Early Morning Garden Walk

I was up before six this morning and on my cushion after a trip to the bathroom. For a change, I went for my daily constitutional before breakfast and took photos in the lovely morning light. The black-eyed susan (rudbeckia) is in their glory, along with autumn sedum.

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Food in the Early Western Christian Monastic Tradition

When we strip our needs down to the barest minimum, there are only two things necessary for life: oxygenated air and food. Unless you dove below the ocean or flew above the troposphere five to ten miles above the earth's surface, oxygen is abundant and free. Food is ultimately what human beings labor for, according to Jewish scriptures, as price for their disobedience. Everything else is extra.

No wonder then that food is at the heart of most if not all religious traditions. St. Benedict in his famous Rule that most Western Christian monastics follow devoted several chapters to food and how the monks took it. Chapter 39 deals with the apportionment of food, chapter 40 with drink. The saint recommended two cooked dishes at each meal so monks had a choice. There were two meals a day, at the sixth hour (noon) and the ninth hour (three in the afternoon). Each monk was allotted a pound of bread a day regardless of whether the monks have one or two meals. This was long before Dr. Robert Atkins. Recognizing that individuals had differing needs for the amount of food, St. Benedict did not specify amounts for the rest of the meal. In the summer, when vegetables and fruits are available he recommended a third dish of these fresh produce. In earlier times, monks grew their own vegetables and fruits. He also made allowances for the elderly, the sick, and those who worked harder than usual that day. The flesh of "four-footed" animals was reserved only for the sick.

The saint wrote his Rule at a time when it was safer to drink wine than to drink water. He would probably have prohibited wine but decided his monks would not accept this so he suggested wine intake be limited to 1/4 liter or 8 ounces a day, again with allowances at the abbot's discretion for the sick and those who performed unusually demanding physical labor that day. Vespers were scheduled to allow for meals to be finished in daylight. All monks took turns at kitchen duty and waiting on each other.

At Lent, monks were enjoined to observe the 40 days by depriving themselves of usual comforts or adding special activities like more prayers or fasting. The monks submit their intended observance to the abbot who approves or modifies the list based on his knowledge of the monk to avoid "presumption and vainglory." In his concise Rule, St. Benedict shows prescience and common sense, regulating only what needs regulating, and he recognized the importance of food as well as abstinence from food.

What we know about St. Benedict is largely from his biography written by Gregory the Great who before he became pope himself followed the Rule as a monk. Gregory praised the Rule for its "discretion and clarity of language." I think we could all learn from this sixth century saint and teacher of men (and, later, women) that our lives in the 21st century become once more moderate and healthy.

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Editing to Music on SonicPro

Slowly, like an ant making the journey on foot from Indiana to Timbuktu, I am learning to use the many programs I need to master to do videos at the level I want. Doing both video and audio editing on iMovie has been great but I'm limited to the Jingles that come with the program. My royalty-free music comes from SmartSound. I need to start using their music-editing software, SonicPro. SonicPro this year came out with a turn-around plug-in for Final Cut Pro but the new Final Cut Pro Studio also has updated Soundtrack Pro. I also have Logic, for crying out loud! It's an embarrassment of riches and my pace is a crawl!
 
Yesterday I placed over half the video clips into the Saugatuck video that I am currently working on. Editing video on iMovie when I intend to export just the video clips and transitions has been a different work experience. Doing all the edits in iMovie is so much easier but I need to advance to the more powerful programs.

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The strange, pungent, exquisite Indian palate

Masaledar Sem (Spicey Green Beans)

New Indian friends have inspired me to look at Indian cuisine again. Last week, for the first time in years, I toasted spices in a skillet to cook some green beans I had in the fridge. The aroma of roasting cumin was wonderful! I modified the recipe I downloaded from the Internet and did not, among other things, set aside some of the roasted cumin to sprinkle on the finished dish for crunch. I love how in cooking with Indian spices there are so many ways of arriving at the end product. Ginger and garlic are a natural combination, a combination that is greater than the individual parts. When combined, ginger and garlic complement each other, much like two ballet dancers in a pas de deux. In Indian food, the ingredients are an entire ballet company!

