tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57360474244836455792011-07-30T09:05:20.517-07:00Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.comBlogger3411100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-10753914789885981232010-03-06T08:54:00.001-08:002010-03-06T08:54:20.530-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/5PHcsy9UGqujWtL8N2gfSsusxdYbIDRelunYlhFBojPyQHGgFes1aHCR2BlB/Sorrento_1095.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/ZloKMPMH66aggD6GUg6fmXQmI7y7kXARFLReUejl8TnEvev4TuOhxDU9lg34/Sorrento_1095.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <div style="text-align: center;">Sorrento 2007</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">I stayed up Thursday into Friday morning to finish my video, <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>The Amalfi Coast from the Emerald Grotto to Amalfi</i></span>. It was exactly a week since I finished my last video, <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>A Visit to L'Isole di Capri</i></span>. &nbsp;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.&nbsp;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, <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Training To Fight 2</i></span>, featuring Arron, was 2 minutes, 5 seconds long.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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."</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/attaining-the-crest-of-the-curve">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-1075391478988598123?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-58663471783752283872010-03-05T13:26:00.001-08:002010-03-05T13:26:16.634-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><div style="text-align: center;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/86qcjuk7CU2ceXYwsaYzSh9lgz6pJEgr3kFWdyNbqd8l0a99phaMcNlj95uq/Kalanchoe_P1050159.jpeg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/XtKI6N3bmXDiZW5ew7FhBZd6TTq3HX8cXy5FxoTdP1G4d2qLQQpIN5T88nxs/Kalanchoe_P1050159.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="414"/></a> </div><div style="text-align: center;">Kalanchoe in the Window</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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."</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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 <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>The Time Traveler's Wife</i></span> 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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/dan-andrews-location-independent-lifestyle">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-5866347178375228387?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-4169881856943575142010-03-05T05:06:00.001-08:002010-03-05T05:06:44.373-08:00<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><p><object height='350' width='425'><param value='http://youtube.com/v/NXaZdEYyidE' name='movie'/><embed height='350' width='425' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://youtube.com/v/NXaZdEYyidE'/></object></p><p>Video of trip from Sorrento to the Emerald Grotto then by launch to Amalfi, 2008.</p></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-416988185694357514?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-43812518057175697452010-02-28T07:59:00.001-08:002010-02-28T07:59:40.834-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><span style="font-family: lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">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.&nbsp;</span></span><p /><div><span style="font-family: lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">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?&nbsp;</span></span></div><p /><div><span style="">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.</span></div><p /><div><span style="font-family: lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">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. </span></span></div><p /><div><span style="">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.</span></div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendeculture.posterous.com/purim-in-israel-with-april">Duende Culture</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-4381251805717569745?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-80598472794833774522010-02-28T07:37:00.001-08:002010-02-28T07:37:18.296-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><span style="font-family: lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">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.</span><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/purim-in-israel-with-april">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-8059847279483377452?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-27287030950244897102010-02-27T08:44:00.001-08:002010-02-27T08:44:54.398-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'>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. <br />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. <p /> 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. <p /> 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. <p /> 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. <br />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! <p /> 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.<p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/blu-ray-players-adds-astonishing-connectivity">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2728703095024489710?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-70832234782976796262010-02-25T08:24:00.001-08:002010-02-25T08:24:21.928-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'>"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 <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Newsweek</i></span> 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.<p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>"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.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>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.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendeculture.posterous.com/a-temple-in-turkey-older-than-civilization-0">Duende Culture</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-7083223478297679626?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-14996961411203726972010-02-25T08:18:00.001-08:002010-02-25T08:18:02.936-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'>"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 <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Newsweek</i></span> 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.<p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>"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.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>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.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/a-temple-in-turkey-older-than-civilization">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-1499696141120372697?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-78046451838644222032010-02-24T14:23:00.001-08:002010-02-24T14:23:29.783-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/cNCSQLWPTFchWzi25SGAiwWQszWWU0GZ35UZUWzMjFluOHHeeU0KMRxPIHBt/Glimpse_9592w.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/nVcFBot5VOZi59puVDqHURTPi89ZEvR3g6W3tglPFMKwx90CMmpLZd056b4U/Glimpse_9592w.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="317"/></a> <div style="text-align: center;">Street Scene, Downtown Iloilo</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">Khaled Hosseini describes his first novel, <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Kite Runner</i></span>, 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."</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">In an interview done for Amazon Wire to solicit pre-orders for his second book. <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>A Thousand Splendid Suns</i></span>, 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, <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Kite Runner</i></span>, 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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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:</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">"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&nbsp;&nbsp;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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/khaled-hosseini-describes-writing-kite-runner">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-7804645183864422203?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-24003374557966079622010-02-24T10:32:00.001-08:002010-02-24T10:32:12.794-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/Osu8korjyJrGpSxU7NBisysvA2ez6yuRsBcImcXnz0DQd36aGmt2nAWjZOT1/Sorrento_1095.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/8WY93JyoRVE22DNuQSUMmC6LTtWkLLTNuufGxZZaHJHLdQnnznzL55VOtaUr/Sorrento_1095.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <p>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. <p /> 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. <p /> 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. <p /> To someone like me fascinated by both words and moving images, the future is thrilling.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/amazons-book-video-preview">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2400337455796607962?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-40392395444600609302010-02-23T13:29:00.001-08:002010-02-23T13:29:48.291-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/N94Jkrm382lHyT6ezRtWCeDBNNH47Eec2FAyeHgFFdXOzqmzzSe1Cz8133U9/Oviedo_Sign_6421.