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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Costiera amalfitana - The Amalfi Coast from the Emerald Grotto to Amalfi.mov

Video of trip from Sorrento to the Emerald Grotto then by launch to Amalfi, 2008.

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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A Temple in Turkey Older than Civilization

"Standing on a hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins." Patrick Symmes's article in the March 1, 2010 issue of Newsweek tells of a find in southeastern Turkey that suggests that 11,500 years ago hunters-gatherers in the last Stone Age built and used temples on a potbellied hill (in Turkish, Göbekli Tepe) before humans turned to farming, then utilitarian pottery, cities, kings, and much later, writing and art.

One of the most influential books that I read when I was just discovering the excitement of books was an ancient cloth-bound book on Greek gods and goddesses illustrated with black-and-white photographs of statues culled from Europe's art and archeological museums. I was fascinated by stories of the origin of things I was learning then through the lenses of science and history, even more fascinated with how people before my time thought about themselves, their lives and the forces that created and shaped both. My interest turned to the culture beyond the native one I saw around me and forty years later turned me into a tourist in Europe.

Our theories about the past will keep changing as we add knowledge to what media and the Internet have transformed into a truly communal store. Long after I am gone people like me will continue to wonder how the commonplace articles surrounding us came to be. More than these solid shapes and manipulable objects I am intrigued by what women and men thought and felt in centuries before mine. Artifacts dug up from the past thrill me with the magnificent possibility that people long dead, most forgotten, were essentially not unlike me. They elaborated theories about how the world operated, why this, what that, and while hiking the wilds of speculation built monuments memorializing their insight, allowing them to enter other aspects of human experience: the sense of the sublime, beauty, and awe.

"Religion now appears so early in civilized life that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it," writes Symmes. In our modern (some say, post-modern) world we cut up the universe into manageable pieces, calling this piece religion, that piece history, this art, that philosophy. Post Aristotle and the classical Athenians we speak of the many "-logies"—mythology, theology, archeology, biology etc. They all fascinate me. 

I have few original insights but they are mine so constitute the composite self that is my ultimate obsession. Teachers of writing say: write about what you know. Few may agree with me but whatever we speak or write about is ultimately self. I enjoy reading what someone else adds to my words and images but writing for me is first of all self-archeology. It is archeology and rocket science. Putting thoughts and feelings into words is exploring the last frontier: my world. 

In Duende Culture I want to write about those aspects of my world we call culture and history, our stories about where we've come from, about the origin and evolution of self.

Posted via email from Duende Culture

A Temple in Turkey Older than Civilization

"Standing on a hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins." Patrick Symmes's article in the March 1, 2010 issue of Newsweek tells of a find in southeastern Turkey that suggests that 11,500 years ago hunters-gatherers in the last Stone Age built and used temples on a potbellied hill (in Turkish, Göbekli Tepe) before humans turned to farming, then utilitarian pottery, cities, kings, and much later, writing and art.

One of the most influential books that I read when I was just discovering the excitement of books was an ancient cloth-bound book on Greek gods and goddesses illustrated with black-and-white photographs of statues culled from Europe's art and archeological museums. I was fascinated by stories of the origin of things I was learning then through the lenses of science and history, even more fascinated with how people before my time thought about themselves, their lives and the forces that created and shaped both. My interest turned to the culture beyond the native one I saw around me and forty years later turned me into a tourist in Europe.

Our theories about the past will keep changing as we add knowledge to what media and the Internet have transformed into a truly communal store. Long after I am gone people like me will continue to wonder how the commonplace articles surrounding us came to be. More than these solid shapes and manipulable objects I am intrigued by what women and men thought and felt in centuries before mine. Artifacts dug up from the past thrill me with the magnificent possibility that people long dead, most forgotten, were essentially not unlike me. They elaborated theories about how the world operated, why this, what that, and while hiking the wilds of speculation built monuments memorializing their insight, allowing them to enter other aspects of human experience: the sense of the sublime, beauty, and awe.

"Religion now appears so early in civilized life that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it," writes Symmes. In our modern (some say, post-modern) world we cut up the universe into manageable pieces, calling this piece religion, that piece history, this art, that philosophy. Post Aristotle and the classical Athenians we speak of the many "-logies"—mythology, theology, archeology, biology etc. They all fascinate me. 

I have few original insights but they are mine so constitute the composite self that is my ultimate obsession. Teachers of writing say: write about what you know. Few may agree with me but whatever we speak or write about is ultimately self. I enjoy reading what someone else adds to my words and images but writing for me is first of all self-archeology. It is archeology and rocket science. Putting thoughts and feelings into words is exploring the last frontier: my world. 

In Duende Culture I want to write about those aspects of my world we call culture and history, our stories about where we've come from, about the origin and evolution of self.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Khaled Hosseini describes writing Kite Runner

Street Scene, Downtown Iloilo

Khaled Hosseini describes his first novel, Kite Runner, as a "slowstarter." Sales were small initially but by word of mouth they grew to make the book an international bestseller -1.25 million copies two years later in 2005. Even before the manuscript was published by Riverhead, NY, it had already been optioned by Dreamworks and the producers who with Mark Foster created what Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called "...a magnificent film."

I want to write a fictionalized account of life in the Philippines when I was growing up and Kite Runner is an obvious model of what can be done.

In an interview done for Amazon Wire to solicit pre-orders for his second book. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled described the writing of both books. He went back to Afghanistan in March 2003, 27 years after he left it as an eleven-year-old boy. This was three months before his book, Kite Runner, was published by Riverhead. He had written the novel based on his memories and book and online research. His editor at Riverhead asked him if he was in Kabul to research his next book. Khaled said at the time he was there just to experience the country he had not seen in all that time. When he did start to write his second book, what he saw and heard on that trip did serve as inspiration.

Khaled tells the interviewer he doesn't structure his novels consciously. He does not plan his novels beforehand. He has a starting point and takes it from there. He does not write for an audience nor write to educate non-Afghans of Afghan history and culture:

"It's a very self-centered act, the act of writing. I write for myself; I'm the audience. I tell myself stories and hope other people would love it as well. But in terms of culture and history of Afghanistan, those things, I try to use just what I need for the purposes of the narrative... It's never been my intention to explain or translate or be an ambassador for Afghan culture or things Afghan... That's too big of a burden for someone who writes novels to be an ambassador for a whole culture. I want  to tell a story and since my story necessitates cultural, historical, and other aspects, I'll use those but that's the main reason for writing.

