Thursday, September 21, 2023
Your World
Very happy that my hybrid documentary/ moviepoem about market culture vs urban commercialism, entitled “Your World”, was just selected by Goa Short Film Festival via FilmFreeway.com.
Tuesday, September 19, 2023
Friday, September 15, 2023
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
The Business Army: Roosevelt’s Inauguration 1
THE BUSINESS ARMY
Roosevelt’s first inauguration 1
Herbert Hoover had taken a lassez faire approach to overcoming the stock market crash of 1929; the approach failed miserably. Roosevelt was elected on a platform of revitalization and increased government spending— a New Deal that seemed revolutionary at the time.
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
Monday, September 11, 2023
Saturday, September 09, 2023
Darkness Lighting Darkness
What colour, the void?
*
Clip from the authorial moviepoem Darkness Lighting Darkness, to be screened soon at IFF Akrobat in St Petersburg.
*
Also from this series:
Wind Circles, part one
https://youtu.be/WK13A9N8qiA
Wednesday, September 06, 2023
The Business Army , September 6/23
THE BUSINESS ARMY
Roosevelt’s first inauguration 1
Herbert Hoover had taken a lassez faire approach to overcoming the stock market crash of 1929; the approach failed miserably. Roosevelt was elected on a platform of revitalization and increased government spending— a New Deal that seemed revolutionary at the time.
Monday, September 04, 2023
Wednesday, August 30, 2023
The Business Army, August 31/23
THE BUSINESS ARMY
The Bonus March
« Many of the war veterans had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression. The World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 had awarded them bonuses in the form of certificates they could not redeem until 1945. Each certificate, issued to a qualified veteran soldier, bore a face value equal to the soldier's promised payment with compound interest. The principal demand of the Bonus Army was the immediate cash payment of their certificates. » Wikipedia
From the manuscript:
Tuesday, August 29, 2023
The Business Army 1
Occasionally I post a link to a historical novel I had published at Eclectica Magazine: https://www.eclectica.org/v23n2/harvor.html
It’s entitled The Business Army, and it’s about a historically documented attempt to organize a coup d’état in the United States during the early months of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.
The novel exists in two forms: as a conventional manuscript and as a form of graphic novel I call the Highly Illustrated Screenplay Narrative (a mouthful, I know; I might rework the term).
I’ve decided to post a lot of the latter form of the novel. Graphic novels tend to be expanded comic books (I wrote/drew one many years ago, and know the degree of labour involved). Conventional novels, on the other hand, tend to be devoid of art, and also tend to hew to a rather traditional concept of how narrative should be produced. Yet at the same time, our mass culture has become acutely influenced by the feature film as a vehicle of narrative. We — including literary writers — now think in a filmic manner; this is self evident.
The Highly Illustrated Screenplay Narrative is an attempt to bring novel-making in line with the new cultural reality we find ourselves in.
Monday, August 28, 2023
Sunday, August 27, 2023
Thursday, August 24, 2023
Monday, August 21, 2023
Saturday, August 19, 2023
Workplace drawings
From a series of drawings of workplaces in 1980s Toronto. I’d carry my sketchbook with me and do these from life without photo references. This one from a small machinery shop called GM Machinery on Richmond. Now defunct. It’s little known that medium scale machinery and garment production existed throughout downtown Toronto until the early 90s.
D’un series des dessins des locales de travail à Toronto dans les années 80s. J’ai porté mon cahier de sketch et fait ses dessins sans références photographiques.
Tuesday, August 15, 2023
Sunday, August 13, 2023
Friday, August 11, 2023
The Canadian novel and its discontents
Am cleaning out my mom’s bookshelves. The original plan was utilitarian; get rid of all except a handful of special volumes. But finding that hard. It’s a good library, with, unsurprisingly, a strong contingent of Cdn books.
Reading these, though, is a mixed bag. Am currently reading a novel by a prize winning author described as “beloved” on the dust jacket. He died a few yrs ago and was instantly forgotten. Why, exactly? Who knows. However, no great injustice that the novel I’m reading is not still talked abt; it’s abt first love during the 1940s, and while it has its moments, it’s generally a static read. Scenes rarely come alive.