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An Uncommon Commodity

"Fasting had made me more alert and more appreciative of the richness around me. I began to comprehend the sense of life anew, more intensely. This sense is an increasingly rare commodity nowadays, because the sense of the Holy, of things that are completely different, of the profoundly secret, has gradually become lost."

Bernhard Müller, Fasting in the Monastery

The early Christians fled to the desert where they confronted themselves. They called demons those features of the mind that even today, maybe more so today, tempt us to immoderation and thoughtlessness. Distinguishing themselves from other Jews, they set aside Tuesdays and Fridays as fast days (Jews fasted on Mondays and Thursdays) to remind them of the passion of their rabbi, Yeshua (Iesous in Greek, pronounced YAY-sus), that began on Good Friday.

When we're fasting, the mind becomes clear as if a giant vacuum cleaner had sucked every detail from the sky—clouds, vestigial moon, flying geese—to leave it an empty blue hemisphere above. When we do see ourselves in this dwarfing landscape, we're as ants, insignificant specks on the vastness of timeless space.

In this vast panorama, we are not the center or point of reference. We see how puny our desires are, how utterly silly our pretensions to power and importance.

No longer the center of being, everything becomes transmogrified, luminous and fresh. We're back in the garden before we took things into our own hands and lost the primal vision. In the garden, every thing is new, pure and essential. There is nothing here extraneous or unnecessary, and every thing is good.

We need to regain this vision of Paradise. All too often we are lost in our own world of thoughts and images, in the project-management attitude we learn early in life. Purpose is great. It pools our resources and directs these towards creation. After a while we forget the true nature of creation. We begin to believe we make things happen, all by ourselves, by our own resources and strength. We forget the deep roots that connect us to worlds of being so vast and empty they boggle the mind. We lose this sense of bogglement. Instead we become comfortable seeing the world from our tiny speck of a reference. Fasting restores us to the whole shebang.

And in the whole shebang, everything we see is replete with light. We can even see death and life, not as tragic events we seek to ignore but as natural punctuation marks in a timeless, endless statement that being is. Each time, our sense of ownership loosens somewhat. We see as gods do, the whole panoply of human sadness and joys laid below us like a model train loop, or the valley below when we reach the summit of high mountains.

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The Longer Banthia Greeting Posted

This was the first version of the Banthia wedding greeting that I made. This took the longest of the three versions I eventually made from scratch and is, I think, the best of the three in terms of finesse. The audio here is more modulated and the ending almost perfect.
 
The address:
 
http://gallery.me.com/karuna711#100279

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A Documentary on American Jains

Yesterday after yoga and meditation I went with Babu and Visha to walk on the Monon Trail. We started at the corner where East Westfield Boulevard turns into North Westfield Boulevard, a block north of Broad Ripple Avenue (E. 63rd Street) and walked in the rain to 86th Street. We crossed to Nora and visited Whole Foods, visiting the produce section. Visha noted how fruits and vegetables at American groceries and food markets all look a picture of perfection, unlike in Asian or even European markets where produce display their natural states of imperfection.

I learned a lot about my two new friends. In particular I learned more about Babu and his grounding in the Jain tradition of his childhood in India. I had shot close to an hour of tape of two Jaina nuns when they were visiting at the Banthia's east side home last June. I had locked myself out of my car along with the Sony HVR-Z1U and my microphones so I used a small handheld Sony to do the shoot. I told Babu I didn't have enough material to make even a small but coherent documentary introduction to Jainism and asked if he would let me interview him. He said he would and would also look for other Jain materials that we could shoot for the video.

