The Goods on Materialism

Cold and cloudy this morning. To get going I turned on Georges Moustakis on the stereo and made the bed, lured by the promise of McDonald's Sausage Biscuit with Egg and, I can't help it, a small decaf. What makes us eat and crave and eat McDonald's "meals"? 

The biscuit, just the right shade of white to remind us of the luxury of rich, white flour, but not too white to suggest that this is healthy, too. Just the right amount of saltiness, and the texture is halfway between crumbly, tender but more substantial than a cake. The omelet is smooth and light, a perfect yellow, not too sweet, a perfect foil to the peppery, chewy sausage patty.

Moustaki is music that comforts like a sausage biscuit. It makes no demands intellectually. It is pleasant yet foreign enough to be interesting. On a cold morning, his raspy, masculine voice brings out the browns and blacks of the color spectrum, glowing and alive unlike the apathy of gray skies.

Reading Moustaki's "stub" on wikipedia intrigued me even more. His parents, Greek Sephardic Jews from Corfu, an island in the Ionian Sea, migrated to Alexandria, Egypt. They apparently spoke Italian at home but so loved French culture that they sent their children to French schools. In 1951, Moustaki moved to Paris, fell in love with the music of Georges Brassens, changed his name to Georges Moustaki (from Yussef Mustacchi) and began a successful career writing and singing songs in seven languages including Italian, French, Greek, Spanish and Arabic. He is a European singer, the language of his songs a short history of Mediterranean culture.

Materialism is preoccupation with the material world, with things, rather than with intellectual or spiritual concepts. Food might be thought of as materialistic, just like clothing, houses, cars, "real" estate, even books, dishes, stereos and televisions. It was the lure of oral sensations that got me out of bed this morning but the story of Moustaki, Corfu and Mediterranean cultures that now engages me wholly. We are, after all, body and soul, soul being that part of us that hovers in and about our corporal selves, our thoughts, aspirations, beliefs, our intellectual and spiritual experiences.

Experience itself is mental. Though it draws from our bodily sensations, experience derives more from contributions of the mind than from the material things our body senses in the moment. I didn't just consume a Sausage Biscuit with Egg. My experience comprises the taste and chewing sensations as well as the associations the mind makes of McDonald's creation.

This is creativity. Creativity transforms base sensory stimuli into culinary marvels, art and the cinematic experience. The body and its senses are nothing without the experience the mind weaves about them, transforming their matter into some "thing" more sustaining, more enriching, even ultimately animating (from anima, soul); transforming existence into life.

McMuffin might induce me out of the house but it is the pleasure of thinking and the chance to write something better than the taste of it in my mouth that makes me come again and again. The words on the computer page are mere shadows of what passes through the mind. Food sensations are pleasurable but not as pleasurable as the appearance of certain thoughts in the mind, certain conjunctions of ideas, the alchemical distillation of concepts, the destruction and creation of whole worlds while McDonald's cleverly marketing wrappers and try liners lie ignored on the table beside me. 

The computer like its maker is matter and thought, even spirit. In Christian dogma, on the day of resurrection, we shall all rise from the earth, body and soul together again and forever. Maybe there are not two here but only one, always and only One.

I searched through my photographs of Corfu ( Kérkira to the Greeks). The first is an image of the Liston Arcade, built by the French during Napoleon's occupation, the second of Mouse Island (Pondikonissi). My sister and I stayed at a hotel on a cliff overlooking the island monastery. How long ago that now seems! On our last evening there, we navigated a small path down to the seashore, visited the monastery and had dinner at the restaurant at the foot of the ramp. I remembered there were several cats about, under the deck, by the water, suddenly appearing from the kitchen. The food was heavenly though I don't remember now what we ate!

See the full gallery on posterous

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Getting out into the spring-refreshed outdoors is like airing musty winter closets

The one day this week forecast as sunny and I was going to spend the day reading in bed. No, siree, I was not going to waste a day like today. Reading is not of itself wasted time but I can always read at night before falling off to sleep. Days like today are for getting about and doing something with this amazing light.
 
The burritos at McDonald's at 10:25 Monday morning are stiff and old but they succeeded in getting me out of the house. I keep thinking I'd switch off my AT&T land line but the included Freedom wireless has been my lifeline to the Internet these many years. I can work at the computer at McDonald's almost as easily as I do at home.
 
The light in spring is clear like teardrops. To step outdoors is to wake up the senses. The magnolias, both the luscious pink that covers the medium-sized trees and the white star variety on shrubs, are blooming. Their blooming is one of spring's highlights for me. Almond trees are creamy-white candles on allées at shopping malls. The boughs of crab apples are shadowed with grayish-pink buds auguring their ostentatious show that would signal the peak of spring blooms in mid-April. April is two days away.
 
Last year in May I flew to Southern Italy, my first trip to Europe without Merma. As much as I love spring, I wanted to experience it in Europe where mountainsides and meadows fill with flowers. I was not disappointed. I want to go again but I may not be able to go again for a couple of years. Later this year, we go to Northern Spain, next year visit Florence, Tuscany and Umbria for the chocolate festival ; I want to go back to the Philippines in 2011.
 
This photo was taken on the island of Capri off the tip of Massa Lubrense on the Gulf of Naples.

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fresh as if just awoken from dreamless sleep. The regular and star magnolias are blooming, the crab apples grayish-pink with leaf buds, the world awaits my camera!

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Saturday night having supper alone is beyond precious

Saturday night having supper alone is beyond precious, is peacefulness quietly savored, embodiment of contentment. Saturday nights are not always so graced although intellectually it makes sense that this one night sandwiched between the two weekend days should be the most insulated from the busy world's hectic paces.
 
After lunch today I worked in the garden for a while. I tore off the stray ivy that has somehow invaded the border. I don't know where it came from. I certainly didn't plant it in the garden. They grow rapidly. Their leaves don't even die in the winter. Dark green on top and purple underneath, the leaves are actually pretty but if I leave the ivy alone it is bound to take over the border. Last summer it was just in one area of the garden. Today I discovered it had somehow leaped across the path to start at another area of the garden. Puzzling. Afterwards I drove to Sullivan's, my neighborhood hardware store, where I bought Miracle Grow potting soil and red pavers to keep soil from spilling past the edges of the borders.
 
As short bursts of light rain arrived with their panoply of thunder I decided not to walk outdoors. I did four miles at the gym before coming home to vacuum the house and dust some strategic surfaces. Frank and Audrey will be joining me tomorrow for meditation. I mopped the linoleum in the kitchen, bath areas and entryway. Was it perhaps the smell of clean that started the soft, quiet peacefulness?
 