My mom and brother often used to discuss why CanLit struggled being as vital as Am or Brit lit. Reading this novel, two explanations come to mind: one (a point my mom liked to make): Canadian novelists (and their publishers) often fixated with being “worthy”; the novels function as moral lessons, not a mix of entertainment and art. Another is the anemic state of criticism in Canada now. @stevenwbeattie has remarked that a literature can only be as good as its criticism. The novel I’m reading now received high praise in a major news outlet and Q&Q. The two criteria intertwine; an urge toward moralizing and emotionally fake criticism lead to a static literature in which better work struggles to break through.
What then is to be done? Cdn movies have some of the same shortcomings but not quite as noticeably. Part of the solution is to write fictional narratives for print that more closely resemble movie scripts. This would at least force Cdn writers to avoid the stylistically pedestrian introspection that sucks the life out of so many of their scenes (the point here being that timid criticism allows Cdn writers to keep doing this). At least with the format of a script, a writer is forced to bring the reader into current action. Narratives using this strategy can still be “quiet”. But they need not so often remove the reader — and the narrative — from the present. In other words, they need not privilege moralistic reflection over action. Examples of how this might work to follow.
Tuesday, August 08, 2023
Loveography: A Highly Illustrated Screenplay Narrative

EXT. A SMALL KOREAN VILLAGE. AN EARLY SUMMER EVENING, MID-WEEK.
A WESTERN MAN is walking down the city's main street. To his left is Haemi Fortress, a medieval Korean fort. Its wall is built of unevenly-matched stones, each lightened by age to a gentle ochre, as if the stone itself has softened.
The MAN walking beside this wall has a peaceful expression on his face. But from his body language we can tell he's lonely.
VO: Those were the days before I met you.
SFX: A light breeze.

EXT. THE INNER COURTYARD OF THE FORTRESS. MOMENTS LATER.
The Western man sees a group of CHILDREN. They are giggling and playing with each other. Then one of them spots the man.

CHILD: 의국인! [Foreigner]
SECOND CHILD: [sing-songy] Hello!
MAN: [smiling] Hello.
ALL CHILDREN: [gleefully] Hello! Hello!
MAN: [speaking slowly] Can you speak English?
The CHILDREN suddenly start to giggle uproariously. But their amusement is more a symptom of shyness than a desire to carry the game any further. They run away, still laughing.
The MAN continues walking. He makes his way through small, sad, empty streets.

V.O.: Chris Marker once asked how we can remember thirst. What I want to know is, how can we remember loneliness? It penetrates not just oneself but the world. Reality itself appears changed. The side-streets suck themselves empty, their noise vacuumed behind shuttered store-fronts. The sky pulls itself as taut as a blue drum. The clouds starve themselves and harm themselves, like self-loathing anorexics.
And as the world seems to change, so does the self: feel lonely enough, and that juncture of soul and body that comprises what you think of as you becomes as parched as cracked soil. The lonely individual is ancient, he is dirt.
INT. AN EVANGELICAL CHURCH. TEN MINUTES LATER.

The MAN enters. He is somewhat surprised to see a CROWD OF WORSHIPPERS. They are very involved in their prayers.
The MAN walks cautiously forward.
A MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN spots him.
CUT TO: CLOSE UP of MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN.
MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN: 하느님! 하느님이 자를 사랑하습니다! [God! God loves you!]
The MAN pulls back, alarmed.
EXT. A STREET. MOMENTS LATER.
The MAN is walking by himself again. He looks even sadder than before. A DIFFERENT CHILD spots him.
DIFFERENT CHILD: [especially enthusiastically] Hello!
V.O.: I don't know what it is was about that kid's voice. It went to my heart -- pierced it, like an exquisitely fine spear, the sharp end of sweetness. And it was this strange combination of sensations -- the needle's prick and the blood's sunny melt -- that suddenly transported me (there's no other word) to a different time. It was a time in the more recent past, when I still felt the residual parch of loneliness. But it was a time when I started to feel.
