The Pursuit of Duende

Cooking with Vinegar in Spain's Former Colonies

2011-10-02T13:20:00.001-07:00

This is tilapia escabeche from Tienda Morelos.

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In countries where refrigeration came late, freshly caught fish is often preserved for future consumption in Spanish-inspired techniques now associated with the Mexican ceviche. A variation is escabeche, lightly cooking the fish then marinating in vinegar and spices, a technique that works better when one lives inland or up in the mountains where fresh fish is not available.

In the Philippines, escabeche is a more elaborate affair. Fish, often cleaned and cooked whole, is fried then cooked in a sweet-sour concoction of vinegar, brown sugar, garlic, onion and maybe a little soy sauce to which are added chunks of sweet bell pepper, tomatoes, maybe slices of pineapple in syrup.

Raw fish preserved in vinegar we called kilawin, a technique used for other food stuff like pork ears, shrimp and prawn. Fish has to be really fresh. I remember tiny sardines that are quickly filleted then marinated in vinegar, finely chopped ginger, scallions and maybe a wee bit of garlic. The translucent flesh turns opaque when it is ready to eat. The finished product is used more like a condiment, in small doses often to accompany really rich viands like fried sole or mackerel steaks.

Posted via email from Duende Joes

Discovering Nectarines and Other Drupes

2011-09-04T17:19:00.001-07:00

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I've lived in North America for over forty years but I've never had a nectarines until a few days ago. How could I have missed it? What happened was, I think, the fruit appeared toward the end of summer when I'm usually sated with the bonanza of fruits the season brings and I just skip its arrival as a non-event. Or maybe I thought the nectarine was not a true fruit but a cross between two fruit species and elitist that I sometimes can be I decided it was not worth my time to discover this luscious delight.

I blame Trader Joe's for introducing the fruit into my gustatory repertoire. Last week they advertised white nectarines as something to try because it was sweeter than the usual nectarines. True to form I didn't see "nectarines" and though the fruit was "white peach." I didn't discover my mistake until I was ready to serve the fruit to a friend and bragged how this was something new, a white peach. He corrected me: it's nectarine. Nectarine? I salvaged the label from the trash and sure enough it read nectarine, but white nectarine.

Anyway I went ahead, cut and served it. I sunk my teeth into my half of the fruit and juice squirted all over the place, overflowing and dripping out my mouth. I felt momentarily silly until the experience blocked out any other sensation. I was conquered territory. I'm now a fan.

I explored produce in other markets and decided to try the regular nectarines. Those are juicy too but the flesh has a different quality. It's translucent whereas white nectarines have fine sandy, milky flesh. I can see how people think of nectarines as crossed cultivars of plums because regular nectarines have flesh that look and taste like plums.

In fact nectarines are cultivars of peach except that their skin is smooth so that sometimes they're called "shaved peach." Like peaches they're believed to have originated in Central or Eastern Asia although Europeans initially believed peaches came from Persia, hence the name peach from French peche, from Latin malum persicus.

Like regular peaches, white nectarines should combine with banana and the usual fruits I blend with dairy to make my post-workout meal in the morning. I am not as keen about plums or regular nectarines because the consistency of the flesh is different. They would show up like translucent or glass-like fragments, which I suppose, can be attractive too, like tapioca "pearls" in Taiwan iced bubble teas or "nata de coco" in Philippine halo-halo.

Nectarines like peaches don't do well in the tropics. They are summer fruit in temperate countries. Nonetheless our summer harvest of fruits in North America take me back to the tropics and their unique fruit offerings. Wherever we are, we develop our own list of favorite foods, what become our comfort food, food we associate with the good times. White nectarines is joining that list for me.

Posted via email from Duende Joes

A Fitness Formula That Works

2011-08-11T10:04:00.001-07:00

I've heard it so many times, I've even preached it myself, but sometimes we don't act until we're in a corner and have to do it. Fitness is a lifestyle and improving health and fitness means modifying my lifestyle. When things are going well, too well, it is easy enough to swell our ego with talk but nothing gives true confidence, faith if you will, than seeing the evidence with our own senses.

Okay, health is an ongoing concern. It is ongoing because our goals change over time and, more to the point (corner), our bodies change. The demands we place on our physical, psychological and spiritual beings change, too, and, hopefully, with time and the experience of well-observed time we may learn a little more about ourselves and the world that impacts our concept and therefore goal for health and fitness.

Quitting regular outside employment two and a half years ago was more difficult than I thought it would be. For years I'd actually been moving towards this change but when I did finally take the plunge (okay, I'm switching metaphors from home interiors to sea) the repercussions were greater than I thought they would be. Now, why did I think I knew about this change before actually implementing it? Didn't I just write that time and the observation of what transpires in time are necessary ingredients to growing and learning?

One of the concomittants of the decision I took was the loss of the very structure that motivated me to make the change in the first place. Constructing a new structure to take the place of the old is in itself a process. It's again not a project we can fully anticipate and work out ahead of time. I guess there is a kind of genius to the whole process. If we can learn without experiencing i.e. living and observing what happens in time what's the point of living? Okay, this is not correct logic.We live because we are living. Introjecting meaning into living is something else and not the raison d'etre for living itself. If learning is not the reason for living, it does give meaning to it. That's just one of the ways we can look at living, of course. For others, living is loving. Or, for others, living is for finding what they call God. For me, living is just living but slathered all over the cake (another metaphor change) are the various icings we concoct to make what is essentially joy itself feel joyful. And that is what I mean by the genius of mindful living.

Back to the title of this piece (more of the preceding in subsequent written-out thinking). This is what seems to have worked for me just in the past two weeks.

Regular aerobic exercise, at least five times a week, daily being better still, starts the day best in terms of waking up energy for creative activity. Since I'd gained 10 lbs. in the past year, resuming a regular walking regimen felt harder than in the past when I'd slack off and start over again. I should know. I've been working out an exercise program that works for me for some 25 years. (I remember that first day I stepped out of the apartment to go walking for the first time. The body was heavier than the world on Atlas's shoulders! My! It got better over the years and I've been more often on a program than not. Then again I'd not weighed as much in the past as I do now!

My goal two years ago was to bring my weight down to 168 lbs. That would make my BMI accord with recommendations for my age, reduce my sugar to well below the maximum healthy pre-prandial concentration, and tune down my bad cholesterol. (Other than these, my physical health couldn't be better!) Instead, I gained 10 more pounds!

Through trial and error, with lots of help from my physician/friend, Kevin, I've found out that taking a mouthful of raisins, wheat bran and grouts, and raw or dry-roasted almonds with 500 mg L-carnitine gives me the energy boost to take my morning walk to cardiovascular levels again. My capacity still has ways to go but it's now up to where it was last year when I was walking five to eight miles a day on the Monon. That was insane. It was taking too much time—2 or more hours a day—and my feet and legs were taking a punishing they didn't like!

Now I just do 2 to 3 miles a day, occasionally spurt to 5 or 6 miles, and my feet feel fine. I've been doing interval running which counterintuitively seems to be helping my lower back. What really proves the point to me is the slow, steadier weight loss. It's not much but unlike before when my weight fluctuates all over the map (the final metaphor change), now it stays closer to the range. And I can feel my belly again.

Frankly I wanted to lose the weight to have more energy and flexibility again. That belly gets in the way of some of the things I used to enjoy doing, like some yoga asanas. Then again I didn't use to have to deal with deteriorating cartilages but this is why formulas for fitness, for happiness, for joy don't stand still. We change, they change. Without change, how do we know time? And without time, can we know we're alive?

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Easy Summer Fruit Sherbet

2011-08-08T10:04:00.001-07:00

As the sun blasts us and the earth in July and August, we can still take comfort in the abundance of fruits and vegetables burgeoning from the fertile earth. What to do with this bonanza while trying to stay cool? Think fruit sherbets!

The old way if you don't have an ice cream maker is to blend the mix, freeze in an ice cube tray, stir every 15 minutes while the mixture solidifies until you have a smooth frozen concoction. My way is easier. Freeze chunks of fruit, process quickly in the blender and voila! Sherbet that satisfies the sweet tooth while keeping your fat and cholesterol intake low.

Here's the recipe for blackbettery peach sherbet: For two huge servings, take 1 C. of frozen banana,1 C. fresh chilled ripe peach, 1/2 C. frozen blackberries, 1/4 C. each orange juice and whole milk, 2 Tb. whey protein powder and a basil or mint sprig for garnish. I use Bally's Performance Whey Protein that is sweetened with Splenda but you can use any good quality whey protein and skip the sweetener or add a little demerara cane sugar or honey. Pulse in the blender and serve!

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The World Is Flat

2011-06-28T15:16:00.001-07:00

Unless you’ve been living under a bushel (not letting your light shine as beacons for others and without nearby WiFi) you’ve noticed our world has changed. It’s no longer the world of your parents or even the world you yourself were born into.

It’s the same earth but, at least on the surface of it and on what paleontologist and Jesuit priest Teilhard du Chardin and Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky called the noosphere, there’d been great changes especially in how its dominant species, homo sapiens sapiens, lives.

(The changes do not go deeper usually than a few feet under the surface and earth remains despite our arrogant illusions very much its own self with its own laws that shall outlast even the longest lived senior of our or any other generation. When we act forgetting this, the earth reminds us with unforgettable force that it remains above our human laws and expectations.)

