New Short Film: "Brush on Wood"

"Brush on Wood"
AD, images, words, and music
©2014 AP Durkee. All RIghts Reserved.

The brush poems and painted segments in this short film were calligraphed by hand on iPad.

Happy Helloween from Spooksville

Happy Helloween from all the deadbeats down in Spooksville!
Just a quick vid for all the spooks on All Hallow's Eve.
Video brewed and soundscape decanted by Arthur Durkee 2013.

Just some gratuitous spooky fun. . . .

A Summoning of Fireflies

A new short film.



A Summoning of Fireflies. 2013.

Video, sound & music by Arthur Durkee.

Music: "Summoning" by Arthur Durkee
AD: Animoog, softsynths, bass guitar, live recordings, effects.
All Rights Reserved.

In June, when I was out shooting footage of the wind in the grass, as dusk fell the fireflies began rising from the verge. They pulsed alongside the road ditches, in the trees, and over the fields.

I have spent several evenings this summer filming fireflies at dusk, gathering a lot of good material. This short film is the first in a series.

Video: Thoughts on recent projects

Why am I making videos like this now? Why this, why now? Why something that has no plot or narrative, that tells a story of a place and moment but not one you can adequately summarize? Why images in sequences that are half-scripted, mostly improvised on the spot? Why images that are captures from life rather than carefully planned and properly-executed linear narratives?

I'm making the films that I want to see. That no one seems to be making. It's not really about self-expression, it's about wanting to see certain kinds of art that are unfashionable, even taboo, these days. In the Age of Irony, sincerity is taboo. In the Age of Shallow Surfaces, diving deeper into the waters of the self is frowned upon. In the Age of Artifice, spontaneity is suspect.

All of that is wrong.

Murkiness and ambiguity presented in art, because life can be hard to articulate, are not the same things as obscurity and puzzle-box-making for their own sakes. It's not that art has anything to hide, it's that it wants to hide nothing. I want to know. I want to see the story. Even if the story is about stopping all stories, all narratives, and just being still, even for just a moment.

I'm making the kinds of films that I want to see, that I almost never get to see, because of their uncommercial nature, their unfashionable contents, their often less-than-slickly-perfect style. The artlessness of artfulness. Everyone who's ever written a story knows that fiction tells truths that life finds hard to tell; fiction compresses events into drama; it only seems realistic because it's so artfully put together. We want to be fooled. We want to be fooled, by art, into seeing something like a larger truth.

This is poetic cinema, often nonlinear as well as nonverbal. It can be oblique. It can be moody—in fact, driven entirely by mood and sensibility rather than plot. It's easy to compare this to how music works, often nonverbally and obliquely, creating emotion without the use of linear narrative or text. In fact, it's probably no coincidence that the videos I am making are more like music than they are like stories. Even Romantic program music—Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique for example—that has a scenario and story to tell is still more imagistic and nonlinear than prose. More poetic than prosaic. Even a musical program scenario bows to the actual melodies and rhythms and harmonies used to convey the emotion of the momentary experience.

In my experience, music is both abstract and visceral, realistic yet evocative without being literal. This is that much-discussed territory where music and poetry meet: on the lip of silence and the inexplicable. In the same way that poetry can't be summarized in prose, music can't be either.

I am well aware that the videos I am making are poetic in form and structure, in ways very parallel to how I often conceive of my poems, in terms of form and structure, as cinematic. I have often discussed how I view many of poems as sequences-of-images, nonlinear but evocative in the way music is: recreating an experience in the audience, evoking a mood or sequence of images and moods. I often think of my poetry as cinematic and imagistic. It only makes sense to think of the short films I am making as poetic. I think this may be another territory where the arts meet: just as with music and poetry, we touch here on the convergence of cinematic poetry with poetic cinema.

Darshan: video

Darshan, 2012

Music, Images & Words by Arthur Durkee.

AD: shakuhachi, synthesizers, meditation bells

This is basically a music video for my recent CD, Darshan, which was written to be used for yoga, meditation, Reiki, and other similar purposes. The setting is the same meditation hall in the Japanese garden that I go to when I can to get back to center, meditate, etc.

I am now thinking about doing more music videos for Darshan, as I think this turned out rather well. Stay tuned.