I heated chicken broth I had made the other day, threw in halved bok choy and Japanese noodles. While eating I watched Antiques Roadshow on WFYI. A French country armoire built in 1776 was valued at $10,000. A photograph of the NY Yankees from the early 1900s was valued at $30,000. Such is the way of Yankee dollars. When there's nothing on public TV to watch, I read from a shelf of books by the dining room table. I've stored the books from that bookcase to make room for DVDs.
 
I used to tell myself I was collecting books, movies and music recordings that would keep me happily occupied in retirement. When retirement came last November, I didn't even notice how well provisioned I was for having the time now to engage in activities I truly enjoy. Was this what caused tonight's lovely serenity?
 
No. I've had this feeling before, a feeling more organic even than what appears after meditating. The sounds of the world outside seem to evaporate and there is just the little space that my body occupies. The rest is the cozy world of mind where thoughts don't stray very far into labyrinths of worry or desire. The mind quiet, its effortless preoccupation is just what's in front of it. It moves from one object to another without fanfare. Very nice.

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Eight Is a Lucky Number

It's going to be colder the next few days but in the garden outside the scent of hyacinths says "spring." Sprinkling on and off today, the weather may even bring light snow tomorrow morning. The hyacinths are just opening fully, the earliest daffodils are past their prime, the mid-season ones just now blooming. This year I had more amaryllis blossoms but didn't take any photographs. This is from last year.

Lunch at 8 China is my Saturday highlight. I am lucky to have a place like this to enjoy. I am there every week so the owner knows me by face. While others queue up for a table, she gestures me in to sit wherever I like. I usually sit at one of two tables by the window. The waitress, Ninny, also knows me and automatically brings me my tall glass of water and cup of jasmine tea. At 8 China I could not feel better if I was a lord in some medieval kingdom or a New York City magnate that owned the restaurant.

I could never prepare the like of the foods the buffet offers. Many take hours and special skills to fix. The Chinese like my people in the Philippines like seafoods so there dozens of seafood preparations. The variety always reminds me of the dinner buffets served on the beach at night in Boracay. Boracay, an island resort that is perhaps the most known resort among foreign tourists in the Philipines, is just off the northern coast of the island where my family still lives, Panay. It does take five to six hours to drive up there although the roads are generally well maintained unlike in Palawan where many were just gravel roads.

At 8 China (eight is considered a lucky number by the Chinese), one of my favorites is pork ears that back in the Philippines we boiled, then marinated in coconut-flower vinegar and garlic and called kilawin. At the restaurant, they take it a step farther and fry the marinated strips of ears until they turn golden while still remaining limp. They are delicious. I always put a mound of them on my plate.

Another favorite is bovine stomach that we called libro because of the page-like flaps covering the surface. It is boiled, then cut into strips and sautéed lightly in garlic and onions with a little of the broth in which it was tenderized. In the Philippines, stomach is seldom served by itself. It is added to beef in clear-broth stews with vegetables like potatoes and cabbage. In some regions the stew is flavored with iba, eyedrop-like, light green fruits that are very sour. Filipinos like sour in stews and use other ingredients like tamarind leaves, unripe guavas, guava leaves, etc. These peculiarly Filipino additions to foods are what I miss the most in America.

At the next table, a French guy was trying to get his children to eat vegetables. Adrian, age 2, and Annemarie, age 5, are half-Japanese and speak a babble of languages. Their dad had also worked in China so spoke some Mandarin. He taught his daughter to say, shi-shi, when the waitress brought her extra fortune cookies.

Encounters with strangers continue to spark my days. I live alone so I welcome these short, impromptu conversations. At McDonald's yesterday, an elderly guy came by and told me he saw me at Bally's. His name was Hollie. "It was my father's name," he told me when I remarked on how unusual it was. Another guy, seeing that the order line was long, came by and chatted with me about AT&T's digital TV offerings. He approached me at first to ask if my laptop was using Internet and how I did that.

Rain clouds have moved in. The sky is darker. I'll run the vacuum cleaner then walk for a bit at the gym.

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Joe's proofs are done!

Six hours straight at the computer today and Joe' proofs are done, 338 images in all, including this one with his hoodie. I don't know why but images of men with their heads covered resonate with me. Growing up, of course, I saw the womenfolk of my family in church with their heads covered with their black or white lace Manto but few men wore any head covering. In the Jewish tradition, men cover their heads when praying and the women, of course, are supposed to keep their heads covered at all times. I think head covering adds not only to the mystique of faces but to their beauty as well. Head coverings are, of course, part of clothing and the clothing industry knows this. Hoods provide a background against which the face is outlined. There is also the link with caves and everything mysterious that we associate with caves and dark holes and openings into unknown spaces.

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Filipinos and religious devotion worthy of the saints

I just finished watching a YouTube video of last January's procession in honor of the patron saint of Quiapo in Manila, El Señor Nazareno. The statue of a black Jesus dressed in purple and carrying his cross is carried through the streets from the Luneta back to the Quiapo church, an event that can take up to 12 hours. Devotees begin to camp out on Plaza Miranda the night before just so they will have a chance to carry the paso or portable altar bearing the statue on their shoulder, their feet bare, their heads bound by a white cloth signaling a bana-ad, a vow to do this act of oblation and faith every year. The vow is often for a favor received not by the devotee but some loved one. Many fulfill a vow taken by a parent or grandparent, such is the devotion of these people whose example those of us in the West can only marvel at or be mystified by. Growing up in the islands I know the fervor of belief still manifested there today in the age of flat-screen digital television and High Definition movies, Internet, email and texting. I can't summon any more the intensity of belief-based perception and action. Among believers, acts like these must lift their lives from the ordinary struggles of daily life, lifting them out of meaninglessness to something luminous or at least transcendent.

Santos, the wooden statues of saints that are so much a part of the religious life of Filipinos, have fascinated me since I was a child. Then they exerted the power of faith in the sacred, in the mystery that religions bestow upon human lives. Now they are works of art but more than just that, too. They outward signs of an inner experience that however materialistic we become still hovers just above our heads or under our feet, beyond arguments or dialectic, beyond reasonableness or practicality. If religion is opiate for the masses, maybe opiates are not just illegal brain-changing drugs but something that transcends what we know or can know about the brain. Maybe mind contains paradises beyond the wildest dreams we can have about the seemingly infinite galaxies the twinkling stars above suggest to us exists beyond our little heads, beyond this speck of earth where we begin and end our lives.