Civilization with its infrastructures has changed from the time of the pyramids at Saqqara and Giza or the so-called Seven Wonders of the ancient world (of which only the Great Pyramid is the lone survivor). One need only look at pictures of the new Shanghai skyline to see how architecturally things have changed.

One of the most exciting changes to me is the globalization of commerce and industry in this digital age. This is the subject New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman explores in his 2005 book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. To Christian Europe before Columbus the earth was flat. The Genoese believed that he would find India not by going east but by crossing the great sea going west. He was the first to act on a guess that the earth was round and that going one direction one could get at the same place as someone going in the opposite direction.

Friedman who won the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work with the New York Times wrote how he came to realize the earth had changed shape again. He was shooting a documentary on the Indian company, Infosys, exploring how India and Bangalore in particular had become such a major pool for outsourcing service and information for North American and European companies.

Infosys CEO, Nandan Nilekani, was telling him that in a world of digitized knowledge, countries like India could now compete for global knowledge work. “The playing field,” Nilekani told Friedman, “is being leveled.” The phrase kept playing in Friedman’s mind like a broken melody until the realization hit him: “My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!”

With the distant places on the planet now connected via satellite and fiber optic cables, communication occurs in seconds via this all-encompassing highway. Someone in Dalian in China (another rapidly emerging outsourcing center) could pick up the phone when I call from Dallas, Texas about my Internet service and the I wouldn’t have to wait that much longer than if the Dalian was sitting at an office across the street. Isn’t this amazing?

There are limits to these arrangements. Dalian gets business from Japan by training hundreds of mostly young Chinese to speak Japanese just as Bangalore service representatives learn to modify their Indian English accents to approach Midwest American sounds but there are limitations that go beyond language.

I experienced this firsthand when I recently called AT&T. The 800 number routed to an extremely pleasant young woman, Danielle, somewhere in India who efficiently answered my questions by consulting her computer screen. She read the pertinent guidelines for setting service and insisted that I was under an annual contract with AT&T. Fortunately I asked to speak to someone else and she switched me to the Disconnect Department

This department was stateside. Tom indeed sounded like Tom. There the customer representative was able to access more customer-specific data and told me that indeed I was not under such a contract. He suggested that in the future I should ask to be connected to his department, which I did when a few days later I made the decision to switch from DSL to cable and discontinued my land phone line. (The landline is going the way of pyramids just as, debunking religious belief, we’re disposing of our dead in less earth space than pyramids or cemeteries.)

What is leveling the field, flattening the world, is not only the speed of telecommunication but the nature of the most rapidly changing commodities and services of our modern world. These are often software-generated products that can be sent in digitized form, packets of information so tiny millions of them travel along innumerable pathways blanketing the earth, physical manifestations of Chardin’s noosphere. Who would have thought in the time of Columbus and the Catholic Monarchs (Reyes Católicos) of post-Muslim Spain that just 1 and 0 (0s are Muslim inventions) could build edifices more powerful than brick or even stainless steel.

As the manufacture of physical products move ineluctably to where labor is cheaper (because the locals are willing to work with passion and dedication for much less money than North Americans or Europeans), industrialized countries are having to re-invent the world. What advantage they still possess today largely consists in technical knowledge and research facilities and superb universities where new knowledge is generated. We’ve become knowledge purveyors, our greatest assets what we dream of in our heads, noosphere.

This state of affairs is rapidly changing, too. Friedman quoted the communist mayor of Dalian teach him about capitalism: “The rule of the market economy,” said Mayor Xia, “is that if somewhere has the richest human resources and the cheapest labor, of course the enterprises and the businesses will naturally go there.” At the time of the book’s research, Dalian had twenty-two universities and colleges with over two hundred thousand students! Xia further emotes: “My personal feeling is that Chinese youngsters are more ambitious than Japanese or American youngsters…”

There is market economics and then there is human economics. The former deals with financial laws, the latter with energy, ambition and spirit. People in poorer countries are forced by circumstance to work harder and improve their living conditions. We in North America or Europe are not so hungry or needy. I think this may in fact be a good thing. Maybe we don’t have to compete as rabidly in the dog-eat-dog world and set the pace instead in truly improving the depth and quality of our lives, focus not only on research knowledge but other forms of knowledge only those who live fairly comfortable lives have the luxury to explore. There is technology information and then what we still could call spiritual knowledge, Chardin’s noosphere.

Members of the our species, homo sapiens sapiens, are said to distinguish themselves from other species in the more elaborate, imaginative thinking of which we are capable. Following Maslov’s trajectory of personal growth, we might climb the pyramid of lessening suffering and increasing joy starting by first providing for our body’s needs. Having those satisfied we move up the hierarchy into satisfying increasingly more subtle needs but instead of stopping with self-actualization we could leap into the empyrean.

“What is quality?” asks Phaedrus in Robert Pirsig’s 1074 classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Mathematical values have changed our world so much, changed our perception of it from being flat to being round and now again to being flat again. Transcending the technological advances of the twentieth century maybe we can go full circle and with those peripatetic thinkers of fifth century BCE Athens concern ourselves with subtler enterprises.

We might, for instance, work harder at improving the lot of humans everywhere, what we call civil rights (because they are recognized by civitas or cities and societies). We can learn to recognize how we oppress ourselves and other people by the beliefs we hold, by plain, ignorant prejudice. After all a flatter earth means ultimately that we live that much closer to our neighbor and who is our neighbor?

According to Jesus of the Christians, our neighbor is whoever needs us, whoever our compassion enables us to connect with that the distance between us really goes nil, zero, and from round or flat earth we grow into one earth, one life blanketed by one all-encompassing thought, our noosphere.

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On Writing

2011-06-16T14:51:00.001-07:00

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In the June 20, 2011 issue of Time, David McCullough discusses writing and its importance (10 Questions):

“The loss of people writing—writing a composition, a letter or a report—is not just the loss of the process of working your thoughts out on paper, of having an idea that you would never have had if you weren’t [writing]. And that’s a handicap. People [I research] were writing letters every day. That was calisthenics for the brain.”

This is why I write and why I don’t feel I’ve done a day justice if I don’t write. Writing helps me document my thoughts, organize and make sense of them i.e. connect them with the overall picture of thoughts I’ve been constructing all my life, and, in the process, stumble into insights and new ways of seeing myself and the world.

Assuredly there are many other people who don’t think of writing on par almost with sleep or eating. They go through life unconcerned with meaning or significance. What’s happening now is all that matters and it is good enough. I am everlastingly concerned about myself, how I should live, why I should live. I’m a masochist, and selfish to boot.

Writing for me surely is both familiar pleasure and questionable good. Writing is one activity I’ve done for so long and done so long because it has repeatedly given pleasure. I say I write to know myself—the “unexamined life” and all that—but its benefit here is dubious. I write because I enjoy writing.

I might even essay that I need to write as some people need to paint or versify or run for political office. It’s my true vocation, not the avocation it was through my adult life till now. I love the slippery rocks that are the words and phrases writers employ to enter into their world of creation. Sometimes they’re just there at the river where you’re crossing it to the other bank but usually you have to go up or downriver searching for just the size or heft of combination of them you need for the hut you’re building by the rushing waters.

Writing is meditation. Both the external and the familiar, doggedly pernicious internal world disappear; I even disappear. There are just the ideas with their precious freight of energy.

When writing my whole responsibility is simply to respect the energy and let it lead me where it may that I can take the ideas to a kind of universal intelligibility. For me this is art: transforming an individual experience, object or idea into its superhuman relative, which communicates that something behind it to anyone who’s looking.

Let those with eyes see… but first I must see it with my own inner eye. Art is really just the energy artists struggle to find within themselves, a primordial, archetypal energy like to that of Yahweh or the artificers of the world’s great myths and religions.

So writing is an activity within the realm of the religious, if by religion we mean our yoking ourselves to something bigger than we are. Writing is a writer’s vehicle to transcendence as painting to a painter, sculpture to a sculptor, mathematizing to a scientist.

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Mung Bean Stew with Jackfruit and Spinach, and Malaysian Salt Red Fish

2011-02-01T19:55:00.001-08:00

Mung Bean stew is an old favorite from childhood days in the Philippines. I never cooked this when I still lived in the islands. In fact I didn't cook much until I came to the Promised Land. So when I cook Filipino foods today I base the recipe on memory. Nostalgia is a powerful teacher, much less necessity in the old saying about invention. Today's stew, cooked while freezing rain was causing a racket against the window glass, was a last-minute concoction.

Ingredients: mung beans (monggo in Ilonggo), garlic, onion, tomatoes, olive oil, Malaysian salted Red Fish, canned jackfruit chunks, fresh spinach, and salt. I boiled the beans and fish until almost tender. I sautéed garlic, onion and tomato in olive oil, salting as I cooked. I added the beans and jackfruit chunks and simmered until beans were tender. I added spinach, corrected the salt and presto! A wonderful, fragrant soup against which the ice storm outside was no match! Served with brown rice tenderized with dried kelp, it was lunch for a king.

