an Internet search that a Canadian architectural firm, Bregman & Haman, constructed both.

Two Chinese women, one eating French fries and the other a spinach omelette. One with a white hairband holding straight black hair back, navy blue trousers, a white top, 'business casual'; the other, older, in a flat-brimmed straw hat with a ribbon coloured in blacks and whites, large white pearl earings, a white cotton blouse edged with fine lace, soft black slacks. They are eating inside a café where the ceiling-mounted speakers play romantic French songs. I imagine they are mother and daughter. The younger woman perhaps working in the downtown corporate complex has been taken out to lunch by her older widowed mother. The older woman is dressed for the occasion; it is clear this is an outing. She sips white wine. Her daughter drinks water. The older woman eats slowly with an elegance that recalls times past; the younger appears stressed and looks at her watch from time to time. Simple complaints about living are aired, the cost of rice, or hydro, or plane fare to China, worries about relatives are discussed, lightly gossiped about, who's out of work, who's drinking too much, who works too hard. The missing man, the husband, the father, who perhaps died of a heart attack, or cancer, is ever-present as a shadow. The weight of the loss of him lies between them. Though it is carried lightly today, it never goes away. As they finish their meals, they sit back, one on either side of the marble café table, similar looks of contentment on their faces. It’s been pleasant. A lovely late lunch. Nothing too awkward arose in the conversation. Plans are made for family outings and dinners, perhaps taking the children to the zoo one Sunday, dinner at the daughter's afterward. The mother voices a distant wish that the children's grandfather could be with them. They recognize their mourning. There is a moment of the silence of remembering. It is a full silence that includes gratitude for the blessings of their lives, the children, the houses, the steady financial flow on which their lives rest. And then they rise and the older woman pays not the waiter but at checkout, for this is the way it is done to facilitate the diners who are largely business clientelle. Do they hug and kiss each other's cheek? I do not see before they wander off to their respective worlds.

Perhaps I begin to understand why I am having difficulty writing in my blog, which has been a writerly home to me for some years now.

A man I had an involvement with a few years back, and wrote about in the poetical way I do, has 'blocked' some of my blog posts.

If I do a search on some of my posts, the page appears blank.

Yet I can get to these pages through direct links elsewhere and by pasting the url into the browser.

For instance, he has attacked my 'Bliss Queen' poem in this way. That he has chosen this poem to target particularly perturbs me. It is hidden but still accessible.

You can find it here: The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss.

Yet if you copy & paste these words- The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss -into the Blogger search bar on the upper left, all posts with aspects of the title appear, but not the post with the full poem itself. He's hacked into my Blogger blog somehow, or paid someone to do it, and suppressed my post. (When he reads this post of course he'll unblock it, but then you can run a Google cache search on this date and see what I am talking about.)

There are other posts too.

Until I gave up on men, which I feel I have nearly done, and it's been a few years now, I was intimately involved with a Rabbi (I didn't become Jewish), a swinger (I didn't 'try it out' but he was writing a book and so it was quite fascinating though I backed out after a mere 8 weeks without judgement), and, and I know it sounds silly and yet I couldn't be more serious, a 'non-violent' yet still textbook-case psychopath. It is the gentleman who is in the latter category who has been hacking into my Blogger account, or, more likely paid someone to do it for him, and made some of my posts "disappear."

Posts that he utterly approved of and had me email to him as well as read to him on the phone and enjoyed my discomfort at what I was describing. He is a man without conscience; an 'always happy' man; a man who lives by a code of outsmarting everyone by lying, and lying in a way that is so seamless you'd almost never know he wasn't telling the truth. I only got confirmation by an outside source that caused his stories to unravel. And I haven't yet even written about that! That's the juicy stuff that I dare not tell, and you would understand this if you knew me, though one day it'll make for an interesting autobiography. :-)

Tonight I realized that once again a man that I have been in some sort of intimate relationship with is deliberately suppressing my writing. I have a history of this sort of involvement - and the list is a long one, including and especially my ex - that, firstly, you'd think I'd have learned by now, and, secondly, there are millions of kind, caring, supportive, sensitive, intelligent, loving men in the world who would be much better match for me than the men I've so haplessly gotten involved with.

This whole episode of the 'disappeared posts,' as you can see, and which would delight him no end, seeing as he enjoys watching others suffer, and I know that sounds terrible, but I witnessed it again and again, never understanding his lack of empathy, of compassion, until I realized how closely he fits the 'psychological profile,' is quite serious, and troubling.

I'm being hacked into and I know who is doing it and I don't know what to do about it.

Other than contacting Blogger, and going public.

Everyday I think about posting, I miss being at my blog. It's an important part of my life. But I have no access at work, and my day starts at 6am and I'm home by 6pm and evenings are busy with both of my children living with me, a dog and a cat, and volunteer tutoring my 18 yo student who can't read (which was tonight so I am particularly tired with getting home late) that I can't seem to get to writing. It's like it's on the other side of an ocean and I can't seem to reach ecriture with the girth of water increasing daily...

Health issues have quietened down, and other that being more tired than I can remember ever being, everything is fine.

Beautiful readers, I miss posting and being with you in the ways we are! I am considering how to squeeze stolen time out of my schedule to write secretly, something, anything, because I will go insane if I cannot write.

Well. Not quite. You understand how difficult it is to be somewhere where you may not compose anything of your own. Not even able to get online through my netbook at lunch because that requires 'special permission.' I've had access to my email and blog in all other jobs but I understand that security is tight and I accept the rigors of it all and I need the paycheck and I am not complaining but not being able to write in the poetic ways I do is perhaps the most fatiguing of all.

Anyway, I am so tired tonight that I must go and rest...

So, sweet beautiful blessings to you all, be back as soon as I figure out how to continue to be who I am in a more corporate world, and I will, I've done it before, just not under such a lot of other things that also require much energy and attention.

If you're curious and would like to know the general area I'm working in, check out Varonis. I'm working in the regulated private sector for a business that is implementing this incredible product.

And so on, onward, onwards ho! and so forth, and etcetera.

::SMILING:: hugs xo