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/hFdXEByI32pLX4GpTSJX7gdwhIMGZuUNS7xBSzSt3tyvvI4ZGrrS37cLQTQd/Oviedo_Sign_6421.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <div style="text-align: center;">Store Sign in Oviedo, Spain</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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, <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Ask the Dust</i></span>. 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."</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/writing-tips-for-success">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-4039239544460060930?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-20897774090101710862010-02-22T07:27:00.001-08:002010-02-22T07:27:29.667-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/SnYT6ByZHsvjWalcdJlWNL2BzT9AZLTKfSdhMtNQqhqR0c36J17t4WhEvzSB/Rias_Gull_7678.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/PXtDuoAt0JTxNHJdxMUrr2OaGfLibPlpBy7bLSXF1Eimu82Kn1gLjAJtyQg2/Rias_Gull_7678.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <div style="text-align: center;">Rias Gull</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.&nbsp;</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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."</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/art-and-art">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2089777409010171086?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-89041655149507289182010-02-21T13:12:00.001-08:002010-02-21T13:12:57.948-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/Th2wuBWSaqAgkLCooVmHVLTpqz5oOqRRjgtYzKueL6o3e4Q8qQkRge5EWjCR/Ice_P1050108.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/w6AegcSdHV8sT75LwrQbCd2GEdvemFhHRxaRLtvi6yIUOlfa99wHdPB2XWa2/Ice_P1050108.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <div style="text-align: center;">Thawing Ice</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">I started reading Bishop Spong's <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Liberating the Gospels</i></span> 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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/audrey-the-writer">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-8904165514950728918?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-29996301224982977372010-02-20T12:59:00.001-08:002010-02-20T12:59:49.301-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/LHRmX5AlSl6G1CJwwbQU0FMExiB96CSh51fu4llEGJzv9OdIDdoz1HprQra5/Snow_Lake_P1050070.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/aK9J9HDX4N1JnMdTFLLatNWITkOIN8mpawy268eFWGYQFE3aWJp1gBYH99sY/Snow_Lake_P1050070.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <div style="text-align: center;">Frozen Lake</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/snow-today-gone-tomorrow">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2999630122498297737?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-91172515955760009032010-02-16T09:43:00.001-08:002010-02-16T09:43:24.920-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/ZF34mELwHFUEW9nUyXYVOo8eoTdCOy6R7o0z5Q5s7i5LnYN2RuVcUocpmxM9/Hamburger_0210.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/DigckVYfGVa0IC96azEPc6XbKvIh4J9Kz0luayj3JHxxDPjkK5DARjPxSJon/Hamburger_0210.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <p>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? <p /> 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? <p /> 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. <br />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.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendejoes.posterous.com/skillet-broiled-hamburger">Duende Joes</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-9117251595576000903?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-1920807049569267462010-02-16T09:16:00.001-08:002010-02-16T09:16:18.347-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/F8WB8tKDSSo23KHQqXu7aW7S7fQeJ0jc0OZAjsCf5xlO9pxSKQO6rMmXRYPq/North_Meadow_0224.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/lb5vjZLfjAwVCt645U7EEFSubHo73KvWOniy3wZFNglAmbSlx7pJmboTECyK/North_Meadow_0224.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <div style="text-align: center;">Ingrid's Coffee</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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!</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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!</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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 <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>conquistadores</i></span> 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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/like-conquistadores-of-old">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-192080704956926746?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-62760335685748564492010-02-04T12:17:00.001-08:002010-02-04T12:17:01.784-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Noli me tangere</i></span>, 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 <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Las Islas Filipinas</i></span>, a disease that made it untouchable because people dread contact with the sick for fear contagion.<p /><div>Rizal was able to see the Philippines from the objective distance of Spain, the "mother country," where he had gone for education with &nbsp;other Filipino <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>illustrados</i></span>, 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."<p /><div>In transliterated Greek, the Latin phrase, noli me tangere is <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>me mou haptou</i></span>. The verb can be translated as "touch, hold on to, cling to." The <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Oxford New Revised Standard Version</i></span> of the New Testament translates the verse:&nbsp;</div><p /></div><blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote" style="margin: 0 0 0 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;">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.'"</blockquote><div><p /><div>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 <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>and</i></span> bodies.</div><p /><div>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.</div></div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/noli-me-tangere">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-6276033568574856449?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-74751425217433712972010-01-27T19:52:00.001-08:002010-01-27T19:52:01.204-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><div style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, Verdana, sans-serif; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: small; line-height: 19px;"><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: left;"><a href="http://colincrawford.typepad.com/idg/2010/01/apple-to-deliver-a-sumerian-publishing-ecosystem-for-mobile-mass-media-.html">Colin's Corner: Apple's slate a "Sumerian" publishing eco-system for mobile mass media</a></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: left;">If Apple manages to pull this off, it will be both potentially devastating and liberating for legacy publishing industries.&nbsp;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. &nbsp;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.&nbsp;The whole of the publishing industry could be revitalized.&nbsp;The journey is the reward.</p><p /><div style="text-align: left;"></div></div> <p><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/QEWIRjeegC1S7DeCU5ugZdQs9qug3sVI2dMHBSXEY2nHu5t1rIHqBMUSdi6o/ipad_2up_hometimes.tiff.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/EuCBzjb5gSqe1ScNuoRxDvjXqAoMNz8YRtXczW47pcQaYoMSCTDPZtCZksi7/ipad_2up_hometimes.tiff.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="343"/></a> </p><p><div style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, Verdana, sans-serif; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: small; line-height: 19px;"><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;">Apple media release photo of iPad showing NY Times App</div></div></p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/colins-corner-a-sumerian-tablet-invitation-fo">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-7475142521743371297?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-22714054455480057912010-01-27T12:35:00.001-08:002010-01-27T12:35:22.320-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'>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.<p /><div>I had the <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>New York Times</i></span> Bit correspondent on liveblog as well but his reports were not as frequent blow-by-blow like Joshua Topolsky's &nbsp;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.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>AT&amp;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.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/apples-cutting-edge-way-with-computing-and-di">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2271405445548005791?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-71658963970619931482010-01-26T11:12:00.001-08:002010-01-26T11:12:10.678-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/rFrsK9gtSokHWlACqi5rjHvN5y1yqT10dhQBkzjdKtUy7qG2R3C2mFq0NkFK/Amaryllis_Window_0097.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/CNxf4r8SVXglINlUc8JuTb5X6GgtpTGqMcrhnR0Q2fIXB07bQ4anPtzyCNt5/Amaryllis_Window_0097.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <p>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. <br />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. <p /> 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. <p /> 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.