Song of the Open Trail

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

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

Morning Coffee for the Creative Juices To Flow

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

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

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

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

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Fitting into the Mainstream

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

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

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

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

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

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Singapore April 18, 2010 Marina Bay/Singapore Flyer

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

Singapore April 14-15, 2010-Tour Around Singapore

The Ga family at the Singapore Harbour. Stunning picture!

Gerald Brenan on how art should be judged

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

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

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

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

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Developing concepts for video projects

San José, Museo Iloilo, Philippines

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

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

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

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Documenting Small Town Life

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

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

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

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Attraction and Lust: The Ethics of a Shoot

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

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

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How the East Was Won

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fields of Violets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Murmur of the Heart Today

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

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

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

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Can conversation alone make a movie?

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

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

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

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

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

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A Natural Cycle of Failure and Gain

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

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

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

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

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

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Easter Day with Echoes East and West

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

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

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

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

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

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Sappho's Gift This Spring Morning

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

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

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

Come to me now and loosen me

from blunt agony. Labor

and fill my heart with fire. Stand by me

and be my ally.

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

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

Now

when I look at you a moment

my voice is empty

and can say nothing as my tongue

cracks and slender fire races

under my skin. My eyes are dead

to light, my ears

pound, and sweat pours over me.

I convulse...

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

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Paying the Dues of Passion and Time

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

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

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

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The House of Flying Daggers

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

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

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

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

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

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Disrupting Comfort for Seeing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knowing When You're There

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Living, Writing & Creating with Boldness and Dash

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

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

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

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

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Photo Shoot - Think Fun, Think Surprise, Think Live

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

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

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

See the full gallery on posterous

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See the full gallery on posterous

Photos from Jacque's FB album.

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Model Photography One.mov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Back to Stills Model Shooting

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

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Casting to Concept and Back

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

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

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

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

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

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The Right Time for the Right Products

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Life and Drama in Photographs and Video

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

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

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

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

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

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Wes Bentley in The Last Word

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

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

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

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Attaining the Crest of the Curve

Sorrento 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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Dan Andrews Location-Independent Lifestyle

Kalanchoe in the Window

Early this morning, while waiting for my video to export, I checked my email. Someone had started following me on Tweeter and this person's location was the Philippines. I followed the link to Dan Andrews's site, Tropical MBA, and watched several of his "Lifestyle Business Podcasts."

Since signing up with Tweeter everyday I get notice that someone was following me. Most of these are businesses trying to create themselves on the Internet. They have something to say but after a couple of weeks I lost interest. Business has never interested me. This is why I remain poor. I don't have the patience to study business situations nor the boldness to pursue strictly business algorithms. My older sister gets nonplussed when confronted with the simplest mechanical problem. My Waterloo is business.

Despite my allergic reaction to business ideas, Dan's ideas persevered. It may be it's just the lateness of the hour. It was three this morning. I had wasted yesterday afternoon but after I finished watching The Time Traveler's Wife last night I took advantage of the return of creative energy and finished editing my Amalfi Coast video. But I don't think so. We become persuaded by ideas we'd already been primed to accept. Truth is simply what aligns with what we already believe.

Andrews and his buddy, Ian, are traveling in SE Asia. They are in Manila as of last notice. They both love to travel but not as much as they love travel when mixing business with pleasure. Location Independent Lifestyle is doing business where you enjoy spending time. It is doing business and earning money without being tied down to a location. It is creating business opportunities where you like to be.

Dan Andrews's idea to combine business with lifestyle is precisely what I've formulated over the last 20 to 30 years. I remember when the idea first occurred to me. I had just come back from Barre where a nine-day meditation retreat shocked me out of complacency. By sitting with physical and mental pain instead of running away, the quality of mind shatters through its normal states of operation. One experiences breakthrough moments. I experienced happiness for the first time in my life.

Coming back home I wondered how I could have time to continue meditating and deepening the practice. I knew happiness was real because I had experienced it beyond reasonableness and doubt. I experienced happiness under the most counter-intuitive circumstances. I didn't have a job, was not earning money, and the relationship on which I had laid great store had just broken up. Happiness did not depend on material accomplishments, on money or any of the usual methods we think we'd achieve it.

My money supply was very limited. I was not ready to stop earning money. I knew I would have to go back to work, save money so I could stop working permanently. The only opportunity that came up meant returning to doing medicine. I took it but set limits. I began working just one day every other week. Through the next 13 years I built up my work week to three days a week. My boss persuaded me to take advantage of the company's IRA plan. The diversion granted me two very important gains. I salvaged my professional self-confidence and I saved enough money to live on for a while.

When I took a leave of absence from clinical work two years ago, I had decided I wanted to work creating digital media. I became excited with video editing in 2006 when I took a week-long seminar on Final Cut Pro. This became the nidus for my vague plans. Four years after that seminar I have at last started creating videos good enough to post on the Internet. I've learned to take photographs of acceptably good quality. I am far from the quality I need to have to venture into business based on the skills I've learned but I have more of an idea of where I am if I still don't know exactly where I am going.

Dan Andrews is making his dream of freedom in my hometown, in my own backyard. He has the advantage of looking American and of having had an American childhood. Both attributes still count for something in developing countries. They count for a great deal in the Philippines where people are still struggling to find their own self-worth after centuries under Western powers. Moreover I have an attribute that goes counter to progress so that in effect I am working with three disadvantages.