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Pinakbet Tagalog Style, Vegetarian

2011-01-20T21:25:00.001-08:00

Ingredients:

3 garlic cloves, peeled, crushed, chopped

2 shallots, medium, sliced

2 Roma tomatoes, chunks

2 Tb. Olive oil

3 C. String beans, cut 2 in. long

1 ½ C. Okra, frozen and defrosted, or fresh

2 C. Butternut squash, steamed till fork-tender, 1 inchchunks

Salt to taste

2 Tb. Coconut flakes (Optional)

Water or vegetable stock, as needed

Directions:

1. Heat oil over medium high heat. Sauté garlic and shallots till fragrant.

2. Add tomatoes and cook, stirring, 1 minute or until tomatoes are soft.

3. Add string beans, cover, lower heat and cook 2 to 3 minutes until tender.

4. Mix in squash gently. Add stock or water if desired for a little sauce. Correct salt.

5. Serve hot over Basmati rice, topped with coconut shavings.

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Song of the Open Trail

2010-08-10T20:01:00.000-07:00

My second hike on the Monon was a kind of rebirth. Until Sunday I had not hiked the trail since summer last year. We're still in the throes of a heat wave so that even at eight the sun's rays still sting. In the sylvan shade however (and much of the trail from 96th Street to the Carmel City Center north of Carmel Drive is shade), one walks in comfort. The greenways of Indianapolis are one of her secret treasures that few people experience. That's a pity because walking the trails I seem to leave the city behind and enter into another world, a simpler world where cars and motors are not evident. It's an egalitarian world. Without their vehicles, their business clothes, people are just people on the trail, each one relying on sheer body strength to journey through the byways. Bikes are the most advanced machinery on the trail and by the rules of the trail they have to yield to those on foot. Even motorists where the trail crosses the street in Indianapolis, most stop to let the trail denizens pass. To be one of these temporary citizens of the trail is to feel a privileged person, someone who has rediscovered the simple pleasures of walking the earth on one's own power.

The landscape changes as I walk from one segment of the trail to the next. Between Broadripple and 74th Street, I cross the White River on modern steel bridges, walk past cafés, then the art center and blind school, past the backyards of modest dwellings. Carmel has really done a super job with her segments of the trail. There the trail goes into lighted tunnels and on hill-like overpasses for breathtaking views of the growing city of Carmel. I walk past businesses but with a different relationship to them. Walking without my wallet I am no longer a consumer. The world, both natural and man-made, is just there to enjoy. It truly is the joy and freedom of the trail in the midst of the cities, a foretaste even of a different way of being.

Morning Coffee for the Creative Juices To Flow

2010-07-05T09:26:00.001-07:00

Now that I've substituted going to Lifestyle Family Fitness for going for a cup of McDonald senior coffee, a once-in-a-while treat is brewing coffee at home.

For coffee like what you get at a café on the Champs-Élysées or the Piazza Navona, without ther vaunted ambiance, of course, the Bodum is eminently suited. The French press, also called a cafetiére á piston, was popularized in New York City fifteen or so years ago when my friend, Ingrid, gave me one for a gift. It's perfect for making two espresso-sized cups of meltingly strong coffee, a heady brew one quaffs by the exquisite mouthful like ambrosia!

Here I've pictured my ancient French press with a recent acquisition, a long-handled coffee measure perfect for dipping into a bag of Starbuck's pre-ground coffee. Sometimes a simple gadget like this turns a plebeian act into something like music, art for the eyes as much as for the palate.

There are many ways to live: we each must find our own way. There is, I believe, a balance between hedonistic simplicity and the overly materialistic way of the average American consumer. I try to navigate my own way between the two extremes, delighting in the tension of choice and desire.

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Fitting into the Mainstream

2010-06-09T09:35:00.001-07:00

There is much to be said for being average. You don't get hassled as much i.e. you get hassled the average amount in grade school and high school, certainly not in college unless you opt for a fraternity, and never to the point of getting PTSD unless you join the military. Everything works out seamlessly, from babyhood to toddler to grade schooler to dating in high school and the first summer jobs, graduating from high school and becoming old enough to smoke, to drink and to vote. For many there's college then the first post-college job and you're on the conveyor belt thereafter with little time to look around you and notice if this is where you want to be. You get married, raise kids, get promoted, retire and move to Florida.

John Waters is not average. His interview with Terry Gross on June 3 hooked me like a drug addict to heroin. His story is pebbled with so many similarities to my own story except that he seems to have moved from "hysterical misery into common unhappiness" and I have not. But that's not true either. I still fall into deep misery as I used to as a teenager but now misery is accompanied by a kind of awareness. I am not altogether alone when I'm miserable. If nothing else misery keeps me company. I'm there and so is he.

In real life few people are average. We're all neurotics, as Waters's hero Freud concluded in the 19th century. Some have more dramatic or flamboyant neuroses but theirs are not the worst. I think the worst off are those who are buried in the past, those who bought into the trauma of their young, growing selves, that they are trapped there the rest of their lives. We're all victims of our egos, trapped forever in how we view ourselves and through those glasses view the world around us. Society is itself like opera glasses that we don't take away from our eyes. To discover that we have eyes that can see without benefit of those glasses is life-transforming.
The only hope I've encountered is described by mystics, especially the Asian sages like the Buddha. I date a rebirth of my own neurosis from the nine days I spent in April 1986 when I attended a retreat with Ruth Denison. Sometime around the fourth day I found those primordial eyes. For moments I detached from the stream of compulsive thoughts, urges, memories and desires and realized there was more to experience beyond the stream. Henceforth, while not all the time, I saw me and saw that it was not all there was. I can pat myself on the back or shake my finger at myself. It's quite a feat. It's my sort of miracle.

Culture is awesome. It's where we come to affix meaning to what our physical senses and minds feed us. From culture comes the wonderful creations of humans from the dawn of time. From culture and in culture we create literature, art, politics, morality, religion, the whole shebang! But culture and ego are not all there is. Alongside them, silent but more potent than them, walks something other. Some may call this God. I don't know. All I know is that I am not alone.

Having established this, instead of suffering in misery I can learn to play. Waters made his living from his being different. Instead of hiding the unsavory pieces of his neurosis, he turned them into movies and now a book, Role Models. He is a role model. We can turn our unhealthy lives into something grand. All it takes is a certain disidentification from it all, learning to soar while immersed in the mud. Mud is beautiful!

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Singapore April 18, 2010 Marina Bay/Singapore Flyer

2010-06-08T09:05:00.000-07:00

The group in front of Sakura International Buffet Restaurant. This is whole gang, right?

Singapore April 14-15, 2010-Tour Around Singapore

2010-06-08T08:59:00.000-07:00

The Ga family at the Singapore Harbour. Stunning picture!

Gerald Brenan on how art should be judged

2010-06-07T21:51:00.001-07:00

I'm meeting with the Pen2Paper Meetup group at seven tonight. At lunch I brought along my folder of short stories. I was newly impressed with how thick the file was and how many stories I wrote between 1988 and 1989. I had always remembered those stories as being overwrought, prose too flowery, plot limited to self-indulgent, self-fulfilling stories. I read three stories this afternoon. Two brought tears to my eyes. Hmmm...

Gerald Brenan in his preface to his 1951 survey, The Literature of the Spanish People (as opposed to literature written in Spanish), summed up his philosophy on art criticism. Every work, he wrote, whether a poem, novel or painting "can be anything—that is to say, can have any form or content—so long as it evokes feeling." That's a to-the-point as anything I've read about what art should be. He writes further, "I believe that one of the principal functions of art and literature, second only to the immediate delight and elevation of mind they give, is the manner in which they display the range and diversity of mind and experience open to human nature—thus putting us into the skin of persons very remote and different from ourselves and so mitigating our chronic state of self-imprisonmennt..." Works of art are to be valued "by the depth and quality of the experience they convey, rather than by their moral or ideological rightness. Ethical considerations only come in when they affect that experience by extending or diminishing it.

I've started so many prose works—I call them "text products" which hints at how I feel about what I have been doing—since 1989 but have not finished a single piece, not even a paragraph-long work. The bug for writing apparently came to life then as quickly went away. In a similar way, I wrote poems in 1972 filling a steno notebook then the flourish ended. These past two years I've trained what creativity I have to shooting images. I have been most successful shooting models. After processing three images from the four-hour shoot with Austin yesterday I hazard to think yesterday's shoot was my best so far. Both Austin and his girlfriend, Jacqueline, whom I shot in April, were so into the shoot. I was tired when we finished but felt we'd done something worthwhile. Austin too felt it. He told me he'll recommend me to the clients at the gym where he works as trainer.

Rereading my short stories reiterated a truism that I've found time and again. Memories are unreliable. What little we remember of the vast amount of sensory and mental events that stream through consciousness 60 seconds a minute, 24 hours a day, 24/7 has been edited into what Asian meditation teachers call ego. What fits our idea of who we are might stay to validate ego but even what remains often is misperception. Ego reshapes events. Art is reshaping events into something meaningful. Both art and ego are constructions of the mind. Why not go for art since ego or "reality" is just as perniciously false?

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Developing concepts for video projects

2010-05-22T13:34:00.001-07:00

San José, Museo Iloilo, Philippines

I have two ideas for a video project. One I've had for a couple of years now, especially after I started shooting young Indiana models. I am meeting with Arron to brainstorm with him. I'd like him to be part of the project, as subject or co-writer or co-photographer. I want to document how young people in America, in this case, small-town Indiana, adopt values, develop and modify them based on personality traits and experience. I am interested in values related to relationships (how do they view intimacy, relationships, family), religion, work and friendship.