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/loving-words-living">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-7165896397061993148?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-51789193591686252922010-01-24T13:26:00.001-08:002010-01-24T13:45:15.084-08:00<div class="posterous_autopost"><a href="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/xXlbDI6mMUM88h4qWP2YPFCviWYLaqrLWP9vkIOnch5vK2PZyWaIyX1UyCwX/Shrimp_Cabbage_0038.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg"><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/pdOxYIMUN2KYnYG7eqUCxu9fl0P29miWFv18c1SnwbgN43A6B5PpspJ9iLLz/Shrimp_Cabbage_0038.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281" /></a> <div style="text-align: center;">House of Cheung Cantonese Shrimp Vegetable Stir-fry</div><p></p><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">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.</span></span></div><p></p><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">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 </span></span><span style="line-height: 24px;"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">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</span></span></span></span></div><p></p><div><span style="line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">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.</span></span></span></div><p></p><div><span style="line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">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.</span></span></span></div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com/">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/the-changing-chinese-presence-in-the-us">Duende Arts</a> </p></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-5178919359168625292?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-29738548622397996412010-01-21T19:15:00.001-08:002010-01-21T19:15:49.696-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><div style="text-align: left;"><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/3jFjNz9fjIJht4PxkBM6u4fj6RDwgXXLFEdutA5VlWiSWofarJarqscFs4EX/n37831078275_1009599_8329.jpg" width="366" height="486"/> </div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">I acquired Merrill's <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>A Different Person: A Memoir</i></span> 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!</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/believing-in-an-afterlife">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2973854862239799641?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-19962845667181384952010-01-19T12:22:00.001-08:002010-01-19T12:22:52.600-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/B9SErWYrW1vqmWSQW4gBcfM3rA7jgzxmEQvt8RvDkBjoFVXFADKTiHdipfig/Shrimp_Cabbage_0038.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/GqCTGlb3Am9hLo4VR4wez3gr00AgzvNbFzoCn8BvvJZXACdz3wEnR0tCmRVH/Shrimp_Cabbage_0038.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <p>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. <p /> 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. <p /> 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. <br />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.</p><p><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/X7SkwsLK4llh0QEo1quT03vLAZHTRycjeFRPtYymXNAnL2wZFZPp9B9HNxNU/Dining_Hall_0052.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/aLYzwIUDUTEjZcSskOwY9bKgZAbol7DbeHbWsHB2qnsQnWFIMGjQ3562tOTM/Dining_Hall_0052.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> </p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/cantonese-diaspora-life-and-the-house-of-cheu">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-1996284566718138495?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-40667074316622897252010-01-19T11:59:00.001-08:002010-01-19T11:59:05.280-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/U27Z6WrelplvvHJ4Yz1QX1G0HZbRaS6q3Ul1H6812EiDoBab2iRWSa6ns2i7/Field_Green_Feta_Salad_0065.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/XZrdhB8zTZwC7NfAcGvTjXywisclKHqaQXZKuoXs4apaRveVcTPD1p3Oi6vX/Field_Green_Feta_Salad_0065.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> <p>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.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendejoes.posterous.com/field-greens-with-feta">Duende Joes</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-4066707431662289725?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-56178901792756909892010-01-19T11:06:00.001-08:002010-01-19T11:06:44.682-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><div><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/2qqnixCQgRGXKPjoVyFBjIPraBGXr71PsCqvUnhPpreqa95LV3mftdql7rR7/Cabbage_Stirfry_0079.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/GGurEGzJpY1hRSqfha8hHlTQ8UHJcnyGrpwXyV1Of6usVUh7NzZXukP6iswd/Cabbage_Stirfry_0079.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> </div><div style="text-align: center;">Cabbage Stirfry with Shrimp and Ham Strips</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendejoes.posterous.com/cabbage-stirfry-with-shrimp-and-ham">Duende Joes</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-5617890179275690989?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-56038854804297398282010-01-18T10:13:00.001-08:002010-01-18T10:13:57.656-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/dvYxDMvIXk6Q797eB64Dt00ebYvdSzMdziRy9MZxaroucpqirS7hzW9TsuQ6/Budapest_3814.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/TRmPdwhOlczPpTDTcEWWJLPF3TPW2PsSwMaIbCqZy2wSZMAE3IBN9K342VZr/Budapest_3814.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <div style="text-align: center;">Budapest 2004</div><p /><p /><div><span style="font-size: 18px;">Woody Allen to Terry Gross on Fresh Air 29 December 2009:</span></div><p /><div><span style="font-size: 18px;">“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."</span></div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/woody-allen-on-the-authentic-life">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-5603885480429739828?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-27496053146769166322010-01-17T12:43:00.001-08:002010-01-17T12:43:40.001-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/Dla7v17Cs3WFKIZNFF4I4An1iPvVso2Q7mGntiN0Il0cyoJBMeIYdy8c5eps/Beef_Marsala_Lunch_0056.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/4y8f8pYxeTC95AEYkbHGgLlRmiDbNoFzGIgaMMHa7PKsbMsfgNnaMwUEmQ2Z/Beef_Marsala_Lunch_0056.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <p>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! <p /> 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! <p /> So, the resolution is this: cook by the book for a few days. I want to enlarge my gustatory vocabulary.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendejoes.posterous.com/beef-sirloin-with-marsala-sauce">Duende Joes</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2749605314676916632?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-60890590534978171742010-01-16T19:05:00.001-08:002010-01-16T19:05:55.506-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'>I watched Simon Chung's <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>End of Love</i></span> 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.<p /><div>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.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>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 &nbsp;60s and 70s, maybe China will increasingly influence the West from hereon.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/asian-centered-reflections-on-moviemaking">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-6089059053497817174?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-88352267164774572562010-01-16T18:37:00.001-08:002010-01-16T18:37:55.278-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/cnaYABbR4ktNgb1YcbBlDsX5DERQHY1Wntszae9Qk7WEXJUUiSGXhvWsEi3Y/Japanese_Balloons_20090802_017.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/D5quTSpXkFCfK6tJ1uBMzKg48JFZko8eqXkcJJY7zhnf6564QbYXJJivwz9X/Japanese_Balloons_20090802_017.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <p /><div><a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122279258">Lucas Looks Back On Movie-Making : NPR</a></div><p /><div>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:&nbsp;</div><p /><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span>Godfather - "a real experience, because the movie originally was very, very long..."</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span>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..."</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span>Jaws - "because it was so hard to make and there were so many things that went wrong..."</div><p /><div>"... 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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/george-lucass-acorn-size-history-of-american">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-8835226716477457256?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-57793830610484030882010-01-09T12:30:00.001-08:002010-01-09T12:30:14.912-08:00<div class='posterous_autopost'><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/Rcvtv1efV3CSO5UWHQYGEqpgTaR11i0Ka2qzHwCAMjZ9sl3uGvnr56sJjGbi/New_Mexico_DSC00065.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/86QG19Ceso1HqMQZPKuIDHgdN6KakVBZRCkvCFOujHYaAY8JUR9VMuD8Sbho/New_Mexico_DSC00065.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="244"/></a> <p /><div>Australian director's Richard Roxburgh's first feature film, <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Romulus, My Father</i></span>, 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. &nbsp;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.