Northern Spark 2012 – Night Owl Paradise

Night On Fire, BlackBerry Shots, photo © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved. Original BlackBerry photo June 2011, part of Northern Spark — Twin Cities Nuit Blanche.

Northern Spark 2012 begins next weekend in the Twin Cities at dusk on Saturday, June 9th and ends at the crack of dawn, Sunday, June 10th. Northern Spark is a free, dusk to dawn, participatory arts festival that presents visual arts, performance, films, and interactive media. Tonight at the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis we plan to attend the Pre-Spark Bridge Lighting where planners will flip the switch for Northern Spark’s signature artwork, Robin Schwartzman’s THINK AND WONDER, WONDER AND THINK.  They will also be giving out festival guidebooks to preview before June 9.

Last year’s inaugural Northern Spark was magical. In 2011, over the course of the night, there were 50,000 visits to 100 projects by more than 200 mostly local artists at 34 venues in collaboration with 60 partner organizations and sponsors. I have listed a few of the places we visited in 2011 and a little history of the Nuit Blanche (“white night”) movement in the piece Northern Spark — Twin Cities Nuit Blanche.

The three photographs in this piece were taken while I was standing in the middle of Jim Campbell’s Scattered Light installation, part of Northern Spark 2011. In Annotated Artwork: The Making Of Jim Campbell’s ‘Scattered Light‘, Jim says moving from 2-D to 3D art is about “exploding an image, tearing it apart, and spreading it out.” His tips: 1. Pick a spot 2. Grab Source Material 3. Turn it into code 4. Create depth 5. Consider the planet. Honoring point 5, he and his assistants revamped thousands of standard lightbulbs, sawed them open, stuffed them with LEDs, and glued them back together, making handmade, unique, energy-efficient hybrids.

I am looking forward to Northern Spark 2012. At the Northern Spark website, there is a Planning Your Night page with a full list of events, including a link to download their new Northern Spark mobile app. We’ve already got ours loaded on our Androids. I only hope there is enough time to make all the events we’ve listed. It’s perfect for all of our fellow NightOwls! Hope to see our local readers there! If you can’t make it, you can follow Northern Spark on their Facebook page and at Twitter @Northern_Spark #NSPK.

Out Of The Darkness (L), #NorthernSpark – Scattered Light by Jim Campbell 23/52 (R), BlackBerry Shots, photo © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved. Original BlackBerry photos June 2011, part of Northern Spark — Twin Cities Nuit Blanche.

-posted on red Ravine, Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

-related to posts: Northern Spark — Twin Cities Nuit Blanche, Suspended In Light (Reprise), Insomnia Haiku: Counting Syllables In My Sleep, Mickey’s Night Owl Sandwich, Dreams Of A Creative Insomniac

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Back-To-School Sales — A Writer’s Paradise

Tools Of The Trade (On Sale), Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 2009, all photos © 2009 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

 
 

Back-to-school sales are a bonus for writers. Liz came home last night with presents in tow: three full-sized college ruled notebooks for Writing Practice and five colorful 4 1/2 by 3 1/4 Composition notebooks with marble covers (my favorite for carrying around in my pocket). The large notebooks were a penny less than 4 bits; the small ones only 19 cents. (Hint: a bit is 12.5 cents; 2 bits is a quarter.)

Last night I put the small red Composition notebook by my bed. It came in handy when I woke up at 3 a.m. with insomnia. I grabbed it and wrote down these haiku (senryu) floating around in my head. I had hoped the rhythmic counting would help me get back to sleep:

 
 

Insomnia haiku (II)
_____________

crumpled white paper
word remembrances of love
regurgitation
 
10 sleepless monsters
rambling around in my head
flat Insomnia

beyond Milky Way
a random act of kindness
what it takes to love

 
 
 

 
 

I hope everyone is taking advantage of the back-to-school sales to stock up on writing supplies. Paper products are our Tools of the Trade. What kind of notebooks and pens do you love? Where can we get the best deals?

 

-posted on red Ravine, Thursday, August 13th, 2009

-related to posts: WRITING TOPIC – TOOLS OF THE TRADE, haiku 2 (one-a-day)

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Insomnia Haiku: Counting Syllables In My Sleep

Insomnia, Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 2009, photo © 2009 by
QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

every waking moment
fitful bursts of sleeplessness
posing as dreams

 
 
 
 
 
 

Couldn’t sleep last night; so many scattered thoughts rolling around in my head. They say you wake up at 3 a.m. for anxiety, 4 a.m. for depression. I must be feeling anxious. At a few minutes before 3 a.m. (Dead Time), I was wide awake. So wide awake, I even broke the 5-7-5 structure on the Sleeplessness senryu (not typical of my haiku).

I did keep the 17 syllables. After a few years of haiku, they must be hardwired into me. Sometimes I’ll dream about writing and counting haiku in my sleep. I once read about a Japanese poet, Shuson Kato (born Takeo Kato but referred to by his pen-name, Shuson), who counted syllables on his fingers while he lay unconscious a few weeks before his death.

 
Here is an excerpt from his 1993 obituary in the Independent — Shuson Kato, poet and scholar: born Tokyo 26 May 1905; died Tokyo 3 July 1993:

In April this year, he fell sick, but again recovered and started the arduous task of choosing the weekly poems for the Asahi. Alas, on 20 June he lost consciousness: the 11 July issue of the Asahi poetry page was his last. It was said that even while he lay unconscious he was moving his fingers in the typical syllable-counting fashion of every haiku poet, bending the fingers inwards towards the palm, then releasing them again one by one.