Next I want to locate a couple of documentaries in the Philippines. My interest is two-fold, both what I call pre-global. I want to document the disappearing Spanish influence in the islands, especially on church music, religious-cultural holidays and indigenous religious beliefs. Some people urge conservation of natural resources. I think much of culture especially in the smaller countries need to be, if not preserved, documented for people to learn from after they're gone or irreparably changed. I want to document indigenous beliefs that pre-existed Spanish conquest or that appear related to Asian cultures prior to the arrival of Europeans.

I've always been interested in psychology, what motivates individuals, how they see their world and their position in it, and how they go about accumulating experience. My interest has moved from helping individuals change their psychological patterns to documenting and understanding the psychological principles governing societies and cultures. Change is inherent in systems so my ambition is not so much to facilitate it as to understand why and how it occurs.

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Documenting Small Town Life

2010-05-19T09:17:00.001-07:00

My sister and I drove to Michigan last week. It was our first trip for the sake of traveling in decades. We stopped traveling in the U.S. when we discovered Europe. This trip whetted my appetite to travel more. Working at home is ideal for slugging along but unfamiliar scene and experiences ignite more explosive energy. I have never been able to work steadily, daily, even when I don't feel a whit of creativity. Published writers say one must toe the line and write every day no matter how one feels. That strikes me as being true; I just can't do it!

This was taken at the Comfort Inn where we stayed in Mackinaw City the morning after we arrived. All day while we drove from Holland the day before rain fell. Sunshine was not expected Friday so when it began to leak into our room the energy tumbled in with it. We took the ferry to Mackinac Island where I was able to take some more photos before the sun disappeared. It was cold. Winds ravaged the island. I had on a thin jacket and huddled closer to Merma as we took an open-coach tour of the island.

I decided to take a break from lynda.com and focus on mastering Photoshop the rest of May and start on Final Cut Pro in June. Arron's sister writes music and agreed to provide music for a video featuring Arron. The concept is nascent. When I first met Arron he lived in Cambridge City one and a half hour east of Indianapolis. I have been intrigued with small-town life in Indiana since I moved here in 1976. I would like to make a 20 to 30-minute documentary about the life of young Hoosiers—the late high school years and early college, exploring careers, making friends and starting relationships. Freud focused on love and work as the main features by which a person's mental health is gauged. These two plus friendships should make an interesting commentary on modern, small-town American life.

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Attraction and Lust: The Ethics of a Shoot

2010-04-23T10:00:00.001-07:00

One of my projects is to shoot nudes but capture images that awe rather than inflame, connecting the viewer with the beauty of bodies like the beauty of mountains or water or sky. The line between pornographic and art is thin, even hazy at times. Think Robert Mappelthorpe, a boldly artistic photographer with his brazen images of black men that burst stereotypes of beauty and candor. When I shoot an attractive model I know when lusting is keeping me from viewing the model as a photographic study. Lust is part of our experience of attraction and I do need a certain attraction to the model to get my curiosity up. Without that attraction the work of photography is just that, work, and I'm not interested doing that. Life's too short to spend on transient fancies. I have to have the initial attraction then shelve it and move into what I call "the zone." There I am lose being involved with persons, with myself, with the model or models. My attention is on creating the image. I treat the model with respect as one does a fellow human being but the personality they project is just another element to calculate into the total picture. We're both in a professional mode, what I call artistic integrity.

Maybe this is unrealistic. The genre is full of stories of divas and divos, of temperamental artists, whose work we all adore but the process by which they arrive at the luminous images flares with caprice and emotional dyscontrol. I've worked like this many times in other than artistic work. The creator begins to feel like god; everything else, everybody else, must serve the ends of creating. When the image is captured we may forget the travail, happy only for what we've created but this feels somehow not enough. The dyscontrol lingers, if not in the work itself when others view it in the soul of the maker. When the chatter dies, in the depth of night or as life ebbs away, all we have is soul. Soul matters.

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How the East Was Won

2010-04-17T08:49:00.001-07:00

We live our four-score years a matter of genetics, family influence, personal choice, and, largely, luck. I’d like to think I make deliberate choices. I’ve bought into the American dream: individual freedom reigns. But I’m Asian at the core: interconnection determines not only the life we live but who we become. We are jewels caught in Indra’s net that weaves us into one, indivisible fabric.

While working at the USAF base in Angeles City, Pampanga, trying to forge connections to land me in America, I met one of the women in that weave of destiny. Mattie was an African-American nurse who one evening, from what goodness of the heart I’ll never know, invited me to her house on base for dinner.

I remember the feeling today. There I was a man-boy, desperately trying to put himself back together, the shining future he had once envisioned now shards of broken glass. The base was a capsule of America. On school buses, teenage girls chewed gum. Servicemen would fly McDonald burgers from CONUS and shared the smell and taste of home with his friends. The base insulated Americans from harsh reality. They shouldn’t have to deal with more war than the war in Vietnam. To me the base was the Promised Land, exciting and scary.

I don’t remember what Mattie served for dinner. I remember sitting at her spinet afterwards to play and sing American show tunes. She left me alone for a minute and came back with a book she felt I should read. I was Asian, of course, shouldn’t this be my natural bent? The Bhagavad Gita was every bit as wise and inspiring as the Christian Bible. I didn’t know what she was talking about.

Aside from my aunt, Dayde, Mattie was the first person to crack the door of orthodoxy into a whole, other world beyond. Back then, Asian art, religion and history were below my mind’s periscope. I was miserable and anxious only to escape. The West shone on the horizon like Abraham’s Canaan. There I would find home because where I was didn’t feel like home. No god dealt covenants to me. I had no choice.

It was only after I stopped attending church that my mind opened to other varieties of religious belief. In the early 1980s I found myself swept into the New Age movement. I went to gatherings in Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, New York and California, met new friends, tried on new practices: Sufi dancing, Midsummer festivals, channeling, unorthodox Franciscans, energetic bodywork, men’s groups, Gaia, etc. I was agog. Here were the inner fires I’d been missing.

Like breath, like water, the soul needs fire. We catch fire wherever we connect, whether we choose it or it flows to us from life’s amazing cornucopia of surprises.

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Fields of Violets

2010-04-15T10:11:00.001-07:00

They say old men more and more dwell in the past. In the past is innocence like unto the innocence of the couple before Eve took a bite of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and persuaded her spouse to do likewise. Product marketing in the U.S. keeps coming up with the "original" this and that, as if the unimproved version from bygone times is somehow better. Byzantine iconoclasts of the 8th and 9th centuries argued against the proliferation of images and for a return to the nonrepresentational worship of old.

I’m more iconoclast than conservationist but there is a sweetness in discovering the simpler delights of a simpler past. I’d be the last to throw out our technological advances like handheld jukeboxes and desktop movie theaters but once in a while, when the breeze is soft as it is today, fragrant with fruit-tree blossoms, tulips and lilacs, I turn heathen and cock an ear for Pan.

As we amass experience, turn from child to grown-up, a bit of the child lingers if only when the fields grow crops of violets and dandelions litter austere lawns with lemon gumdrops. Then we hark to the honeyed years of those first years of life when we didn’t know temptation or the pain of loving or even common sense: it was enough to sense and to know.

Wisdom brings more self-reflection. We learn to heel to societal right and wrong, become secure thinking we know it all, but the past finds its way to remind us how puny wisdom is, how trivial many a time, and how our hard-earned maturity is but a second skin: we are more than what we think.

As Christians, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, seek to understand the raucous phenomenon of priest abuse, many seek to hopscotch past the Catholic Church’s centuries of tradition to how earlier Christianity was like: marriage was no obstacle to priesthood and women held positions of influence from the time of Mary Magdalene.

Thinking I espouse opinions just like everyone else. I am a devotee to Logos and mind crystallized, some say fossilized, into words. Words help us navigate the uncertain, wonderful, endless landscape of the mind, its divine reaches, its impossible breadth. With words I can summon a space ship to explore this vast, ultimately unknowable immensity and old and new, sweet and bitter, heathen and believer, light and dark, tender and rough, live together.

“And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”(Isaiah 11:6) In fields of clover and violets shall I yet dance, on this spring day, on this spring day. (April 15, 2010)

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Murmur of the Heart Today

2010-04-14T08:58:00.001-07:00

After a winter chuck full of dark, cold days, spring is welcome indeed. Without any disruptions this year (in Kansas, my sister reported a spring snow storm that froze daffodils), bulbs, shrubs and trees have taken their turn showing off their reproductive strategies. Tulips are still opening but the daffodils, except the late-blooming varieties, are crunchy paper-thin ghosts. The almond trees are starting to show green under all that white efflorescence, cherries weeping and laughing endure. In the garden, the tree tulip bears just four buds. During the winter, snow removal chopped off two main branches and the tree is now busy sprouting new shoots from the ground for next year. I am raring to get me a new rosemary bush for the deck. Rosemary-and-sage roast fowl beckons, as well as rosemary-scented lamb and pork chops on the grill.