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Amazon's Book Video Preview

Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic, published last February 9, is available on Amazon. How it is listed brought on this meditation on books and publishing.

Amazon offers the book for 42% of its hardcover price. The listing makes note the book is bound with "deckle edge" paper and explains what this means: the pages are bound to resemble handmade paper by fraying the edges so they appear uneven. Amazon, with Wal-Mart, the most successful merchandising gambit of recent times, sells its products at a sharp discount and with free shipping. Not even Wal-Mart can beat that, especially since for the 49 states, sales don't include sales tax. With its very modern stocking, listing and distribution system, Amazon emphasizes how the publisher (Nan A. Talese) produced the book with a touch of the handmade craftsmanship of a bygone era.

I was struck the most by one element on Amazon's list page for the book. I clicked on a video icon and was treated to what I presume was the author reading from the book against a background that suggested its setting. Amazon, always on the cutting edge to keep its merchandising dominance, may be pioneering another merchandising tool. There really is no question that videos have arrived. With the ease with which video producers today create videos the format should inundate the media even more.

To someone like me fascinated by both words and moving images, the future is thrilling.

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Writing Tips for Success

Store Sign in Oviedo, Spain

Dan Fante, author of the novel, 86'd, spoke with Terry Gross after the novel last year. They spoke about Fante's books, his writing style, and his relationship with his father, Hollywood screenwriter and author of Bukowski's discovery, Ask the Dust. Fante told the Fresh Air host how he started writing when he lost everything again following an alcohol binge. "... I didn't know what to do. So I started to write."

After writing 31 pages of a novel in two years, he realized that he couldn't write a novel. But he could write a page at a time. He didn't care for the alcoholic's 12 Steps but this much he learned from it. A sponsor had suggested to him a format for writing a "fourth step" inventory. He was "to write the story of his life an hour each day for 12 consecutive days at exactly the same time." The sponsor ended up suggesting he work with another sponsor but Fante discovered his modus operandi for writing big works: structure and one page at a time.

I did go to sleep at midnight last night and got up at eight this morning. I wrote the whole morning. I still fantasize working would be easier at night when my mind's censors are soporific and not totally on the job but I turned out better work this morning. It was certainly better than yesterday. I'll go for a third morning tomorrow although it is premature to say I've learned structure and discipline. I think this will come only after I've done enough work to convince myself I am truly working. Nothing, as show biz people love to say, succeeds better than success.

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Art and Art

Rias Gull

I made myself go to sleep last night at 12:30 instead of working on video or short story. I wanted to see if I can be just as productive working during the day. I may end up going back to working after nine at night when the mind censors are partially silenced and I am more likely to take risks in the creative choices I make. But I still feel guilty when I get up in late morning or early afternoon. A tiny voice tells me I should work as everybody is supposed to work: eight to five. Ludicrous when you think about: this is why I am "retired" is so I can find more creative ways to discover and develop skills in text, visual and sound media.

On a lark I called Art Silva last night. I stopped calling him last year when it appeared he was not as interested as I was in hooking up again. I remembered the kind of vision and work ethic he applied to shooting video and creating photographic images. I told him how he was genuinely an artist whereas I was trying to develop that part of the psyche in me. 

Is that possible? Now I know it is. How good an artist one makes oneself into may be arguable. Can something come from nothing? I think an artistic streak was present in me as a child. April reminds me often enough how I was creative back when we were children. I would gather the other kids outside the bedroom window to stage a play with bedsheets and improvised elements. I would tell them stories. I drew pictures.

Last night Art was receptive. He even sounded glad that I called. He has not done much in the way of creative work since we worked together. He is now completing his sixth year teaching in public school. All his free time he spends helping to raise his kids, the ones here in town and the older ones in Chicago. He really tries to be a good dad despite not being such a good provider. He still thinks of himself as an artist. "It's not something that goes away."

Increasingly, being an artist to me means one has to create. There's no sense in "being" one and not externalizing this into works (a telling word if there is one) that other people can experience. To be an artist is to create art.

He told me he'll look at my videos on YouTube and get back with me. He said he would like to get together. I keep looking for colleagues to work with. This is another area that I may be forcing just because this is how it is supposed to be. I am not completely convinced that I can be productive and creative working on my own. This would mean total reliance on just my own skills and resources, and this is scary.

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Audrey the Writer

Thawing Ice

The snow is melting but not with rain. The clouds that hover motionless above the city are exuding tiny drops that little by little are uncovering bits of grass by the side of the road, at the foundations of buildings, and around the trunks of trees.

I started reading Bishop Spong's Liberating the Gospels when I woke up this morning at nine. I thought of calling Frank and asking them not to come. I wanted to stay in bed and read. Well I roused myself from the compulsion and almost as soon as I started moving around saw my mood change. Movement in the body affects the contents of mind just as movement in the mind affects the body.

Audrey was excited about putting on the Estonian national costume last night at the Estonian Independence Day gathering. For the first time she talked about writing down her memoirs—how she and her mother fled the war into Germany then the U.S. She even talked about writing her memories of when Frank was serving in Vietnam and she was raising their sons alone in Oklahoma. Retirement can bring out sides to a person that the constant attention required by working keeps us from entertaining. She left saying she had the first sentence with which she wants to begin her memoirs: I lead a good life.

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Snow Today, Gone Tomorrow

Frozen Lake

Everybody is talking about how this is our snowiest, coldest winter in years. We had three snow storms the first fifteen days in February putting this month among the top 10 of all time. Fox59 meteorologist Brian Wilkes said that if the pattern continued this month could break all records. Last year this time we saw 50s and 60s of mercury.

In December when the onslaught began I battled with the cold. I wore a hooded sweatshirt under a padded jacket and still felt cold. Now I go around in sandals again, wearing just a tee shirt under my regular winter jacket. No more hats. And the snow-covered landscape makes me catch my breath with its beauty. Undisturbed snow carpeting everything including the lake turns disparate elements of a summer landscape into one whole.

