Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Location shoots have their advantages but so do studio shoots. The photographers whose work I admire, from Andy Warhol to Mario Testino, from Fred Goudon to Terry Richardson, Bruce Weber to Wolfgang Tillman, Juergen Teller to Steven Meisel, all do some of their best work in the studio. Four-fifths of the photos on the Major Model site are studio images, over half against a white background. Beauty in images follow trends and the successful photographer not only has to know his craft but also create images that shine above those of his competitors, that grab you by the collar and make you pay attention. In most instances, the media in which it is portrayed determines what constitutes an effective image.

Jay Meisel started out renting a three-room apartment as a studio for $53. A photographer nowadays could spend ten times that just for rent while pay for photographic work has only doubled. And then there are the expensive equipment, computer and software that modern photographers employ in an increasingly competitive field. Jay calls his lighting technique "very unsophisticated." He uses available light which to him means light that he has "experienced" naturally and that he will duplicate if that is what he wants for his photograph. In an interview for a Smithsonian photography series, he says photographers just starting out nowadays have to have mastery of the technology just to get a foot in the door but then there is still the competition with equally skilled other photographers.

With on-location indoor or outdoor shoots atmosphere is easier to create but lighting is easier to control in a studio. My aesthetics are still evolving. Not only am I learning the fundamentals of the craft but I am also still exploring what market I want to break into. Right now I want my images to be high-resolution but just about everything including degree of resolution itself is negotiable and can run the gamut.

I want to do more atmospheric images. White background to me, above and beyond other solid backgrounds, tests the photographer's art the most. It is like playing a Mozart piano sonata without using the pedal as the piano was just emerging in Mozart's time. Without pedal, without the modern-day studio enhancements, the music the pianist plays is transparent, relying solely on his mastery and feeling for the music. Every mistake is glaring but the subtlest nuance is clear too as rain. Here are the top male models according to models.com: http://models.com/model_culture/50topmale models/index/cfm.

I do want to experiment some more with lighting. I've identified a couple of details from my shoot with Brandon that I think I can correct. I still want to do just indoor shoots with white backgrounds but I also want to use parts of my living room and bedroom as setting. Right now I am thinking of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. First performed in 1949 when the Great Depression was transitioning into the high-consumer age of the 1950s, it was a "caustic attack on the American Dream." We're at a similar point today. My hope is that as a society we reconsider the so-called American Dream and what that really means. A house for every family, according to President George W. Bush when he first took office. Maybe the dream is not what it has devolved to today - overly ambitious and greedy corporations, fantastic use of fantasy capital, devaluing old-time saving for a rainy day, excessive wealth display. Maybe we need to cut back on the excesses that have bankrupt our faith and trust in government and our financial system.

I envision a modern-day documentary much like the photographs sharecroppers that Walker Evans collected in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and his other pictures of the Great Depression. I want to create images of the man in the street, the archetypal "young man" facing his future in terms of the current financial debacle, the updated version of Miller's Willy Loman in his many present-day guises.

I still want to try shooting with a green screen so I can replace the background with other scenes, perhaps from my travels or manufactured from sets I'll create later. This amplified equation should give me greater flexibility in composing images. Notice I write of "images" not "photographs." I think the future of the photographic image lies in our ability to manipulate the pixel bits captured by our digital camera sensors with software, in much the same way that movies today, even those not involving fantasy or science fiction rely heavily on CGI and SFX. David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button took over a year and a half for post-production to allow technology to catch up with the vision of the director.

As much as I enjoy software and computer manipulation I acknowledge that photography is at its heart about light. It is the art of capturing light, for crying out loud! But in a highly competitive field a photographer's vision, his idea of what constitutes photographic substance is what will make his work stand out. In staged people photography, the model and his relationship with the photographer are crucial. The successful photograph surely is the product of two minds working hand in hand.

Divining Joy

In Brit director, Stephen Daldry's much praised The Reader, an 18-year-old law student in post-WWII Germany falls in love with a woman twice his age who turns out to be Nazi war criminal. According to star Kate Winslet, it's "a love story"; according to the director it's about the struggle between two generations of Germans, one that participated in horrific genocide and the next generation that had to deal with its vicarious guilt.

For me, the movie is about an intriguing story concept: a young man with an older woman who is illiterate. Literature is part of the chemistry of their intimacy, words treated like love objects. The movie was scripted by British playwright David Hare from a novel by German real-life lawyer, Bernhart Schlink, who in an interview with Charlie Rose sidestepped the question of how much of the story was autobiographical by saying "all novels are autobiographical."

In David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Brad Pitt plays a man who was born old and ages backwards. The movie explores a fantasy many of us have: what if we start out with a young body and a mature mind that has already benefited from years of experience? The story is based on a 1920s story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Kate Winslet  also starred in another current release, Revolutionary Road, by another British-born director Sam Mendes. Based on a novel by Richard Yates, the movie is about a Connecticut couple in the 1950s, April and Frank Wheeler (played by Leonardo di Caprio) who sell their house and take their savings to live in Paris for six months to allow Frank to find out what artistic road he really wants to take instead of working a well-paying but boring job.

In my all-time favorite novel, André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name, a seventeen-year-old Italian boy falls in love for the first time with a twenty-something American literature professor and writer who spends the summer with his family on a seaside Italian village. Both are Jewish.

What are the features common to these works of fiction and/or cinema that appeal to me? Are these the directions I need to take to realize my own nascent dreams to become a writer, a tooler in words, ideas and images?

The movies are based on novels or short stories so all these works begin as prose. The concept is something many of us dream about but doesn't usually happen. The works explore what if scenarios with which we can identify. The characters are about people who are in love or falling in love. They are couples usually different or opposite to each other to make describing their relationship bring out features common to most relationships but in a more remarkable, shining, if your will, way. The couple share something deeply similar but have to struggle against their differences to make the connection or achieve a common purpose.

Traveling the Dreamscapes

At the gym last night I noticed that a personal trainer was showing a weight-training program on his laptop to his client in the free weights area. Cool! Why couldn't I produce training videos like that?

On TV last night I watched The Power of Harmony about the Turtle Creek Chorale, a Dallas-based gay men's chorus. It was awesome. Immediately following this was the monthly In Your Life feature that I seldom watch on public TV. It is usually shown late at night when I am no longer watching TV. The show featured two documentaries about gay men and AIDS. I have no stomach for AIDS anymore but documentaries continue to fascinate me.

Later last night, I retired to bed with Christopher Nolan's much-hyped Dark Knight that people are saying could win Heath Ledger a posthumous Oscar for his performance as the Joker. The movie has been touted the "best superhero movie ever." I must say it lives up to the hype. For two and a half hours I was glued to the set. The Redbox movie was in plain DVD format but both the video and audio were phenomenal! The sound in particular was riveting. It thundered through my bedroom speakers without sounding too loud. Amazing. Once again I was reminded how powerful the sound track is when viewing a video. The resolution might be hazy but if the sound is phenomenal the overall effect is lifted by the sound. Last night both video and audio were stunning.

This morning I read from Rob Pope's The English Studies Book about the academic study usually lumped in the university's English Department. The book reminded me of my interest in academic nonfiction books like this. I love learning about culture, art, history, and the individual lives of people especially in media that challenges me to think and rethink my ideas.

This afternoon, I ordered what I called my "last business purchases" of the year from B&H. Aptly enough I ordered their collapsible chroma background set that would not only allow me to shoot video as well as still images and replace the background with a background of my choosing. The included stand would also support reflectors and although it may not be as adjustable as the Denny version it is considerable cheaper. 