Last night I watched Louis Malle's Le souffle au coeur (Murmur of the Heart, 1971), which does not refer to the boy, Laurent Chevalier's rheumatoid heart ailment that led to his stay at a sanatorium with his mother, Clara. It refers to the fifteen year old's coming-of-age when France was struggling to hold on to its Indochinese possessions. It depicts Freud's Oedipal complex but without today's strum und angst over sexual abuse rattling the West and the Catholic Church. After their night together, Clara, the mother, tells her son: "This won't happen again but we'll both think of this night with tenderness, not with remorse or guilt."

Malle who also directed another of my favorite movies, Dinner with André, created a masterpiece of nuance, images of a bygone era and of how things used to be tender now just crass and obscene. It depicts a Europe that even today holds a mirror to America showing how we here in the New World have much to learn from the old when it came to the truly profound human values that characterize the West. I'll be looking for more Malle-directed movies and when I do make my own will remember this movie for its delicate images and tenderness.

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Can conversation alone make a movie?

2010-04-11T12:01:00.001-07:00

"I love the notion of long, enduring friendships that clearly are complicated," says Charlie Rose at the close of his interview of Wallace Shawn and André Gregory of the 1981 movie, My Dinner with André. Gregory told Rose he and Shawn were "best friends," a category Shawn waltzed around. He, on his part, can't say he knows himself, much less knows Gregory so he can he say they're friends? André tells Charlie that this is how the two of them are different but his friendship for Wally did not depend on how Wally felt about him.

My Dinner with André always reminds me of my old "best" friend, Al. That friendship is every bit as complicated as that between the two actors. Al introduced me to the one-of-a-kind movie. Directed by the two's frequent collaborator, Louis Malle, the movie depicts a dinner conversation between Wally and André. I was reminded of the movie today at lunch while perusing the screenplay. André's Preface narrated the events in his life that led to the making of the movie. In 1976, to the consternation of friends and colleagues, he gave up his career in theater and like the White Rabbit (in Alice in Wonderland that he directed in 1970), he embarked on a New Age journey. "I went to Asia. I went to North Africa. I stayed up till odd hours of the morning talking to Buddhists and physicists about ancient mysteries." He questioned the future of theater and questioned his own place in the universe.

André's journey recalled my lifelong quest for my place in the universe. I jumped off the cliff to confront the question frontally two years ago and I'm still questing. The movie, now that I was reminded of much of the content of it, gives me an idea of the movies I want to make. After years working with distressed individuals and couples I am clearly interested in the inner lives of people. What do people think about when they're alone? Gregory wrote that he became interested in Shawn's idea to make the movie in part because it would allow him to talk about what he'd been through, his thoughts and the feelings his adventures brought up. What we think in the privacy of the bathroom may largely need to stay private but much of that seemingly useless cogitation might be interesting for others likewise prone to self-reflection.

I love emotional dramas and tragicomedies about love and relationships but putting these on involves people and money resources I just don't have. What can I do at this stage of my questing? I can do screenplays and videos portraying conversations about the ideas and feelings people explore in the privacy of their own thoughts or when talking to best friends. (Spouses won't be ideal for this sort of conversation. They invariably think they know us so well we won't get far talking about those parts of us we'd not shown them before. I'm with Wally on this.)

In the 1960s when I met Aldo, I explained to him once what I thought of intimacy. With a best friend or lover, the two of you are "on the same wave length." Love creates this feeling between two people but it's not real. The feeling enchants us into thinking we're the two people in the world in our special cocoon but it will take years to create the real McCoy. Friendship usually does not involve that intensity of emotion but the two are the vehicles by which we create what deists say they experience in their relationship with their god. My fascination is with inner journeys and the outer journeys like friendship, love and other relationships that enable us to realize the inside outside.

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A Natural Cycle of Failure and Gain

2010-04-08T19:46:00.001-07:00

I have a photo shoot with Jacqueline and her boyfriend, Austin, on Saturday. She is competing at the 2010 Natural Buckeye Classic Figure competition and has been training intensely to rid herself of extraneous body fat. Her physical energy is down to basic. She asked me for my take on whether to do the shoot on Saturday or put it off after the show.

My natural inclination these last fifty years is to slack off, take it easy, not push to only fail. That's what happened in the late 1960s. I ran out of inner fire and came to a standstill. I'd been pushing myself for the wrong reasons. This is my reading today of what happened.

Pushing oneself can be healthy and fun. I just need to accept that I don't always get what I aim for. The fun is in the tautness of spirit that comes when I go beyond what I am usually capable of doing, when I push and find myself on unfamiliar energy. The landscape inside me changes. I am in God's land, the land of possibilities, not land I already know. It's the pioneer spirit, the spirit of adventure and conquest that led European men to attempt the dangerous voyage into uncharted seas because the familiar limits back home they already knew too well. Sometimes home has become arid and dry. We need to turn on the juices again and danger and risk do that.

In my early twenties the risks were closer to the jugular, or at least, felt that way. Actually now, from the wisdom of age, I see that I had options back then, options unthinkable then but what a difference my life would have been. I am glad I didn't take those options. I am glad I pushed in the door that was right in front me instead of looking a few feet on either side for the other doors to open. I am glad I came to America where I failed twice more and still struggle with the same elemental demons I faced then. My life became the intricate challenge it is because I pushed myself when I didn't think I had it in me any more to push.

History is memory. We redo history as we gain new insights into ourselves. I know now that I didn't stop pushing when the wind went out my sail. In my despair life provided me other channels for expressing myself. The failure was failure to gain what wasn't mine to gain. The failure was the energy that kept me again and again reinventing myself and in the reinvention discover those places within me that now glorifies my life.

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Easter Day with Echoes East and West

2010-04-04T10:32:00.001-07:00

It rained yesterday and more rain is expected tomorrow but today the sun is out for Easter. People mill at the grocery store where the long table full of forced tulips and hyacinths now just holds debris. A few plastic trays remain on another long table that appeared last Friday, laden with iced cakes, cookies and other desserts.

Spring festivals mean lamb and ham. In the Philippines the undisputed queen of fiesta foods is the caldereta, a tomato-rich stew of goat meat with chunks of chorizo Bilbao. Throughout the islands various recipes for caldereta are touted. I think my mother's family's recipe is the best. No potatoes here, no hot chili peppers, just the unmistakable flavor of goat tempered with long marination in palm-juice vinegar and spices. In America, goat meat only available at some out-of-the-way farm in the country, lamb substitutes for that wonderful flavor and aroma many people who don't know what they're missing loathe. Few Hoosiers have acquired a taste for lamb one does not see a lot of it. Easter is the one holiday when lamb prices come down. The rest of the year, if lamb is available, prices are astronomical. Maybe this is why I love Greece. There lamb is more common than beef because of the rocky, mountainous terrain. I feasted on lamb night every day when we toured the mainland some years ago.

This year, with no one expected to join me, I decided to treat myself to lamb. I love stews but browning the meat before simmering it in wine, broth and tomato paste casts grease over every surface facing up. After stewing I have to get the jars down from above the kitchen cabinets and wash them down with soap and water. Still that's a small price to pay for the rare treat. The last remaining leg of lamb at the store yesterday was five pounds. I had the butcher cut it into stew-size chunks and back home divided the loot in two. I froze half in a vacuum pack for the other lamb dish I fix at springtime: navarin printanier, lamb with early spring vegetables.

While gathering daffodils for the dining room this morning I met my neighbors, Carrie and Chuck. Carrie's lived in the condo next to John's but I'd never really talked to her except maybe when she came in 2002. Her sisters lived with her and they were all busy during the week. Her boyfriend, Chuck, recently moved in. Now they're thinking of planting a garden and redoing the kitchen. We chatted for a good while until I remembered the bread baking in the oven. I hurried to take the loaf out. It seemed okay although the timer had gone off while I was outside.

The first batch of tulips are withered and gone. The middle batch is near dying, the third batch poised to bloom. The parade of blooms has been fast this year. I can't believe how quickly the season is speeding by. I plan a quick trip to the gym before they close at four and then have dinner when I come home. Everything except for the salad and veggies (more asparagus, $1 a pound at Wal-Mart!) is done. After dinner I might drive to the art museum grounds if the sunshine holds out. What a gorgeous long-awaited Easter Day!

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Sappho's Gift This Spring Morning

2010-03-29T11:40:00.001-07:00

Can passion or creativity come ex nihilo? I don't know but I believe they can be cultivated; they can grow. I know for me passion for photography and video is greater today than even just last year. I think images all the time now—when I'm on the treadmill at the gym, while driving to UPS or sipping my McDonald's senior decaf looking at what's new in the spring garden.

A pristine love for words and writing comes and goes. I like elegant paucity which is why I adore poetry, but only when my mind is clear like a spring morning. The few words that run across the page in a lyric poem seem all to shine with the gravity of heavenly thoughts. They fall, as my piano teacher once instructed me for plucking notes from the piano, like pearls dropping on a wooden floor when the string breaks.

This morning, lounging in bed while the sun cleared the sky of nighttime clouds, I read Willis Barnstone's translations from the Greek of Sappho's poems (Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho, Shambhala, 2006). From "Prayer to Afroditi":

Come to me now and loosen me

from blunt agony. Labor

and fill my heart with fire. Stand by me

and be my ally.

The poems struck two chords. Like other Greeks of her time, praying to the Olympian gods must have been as commonplace as Christians today praying to Jesus: for gifts of love or harvest, for relief from sickness or love's agonies. The other chord goes mano a mano with this morning's sunlight: love, spring love, adulterous love, any kind of love!