Video: Snow

Snow, a winter video poem, 2012

The artistic constraint used in making this piece was simplicity: this is a single long video take made from the front porch of my old house, during a blizzard in March 2008. That winter we had several blizzards like this, and record snowfall numbers. This was a single long take made when no cars were driving by, because of the storm, and I could get a long take of snow being blown hard through the trees, and off the roof of the house.

The music is similarly constrained: it is an improvised piece played live to stereo recording, with a little processing later. I played my Chapman Stick through an effects box direct into the computer, then added Frippertronics-style tape-loop effects (in this case made using the remarkable VST plugin Ellotronix.)

The haiku was written at the same time as the blizzard was filmed.

under fresh snow
white flowers bloom anyway:
the days passing

Very simple constraints were used, then, producing a focus on one mood, one moment, one vision.

Video: bell ringing in an empty sky

bell ringing in an empty sky, a meditation video, 2012

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This was made using time-lapse photography, photographed at 1 frame per second, played back at variable frame rates. Shot using a tripod; the pan effects were made by turning the tripod slowly as the camera clicked through frames. The only lightsource was the candles in frame.

Another experiment in using tools to make style. We learn by doing. Sometimes the tools themselves give you a clue towards what the subject matter is, and the tone and style in which to present it. Artists need to listen to their tools, usually more than they do. There's a wisdom in the hands that often supersedes the egocentric directions of the head.

Approaching Dusk: poem for video

Approaching Dusk


something not quite seen
not quite there
approaching out of the corner
of the eye

not quite invisible
saturated with secrets
at day’s end

something in the water
the sky’s heartbeat
where the water rises
up to heaven

a small mystery
half-hidden
not quite visible

world whirling on its axis
what do you flee?

why do you hesitate?
who’s coming?
just around the corner
behind that next shadow

something like twilight
like approaching dusk
that takes the edges off the day
full of secrets

•

This is the poem transcribed from my pocket notebook, written at the same time as I was shooting video segments to be edited later. This poem was used as the spoken text for the short film of the same name.

Video: Approaching Dusk

Approaching Dusk, a video poem, 2012. Words, music & video by Arthur Durkee.

My YouTube video channel, where new short films will be posted as I finish them, is: apdurkee

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A few notes on this video:

This is a mood piece, pure and simple. I had the idea for it one evening, and began working on it immediately. It was shot on consecutive evenings in early May, at dusk. That time of day just after the sun has gone down, but it's still light outside. In summer, twilight lingers a long time. The mood I was feeling when I shot the video segments was haunting, poetic, mystical. Not a cheerful mood, not a dark mood, but that mysterious and beautiful in-between mood you often feel at dusk.

I am working my way towards completing more multimedia video work, incorporating poetry, music, and image, and even adding words moving on the screen at times. I've been working towards this for awhile, but finally am getting there. I have made some films like this before, using still photos and poetry, but this film takes the technique and tools to a new level.

To make this video, I set myself come arbitrary creative constraints.

I learned a big lesson from my mentor in music school, Bill Albright, who once told me that sometimes it's liberating to set an arbitrary limit or boundary on your creative materials. Working within set parameters can sometimes free you up mentally, so you get creative. Many writers find their most difficult moments to be when they're staring at the blank page, when anything is possible. To break through that barrier of too many possibilities, which if it's not pushed past can lead to creative block, is to start small, start anywhere, just improvise, set a limit and go with it. A painter can be just as intimidated by a blank canvas: Where do you start? Sometimes setting the arbitrary limit is enough to get you going. You can choose to stay with it until the finish of the work, or transcend the limit later if necessary, but the most important thing is that it gets you started. If you do break out of the limits, it's for a reason, because inspiration and the creative process has led you in that direction.

This insight about creativity really stuck with me. I explored the idea, as a composition student under Prof. Albright's tutelage, by working with unusual instrumental groupings, and by setting arbitrary choices on musical materials. I wrote a three-movement for the archaic early music ensemble of an unbroken consort of recorders. I wrote a piece for english horn and vibraphone. I wrote a percussion quartet, which won a national award. I found that when a musician friend asked me to write a piece for their instrument, it freed me creatively to learn about the instrument and explore its possibilities. I wasn't thinking about a grand career as an orchestral composer, which was too intimidating, I was thinking about just getting this one piece done. I wrote a lot of chamber music, and most of it got performed, and recorded.