</div><p /><div>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 &nbsp;life palls by comparison; I live after all in affluent America.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>Roxburgh, an actor who directed plays before he made this movie, offers video diaries of the making of the movie at&nbsp;<a href="http://www.romulusmyfather.com.au/diary1.html">http://www.romulusmyfather.com.au/diary1.html</a></div><p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/romulus-my-father">Duende Arts</a> </p></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-5779383061048403088?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-48428125233850102762010-01-08T10:11:00.001-08:002010-01-08T10:11:04.730-08:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/tO7zlyeiuZ1Dp1ExMvlz90R1RfkM9ZUuScZWY0dmdfS4pdkvaWRlHMQ7CsGf/Snow_Storm_9989.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/cgYUsbz1US7ej9EQ0xVu6kQdg6GT7j9zdJKXZM8nCQMYfrXE29Bb36p2CuP0/Snow_Storm_9989.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="284"/></a> <div style="text-align: center;">Light Storm</div><p /><p /><div>Bill Backer's book, <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>The Care and Feeding of Ideas</i></span>, 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:</div><p /><blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote" style="margin: 0 0 0 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;">1. ideas that moved me in the direction that I would like to be going</blockquote><blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote" style="margin: 0 0 0 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;">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.</blockquote><blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote" style="margin: 0 0 0 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote>In terms of creating a business, I am interested in how to generate ideas and to how&nbsp;to&nbsp;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.<p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>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.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>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, <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Fresh Air</i></span>.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>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.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>I read &nbsp;David Pogue's <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>iMovie '08 &amp; iDVD </i>yesterday</span>. 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.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/the-care-and-feeding-of-ideas-in-the-making-o">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-4842812523385010276?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-8072969815090990722010-01-07T10:19:00.001-08:002010-01-07T10:19:36.161-08:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/goBPmfBij5m6YbBhbiSiBvgMMArGs6D5nvKlt7VtuB8w5GwLopFsvV8GpkUh/Snow_Storm_9996.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/G28t15zThm6wUG8EyGideie80xYhgDZgbnaaqmV2YFQpGgWnr0kNFQNPQJKV/Snow_Storm_9996.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="303"/></a> <p>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. <p /> 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. <a href="http://www.iskconberkeley.com/bedtime/?p=index">http://www.iskconberkeley.com/bedtime/?p=index</a> <p /> 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. <br />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. <p /> 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. <p /> 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. <p /> 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. <p /> 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.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/before-the-beginning-mystical-time">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-807296981509099072?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-68753191229301068152010-01-06T11:01:00.001-08:002010-01-06T11:01:44.951-08:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/IKavJFZyfsWw4HEYJXTLwvLosCVZPUvjUhcHg0VvULjbNPyJqo7GdBAicZjL/Snow_Leaves_4177.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/ObCVkZQFXB2Qsx0uHNmG1G2ankXgPsnDT4JcFoVUhogOpFniBuk69WeeY7Vt/Snow_Leaves_4177.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> </div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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 &nbsp;philosophy, everything stems not from God that people talk about as though they knew God. The world of experience radiated from <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>ein sof </i></span>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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">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.&nbsp;</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.&nbsp;</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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 &nbsp;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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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!</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><p /></div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/remarkable-random-relationships">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-6875319122930106815?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-34679868270067925152010-01-05T08:59:00.001-08:002010-01-05T08:59:14.307-08:00<div><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/HyIJRAw6IhilP3FWxEOEwwSMW3Bg6eNoXNvITeiRXP5piyqpghF0iQaxwmiY/Swallowing_Clouds_9489.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/aKzcQ77hQFnb8aZxDlfPtrMGzaK384iOafN06PSegiig0aiIYNDyd6aTuVDH/Swallowing_Clouds_9489.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> </div><div style="text-align: center;">Swallowing Clouds</div><p /><p />A. Zee in his book, <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Swallowing Clouds, Two Millennia of Chinese Tradition, Folklore, and History Hidden in the Language of Food</i></span>, 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.<p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p /><div>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.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/the-stories-behind-chinese-characters">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-3467986827006792515?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-73236221154037766152010-01-04T12:14:00.001-08:002010-01-04T12:14:10.048-08:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/0mlNgkaWyugkl0YyiBtFyn57mt5LgCLKAtO11MwkNmM38bcc8eXOvqxiC8CR/Arron_Video_on_YouTube.tiff.converted.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/8mByWlvf7ynRyzuqIiRbSO64S9dwEzWUingzc8zpCvKalbd8PejOOY8ervX0/Arron_Video_on_YouTube.tiff.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="317"/></a> </div><p /><div>It must be like holding your first child in your arms. Oh, that may be hyperbole for someone with children but I don't. The trickle of products I am starting to create is the closest I'll get to having children. And there are disadvantages, sure, but advantages, too. No college education fund to set up, and best of all, I can still have my quiet and solitude!</div><p /><div>When Arron came over last night with loyal friend, Seth, he showed me his brother's goofy videos on YouTube. With titles promising titillating subjects, they had hundreds, even thousands of hits. Titles like Fuck Vegetarians, Sexy Girl Shows Her Boobs, Fart Torch... Coming Up!!! categorize Billy's raunchy, raucous humor but it worked. Titles are how videos are searched. Catogories, too, are helpful.</div><p /><div>YouTube sent me a routine congratulatory email with suggestions on how to spice up my page. Meanwhile I enabled broadcasting my walks on Nike Plus to Twitter and Facebook. Inevitably I am linking myself to the social-network age, a phenomenon I learned about two years ago. And I used to think myself a first adopter. Nope, nope, nope!</div><p /><div>Meanwhile on my Facebook page, Duende Arts Photography &amp; Video, I looked at the five videos I uploaded since the iPod nano test video three weeks ago. The improvement, I think, has been phenomenal.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/uploading-my-first-video-on-youtube">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-7323622115403776615?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-84746642309228239682010-01-04T09:47:00.001-08:002010-01-04T09:47:39.347-08:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/7I6luUGWBYLaHlBo9QUKJPpusnD7SWSiKmYlgCknZVPfMjHH7Iix04zJkazn/Walnut_Ham_Salad_with_Mustard_.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/NZuQbLdaIImbqcg82CZPFjec4PAwscswMgX6YXuMPY61rpx5U1lMStP4jecR/Walnut_Ham_Salad_with_Mustard_.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> <p>Yesterday I hewed to my resolution to eat at home and eat healthier meals. I toasted ham strips in a non-stick pan and in the same pan caramelized walnut halves as toppings for a salad dressed in mustard vinaigrette.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendejoes.posterous.com/walnut-ham-orange-salad">Duende Joes</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-8474664230922823968?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-84541531521947174732010-01-03T11:26:00.001-08:002010-01-03T11:26:42.375-08:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/iNmV8O9xacfrudHLXtyXBlOIl21tGtHPlKOfkLnVnYseZsi8Ps4JtWwgBVpZ/Winter_Geese_P1050019.jpeg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/JhNyMBJBEVGdQICvUZEqRrrjat7CEABy3L1IMeccJY9l6qJoNkK6B7vBo9ZK/Winter_Geese_P1050019.