Sometimes love feels like a giant feast's aftertaste in the mouth or morning-after mouth: too much, and too much regret. Love can sate to the point of repugnance. Other times love regains its spring-water freshness, a feather touch on the skin, a simple, devastating "hello," a quick kiss, a whisper of choir in a quiet church, her faint perfume while you're cleaning the house months after she has gone.

Now

when I look at you a moment

my voice is empty

and can say nothing as my tongue

cracks and slender fire races

under my skin. My eyes are dead

to light, my ears

pound, and sweat pours over me.

I convulse...

This woman Sappho, in Barnstone's translation (I didn't much care for his translation of the New Testament Gospels but here he shines), sound like a modern woman—soft, bold, loving and envying, needy or in love. She speaks of emotions you or I might have today, this moment. And she makes us feel less alone with our solitary thoughts, our despairing feeling. We're linked, all to one another, like Indra's net in which are caught the jewels of consciousness, of our pure humanity.

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Paying the Dues of Passion and Time

2010-03-27T08:44:00.001-07:00

In 1989 I read Marsha Sinetar's book, Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow: Discovering Your Right Livelihood (available at Amazon.com for $11.56) and liked how it sounded. I was years then from discovering for myself how this principle worked. I'm a thinker, late on doing.

I was seduced by the promise of digital movies in 2006 when I did a week-long certification seminar on Final Cut Pro. I finally leapt off the cliff and quit my daytime job in March 2008. In May I shot my first model, Kaleb, after testing lights on my neighbor, Ryan, who was kind enough to sit on my posing stool for images he wanted to send to his Greek friend. Kaleb was my first teacher and I was no longer just being seduced. I had fallen completely in love.

It has taken almost two years to move the inch I needed from dreaming to doing. I've done 18 photo shoots now and it's starting to feel like home. I have lots more to learn, enough that I am not eager to push myself into commercial light. I suspect, if Sinetar is right, the push will come by itself. Passion makes one devote his time to what he loves and what he loves makes him talk about it, share it, enthuse and lyricize about it. The magic is simple and fundamental and to think that life is rife with magic like this!

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The House of Flying Daggers

2010-03-25T07:55:00.001-07:00

Shi mian mai fu in Mandarin, directed by Yimou Zhang, was the second Chinese movie I’ve seen in the past week.

I watched it in Blu-Ray and the first thing that struck me was the opulence of colors. The costumes and the interiors made me think China’s old culture was every bit as decorative and beautiful as Europe’s. Maybe Chinese art has been more perishable. Everything in the tropics unless made of stone or metal deteriorates. China’s elaborate designs—dragons, chrysanthemums, peonies, clouds, all with great curling, curving lines—take getting used to. I was not a fan of European baroque either but Mexican baroque, also known as Mexican Churrigueresque, warmed me to all those garish curlicues and tiny embellishments reminiscent of beautifully crafted silver jewelry. Chinese decorative art is simpler, more often painted rather than sculpted.

The second thing that struck me was the beauty of the women. Even the men were strikingly handsome. The women though had the smoothest, whitest skin. It’s mostly makeup. I imagine living with one of those women they would not appear like the celestial beings they are on film when newly risen from bed.

The movie struck me as much by the images it portrayed although the ballet-like fighting and the amazing special effects as the plot. Daggers, swords, arrows, even women’s long sleeves zip through the air, impossibly hitting their targets a long distance away. Warriors of Heaven and Earth, according to one review, had less of the fantastical motion of fighters and a weapon so was better. Me, I like them both. I like that we in the West are now seeing Chinese culture portrayed eloquently in films.

China and America may not agree on political and human rights values but through art and the humanities we might yet see the two cultures give and take and shape each other for a better world for us all.

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Disrupting Comfort for Seeing

2010-03-24T08:23:00.001-07:00

In photography (and videos, or, for that matter, any creative enterprise), we need to break beyond the familiar to explore something new in ourselves. Every shoot for me, when successful, explores the unfamiliar and cracks the comforting, conquering certainty of what I already know.

After working in videos for the past eight months I did a photo shoot last Saturday with a male and a female model. I was just going to shoot Coty but when I suggested we do a duo shoot with a female model he took off with the idea and Jacqueline was the result.

The only other male-female duo I shot was Scott and Chanté in 2008, my first shoot with two models with the same Scott and Arron who brought him in for the shoot earlier that year. Models when they're new to me don't feel free to pose for the camera. A friend behind the scenes can loosen them up. Posing is both serious and fun. When seriousness dominates we can get stuck in deadpan images, what in Filipino-Spanish we call "de cahón." Straight out of the box. It's quality we've come to expect from the industrial age, quality that is identical from one item to the next that rolls off the conveyor belt.

I must admit that my goal these last two years has been to achieve that industrial sameness, a certain minimum of quality in the shoot, because I was new to the craft. In the normal course of events a young person goes to college or undergoes apprenticeship, this latter now too a vanishing phenomenon except in the higher echelons of business and art to which few of us have access. I'm an autodidact. I study and learn on my own, a modus with disadvantages and advantages.

While still working on industrial quality I find myself comfortable enough in the medium to widen its expression. What I need to do is to create artistic discomfort, to see anew, to push the medium not to the reaches other photographers have created with their own disruption of comfort but to my own Loki realities. What is beautiful but something that makes us look and see again as though we've had eyes to see just moments ago?

I want to do more duo shoots. I think two women, one older, almost a mother, one younger, could be interesting. Meanwhile Arron is bringing his girlfriend, Brittany, for a shoot this evening. That can be interesting, too because Arron is a natural in front of the camera. A craftsman has to take what he can get and shape it into something worth seeing, worth having as part of our familiar world. We've always had this, we say of anything we've seen once but it takes a special eye to dream it before it came to being.

Knowing When You're There

2010-03-17T09:22:00.001-07:00

Terry Gross's last interview with singer Johnny Cash in 1997 was phenomenal. The man was at the peak of his life, wise, modest without being falsely so, generous to those who've helped him on his rise to success and fame, still the genuinely respectful boy he was growing up with his cotton-farmer dad and mom and a man who still remembered the moment when he had arrived.

After a false start in Michigan when he graduated from high school, Cash went back to Arkansas and joined the army. He got out in 1954 when he was 23 and moved to Memphis. He sold appliances for Home Equipment but couldn't sell anything. "I didn't really want to. All I wanted was the music, and if somebody in the house was playing music when I would come, I would stop and sing with them."

He called Sam Phillips who had produced Elvis Presley's "That's All right" on his Sun Records label. He told Terry it didn't take nerve to call. "I was fully confident that I was going to see Sam Phillips and to record for him." When Phillips told him a flat no, Cash went down to the studio and met the producer as he came in. He told Phillips, "If you'd listen to me, I believe you'll be glad you did." He got his first record. "That was a good lesson for me, you know, to believe in myself." Three months later, Elvis asked him to sing with him at the Overton Park shell in Memphis. "And from that time on, I was on my way, and I knew it, I felt it, and I loved it."

Fresh Air interviews singers, actors, movie directors, and writers, genres of artists that fascinate me. I learn from hearing their stories. I am sure what they tell Gross is not everything that happened. We all edit our stories, delete insignificant, non-dramatic parts and craft a plot just as a good fiction writer does. Our stories how something come about arise from our insights into a stream of experience that has no chapter or paragraph markings. Along the way, some piece jumps at us from the stream and becomes an event. One such event that interests me hugely is the moment when an artist or craftsman believes his or her career took off. It underlines for me that moment when I've become what I'd decided I wanted to be.

It is working. When I decided in late 2007 to learn to shoot professional photographs and videos I set four years as the goal for getting my work up to commercial standards. The goal was arbitrary, based on a piece of otherwise irrelevant fact: when I could earn substantial income again without jeopardizing the source I'd tapped to use until my work began earning meaningfully. Two years later and I feel my decision vindicated seeing what I've done. Starting out I didn't know what I would need to go through. Truly we make the path by walking. From the first model shoot I did with Kaleb in May 2005 to now as I prepare for my 19th shoot is an adventure beyond belief. The struggles day after day are there but they're forgettable for the moments of achievement, when I look at what I am now able to do.

The process involves many phases. To create good photographs I needed to learn how to use a DSL camera, learn exposure settings, lighting, printing, and other outputting media. I needed to learn software for postproduction. And there's more. I found websites for tutorials and to see what professional photographers were creating. I learned about social media and marketing. Just over two years after making that decision, I feel I am on the cusp of fundamental change. I'm not there yet but I feel it's going to happen within the coming year. I know it, I feel it: I'll have a moment as Cash had when he knew he was on his way.

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Living, Writing & Creating with Boldness and Dash

2010-03-16T09:40:00.001-07:00

I listen to Terry Gross's guests on Fresh Air (named aptly) and think: I should live with more of their brash and brio, more of their daring and dash; I should create more wildly and in life take more risks instead of cowering in my corner, afraid of making a mistake!