After reading Dan Cummins' comments about the photo of his best friend's son I was interested in the equipment he said he used. He shoots with Nikon and for this shoot used a Sigma EF-500 DG Super flash triggered by a Pocket Wizard Plus II. I would love to own  a wireless trigger and camera-triggered lights but the cost is prohibitive at this point. I had bought a cheap flash to use with my Canon D5 but the amount of light cannot be controlled. I was trying to save money and bought a cheap alternative that is not working quite as well. Perhaps I should have sprung for a more expensive Canon speedlite that can be a master but I could always use the one I ordered as a slave if down the road I opted to get off-the-camera flash lighting.

2008 is fast going. I have all kinds of noble resolutions but have not done much real work this year. Maybe 2009 shall be more productive. On the other hand, I am settling down to a new lifestyle. When I got up late this morning I did yoga and meditated for an hour. It felt good to be able to have the time to do this. I can worry about my professional goals but so far I am getting by without much additional income. As my friend, Tony, says, he himself is not "driven" as I am. Perhaps the main challenge for me in 2008 is adjusting my lifestyle to prepare for the rest of my life. Then not having been as productive as I wanted to be becomes less important. In the larger scheme, there are far more important issues.

Calling Me To Danger

It has been snowing the whole morning with two inches of the white stuff dressing the ground. I was up until two this morning reading two of my favorite books, André Aciman's Call by Your Name, and Eddie De Oliveira's Lucky.

Of the two, Aciman's is undoubtedly the better work. He teaches comparative literature at CUNY. Born into a Sephardic Jewish family originally from Istanbul, he grew up in multilingual Alexandria. His prose exudes the best of a cosmopolitan growing up experience. It is refreshing to see someone juggle concepts so elegant and diverse with such grace and elegance. Okay, I've done my quota of adjectives but every one was worth the risk of overdoing a compliment. We should all be so lucky.

Lucky is apparently the first work of a young Londoner born of an Argentinian mother of Italian stock and a Brazilian father whose ancestors came from Scotland. Another cultural mongrel, Oliveira utilizes the patois of young, rocking Londoners to describe the loneliness, confusion and sudden ecstasies of a teenager discovering love and its many chambered heart.

Both books are heavily internal, monologues written out when thoughts are made to stop in their tracks and their ramifications followed down byways and alleys into tiny rooms where no one had lived for years or to the edges of cliffs overlooking rampaging waves dizzyingly far below. If one were not acquainted with thoughts that love incites, these passages would be onerous but for me they are ambrosia from Ganymedes' cup, luscious, airy and sweet, the very stuff of fantasy and what is life without fantasies like this? 

To read these books, especially Aciman's wonderful prose, is to attempt the impossible with sodden words, to run the gauntlet for the flimsiest reward just so one can breathe love again.

Of Acorns and the Oak Tree

The sun stayed out just long enough to get me out of bed this morning. After the mild, sunny autumn days, winter is settling in with strings of dark, cold, rainy or snowy days. And January is not even here yet!

I don't know if the shoot with Brandon will materialize. The prospect certainly inspired me to work with my old model photos anew. This image is one of several I "discovered" with my new Photoshop-processing skills.  I was gratified to see I've shot a few images that I thought were on par with other photographers were posting on the Internet. On the other hand I was disappointed that the bulk of my model photos are simple, head-on head shots. Back then, of course, I was more concerned about taking good-resolution photos and shooting live people whom I could direct to assume poses instead of snapping images before they vanished into the crowd was intoxicating.

There are directions both in photographing models as well as in post-production that I am keen on exploring. So far I've been processing in Photoshop just for composition and lighting, without using the program's bells and whistles to effect more profound or dramatic modifications. For instance, I want to be able to "paint" in specific areas to alter the hue or brightness of these area. I want to be more profligate with color changes, both for the overall effect as well as for specific details. I want to work with monotones containing elements in pastel shades, like ghosts silhouetted on the nets blowing in tropical bed chambers.

Meanwhile, re-reading André Aciman's novel, Call Me by Your Name, has lit a fire under my dream of writing something that combines memories with the lifelong obsessions I've had with religions (especially Christianity and Buddhism), with the experience, theory and ideals of romantic love, and confronting both life and death. Too big for a book? Maybe. Just to get started on a real prose project would be satisfying enough. For a while.

Last night I caught the tail end of a PBS show on "brain fitness" for the elderly. The experts spoke about principles that I've already discovered for myself but hearing them verbalize these ideas was greatly empowering. Attention and focus maintains the brain's ability to crunch sensory data. A rich sensory experience keeps the brain's plasticity. Demanding less and less from our brains leads to early aging. Challenging the brain with new learning and practicing sustained attention on any subject signals the brain that it can't grow old too fast yet. Old people have smaller circles of people they communicate with. This too hastens aging. The principles that work at the gym work for our mental life and life in general. The more we demand from ourselves the more we are given. Don't the religious texts that appear paradoxical and contradictory say just that? 

Maybe maturity brings into union the vast divergences that characterized our youthful explorations of life. Only as we are able to sit down and rest from our labors can we see the beauty and power of true labor, of effort that nourishes, and the wisdom of the ages begins to spill into the crannies of our exquisite, oh-too-short existence.

Time for Reflection

Instead of meeting Chuck at Sichuan in Carmel yesterday, I called him first thing in the morning and suggested we meet at the house. I would fix lunch for us and talk business afterwards. I didn't want the temptation of a Chinese buffet and apparently neither did he.

We learn from others. I had always objected to the idea of "learning" invoked, for instance, by people rationalizing painful experiences as occasions for learning. For me learning was acquiring knowledge that changed how we thought, made choices and subsequently acted. 

Yesterday's meeting made me reconsider the idea of learning. A glimpse of another person's life adds to the breadth of our own experience. Sometimes that glimpse actually changes our understanding of the world in which we take action and experience its results. More often when we don't take the time to reflect, compare and study what we have seen, we interpret it according to our existing understanding and our understanding remains unchanged. In both instances, we do "learn" in the sense that these new images are added to our panoply of images available to us when the subject comes up again.

In the last fifteen years, I have grown to value vicariously acquired images. I don't have to own majestic houses to enjoy their exteriors as I drive past them. I don't have own the garden to treasure memories of the flowers, shrubs and trees in someone else's garden I visit. Ownership is primarily psychological. We own something because it has entered our mind's eye. We call this experience. Material things though we own as a legal and civil concept. Our nature rejoices in the idea of ownership and aggrandizement is simply an expression of Self, this force within us that always seeks more of what is pleasant, less of the unpleasant.

Chuck has been regaling me with the delight he and his family takes in owning a powerful SUV and the trailer is hauls. Their vacations consist of taking these mammoth machines, icons of the wealth of this country, to drive to Florida or some other picturesque locations. This weekend he is taking his portable home to IU to spend time with his son, Adam, at Adam's fraternity house celebration.

For some, a portable home no matter that gas recently cost over four dollars a gallon is the icing on the cake we acquire from the labors of our lifetimes. We might envy them for the icing in their lives or feel puzzlement how they could value this or that so highly. We would like to think that people in a society hold the same values but this is true only so far. The idea of democracy is built on this premise: individual differences keep extreme communal action in balance.