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="268"/></a> </div><div style="text-align: center;">Geese at 8°C</div><p /><div>Frank's mother is "probably terminally ill" with cancer. He and Audrey are flying to NY to join his siblings. He told us after the hour-long sitting this morning that spirituality is fine "then there is reality." We sit in the fashion of vipassana.</div><p /><div>Spirituality that which ennobles our lives, that springs us out of our usual self-centered habits into transcendent action, that kills our addiction to meaning and purpose inimical with what is real. Spirituality belongs to spirit, that part of our lives beyond the concerns of the physical body or the psychological self. When it comes in conflict with reality, generally it vanishes without a trace as we deal with reality.</div><p /><div><span style="font-size: 24px;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">In Yoga the teaching aphorism states: </span><i><span style="font-size: 18px;">Asatho maa Sadgamaya</span><a name="_ftnref" href="#_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 18px;">[1]</span></span></a><span style="font-size: 18px;">.</span><span style="font-size: medium; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Lead me from the unreal to the Real. Westerners often point to how Indian-inspired spirituality leads practitioners into la-la land. By contemplating their navel they miss financial and technological opportunities and preserve the poverty of their societies.</span></i></span></div><p /><div>In Buddhism, the practice is geared towards realizing one of three fundamental characteristics of experience that singly or together bring about dukkha or suffering. One of these characteristics is annata, without self (atta in Pali, atman in Sanskrit). Meditation reveals how dominant and controlling is our sense of self. Self is the story we want to tell. It is not necessarily the story we want to &nbsp;live much less the story we are living. Self is opposed to reality. Self is how we want to see ourselves and how we want others to see us. Self is living our life for the effect we want our presence and actions to have with others. We live for the effects and stay impervious to what &nbsp;is essential, to what is real.</div><p /><div>The universe is meaningless, that is, beyond the story we are living out. Meaning is what we try to impose on reality. It is how we think we, others, the "external" world, what we experience should be. Self is our preferences, what we would like to experience, &nbsp;not the experience itself. We spend our energy combating how things are and trying to impose our will on everything. Being unaware of the operation of self is, I believe, the idolatry monotheisms inveigh against. Thou shalt have no other gods but me. Modern-day followers of the great monotheistic faiths have lost the gist of the teachings of the founding teachers of their tradition. They have created God out of their preferences and beliefs and anybody who sees differently are wrong. Their God is what they believe reality is, not what reality is but what their belief construes as being ultimately real. Instead of leading them to see what is real religions lead them to superstition, that is, something added unto what is real.</div><p /><div>The real is simple, utterly and murderously simple. It is beyond the drama we complain about but keep on creating by responding to the world of circumstances as though it was real instead of this world being the illusion created by self. Self is our history of experiences of success and failure. What brought us pleasurable consequences becomes enshrined as absolute, unchanging, the eternal rather than product of a particular moment. We see the infinite in a ridiculous detail of deluded living.</div><p /><div>Human beings believe themselves very powerful indeed. They even affect global weather, forgetting that they don't drive the weather. The weather is governed by forces inherent in itself. Describing the phenomenon is not the same as identifying how that phenomenon arises and goes away again. We are responsible for only this much: what we think, what we say, what we do. To think we are responsible might mean we control the energy we put out into the world but thinking upon this we might realize we don't really choose. We think, speak and do what Self directs us to do. Our doing is just the doing of Self. Where is the choice? To be enlightened is to be free to choose how we respond to what is real. First we have to see through the machinations of the self. Once we see how self makes us see things, what we call the subjective or experience, we can then be free to be like the clouds or rain or sunshine or the flowing stream. The marvel is not that a man can walk on water but that water yields when something heavier than itself is set upon it, gravity being operational.</div><p /><div>Back to Frank and Audrey. We can continue to act in the way we think or feel others would like us to act and we are simply living out our stories. The story we want others to recognize as who we are is powerless in the face of nature and its laws. It is something "extra," as Zen teachers teach. Practice is to see past the extras we build into life, the drama to which we are addicted, that we become one again with the totality beyond our projections and imaginations. Art is something else. When genuinely art, it appears to add strokes to the illusion but its effect is the opposite. We transcend self and perhaps momentarily live in the real, in the essential, in the infinite truth of what is real. What is real is beyond what we have experienced, beyond what we can experience if experience is what the self lives. Buddhists talk about samsara, spinning wheels that give us a sense of being active and busy with living. When we see what is real we see the inconsequence of spinning wheels. We talk less, act less when we see how mindlessly yielding to self just adds to the drama we want to escape from. It is not life we want to escape but the delusions that again and again we seek to impose on an impersonal universe that is deaf and blind to what we want.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>Freedom from the extra imposed on reality by our measly self we might gain the awe that life seen clearly brings about, the same wonder that stirred a Buddha or Jesus, maybe even Mohammed, into changing the Mecca of their existence and pointing their effort instead to what is real.</div><p /><div>As we go into each situation let us remember to act knowingly. Let us remember to bring into each situation what we want to bring into each situation. Do we want to sow enmity and differences? Do we want to sow harmony and impeccability? Do we want to bring kindness or generosity or gratitude or wonder or joy? Someday we may want to examine the very values we say we live our lives by and see which are true, bound not by our tiny lives but transcending our laughable wisdom that we live harmoniously with ourselves. Until then let our values guide our conduct, shape our contribution to every human circumstance, remembering to eschw idolatry, worshipping the Self.</div><p /><div style=""> <hr size="1" align="left" /> <div style=""><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 18px;">[1]</span></span></a><span style="font-size: 18px;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">For an example of how a Hindu teacher teaches this aphorism, see&nbsp;<a href="http://www.saibaba.ws/articles/fromtheunreal.htm">http://www.saibaba.ws/articles/fromtheunreal.htm</a></span></span></p> </div> </div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/what-is-real-in-indian-spirituality">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-8454153152194717473?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-57573639282266868342010-01-03T07:46:00.001-08:002010-01-03T07:46:26.854-08:00<div style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/tpk6sLIAqMWfVFiEy4GrSjjhtp4HSBul5Vx1rVXMoz4NGqEIe2IpsE0OR8qT/Brock_4x6_8912.jpeg" width="288" height="432"/> </div><div style="text-align: center;">Brock Faces the Camera</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">I'd thought myself an adventurous guy but listening to Peter Bogdanovich's interview of Hitchcock last night is making me rethink myself.&nbsp;</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">In the interview, Hitchcock admitted he was a voyeur, like his character Jeffrey in <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Rear Windows</i></span>, whose "subjective" experience was the movie's main plot. A photojournalist confined to his two-room Greenwich apartment after he broke &nbsp;his leg trying to take an action shot at an auto race, he could only move himself from bed to wheelchair, from wheelchair to bed. He occupied himself doing what he did best: observing. John Michael Hayes wrote the screenplay but it was apparently Hitchcock who wanted the subplots about the neighbors that Jeff could observe through their wide-open windows. Their stories not only stretched the plot into the 112-minute movie but gave it substance. It was Hitchcock's genius—putting together a movie with the various elements that somehow created the complete gestalt of a storytelling experience.&nbsp;</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">I thought myself adventurous five years or so ago because of my interest in the Macintosh and its thrilling software. I wanted in on what I saw as an exciting trend in modern American lifestyle. I had been shooting photos of my trips to Europe since 2001 but I forgot it took my sister several years to convince me to leave my travel books and actually make the trips. While not bedridden like Jeff, I have always spent an inordinate amount of time in introspection and analysis. The highlights of my days are insights, images, pieces of information or thoughts that seem to light up my otherwise morbid brain. I live for those lights.