S O U V E N I R S

My latest film effort is a way to tool about with Movie Maker.  My wife and I intend to make films using this basic software and footage from cell phones, digital still and video cameras and found sound, over-dubbed dialogue, BBC sound effects....A kind of minimalist approach, using whatever's at hand.  I always hate hearing people say "I'd make films but I don't have the money or the equipment."  This is no longer valid.  Fortunately, there is free software and cheap equipment out there.  Anyone with a cell phone and access to a computer can make a film.  So yeah, there's a lot of crap on YouTube, but we want to try and making something  good, exploiting what might be seen as limitations and develop an aesthetic.  We have some simple ideas, we're not looking to make a feature, but experiment, have fun and hopefully interest some people in what we're doing.  No pretense to being especially original or innovative in what we do, though we'll try and plus, we want to do it, so we're not gonna let the fact we're not talented filmmakers stop us.

This film actually comes from images I'd been collecting for the very purpose of making a film.  My wife both smiled and grimaced when she saw it, called it kind of "trashy".  I took a deconstructed version of "To all the girls I've loved before" and played it over a series of still images from ads, photo shoots, media, selfies, etc. of sexy women in bikinis, lingerie, nun's habits, naked....anyway, the quote is from the song of the same name and is more a poke at myself than anything else, as if I'm the last of the international playboys, going through super models like a couch potato and his cannibal crisps!  OK, whatever that means.  Anyway, it's a goof, but I know some will find it sexist, which I regret and isn't my intent, but I won't say I'm making a critical comment about the objectification of women or anything noble like that.  I actually selected each of these images because of an erotic charge.  So in a way it's an homage to women or images I found sexy.  It is kind of pervy, though.  Needless to say, it's NSFW.

Previously on LoS:

The Ostrich

Found in translation

Back on August 18, 2013 at 3:47am, I posted the following poem on the LoS Facebook page.  

 

Basically, it's a text from the (Masonic) Grand Lodge of Morocco's website (from which the English seems to have been removed) translated from French to English using a machine translation; one quick read and you'll see why my trade (word pimp/translator) ain't dead yet!  

 

As I said then:  "Google Translate is a great tool for the creation of poetry."  I'd forgotten about this statement when I did my last post, which, if you follow this virtual rag, was me making poetry using Google Translate.  In the following poem I merely took an existing text and broke it into stanzas.  I may have only used selected blocks of the original text; I can't recall and can't find the original for comparison.

 

I rarely write poetry these days, but when I was more active at it (as in a daily routine), I experimented with appropriated text with relative regularity.  Someday I'll post pages from the website I made named "Hand of Glory" which showcased my own experiments, various collaborations and examples of  appropriated works from Burroughs, John M. Bennett and statements by various poets about the practice of appropriation.

Until then....

FOLLOWING IN THE SPRING
OF ARAB MOROCCAN Freemasonry

The United Grand Lodge MOROCCO'S NO LONGER LEGAL no legal existence.
THEREFORE ITS REPRESENTATIVES PRESENT represent only ...
BUT EVEN slander
Gladly!

Information: as usual in Freemasonry Moroccan
few weeks after their affiliation,
close members of radical movements
have declared their intentions foul.

Many BB commend themselves
     as a member of our obedience
with persuasions and Lodges
     with whom we have relationships.

Unfortunately sometimes it is a usurper.