As I've settled into winter my work habits too have settled into more productive days. I am slowly relearning Final Cut Pro after uploading 12 videos on YouTube, all done in just the last six weeks. I have also began reworking a short story that I wrote in 1987. The characters are surprisingly strong. I think they're strong enough for a novel. And I am coming around to the idea I really do need to script my video shoots. I am wasting so much storage on the camera hard drive and worse editing takes more time. I am doing much of the work at night, spend mornings in bed reading and going back to bed to sleep at four or five in the morning. When given lemons, we make lemon meringue pies.

The snow they predicted for the weekend is going to be rain. We'll have this gorgeous snow scenes for a couple more days. We always seem to value something just when we're about to lose it or have just lost it. Change whets our appreciation. Without it we lose our capacity to see, to hear, to feel and take it all for granted.

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Skillet-broiled hamburger

I can't believe that I haven't posted to duendejoes since January last year. Can memory be so unreliable? I thought surely I'd posted photos and squibs about food since then?

I do admit: I have not cooked at home much since last summer when I would fix lunches for Tony. Tony was my excuse to drum up meals so I would eat hot meals at home. Of course it didn't work like that. By the time I'd photographed the food it was cold. More often than not I'd fix the food and not have time to photograph the masterpieces: Tony was already at the door. It was an exercise in frustration and futility. I eventually stopped doing it, and stopped cooking at home. Is this like throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

Life is the series of attempts we make to change our basic structure—our karma, our character. I should learn not to accumulate regret and realistically just enjoy the gambit.
This was a meal I prepared for myself a week ago. Since then I made chickpea soup and spaghetti with oyster sauce and that's it: all the home-cooking I've done.

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Like Conquistadores of Old

Ingrid's Coffee

We had more snow yesterday. I stayed home, my typical hibernal Monday. I am tasting hardwired brain pathways. In just a few months habits become indomitable. I must drive to McDonald's for my brew those mornings I feel a need for extra umph! I must read my email before I can do anything else. Most egregious of all: I must take lunch at a buffet to get my afternoon production going. Aaaah! Tyrannized by dopamine!

My tiny rebellion for the day: I dug out Ingrid's Bodum French-style coffee maker, sloughed in two tablespoonfuls of Starbuck's Caffé Verona and six ounces hot filtered water and voila! Maybe an old path can revive some more desirable pathways. I doubt it. Life seems to me an endless struggle to reshape inherent patterns in life only few of which we can truly change. The best we can usually hope for is is to transform them that their frankly unhealthy impact becomes only slightly unhealthy!

But there's another way to use wine in old wineskins. We can use the daily, mundane struggles to move the waters, so to speak, and cast a tempest in a coffee cup. Conflict is energy. Why not use it constructively, use it to create new dopamine pathways. Instead of fighting it and putting oneself down, we can harness the energy and sail into new seas like the conquistadores of old. Without them we would not have coffee as we now enjoy in elegant French glass. Hardship for those Extremaduran Spaniards drove them to sail past the edge of the Old unto New Worlds leading to the global village we enjoy today.

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Noli Me Tangere

Noli me tangere, touch me not, Jesus says to Mary Magdalene in John 20:17. Filipino writer and hero, José Rizal, used the phrase as title for his first novel, a book that frankly I've only heard of and admired from a distance. I tried reading Leon Ma. Guerrero's translation after my second visit to the Philippines since leaving it in 1975. I am ashamed to say I didn't go far beyond the author's preface where his choice for a title is explained. His novel, he wrote, was his "endeavor" to uncover the cancer that afflicted Las Islas Filipinas, a disease that made it untouchable because people dread contact with the sick for fear contagion.

Rizal was able to see the Philippines from the objective distance of Spain, the "mother country," where he had gone for education with  other Filipino illustrados, bright, young Filipino intellectuals whose families had some money, enough to send them abroad. He wrote the novel in Madrid, Paris and Germany. He had become a cosmopolitan but the wider view made him more acutely want to do something for his home country "for as your son your defects and weaknesses are also mine."

In transliterated Greek, the Latin phrase, noli me tangere is me mou haptou. The verb can be translated as "touch, hold on to, cling to." The Oxford New Revised Standard Version of the New Testament translates the verse: 

Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'"

Do not hold on to me. This more contemporary translation of John's verse doesn't move me as the King James version does. To touch some thing is to cause it to enter us in a new way. Before touching it is just a thought in our minds and a thought infinitely elaborates into the many shapes that plague our waking and sleeping life. Touching it joins us in the flesh: we establish a carnal relationship with the thing. It gains physicality and incarnate the relationship to it more likely yields tangible fruits. A plague upon your houses, cries Romeo. A plague, at least, awakens us to our bodies and what bodies do: they are born, they live, and they die. In the course we might make something of value to survive us when we're gone. Or not, it does not matter. It is enough to have lived in both our minds and bodies.

Two years into my "new career," I must confront what I have dreaded touching. Enough dreaming, I say. Touch and take the terrible risk of becoming contaminated. Contagion sometimes is necessity. We have never ceased being putrid dirt to which we shall all return. Dirt is as beautiful as moonlight or star shine or the yellow of tulips in springtime, the hush of oncoming evening in summer, the weight of someone dear on your chest in winter huddled in warmth together as though time and seasons had ceased. Every "thing" imagined and physically lived has the potential to justify and elevate our dirty lives. For everything do we call the endeavor art.

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Colin's Corner: A Sumerian-tablet invitation for multimedia-enhanced "books"

Colin's Corner: Apple's slate a "Sumerian" publishing eco-system for mobile mass media

If Apple manages to pull this off, it will be both potentially devastating and liberating for legacy publishing industries. Bright creative entrepreneurs will change the moribund textbook industry, children's books with be brought to life via multimedia, the travel guide industry and special interest publishing will be revolutionized, comic books anime and manga will reach massive new audiences.  Where it makes sense text can be enhanced by audio and video, readers can be connected to discuss and share content, and new business models can be developed that take account of how readers want to access and consume content. The whole of the publishing industry could be revitalized. The journey is the reward.

Apple media release photo of iPad showing NY Times App

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Apple's Cutting-Edge Way with Computing and Digital Media

What amazes me is how the Internet has made breaking news just minutes away for someone thousands of miles away from the event. Following the endgadget liveblog, unwashed, unshaven, still dressed in night clothes, I read what Steve Jobs had said just a minute or so before on my computer screen at home.