Below is a photo of a religious plaque taken from a church or private residence, now at the museum in Iloilo. As art we might see it as belonging to the category of folk art but when familiar with the language of symbols and associations, the image suggests to me what the most sublime art can not produce in the beholder. Then again I might be splitting hairs. Religious feeling or feeling for the beautiful may really be more than the words or conceptual categories we assign to it. Words and even ideas, like the Zen finger pointing at thus-ness, are mere attempts to express something ineffable because it is neither localized nor couched in the language of any tangible experience. 

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Joe's proofs show work with Kelby and Orwig

I am a third through processing proofs for the shoot with Joe last Saturday. This has been a lot more pleasant and certainly an easier chore than previous shoot processing, thanks to the work I've done with Kelby and Orwig. And that is very little work really. There is a lot more that I can learn from these two. For now, here's one image from the shoot.

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A springtime reckoning of effort and self

Sorrentine Spring 2008

My efforts are often dogged by what Horace once called a mountain in labor and out comes a mouse. I can live with that; I must live with what I have done. Thoughts are more insubstantial, therefore carry the seeds of transcendence. With religious fervor we doggedly follow karmic patterns that we struggle to overcome while something else, the transcendent I mentioned, happens that redeems us from ourselves. 

Out of thoughts arise dreams of paradise dwarfed by the materiality of what actually transpires—the vividness of blue and purple, the Thomas-tangibility of a wood splinter stuck in our thumb, the incontrovertible warmth of the sun on our face, the touch of a lover, the sting of hot pepper, the beauty of daylight striking the eye.

But thoughts, more than the materiality of the senses, can organize the memory of these sense experiences and produce something more than we could ever imagine we are capable of, the transcendence I spoke of, that relieves the monotony of prodigious rodent-producing effort. Salvific grace may not strike in a lifetime but we know it does. We see it in what other men and women before us have done. They labored to accomplish what talent and predilection determined but the power of their creation is not theirs alone as much as what appreciation endows it. 

Pattern is hard to see within the limits of our subjective selves. Poetry, art or music might allow individuals to believe in themselves enough to sally forth into transcendence but even the most energetic believer must reckon with forces outside of himself. Harold Bloom in his tour-de-force Genius, A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, writes:

By "appreciation" I mean something more than "adequate esteem." Need also enters into it, in the particular sense of turning to the genius of others in order to redress a lack in oneself, or finding in genius a stimulus to one's own powers, whatever these may emerge as being.

He further writes:

Appreciation may modulate into love, even as your consciousness of a dead genius augments consciousness itself. Your solitary self's deepest desire is for survival, whether in the here and now, or transcendentally elsewhere. To be augmented by the genius of others is to enhance the possibilities of survival...

Maybe age does bring wisdom. Not wisdom like God's omniscience but more earthbound, more self-bound, we grow to think beyond the categories imposed on thought by our self-limiting efforts. At 71, after 46 years of being a teacher to the still malleable young, Bloom writes with authority about literature and religious ideas. Maybe wisdom is simply awareness of one's approaching death. We can't afford to wait for conditions to be right before expending effort we may soon no longer have. 

To "do" something is to struggle from within "need," a kind of desperation, rushing into what we know well to be mice-like. A mouse contemplated outside our familiar self-deprecation could yet be heroic, grace, the beneficence of human failing transformed by what we might call the divine. We can't live within the memory of what we have done or failed to do. We can't constrain the future by what we see as the past. We must step off the planet of our selves, of our desires, and leap into the unknown.

Maybe this is not so much wisdom as grace, the transcendence of self as we move ineluctably towards the end of all striving, the end of the genius of our experience: death is God finally realized. Back on earth, we take each clod-like step meanly while appreciating the marvel of being able to know earth, being able to feel effort, being able to live beyond what we know to be true. This to me is genius, transcending self.

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Watermarking the copyright on images

Scott Kelby is like a god to some Photoshop users. I bought his The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers in 2003 but never used it. This afternoon, coming across his book for Photoshop CS3, I tried one of the lessons in the book I owned and chose how to apply a copyright watermark to my images. The copyright symbol didn't work as an F key shortcut but the embossed name turned out okay. I still need to be have it appear centered when applying the watermark to a whole folder of images.

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Already mint from the garden for a spring lunch

Spring has got to be my favorite time of year. In a temperate zone with its changing seasons, I like the cool breezes of spring, even its sudden showers and cloudbursts. Life all around is waking up and every green thing seems precious. Later and in the summer Mother Nature is almost overwhelmingly full of life; in minimalist spring it is easy to appreciate the few, little sprigs of life that shoot out from under old leaves. In Japanese Shin Buddhism, practitioners think of themselves as bombu, "foolish beings." Our foolishness expresses our karmic limitations. To see clearly our limitations is to be free—free of unrealistic expectations, free of "foolish" desires. 

Taitetsu Unno wrote of meeting D.T. Suzuki at Berkley when he was 21 years old. He asked the Japanese scholars whom many believe introduced America to Zen what karma was. Suzuki, then 80 years old, replied, "The elbow does not bend outward." Herbs sprout in springtime, are full of worms by summer, look depleted in the fall, and in the winter disappears under the cold earth. Is this foolishness? To want to walk on water, says another Zen teacher, that is foolishness. To sink in the water, knowing and respecting, maybe even loving this, is wisdom.

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The Spanish and the Philippines in Me

In the 1950s my parents would take my sister, Merma (named for her mother, Mercedes, and grandmother, Matilde), and me to what then looked to me a palatial Chinese restaurant, the Dainty Restaurant, on J. M. Basa Street. My father would order morisquita china, fried rice with bits of Chinese sausage, scallions and garlic. My mother's favorite was sopa de nido, chicken broth with pieces of swallows' nests from the island of Palawan. My sister loved camarón rebosado, prawns with their tails on, in a crisp batter. We ate Chinese food with Spanish names and this was some 55 years after the Spaniards left the islands.

The restaurant was the biggest and best known restaurant on what was then the most important downtown street in my hometown, Iloilo. It was in a block of shops near Plazoleta Gay, the intersection of five streets at the foot of J. M. Basa Street. Nobody called the street J. M. Basa; to everyone with whom I grew up, it was Calle Real (spoken as one word, calyereál). I never found out who J. M. Basa was but know now that the Spanish built roads connecting the towns they established in the New World as well as in the Philippines and called the main ones cutting across town the Royal Way. 