I mean, it was a time when I started to feel again.

Tuesday, August 01, 2023
Thursday, July 27, 2023
The War on Smog
From the War on Smog series: youtu.be/MPs59Eat-MA
In effect, the primary threats to humanity have changed. And no amount of weapons systems can insulate us from those dangers.
#ClimateBreakdown #ClimateActionNow
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
The Suicide of Earth, one
#moviepoem #videoart #poetryfilm #climatechange #videopoetry
You — we — need to change.
Clip below.
Full video at YouTube: The Suicide of Earth (One — July 26/23)
https://youtu.be/NdYfJXgyoDM
Saturday, July 22, 2023
Yes. Planet, We’re Warming
#홍수 #큰비 #ClimateChange #korea #globalwarming
Screenings:
iSmartFilms Festival
Dec 5, 2020
Dublin Smartphone Film festival
Jan 4, 2021
LIFFT INDIA FILMOTSAV - World Cine Fest
Nov 15, 2020
Chhatrapati Shivaji International Film Festival
May 23, 2021
*
This is a smartphone documentary project that took several years to complete. It began after the unprecedented heavy rains in 2011, which caused lethal mudslides right in the center of the Gangnam district of Seoul. After that, the government took action to build flood channels and improve storm sewers in the metropolitan area.
But for rural Korea, flooding remains a threat. Moreover, because global warming seems to be changing the seasonal calendar, the rainy season rhythms that Korean agriculture adapted to millennia ago are also shifting, having a negative effect on agricultural productivity. And there is the sheer extent of the volumes of water, which still catch local governments by surprise, and sometimes cause untrammeled flooding in any event — which is what is happening in 2020.
Finally, the unseasonably heavy rains that have lasting well over a week ago in Korea and which have caused dangerous flooding aren’t just a local problem; they auger the future of the planet.
Friday, July 21, 2023
War Markets
War Markets
by Finn Harvor
Where were you born? In what city was the future written on the hard, cakey walls of destiny’s blind alleys? Well, don’t worry — International markets, dizzylingly high on their abstract mountains of profit and gas — have been teetering lately; their great volumes — stacked high as peaks — are due for a crash. Experts all bitcoined (till last spring) take to media, and reassure, reassure — while stocking secret fridges in faraway cottage-bunkers with veggies, dried meat and fruit ... food, in the near future, will be the new loot. And as the concussion bursts echo from one oblast to the next, and cheap, green kamikaze drones fill the autumn sky, policy experts discuss what will happen next: will the war go nuclear, will Vlad lob a bomb? Will we have to respond to a tactical burst, without uncontrolled exchanges and strategic mega doom? Then the experts draw deep breaths, and tell us not to fret, for even in the almost-next-worse-case scenarios, the worst that can happen will just be a Crash; all those savings in bank accounts — tinkling ... piggy banks smashed. And the resulting Depression ... trillion-strengthened by a billion plastic debts will temporarily- permanently last. And on this patchwork planet — battered, tattered globe — from faraway battlefields, their earth newly soaked, to the stock markets and bourses, where the day traders toke, the future’s just a mirage, and we, common people, its fodder, its joke.
Finn Harvor
Originally published in Mudlark
Thursday, July 20, 2023
The World Bardo
The World Bardo
S. and I went to a temple today. It’s the fifth anniversary of her mother Shil An’s death. Suki remembers the exact moment it happened.
Her eldest brother Su man has been gone four years, and my brother Richard ten.
Since S’s family is Buddhist, Buddhist imagery, ritual and cosmology tends to imbue any anniversary that occurs. My brother wasn’t Buddhist, or any religion at all — if anything, he was nihilistically atheist. Yet in the writings he left behind there is a very pronounced emphasis on “eternal return” and the elementary nature of universal cycles. S. and I often talk of how much he would have enjoyed temples if he’d made it to Asia.