Few people outside India know about the Jains. In 2001 there were slightly over four million Jains living in India, in about a hundred communities in states like Gujarat, Bihar and Rajasthan. Only a few thousands are said to live in the U.S. Small as the population of Jain adherents is, their influence on contemporary Indian culture outstrips their numbers. The main tenet of Jain practice is ahimsa or non-harming of all sentient beings. (Plants and animals are categorized into how sentient they are. Plants are said to have only sense organ as contrasted to humans that have five. Jains are strict vegetarians.) Buddhism arose around the same time in the 5th and 6th century BCE. Gotama Buddha is said to have studied with a disciple of Mahavira who is referred to in Buddhist Pali scriptures as the Nigantha Nataputta. Buddha chose to follow a less ascetic path that he called "the Middle Way."

I think people in modern societies can learn from knowing more about Jainism as a way of life. There are some films on Jainism (like Ahimsa: Non-violence by American writer and filmmaker Michael Tobias). We can use a few more. I want to explore the possibilities of making a small documentary of one of the world's oldest religions, Jainism, the way of the Jina (literally meaning "victor" or "conqueror." We all too often seek to master the world outside us, neglecting to understand the struggles brewing inside ourselves where perhaps the greatest and most profound conquests can occur.

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Improvements on My Video Workflow

I re-captured video I shot in Saugatuck in 2007 preparatory to making a video about the popular Michigan summer resort. I had captured some of these clips on my old Power Mac when I did my first video about Brock's first encounter with a beach and waves. Viewing the footage again tonight I came up with these improvements to my video workflow:
 
1. Shoot more close-ups
2. Start shooting with the HVR-Z1U with microphones
3. Shoot more from the car with someone else driving (instead of dolly shoots)
4. Shoot more using a tripod (I have to graduate from using iMovie's stabilization feature)
5. Shoot more creative angles
6. Shoot MORE, MORE! - I have tons of miniDV tapes. Use them.
 
I was impressed by how much footage I had from these two trips to Saugatuck in 2007 and how much of it appeared usable. I am finally viewing clips I've taken in the last five years but seldom watched after I stuck the used cassettes away somewhere. Now all the tapes are labeled and a few even have shot-by-shot catalogue lists!

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Shrimp Dumplings in Hon-Dashi

I didn't make the dumplings. I bought them frozen at Asia Mart and one night cooked them in a ready-made Japanese bonito-and-seaweed stock. Scrumptious!

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A Kaleidscope of Mostly Asian Flavors

This has been so far the coolest July in memory. I love cool weather like this though others in these temperate climes say they want to feel the intense heat of summer. I've been cooking more, especially as I've invited over for a swim party, a video party, any excuse to get together and enjoy the weather. I have yet to use the garden hose to water the garden and that is something I have not done since I started the garden 22 years ago!

This spicy green beans (Masaledar sem) is my favorite among my recent explorations, the dish most likely to become a regular in my repertoire. This was the first time I cooked with Indian spices. The aroma of roasting cumin was wonderful! I "doctored" the recipe before serving it. A dash of Balsamic vinegar and Bragg's amino acids did wonders to the final product! The next time I cooked it, I cut back on the vegetable oil and that made the result, I think, more intense.

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My third video is online!

I uploaded the Banthias' wedding greeting to their friend's friend, Laura Huang, in Shanghai last night. She is putting together a multimedia show for the newlyweds on their big day, August 2. Today I quickly put together a shoot I made when I made my fresh tomato and basil pasta sauce, one of my favorite things about summer in Indiana. The video is here:

http://gallery.me.com/karuna711#100268

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A New Day for a Videomaker

I have finished a rough cut of a two-minute video that friends requested I make for them to greet another friend who is getting married in Shanghai at the end of the month. At first I didn't want to do the video. Most people nowadays post videos as they shoot them with their iPhones or cellphones or still cameras without editing them. This is why we have billions of YouTube videos. I consider myself a professional so if I make the video I can't release it unless I feel it reflects my professionalism.
 