In 2001, Merma and I visited Spain. Spain and the Philippines are inextricably linked in my memories. Spanish culture and the history of the Spanish domination of the Philippines are at the core of my identity. That visit allowed me to put the stories I read in school about Spanish oppression in context that liberated me from resentment and anger. Seeing for myself where the Spanish conquistadores and later political and religious bureaucrats came from I grew a sense of who these people were and why they went to the Philippines. Like people of today, the Spanish autocrats came in search of a better future for themselves and for their families. I can understand that.

One of the cities we visited on that trip was Valencia, land of Valencia oranges. At our town fiesta, my grandmother always entertained at her big, airy Spanish-colonial house at La Granja. One of the perennial dishes served was arroz Valenciana. In Valencia in 2001, Merma and I had paella. Here was the arroz Valenciana of my childhood!

Catedrál

Puerta de Hierros

Mercado Central

Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciéncias (in Valencian, not Castilian Spanish)

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The intellectual and the sensual don't fall far from each other

The intellectual and the sensual don't fall far from each other. I was reminded of this at lunch today. The entrée was spaghetti alla chittara (machine-made with bronze plates) with a meat-ball tomato sauce, paired with a fresh salad of organic field greens, Bulgarian sheep's cheese and balsamic vinegar. To complete the meal I had a wine-glassful of iced coffee.

People who valued the intellectual life during the Wei and Jin Dynasties in China fled community life to live in relative material poverty in bamboo groves or isolated mountain tops so they can pursue study and the cultivation of their minds freely. I don't think the modern Chinese are inclined to this kind of life any more but in America we do have the opportunity to get out of the rat race and allow time for reflection and study. We may not get wealthy or gain wide repute but such a life can bring pleasures that money can't buy.
 
I was surprised but shouldn't have been. Both the intellectual and the sensual are faculties of the same mind. When we take the time to reflect on our experiences we see that we categorize the world in a certain way and that categories are artifices. As with all extravagances, there is a price to pay but we might cheerfully pay it to experience delights that a fast-paced life seldom brings.

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The Journey Taken and What Lies Immensely Away

Since doing the model photo shoot last Saturday I have been experimenting some more with manual camera settings. I took some photos at the Monon Trail yesterday. Just to be able to capture images that made sense while fiddling with f stops feels like an accomplishment.

This morning I set up some still-life on the piano bench. This image shows how natural light from the window and lamp light on the right gave it two color temperatures. I suppose this can be used creatively although mostly I might want to blend the light sources more subtly.

This image was shot with only the thin light from the cloudy sky outside. It still shows highlights which can be a problem to avoid hot spots when printing the images. Not that I've even gone much into printing the images so far. 

When I decided I wanted to start a new career in digital imaging I had no idea I would need to learn to accomplish this. Foolishly I didn't think it was going to be much of a feat but I learned otherwise. I had shot with point-and-shoot cameras until I acquired a Minolta in the 1980s and discovered SLR photography. The Minolta showed me to appreciate color, lines, textures and shapes. It seemed so easy.

When I lost the Minolta on a trip to Niagara Falls, my interest in photography dropped close to nil. It was not until I started taking trips to Europe that the interest slowly came back. Canon had started to sell hobbyist cameras with professional features. I jumped on the wagon and bought a Canon EOS Rebel. I credit that camera with first instilling the idea that I could make a profession of photography. Looking back now I feel foolish for thinking this was something I could do! Hindsight might be wisdom but seeing what we've learned points to the many other lessons that lay ahead.

At first I used automatic focus modes to learn about composition and perspective. I was interested in shooting videos then so acquired studio hot lights that led to my shooting models. Learning to use hot lights was a major feat. Now I want to add flash and strobe lighting. It seems one thing leads to a dozen others. I have a feeling what I have embarked to do is equivalent to going back to college! Why am I surprised? To become professional in any endeavor one first has to acquire the language. We don't think of this until we have stepped into Alice's world of talking animals and infinitely adjustable sizes.

The gamut of what I had to learn ran from what seemed as simple as using my Manfrotto tripod to learning about exposure and what constituted an f-stop. Learning to shoot with manual settings this weekend was another milestone. 

For years I've admired virtuosity among young musicians competing in the proliferating world of competitions. A young pianist or vocalist at IU Bloomington or any of the many other top-notch music schools in the country acquire impeccable technique. This does not come without a price. I am now just beginning to realize this. Technique is basic but beyond that is a whole, new world. After learning to capture images, after learning how to process and display them on the Internet, there's a stage beyond suggested by Alexey Brodovitch's exhortation to the young Avedon: "Amaze me."

A final image when I tried different metering modes on the camera:

This is a cheap porcelain statue 2 1/2 inches tall. Special effects in movies often employ miniatures to create fantastic worlds. This involves blowing up the images so the miniatures have to be created with consummate detail. Otherwise they would appear as this did.

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Defining where posterous posts

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Saturday Night Sermon on Meaning

I am often goaded to write when something in a book or magazine I am reading or a movie I've watched strikes me as curiously fascinating. The item may be an insight into human nature (or life, which is the same thing) because it corroborates what I recall having experienced. It may be information that again supports something I've suspected but that goes against common wisdom. It may not be any of these but still possesses an energy that stops my thoughts in their tracks as if a load of gold had dropped into their path. Energy is curious because it is no respecter of categories that my mind creates. Tonight the energy derives from two seemingly disparate sources.

Over dinner earlier I read the April issue of Portfolio and came across a beautifully laid-out advertisement for Hard Rock Hotels and Casinos. Arranged throughout the text were images of their properties scattered throughout the world, including a half-page photo of the China Grill at the Hard Rock Hotel Chicago. Jeffrey Chadorow had designed the space, patterns of circles on the neutral-color carpet and horizontal lines along the mahogany walls reminiscent of Japanese shoji screens.

The magazine also included an article by Matthew Cooper listing seven behind-the-scenes key players in Obama's White House. One of the seven, Lael Brainard was said to live in an $1.8 million home in Chevy Chase with her husband, a co-founder and CEO of a think tank based in Aspen. All the people on Cooper's list had served in high places in the government and in private enterprises. How much of the power and wealth that these people wield came to them because of their unique skills, how much from privileges they were born into, how much from knowing people in high places who opened doors for them, how much from hard work and dogged persistence?