What has this got to do with duende? Duende is not just the dark, mysterious, almost erotic force in art and experience that pulses with life and makes us dread and feel awe in its presence. It is to me ultimately the quality over time that I sense in my life. We have a set of standards for quality by the time we are, say, fourteen years old and these change little if we lived sixty, seventy or eighty more years. Beyond the acquisition of material objects, wisdom might consist in understanding the foundation for our happiness -- what makes us feel contented and charmed at the end of the day, satisfied at the end of our lives. Since we are seldom born with either wisdom or happiness, we acquire these through learning. 

To learn is to grow, to add to what we know and to what we can experience.

The Primal Imagination

My new neighbor, in dark slacks and IBM-blue dress shirt, is shaking off the dirt from his BMW's floor mat. Next door, another new neighbor is getting into his shiny black truck, Boxes Inc. emblazoned on the door. The road outside the study window is deserted after they drive away. The world has gone to work elsewhere. Here I am trying to conjure my own work world.

Again and again I realize I don't know how to think with imagination. I am schooled in logic and rationality, thin veneers over the child who felt inherently inadequate with his peers. They flew kites, hit one another with gusto in free-for-all fights, broke rules and reveled in the telling of these and other infractions. I felt inept. I was good out of fear and that goodness keeps me from breaking out of the defensive rationality my little self created as armor and weaponry.

Coming home yesterday afternoon from lunch at my new neighborhood Chinese buffet, I sought out the two-volume set of W. Somerset Maugham's The Complete Short Stories. His stories are dated. He writes about the "natives" like the Englishman whose empire still stretched around the globe. But his stories glitter ever more. He writes so easily that reading just the first couple of sentences he has already drawn you into his world. His narrator seems always that same dated Englishman, a writer no less, but each story is crafted like a solitary gem.

Noah Lukeman in his book, The First Five Pages, writes how the fiction writer does not "tell" but "shows." Instead of simply describing a scene, he should state facts. Avoiding adjectives and adverbs, he uses terse language, each word weighted and necessary. He conjures up vivid scenes and appropriately limned characters: the protagonist is clearly the protagonist, someone the reader likes or dislikes but captures his interest nonetheless. The hero, the villain, the obstacles, all come together in what Maugham writes of as the "shape" of a story.

I fell asleep after beginning the short story, Honululu, and woke up at six thirty this morning drenched in a vivid dream. I was doing my last consultation with group home patients. Two of the case managers were attractive young men, the kind that always makes me want to help. One was going to school in his spare time. I was encouraging the other, smaller and cuter, to do the same. I was thinking I could help him financially but didn't tell him so. 

The dream segued without a break into a scene at home where my parents were still alive. My older sister had booked a flight to Hong Kong with a client. She got the seat cheaply because the travel agent told her three people booking together would get a deal. A woman happened to be at the travel agency and they got the special price. I told Merma I would pay for her to stay an extra day so she could tour Hong Kong. Her eyes lit up.

I told my sister  I'd go, too, even if I paid an exorbitant price for airfare. I was thinking about my waking-life worries about prostate cancer. I didn't know how long I'd be living anyway so why not take every opportunity to do what I wanted to do? I went to a Filipino travel agency. The office looked like a bar. The pudgy Filipino owner showed me  brochures of hotels he could book for us. I asked him about flight tickets. I bought one without even checking the price.

Back home I noticed I had paid $2000 for the plane ticket. For that amount I could have flown back to the States. I still wanted to go on the trip. I woke up.

I imagine the creative mind to possess a kind of coherence similar to what I felt last night after watching Frederick Fonteyn talk about his movie, Gilles' Wife (La Femme de Gilles). He described how he felt shooting the deleted scenes and why he edited them from his movie. Sometimes, he said, you have to cut out even your favorite scenes because the movie doesn't need them. You shoot the scene and it influences subsequent scenes that you shoot. Then you don't need them anymore because what they captured are now in the newer shoots.

The creative mind works on two levels: on the rational mind that chooses not only on the basis of what it sees but with the subconscious mind where mythic images and iconic symbolism resides giving subtle shape to what is chosen. Creativity is a dance hinging on two worlds. I must work from the "real" world while keeping the door ajar so the inner world can give what I write or shoot that complexity that makes anything we create art. From our inner world to the viewer's or reader's, this is the route I should learn to create.

New Indeed!

Truly, creating a new career and a new life takes shape by hiking the trail, day after day, minute after unremarkable minute.

Through the jungle, leaping across ravines, dodging feral obstacles, navigating equally feral urban adversities, charging human and non-human barricades, the landscape changes as we go from frame to frame, day after day. That's adventure!

Envisioning the shift from working in a largely scientific field to doing creative, imaginative and artistic work was nothing compared to the reality of actually doing the shift. The sun this morning is brilliant in a brilliant autumn sky and my mood is up but there are days when defeatism reigns and I just do what I can. I recall that I am venturing into new territory, a field for which I have not been academically prepared. The notion didn't hit me when I started. It felt then that shifting would be as easy as tumbling down the hill with Jack.
I started with just the hobbyist experience of snapping pictures and the delight I took viewing digital images and graphic designs. Professional photography is much more than that. In this day and age, photography is no longer just taking the photos and mixing chemicals in the darkroom. Photography is taking pictures, processing them digitally and displaying them for people's enjoyment as well as commercial opportunities. One does it all.

I was fortunate to find a model that inspired me when I shot Kaleb. The adventure took me into the exciting field of modeling. I loved it. It was months before I realized I needed to learn more about processing the images and correcting color balance. 

Studio photography is another whole world to explore. There are nuances of lighting, setting the stage, using props, and, an area I have barely touched, creating the emotional pull from combining these elements.

Correcting a picture's color is just the first step, too. Becoming comfortable with the technology, I can liberate my organ of sight and create my own unique vision. Verisimilitude forms the basic first stage but vision is how we see things our own way. It is what we contribute to the diversity of human experience, of culture, and the joy we can take on the trail of discovery, accomplishment and desire.

Living In Time

This is the most attention I have paid to autumn since coming to America with its four seasons. Should I look back to this time of interest the colors will most likely be shades of yellow and brown contrasted with the crystal blue of the sky.

This morning, waking up to the drumbeat of rain falling on the roof outside my bedroom, I took my cup of Verona Starbucks coffee back to bed with me and read G. J. Whitrow's What Is Time? Snuggled in bed I wanted no interruption so I cancelled my lunch with Tony. What a wonderful meditation on time!

I have not done any more work on defining a text project since first opening Eric Maisel's The Art of the Book Proposal but elements of what he suggested fly about the mind influencing what I think. I have thought of writing a book on the theories and practice of  vipassana meditation using Western psychology and philosophy language. Whitrow's book underlined one of the areas about the practice that fascinates me the most: the concepts about time and memory.

Whitrow, after quoting Robert Hooke writing in the seventeenth century, said that what Hooke referred to as "the Soul" nowadays we would call the mind. He didn't explain how he made this transposition but it made sense to me as if I'd always known it. Soul and spirit are nowadays not much differentiated, the first term now hardly used as we immerse ourselves in the enlightened, more secular world of science, computer technology and global warming. While writers in the past differed in how they used the word "soul," it did seem to carry the burden of  the psychological component of our individual being where resided the historical collection of our exercise of choice, our subjective interpretation of events and our image of ourselves.

Buddha reportedly advocated the absence of self, what perhaps is best equated with soul, not that people did not experience self but on the contrary lived through self or the soul which is the reason why they suffered. The self was the individual's psychological processes which he or she refers to as reality but in actuality are something he or she collects in the course of life and imposes on an undifferentiated reality far vaster than the collection he or she makes. Critical to the operation of these processes is the element of time no matter that karmic time is understood in a very different way than time as understood in the West. In India, time might be described to be circular as opposed to linear, progressive time in the West but this is simplistic. Time in Buddhist philosophy is really chaotic, only superficially organized by karmic events. Buddha himself taught that there were four things a human being could never understand and karma is one of these.