I had the New York Times Bit correspondent on liveblog as well but his reports were not as frequent blow-by-blow like Joshua Topolsky's  at Endgadget. I also had Twitterific on so read tweets as people commented on what was unveiling at the San Francisco Yerba Buena (Good Herb) Center.

Apple did it again, despite naysayers. The way they built up their campaign of controlled leaks so anticipation grows like a giant propaganda machine is perhaps without peer. This reminds me of the much-hyped release of the iPhone. Most comments were slightly negative-"underwhelmed." The most frequently written criticism was lack of multitasking which one could do with a "real" computer like the iMac or MacBook. Jobs left for the very last his announcement of 3G phone connectivity. Without that I think the product would have floundered.

AT&T served an unexpected surprise. It undercut its competitors in offering unlimited data/call monthly charge for $29.99 and this without contract in an unlocked GSM-microSIM device. For me this was one highlight of Apple's new release. It heralds a new era in phone/Internet mobile pricing, perhaps appreciated only in the context of what has been happening on Wall Street and the global financial market. Pull back, retrench, cut prices back to something closer to affordability.

The most momentous element of the release to me is Apple's iBooks. At a time when the publishing industry has been struggling with sales for paper products, Apple's iBooks Store could very well revolutionize not only books but magazine distributions. With its capacity for Apps, one can fantasize about the possibilities.

Pundits mourned how the iPad lacked hardware revolutionary emendations. Someone pointed out the obscured significance. Apple provides the hardware and a few initial software offerings (as it has always done) created by Apple itself and a few typical software creators) and provides with the hardware release the software development package that allows other entrepreneurs to create the content that makes the device so powerful and useful.

I think Apple was right in not changing the UI significantly. Why change something that works? Now people used to the iPhone and iPod can use the same skills to use a new device with more content possibilities. Jobs spoke of standing on the shoulders of Amazon's Kindle. What he didn't say but which is obvious, the iPad stands on the shoulders of the iPhone and iPod, and really on the whole Apple product line: the online store, the intuitive graphical interface, touchscreen that allows fingers to directly manipulate content.

Jobs said something at the outset that struck me because I had not thought of his company in this way. Apple, he said, was the world's largest producer of "mobile" devices. Of course! With included WiFi, Apple MacBooks, iPhones and iPod Touch are what else but mobile devices? These are the very devices I first heard about at NAB in Las Vegas four years ago, devices that were going to be the new distribution outlets for creative people.

Sometimes I am appalled at how slow I am on the uptake. It has taken me two years to feel I am understanding digital media enough to be creating intelligent products. I am so very far away from creating the cutting-edge, edgy products I wanted to make but over all I am happy with the little I have accomplished. The future is opening, slowly, but it is opening to a new page, and I am excited.

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Loving words, living

Verbal sensitivity, wrote John Gardner, was one quality a writer could use. I like this phrase better than "love for words." It's a closer approximation of what I enjoy when writing.
I do feel a caffeine jolt when I find a new word that captures what I mean. I love the sound of it, the cadence it adds to my sentence, the harmony or disharmony it contributes to the paragraph, or even to the whole work but what I enjoy is bigger than this. Gardner's term includes more than the delight I feel with individual words or group of words. It is curiosity about the structure of language and the mimetic function of thought in putting flesh to experience. I might hazard to say that what I enjoy in writing is intrinsic to living life itself. Living by itself seems inadequate when I cannot put down what I am living into what I see. Seeing is at the core of writing, seeing in the sense like dipping a teaspoon into the surging river that I have a bit of it in my possession, something I can gloat over and dissect and make something else out of because what I have is not the river surely. It's mine now; hence I I can, maybe even must do something with it. It is delight and obligation; it is response and responsibility.

I lost this sensitivity to language and to words for years but it only went underground and took on another form. I wanted to cultivate and understand images. Now I understand why. Language is more than words. It is a tool I was not interested in passing on information or facts. Language rises to its potential when it recreates experience. (Life is, after all, only what we experience, not some absolute thing, certainly not "reality" or "truth." The art of the writer or graphic artist derives from his or her experience of this confounding, frustratingly ungraspable entity that created mystics in the first place. An artist is one who senses in some dark corner of her psyche that there is more to life than just living it. She must imitate what experience hints is it's essence, that animating force that some call God. By imitating it she tries to identify with it and sometimes by God accomplishes this. Or appears to, anyway. Artists aspire to this goal, a goal no one can verify. Publishing what a writer writes might give verity to his success. Selling a movie concept or a video or a painting might make the artist feel he's gotten it. The recognition by another person encourages the artist to try again, and try and try. But I think he tries because he must. Life otherwise would just not be enough. It has to be transported by his imagination and desire into something filtered through his being, through what he represents in the incalculably immense scheme of things.

To descend from hyperbole, I think I am on the right track. Better late than never, they say. Not being a fatalist I still think we do what we do. To feel remorse or dwell on what might have been is senseless. Desire is, like imagination, just a page in the eternally mysterious that changes and moves relentlessly on (or back or sideways). We don't become eternal by cultivating art or achieving financial or business or personal success. It's just life, this short span of time of awareness, of sensitivity.

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The Changing Chinese Presence in the U.S.

House of Cheung Cantonese Shrimp Vegetable Stir-fry

At Sichuan last Friday, my Chinese friends Allan and Helen urged me to check out the Sunday buffet at Mandarin House, Carmel. They'd been urging me to try the food there on Sunday as they had also urged the Thai Taste buffet on Thursday night and The Journey, Carmel, buffet Saturday noon. Today I decided to see for myself what the brother-and-sister Chinese gourmets were so excited about.

