video poetry

sorry for the virtual absence, but after wrapping up one of the most trying academic years of my life, i needed to get away. i spent a lot of time in the woods in the back of my house, picked up the harmonica and tambourine, danced and jumped around, and said goodbye to many dear friends. i've crawled around in attics of lofty chapels, swung from vines, and howled at the moon from rooftops. i've passed whole evenings ensconced on windowsills drinking wine from bottles, and spent whole afternoons looking up thru sun-filtered leaves at the sky.


i haven't done any recreational reading, but i've found the act of sitting down to read a difficult one to commit to. i've been restless and noisy lately, a development my parents no doubt regret. since my fascination with the percussive arts has come to a recent boil, they've been trying to divert my energies toward the piano. but since i injured myself during finals week [oh yes, it has been a while: i ran into a concrete wall with my arm while rushing to class and probably fractured it. it swelled up to twice its natural size and then turned a dark purple. the bump has lessened, but a lump remains, and i've been a little worried about my inability - still! - to put pressure on it] piano has been kinda difficult. trills, for example, are inadvertently syncopated, since i can't seem to move the fingers fast enough [that was another thing that was injured in the collision: my knuckles!]

anyway, what i HAVE been up to is trying to find a place for all this stuf i've accumulated in the past year. and, i'm organizing my bookshelf in preparation for SENIOR PROJECT. yes, the huge 80-page thesis i must complete for my defunct degree is nigh. and eventhough i have been writing and preparing for it since basically my sophomore year, i am still worried about it. and so, i am gathering all the hard materials i've been collecting since my freshman year and organizing them into stacks in my room. virtually, i've been collecting research articles and pdf's that are filed away in folders on my mac. i'm working them into chapters soon, and it's exciting to see some form come from all this madness.

other various things: i'm going to Mongolia in less than a month! yippee and yikes at once! i have to find another sleeping bag soon, since the one i have is much too small now and not nearly as warm as i need for the below freezing Mongolian nights. i also have a paper and research to finish b4 i can leave the country, so whew! i am kinda exhausted just talking about it.

but anyway, the REAL point of this post is to share with you the project i have recently started. in the past year i've been taking media aesthetics classes, which was great, b/c i got to watch beautiful films and talk about them all the time. problem was, i never got to make any of my own. and this flies in the face of my own philosophy about being a producer rather than just a passive consumer of cultural products. and so, i have undertaken to make some movies [pardon, FILMS] this summer.

on my list of to-do's:
-video-document the Mongolia trip (i need to buy a new camcorder for this!)
-begin/finish(?) the Students for Staff documentary i started
-do something with all the dozens of video clips i have from the past year...

starting with an idea i had today for a video called Bird Flight, a response/rxn/derivation of Stan Brakhage's Moth Light.


whereas Moth evokes the life (and death) of a moth thru the cutting and pasting of pieces of its actual habitat, i will seek to evoke the life of a bird thru the documentation of its death, thru the cutting n pasting of images it encountered before the moment of its fall. and thusly, i hope to evoke something of a mirror on human life as well.

if i can just get my damned iMovie program to cooperate for a friggin second!!

so stay tuned, somethin's gonna come...
-stephan!e