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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