Mandarin House is just across the street from Sichuan, both of them on South Rangeline Road. When I got there at 1:45 this afternoon, there were two cars in front of Sichuan. The parking lot in front of Mandarin House was packed with more than twenty. Groups of Chinese diners were oozing out the door, many in a hurry to get back home to watch the Colts game scheduled at 3. While waiting for a table, Allan and Helen come out. Allan insisted on showing me the buffet. He walked me past the maître d’ and pointed out the day's highlights. He told me the restaurant periodically changed their spread. He introduced me to the "boss lady," Lilly, who later told me the regional provenance of my favorite dishes. The noodle dish was from Shanghai, the bean cured Sichuan, the ribs Cantonese, etc

Last week I took photos of the food at the House of Cheung on Keystone Avenue. Peter's restaurant opened 20 years ago. Back then he told me there were seven Chinese restaurants in the city. They all more or less had the same menu, mostly Cantonese specialties the owners had modified to American tastes, what came to be called "Chinese American." Unfortunately I shot the food at the steam table with just the existing light. The pictures did not have good contrast.

I want to make a video about Chinese-American restaurants. These are cultural dinosaurs. I would also love to make a small documentary about Peter and his family and the story of how they came to America in tandem with the story of Cantonese American restaurants. More Chinese now are coming directly from what used to be called "Mainland China." Chinese restaurants in the U.S. are changing because the Chinese who are creating them are different, and the American diners, too, are savvier. Many are now open to food traditions their parents could not stomach before.

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Believing in an afterlife

I acquired Merrill's A Different Person: A Memoir last August, began to read it then tucked it away on my shelf for future reference. Yesterday, determined to stay in bed and rest away an incipient cold, I plucked the book for something to keep my mind from going crazy. What a crazy inspiration!

I resumed reading the book today. It inspired me to rethink what I had recently concluded was a false love for words. How could I ever have thought I loved words? If I ever did, where the hell did it go? Merrill resurrected that sweet inebriation. How I've missed it. A gift sometimes becomes a slave's collar that keeps getting heavier until we tear it off our flesh that we can walk off the slave boat a free man again. But then sometimes we miss what we had so violently discarded. We'd extirpated a vital something in us; we'd reduced ourselves to becoming a stranger even to ourselves, treading water in an even more alien sea.

I found Merrill on Facebook. Nothing written there on the wall but I joined the 117 fans. I learned from Wikipedia that the poet had died in 1995. His memoirs were published a year earlier. They comprised the main text he must have written closer to the trip to Europe he undertook in 1950, and updates in italic from the "different person" he felt he'd become. The memoir may be the last thing he published while alive, a final statement on his sixty-nine years.

Among the fans of his faux Facebook account was a young man who blogged about the 142 books he'd read in 2009. Erudite, sensitive, intelligent, possessed of a way with words I used to think I too had, he added to the feeling that took over this otherwise dismal, drizzly day in Indiana. It's a day to ignite belief in resurrection and the afterlife. I have been bemoaning my sad estate while being obnoxiously ungrateful for my advantages. I can turn this ship around. I am not Merrill nor the unnamed prodigious young reader but I can do a bit more than what I thought I could.

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Cantonese Diaspora Life & the House of Cheung

Cantonese food is what came to mind when growing up in the Philippines we went out for Chinese with my father. Cantonese was also what Americans had until the last ten to fifteen years when more mainland Chinese have been liberated to come to America and offer us the wider variety of Chinese viands.

Peter Cheung started the House of Cheung in 1989. His grandfather came to America in 1907 and worked at various jobs until he came to the Midwest in the late 1940s and started working in various restaurants. Peter followed in the 1970s, his father arriving later on with his mother. Peter told me that when he first arrived in Indianapolis there were seven Chinese restaurants. Now there are over a hundred. But his Cantonese-American style of Chinese restaurant is quickly disappearing. Sprouting like shiitake mushrooms after the rain, the newer restaurants are smaller with minimal decor to tell customers they sold Chinese food. Peter's restaurant, on the other hand, is a museum of artwork overseas Chinese and Chinese who fled the mainland were homesick for. Reverse glass paintings, scrolls, ornate imperial-style dragons, and the golden lanterns with Mandarin-red faux silk tassels.

My rather confused take - his machine-gun speech left me in the dust - on Peter's family history in America gave me the impression that the seven Chinese restaurants in the city were incestuous enterprises. Owners and chefs came from a small group of Chinese who knew each other and who traded places as necessity occasioned. They maintained a consistent blueprint for what constitutes a Chinese restaurant and its menu. Peter's House of Cheung is one of the last examples.
The story of Peter's family and their associates starting from the late 1800s fascinates me. So much has been written about the Jewish diaspora, largely in the Europe and the Americas, but the Chinese too dispersed from mainland China and their story has been told only in a few books. They came to California in the 1800s and built the railroads that spanned the West. Many ended up finding new ways of making money by starting Chinese laundries and restaurants. These were the equivalents of European explorers fanning out into America and Asia. The Chinese began to leave Manchu China after Europe and the U.S. made contact with the deteriorating Middle Kingdom to seek their own fortune. Theirs is a story begging to be told.

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Field Greens with Feta

Wal Mart has been offering a large tub full of organic field greens for under two dollars. The organic revolution may be said to have arrived mainstream when Wal Mart offers organic veggies on its shelves. The greens include baby red-leaf lettuce and arugula, which by itself is often prohibitively priced. I should have used plain cider vinegar instead of balsamic that darkened the salad. A Greek salad to me is mixed greens, cucumber slices, a few tomatoes slices and feta cheese dressed simply with vinegar and olive oil. I didn't quite achieve this but the mix was tasty nonetheless.

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Cabbage Stirfry with Shrimp and Ham

Cabbage Stirfry with Shrimp and Ham Strips

I have been buying cooked, shelled jumbo shrimp from Marsh when they on sale. They are so convenient to use and don't spoil as quickly after I defrost them in the fridge. There's a significant disadvantage. They don't caramelize as well when stir-fried so don't add as much flavor to the vegetables. I miss the large prawns I used to get from Asia Mart, shells and heads on, the carapace often glutted with shrimp fat that to me is more delectable than caviar. Seafood fat is unknown to most Westerners. I remember a show on the PBS Create channel. The food expert showed how to prepare crab. After steaming it, she plied the carapace off and washed what remained under running water! Washed off the best part of the crab! Fat is untidy to Western eyes, but a delicacy among those really in the know.