Nevertheless listening to Dan last night I was reminded again of some of the ingredients for the success I've begun to envision for myself. His website blog and podcasts are the latest in a series of encounters just in the past week pointing me to a resolution of impediments. Creativity is easy enough in certain states of mind. How one thinks is the key.

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Purim in Israel with April

My sister is in Israel, a guest of the Swedish Theological Institute where she is studying liturgical music. Part of the program goal is to educate the participants not only about the religious sites of Jerusalem and Israel but also about the Arab-Israelite conflict. 

I sent her a message on Facebook: Did you talk about the origin of the conflict? How the West agreed to the recreation of Israel on Palestinian land? Before that, how the Jews were forced out of that land by foreign conquest? Who has right to the land under our feet? In the Philippines, Christian Filipinos pushed Muslims out of their land leading to the conflict there. But did the Muslims own the land? 

Possession of the land is at the heart of many of the wars fought throughout history. Even if humans did not progress from hunter-gatherers to farmers growing plants and animals, land would still be at the heart of conflict. We need land to live. At the fundamental level we need plants and other animals to get the oxygen and food we need just to maintain the metabolism vital to being alive. When we see that possession extends beyond land but to control, what we call politics when it involves groups of people we call nations and churches, we can see why conflict arises between individuals and peoples.

My conclusion is that if we can be impartial we might see there are no victims or aggressors. It's human nature to covet and think something belongs to them whereas possession is really a legal invention to support the psychology of the self. Possessed of a self we feel, in James Cameron's words, "entitled" to take what we think or feel we need. Laws are useful to mediate conflicting claims. When they work they make physical aggression unnecessary. Laws arise from rules we learn about human nature. If we understand how rules come about, we can legislate more wisely. But if we understand human nature, we won't need rules to live peacefully We're all aggressors when we don't understand the nature of the self.

April and her colleagues are going out to eat. It's Purim in Jerusalem and everybody is out celebrating, based on the account of the rescue of the Jewish people from slaughter as recorded in the Book of Esther. Our religions, literature, art, even culture itself documents the problem we have co-existing with each other on an increasingly small planet.

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Purim in Israel with April

Did you talk about the origin of the conflict? How the West agreed to the recreation of Israel on Palestinian land? Before that, how the Jews were forced out of that land by foreign conquest? Who has right to the land under our feet? In the Philippines, Christian Filipinos pushed Muslims out of their land leading to the conflict there. But did the Muslims own the land? My conclusion is that if we can be impartial we might see there are no victims or aggressors. It's human nature to covet and think something belongs to them whereas possession is really a legal invention to support psychology. We're all aggressors when we don't understand the nature of the self. Visiting Spain I understood why the Spanish came to the Philippines. Our human story has lessons for us all to learn if we can get over the bias of belief.

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

Blu-ray technology is changing how we view video content. Despite what naysayers proclaimed initially that entertainment delivered by disk was going to be completely supplanted by Internet-streamed content, the Blu-Ray Disk player appears to be staying around and may even become part of the future way content producers deliver products to consumers. The introduction of BD Live, an implementation of Java on the disk, is why.
The process from science to consumer production has taken taken ten years. The first of prototype implementation of blue laser technology was unveiled in October 2000. The project was officially labeled Blu-ray in February 2002. Sony shipped the first BD-ROM players in June 2006. HD DVD had beaten it to the market by a few months. I bought an HD DVD player later that year. Blu-ray players were vastly more expensive then.

I gave in and bought a Samsung BD player in late 2007. A year later newer BDs were unplayable. I managed to upgrade the firmware despite Samsung's awful support for Macintosh users and that allowed me to view most of the new releases but BD Live that began appearing on BDs were beyond the capacity of my player.

This week I decided to try the new LG BD player with built-in WiFi. The alternative was to buy a cheaper player without WiFi, just so I can watch the new releases without crashing my player. I bought the cheaper model with just 1 G built-in memory. I brought it home thinking I would probably have to exchange it for a cheaper, non-Wifi-capable device. Unlike the Ethernet-connectable Samsung, connecting the LG player to the Internet was instant. Whew! But when I tried to check for upgrades, the player once again crashed. I tried BD-Live on some disks I already owned. "BD Live content is available only on some players," the dialogue said. I was going to return the player yesterday when I discovered the problem. I needed to plug in more memory.

I had an old Cruzer USB flash-memory unit that I used at one time to transport files home from my computer at the office. I plugged this to the LG player and everything worked! I plugged a Windows-formatted USB hard drive with 80 gigs and that worked, too. Now I could download additional content from BD Live sites like Warner and Lionsgate.
Bonus View and BD Live, implementation of Sun Microsystems's Java platform, changes the whole entertainment experience. Right now I need a BD Live disk in the player to access additional content like live weather and news reports but the technology has turned my large-screen HDTV into an Internet device! Non-HD streaming content is still unviewable (I require crisp resolution on my screen or great audio or not I would not watch the video) but downloaded HD content is absolutely thrilling to watch. And download is fast!

I decided to learn content-creation software because of my interest in media. After all, I tell people I left the Philippines to access media that were few and far between in the 1970s. Mass media connect people and disconnected was what I felt back then. Pundits warn against over involvement in virtual connections and they may have a point. Nerds are antisocial humans but with their narrow focus they have brought profound insights into our modern world.

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