I'm glad I undertook the small project. At this point, any video project is a learning experience for me. I decided not to use all the bells and whistles. I used a simple camcorder setup to shoot the clips but since they both wanted the video to come out well they followed my directions. This was, in fact, the first video I directed! I love it!
 
Doing the Dubrovnik video taught me what "storytelling" was. I experienced for myself what film editors do to put together what the director and cinematographer have shot using the shooting script to create the movie that the public sees. In effect, the editor is the last person to actually make the finished product. Depending on how involved the director is with the editing process, the editor can change the script based on what was shot to create a movie with the emotional and visual impact that works best for the purpose the movie "team" wanted to meet. Making movies or videos is exhilarating!

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Buddhist Take on Friendliness

The technical term, kalyãna-mitta, is translated as "noble or good friend." In American Buddhism, this has been updated to mean the friendly relationship between practitioners of the tradition, not just the relationship between a monk preceptor and his younger (in the practice) colleague.

The more common term for "friendliness," of course, is mettã (Sanskrit, maitre), often translated as "loving-kindness." I think "friendliness" is a better translation (see the Mettã Sutta, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/khp/khp.9.amar.html). Mettã is one of the four brahma vihãras, the divine or sublime abodes or mental states that Buddhists aspire to cultivate to reside continuously in enlightened or "godlike" being.

When I finished the video on Dubrovnik I wanted to just move on and not do any more edits to it. Now I think I might make it part of another video about the Eastern Mediterranean maritime republics of the 14th to the 16th century. We'll see.

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Fasting Is Great for Renewing Body and Soul

With no prior planning, I started a fast yesterday morning. It's been so far easier than I thought.

About a year ago, I came across Peter Sewald's Wisdom from the Monastery. I was attracted to the title because of the many years I visited St. Meinrad Archabbey in southern Indiana. Staying at St. Meinrad was an extension of the Holy Weeks I spent in summer-hot Manila. In the Philippines Lent came when the tropical sun burnt everything in its light. Semana santa was hunger and heat.

Yesterday, fasting brought the accumulated memories of Philippine Lenten observances and visits to St. Meinrad. I turned off my computer, didn't answer email nor check my postal mail. I spent the day reading Sewald's book. I decided at six to drive to Half Price to claim my 40% discount. Next time I'll turn the car off, too, but yesterday the drive did not break the rhythm of the fast. However the day could have been more intense had I chosen not to leave the house except to walk.

Fasting gave me a break from the relentless planning and stress that my days have become. Fasting I see how superfluous most of the things I desire really are. I gave up drinking coffee by default. That is a biggie! When I started my sabbatical in late 2007 I would drive to McDonald's just to motivate myself to get out of bed in the morning. Early this year I decided to stop eating breakfast at McDonald's. I would just drive there for my cup of Senior's coffee. Now it's time for even that decaffeinated brew to stop. 49 cents. It's a bargain but I don't need the two packets of Splenda.

I would like to follow the Jewish tradition of fasting Mondays and Thursdays. The early Christians fasted Tuesdays and Fridays to commemorate Good Friday. I could also do just one day a week. I’ll see how this goes. Fasting also whetted my appetite for going lacto-ovo-vegetarian again. I think I can make this work better today than I did when I first tried this in 1986. Back then I gained weight from overdoing carbs.

The FW hard drive from OWC came yesterday. I left the box unopened until this morning. Carbon Copy Cloner is busy cloning my boot-up internal drive unto the new drive. I plan to then use the FW drive as my start-up drive and replace the internal drive with a larger (maybe 1.5 Terrabyte) drive.

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How do we decide morality or art?

Buddha with the elixir for healing suffering

"It is a work of art because an artist says it is; because it occupies the place of art (the wall, a pedestal); because it's worth so much money; because you perceive it to be art."

The Essential Man Ray by Ingrid Schaffner

Reading The Essential Man Ray this morning while waiting for my body to get out of bed was one of those quintessential moments that liberate thinking from confines it didn't even know were there.