I had pan-roasted sirloin strips and thought of adding this to the stir-fry but decided against it. I am often too tradition-bound. Seafood and pork are traditional cook mates. Beef should marry with these as well but in the Asia of which China and the Philippines are a part cattle were not high-profile ingredients. We didn't have the vast grain fields to support flocks of cattle for commercial large-scale beef production. Beef seems to be a more domineering taste whereas both shrimp and pork are sweet and gently blend together well. Sometimes though art must grab the consumer's attention and does this with bold, unusual pairings. Regrettably I am seldom that bold, thus seldom truly artistic.

As to the photograph... This is one I've remembered to take emphasizing the height of the food. Instead of taking the picture from above which results in a flat image, I shot from the side and with a black background and low F-stop. I like how the food is contrasted against the stark black background. The resolution is also good. I like seeing the striations on the thinly sliced green onion rings.

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Woody Allen on the Authentic Life

Budapest 2004

Woody Allen to Terry Gross on Fresh Air 29 December 2009:

“How could you go through life, you know, taking direction from the outside world? I mean, what kind of life would you have, you know, if you were – if you made your decisions based on, you know, the outside world and not what your inner dictates told you? You would have a very inauthentic life."

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Beef Sirloin with Marsala Sauce

This is the first time I've cooked anything from scratch at home so I am happy with just that. I had some top sirloin that I wanted to quickly sear on a hot cast-iron pan and serve it with Botan rice and a field-green salad. I thought I'd use a prepared Thai peanut sauce on the steak. Instead I decided to degrease the pan with Marsala wine while the pan was still on pretty high heat. The result is this almost-burnt-looking sauce with probably a dose of indigestible iron to boot! Lunch was still tasty, and as I said, the occasion was still something to be happy about. I cook in bursts. Days pass and I just don't feel like lifting a finger in the kitchen, even when I know the wonderful feeling of eating fresh-cooked food. The aroma and the warmth and the fresh taste are incomparable. This is why people spend a fortune on restaurant food when they can get more for their money at a buffet. At a restaurant, the waiter rushes the food to your table hot from the chef's pan. What a luxury!

Having expressed gladness that I'm back on my culinary legs I think I might hew the line for a while. I enjoy cooking spontaneously, cooking with the instantaneous inspiration from need and memory. But cooking by someone else's recipe is another level of enjoyment, and mastery. Following a recipe is discipline. After all they are often concocted by highly talented and skilled people, more focused and trained on cooking skills and tastes than I shall ever be!

So, the resolution is this: cook by the book for a few days. I want to enlarge my gustatory vocabulary.

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Asian-centered Reflections on Moviemaking

I watched Simon Chung's End of Love this morning. He wrote and directed this Cantonese-language movie that was featured at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008. Variety trashed the movie, calling it "uninspired. I was going to eject the movie after the first few frames but something about the main character's demeanor arrested my action. I ended up watching the whole movie. It was depressing. The plot didn't make sense. The end brought no closure, as if the threads were left just hanging there.

I watched the included interview with the actors and that improved my impression of the movie considerably. This certainly is not your typical Hollywood or European movie and this is its drawing card. The actors talked about they prepared for their roles. Both of the principal actors played gay roles but were straight. The movie was about drug addiction and prostitution. It touched on three controversial themes. But it was not the themes that appealed to me, especially after viewing the actor interviews. What interested me was the Chinese actors' take on these themes as they related to them personally. Their comments seemed to reflect to me contemporary young Chinese attitudes about these issues as well as movies. 

If China has become an economic giant, the media it creates will soon also cast a giant shadow on the global imagination. The attempts of the director (whose interview was apparently lopped off) and actors are sophomoric by American and European standards but their earnestness is impressive. While they may still look up to Hollywood for models I can see them striking out in their own direction as confidence in the Chinese as a whole grows with their economic power. This at least is what I'd like to see. Coming from a comparatively insignificant Asian country, I fantasize it hanging on to the coattails of China as China flies against Western hegemony. If Indian spirituality influenced Western culture in the  60s and 70s, maybe China will increasingly influence the West from hereon.

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George Lucas's Acorn-size History of American Movies

Lucas Looks Back On Movie-Making : NPR

Asked by David Binaculli (substituting for Terry Gross who was "still slightly under the weather) for movies he saw in rough cuts from showings by his filmmaker friends, Lucas named three: 

Godfather - "a real experience, because the movie originally was very, very long..."

Taxi Driver - "pretty intense and it was sort of pushing the boundaries of violence and story and all kinds of things - so that was really exciting..."

Jaws - "because it was so hard to make and there were so many things that went wrong..."

"... a movie is ultimately is a very fragile thing..." So many things can go wrong. When you watch it in rough cut before it is finished it might appear a disaster. Post-production makes or breaks a movie. It is how the various elements created by the director are put together, how they are set against each other, until the director is satisfied with the result. Not until then is it a movie.

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Romulus, My Father

Australian director's Richard Roxburgh's first feature film, Romulus, My Father, was released in the U.S. 31 May 2007. It is unlike American movies for the sparsity of action. The frames load quietly, with long cuts and dialogue rationed out as abstemiously as water in the parched Victoria pastureland.  Much is left to the viewer to figure out and the sometimes inscrutable Australian accents add to the near-incomprehensibility of the viewing. The paucity of details actually adds to the power of the film. Events sometimes happen one after the other while for stretches there is only the pantomimic display of seemingly insignificant activity. Romulus, helping to prepare a field for winter by burning the brush down; Romulus, hammering red-hot metal that he shapes into cast-iron furniture; the boy, Rai, riding his bicycle up rocky hills. The images burn themselves into the brain, colors sere like the brown earth, red rocks, and tiny bright yellow and purple flowers like tiny stars in the sky's huge, black firmament.

The film is based on the critically acclaimed memoir of writer and philosopher, Raimond Gaita as he comes of age in Frogmore, Victoria in the early 1960s. It tells the story of his father, Romulus, an emigrant from Romania, and his beautiful German wife, Christina. Christina is highly unstable but Romulus always welcomes her back even after she moves in with his best friend's brother in Melbourne. The story is tragic and with his wife's suicide Romulus, too, sinks into psychotic depression. With so much tragedy, the movie nonetheless leaves me with an impression of lyrical beauty. The struggle I feel many a day in my own  life palls by comparison; I live after all in affluent America. 