In the meantime, my father (just as atheist as my brother) lies in a hospital in Toronto. The medical team reassures me he’s stable. But he himself is obviously nervous when we talk every day on the phone. S. and I have plane tickets and we’ll be able to see him in a week.
Cycles continue. And are unpredictable.
Sunday, July 16, 2023
Saturday, July 15, 2023
Friday, July 14, 2023
High School 5
THE HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY NARRATIVE
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HIGH SCHOOL 5
Int. A basement in a low rent row house. Evening.
Tom is watching TV — the news.
Broadcaster: Our top story tonight — Mao Ze Dong, the revolutionary who became China’s paramount leader and both ruled and transformed that great nation for several decades, is dead. The entire nation is in mourning. From Beijing, our reporter Brian Henderson….
Cut to:
Int. The basement. Thirty minutes later.
Tom, tired, his expression impassive, fatigued, rises from his impromptu sofa, the weirdly coloured styrofoam slabs, and turns the TV off.
Cut to:
Tom, in his bedroom, five minutes later.
It’s dark out, and dark inside, too.
He does not turn off the light in his room to change into pajamas. He just stares hypnotically out the window.
SFX: … The wet buzzy drone of the rain….
Wednesday, July 12, 2023
The Novel and the Movie — part one
In a recent review of Patrick DeWitt's novel The Librarianist, Steven Beattie gives what seems at first read a seemingly positive assessment of the DeWitt work. The novel is filled with self-consciously flamboyant characters -- apparently an artistic strategy to throw into stark relief the considerable blandness of the novel's protagonist: the lonely, aging librarian Bob Crane.
Beattie: There are earlier indications of deWitt’s “stealth absurdism” in the character of Miss Ogilvie, Bob’s first boss at the library. A vicious harridan who prizes nothing so much as silence, Miss Ogilvie is a comic delight, a character on the margins of the story who fully inhabits every scene she appears in. Despite her powerful presence, however, neither she nor Connie’s father — nor, for that matter, the bombastic Ethan — fully detract from the focus on Bob and his bookish interiority, which carries “The Librarianist” forward in a spirit of what might be called insouciant melancholy.
However, there are problems with literary flamboyance, and one of them it makes a narrative hard to believe. And, near the end of the review, Beattie seems to acknowledge this -- albeit with the criticism slipped quietly, librarian-like, into a drawer: "Of course, the section at the Hotel Elba goes to show the extent to which an ordinary life can be deceptive, though this comes at a cost on the level of emotional resonance. The aching heart of “The Librarianist” is a piercing seriocomic character study of isolation and abandonment. Would that deWitt had left his more flamboyant tendencies in the drawer for this one."
Whether The Librarianist is truly successful as a work of vital art, it is certain to sell well: almost all of DeWitt's novels have become best sellers, and many of them adapted to movies, which only augments DeWitt's celebrity as a writer. The movie-making process is quite different from the novel-writing one, and DeWitt emphasizes this in a September 26/18 interview he did with Library Hub. In the interview, DeWitt emphasizes the considerable difference between bringing a novel manuscript and a film to completion: "I didn’t really understand how difficult it is to get a movie made. It took eight years, and so many people worked so hard over the course of those years to get the film made. It makes me thankful for the relative simplicity of life as a fiction writer where you sit down and do it."
However, by the time the movie of the The Sisters Brothers was complete, DeWitt was already experienced in the film industry; in 2011, he wrote the screenplay for a movie entitled Terri. He was conversant with both mediums. He was also aware of the dangers of movie adaptation. In a September 21/18 article in Publishing Perspectives, DeWitt apparently had misgivings about the possibility of his story being distorted unrecognizably. John C. Reilly, one of the starts of the movie version, had to reassure DeWitt that DeWitt's original narrative vision would be respected: "In a recent news conference at the Toronto International Film Festival, Reilly was quoted by Jessica Wong of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, saying, “We know what can happen in this process of books becoming movies. Often, they get twisted into an unrecognizable shape … We said, ‘Pat, we’ll try our very hardest to make a great film out of this. We’ll find the very best people we can. Please trust us,'”"
Tuesday, July 11, 2023
Greening Korea: Precipitation Patterns
Yes, it matters when it rains.
