DiS Does Art: January 2020 šŸ„³

Took a paragraph from the December one (is that cheating?) but here you go.

The absence of raindrops on a pool, or how I wrote about masturbating and anxiety under the guise of a swimming pool pieceā€¦


I watched as the bite of cold devoured patches of the lawn, a silver pelt of ice crystals where it once was green. I stepped onto the lawn in those places just to feel the tsunami of minute crunches crash beneath me, and my daughter, too light to make those same devastating waves, ran back and forth across the lawn and when she reached the furthest corner she shouted: ā€˜Mummy! I love youā€™ just to hear her echo. In winter the garden canā€™t show us love so we summon our own and it bounces off the walls into the night.

I didnā€™t make the neighbourhood tree planting day. Afterwards, the new saplings in their test tube casing winked at me through the kitchen window, light playing on their protective coats in triumph. They tried to coax a jealousy from me that the garden grows without my help, that it is hardy and sufficient and when it is frozen it is its truest, sharpest form. It noted my absence on the tree planting day and withdrew from me. It never saw me tame its weeds in the kindest possible way, or tend the rhubarb when it was thin and spindly, or plant the teasels in its borders to bring goldfinches, or castrate the raspberries down to raw stubs in February. I feel like it saw us decimate the ghost berries though, picking them to crush just to hear their pop. I think it felt as I needlessly drove a stake into the earth to support a ladybird shelter which remains devoid of life, and it watched as I took its conkers into the flat but never saw me return them in the dark, away from my daughterā€™s magpie eye.

I have tried to make the garden my saviour, and often times it obliges, but it bears a grudge and in winter it leaves me loveless.


It rained for days. When the rain landed on my face it was a barely registered prickle, I felt numb, I had stopped looking when I crossed the road, and as if inside a perpetual grey cloud I drifted over dark pavements. I have been disappearing for some time. Rather than cocoon myself from the freezing mizzle, often I lift my face to the sky. I threatened the moon that met my gaze during those times: show me something I can feel.

And she did. There was a sea change in me. Anger which had swelled like waves took over the calmer waters too, it fizzed at the surface with ever-increasing ferocity and the thin shell that had contained the expanding mass beneath now became infected by it. The rain, the sea, the tide inside. I fled to still waters, submerged in a pool, dolphining silently above the tiles. In the pool, there is no weather.


There is a time the pool and the garden co-exist within me and when the rain and the sea seem not to.
Lying on the bed, I see a tall drooping branch of the raspberry bush bowing at my window. Where it bends I see shoulders, the curved section that bobs under the weight of the arc like a head makes slow and small moves, swaying from side to side, and its movements are that of a lover between my legs and when my eyes close I see bright flashes like the neverending white pits in a jam jar, and blood rushes to my skin and makes me the colour of the just-reddening fruit. I invite the garden into my bedroom then.

I am untethered, my phone slips from the duvet. I listen. I listen to the air pass over my lips, then to the absence of sound like the black space between stars. Quiet sighs oscillate across the heavy bedroom air. Again I sigh, I gasp, on my bed I float on my back, and the pool and the bed fight for reality beneath me. I push off from the wall, pulling myself across the water in a fast backstroke. The only sound I hear is my straining breath and with my ears submerged I hear it only from within. As my breath escapes into the space above me I am on the bed, in the clutches of the raspberry bush, my face to the sky looking for a feeling and finding one. I push my body through the pool with an urgency. Around me people race, crawl, tread water, swim laps, track their speed, count their lengths, submerge, but none of them hear the noises I make when I try to quietly orgasm. When I pull myself out of the pool the spell is broken. I am just a mass of chlorinated body parts that wobble and goosebump as I walk to the showers.

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This is awesome! Your writing is so evocative, I always feel (no pun intended) like Iā€™m swimming around in your words when I read it. Talk about setting the bar for the month!

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Thank you :blush: Of all the private things Iā€™ve shared with this forum over the years sharing my writing is the hardest, but this being a mixed medium thing is great as I donā€™t feel like itā€™s a serious writing group and I can just have some fun.

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Youā€™re really good, and I can definitely understand about the nerves - I was terrified about sharing musical stuff here because of the sheer level of talent knocking about! Love this piece.

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Very much this. I love when writing can effortlessly create a vivid sense of a place or situation without imposing specifics on you (if that makes sense), and thatā€™s something that was def present here.

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This is good to hear because something I really struggle with is putting myself in the readersā€™ shoes. Sometimes I write things that are confusing as I expect the reader to know what I do about the setting. Must get better at that, its something I always forget to sense check.

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Summary

:eggplant:

The absence of :eggplant:

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I have a good idea as to what the music will sound like for this, and Iā€™m feeling better about my voice, but I donā€™t know if and when a recording is gonna happen.