The film's story is set among poor Australian immigrants who somehow eke out a living doing whatever they can. The movie to me therefore is a story of immigrants, how migrating to a so-called first-world country is not always what we think it promises to be. Life is hard but here at least we have the freedom to pursue our lives however deprived it might be, and the opportunity to earn a living if we are industrious enough to do whatever work comes our way.

Roxburgh, an actor who directed plays before he made this movie, offers video diaries of the making of the movie at http://www.romulusmyfather.com.au/diary1.html

As I trudge along, beginning now to make videos in fits and starts, I dream of being able to create experiences in the viewers comparable to movies like Romulus, My Father. Obviously, the story of Rai and his father appeals to me because of my own issue-ful relationship with my father, but content perhaps is only the initial motivation for doing anything creative. When I am able to immerse myself in a project no matter how small I discover feelings and intuition that surprise me. I didn't know I had these in me. I think this is at the core of why I want to explore this aspect of my productivity. In working with images, words and emotion I find bits of myself that sometimes fill up the wide sky of an unimaginably bittersweet world.

At one point in the movie, Hora, reads a quotation from a book to Rai: "Wasted time that you enjoy is not wasted." That's my scripture lesson for the day.

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The Care and Feeding of Ideas in the Making of Images, Sound and Animation

Light Storm

Bill Backer's book, The Care and Feeding of Ideas, glittered with useful insights when I read the first few pages this morning. The ideas that he wanted to explore and that interested me belonged to these groups:

1. ideas that moved me in the direction that I would like to be going

2. ideas that provided fresh responses to the wants or needs of the world, of consumers, or of a particular group in which I am interested.

In terms of creating a business, I am interested in how to generate ideas and to how to identify which ideas to execute that would meet needs in potential consumers that they'd want to pay me for my services or products. It's more than marketing, earlier in the process but in a way if I can do this marketing would largely take care of itself. I want to create products that I would enjoy creating for people I would enjoy creating them for.

I spoke to my sister last night. Her boss, the hospital administrator, asked her incredulously if I was retired. My sister's answer delighted me. Her answer indicated she was finally accepting the idea she fought so vigorously when I first told her about it. She told him I was not retired. I was working on "his second career." This is in fact what I am doing and two years later I feel I'm past just "attempting" to do this. I have made the transition even if I have not yet made significant money from my endeavors. For one thing, I am clearer about what I want to do and why I want to do what I want to do.

Two years ago my motivation was more just to get out of what I was doing, of what I had done for the last 30 years: working as a psychiatrist. The secondary motive was a hypothesis that I would enjoy working with people in a different fashion, not as a medical expert but in a more creative and personal way. I enjoyed it when I could come up with a prescription that relieved the emotional discomfort of my patients but what I enjoyed more was listening to their stories. Hearing them talk about their lives, their relationships, the journey they have taken, what brought them joy, their inner conversations and debates: this was what I enjoyed most of all. 

Backer wrote that the richest source of ideas was popular culture—movies, popular songs, mass products, and especially advertising. I've found this to be true. When I use the treadmill at the gym I watch music videos. I get inspired by how the videos are created, the packaging, but the content being packaged intrigues me, too. I am especially drawn to the new ideas of young people or people just emerging into success in the lines of business or career they have chosen. Thus I enjoy the interviews of actors, singers, directors, and writers by Terry Gross in her NPR program, Fresh Air.

Backer writes: "Advertisers today are quick to substitute a new film technique for a new message, and manufacturers are more prone to redesign the package than improve what is inside it." I think this is true. There have been few truly innovative, revolutionary ideas. Apple's iPod is one such idea. It took over the world that Sony Walkman tape and CD players used to dominate but raised the ante considerably. Instead of being limited to the 13 or so songs on a CD, iPod users can have thousands of songs at their fingertips. Thousands! In addition, they can even watch videos on these tiny gadgets thus impacting the creation and delivery of movies, both entertaining and informational. I listen to Terry Gross's interview as podcasts on my iPod.

Products like laundry detergent or toothpaste have not changed in decades, maybe not since they were first introduced and marketed. Manufacturers market new tastes or new fragrances, sometimes adding new ingredients that supposedly "improved" the product but the next slew of products boasted new ingredients, suggesting that the additional ingredients are like the taste or fragrance is just new packaging.

As someone interested in creating photographs and videos I am obviously interested in packaging. I am still in the stage of climbing the learning curve and have not left the ground behind me much. But I think sometimes the packaging is the revolutionizing idea. 

I read  David Pogue's iMovie '08 & iDVD yesterday. iMovie, he contends, has revolutionized movie-making that ordinary folks can make movies now that are not tedious but truly creative. With the accessibility of video-making, animated visual presentation is taking over what used to be static, non-visual media. Even photographs now are more effectively displayed as slide shows or outright videos set to music, the elements of Hollywood-style movies. In a society where ADHD is rife and attention spans have grown shorter because the visual or sensory stimuli can be delivered with great speed, people now crave dynamic, faster-than-life presentations. 

Faster-than-life and we can collapse our very experience of life (being composed of thoughts and sensations) and feel we are living more, living richer, more profound and wide-ranging lives.

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Before the Beginning: Mystical Time

We're getting our first real snow. Since early December days have been mostly cold and dark, with light snow several days a week, but nothing like the accumulation we are getting today. We're supposed to get four inches. Already there're three inches on the ground and the snow continues to fall in that hushed, relentless way that augurs little change.

Checking out the Midlife Motorcycle Madness blog what do I find among the Google ads near the bottom left corner but a link to Krishna Bedtime Stories: Before the Beginning by Damodara Dasa. http://www.iskconberkeley.com/bedtime/?p=index

On further investigation, it appears the site is from the the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in Berkeley. No matter. The book website exemplified the simply designed website I was drawn to years ago that started my interest to learn digital design. At one time I wanted to write a book comprising text and images—photographs or illustrations, like this Krishna book.
The Krishna book reminded one reviewer of children's Bible books. The teachings are couched in simple words and very accessible concepts. This is why I fell in love with cartoons as a child. In the world of cartoons (not in the anime books that teenagers and young adults now enjoy as imports from Japan), life is simple to read. The colors are primary colors. No ambiguity or complexity here. The lines of the comic figures too are unequivocal. Life should be this unambiguous.

Snow turns the landscape black-and-white. Details that give complexity and meaning vanish. Only the main points remain, the skeleton framework, not the flesh-and-blood that obscures the fundamentals of a body.