Driving to lunch I listened to World Have Your Say on public radio. The topic: Is it possible to have a moral army. I had jumped into the middle of the vociferous discussion but during all the time I listened to the broadcast no one, neither the moderator nor the participants, challenged the notion of "moral." What is moral, and is there one standard for morality for everyone? A former general spoke of the rules and standards much of the world recognizes like the Geneva Conventions, treaties and protocols set up in 1949 the aftermath of World War II. Contravening the conventions would be immoral, the general said.

It seems to me morality and art both sink or float in the same or similar boat. We have history as variously interpreted by experts to form some basis for what many people intuitively, or at least, subjectively feel is right or wrong, is artistic or not artistic. My own personal history argues that history, conventional and personal, changes. When I first saw modernist art I was appalled. What was I seeing? This is beautiful?

I've clung to old-fashioned, third-world conventions all this time. People born in wealthy, developed nations grow up confident that what they and their society believe is correct, so correct that other nations who think otherwise are backward and need to be converted to the right way of thinking. But these fortunate/unfortunate people are also more likely to spawn rebels and innovators. Westerners have evolved generally high self-esteem. The individual sprang out of the masses in the aftermath of the Middle Ages. As burghers grew riches that challenged then outshone those of the ruling, aristocratic classes, an individual grew to believe he could be what he chooses to be. Society is something he can change.

Admittedly most grow up and function as obedient adults. They live out what morals or artistic sensibilities they were taught or somehow absorbed living in the medium of their society's religious, political and economic realms. But for some people, whether because they feel inordinately confident of their own vision or intellectual take on a subject matter or because they don't fit the mold and struggle to make the mold fit them, they poke holes in the frayed fabric of conventional wisdom and show the way to other ways of believing, other ways of thinking, even other ways of feeling.

So much of art is feeling but did I mention economics? Money might be lucre but lots of it gives luster to the thing that requires so much to acquire. We love to shop at high-end boutiques because looking at all that expensive stuff we feel we too are valued and beautiful.

Years ago I debated with a friend who was studying voice at Butler. Western classical music is largely Teutonic music. I do find Schubert or Strauss lieder incomprehensibly moving but I argued that what moved us was acquired taste. I remember listening over and over to recordings of Teresa Braganza before I learned about opera and lyric sopranos. In Manila, surrounded by dusty, tired, poor compatriots I dreamed of a better world where I too would enjoy the elegant and sophisticated lifestyle my girlfriend and her family took for granted simply because they had the money to expose themselves to expensive objects and activities.

An art object is expensive a priori because of the time and energy that the artist invested in creating it. The actual creation might take a few seconds, a few strokes of the brush or keyboard, but the gestative phase is the artist's whole life.

How do we define morals or art? In fact how do we define values, what we rank higher when we make choices or decide for or against anything? And digging a few more miles under the surface, do we decide on the basis of values or simply react? If the latter, society bears the brunt of responsibility for our inattentive action-taking. If the former, we take on responsibility for what we choose to do. Creating, producing, photographing, editing: all involve choices. The artist perhaps more than most people have to be self-conscious about the choices she makes. It's that consciousness that gives value to what she creates.

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Playing with Perception, with Color and Interpretation

Thinking outside the box has never been my forte. Growing up feeling I didn't belong, I strove to be like everyone else—unless I could be more Everyman than anyone I knew. This formula has haunted my perception of myself and myself-as-relative-to-others for some sixty years. I forged my images of reality awash in emotion and didn't realize how much emotion colored them that I didn't see the structures hidden beneath.
 
These are not grounds for regret. It's how the dice fell and they fall for every one of us. Our insight into the bricks and mortar of our reality does grow with experience. Hell does not crack open and swallow us. Monsters lose their roars and bites. We begin to see that there in fact are as many realities as ways of seeing life. We have choices in how we interpret the throw of the dice and even re-throw them for another set of interpretations. I think maybe that artists are not as intransigently rooted in the reality they share with others. They can strip away interpretative layers and color down to empty lines and shapes that they can then fill with their own vision, their own chosen significance.