As a writer, the setting of an arbitrary limit also works well. I know that some formalist poets talk about how working within a fixed form frees them up rather than limits them. My version of that is to invent a new form, or discover a form emerging organically from one poem and then use that same invented form when writing new poems later. Most of the poems that I write in a fixed form are within forms that I invented, or discovered. I also write a lot of haiku, which is the poetic form I feel most naturally. I have no "feel" for the sonnet, or the sestina, or most of the forms inherited from the history of English-language literature; they don't come naturally or easily to me, and the results tend to be too intellectual and not very lifelike. For example, the only sonnets I've ever written ended up being stale five-finger exercises rather than finished pieces. Haiku and its related forms, tanka, renga, haibun, and haiga, all come naturally and easily. I can almost always write a haiku on the spot. I often write haiku when editing photographs, as a response to the images I made perhaps a month or a year ago, but haven't looked at again till mastering them in Photoshop.

So i set myself some arbitrary limits for the making of this video, in part to learn my tools better, in part as an aesthetic choice made to constrain technical craft in the service of vision. The limits I set myself for shooting the video segments were:

Shoot at dusk.

Make each take short, between 5 and 12 seconds, with the intention of stringing them together later to assemble the film.

Only sharp cuts and very quick crossfades would be used in editing, so many of the video segments were shot with that intention at the forefront.

There were a couple of exceptions to the set time limit that happened, that I knew in the moment of filming were the very best video segments I had captured that day, two of which ended up as longer segments in the final film. The video was shot on two consecutive evenings in early May, and is basically unaltered except for editing segments for length and putting them together.

The video was shot entirely on my iPhone (my phone!), using one video-capture app to make a consistent look. The audio track was made from an ambient recording of my backyard mixed with music I played in GarageBand on my iPad.

I wrote the poem in my pocket notebook at the same time I was shooting the video, just to keep the mood operating on the same level. The poem was revised slightly, and recorded into the same multitrack mixing mastering software that I used to edit the video and audio tracks, on my home studio computer.

The resulting film took a couple of weeks, off and on, to finish editing and mastering. That's typical: post-production always takes longer. Still, I think the mood is captured and sustained, and all elements converged to make a short film that recaptures exactly what I was feeling at the time I made it.

Video: Ocean Arch

Video: Light & Silence

I've opened up my own channel on YouTube, apdurkee, and uploaded two short videos by way of experiment. Eventually I plan to make better-quality uploads. There will more experimental short videos like this on my channel soon.

I have been making short video films since 2005, incorporating my still photography and original music, along with the occasional use of my poems as texts either presented as type in the video itself or read aloud as part of the audio track. I want to explore these possibilities in more depth; it's just taken me some time to figure out the technologies involved. (Including YouTube itself.)

Honestly, making the videos is the most time-consuming part; the upload is relatively easy. Creating, editing and mastering video programs brings out my latent perfectionism: you want to get everything just right, and look and sound its best. This means going over the finished product as a viewer two or three times, to find the last tweaks to make. It's the same process, really, as recording and mixing a song in a recording studio: you do the creative work, you finish the mix, then you take a short break, then sit down and listen through the track with fresh ears (and eyes) for final tweaks.

The video for "Light & Silence" was shot a couple of years ago, on an autumn visit to Grand Teton National Park. The dramatic skies made the day I spent making photos and video some of the best images I've made while at these mountains. The Tetons are one of my favorite places on the planet, in any season. The original video footage was in color, but I've been wanting to experiment with B&W video for some time, to bring the B&W photography aesthetic into the video realm. Two of the shots in this video are time-lapsed, to bring out the movement of the clouds over the mountains.

The music for this short film was made using software synths on my iPad. After recording the basic track, I did some sweetening with reverb while mastering the combined audio and video tracks. The music was recorded very plainly, to keep it simple and clean. It's essentially an improvisation within planned parameters—a way I like to compose a lot of my ambient music. You set an arbitrary limit, perhaps on scale, perhaps on instrumentation or tempo, then you improvise freely within those constraints. This is a way of working as a composer learned from Brian Eno, John Cage, and others. It is partly determined, partly free. Limits give you room to work within. My composition professor back in college once said that limits help us focus, using the constraints they place on us to give us freedom to work within; a lesson i've never forgotten.