Never was there a time when I did not exist, declares Krishna to an Arjuna reluctant to begin battle with revered teachers and relatives. There was never a time when God did not exist, nor you, nor these warriors and kings many of whom shall be dead by day's end. Nor is there a time in the future, Krishna continues, when any of us ceases to be.

Krishna is not saying as Christians, Jews or Muslims believe that we have the opportunity to go after death to a more pleasant life where the pleasantness never ends. His teachings is more profound than this, goes beyond even the idea of what in the West we call reincarnation. From investigations that they make from the depths of meditative stillness, mystics see beyond time, and therefore beyond being. (Being is gerund for the verb to be, as abstract as anything we know.) Without time there is neither then or now or later. What is seen is seen now and now is all there is. Now is tied to a particular seeing. When the mystic breaks free of that tie now becomes the boundlessness that is ein sof in Kabbalah. There is no death if there is no individual or separate being.

That is little comfort if we are caught up in our personal daily dramas. We'd like the snow to stop, the drier fixed, the stir-fry aromatic and hot, the cage fighting video dream-like and evocative of human aspirations. Now is not where we are and where we are there are birth and death, beginnings and endings.

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Remarkable Random Relationships

An audio program on the Kaballah made me realize that the names we have for objects and people are basically expressions of relationship. In Kaballah  philosophy, everything stems not from God that people talk about as though they knew God. The world of experience radiated from ein sof or boundlessness. Our separateness from each other, each object's separateness from the rest of the physical world and we humans who walk it often oblivious of anything beyond our thoughts and agenda is an illusion created by the names we give ourselves and others. Relationships are integral to our being distinct and separate, expressing what mystics believe as the whole oneness of everything. Maybe this is why much as I enjoy my solitude these ordinary, often chance encounters yield such delight.

One such encounter was the the gym the other day. Having resumed exercising again just recently I am still becoming comfortable at Lifestyle as I felt at the old Bally where I had worked out since 1987. It closed last July. Lifestyle Fitness is a more spacious facility without the catwalk jogging trail or the water amenities. I can't get over how high the ceilings are, dwarfing my Lilliputian efforts at seizing control over my weight and body fat content. 

I had nodding or chatting friends at Bally. In the locker room I often tried my broken Spanish with the Honduran cleaning person, Luis. On the floor I knew a couple who had modeled for me and with whom again I chatted inanities that made the gym trip the social highlight of my day. I enjoy the silence and quiet of living and working alone but many days I get hungry for some kind of contact. 

At Lifestyle on Tuesday, while changing back to street clothes I struck up a conversation with a young guy who was flexing in front of the mirror. Edgardo is Mexican. He was three when his family moved to the States. He is 17 and still in high  school. Two years ago he was overweight and started working out. He now looked toned. He told me he got up at 4:30 on schooldays to go to the gym before school started. He wants to be a personal trainer and can hardly wait until he turns 18 when he can apply for an accreditation exam.

At Burger King today, I tried to buy a triple whopper from Harold, the assistant manager. He told me the sandwich was "very big. Are you sure that's what you want?" I changed my order to a double. Later he came around and asked me if the double whopper was enough. It was. Imagine a salesperson talking you out of a bigger order!

This morning I met the Banthias at the airport. They had spent the New Year break in Florida with their three children. When I learned about their trip last December I offered to drive them to the airport. Babula told me he already had plans. He and his wife were going to take the bus. Visha did not look forward to the two-hour trip by bus to the airport and quickly accepted my offer. Later Babu emailed me to say he had been trying not to get me involved because he did not want to impose on me. He and his wife are a pair. They must complement each other because they have been married almost 40 years, and this after a wedding their parents had arranged.

Relationships create stories and stories intrigue me. I can't see myself writing fiction however. I like the "found" stories I encounter by chatting up random people I meet when I venture outside my home most days but creating the plot myself does not attract me.

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The Stories behind Chinese Characters

Swallowing Clouds

A. Zee in his book, Swallowing Clouds, Two Millennia of Chinese Tradition, Folklore, and History Hidden in the Language of Food, deconstructed Chinese characters to suggest what the Chinese of old thought were basic values of the culture. Home, for instance, is a a roof over the character for pig. In China as it was in the Philippines of my childhood, families often raised pigs under their houses built on bamboo stilts as precaution against the seasonal floods. Raising a pig was part and parcel of the construct for home, like the TV and computer might be for the modern American home.

The character for good comprises a left part signifying woman and a right signifying child (or probably more correctly, son). A son is what the Chinese of old considered the good in life. It can also represent one's wife and children, that is, one's loved ones, and therefore everything that is good, what matters to us. Extending the exploration, we might also see the character signify that having lots of children was good. In an agrarian society where hands were needed to tend the fields, having many children was having many hands to sow, weed, water, reap, process and store what the farm produces. In words is imbedded the cultural history of a nation, of human civilization.

The character for contentment is a woman under a roof. I am reminded of my friend, Arron, who when I was videotaping him for his cage-fighting video, declared that while he lusted after fame and fortune, at the end of the day you could not snuggle to your hard-won trophy as you could with a girl. He and Brittany are back together again but back then they had broken up on Arron's decision to move to the big city to improve his fortune.

My friend, Larry, told me on the phone just now that the character for conflict was two women under a roof. Zee wrote that the character for union was a triangle over a mouth, suggesting what happens when three persons are speaking in accord with each other.

Words in English probably provide the same insight into the English and English-speaking peoples but Chinese characters because they are pictographs and only phonetic in a minor way provide evocative images of what individual peoples have had in their minds. I feel connected with people in remote times and places for the community of images we share. Each character is in effect a pocketbook, an SMS linking us to an organism much larger and therefore more powerful than I am.

The character for won ton comprises a mouth and clouds. A. Zee wrote that looking at a hot bowl of wonton he saw billowing clouds. If neurologists are right that smell and taste are the most powerful vehicles for memory, the smell of this soup can be our magic carpet to our mythologic past. To write or create photographs one must be connected with our communal mythology. In the ordinary course of our day we are reasonable beings. Those of us who aspire to be artists must in addition be able to dive deeper into the psyche to come back up from the depths with pearls.

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