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The Perfect Hamburger according to The Splendid Table

I have been listening to Lynne Rosetta Kasper's The Splendid Table podcasts when on my evening walks. At one episode she had a guest who discussed how he thought hamburgers could taste as good as those expensive entrées at restaurants. His choice of beef is not sirloin or more expensive cuts but chuck, but preferably ground in those wavy, almost fluffy mounds we see in some stores. His only seasonings are salt and maybe black pepper. He believes burgers are best cooked not in a barbecue grill but on a stovetop open grill, a discovery I have also made. The pan—I use a heavy, non-stick Cuisinart pan—should be very hot. I don't use any fat or butter. Fat or butter makes the pan smoke. The meat is seared quickly and cooked 2 to 3 minutes each side. He suggested half an inch thickness and spoke against squeezing the ground beef tightly. He wants his burger to "crumble" in his mouth. Finally, of course, he advised against pressing the burger down as you cook it. All of these, except for the "squeezing" I had discovered for myself. To hear an expert second my impressions was empowering.

Tonight, I did season lightly with salt and black pepper but also mixed in a tablespoonful of coarsely chopped green parts of a scallion before forming the patties. As I learned on The Splendid Table, I patted the beef gently into shape without squeezing them into a sausage-like density. After turning the burger, I added organic New Zealand sharp cheddar on this burger and the result was heavenly. Grass-fed animal products like cheese and milk contain lipoic and omega-3 fatty acids, both good for one's carbohydrate metabolism.

The Angus beef chuck hardly left any fat in the pan but what was there I mopped up with Japanese short-grain rice that formed crisp curds when allowed to dry after I turned off the heat. I sprayed another pan lightly with olive oil and roasted whole garlic cloves and yellow onion rings, zucchini and celery, seasoned with a Hunan dry marinade from Dean Jacobs whose products have become staples in my daily kitchen.

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To Dubrovnic on a Costa Cruise, the video, is done!

The video is done! "To Dubrovnic on a Costa Cruise" can be viewed at
gallery.me.com/karuna711/100262
 
This is the second video ever that I've completed. (I have dozens of uncompleted videos on my various drives and computers but only two are done.) The first was a simple edit, just joining together clips plus a beginning and closing title. This was, done on iMovie '09, is my "learning" video for getting back into video editing. It is practically a showcase (not in a spectacular way, but as a demonstration) of the various editing features of iMovie. I stuck to one transition for most of the video and tried out just one video effect (reverse). This was my first attempt at voice-over and working with audio just within iMovie, which surprisingly had pretty powerful and easy-to-do features, especially through it's Precision Editor window.
 
It's exhilarating! I can imagine how a "real" editor would feel upon finishing a full-length movie for theatrical release. I worked on this video for just over a week, doing 2 to 5 hours a day, but the learning and discovery aspects of editing this video was powerful even for this little amount of work. A mountain in labor, Cicero wrote, and out comes a mouse. Well, I hope it's a tad bigger or more significant than a mouse.
 
I welcome comments, criticisms, suggestions for improvement. I'll resist the thought of re-editing this video. I really feel I'm done with it and want to move on. I plan to do at least one more video in iMovie, maybe two, while also learning to use Apple's QuickTime Pro. I used QT to export the video to a 1280x720 widescreen "HD" format last night. iMovie worked through the night. It said it would take 5 hours for the export but the time was creeping up as the CPU started to lag behind the process. (No, no, no! Not yet time for a faster Mac!) I've been learning the usefulness of overnight tasking on the computer for CPU-intensive work like video compression and rendering.
 