Shuson believed in the healing powers of poetry. Again from his obituary:

In 1957, Kadokawa Shoten issued a first collected edition of Shuson’s works. But the poet fell ill in 1960 and underwent chest operations, presumably for tuberculosis. Yet he continued writing haiku. As he said: ‘Without my haiku I am nothing. It is only haiku I live for, and only haiku that keep me alive.’

His faith in the healing power of poetry was such that he gradually recovered. It was in the Sixties that Shuson became identified in the popular mind as a poet who wrote in order to explore ‘how human beings should live’.

Powerful testament to the value of poetry, an art form whose readership is dropping. I find the ancient haiku poets inspiring. It is customary for haiku poets to compose a death haiku just before dying, an epitaph that lives on. Perhaps you’d like to leave your own haiku or senryu in the Comments to honor the recent July 3rd anniversary of Shuson’s death.

 

Blue (If I Knew Then, What I Know Now),
Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 2009, photo ©
2009 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

 

_______________________________________________________

Epilogue: At 6 a.m. when Liz’s alarm was about to go off, I was heading to bed and a Version 2 of the Sleeplessness haiku popped into my head. I don’t know if Versions 1 and 2 are opposites, or complements like red/green or orange/blue.

 

every sleeping moment
fitful bursts of wakefulness
posing as dreams

 

Below are a few other Night Owl posts from over the years. I am most creative in the middle of the night or very early in the morning in that space between dark and light. I wonder if there are other Night Owls out there who write poetry in their sleep. Or if the Early Bird still catches the worm. 
 

• Night Owl
• Mickey’s NightOwl Sandwich
• Minneapolis At Night
• Dreams Of A Creative Insomniac
• haiku for Stella’s (Night Owl revisited)

 

-posted on red Ravine in the space between Tuesday morning, July 14th, 2009 and Monday night, July 13th

-related to these obituary posts on red Ravine: The Uses of Sorrow – What Is It About Obituaries?, Reading The Obits, Halloween Short List: (#2) Build Your Own Casket

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Dreams Of A Creative Insomniac

 Can’t Sleep, April 7th, 2007, Minneapolis, Minnesota, all photos © 2007-2008 by QuoinMonkey, all rights reserved.

I stayed up writing until 4am last night. I recognize the state of mind as one of my creative zones. It’s also a lonesome place where I live in the heart of darkness and pulpy gray brain matter. Thoughts, feeling, and ruminations move in and out of cerebral spaces. But the body takes a back seat. I feel sleep deprived.

According to a Blogcritics Magazine HBO link, Wide Awake: Portrait of an Insomniac, I’m not the only one. Chronic sleep deprivation affects more than 100 million Americans.

Wide Awake is the latest from documentary film maker and lifelong insomniac, Alan Berliner. In the film that had its premier at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, Berliner himself is the case study. There is a great interview on his process around creativity and sleep deprivation as a way of life at  Wide Awake – Interview with Alan Berliner.

The creative insomniac zone is a familiar place to me. I spent a lot of time there when I was in art school, up all hours of the day and night, processing, mapping, printing, developing photographs on night watch in the darkroom. Neighborhoods surrounding the South Minneapolis campus would be sound asleep. But inside the heart of art world – students would be buzzing with creativity.

Berliner talks in the interview about how, for good or for bad, creative structure developed around his sleep deprivation:

Eventually it occurred to me that there was no point in lying awake in bed, tossing and turning every night, so I started delaying the time I went to bed until later and later. By the time I reached my late 20s and early 30s, I sometimes found myself going to sleep after the sun had risen in the early morning. I had become a true “night owl.” That way of life became an important part of developing a sense of myself as an artist and filmmaker, because I discovered that I do my best work at night. In fact, all my films have been made at night, when almost everyone else I know is sleeping.

He also discusses another jolting realization of a timeless unreality sapping us of sleep – computers:

You can go back to Edison’s invention of the lightbulb, which completely changed our relationship to time. By blurring our distinction between day and night, it opened up the night as a time for work and for play. A full night’s sleep has now become just one of many options. Now take that lightbulb and shrink it down to the size of a pixel, multiply it by whatever factor it takes to fill your computer screen, and now you have another far-reaching revolution in cultural sleep patterns. That computer can take you anywhere, anyplace, anytime, day or night. It’s a portal to timelessness. And whether we live in cities or in rural areas, it’s keeping us awake and away from our beds more than ever.

I don’t get a chance to dwell in sleeplessness for long. My life’s very different than it was when I was staying up all night completing art installations, or knee-deep in papermaking studio water, filled with cattails. And I have found that I love to sleep and feel rested.

But when I get into the writing and creative zone (like I was this weekend) nothing deters me. I get so much accomplished. Then suffer on the backend. I have to say, I prefer more balance. But sometimes it’s heaven to be able to visit that dreamless place with the gods of the sleepless.

Are you among the sleep deprived and sleepless creatives? Maybe Berliner’s documentary is the film that will wake you up.

Wide Awake premiers Wednesday, May 23rd at 8pm.

But there’s a special Insomniac Premiere on Tuesday, May 22nd at 1:30am.

Sweet Dreams.

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007

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