Two nights ago, I watched Gus Van Sant's movie, Milk, and was surprised how powerful it was. I had expected a "gay" movie but found myself engaged by the magic of cinema, of images and their progression that captures us in the net of storytelling. The movie was so effective I lost awareness of myself. Neither my breathing nor awareness of a body part or anything that recalled me to myself intruded into my immersion in the story. It took my mind hostage and I was nowhere to be found. 

The movie introduces Harvey Milk as a hippie-type closeted gay man who runs into Scott in the NYC subway and entices the younger man into spending the night with him. Scott tells him he didn't date men older than 40 but, demonstrating the chutzpah that later enables him to become the first openly gay man to be elected to public office, Milk quickly riposted: I'm in luck then because I don't turn 40 until midnight. In bed, presumably after making love, Scott reminds Milk it is now past midnight. Milk is forty and he realizes that he has not done anything he can be proud of in his life so far. He and Scott leave New York for San Francisco and Milk's life changes. It becomes a force that affected other people just as Van Sant's movie affected me.

What have done with my own life? This afternoon I did a photo shoot with a 20-year-old theater major at Ball State. It's the first shoot I did completely in manual camera mode. That for me is an accomplishment. The images so far I've looked at are superior to any I've produced in previous shoots but is this all I should be doing with my life? Weekends I go out to my favorite restaurants for dinner. Mornings when I wake up I read, evenings I go to the gym, after supper I watch a movie. Is this all? Is it enough?

Years of contemplating human destiny and the values that men and women have identified and tried to live through the centuries suggests how fame, political power and wealth are not all that common wisdom says they are. In their pursuit we become like rats on a treadmill, caught in a maze that feels meaningful but is in reality mindless habit and empty. When physical health is disturbed or death imminent many of us find ourselves waking up as if from a dream. What was meaningful is simply the momentum of decisions we took when we were too young to know what we were choosing. I've grown to value time to recollect myself and weigh the choices I am making. 

Time is more important than anything we can achieve through effort or genes or luck. As long as we have time we're alive and as long as we're alive we can posit meaning anyway we want because meaning is simply something the mind creates. By itself it is nothing of enduring value. Meaning invests ideas and acts with value but, as Gotama the Buddha taught 2500 years ago, it's as evanescent as any content that passes through the mind. Mind, time and that curious energy I started this journal with are to me my most valuable possessions. Everything else stems from this trinity for together they constitute life.

While Joe was changing in the bathroom, I took my vase of daffodils and lit it in front of the white nylon background. Adjusting the camera's aperture opening, shutter speed and sensor sensitivity, I created the image below.

After 35 years in a profession founded on thinking and science, I took a sabbatical a year ago last May to better understand and appreciate images. Morality no longer dominates me. Religions too have lost their superiority. Relationships are wonderful but I've grown to accept that I enjoy solitude as much. I do still enjoy knowing about things, understanding elements of my internal and external environment but rising like the moon over the mottled lake water is this infatuation with images. 

Lurking behind the fascination is yet another perennial preoccupation. If truth is nothing more than transitory knowing, if spirit is simply mind's projection beyond its pitiable limits, if charity and other virtues are at their core self-centeredness masked, then  beauty while sublunary and deceptive is at least innocuous? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I might make some money from its pursuit but I also know it is just another meaning attached to what I do with time, energy and mind. Everything else is vanity.

In Chapter 40 of the sayings of the Hebrew prophet we know as Isaiah, the prophet is told to proclaim:

All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.

In Ecclesiastes, said to be the sayings of Solomon, King David's wise son, he says:

Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever...

All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing...

Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us.

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Manual exposure comes home

I knew that if people just kept doing what they like to do they will get better at it. I just never thought this would apply to me, too. It does. I have a long way to go with learning to create images I can be proud of but another saw is proving true. It is hard to see where you really want to go until you've taken a few steps and can see a little more of the horizon. Progress must come in stages, each one a beginning and an end.
 
Without planning to do this today I turned the camera selector to manual while shooting at noon today. I had been playing with aperture for months now, mostly when I want to adjust depth of field, but have only played with shutter speed a couple of times. Today it all came together. I didn't notice before how in manual mode a scale appears on the LCD showing the "standard" exposure and how the current manual settings would be underexposure or overexposure. This makes shooting in manual mode so much simpler.
 
This image of an iron Buddha that I coupled with sweet, red peppers came together again without much thought. Later I decided to pair the two because bright red looks elegant with black but that's ratiocination after the fact.

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Lunch can be healthy and quick

Lunch can be healthy and quick. When I saw my friend, Kevin, last November, he suggested I cook my vegetables and give my pancreas a break. Serendipity came to the rescue. I love eating crunchy, fresh salads but with a non-stick casserole I learned to sauté the usual salad ingredients after coating the cookware with olive oil over high heat. Crushed garlic and green onions are wonderful to start the sauté. Once everything has been added to the casserole, I cover it and turn down the heat to moderately high and steam the "salad." My friend, Tony, gave me Chinese stir-fry seasonings from Dean Jacobs. The Oriental Blend and Mild Szechuan don't contain salt and I didn't use salt initially. Now I have resumed using salt again but more deliberately and learned to keep boiled chicken breast in the fridge to add a special touch to the sauté some days like this first day of spring. Hooray!

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Not daring enough to recreate

Food comprises much of my favorite childhood memories.
 
For instance, when I was four, I was hospitalized at Iloilo Polyclinic and Hospital for pneumonia. My room was on the top floor of the hospital. It was on a sunny hallway that looked out upon the roof of the multi-story building near the high school where my father taught English. I remember the white-garbed hospital staff bringing in a bowl of alphabet soup. My mother told me the broth was made from paras, pork neck bones, that she said made the richest broth for soups. Ever since I've been looking for that elusive soup.
 
At the Mexican groceries sprouting all over Indianapolis I would sometime find small cellophane packets of alphabet-shaped pasta but I've never been brave enough to attempt to recreate that wonderful soup when I was four years old and the world was an unexplored universe I couldn't then even imagine.
 
This soup, served in an oddly shaped Sam-&-Squito bowl, is the best I can do for now. Chicken broth simmered with bok choy and noodles, garnished with diagonally cut scallions.

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Bringing spring indoors

The Early Show hosts welcomed spring with the NYC crowd amid falling snow this morning. In Indiana this morning was cold but we had lots of sunshine. The daffodils hang their heads in the cold but by late morning had all perked up, their heads once again raised to the warm sunshine.