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">An adventurer I am not if by adventurer we mean someone who physically takes himself to various and new environments to physically experience various and new sensations. I am an adventurer only in the sense of being curious about new technology, new ways of thinking, new ways of experiencing life. My adventure is largely of and in the mind.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">So yes, I think I am an adventurous guy if an inveterate observer of the human psyche (especially my own) and our subjective experience of the external world with its many-storied marvels and mysteries. The still and video cameras are extensions of my mind, tools to further the mind's exploits, to push it as technology tends to push it into ever expanding Brave New Worlds. The Internet and the millions of computers and servers hooked to it are after all extensions, as my computer is an extension of my mind, of the thoughts, ideas and imagination of the world's peoples joined together in its net. And that's the field of my adventure, the incomparably vast world of the mind.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">Let the show begin!</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/voyeur-or-adventurer">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-5757363928226686834?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-11103757598831206992010-01-01T20:29:00.001-08:002010-01-01T20:29:35.497-08:00Study for a couple of video projects featuring my friend Arron and/or cage fighting:<p /><div><div style="font-family: lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(85, 85, 85); font-size: 11px;"><object height="224" width="400"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://www.facebook.com/v/276935165032" /><embed allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.facebook.com/v/276935165032" allowscriptaccess="always" height="224" width="400"></embed></param></param></param></object></div></div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/fight-club-video">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-1110375759883120699?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-14602690802639343402010-01-01T15:46:00.001-08:002010-01-01T15:46:33.204-08:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/oYz00u6IydyDmKcVzSlmcyuKrqJpt5l7r6BSsDdeigzklbICqYQSz3At2BI5/_MG_9588.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/EQsirGElK0dSaBZT5Zl977uyGcbLJqe3VN8ctHQuBH2ahDWJjL5vxNUOtOGI/_MG_9588.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> <p>Dates and number only mean something when related to human lives. Seasons like every other aspect of nature follows its own supra-human laws. So the turning of our calendars to the year 2010 is at face value not significant except as we give it meaning, as I give it meaning. <p /> To the child that I was, New Year's Eve was more than the Chinese custom of scaring away devils with fire crackers attending midnight mass so that the bells ringing at the Gloria welcomed the new year in. We would walk home (because the jeepneys had all stopped running and taxis were a foreign novelty) to media noche—hot pan de sal, Chinese ham, Gouda cheese, Chinese pear, and Japanese apples. <p /> A grownup now no longer given to superstition traditions shorn of religious belief I try to put the pieces of Humpty Dumpy together again. After doing end-of-the-year chores last night I mixed five cups flour with sugar, milk, eggs and spices so I could have fresh-baked bread to celebrate a new year to try to re-create meaning where meaning has long ago flown away.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/the-2010th-year-of-the-human">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-1460269080263934340?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-23679330213396769752009-12-30T18:46:00.001-08:002009-12-30T18:46:42.564-08:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/ut0AbVYcGCauc94YN0B6HBWd9QX24EjHlLcCm5cpcQMUgD2abLOuWCJ9X8fL/Citrusy_Chicken_Pita_Wrap_9549.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/iFp9axPYX6bGIOSWvhUUXz7Xub9yaPHdFPgWlHlOgs0aAAzUMOxlCdK9ERIi/Citrusy_Chicken_Pita_Wrap_9549.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> <p>Whole-wheat pita when toasted is warm, nutty and crisp, thoroughly satisfying on a cold, snowy winter night. It recalls warm, sunny lands. The salad is simply dressed with a Trader Joe Orange Muscat Champagne Vinegar, virgin olive oil and a sprinkle of coarse kosher salt. Fresh, sliced pineapple finishes the meal.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendejoes.posterous.com/citrusy-chicken-pita-wrap">Duende Joes</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2367933021339676975?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-35821600731576088002009-12-29T16:48:00.001-08:002009-12-29T16:48:48.949-08:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/y79eCNgOqm27jde0VWBBmhp43HiEty5yLNSfpTsxWmoDMQWsN2xpYRqat21a/Chicken_Salad_on_Blueberry_Bag.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/5F53copm19SN9zZVA95XhuczgebHS2xuMhcF0RaVdtHrTdvYgWMsu51kjfEx/Chicken_Salad_on_Blueberry_Bag.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> <p /><div>This is the second meal I've prepared in the last few days. After disrupting my routines to go off to Northern Spain then visit with my sisters here at home and on a &nbsp;road trip to the Southwest, reconstituting healthy routines has been a challenge! Lou Manna's book, <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Digitial Food Photography </i>(Thomson, 2005)</span>, pointed me back on the right track.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendejoes.posterous.com/food-glorious-food-10">Duende Joes</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-3582160073157608800?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-17678388366903882522009-12-29T16:34:00.001-08:002009-12-29T16:34:26.046-08:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/5J1yCtEhe0nLB2iG43uxC1BDsabOSXUVDGAuB6AYRIJkZ6gPZRAtupqHUYjj/Morning_Sunshine_P1050011.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/79Zd9TJTZSzZ9Ww17BRCnuLFnA4Dhv9jbbgfpXsqCA9qYQaIz21A3oqnxmzt/Morning_Sunshine_P1050011.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="311"/></a> <br /><div><p /><div>On this morning's <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>The Writer's Almanac</i></span>, Garrison Keillor quoted Paul Rudnick (<span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Jeffrey, In &amp; Out, The Stepford Wives</i></span>): "As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write..."</div><p /><div>At last, someone put it in writing. There is procrastination that puts off the task at hand but in a writer that same procrastination provides him with the raw materials whence springs creative inspiration. Deadlines put our backs against the wall. Then we scrounge amongst the material procrastination yielded for what a project requires. It is a great waste of time and so necessary for us to create. If only there were a machine that churns out great stuff, be those words or images or inventions, minute after minute with no pause but then we may not experience the god-like feeling when in the midst of implacable deadness appears this tiny thing that crumbles walls and cities, demolishes worlds, betrays us to that transcendent moment of creation when we fly past hope to the momentary summit of achievement.</div></div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/paul-rudnicks-90-of-creativity">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-1767838836690388252?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-12435192906459861102009-12-27T09:50:00.001-08:002009-12-27T09:50:32.836-08:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/H5vR7c2Qwbdu1b1LGnvkQzvWIRKE4IKd2rmR0mWQaPwFSHgG1oYcprPcxl7N/Pancit_Molo_9506.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/xlz8caJsiRgn65xzi9Z5QKL0yl1LsPLPE82hzQVxfkI9ghjljYwskNNNjDSA/Pancit_Molo_9506.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> <p>This is not the pancit Molo I remember from Prince's Kitchenette or Fatima on Calle Real in Iloilo City but it was good. I used store-bought wonton wrappers and they worked just fine. I processed the filling in my ancient Cuisinart, a mixture of pork, shrimp, garlic and yellow onions and made stock from a whole chicken I boiled with slivers of ginger, Italian parsley and celery stalks. I found out that adding surplus filling that I dropped in half teaspoonfuls into the boiling broth made the resulting soup taste closer to what I remember. Then I added my own emendations: baby bokchoy and a few drops of sesame oil.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendejoes.posterous.com/pancit-molo-after-40-years">Duende Joes</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-1243519290645986110?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-77599858886080454262009-12-27T09:43:00.001-08:002009-12-27T09:43:52.998-08:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/MZvqKcjbZVoGgfX5ulPfE5In7auKIPsxZeuLYNsT36FtE45YPUT62hTYER8f/Zabuton_9511.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/kkFPzQPRbJIm3vGXI7aGgnwFWX3UiVBjOJd5hxYcjZ2R5ydygrXeE91TIxXA/Zabuton_9511.