When the sun is shining as it is this early spring morning amazement and gratitude flood my soul. I am really blessed. I may not live in that Paris house over looking rooftops, with glass doors between rooms, shared by Tiffauges, the cat, with his master and slave, the writer Abel, but my small condominium is modern and bright with light, situated close to the places I like to frequent, its wood floors a marvel of warmth, a tiny all-season garden outside that I can visit in the morning before I start working in my study with a sparkling Macintosh computer, hundreds of books, CDs, and DVDs at my fingertips (or at most, a few steps away). In Yves Navarre's A Cat's Life, Tiffauges writes and comments on his owner's life, a clever device for insight into human foibles. It is not too daring a literary device but it does provide a unique point of view.

Daring, I guess, comes after some homework to stretch not just our skills but our imagination. Without that stretch, it is hard but not impossible to leap with panache into strange worlds where our familiar fears grow luminous with new eyes, new ears, new skin for feeling and contacting what? Just our own selves, but transfigured by the risk we take without which growing does not follow stretching.

Action is paramount. Avoiding what feels unpleasant or arduous we don't gain the energy of achievement. Our lives are small because we don't make more of the world ours. More space is available just for the taking if we just stretched out our hands and grab. Thorns might prick us and we might get burned or wounded or sickened but we would have experienced something that our inner world is larger thereby. We are fools not to dare and be more alive.

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Photo Shoot - Think Fun, Think Surprise, Think Live

2010-03-15T12:22:00.001-07:00

I don't think the weather would allow us to shoot outdoors at the pool on Saturday so it will be an all-studio shoot. Props would be important: bright-colored beach balls, basketball or soccer ball, bright beach towels, gym towels, sweat bands. A clean bike would also be a nice prop, or inline skates or surf board. Windbreaker or jacket and shades for action and lifestyle shots. Vintage clothes would be nice, and vintage beach props like vintage portable radios, beer cans and bottles. We don't have access to shoot in a gym so think outdoors activities and outdoors sports.

Think color. Solid bright colors or large patterns. Thin stripes don't always show well on TV or computer screen, fat ones are okay. If Jacque has a fur coat or handsome winter coat, that can contrast with swimwear tho that would be more fashion than fitness. Scarves and a bright tie for interesting shots with swimwear.

Think different. What would make the images stand out in the crowd. Toned bodies alas are plentiful so we'll have to find images that stand out. Jacque may want to bring girly stuff like barrettes for the hair, ribbons, dangly earrings, charms, something to soften the often masculine fitness images. I like some of the photos in your Fun times album. Photo shoots should have that fun, spontaneous, surprise, live quality.

See the full gallery on posterous

Photos from Jacque's FB album.

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Model Photography One.mov

2010-03-13T18:05:00.001-08:00

A review of Duende Arts models the first two years (not quite but close enough).

Valentino the Last Emperor, and the world and market for women's beauty

2010-03-11T11:21:00.001-08:00

I rented Valentino: the Last Emperor from Netflix because it was on Blu-Ray and featured fashion and the fashion industry. It was just the thing to watch this morning. Uncanny and freaky-unpredictable, events sometimes come together, the outside world with the inside, the dream with the jogging reality. After Coty emailed me to say he was ready for a photo shoot, the energy shifted direction. When I mentioned that I wanted to shoot him with a female model, he volunteered that he knew a couple who might be interested. Jacqueline has consented to shoot with us. After ten days being energized by video, days feeling focused on writing, words and how to combine them efficiently and beautifully, now I am thinking and dreaming images and photography.

The movie tells the story of Valentino and his lover/partner, Giancarlo Giametti, whom he met in Paris 45 years ago (at the time the movie was made), and Valentino's last collection in 2008, five months after he announced his retirement from an industry that had left him behind. I was interested in the relationship between the two men, artist and business manager, but what got to me the most was the fabrication of beauty in women, a lifestyle of creativity, and the rewards that came when one is driven by the passion to create.

I've shot more men models than women. Women's images are more complicated, more of a challenge. Men's beauty is straightforward, clean and easy. Between the two is a great divide, like the sweet pond of your childhood and the immense Pacific. For whatever reason, the image of women in Western society is complex, driven biologically, sexually, romantically, and now politically but photographing it is all about beauty and how beauty moves us. I'm more familiar with women's psyche than men's. I had two sisters and grew up surrounded by women my father, a mysterious appendage, an afterthought. Maybe I wanted to distance myself from what I knew. Familiarity breeds contempt but in attempts at art is deadly.

At the gathering at my house last Sunday I accused a friend of having champagne taste. Champagne is okay especially when you throw in money to spend but one's lifestyle does not have to be so materially endowed. In the 1980s I discovered Buddhism and Zen and since then have found simple the most daring form of beauty. What we lust after fades quickly after attaining its avatar and we are hungry again. Simple is as tough, maybe tougher to find than the byzantine excesses lust conjures for our pursuit. With moderation, one can have both sensual and simple and that's the path I have to discover.

Balance, always: the elusive goal. When the Lord God in Jewish scripture ordered light to appear he did not destroy darkness. Between black and white is the array of colors that if judiciously employed can do the imitation of life to which we aspire.

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Back to Stills Model Shooting

2010-03-10T08:49:00.001-08:00

I am preparing for a photo shoot next week. I have not shot still images in months so I am brushing up on exposure, shoot styles and techniques, and lenses. I have a small but nice collection of lenses that frankly I have not learned to use to their full potential. For model shoots I like to use the EF 24-70mm f/2.8L, EF and 24-105 f/4L and the cheap but good EF 50mm f/1.8 on my Canon. Preparing for the shoot I am also reviewing my old model shoots and processing the Raw Files in new ways. I am also reviewing my favorite photographers like Greg Gorman's 2009 In Their Youth. I plan to pay closer attention to mood and lighting, and shoot video, too. I am trying to hold off buying the new Canon 7D with manual exposure and selectable frame rates of 24, 25 and 30 fps. Canon is releasing a special FCP plug-in to facilitate the addition of time code and saving the CF files into a burnable disk image. Truly we live in a fast-changing digital world!

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Casting to Concept and Back

2010-03-09T09:03:00.001-08:00

See the full gallery on posterous

Filmmakers and photographers cast for projects they want to produce. I do the reverse. I find the models then develop the concept for the projects in which I can use them. It's not a bad way to work, not until I've acquired enough skills that I can devote time to starting with a concept then finding the talent to work with and realize it.

I've been exchanging email with Coty for over a year. Finally he says he is coming down for a shoot on March 20. He wants fashion modeling but is open to doing videos. This will be the first time I'll be shooting video with a model so I am very excited. Coty emailed me his Facebook url and we became friends this morning. Looking at his photos is making me redesign what I had in mind for the shoot. He loves bodybuilding so we should probably take advantage of what he's worked hard to acquire. But maybe not...

I've shot two kinds of models. Most of the men are into bodybuilding. In fact I've found a couple of my models at the gym. Fashion modeling on the other hand tends to go for tall, slim men. I need to remind myself that there are other kinds of modeling e.g. product and body parts modeling, like for gyms. The first model I shot, Kaleb, had a fine physique but he was more into actual modeling than bodybuilding. I feel compelled to take advantage of a male model's physique and play on sensuality, even eroticism but isn't that shorting the model?

As I move into videomaking I'll be thinking of acting and actors. Videos can utilize well-built models in a different way. I need to think about commercials and corporate videos although frankly working for businesses and corporations just does not appeal to me. Commercials and music videos are more my cup of tea. Short videos can showcase the cutting-edge technology that appeals to me. And the Internet with viral marketing is ripe for video delivery.

If Jobs is right, the iPad can revolutionize the creation and distribution of journalistic and entertainment media. Publications can create apps that combine text, graphics (photos and images) and animation (videos) seamlessly. My three interests shall have come together!

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The Right Time for the Right Products

2010-03-09T07:59:00.001-08:00

Ideas took shape as I watched Charlie Rose interview three tech journalists about Apple's iPad. My goal at this time is still to gain the skills and craft in writing, photography and videos. Since January I've been posting to YouTube; since February to Facebook. Posting videos and text on the Internet is my market research for what people like, for what the market wants or is ready for. I can see the two lines converging and that time feels thrillingly closer!

I've always had the idea I would be distributing digital images and videos on the Internet. I'd love to do a theatrical feature but to be realistic I don't have the time to develop the skills, networking and financing to do that, unless, of course, I do well preserving physical and mental health. Virginia Woolf is quoted to say that in her early 40s she had to be a miser with time. She had to focus on what mattered to her. Of course, she may have had ideas of suicide even then and suicide radicalizes the picture.

Another feature: I've worked with Apple products and the Macintosh so I'll be using Apple or Apple-compatible software. This is not as much an issue today when cross-platform is more the rule. Even Microsoft has been making critical software available for the Mac and Avid in videography likewise has paid more attention to the Mac with the Mac's impressive showing through this recession. Premium pricing has not inhibited Apple's growth. Jobs was right in setting the lead instead of following the herd.

The Rose interview commented on Jobs's strategy and success. He has creative and innovative genius but these are lens through which he looks for what is missing in the commodities market and designs a beautiful product that fills that niche and that people get passionate about. His high tech design is high art.

I still don't know what products I shall eventually be making that will get monetized. Right now, I am still interested in doing model photography but I don't think I'll be doing fashion spreads. Documentary and drama are more interesting to me. I am definitely into videos not film. Right now I am producing 4 categories of videos: travel, modeling, commercials, and people interest. The last is the most intriguing but needs work to develop it so I can give an elevator speech in one sentence. Narrowing the focus is what skills acquisition and market research is about.