For St. Patrick's Day, I bought a 99-cent bunch of King Edward daffodils and stuck them with more blooms from the garden for my dinner table that evening. Daffodils, more so even than tulips, for me signify spring. They recall William Wordsworth's lines:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Miss Ardeño, petite and pretty-as-a-picture, taught freshman English at the old ICC campus in La Paz where I grew up. To entice us to love literature, she taught the poem to music that effortlessly plays in my head now whenever I think of daffodils. Tradition claims that Wordsworth wrote the lines after he and his sister, Dorothy, came across a mass of daffodils by Lake Ullswater on April 15, 1802. Dorothy later wrote in her journal:

"...they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake..."

When we're alone, in bed upon first opening our eyes to another morning, or sitting at the lake pondering the newest gaggle of geese a-visiting, where do our thoughts go? Feeling quiet and peaceful we might recollect images from those faraway, long-ago days when the world was still largely a figment of our dreams and desire, and life stretched ahead of us deliciously, like a never-ending stream of daffodils.

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Searching for Eye (I)

At the end of this month I shall have been on sabbatical from a science-based career for a full year. Reviewing what I have done with the time I have been disappointed with the level of my productivity but last night as I watched 1000 photos on Apple TV, now upgraded to display in HD on my large-screen 1080p monitor, I don't think I've done too shabbily! 

My photos, or images as I like to call them since they are all digitally processed, have a cumulative effect that one does not get viewing just one image. Most of the images are model images going back to my first shoot in May before leaving for Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast later that month. I used Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs as background music for the impromptu slideshow and the effect was magical. I have wanted to gather together a portfolio for a local gallery show late this year (more likely now in at least another year) with blown-up prints but I like the idea of projected giant images. HD monitors are about light, incredible intensities of light that move the heart as only vivid colors do. 

When I began doing model shoots last year I didn't have a clue about art, much less artistic vision. I needed to develop, even find my own "eye." After a year I think I have my own style of seeing. Artists throughout the centuries are constantly forging new rules to keep their art edgy and attract consumers. Digital processing is making the art of breaking old rules more exciting even as established, more conservative photographers still tied to film technology try to impose their canon on emerging, struggling newcomers. I like being a newbie!

Shunryu Suzuki's advice to his early American students was to practice, practice, practice but never to lose the "Beginner's Mind." Alas human nature quickly turns newbies to experts. For a while it works but before we know it, certainly before critics and consumers realize it, we have become old fogies, desperately defending what we know and no longer able to see with Beginner's Mind.

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Setting Sail for the Hereafter

Oscar Hijuelos was born August 24, 1951 in New York City, the son of José Hijuelos, a hotel worker, and Magdalena Torrens, a homemaker. Both had immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba. He attended NYC public schools then received his bachelor of arts degree in 1975 and his masters in English and writing in 1976 from City College. One of his teachers in the writing program was short-story writer, Donald Barthelme.

After graduation, Hijuelos worked at an advertising media company from 1977 to 1985. He wrote short stories in his spare time, some of them published in the Best of Pushcart Press III in 1978. One of his stories, Columbus Discovering America, received an outstanding writer citation from Pushcart Press in 1978. This led to an Oscar Cintas fiction writing grant and, in 1980, a Breadloaf Writers Conference scholarship.

Our House in the Last World was published in 1983. Like many first books, it was probably autobiographical, the story of a Cuban immigrant family in America in the 1940s. The book allowed him to examine his feelings about his Cuban heritage. Critics praised the book for being warm and vibrant. It was a departure from the usual book by Cuban-American writers that focused on political issues. In 1983, Hijuelos received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His second book, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, was published in 1989. The story of two brothers, Nestor and Cesar Castillo, who moved from Havana to New York in the 1950s, was nominated for a National Book Critics Award and the National Book Award from the National Book Foundation. The following year, 1990, the work earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He was the first Hispanic writer to win what is considered the highest national award for excellence in journalism, literary achievements and music.

The Pulitzer is named after Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-Jewish-American journalist and newspaper publisher (St. Louis Post-Dispatch and New York World. New York World ran the first newspaper comic printed in color in 1895 and became the largest paper in the country.

Columbia declined Pulitzer’s money when he first offered it in 1895 to set up a school of journalism because Seth Low, Columbia’s president, didn’t want to associate the school with Pulitzer’s unscrupulous reputation. New York World competed with the William Hearst’s New York Journal, especially during the Spanish-American War, and was accused of yellow journalism. In 1902, the new Columbia president was more open to the donation (time softens our scruples, doesn’t it?) but it was not until after Pulitzer’s death that his dream to be memorialized by the two-million-dollar he had left in his will was realized. Columbia created its now famous Graduate School of Journalism in 1912.

Pulitzer, apparently anxious to leave a positive memorial to his success in America, had earlier successfully induced the University of Missouri to create the Missouri School of Journalism so his legacy includes two of the most prestigious schools for journalism in the country.

Columbia started awarding the Pulitzer Prize in 1917. Pulitzer died six years earlier, in 1911, on his private yacht en route to his winter home on Jekyll Island, Georgia.

Our lives are strangely interconnected, links we don’t see until some time has passed and we can see these lives as though from outer space in its greater totality, its edges and center visible at last. Hijuelos, a Cuban, won a literary award funded by Pulitzer who made much of his money from reportage of the Spanish-American War when America first encountered Cuba and by the end of the war had evicted the Spaniards from the hemisphere.Hispanic came to mean not the Spaniards but the people they had colonized and with whom they’d left their genes, language and culture.

The prize for excellence created from the wealth of a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant routinely went to Anglo writers. Hijuelos broke that mold and became the first Latino to win this recognition of mastery in the use of the English language. No Filipino has ever won the award. For that reason alone might one born in the islands dream of someday breaking the mold. Like Pulitzer, when we begin to realize that our lives are not endless, we seek to leave something of our lives when we finally must let life go. 

Memory: it's the stuff of dreams, of art, and, for better or for worse, the life we grow to believe we must live.

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Eating Just the Right Amount Is Not Easy

Lunch at home today was how I should eat every meal. After writing at McDonald's this morning I stopped by TJ Maxx where I found a new arrival from the Sam & Squito line square and rectangular white bone-china dishes. I have been looking for these after refusing to pay hefty price tags at Crate & Barrel. I took home a service for two people, the usual number of place settings for my dinners. After washing the plates I had to use them there and then. The result is this plated lunch of red-leaf-lettuce salad with no oil, curried chicken breast salad, and home-cooked fries.