I think I have decided on my next video editing project but I'm also planning my next video shoot. First I need to get the hang of green-screens but I am just about decided I am going to spring for a 1080p Sony handheld camcorder. By the end of summer I want to start capturing video directly into a RAID 0 drive. That's more money going out but the completion of this small project gives me for the first time a feeling my interest can morph into "real" business venture. Just not to forget why I am doing this: for joy, for sharing joy.

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The next video project: the Aegean Islands?

I'm a few editing strokes from completing the video on Dubrovnik so I am looking through my photos to set upon my next travelogue project. I should start working on my interviews on the "spiritual lives of ordinary people" and learn to shoot green or blue screen to add another dimension to travel documentaries. I have over fifty miniDV hour-long tapes but these are all shot with me not stabilizing the camera and panning ad lib. I need to create footages that I don't need to stabilize in iMovie. When the Dubrovnik video is finished I want to do another video on iMovie using large-file import, then do an HD import and project before moving back to FCP.
 
I need one more hard drive to create a bootable backup drive for my system drive then plan to turn two of my internal eSATA drives into a 0 RAID array and directly capture video into the computer. That would involve additional purchases that I want to put off until I get my feet firmly in water.
 
We arrived in Mykonos with just a few minutes of sunset. The light completely disappeared by the time we had walked from the quay to the town so I took this and a couple of flash pictures and that was all. I would someday like to visit Mykonos and stay a couple of days although admittedly it is now so commonplace and overly touristy. Still the island has its charms. When we were there I remember a couple of intriguing conversations with local people who spoke English. As I become more confident and competent with videos the scope of topics I want to shoot is exponentially exploding, limited, of course, by financial resources and opportunity.

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File Storage: Hard drive, DVD, Blu-Ray versus Tape and Celluloid

Seagate came up with a replacement for my internal drive that failed last week. It contained all my photograph files. The model and travel shoots were all backed up to DVD but all the photos I took this year went kaput with the drive. My PowerMac still has the photos I took before 2007. I shall just have to move those files to my new Photo Drive (backed up to a RAID array). Moving raw files takes forever. I may have to spring for an eSATA card so the transfers and backups can go more quickly. I have been backing up files most of the past week.
 
The loss of files on a hard drive point to the risk of having tapeless video clips. With tape (or the old way of celluloid), you can save your files for longer although celluloid too degenerate with time. DVDs don't last forever either. I don't know the longevity of Blu-Ray although I suspect it is the same as DVDs.
 
I didn't mourn the loss very much because I feel that those files were just my apprenticeship files. As I move into professional work, securing files become more critical.
 
Little by little I am organizing my image files again. (I had organized them all going back to 1999 when I bought my Sony 1 MB digital camera. The next couple of years, I used a 4 MB Olympus. Canon has been my main camera the last seven years or so and I have been happy with the choice.

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Video on iMovie close to finished

I am down to the last few minutes of the 20-minute video on my trip to Dubrovnik in 2004. I may have to trim what I have on the timeline already because the video already lasts 15 minutes with the main activity, the city tour, has just begun! When finished, this will be the first video I've completed since doing "Brock in Michigan" in August 2007.
 
I am using iMovie for this edit, just as I did in 2007. I want to have a couple of new videos under my belt before resuming work on the heftier FCP editing suite.

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Cranberry Juice and Primordial Energies

I shouldn't have any sugar in my diet but drinking unsugared cranberry juice would be a challenge. It is bitter, not something one thinks of as part of a human diet. But cranberries are reportedly good for the kidneys, cleansing them out as Hercules washed the Augean stables of ages of accumulated horse manure in one day by diverting the Alpheus and Peneus Rivers! Alpheus is the same river in one of my favorite English poems, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan; or a Vision in a Dream: a Fragment:
 
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
 
Pure evocation!
 
For me art is the evocation of some primal experience we no longer have access to. All that remain of these deeply forgotten experiences are dreams and the unexplainable reactions we have to objects we see or taste or smell. Strange, even eerie objects sometimes elicit powerful emotions that themselves don't fall into definable categories. We think we live in ordered spaces, universes for which we have names, whereas reality is infinitely vast, infinitely varied, inconceivable by our limited scope of knowing. Some days I feel myself on the edge of the known universe and hover close to the Unknown, feel its primordial energy pulling at me and I am torn between my allegiance to the familiar and this strange, compelling interest in worlds beyond my everyday experience.