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> <p>Teachers say that in Buddhism once the thought arises to pursue enlightenment the very structure of mind changes. The goal may not be reached until after many lifetimes but the impetus once created never goes away again. So unlike its course in North America and Europe, Buddhism in Asia became inextricably linked with just the ordinary living of life, sometimes fun and exciting, sometimes momentously sad or monotonous, but like the dominant figure in the carpet background that most people no longer sees, the aspiration ticks away indecorously slow but always there. I remember a Tibetan shopkeeper in the village in New York City telling me how the Dharma among his people was as ordinary and unobtrusive as sunshine and rain. It is part of life; it is life. They prepare supper at night, might spend 50 years building up a trade, but in the background is this unspoken goal to seek the Ultimate and become free at last from life's vicissitudes. Unspoken because it is so taken for granted until one day the bud opens and the muddy water drips away as water drips away. <p /> It has been thirty years since I encountered Buddhism not in the land of its birth but in my adopted country. Buddhism was a big part of my going home again, home where I had thought I never belonged. I like the simplicity of its practice, the barebones approach that depend solely on one's effort and utilizing only one's own mind and body. Anything else is excess. A cushion to sit on does help. Rituals inherently human can support the most genuine aspiration for simplicity. They create a feeling of what is sacred, recreate the awesome experience of something beyond words, beyond desire, beyond the very habits of being alive.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/the-aspiration-of-lifetimes">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-7759985888608045426?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-67947929769928180752009-12-26T13:47:00.001-08:002009-12-26T13:47:58.278-08:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/lHWjZlTxFXjzWFtuW6s38Sg5UpKnmqEXrzhLCFk8prB1YDqAkQYdT9hXgZOq/Christmas_Eve_9484.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/YUabu5jjtCzjaCnns0cnBFN8ZDaizwdNa7Kwm1zJJKzrxAEs7CRNvqcGp17t/Christmas_Eve_9484.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="323"/></a> </div><div style="text-align: center;">Christmas Eve 2009</div><p /><p />Today 17 more seconds of daylight are added to the day. We are inching our way towards summer!<p /><div>Many would-be pundits declare New Year's Resolutions futile wish-fullfillment while as many others vouchsafe their effectiveness in guiding the changes we make to our lives. Some of us try to live day to day, neither in the past nor in the future, feeling grateful just for the miracle of being alive to enjoy nowness. Human nature is incontrovertible so I try to dodge its inevitableness by making a deposit of wishes and dreams in my journal or blog. When I shut down my computer, maybe the fiery forces of envy and greed might stay there in digital space, mollified by my confession of hope.</div><p /><div>At lunch today I fell into the spell of Central Asia and its history of linking Asia and Europe through the Middle Ages. I've visited my favorite countries in Western Europe and even edged into the former East and Central Europe. I've been thinking I've satisfied my wanderlust until this new curiosity rears its head. Many days I am content to view the many faces of the unvisited earth in the people I see right here in my own backyard. If Central Asia harbored then (and still does today to a lesser extent, maybe) many peoples from different cultures, North America today is such a meeting place. At lunch I watched a Chinese family, the girls dressed in bright red silk blouses, the boys in Western gear speaking flawless American English. At another table a French couple doted on their young daughter. Over by the window a large Mexican family chatted away in mellifluous Spanish. And the food is, I imagine, as good as any you would find on a road trip through China. After all the cooks come from that once-upon-a-time unknowable Middle Kingdom, bringing to me here in Middle America their heady, exotic tastes in chicken feet and pork ears and onion rolls and chive rice-flour pillows.</div><p /><div>There is one place and time I think no one yet has brought effectively into the fecund Western imagination. I grew up in the Philippines at the cusp between its colonial past and the technological everywhere present. I grew up when the Spanish heritage of 300 years still clung to our foods and traditions and only an idealized Americanism peppered our lives from parents who unlike the generations before them had fallen thrall to the fifty odd years of benighted American tutelage.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>The next generation, my sister's children, knew a different childhood. Their mother cooked for them without the aid of a bevy of helpers so they grew up on spaghetti and <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>inasal nga manok</i></span> from the neighborhood <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>carinderia</i></span>, not the rich cuisine at my grandmother's house. Christmas Eve has remained the same but they celebrate it now with different foods. My sister plays Pastoril at dawn masses from memory because the owner of the original music sheets is dead and took the music with her. She transposes the music two notes down so it is accessible to singers of moderate skills. As homage to the past she buys a few ounces of ham for <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>media noche</i></span> but says it is not as good as the Chinese ham of yore. She and my cousin, Daisy, split the cost of a special-ordered suckling pig <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>lechon</i></span>.</div><p /><div>Cultures fascinate me. How people in different places and times live, how they celebrate life and make meaningful what is ultimately without meaning, the art, music, cuisines, religious rituals and family traditions that result, these have always fascinated me. Maybe I can do something with this interest, a book, a documentary?</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/17-seconds-more-of-daylight">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-6794792976992818075?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-88406008619095773042009-12-16T06:09:00.001-08:002009-12-16T06:09:50.777-08:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/xwjLWZkyxbfPfRYQ5YsrV6dAqMCZHgb7SH3EUimTkSbfyx8ufaATFly57jD1/Linda_DSC00338.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/f3ktppugbZf6XFXkjD1H9kkQf1mrJKAO5qzYEqbycFkxQnac9TnnaPhiHHbo/Linda_DSC00338.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="331"/></a> <p>I did another portrait shoot with Linda and her family last Monday. I've processed six images from the shoot while still having to redo processing the Banthia images I want to burn on a DVD for the parents to take to Orlando next week. This photo of Linda was taken by my Sony HD camcorder that I had set to record on its own while I took still photos with the Canon 5D. The resolution is much smaller but the effect, as Linda commented when I sent her the photo, was "complimentary to my age." I need to learn to use the sharpening commands in Photoshop to soften the effect of the bright lights I use in studio shoots. A design consultant I saw who has a degree in photography and film from IU Bloomington made a similar comment. She asked me why I was using hard lights. I had gradually started using more hard lights in my shoots, not just for the background but for the foreground. With Linda's shoot I was careful enough to use only the soft box and an umbrella-filtered light for the faces. Before the clients came I took preliminary photos using manual camera controls and was surprised at the stunning clarity but once they got here I threw caution to the air and shot pellmell. The boy was uncontrollable and finally brought the backdrop down. The soft box light kept going out. I should have checked the images on the camera LCD but didn't, an almost fatal mistake. There is so much to learn and to do. <p /> Meanwhile yesterday I went with Arron to Elite Martial Arts where I spoke with the owner who told me he wanted a commercial to draw more people to his center. He wanted a surprisingly artistic video, with a specific look and audio background. He may need additional documentary-style videos to actually show prospective customers what it is he does at the center. I have so far only been using iMovie putting off using FCP again. It's been four years or more since I learned to use FCP in NYC! <p /> I'd lamented at the lack of drive in my desire to create commercial photography and videos. I need the structure of deadlines to keep me at the wheel. When structure comes I feel stressed out by all that I need to do to turn out a creditable product. The lesson perhaps is learning to go with the flow, to appreciate the down times as well as the up times and make the most of what I can do and do.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/change-sometimes-too-fast-sometimes-slow">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-8840600861909577304?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-68441449326855860202009-12-11T17:07:00.001-08:002009-12-11T17:07:23.284-08:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/2R35GBP9sPh6MsUnuGffUrfWBSneiBo1CMGmdRv1mMwsFJa0X3XEPhjqyKww/iPodVid.tiff.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/KtxS07zXh8uBUqRlTKsA3nHpfBexDC3V6WeMEN0rHBqyRjG5Ndzgi9Yf76C5/iPodVid.tiff.