The 1TB LaCie was, I thought, my safest external hard drive, and I kept my back-up on it. But I make video poems, which eat disk space. So my desktop hard drive filled up, and another 500GB EXT HHD hard drive was full, so the back up became the archive. I'm currently out of work, and hadn't bought another drive for back-up when I was clearly bursting at the seams. And was flat up against not being able to continue with a few video projects because I had no disk space. Now, however, the money I was going to use to fix the LaCie will go to a cheaper Western Digital 1TB EXT HHD, and then I can continue with the videos. The LaCie disc itself is dead, it won't turn at all, but the data is probably fully intact, and there are ways to retrieve it. I was quoted $1,000. which is out of my budget range, but you never know... a deal may come up, a computer student may appear, or I could find I can afford it down the road.

If not, well, I'm a self-taught video artist, learning as I go, and while that drive has 2 years of work on it, it is early stuff. There are a couple of videos I'm sad I won't be able to include in a DVD collection, but otherwise, eh. On with the new.

The good news is all the videos are at YouTube; images in Picasa. Artwork is fine, of course - I have the originals. What's online is not the highest resolution, or the quality you'd need to make DVDs, or art prints, etc., but at least I still have a record of these lost years.

All my documents were double backed-up, so that's fine.

With an empty 1TB ext hdd, I look forward to getting back to work.


direct link: 25 video poems by Brenda Clews

Sigh, after embedding my video poetry playlist at YouTube, when I look at what I've lost -the original footage and Final Cut files for all these videos- if I can't afford to retrieve them from the defunct hard drive before the data disappears in however many years, while I try to be optimistic, yes, I do weep a little. Trying to be positive though!

direct link: Welcome to hard times

What a haunting, evocative video poem... the footage quite perfect, it contains the emotion, buried in black seawater and suffused, washing up to the shore like an oil spill, an edge of threatening, and we must imagine the events as they occur in their surreality. Poem by Howie Good and reading by Nic Sebastian, amazing of course.

Swoon wrote (in response to my comment above, with his permission):

"It was a struggle to make though... I couldn't get the atmosphere right at first. Too much... In the end I stripped down a lot and stayed with only the 'washing' tides, the washed up seaweeds and stuff and the wood. I kept the 'foggy footage off course, that was the first idea."

Which caused me to elaborate a little:

Nic's reading is understated, and your video is understated, but wow, the emotion spills out in ways it wouldn't if the video were a more dramatic enactment of the poem. I think you've caught the dreaming, imagining mind at the crux where the river flows into the ocean, where emotive images become part of a thought-process, and the visual and verbal metaphors continue to work at that subliminal level after the video is over.

Our tongues fork into each other. The undersides of clouds splatter slithers of rain meandering down the panes.

In a state of shock. My LaCie 1T external hard drive is dead, fried, the data irretrievable (in my budget range), and it was my back-up. I've lost all of my original files for video poems, Final Cut files, Garageband files, Photoshop files, music, I am too numb to remember everything that was on that dear drive.

My cheap drives are all doing fine. Maybe a message in that?

I have it in to a repair shop. The drive, even in another casing, attached to another computer, is not turning. Dead. Like, in the spirit world. Likely the data is still on it, but unaccessible. It would cost a lot to retrieve it (and that shop doesn't offer that service).

And I nearly did Backblaze a few months ago, or CrashPlan, I can't remember, but I am an anti-credit card type, and they don't accept any options to pay cash.

C'est la vie. I've lost so much stuff over the years as computers have died or I've moved and lost all my emails with a service provider, so....

On with the new.

"...participants who exhibited more low frequency theta waves in the frontal lobes were also more likely to remember their dreams... This finding is interesting because the increased frontal theta activity the researchers observed looks just like the successful encoding and retrieval of autobiographical memories seen while we are awake. That is, it is the same electrical oscillations in the frontal cortex that make the recollection of episodic memories (e.g., things that happened to you) possible. Thus, these findings suggest that the neurophysiological mechanisms that we employ while dreaming (and recalling dreams) are the same as when we construct and retrieve memories while we are awake."

"...dreams help regulate traffic on that fragile bridge which connects our experiences with our emotions and memories."


The Science Behind Dreaming: Scientific American

out of the continual hum, I grasp my fragmentary words, speaking, momentarily, before they slide into the murmur that is everywhere

Slow, meticulous cutting of patterns, sewing. Each second is a stitch; each hour a finished seam. Our lives are the garments we wear.

In the Annex's wealthiest areas, the streets are empty. No cars, no porch-sitters, no children, no-one out watering their front gardens. My dog and I walk. Unencumbered silence.

An empty apartment pool, high up, maybe the 20th or 22nd floor. The building is thin, constructed of whitened concrete. Light from the slits of windows shines on the water. My ex makes me swim naked. He is in a bathing suit. He is in his late 40s; I am more like my 20s. It's okay because we are alone. I swim in the blue chlorinated water around the bend. The pool is shaped like a half moon.

Then we walk down the street, where, again, I am naked and he is dressed. I don't like this, am embarrassed.

I rush back to the building, trying to hide my body. We are in the elevator rising. On the screen in the elevator I try to edit the YouTube video. I want to put on the clothes I am carrying. Only I can't. I have to go to the YouTube studio to do that.

Daphne, 20.5cm x 20.5cm, 8" x 8", dip pen with India, acrylic and fountain pen inks, Moleskine Folio Sketchbook A4. (Click on image for larger size.)

I hand wrote the words with a dip pen under the image today.

I lay in the park sketching the tree; though invisible to the biological eye, she was there. Neither did the lake exist, nor the rocks. It was sunny and yet I found a sliver of a moon and a star on the paper. The child in me saw her. She is like a paper cut-out, drawn as a child would draw; she is Daphne. Look at her laurel crown. Her arms are turning into branches with leaves. I found her ghostdrawing her myth in the green dreaming imagination of the woman drawing in the book on her lap.

This Daphne is caught, perpetually transforming, as night falls. Apollo, the god of light, long gone. No sign of Cupid's arrow, if it ever flew.