Alas, for dinner I negated the good feeling from lunchtime. I was upset about a minor incident and decided to eat out. The food at my neighborhood Chinese is too easy to eat. On Sunday evenings, the buffet is crowded. The people who eat there come from the neighborhood. Elderly couples, the woman with perfectly fixed white hair in her Sunday clothes, the man in jackets, and young families, Indian, African-American, Mexicans: these are not the folks you see at Olive Garden much less at Manggiano's. Clothes and style tell so much about people's income levels. Judging books by their covers is so superficial but nonetheless makes an accurate statement of our classless society.

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Content Is Our Inner World Externalized

Over lunch today I read husband-and-wife Thom Taylor and Melinda Hsu's Digital Cinema, The Hollywood Insider's Guide to the Evolution of Storytelling. In his Foreword, Richard Martini, co-director of the Do-It-Yourself Film Festival in LA narrated how he made his first film using "super slow-mo" on his 8-millimeter camera at the wheelchair races at the Special Olympics. The 10-minute film won at the film festival in Mexico City in 1980. "It was at this point," he writes, "that I realized that the content of the film was more powerful than its delivery."

That was a powerful insight for Martini and points to what I feel is my main failing creatively. There are topics I am compelled to write about but none pervasive and persistent enough to fuel a diligent application of time and effort. Content. We are too often prevented from doing what we dream of doing from deep-seated feelings of inadequacy with the technology yet I've come across so many stories of how people started their careers with the most primitive of equipment and know-how. What they had was indefatigable interest, passion.

Martini points out something else that I found helpful. "Images," he wrote, outweigh any words." He described the young Vito Corleone walking across the rooftops after murdering his enemies and tells his infant son, "Your father loves you very much." 

Content and images. For much of my life my inner life was a life of ideas and thoughts. It was after I bought a Minolta SLR some 15 years ago that images begun to interest me. I took that camera when my sister and I drove to Texas through Kentucky and Tennessee, then later Arizona and New Mexico. My family made fun of me when I showed them my trove of pictures: corners of buildings, close-ups of flowers, landscapes empty of people, and no one they recognized gracing any of them. I was so proud of what I've shot that the negative reception only fired my interest in "cold" images. Later I discovered that inanimate objects can evoke as powerful emotions in the viewer as human subjects although admittedly people relate easier when they recognize something human in what they are viewing.

Martini's next movie project was a dare from a friend to find how little a full-feature digital movie would cost. Most actors he knew declined to participate in his no-budget venture so he decided to make the camera the main actor in his movie. Camera had its world premiere at the Digital Talking Film Festival in India in 2000. The organizers paid for his hotel, one night's stay costing more than the movie cost—$300 for the tapes. Otherwise the movie earned him no money but did lead to his being hired to shoot a commercial for a tour company in India.

The book's authors too started their book by telling the story of how three men developed and carried their movie idea to completion as the independent digital feature Washington Heights. "Their creative efforts, as often happens in the real lives of everyday people, are sometimes forced to take a back seat to their needs to pay the bills and have a somewhat normal existence..." Somewhat normal...

They posed their question: why is storytelling exciting? "Going back to our came-dwelling ancestors sitting around the fire, the human impulse to entertain, provoke, move, enlighten, and share has shaped our whole history of dramatic, written and visual work," they answered. Then they wrote something that struck me maybe more than anything so far they'd written. Art happened "because of someone's ability to externalize an internal experience and affect others with that externalization.

I've lived all my life in my mind, at first with just the thoughts that streamed endlessly through its interlinking byways, later admixed with the images those thoughts, largely memories and association, compelled to appear. To make the transition towards becoming a content producer, an artist maybe, I need to translate this amorphous mass into one form of media that I can share with others. Not to do this is to keep the inner life I've grown to love to myself. It will die with me as it dies moment after moment. To externalize pieces of it into some art form is to contribute to the ocean of images and ideas in which societies swim, from which they derive new inspiration and push the shores to undiscovered lands.

I shot this image while walking along the cliff walk overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. We were visiting Cinque Terre, one of my favorite places in Northern Italy.

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Evoking the disappearing Spanish past of the Philippines

via ivanhenares.com

Ivan's post extolled the pork lechon and chicharon of Carcar in Cebu but more evocative even than the food he wrote about was this photo of a Spanish-era house where he and his friend stayed, the Noel House. The ground floor was stone and used for storage; the family lived upstairs with abundant light and air streaming in through the huge, tall windows with two kinds of shutters: for rain and wet weather, for the humid summer nights.

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Some of Our Most Powerful Memories

Some of our most powerful memories are those associated with taste, aroma and the visual sensations of eating. I just came from my Saturday ritual of having lunch at 8 China Buffet on 86th Street. The hostesses know me from years of patronage and just point me to my regular table when they see me at the door. More and more non-Chinese customers are finding their way to the restaurant but the bulk especially at lunch at Saturday and all day Sunday are Chinese families. Gustatory pleasures must be a Chinese value.
 
A visit to 8 China is like going to the Tusita heavens of Buddhist lore. Everything, it seems, the heart remembers from childhood treats and unforgettable family dinners at Chinese restaurants in the Philippines where I grew up were available on the restaurants three rows of hot food, an ice-refrigerated table of shellfish and salads at one end and Chinese cakes at the other, a sushi and cook-to-order bar, and a separate buffet for non-Chinese sweets like French-inspired palmier, layers of crisp puff pastry shaped like a palm leaf. As I said, it's a feast.
 
Chinese food at one end of the Eurasian land mass, Italian, French and Spanish food at the other end. These are the antipodes encompassing my culinary desire. Of the three Mediterranean cuisines, Italian is the equal of Chinese food for sheer variety and exquisite delights. While foods with taste too complex even to analyze are supreme examples of the cook's art, simple foods can be just as evocative. On a trip to Cinque Terre in 2006, I reveled in fresh figs, a fruit we didn't have when growing up. Outside of California, Americans know the fruit only by its dried incarnation, nothing like the juicy treat of the fresh fruit with its lovely purple skin. No wonder the fig when pressed open with thumb and index finger has been compared to the sex organs. Food and sex: man's most powerful urges!
 
I shot this on a glass-topped table at Portovenere where we stayed while exploring the Tyrrhenian coast.

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Time's Delectation Challenges Us To Enjoy Now

With spring breathing down our necks my fancy turns to summer goodies like tomatoes, zucchinis, beans, lovely lettuces, all grown in the garden or bought from the Saturday farmers' markets that now abound all around Indianapolis. I still can't believe how quickly winter seems to have flown by. Time's elastic, for sure. This morning, getting restless while sitting, I kept opening my eyes to check the time. It took eternity for the LED to mark the one-minute change. Useless, I suppose, to harp on time and try to save it for some future delectation. It can only be enjoyed now.