#moviepoem #climatechange #climatecrisis #globalwarming
Full video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/qVfEpSJ_ErI
High School 4
THE HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY NARRATIVE
*
HIGH SCHOOL 4
Int. Tom’s home. The home is a row house. Basement. Evening.
His brother and mother upstairs, Tom sits on a tatty styrofoam pillow the colour of yellow yolk that’s been left to age.
SFX: The drone of the TV
A motorcycle cop: Don’t you realize that California law stipulates you should check your muffler every six months?
Tom, his face impassive, gets to his feet and turns the channel dial. It clicks loudly with every new channel.
New voice (on a talk show): Today on Front Page Challenge, we have a guest who was the first Canadian to star in an American western.
SFX: Applause.
Monday, July 10, 2023
High School 3
THE HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY NARRATIVE
*
HIGH SCHOOL 3
Int. A city bus. Evening.
Tom is riding home. The steady motion of the bus. The rain outside.
Sunday, July 09, 2023
High School 2b
THE HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY NARRATIVE
*
HIGH SCHOOL 2b
Int. A high school classroom in 1976. English class. Day.
It’s raining outside. The students seem numbed out by the topic at hand: the blood motif in Macbeth. One student, TOM, seems particularly uninterested. Yet at the same time, he listens carefully to Mr. Barrett’s words, searching, it would appear, for vital meaning.
Saturday, July 08, 2023
Cluster munitions
Via Bard, July 8/23:
Question: Are Russia and Ukraine currently using cluster munitions in the Ukrainian war?
Response: Yes, both Russia and Ukraine have used cluster munitions in the Ukrainian war. The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission has confirmed that the Russian military used cluster weapons in Ukrainian settlements at least 16 times during the first month of the war in 2022. At the end of March, the head of the UN Human Rights Council, Michelle Bachelet, reported at least 24 cases since the invasion began.
Human Rights Watch has also documented the use of cluster munitions by Ukrainian forces. In a report released in July 2022, the organization found that Ukrainian forces had used Turkish-provided cluster munitions in and around the city of Izium in eastern Ukraine. The report found that the use of cluster munitions by both sides had caused civilian casualties and had posed a serious risk to civilians.
Cluster munitions are banned by more than 100 countries under the Convention on Cluster Munitions. The convention prohibits the use, production, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions. However, neither Russia nor Ukraine is a party to the convention.
The use of cluster munitions in the Ukrainian war has been condemned by human rights groups and humanitarian organizations. They have called on both sides to stop using the weapons and to clear any unexploded ordnance that has been left behind.
Friday, July 07, 2023
Wednesday, July 05, 2023
Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant
There has been danger of a nuclear catastrophe at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant throughout the duration of the war in Ukraine. Recently, however, the Ukrainians have been warning that Russia has mined the plant for potential sabotage.
The danger of a catastrophe is not as high as it was in the video above. This is because the plant , at the behest of IAEA inspectors from the United Nations has been placed in cool shutdown.
From CNN (July 6/22): “What Grossi is doing is completely unprecedented in the history of the IAEA,” Alberque told CNN. “The whole thing was saying: Russia’s basically going to have to kill me, in order for me not to make this nuclear power plant more safe. It was astonishing.”
The IAEA staff’s mission, Alberque said, was to “establish a precedent here, that we’re willing to get involved and to try to take this chess piece off the board.”
Russian occupiers, however, continued to prevent Ukrainian operators from putting each of the reactors into a safer “cold shutdown” status. This means when the reactor’s temperature is below boiling point but electrical pumps moving water through the core must still keep working to cool the fuel and avoid meltdown – which requires an external power supply.
The safety of the plant was threatened further by the breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam on June 6, which lowered water levels used for cooling the plant precipitously. Ukraine accused Russia of deliberately destroying the dam – a claim that Moscow has denied. Shortly after this, the final reactor unit at ZNPP was put into cold shutdown status on June 8.