The soul experiences time as memory. Science, of course, understands time as progression of events although some theories in quantum physics challenge linearity to events in a similar way that Buddhist philosophy thinks of chaotic time. Hugh Everett, for one, in PBS's Nova program, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, proposed another explanation of Bohr's thesis that electrons revolving around the nucleus of an atom are simultaneously present everywhere. Only when an observer observes them do they take concrete positions in space. Imagine that if electrons indeed are simultaneously present everywhere our concept of time goes bananas! Because time in the West is linear, Whitrow argues, deriving he claims from the dogma of Jesus Christ dying on the cross once and for always to save all humankind from sin committed all over the spectrum of past, present and future.

I doubt I would have the patience to sit down and develop the themes about time that reading Whitrow's book has inspired. I doubt I would ever settle down to one project I could develop into a book, a movie or a photographic project. Having said this I would also add that I doubt I know what I shall be doing in the future. Ancient cultures like the Mayan developed their ideas about time in an effort to control events in the future. We use the past nowadays for a similar motivation. Even our construct of the four seasons is in part an attempt to predict the regular recurrence of events in the future so that science in effect is a throwback to the pre-historic idea of circular and chaotic time. The Buddhist avoids paralysis by training himself to value the present and only the present. Take care of the present and the future takes care of itself.

Or as one of the survivors in the recent Heartland Film Festival movie, Stranded, decided after an avalanche cut off their oxygen supply: don't fight it, experience the moment.

It Begins with a Conversation

I missed going to any of the shows at the Heartland Film Festival yesterday to join the fun at the Parke County Covered Bridge Festival. Minda had left a message for me Friday night that she and Luz would be here by 8:30 if I called her at 7:30 Saturday morning to confirm. They did not get here till after 10. I was already talking to Tony about canceling the trip and moving it to this morning when M's BMW slid into the parking lot in front of the house. I made an executive decision to go and miss the film festival.

I don't regret the decision. Maybe having time away from the film festival would give me time to process the heady ideas coming from the shows I saw on Friday and what I heard from the filmmakers at the end of the screening.

Paul Murphy was one of the directors available to answer questions Friday night. He directed the New Zealand film, Second-Hand Wedding, his first feature after doing commercials for 20 years. He told us that the movie "started with a conversation." After you begin working on it, the project "takes on life of its own." 

These comments connected with me. I complain that we don't have dramatic geological formations and landscapes in Indiana. We are cutoff from the movie-making industry. Movie people are few and as far between as any scenic wonders in the country's heartland. But one does not have to look far for a story to tell or for an image to shoot. The crucial step is to take the step.

For years now I've been collecting inspirational stories of how other people made it, how they started. Movie actors, fiction writers, scriptwriters, visual artists, computer software geniuses, website entrepreneurs, film directors and producers, photographers: these are my heroes, theirs the story that intrigue me no end. Each one's story is different. I can look for the correct mixture of ingredients to make my own start and may be looking the rest of my life. The crucial step is to take the step.

The last two Saturdays going out in search of local images to photograph have moved my interest in photography farther than maybe the last year put together. Shooting models tops the experiences but more than this shooting ordinary scenes like the orange Oldsmobile in my front yard or M's son, Ken, peering at the honeybee he had been shooing away and decrying just minutes earlier suddenly seemed examples of beginnings to get started so a project, any project, can have a life of its own.

Four and Three

My interests do come and go. Along with fluctuations in my energies for productive work, this makes progress towards a goal that also keeps changing hard to define.

The excellence that this blog attempts to explore is disseminated among these three: photography, lifestyle, and writing. This morning, after visiting some Internet sites and signing up for vimeo.com, I felt my interest in videos rise like the phoenix. I have not thought much about videos since last April at the NAB conference but making commercial videos or "movies" is my fourth musketeer.

To mirror its arising (or is this just another instance of superstition?), Charlie Rose in last night's show that I watched at lunch chose guests from the movie industry. "Bob" de Niro, director Barry Levinson and producer/writer Art Linson graced the first half of the show discussing their movie, What Just Happened opening this coming Friday. Later Rose chatted with comedian Bill Maher and Larry Charles, director of the surprise hit, Borat, about their movie, Religulous.

Just before breaking for lunch I went through the 259 images on my Flickr photostream. These are not "astonish me!" images, nowhere close to the quality I am aiming for and with which I would have the gumption to invite the public to see and criticize but when viewed as a whole they are rather impressive. The mix of images I have, reflecting my interests, is unique to me. It is from this mix though not necessarily from every ingredient that my public work shall come from. I don't have my "voice" or "vision" yet but fate has already determined the grist for their mill.

I have not shot models since July. I miss the high of those shots although I have a feeling this present phase on the journey holds an important place in the overall schema. I want to finish at least Deke McClelland's tutorial before I start processing images from my "professional" shoots. Meanwhile I do a handful everyday, just to keep my spirits up.

As usual, the Internet sites I visited awed me by the virtuosity and "outside-the-box" thinking of artists, software engineers, and entrepreneurs. If I have my four musketeers, I also have these tres virgines: art, digital technology and entrepreneurship as the powers behind the musketeers. 

Life is too short for everything I want to do. This is how I feel when I am feeling creative. It's a feeling; I don't believe it to be true. Time at our disposal is important but what we become proud of as we become proud of children are small parts of the package. Our pride in our work is symbolic of the struggle that is life itself.

My Close-up, Mr. de Mille!

The struggle for supremacy between words and pictures continues. The winner gets my attention and whoever gets it makes it to the show.

The day was so pretty yesterday that I frittered the afternoon away taking pictures instead of going to the gym. I don't regret the lack of discipline. The pictures were great. Trees were turning, ahead of the crowd the maples. The red maple in the courtyard outside my bedroom window is aflame. Against the cloudless blue sky, the tree epitomizes the prettiest images of autumn in Indiana.

At Gloria Jennings' office yesterday I chatted with her office manager, Meredith. He has been writing a blog since last fall. He told me he was raised in a conservative Pentecostal family and was never allowed to swear. Now a grownup he has given vent to his feelings as he navigates through the pain of breaking up with his girlfriend and not being able to see their daughter. Cuss words have their usefulness and in his blog really shine.

Meredith is also pretty aware of his belonging to the African-American community. He writes, he told me, as he speaks, at least inside his mind. His written prose certainly is colorful and conjures tribal qualities, the unique way people in communities choose words and phrases to communicate with each other.

My own prose seems colorless by comparison. For years I've told the few people whom I've told of my occult dream to write for publication that I was still looking for my voice. To a stranger maybe I already have my voice, my own individual ways of using words and phrasing them to express ideas. Certainly the topics I write about when taken together help to identify me. I can't use tribal colloquialisms as Meredith does. That would not be me. And I am not interested in fiction, in re-creating myself to write something others might want to read.

However I do know that if I wanted to break through the glass ceiling and into the public sphere I must keep to some rules. So far I've written solely for myself. Frankly though if I didn't know me I would probably find what I write dull. I'd read a few words, diagnose the writer as inept and narcissistic and move on.

I've admired many published writers. I have a revolving gallery of prose heroes. I can pinpoint what they are doing right; I just can't make myself write as they do. 