Ballad

Ballad by Salvatore Martirano.
David Barick, bass-baritone



Video editing and compositing, effects, etc. by AD.

David Barick is my excellent brother-in-law, a professional musician, former singer with the Nederlaans Kammerkoor.

No, that isn't a picture of David. Just some incredibly disturbed-looking singer found on the Internet. All the X-Files acid green elements were added by me.

Productivity, Creativity, Fear

I was talking late at night with one of my musician friends in Chicago, after a late night video mixing and editing session, in the recording studio. We were editing the music video for a track by Bad Wiring called "Black Frog Soup." While the rest of the gang was working on a section of the video, I made some photos around the studio of what I called, after the idea came together, The Dead Band. The guitar shots ended up in the video.

We were talking as dawn was approaching, while closing down the studio for the night, after everyone else had gone home to bed. Talking personally. Most of that is no one's business. Talking also about the fears and worries that living the artist's life brings us. Always unsure if we'd ever break even or thrive financially. Always dependent on the fickleness of the market for our talents. Our health, our livelihoods. Our families, our relationships. It's not the most stable life, financially.

But what we kept coming back to again and again, the truth that makes it all worthwhile is that, no matter what, no matter how scared you get about life, about people, and everything else, we still make music. No matter what. It's part of life, it's part of what keeps us sane, it's what keeps us going, keeps giving us reasons to put up with everything else, keeps making it all worthwhile. And it is worthwhile.

We agreed that in fact as artists and musicians we're ridiculously, fantastically productive. We never stop. I had spontaneously made photos earlier that night, that we used. (Yes, a good single malt Scotch was involved, at some point. It was that kind of video project.) No matter what else is going wrong, we keep making art. I've got art coming out of my arse. We all do.

Productivity is not our problem.

Our biggest problem, as always, is doing what we do and getting paid for doing it. Finding the audience. Finding the people who want what we do. Finding the clients. Funding the ongoing work.

Productivity is not a problem. We're always productive. None of us, in our circle of artist and musician friends, ever have writer's block. We just don't experience that. There's always some kind of art to be made. And if one project gets stuck, there are always more to work on. You just shift gears, or do some crop rotation.

Creativity is not our problem. As a group, and as individuals, we're always coming up with lots of ideas, some no one else has ever thought of before.

So what's the problem?

Well, there isn't one, not really. Except making a life worth living, which is everyone's problem. Nonetheless, talking about productivity, and the need to just keep going even when the chips are down—this was a mutual pep talk, to be honest—got me thinking about what does stop people in their tracks.

Almost every time, it's fear. Fear, and nothing else.

There's a masterful book about artmaking, written by artists David Bayles and Ted Orland, titled Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. Every creative ought to own this book, and reread it every few years. The advice therein does help one stay on track.

Here's a few relevant quotes from the book:

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The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential.

To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process.

Those who would make art might begin by reflecting on the fate of those who preceded them: most who began, quit. To survive as an artist requires confronting these troubles. Basically, those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue - or more precisely, have learned how to not quit.

What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears continue; those who don’t, quit.

Art is made by ordinary people. Creatures having only virtues can hardly be imagined making art. It's difficult to picture the Virgin Mary painting landscapes. Or Batman throwing pots. The flawless creature wouldn't need to make art.

What you need to know about the next piece is contained in the last piece.

•

So being an artist means: Keep making art. Keep on going. Keep producing.

So what we were talking about, in the studio, late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed, was survival, continuance, productivity. My friend turned reminded me that we are both very productive, always have been, and will continue to be so. I've been thinking about that.

Last night I got home after jamming for a couple of hours with another musician, one who I'd just met. It was good, but because of my chronic illness I got home very tired. When I run out of energy, I hit that wall hard, and I just have to stop. So I spent the rest of the evening just relaxing.

And before I went to bed, I went over to my new piano for awhile, and played Erik Satie's "Premiére Gymnopédie" from memory. A favorite piece I've played many times over the years. I stumbled a few times. I need to get out the score and refresh my memory.

Yet I sat there at the piano, marveling: I have a piano! I can sit down and play, or compose, any time I want to, even the middle of the night.

Tonight, a thunderstorm has swept through, soaking the land. A few dramatic claps of thunder and flashes of lightning. It looks like it will rain all night. The sound of the rain on the porch roof, on the chimney cap, is soothing. It's from my childhood in the tropics, I suppose: I always find rain on the roof soothing. It's a favorite sound to fall asleep too. I've even been known to sleep on the porch on rainy nights, just to listen to it.