Nevertheless, there is a general threat that the Putin government — which has engaged in nuclear saber rattling throughout the entire war — will deliberately set in motion some form of nuclear incident.
Part of what makes the situation unstable and worrisome is the psychology of Putin himself.
장마철이 시작 왔다/ The Jangma Season begins
Tuesday, July 04, 2023
High School 1
The Highly Illustrated Screenplay Narrative
HIGH SCHOOL 1
Exterior. A city street. Early evening.
The sky — bright fifteen minutes ago — is now heavy with thick grey.
Pedestrians make their way along the sidewalk with the expressions of those just released from labour: office workers, students…
Monday, July 03, 2023
Saturday, July 01, 2023
Thursday, June 29, 2023
Sunday, June 25, 2023
The Prigozhin Mutiny: What Next?
#russia #prigozhin #ukraine #putin #wagnermutiny #russiaukrainewar #russian #rostovondon #f16fighter #ukrainewar
What next for the war in Ukraine?
Clip.
Full video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/dzp_0I23PXA
Prigozhin: Wagner — Mercenaries or military contractors?
Mercenaries or military contractors?
Thursday, June 22, 2023
Sunday, June 18, 2023
Saturday, June 17, 2023
Thursday, June 15, 2023
The Eco Crisis
#climatechange #climatecrisis #EcoArt
Clip. Full video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/Mm6a5cJncT8
The Earth is in the first stages of an unprecedented crisis; humans starting to feel the effects of this & the changes in climate are only going to worsen.
What can we, collectively, do?
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Cameras and Economics, clip
Another clip from the Cameras and Economics series.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the camera — as a medium — is changing culture; literature, for example, is now marketed as much visually as it is literarily.
Yet camera cost & camera accessibility are not discussed.
Being Alive: A Love Short
#peaceart #marketplace .
A clip from Being Alive: A Love Short.
Full video at YouTube: youtu.be/EbhfGgEQuZk
Tuesday, June 13, 2023
Monday, June 12, 2023
Saturday, June 10, 2023
Friday, June 09, 2023
Being Alive
#peaceart #marketplace .
A clip from Being Alive: A Love Short.
Full video at YouTube: youtu.be/EbhfGgEQuZk
Thursday, June 08, 2023
Wednesday, June 07, 2023
Tuesday, June 06, 2023
Saturday, June 03, 2023
Noteworthy
Sensurious by Ian Gibbins and Judy Morris at Moving Poems. Ian writes:
Judy and I have collaborated on many projects over the years. Sensurious – drawings to stimulate the sense was her third solo exhibition. It was held at Pike Wines gallery in Clare Valley, South Australia (2014) and at Magpie Springs winery gallery neat McLaren Vale, South Australia, in 2015. I wrote short pieces of text for each of the drawings and they became the basis for poem. The video features the formal Latin names of the plants, the meanings of which inform the text of the poem.
Also, thanks to Marie Craven at Moving poems for posting on a recent work entitled Deep Into Another Night . This is a work in progress; however, I was happy enough with the footage to build an ambient, text-free version around it. The poetry version to follow.
Friday, June 02, 2023
The Highly Illustrated Screenplay Novel
An intro to the idea of the screenplay novel as a hybrid form of conventional novel, screenplay, and graphic novel.
AI and killer robots
#ai #remotewarfare #AIweapons
Are AI and remote warfare becoming weaponized too quickly?
Clip 1.
Full video at YouTube: youtu.be/Fs3OREhDaKM
Thursday, June 01, 2023
BridgeText: The Screenplay-novel
In this video, I describe some of the ideas I originally had.
Unlike a few other writers who’d dabbled with similar concepts, the screenplay novel, as I envisaged it, had to work both as a conventional novel and as a graphic narrative.
In early experiments, I used both photos and drawings.
Increasingly, the projects have moved in the direction of moviepoems and moviestories.
(More to follow)