The latest is Tahir Shah, the offspring of "Afghan royalty" who grew up and now lives in the U.K. I came across his second book, Trail of Feathers, at Half Price yesterday before I decided to junk going to Bally and spend the rest of the day snapping pictures instead. Tahir certainly has found his voice. He writes in simple sentences that seem to come straight out of my mind, at least, the idealized mind. (The real mind is going hundreds of miles faster, crowded with wordy vehicles all streaming towards nowhere in particular.) He writes with humor and sets the stage over and over to grab his reader's curiosity. He describes himself as inherently a curious man and it's his curiosity that led to his writing books.

Curiosity, that curious quality some of us have who grapple with seemingly endless numbers of topics. The world is truly a wonder, its details insuperably intriguing. But curiosity is not enough. We must husband it and yoke its energy to a project. This may be the difference between a rock and a man. The latter believes he is master of his fate while the former simply is.

Lunch with Tony at noon became stressful. When he arrived I was urgently washing pans and cooking utensils while the food that I had already plated was going cold. It was a great spread though if I might say so. I'd bought a fennel bulb intending to make a version of coleslaw using it instead of cabbage. I was going to eschew mayonnaise and make a lighter dressing. I envisioned poppy and toasted fennel seeds to top it.

Well I never got around to making the slaw. Today I sliced up the fennel into crosswise strips, added a smaller portion of celery also cut into crosswise strips, quickly fried these in olive oil with rehydrated wild mushrooms, bits of scallion and walnut halves and the result was ecstasy!

So okay I may never have my moment in the public eye but I have art nonetheless though only for my own enjoyment and the enjoyment of my few friends. Life can be better, definitely better, but what's to complain. It's all good. As Hildegarde, the medieval Catholic saint sang, all is well is well is well...

My Ithaka

George Seferis, the Smyrna-born Greek poet admirer of C.P. Cavafy, wrote:

"As you are writing

The ink grows less

The sea increases."

When creative energy is high, the "real" world around me - the window full of morning sunshine, the hum of the computer, the keyboard under my fingers - disappears. I inhabit my inner world completely and there the sea surges to blasts of tropic sun, the breeze startles, the sand enraptures. For the real world to an artist or writer is what he or she has in her mind. Nature as we know it belongs to the domain of science but experience is the nature he or she mines.

In Theodoros Angelopoulos' 1998 movie, Eternity and a Day, the protagonist, an old man and poet, Alexander, tells the story of how Dionysios Solomon whose poem, Hymn to Liberty, became the words to the newborn Greek nation's national anthem, used to buy words from the locals to write his poems. Born of an Italian father, he wrote in Italian until deciding to move to the Ionian island of Zanthikos when Greece fought for and won its freedom from the Ottomans in the late 1800s. I employ the same maneuver because while I write from my inner world it often takes an external impetus - a movie, a poem, a book - to trigger the creative process.

One of the words that the old man bought from his "friend-for-a-day," an Albanian child he rescued from the Thessaloniki police, was "xenites," meaning an outsider, a stranger, an exile. We are poets, writers, moviemakers because in a sense we are all xenites. We live in our inner world and only by concretizing its denizens to share with others do we make that connection that lessens our loneliness.

The DVD of Angelopoulos' movie contains Cavafy's poem, Ithaka, one of my favorites.

"Keep Ithaka always  in your mind.

Arriving there is what you're destined for.

But don't hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you're old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you've gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn't have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now."

Finding the way to externalize my inner world where lie my most precious treasures is my own journey to Ithaka.

I took the image above from inside the tourist bus taking us from the port of Bari to Matera in Central Italy in 2007.

More than Art

More than art, my interest is what delights the mind. 

What delight it are ideas, but not just any idea. The idea that delights has to grab the mind and not just grab it but grab it totally. The idea must take center stage and squeeze out everything else.

Where there is delight there is attention. The mind attends to what seduces it into delight and the mind "sees."

I have been exploring the way of images to counterbalance the emphasis I have always placed on words and concepts. Images are a more complex expression of ideas in the mind. Many times words fail. Concepts fall short. They only represent what the mind sees but does not comprehend it. Images by their very ambiguity allow various interpretations. Ideas, as Plato also conceived it, are primordial, before thought, before the attempts of reason to give solidity to what is inherently immaterial.

For years I've viewed my coming to America as my search for a bigger world, a world not limited by the little that I knew. To understand and live my life more fully I needed a larger ocean so that the mistakes I made would not cause a maelstrom but be a simple ripple in its vastness. As a child I attempted to comprehend experience by tying it to the Christianity of my upbringing. It was only after coming to America that I obtained access to other systems of thought and belief. America gave me access to media - books, movies, television programs, magazines, and, most powerful medium of all, the Internet. Through these I've come to know the many ways that men and women have understood themselves through the millennia and throughout the many parts of the earth they inhabited.

Perhaps my most important discovery in America was Asian  religions and ways of thinking and being. It took my coming to the West to find my East. Never shall the twain meet, wrote Kipling. They are meeting now despite our deaf ears and blind eyes although to only a very few is this realization dawning. We need every part of our heritage as human beings to see more of the whole, what Nikos Kazantzakis caused his protagonist, Zorba the Greek, to call "the whole shebang."

Artists can play a vital role in all of us someday realizing we're all in this together. Art if genuine has to be rooted in something universal in the human spirit. We use the details of our workaday lives to flesh out the universal. What is universal is delight, the joy of our being.

Where's the Wonder?

"Where's the wonder

As each day would start,

That sang with the dawn,

Ran away with my heart:

Where is it gone?"

These opening lyrics from the song, Wish You Were Here, struck me as I walked at the gym last night. I've had glimpses of this feeling in the past, usually associated with falling in love as sung in this Rome and Harold song as well as those times when I was on long meditation retreats but I've never had the feeling consistently day after day. How wonderful to wake up each morning with a sense of wonder and anticipation! 

But is it even possible? I have now been on my own five months since taking a sabbatical from the clinic in Lafayette. I don't have to worry about traffic or the weather and road conditions driving to and fro the clinic. I don't have the stress of diagnosing and coming up with appropriate treatment for one client after another. One would think I'd eliminated all the stresses in my life but still this feeling of wonder that starts in the morning and pervades the day eludes me.

The feeling is more accessible on a day like today when the sky is clear and sunshine is pouring down to illuminate the landscape. Light brings out colors and vivid images are hallmarks of the experience. This is at the core of my interest both in writing and in taking photographs, to stay alert to possibilities of wonder and joy.

The Streets and Neighborhoods of the Mind

After fresh snow blanketed Maine and with sunshine transformed his backyard to an enchanted land, Kyriacos Markides, in his book, Riding with the Lion, wrote : "A day like this made me temporarily oblivious of Cyprus. My incurable longing for the streets and neighborhoods of my youth and the hidden coves where I spearfished with my friends receded for a while to the back of my awareness."

I don't yearn for the streets and landscapes of the Philippines. I am not the patriotic sort. But images that remind me of the Philippines--coconut trees bending towards white, sandy beaches, hibiscus and plumeria blossoms, rice cakes on banana leaves, tiny village churches--delight and bring inexplicable pleasure.

What is the nature of delight in the mind. How do certain images or ideas seem to glow when they enter into the mind stream? What is the experience like? Can this be a phenomenon I could intentionally duplicate? But why only certain images or ideas? Taken together, do these images and ideas amount to something coherent and true about life, about me, about the universe?