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Ruins and the Primal Imagination

Greek ruins continue to fascinate me. These skeletal remains of marble columns once painted with the bright colors of Mediterranean sky, earth, sun, and sea are highly evocative. I should feel the same way towards the artifacts of ancient Asian civilizations but for me there really are East and West and they evoke different primal emotions. Inchoate emotions coupled with equally deep memories we no longer visualize still affect us in some deep part of the psyche where they swirl chaotically in the mythic sea stirred by the primal winds that initiated creation in the first place.

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Colors in the Dark

Colors against black, light and shadow: I love photographs for these. I shot this on a lark last night because I liked the color of cranberry juice in a wine glass. I like it so much that I might use it on a new website, if I get around to redoing my site.

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Relearning computer tasks

Without my photo internal HD, I am relearning how to do photography tasks. On the USB drive, access to the files is so slow with Adobe Bridge and Photoshop that I copied the files to another internal HD for now until the replacement drive arrives.

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Recovering from Digital Disaster

I decided against trying to recover my photo files from the failed HD via a Seagate affiliate and just move on. I did back up my model and most of my foreign travel photos. I am still discovering what I lost in the drive, like model contact notes, photography business files, etc. I organized the files on that drive just the day before it failed. I was so proud of myself: all my photography files organized into personal, travel and model folders going back to 1999!
 
Seagate did have an easy warranty-return procedure. I opted to pay $20 to get a replacement drive in two days (will probably mean I'll get it on Monday) and paid UPS label and packing (from the drive they are sending me: clever!). I am still waiting for my OWC RAID array that was supposed to save me from this disaster but itself ended up being defective.
 
The lovely thing about all this is how losing the files has been relatively easy. I credit Buddhist practice for this. The ultimate goal of practice is dealing with loss more critical than a mere hard drive!
 
I continued processing files from my trip to Hungary in 2004. Using the backup USB drive demonstrated how an internal SATA drive is so much faster! I think I'll wait to process any more photos until after I get the replacement drive back. I shall probably receive that the same day I get my RAID back-up array from OWC.
 
Meanwhile an Indian couple has invited me for lunch. Life is really largely what happens beyond what we plan to do, beyond what we spend our time thinking and worrying about!

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Turning Pro in Digital Content Creation

I am surprisingly calm considering I just lost my entire collection of photographs going back to 1999. I spent two hours yesterday organizing them into a more coherent system and then this morning the drive failed just like that. 

It's a Seagate internal drive, one of a pair I bought in August 2008, barely a year ago. It had a five-year warranty and cost twice what a one-terrabyte drive costs nowadays. I am thinking: okay, so I lost all the photos I shot so far this year, but the photos that really matter—my travel and model shoots—are backed up to a FireWire external drive. I can start really ruthlessly erasing photo images that don't meet a professional standard of quality instead of cluttering my hard drives with largely unusable files.

My first photo hard drive failed last year which was why I bought the internal hard drives. I am in the process of procuring a workable RAID array. The Qx2 RAID 5 array from OWC arrived defective June 12. OWC has been working on it since then. I suppose that if the RAID array had worked from the start I would have backed up the photo drive which was one of the two reasons I ordered it. No sense crying over spilt milk. The other reason is what I intend to move my work towards: doing videos.

This is not justification after the fact. I believe that the work I have done until today has been a kind of exploration via self-directed apprenticeship in the field of digital content creation. I still have many miles to go but the past year and a half has cobbled together a credible foundation of experience and expertise that I can say I do want to go deeper into this new career field. I just can't see myself going back to what I did for 30 years. It is truly a new era for me.

Posted via email from Duende Arts