So tonight I will before bedtime sit down to play some more. Some quiet lullabies, some music to soothe the savage breast.

No fear. No end to creativity. Endlessly productive. Just keep going. Everything else can fall apart. And probably will. And for now I have a piano, I have music, I have to make, I have another several months of photos to sort through, and we all keep going forward.

Road Work

from the Road Journal

I'm in Maine at the moment, on a photography/videography road trip. I've met several people in Maine who came from elsewhere on a visit, and stayed. Or left and came back. It is indeed very beautiful here on the northern Atlantic coast. It's the same latitude as northern Minnesota and Michigan's Upper Peninsula, so at times the land looks very familiar to my eye: right down to the dominant tree and other plant species. You're in "The North" here. But there's also the ocean.

I've been doing a lot of driving. Some days it seems like too much. Driving in New England does not impress me, for several reasons: all the roads here are twisty and low-speed, so even though the distance on the map doesn't look like much, you don't get very far some days. Out in Wyoming or Nevada, I've driven for nine hours, example, and gone the length of those states, where the roads and long and straight and open, and where the speed limits are higher than in New England. A couple of days ago, in Vermont and New Hampshire, I drove all day and barely got 200 miles. It can get frustrating to someone more used to open roads than windy river-valley-following trails.

Another problem is that every little town on the two-lane highways seems to regard having a stoplight as a status symbol. The problem is, they are not run by computers using traffic sensors, so you can sit at a red light, where there's zero cross-traffic, and no else around at all, for up to three minutes for no reason.

Final reason that I'm going to mention here. Call me a Midwesterner, I won't complain. But I have yet to observe that the feeling that many New Englanders seem to carry, that they are the center and circumference of the Known Universe, is based in anything but illusory self-satisfaction. Granted, any locale can contain a certain smugness. You expect this sense of self-focus from New York City: but to also get it from people who live in remote upstate New York as well? Well. If it's earned, I haven't seen how as yet.


from the Road Journal

I'm on the road, making new images. I'm getting some good work done, yet it's been raining and cold this entire trip, with only about a day and a half of sunshine logged in over a week of travel. I intended to camp out in state parks all the way; but the weather has been so bad, I've only been able to camp out twice so far. Perhaps on the return leg of the trip, when things further south become more summerlike than late-winterlike.

But I'm also on the road for my own reasons, which are more important. These reasons didn't even become clear to me until I'd already set out. Specifically, I am on a sort of pilgrimage to visit the home-places and muse-places of many artists and writers I admire. I've visited May Sarton's home in Nelson, New Hampshire. I plan to look in Frederick Franck's place Pacem In Terris; also, Andrew Wyeth's Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania; Robert Frost's Vermont; and perhaps some others. This plan and purpose only came clear to me once I was already here; but now it's the trip's main theme. I've been writing up thoughts about this as I go, which I will eventually post as essays with photos. Right now, though, I'm gathering still, not yet digesting and writing-about. Later for that.


the artist at work, Watkin's Glen State Park, NY

I'll be traveling for another week or so. Then I'll be back home, and start the sorting process, once I recover from the long drives. Meanwhile, I post here a few tidbits, a few random images and haiku and other thoughts, and perhaps one or two soundscapes as they occur.

We drive on. We can't go on. We go on.

Liquid Crystal Gallery Debuts

It's official!

Our Liquid Crystal Gallery DVD project is now real.

The first DVD, A Day in the Natural World, has been duplicated, and is available for all to see, and hopefully purchase. I have also built a website for LCG, and will add to it as time goes on, and new DVD films get made.

We have previews of the first four films on the website, available to be viewed as streaming or downloadable video, including previews you can view on your iPod.

         

There are four DVD films completed, with one already duplicated, and the others soon to follow. More films will be on the way. (This past month I have been photographing and shooting HD video of the autumn color changes here in the Upper Midwest, which will be the material for our next DVD.) I really want to get back into this, now that I have more time available for it. We have a long way to go to make this DVD business a viable concern, but at least the first steps have now been taken. It's taken me more than two years to get this far, but now I'm at the threshold, and waiting to cross over into the new life.