For over 20 years, after sitting in meditation I would give dharma talks to those gathered there with me. Bits of ideas do come into the mind as I meditate and I do often identify one idea that is like the string with which I know I could pull the kite out of the wide blue sky. I start with that one idea and soon I am discoursing about Buddhist philosophy and its constructs about personhood and the "world," and I am amazed. Ideas tumble out of my mouth unbidden, often as a much a surprise to me as to my listening friends. I could feel the truthfulness of what I am saying. Thus I would think to myself have other people written extended expositions of prose that have inspired religions. But does the feeling of truthfulness mean these ideas are true?

In his book, Markides recounts how the two saintly mystics he had met back in Cyprus had had a falling apart. Do saints quarrel? Are they not supposed to have ego, pride, or vanity? The history of religions contains numerous examples of how religious leaders, many of them saints revered by their disciples, act in ways we think of as unholy. Even Jesus lost control of his anger and harried the vendors of animal sacrifices out of the temple in Jerusalem. Somehow Christian apologists were able to put his anger into something elevating but we all know how anger means loss of control to our ego. In anger we say harsh and hurting words, and act harshly and meanly.

What is the connection between the felt truthfulness of ideas that come to us in prayer or after meditation and virtue, the way we live our lives? Are the two compatible? Is there truly a person who after entering some doorway into sanctity forevermore acts, thinks and feels holy, kind, generous, compassionate, all the virtues our religions teach us as the way noble humans ought to act?

More to the point, does our feeling that an idea is true founded in truth? I think an artist also finds his art in a similar fashion. How many times does art arise from some mistake? How often do artists create new visions of enchantment after losing their way and finding themselves suddenly in a strange neighborhood where they'd never been?

Finally, what is truth? What is beauty? Are all these simply maya, delusions our minds bring about to soften the impact of a truly meaningless existence where there is no truth, no goal truly worthy of pursuing, no truly saintly or holy person, nothing worth living for? There is just this moment and how we construe it is immaterial?

Shopping the World

I feel guilty when I get lost roving the Internet and checking out the sites that mirror my interests, which are legion! But sailing the ether waves for me is like traveling through security lines, planes, ships, buses and cars. Real time travel might even suffer by comparison for the discomfort it involves!

Visiting other people's websites whets my appetite for creating my own. So far I've finished a third of  David Morris' book on creating a Flash-based site and realizing that by the end of the book I still won't be ready to create my own site. The book only introduces me to what can be done with Flash but not what I want to do.

Nonetheless we dream, I dream, and take one tiny step each day. I have decided not to go back to my lifetime profession and stay instead learning digital imaging and Internet art. I have the time and if I don't produce what I dream of producing the intent is not so much the product as the process. That, I'm afraid, is where I'm at today.

But while quality of life and being able to pursue lifelong dreams at last are increasingly the raison d'être, I don't want to think of myself as a hobbyist. One of these dreams is to learn the business of making money from my interests. For what I do to earn money would indicate a level of mastery that by myself I could not give to my work. Men and women band together not only for the more efficient production of food but, in the modern age, other less material benefits. Money as I learned from Joe Dominguez years ago simply symbolizes effort and time from the finite supply of both that we have. But it is also founded on people willing to use the symbol of what they've earned to acquire what they themselves could not produce but would like to have in their life. Money is desire as much as necessity symbolized in concrete form.

I use the term duende recklessly. I know that in the field of art and intuitive creativity I am a tyro. I look at what others do and I'm humbled, sometimes shamed that I aspire to heights from which they already produce their works. Duende like perfection is a goal, more elevating than death that comes with little effort on our part. It's the effort that makes the aspiration thrilling and worth the ups-and-downs of spirit that taking on the enterprise entails.

Where's the Beef?

In 2007, critics uniformly panned Good Luck Chuck. Critics in 21 reviews gave it an average score of 17 out of 100, indicating "extreme dislike or disgust." Audiences however flocked to the box office making it the #1 opening week blockbuster in both the U.S. and the U.K.

I watched the movie last night with dislike alternating with curiosity. I was disgusted one minute, touched the next. The movie certainly is a mixed-up cocktail. It didn't go down smoothly like the best gin, more like tubá from an unknown street-corner vendor in an unfamiliar Iloilo town.

The movie was based on a short story by Steve Glenn about a thirty-something doctor-wannabe dentist cursed to make every woman he beds fall in love and marry the next guy they meet. The concept sounds like the daytime fantasy of every teenage boy with roiling testosterone levels but surprisingly no one until now has made a movie or novel treatment of it. 

Maybe it's not so surprising after all. The concept is so lowbrow. What can be more disgusting than the teenage male fantasies of female parts taken out of context to feed interminable jerk-off sessions? Civilized people insist we love the person and not just her or his body parts. In our endless attempt to morph our natural instincts to serve our equally ubiquitous yearning for lofty spaces like heaven, society has provided us with a supply of story concepts to mine.

To think outside the box: this is what I think of as creativity. To think outside the box: this is what's missing in my own appreciation of myself. I think and analyze and come up again and again with the same boring mazes that no longer amaze. I feel I'm missing a vital part of myself. Maybe it is the familiar theme of seeking perfection when we are experiencing what Buddhist call dukkha, the intrinsic quality of life that moves from pleasure to disgust as things change. If we didn't have this sense of incompleteness we would have no ambition. Without desire, life is incomprehensible.

I shot Aaron and Scott four times before I got surfeited and stopped processing the images. Last night I came across two folders of images shot by the guys when I gave them a camera to shoot when the other was posing. They took pictures without paying attention to the "rules." Some of the images are really good. I am too much of a law-abider. My images, like my stories, are all hackneyed products of a rational process.

Good art, whether in photography, movies or literary fiction, combines a respectful combination of stereotypes and inventive casting. Creativity is letting go and barging into familiar territories blind to what we know. Fumbling in the dark is uncomfortable but through that discomfort we move to spaces outside of ourselves.

Gathering Up the Sun

Not including April when I closed my cases at Alpine Clinic, I have now been on sabbatical eight months, two-thirds of a year. It's time for a review.

I went over iCal on my desktop to see what I have been doing with the time. It appears I have done very little of what I thought I wanted to use the time for. Three consistent daily activities are meditating as soon as I get dressed, writing while I am having my first cup of coffee, and going to the gym in the evening. 

I did want to go back to meditating on a regular basis. I can't say that regular meditation has affected my lifestyle much. I do the minimum, sometimes as little as five minutes a day, but I do feel my morning incomplete if I don't sit on the cushion for at least that much time.

There have been days when I am inspired again by Buddhism. My dharma talks on Sunday mornings have been superb, often a surprise to me as well. But when I try to sit down and write down what came out of my mouth the inspired thoughts melt into inaccessibility.

Working out at the gym has been my greatest achievement. I lost 10 pounds early on then didn't lose any more. I did progress to walking up to seven miles a day. I rediscovered the pleasure of walking outdoors around the landscaped lake at the Crossing. A month ago I started using weights again, something I had not done in years. The muscles of my upper body are starting to bulk up again but overall my muscle mass has gotten flabby.

For a couple of months I had left-sided chest pain that frightened me. They are gone now. I don't think they were cardiac in origin since they would come at night when I lay down in bed. I would prop myself sideways to view the TV monitor on one side of the room. The experience did bring about a change in my routines. In years past I thought I would prefer to die of cardiac ischemia but I've changed my mind. This has added impetus to my working out, cooking and modifying my eating habits again. Now my worry centers around the floaters in both eyes that appeared after cataract surgery four years ago now.

Going on a springtime walking tour to the Amalfi Coast of Italy last May was a chapter opener. Walking at the gym enabled me to tackle the walking. I didn't do as well as I could have but this does not belittle the accomplishment that trip was for me. It was my first trip to Europe without Merma. It was my first trip on a time of the year I've always wanted to visit Europe, in the spring when spring flowers abound. 