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Media Images as Historical Artifacts

John E. O'Connor's Image as Artifact struck me about how media images not only contribute to the documentation of our ongoing history but actually shapes that history by shaping our perception and understanding of events.

As individuals and different hierarchies of communities we consume and are purveyors of images, whether in still photography or moving images on the theater big screen or television or the many artistic forms that our society allows. In the age of digital media, the proliferation of images has multiplied exponentially. With the Internet, images are now available globally except in regimes that severely restrict access to all the sites. 

One effect of this rampaging distribution is a sea-change in the role of newspapers and magazines, and journalism in general. In America we flip from one TV channel to another and see and hear the same  news items. It makes us wonder if the Fourth Estate does not provide us our window into unfolding history. Why be satisfied with canned content when we can go directly to the place and people affected by these events and hear and see what people there are recording and broadcasting via the Internet? With the digitization of images, photography is losing its link with veracity, the same link that made other visual artists question if photography was art or simply the recording of lightwaves. 

I for one no longer call what I produce photographs but images. When we can change what we see in the picture, we are no longer dealing with dependable records of actual confluences of light and sound energies. How many of us realize this about the images we see? 

O'Connor is right in reminding us to apply the humanist principles of the historian to our ingestion of media images. We must use critical judgment as well as emotions that we not only enjoy these images but recognize how they are products of people's perception and interpretation that we retain our independence, to the extent we are able to, living immersed as we are in our goldfish-bowl cultures. 

Ascending to the Acropolis at Lindos, Rhodes 2007

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Fries-on-Tomato Philosophy

I've found it easiest to photograph plated food on the deck railing outside. Today it was chilly out there and the breeze kept blowing the napkin unto the plate but I did want to photograph the food before consuming it. Here it is, more of the finely-julienne French fries on a slice of hothouse tomato with a single-slice sandwich of curried chicken salad.
 
It is only after I've shot the food that I remember how I wanted to plate it like present-day chefs do, mounded together to form a three-dimensional images. On today's episode of Perfect Day TV with host, Tina Nordström, she piled an argula salad on top of smoked monkfish on top of an anchovy-creme-fraiche-dressed potato salad. Neat. Does the current obsession with 3-D in cuisines, photography and Hollywood movies an expression of the ADHD mentality of our population, especially the teenagers and twenty-somethings? Images have to pop to earn attention.

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The First Crocus Arrives

The temperature dropped from yesterday's 70°F to 34° this morning when I drove to McDonald's to write. My toes were cold in my sandals. That didn't stop me from lingering in the garden to ogle the first crocus of the season. Has winter gone so quickly? Sometimes I am overwhelmed at how quickly time flies, sometimes waste time like it's nobody's business. At Half Price Books after my large cup of premium roast, I came across this quote from Voltaire: "History is a pack of tricks we play on the dead." My sentiments exactly. We can never recapture the past. Even the recent past is lost in the mists of our exquisitely selective memories and memories play a dominant role in how we perceive something as being beautiful. Anymore I think beautiful is just energy that excites us as though we are experiencing something as new again. I think religions like that of the "followers of Jesus" work their power on human minds and hearts because of this renewing effect it has on our perceptions. And what is the connection of all this to photography?

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Food Values Matter

A sack of Yukon Gold potatoes was on sale last week so I have been incorporating the tuber into my diet in various ways lately. One day I decided to try Hubert Keller's recipe for "authentic" French fries that involves soaking the potatoes in cold water for two days. The fries are wonderful!
 
Fast food and good food are different largely from the attitude we take towards food and eating. Fast food tends to indulge what our palate enjoys and the excesses - too much fat, too much cheese, too much sugar - make food that can be as sublime as these fries destructive to our health. Fast food is unhealthy because we don't take the time to prepare, consume and enjoy the food. Eating only to enjoy we miss on some other values that might be as important as making money or acquiring more material possessions. What after all is obesity but the possession of more calories than we need?

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Paradise Gained Today

I need to get back to a healthier lifestyle. This morning, aware of the burden on the pancreas from the last few days' excesses, I took out frozen banana and strawberry from the freezer and spun them in the blender. Smoothies are so easy to make but I have not made them in decades. I think we take paradise for granted or live today thinking paradise lies beyond this life. When I look in me and around me I wonder if this is as good as it gets. This is paradise today; we only live it as it is to make it so.

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Pushing the Envelope in Color Correction

All this time I have been working to approximate "true-to-life" color in my model images. Now I want to explore color spaces that diverge from the real. We watched the live HD broadcast of Puccini's Madama Butterfly on the big screen yesterday. Nothing is more artificial than opera but the emotional experience it affords is more vivid than reality. In 3 1/2 hours I experienced more emotion that 3 1/2 weeks in real time! Art does not imitate life; it makes it more real.

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Excited about coming changes

Nothing new here but there will changes soon. I am learning new ways to more effectively use Photoshop. I may have a new model to shoot and the shoot will benefit from what I learned shooting Brandon.

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Hubert Keller's French Fries

Keller's recipe for "authentic" French fries calls for soaking the potatoes in cold water two nights in a row. Tonight, after a record-breaking workout at the gym (walked nine miles), I came home, dusted off the deep fryer I have not used in years, poured in eight cups of vegetable oil (two cups for every potato julienned on my new mandolin cutting set), set the temperature for high (the cooker only has two settings, medium hot and hot) and waited until the light went out. Into the basket went the julienned potatoes and down the basket went into the perfectly heated oil. In six minutes I had the most delicious fries I have ever tasted!

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Salad When the Sun Is Shining

When the sun is shining and the energy is high, salad makes a perfect lunch. The day started with a two-hour writing stint at McDonald's. The Big Breakfast is not very healthy but I don't see life simply as an exercise in healthy living. To eat nutritious meals is secondary to living life creatively, with enthusiasm, delight and adventure. I did get some writing done, nothing worth crowing about but writing nonetheless. I wrote about finding one's voice:
Pre-Christian Greeks worshipped Zeus, the “Bright One,” the power of the sky that brings sunshine, rain, and snow, even meteorites like the black stone Muslims to this day worship in Mecca. The Bright One becomes God the Father of the Christians, the sky god that oversees everything as the sky overlies everything. To me, the Bright One is the source of what inspires us, the source of nobility and all the other immaterial values without which our lives would be no different than those of animals (at least as we imagine animal lives to be).

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