Meanwhile here's the elephant in the room. I love images but long ago I already had a first love: words, what I am calling right now "text." Once I feel I've acquired enough skills and craft I can push the envelope and call what I do writing. It's the elephant because it's what gets me up in the morning to start working; it's how I spend my mornings. It's an elephant because compared to video and photography work, writing feels the least likely to become monetized. What I can do is combine my love for words with my love for images, drama and people interest: write my own screenplays, direct and edit the video. Right now that feels like something in a remote future i.e. one to two years from now!

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Life and Drama in Photographs and Video

2010-03-08T09:19:00.001-08:00

By dramatic images I mean images that convey mood or emotion not only by the model's facial expression but by his or her whole body. I like to capture close-up, full-length or three-quarter images of a single model and employing multiple models adds more possibilities for portraying emotion and relationship. This would involve acting that models already do without thinking they are acting. We call it "striking a pose." I just want to make acting out emotions and relationships more conscious.

Admittedly this focus is bound up with my interest in moving images—videos and movies—where emotion and relationship are captured through more than one frame. Movement conveys change.

I don't off hand have an image from my own shoots. This is a weak example, a man bent down as if in despair while his companion sits quietly by his side.

In a future shoot with model Coty, I want to shoot video as well. I can have the video camera shoot in the background while we shoot still images (unless I can find an assistant to man the camcorder) but I also want to use part of the shoot time to shoot these extended frames. Maybe I am too ambitious for the time we'll have but I do want to shoot a short vignette of Coty telling his story. No acting will be required because I'll just ask him some questions that he can answer (or not answer if you choose) from real life. As much as I love still images, I think moving images up the ante. This is the director in me.

Two subjects interest me that I want to document in photographs and video: life in small-town America and the lives of ordinary Americans, not the people we see in the news at night nor the intense drama of prime time TV.

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Wes Bentley in The Last Word

2010-03-08T08:06:00.001-08:00

The Last Word (2008) was directed by Geoffrey Haley who also wrote the story. I'd not heard of him so it was because of Wes Bentley who played the main character, Evan Merc, that I chose to watch the movie. I liked it. I liked the character of Evan, a reclusive writer who made his living writing suicide notes. The character is not only reclusive but restrained, his range of emotions, emotional responses and daily activities so circumscribed they'd fit on the head of a pin.He is also dressed with the same restraint in almost monochromatic earth hues. The shirts hint at a man who dressed as he did as a teenager, someone who did not care about clothes or his appearance.

All through the movie, the Evan character is flat and two-dimensional, a cartoon character without emotion and the barest of life. When the sister of one of his clients, Matt, pursues him, he resists but is drawn into a relationship when Charlotte (played by Winona Ryder, another movie personality I am not familiar with) casually offers sex on their third "date." His emotional involvement with Charlotte and with Abel (played by Ray Romano of the long-running TV series, "Everybody Loves Raymond") leads to Evan's castled restraint falling apart. Desolate when Charlotte finds out he had written her brother's suicide note, Evan who does not drink (or eat out, a "saint" according to Charlotte) goes on a drinking spree at a bar. When he leaves, a man follows and holds him up. Evan is surprised at the intense rage incited by the hold-upper. He punches the man to unconsciousness. His emotions are awakened. He stops Abel from killing himself and together they realize Abel's dream of making a cliff living. They allow people irate with some purchase or possession to hurl the darn thing over the cliff and watch it detonate as Abel pushes a button and the client watches on a monitor.

The story concept is original. It gives the movie an understated weirdness. It's like the elephant in the room because the movie is otherwise presented almost blandly. I'm afraid I won't remember this movie after a week and wonder how it could have been a more memorable film. On the other hand I get tired of action-driven films with explosions and acrobatic fistfights every second frame. The Last Word is memorable for how Haley constructed Evan's character. There is something lovable about this ecru-and-earth-dressed man who was drifting through life after an abusive childhood. He makes a "horrible boyfriend" but hooks me emotionally because we're all at one time or another felt we needed distance from the madding crowd to have some control over what Evan calls "issues."

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Attaining the Crest of the Curve

2010-03-06T08:54:00.001-08:00

Sorrento 2007

Yesterday was my best day of the week and it shouldn't be. I was groggy from having stayed up till half past three and was up again at eight. I've often wondered if I do my best work, whether editing videos or writing, when sleepy or when pushing myself into the morning's wee hours.

I stayed up Thursday into Friday morning to finish my video, The Amalfi Coast from the Emerald Grotto to Amalfi. It was exactly a week since I finished my last video, A Visit to L'Isole di Capri. Both come from videography I did on my 2008 walking tour of Naples and the Amalfi Coast, the best videographed of all my foreign travels. These two latest videos are the longest I've done since I started posting to Facebook on December 7 and to YouTube on January 4. My first YouTube video, Training To Fight 2, featuring Arron, was 2 minutes, 5 seconds long.

I'm starting to feel competent using iMovie. I started relearning Final Cut Pro ten days ago. FCP has features I want to use e.g. alpha channels, more control over audio, and animation but I can do a lot with iMovie I discovered its undocumented features. Most operations are as set but I've found out that most these defaults are easily modified. I can, for instance, start a project using a theme. When I cancel the theme I can modify its defaults i.e. beginning and closing titles, default transitions without losing what I've already edited into the video. The theme's special transitions then become available to me. Titles can be modified using Apple's built-in Fonts panel, not the Fonts panel that came with iMovie. I can choose from my computer's entire font collection, add shadow, outline and color, far beyond what Apple made available in iMovie's own font panel. David Pogue's O'Reilly manual has been invaluable. It is truly "the book that should have come in the box."

I went into photography and videography two years ago not only to explore my latent artistic bent, nor only to find another way to earn a living but, most important, to pursue necessary personal growth changes. I am back to 1969 when I paused medical school after getting overwhelmed by what I was doing. I was overwhelmed by what I was. I've made many adjustments but at core are still essential adjustments. I need to learn my own work ethic.

Learning to use iMovie has proved once again an old dictum. To succeed with a new skill one must go through and complete the learning curve. If one stopped short of achieving the crest of the curve, he would just have wasted his time. The goal each time is mastery. One needs focus and perseverance. I am learning the importance of attaining the crest of the curve.

The Pursuit of Duende

Cooking with Vinegar in Spain's Former Colonies

Discovering Nectarines and Other Drupes

A Fitness Formula That Works

Easy Summer Fruit Sherbet

The World Is Flat

On Writing

Mung Bean Stew with Jackfruit and Spinach, and Malaysian Salt Red Fish

Pinakbet Tagalog Style, Vegetarian

Song of the Open Trail

Morning Coffee for the Creative Juices To Flow

Fitting into the Mainstream

Singapore April 18, 2010 Marina Bay/Singapore Flyer

Singapore April 14-15, 2010-Tour Around Singapore

Gerald Brenan on how art should be judged

Developing concepts for video projects

Documenting Small Town Life

Attraction and Lust: The Ethics of a Shoot

How the East Was Won

Fields of Violets

Murmur of the Heart Today

Can conversation alone make a movie?

A Natural Cycle of Failure and Gain

Easter Day with Echoes East and West

Sappho's Gift This Spring Morning

Paying the Dues of Passion and Time

The House of Flying Daggers

Disrupting Comfort for Seeing

Knowing When You're There

Living, Writing & Creating with Boldness and Dash

Photo Shoot - Think Fun, Think Surprise, Think Live

Model Photography One.mov

Valentino the Last Emperor, and the world and market for women's beauty

Back to Stills Model Shooting

Casting to Concept and Back

The Right Time for the Right Products

Life and Drama in Photographs and Video

Wes Bentley in The Last Word

Attaining the Crest of the Curve

Dan Andrews Location-Independent Lifestyle

Purim in Israel with April

Purim in Israel with April

Blu-Ray Players Adds Astonishing Connectivity to Our Post-modern Lives

A Temple in Turkey Older than Civilization

A Temple in Turkey Older than Civilization

Khaled Hosseini describes writing Kite Runner

Amazon's Book Video Preview

Writing Tips for Success

Art and Art

Audrey the Writer

Snow Today, Gone Tomorrow

Skillet-broiled hamburger

Like Conquistadores of Old

Noli Me Tangere

Colin's Corner: A Sumerian-tablet invitation for multimedia-enhanced "books"

Apple's Cutting-Edge Way with Computing and Digital Media

Loving words, living

The Changing Chinese Presence in the U.S.

Believing in an afterlife

Cantonese Diaspora Life & the House of Cheung

Field Greens with Feta

Cabbage Stirfry with Shrimp and Ham

Woody Allen on the Authentic Life

Beef Sirloin with Marsala Sauce

Asian-centered Reflections on Moviemaking

George Lucas's Acorn-size History of American Movies

10th Planet Indy1.mov

Romulus, My Father

The Care and Feeding of Ideas in the Making of Images, Sound and Animation

Before the Beginning: Mystical Time

Remarkable Random Relationships

The Stories behind Chinese Characters

Uploading my first video on YouTube

Walnut Ham Orange Salad

What Is Real in Indian Spirituality

Voyeur or Adventurer?

Fight Club Video

The 2010th Year of the Human

Citrusy Chicken Pita Wrap

Food, Glorious Food!