A walking tour affords views of Europe that melted my heart. That is like the intimacy one gets a glimpse of when going to bed with a bar pickup. Tourist haunts are great but seeing a foreign country in those places where only locals live grants pleasure beyond the tourist high. Somewhere in the back of my mind, probably influenced by my readings about ancient Buddhist and Taoist adepts, is the lure of passing my days "like the clouds in the sky."

Writing has been confined to journal, blog entries and email. Since starting the sabbatical I have written blogs, first on the iWeb site I created, now on several blogger sites. I have not written anything close to something I'd want to publish. Writing has been more of a self-indulgence, analyzing what is going on with me (as this blog is doing) or recording ideas or memories that have somehow captured my attention. 

To write for publication, a dream I've had for decades, I have to be more disciplined and organized. Writing for myself is a different animal altogether. To write for public consumption is not the activity I look forward to doing when my eyes first open in the morning and I rouse myself out of bed by visualizing the first thing I would do. Writing for public consumption feels, like the other projects over which I've been dragging my feet, like work!

I write best when writing to someone. Email from Castor has been my inspiration for writing essays about my memories of life in the Philippines and life now in America. Writing with panache does not happen as often now that the energy of first meeting someone has faded. An old Pacific Bridge correspondent, Kody, recently established contact again. My letter to him the other day had elements of writing that I had not seen in a while. I am still "looking for my voice," something I am starting to think is simply another pussyfooting tactic.

Work on digital imaging has not been as consistent. I did start photographing models in April when Kaleb drove up from Bloomington. Shooting him was an eye-opener. I loved shooting an attractive man. It was, frankly, like making love to a fantasy image. Photography makes possible an idealized fantasy. Relationships are too quirky. While I have not completely sworn them off what I've experienced have generally been more of a chore than the fulfillment of a dream.

Dreams, it seems, are fine when sleeping or when we look into the future for what we desire in the present. They give us something to work towards while we continue to take the present, passing moment for granted. Dreams add electricity to the images we conjure when we indulge desires. To live without dreams is a possibility I have not realized.

Meanwhile I find myself moving ineluctably towards old age and death. My letter to Kody was a response to his letter that continued to speak about the loss of his one lifelong relationship, his mother. Going down gently into the night evokes elegiac beauty but in the main I am not ready to go that route. I feel I've paid dues to arrive where I am now when dreams finally can be worked on and turned into concrete realities.

Since starting the sabbatical I've resurrected another activity that had disappeared from my daily routines: cooking. Cooking used to be an art form. It is starting to be that again. Tony, another old Pacific Bridge friend who re-entered my life a couple of years ago now, has taken to coming over for lunch once a week. That's helped inspire me to plan and execute beautiful meals.

Through all this I have been neurotic about measuring the daily surge or lack of creative energy. In clinical terms that I refuse anymore to accept, this is the old "enemy" that was labeled depression. I believe depression is more than just a clinical entity to be addressed with antidepressant chemicals and therapy. It is brain chemistry but at the core of it is something more essential and subject to being altered by modifying my perceptions. 

Desire is critical to dreams. The real task is to extract the way it illumines experience and apply that to moment-to-moment living. Dreams prefigure a reality more dazzling still when we live it now. While I busy myself listing again and again the dreams of a lifetime, the future, just a moment from now, takes its own shape, more amazing than anything I plan. So I'll husband my resources to use the time I've created for these old dreams while recognizing that the reality that comes about is more than what I know myself to be.

Maybe going old is simply rejoining the stream of everything that changes according to a governance we can only intuit but never quite know. We learn to trust, and not judge ourselves and our accomplishments so harshly.

After a Storm

I was working in Flash last night using David Morris' book on how to create a Flash-driven web site when the storm arrived. Hail cluttered against the roof and window while wind and rain lashed the trees outside. Power went out several times. I gave in and called a halt. It was half past eleven.

The storm melted the humidity. This morning the air glittering with sunlight is fresh and cool. 

I spent the morning dealing with finances on the phone, an activity that can be frustrating. I'm glad for the work I did. I could have waited until tomorrow as I had planned to do and not discover that what I had banked on was not going to happen. Worry can be a good thing. It causes us to take action. But wouldn't it be better if we eliminate worry and simply chose action according to a rational view of the lay of the land?

In art and the activities where I seek artistic expression, there seems an unavoidable joining of tension and creativity. At lunch I caught a documentary on the Cliburn piano competition in Houston. Pianists young and old spoke of their art. A pianist who sits at the piano like "a bag of potatoes" is not going to ignite the audience with passion for music. It is when he sits at the piano as though facing his mortal enemy and struggles with wood and steel to wring out passion that the audience feels passion, too. Passion after all is intense emotion and art cannot be art without that intensity.

We express intensity of emotion in our voice, posture, and something about attention that viewers pick up though cannot describe in words. It's in the way our eyes look like those of a madman, every muscle in our frame poised for immediate action that they might be called to render in a split second.

There is quiet intensity, too, when the body appears still but not lifeless. It's the tense quiet before the storm. I worry about intense emotions and feel I should be calm and relaxed but creativity like love always presupposed struggle, tension, life-and-death combat, expectation maybe of hyperbole but without throwing our lines towards heaven and the impossible art seems not to appear. We conjure it with our blood, sweat and tears!

Picking Up the Thread

Yesterday's shoot with Minda was my first since the round of shoots I did with male models that ended in July. The business of recreating myself and adding art to how I live my life is a stop-start process, something I should know by now but still strikes me anew every time.

Shooting models remains my first love in image-making. Reviewing photos as I processed and uploaded them this morning to Flickr and Smugmug, I am surprised at how good these images look even as I feel I am just scratching the surface of what I can do and really want to do.

After purchasing the mini-DV tape player last month, I have not worked with it since. I tried it out to make sure it worked but I've resisted doing actual work with it. I need to re-tape the interview I did of Sean. Of all the videos that I have shot, that alone strikes me as something I want to keep and work on. What I want to do with this seed video keeps changing. I want to create a video good enough for theatrical release. Increasingly, with my time and talent constraints, I think the best I could do is a documentary-type movie. 

Watching Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs this weekend inspired me. That was basically a documentary. He had gathered friends in an apartment in Chicago and over the course of a month shot them acting out scenes they improvised in collaboration with Joe. His accomplishment, what critics have called "mumblecore" is heralded as a new movement in independent filmmaking. Plot is secondary to conversations among normal-looking, young Americans doing what comes to them naturally. This is not the cinematic stuff Hollywood is producing. Large-scale scenes of heart-pounding scenery is replaced by intimate close-up scenes of people talking to each other in everyday lingo. The impact turns upon the trivial exchanges we make with each other that in our recollection of the day's activities are infinitely more important than any World News item. It's Web 2.0 catapulted to the big screen.

Relationships are my one persistent obsession. My days are relived scenes of relationships, of people discovering things about themselves, often alone but usually in relation to someone else. Alone our insights stagnate. In exchanges with someone or some others old views are fertilized and take on energy that feels very much like creative juice.

I want to continue taking still photographs of individual models but I also want to push into the interior of my psyche to create videos and text products. I don't know what products will see the light of public viewing but increasingly my faith grows: taking one step at a time, keeping close to what Joe Campbell called my "bliss," concepts take root and concrete products shaped. The process is as tantalizing as the products themselves. 