I meanā€¦ I think Iā€™ll try coming up with some chords/loops/whatever tonight, as I have a vague idea of the mood and tonality, but should I just post the lyrics Iā€™ve come up with?

Yes to the lyrics please

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itā€™s lapping at the tiles in the porchlight,
ā€œif I was with youā€
will always be you /

a single bead dissolving spreads the distance,
it is drumming on the windowpanes tonight /

(she likes swimming, like you like swimming,
slips in easy, and looking at me smiles) /

what is contained
in what falls
in any given forecast? /

raindrops on the pool, you can tell,
and in the footprints, the wake,
her towel at the the side /

(have you suffered enough to have earned this,
or so much thereā€™s no surface left to grip?) /

still buckled August 4th with that response,
empty days through seven years before,
still crossed out /

despite the covers
they will like any story
be drained but for debris /

but these years will never ache like those years,
their years,
closed now in diaries and lived/


(I hope these arenā€™t actually terrible lyrics. itā€™s been a while, and itā€™s hard to write anything I donā€™t loathe just because I wrote it)

(I changed the first utterance of ā€˜dropā€™ to avoid repetition)

(ugh Iā€™m awful, sorry)

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I love them. Reminds me of Built to Spill meets American Football meets R.E.M.

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thank you so much :blue_heart:

I love Mike and Dougā€™s lyrics, so this means a lot, to think I can even come close

(and Michaelā€™s :slight_smile: )

there are worlds in this. your vocabulary is incredible.

my favourite writing has always communicated emotions through something of an abstractionā€¦ like the way you use the garden and etc as a vessel for all kinds of brooding; the way the tension builds between the inner turmoil and the observations. tumultuous, symbioticā€¦ yeah. youā€™re good. :slight_smile:

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Wow scout, just wow. Your writing evokes physical feeling.

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Kanawa plumbs the depths in his latest effort

Satoshi Kanawa seeps back into the public consciousness with his sixth film, ā€œRaindrops falling on a poolā€. Like his previous efforts, Kanawa eschews any easy categorisation. He makes eyes at the mystery genre, dabbles in romance and even flirts with horror towards the end.

The elliptical story follows Shuji, a young dilettante living in a deadbeat village in rural Japan. He has no interests except from his butterfly collection. His disapproving aunt enlists him to work at the local pool, a rundown artifact attended by a ragtag selection of swimmers. There are the elderly twin brothers who have swum for 60 years in perfect harmony. The middle aged housewife, obese and terrified of another heart attack. And finally, the young woman whose athletic dreams were shattered in a fit of youthful insolence. In the chlorinated depths these characters find some kind of salvation.

There is just one catch for Shuji: he canā€™t swim, and is terrified of water. His days are spent in a strange limbo of boredom and terror. Scared that he will waste his life away under the artificial glare, scared he will be called into action for a test he cannot fulfil. His only possible redemption is the elfin Hina, the failed Olympic swimmer. In her he finds a mirror of his own confusion and sadness.

The film is a triumph of drab hues. The swimming pool complex is a murky other-world of ancient tiles and mournful ripples. Haruto Nakamuraā€™s tactful lens captures the sharp glare of the overhead lights beautifully, contrasting it with the grey skies dominating the windows. And this is where Kanawa really excels, the strange, eerie atmosphere that permeates the film and tells us that not everything we are seeing is at it seems.

The film takes on a rather left field turn at its median point, a rather risky endeavour that will divide audiences. For myself I found the switch a little jarring, as the carefully crafted atmosphere of the first half makes way for broader, less nuanced strokes. While the character of Shuji has his initial charms, the pursuit of Hina falls into clichƩ. She feels like a character we have seen before, conjured in the minds of a thousand adolescent boys.

Still, it is in the echoing corridors that the mind will rest. If Kanawaā€™s imagination cannot quite make the final lap, at least he has given us a shadowy world which we would readily dive into again.

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Would watch.

Love the phrase mournful ripples.

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I might read this again before I go to sleep and try to make this film occur in my subconscious. Thereā€™s a shot from it in my head that I think is really cool.

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Hereā€™s my entry (also my first track of 2020, yay!) Iā€™d been doing a kind of raindrops on surfaces-ish sound on the little dinky Volca modular Iā€™ve been on and off teaching myself to use, and had been looking for somewhere to use it. So thanks!

I was hoping to write something alongside it, but then the sort of atmosphere of this music changed so now has nothing to do with the original thing I was going to write, and more to do with something else I might write.

See the above paragraph for ample reasons why, ultimately, I should probably abstain from writing anything.

oh and obviously the ableton file was called milpool

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This is lovely. Also, M immediately stopped having a tantrum when I put it on.

The birthday bit :blush:

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