Those Little Cat Feet

Six weeks ago I started this, the first of my blogs on blogspot. Like Shiva, I had been creating and destroying blogs for years. Before that, going back to the 1970s when I still lived in the Philippines, I wrote journals in steno notebooks that I still have. (Amazing! 30 years of this!) Blogger was the first time I wrote on a publicly searchable format, an advance that mirrors many of the other endeavors that I have now undertaken.

This blog started when I became disheartened with using iWeb because Apple had trouble creating its new web-hosting service. That launched my move to searching for another way to post my photo images on the Internet and led me to duendearts.smugmug.com. Smugmug.com is a better venue than anything I knew of before moving through the fog on little cat feet!

The Pursuit of Duende is the record of my search for excellence in my life, not just in terms of photographs and what art there is in what I do, but in how I live life itself. Today's post is a point-in-time summation. How does my life, maybe life for everyone, unfold? Wherefore comes its happy accidents and creative moments? 

I said it: accidents.  What turns out is a mix of what we determine to pursue and what comes our way as unpredictable circumstance. So much is made of human will and intentionality, be this in Judeo-Christian, Muslim or Buddhist framework of belief. Certainly what we will shapes much of what happens in our lives. Will gives "shape" to what happens but most of the details in that shape arises from somewhere else, what most civilized people in the world today call God.

As I look back from the vantage of someone who has been analyzing the events of his own life the past 9 months, I see the interplay of these two forces, will and circumstance. Often I decide to do something because of a feeling that I don't even acknowledge to myself. I justify the decisions by cloaking them in the raiment of reason or some other more elevated bias. Regardless of the inciting motive, the result more often than not leads me somewhere both strange and exciting, leads me where I realize I do want to be just didn't know about it before I got here!

I decided on taking a year-long sabbatical in April after trying out three months of it and finding on my return to clinic work that I didn't want to be there. This process actually started a year ago when I started planning to take time off from clinical work. I took a short break from clinical work earlier in 2007 to attend NAB. That first break taught me a break was doable. The December break was not productive of the results I thought I wanted to accomplish. This was because in truth I was acting on a motive that had been lurking in back of my mind since the late 1960s!

As the fourth month of my third break comes to an end, I find myself at a place almost wholly different from where I imagined I would be last December. For years I dreamt of "retiring" from clinical practice but just didn't think I had the financial resources to do it. "Retiring" is a different animal to me now than it has ever looked like in the past. It is not only doable but may even already be here!

Retiring is no longer the retreat I felt it was. It is more like a surge into a future that I had missed creating my previous years. A friend, appropriately called Castor, recently wrote me that he admired me because I was doing what I wanted to do in life. Someone outside my mind sometimes reads it better than I. Retiring is doing what I want to do and having somehow the resources to do this amazes beyond belief.

What I am doing now is not only a shift in activities but in patterns of doing. Years ago when I came across stories of the Chinese gentlemen hermits who opt out of society to live alone in inaccessible places where their lives became simple because they eliminated responsibilities and constraints that they determined were spinning-the-wheel useless the idea was born to live a contemplative life that included only what was bare-bones necessary and desirable. How many people can say they have done this? For most it is not what they want. Commerce with the world at large so obfuscates the issues. The "world" is too seductive.

In the Samyutta Nikaya, Mara, the Buddhist personification of Evil, addresses the Buddha: " To me belong the eye, all bodily forms, the field of vision... To me belong the ear, the sounds, the field of audition.. To me belong the nose... the tongue... the body... the mind, the conditions of mind, the field of mind cognition."

Mara actually is the ancient Indian god of death but he also represents our lust for life, the power of transitory things that somehow we unenlightened humans slavishly pursue. But like the solar year, our lives too have seasons. The Hindu system described this perhaps better than any other. We move from being students of life to being householders (pursuing a livelihood, raising a family) to pursuing wisdom and finally to slowing down to the cadences of nature and timelessness.

A man's life feels long at times but when summarized is such a short span of time. Mind occupies no space hence gives the sense of timelessness. We journey in a split second from childhood to our imagined death.

In his saga, Ultimate Journey, Richard Bernstein, New York Times book reviewer, wrote: "Most of us middle-aged men are among that species of routinized, rationalized beings that Max Weber called 'specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.' We start out idealists and we end up creatures of habit, more concerned about the state of the lawn than of the spirit. Yes, we say to ourselves, it would be nice to break away for a while, but who would walk the dog?" Truer words I have not read.

Duende When It Comes

Duende when it comes permeates everything. I woke up at 2:15 this morning and could not go back to sleep. I took a fourth of a tablet of Diazepam from a prescription I've had for ten years. It worked. After watching an hour of Wild China on Blu-Ray, I felt sleepy, turned off the set and woke up as bushy-tailed as I've ever felt! 

The whole of the day followed like olive oil dripping on fresh, red-leaf lettuce leaf. I found two new models on the web and offered them a shoot. I have not done a photo shoot with models in five weeks. I miss the adrenaline rush.

At the same time I am not desperate to do a model shoot. I am still working on my Internet venues for presenting my work. Smugmug.com has worked out well. I am now referring prospective clients to the site instead of to my duendearts.com site. I did set up a download site on iPhoto for Joe and called him on his cellphone yesterday to let him know. I took the plunge and bought a pro membership on Flickr. I started a new blog specific to photography on blogspot. I still have to get to Facebook, Twitter, and other social network sites, my strategy being to lure visitors to my Internet venue through Web 2.0.

I am rethinking what to offer models for shooting with me in the future. Up to now I have been overly generous providing them with up to fifty digital images. I have to start thinking about licensing rights and the future of my work. I feel my photography career has moved on to the Chapter 2.

I have also switched to Photoshop for processing the images. Aperture is easier in many ways. The straighten tool, for instance, is way easier in Aperture. I can see the immediate effect of every rotation I make. In Photoshop I have to deal with angle of rotation! But Photoshop offers a far better way to adjust white balance. White balance may not be as much of an issue if I set my camera's white balance and type of lighting. The negative of doing that is having to remember to reset the camera when I change shoot venue which I often do in the course of a photo shoot. Half a dozen of sardines, and six anchovies.

Workout at noon was great. I really like taking this break at noon. I do a quick aerobic walk/jog on the catwalk then do weights. I have not done weights in a decade or more! The routine is taking root. I have been doing weights now for almost two weeks. I like the way the muscles feel. At night sometimes they ache but surprisingly I don't ache in the morning. The body is such a forgiving animal.

Back home I spent an hour and a half preparing lunch, reading Bernstein's Ultimate Journey while consuming that, then fixing chicken breast for lunch tomorrow. Already I am missing summer. In the summer I have these wonderful herbs on the deck just steps away, and fresh garden vegetables are available at the store. A few chopped rosemary needles in olive oil is magic toasted on focaccia slices! Right now I am in love with acorn squash. Squash all by itself makes a wonderful thickener for a stew as the photo here shows. It is also rich in vitamin A like all red, yellow and purple vegetables and fruits. 

I boned the chicken breast halves, marinated the meat in vermouth, fresh lime juice, extra virgin olive oil, freshly ground pink and red peppercorns, and crushed garlic. The bones I am simmering with tarragon leaves, fresh thyme, celery, bay leaf, a carrot, and the white part of green onions. I don't know yet what to do with the broth. We'll see.

For the life of me I want to discover if there is something I can identify that brings about a duende-permeated day. Certainly last night did not augur such a day. It could in fact have resulted in a disastrous morning. Maybe duende is as mysterious as others say it is. Just enjoy it when it comes.