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="279"/></a> <p>It takes so little to grow a weak flicker into a fire. The wonder of it is how infrequent I do the talk. <p /> My client didn't show up this morning but I was at the computer early so I started messing around. Before I knew it I had learned to use the video camera on the 5th generation iPod Nano. Granted this was not a herculean task but one thing led to another. By 5:30 this afternoon, I had set up a meeting with Arron to see first-hand an MMA fight in Zionsville tomorrow evening and I'd started the confounding mysteries of using Flash. I went to Lifestyle Fitness and for the first time working out there was not as uncomfortable. Again this was no big feat. I simply used the treadmill at 4 mph while watching music videos on an HD monitor 20 feet away but as I was driving home in the dark this evening listening to a performance of Brahms's German Requiem I was feeling the creative juices bubbling inside me, a sensation that had been eluding me since I came home from the trip to Las Vegas with my sisters. <p /> The iPod video is on my Facebook page: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Duende-Arts-Photography-Videos/194848773479?ref=search&sid=740460032.1486545904..1">http://www.facebook.com/pages/Duende-Arts-Photography-Videos/194848773479?ref=search&sid=740460032.1486545904..1</a></p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/retaking-the-momentum-with-an-ipod-nano-video">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-6844144932685586020?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-13237407528721198432009-12-06T08:11:00.001-08:002009-12-06T08:11:46.277-08:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/YGHOe741eKqYDwGZ1l4Ipz7uBgQKyLSJaCAI8hgfGfINyvK6Jp56pdWkM0EN/Smriti_0057.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/fUhiRbSyrHs92TcnaWKqV5Vbkzz1ozeikfU1mqoqwHMsRd61AYN7ck2ghaln/Smriti_0057.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> <p>The portrait shoot with the Banthias was instructive on several levels. I used automatic camera settings all throughout, manipulating white balance and exposure post-shoot in Photoshop. I shot with manual settings with Brandon and lost so many images. Maybe with more practice I'll get better at doing manual-setting photography but maybe I've found the process that works for me in this shoot with the Banthias. <p /> I shoot quickly, only making lighting changes when I really have to e.g. to avoid obvious, undesirable shadows. I should probably learn to be more deliberate with lighting and camera settings but when I have a model or models with me the excitement is hard to resist. I take as many shots as I can. I end up with hundreds of images that becomes a challenge to process from just the sheer number. If I set up the lights and camera settings more carefully, I'll have fewer images to review and process. Will I be missing out on images that I'll like? <br />This image was unplanned. I simply took advantage of the situation and hoped for the best. The women were arranging their saris when I took this photo. I should probably make it a point to let the models know that I want to take photos "behind the scenes" and set up a camera to do just this. <p /> I shoot a lot of images because many times the image I want is an image I had not planned on getting. I direct the models into situations or poses that I think should yield the image we want but it's the spontaneous take that often yields the harvestable image.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/finding-that-harvestable-image">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-1323740752872119843?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-54399255891363717812009-11-29T13:22:00.001-08:002009-11-29T13:22:30.430-08:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/TCLlyOwuejfss44QvgUa6zouEWVLxfy5cQJsEYgHbyWDpcSCUwkVy1xuwM1u/Asha_Smriti_Visha_0322.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/WqEZOTduhPa8TVWdYSU2p3UNGLCEPswcf4jKOx6YMjCYZSyF2CSoJaNaUo9Q/Asha_Smriti_Visha_0322.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="292"/></a> </div><div style="text-align: center;">Asha, Smriti, and Visha</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">The Banthias got together for Thanksgiving and chose to spend a full afternoon of their special time together posing for a family portrait with me. This was the first pro photo shoot I've done since the abortive shoot with Greg last May. Once again it restored to me full-force why I want to do photography. Capturing the visual essences of people is incomparable joy!&nbsp;</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">In ordinary discourse we gloss over the physical presence of the people with whom we share physical space and energy. We listen to what they say and try to respond with our own expressions of self. Ordinary gatherings with other people are largely intellectual, mediated through the audible expression of our presence. Photography is unabashedly visual. When I take photographs I respond to their physical energy but the medium of capture is visual.&nbsp;</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">The physical space in which this capture occurs is significant. One day I'll learn to take onsite images but for now the blank, white background works very well for me. Against this white space, the subjects come to life in unusual vividness of color, line and shape.&nbsp;Music, I've found out, is a significant component of the process of capturing personal energies. Although the still camera does not capture sound, music plays on us emotionally and influences our physical expression. We started the shoot with my choice of music—Mozart chamber music and Strauss lieder—but when we had settled down the energy took a new direction when the Banthia children brought in their choice of music—modern Ballywood dance music.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">All this is probably hocus-pocus, frilly figments of imagination. Professionally one should speak about lighting and resolution, composition and color balance. I have much yet to learn about lighting but I think I am now more comfortable using the lights I have (though they are mostly intended for video capture than for still work). If I didn't have Photoshop to adjust exposure, white balance and fill light, lighting would be more complicated and manual controls not effective. The main component I can't change with processing is depth of field, which affects the clarity and blur. I left the soft box on all the time, just moving it closer or farther from the subjects. I turned on and off the three other lights. While I achieved effects that I think improved on the resulting images I forgot that hard lights cast shadows more easily than soft box.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">More than ever I appreciated shadows cast on the subjects. These are the shadows I like because even with flattened lights they give dimensionality to the images. Soft light is great but it's the hardness of light that gives complexity and perhaps ultimately the drama so vital to images that touch and move us.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/new-takes-on-shooting-portraits">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-5439925589136371781?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-12285036545548852142009-11-27T08:21:00.001-08:002009-11-27T08:21:25.625-08:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/aySLg5EbRxYTN6EYPhuF3CdIH4eLB6gJnvbHaqDKbOHy7c2fRzRd5oowyRPE/Santiago_de_Compostela_7078.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/tGw4rb5oDD6Glu4i9HMibHy3667tPNjb7pkaedlFuqf8lHCUxFPcazVFWM2U/Santiago_de_Compostela_7078.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> </div><div style="text-align: center;">Santiago de Compostela 2009</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">Bursting out of one's comfort zone does not take much. It can be as small as going to another part of the city I have not driven to before, or going out on a limb to make new friends, or learning about subcultures like cage-fighting or suburban living in Indianapolis. Getting extruded out of one's routines does not take much but feels like such a big deal. Maybe this is because of the sluggish, slovenly pace my life took when I decided to take a sabbatical from my active professional life. A year and a half of waking up to a day I can design as I wish inured me to listlessness instead of focus and joy. I needed to challenge my rote life.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">No matter that taking initiative is often what change takes, aiming for a goal seems to me not the shaping power in change. The major changes in my life came either as corollary to what I have undertaken or, even more often, irrelevant to where I have set my goal on the horizon of possibilities. Ultimately this is my basis for hope: that what proves significant comes out of the blue, from beyond the corner of what I see. The possibilities I see are not as great as those beyond my ken, beyond me.&nbsp;</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">Years ago an Indian moksha yogi explained to me how he saw the dynamics of mystical states. The adhika, the striver, must indeed take the first step and work his way as close as possible to the goal but all he can attain at the most is to bring himself to the cliff edge. Something else, something alien to him, must pluck him from the edge and carry him like a cloud to the other side. Again and again we bring ourselves cliffside. Many times then nothing happens. The edge begins to lose its sharpness and still nothing. Then out of the craven blue it comes and suddenly we're nowhere familiar and predictable. We've leapt without leaving the ground but our feet stand somewhere new, our eyes look with new colors and clarity, we zoom past ourselves into change.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/the-dynamics-of-zooming">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-1228503654554885214?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-44297018435938940872009-11-25T18:24:00.001-08:002009-11-25T18:24:56.668-08:00Judith Fox's book of photographs about her Alzheimer's-ravaged husband, <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>I Still Do</i></span>, is being published this month.&nbsp;<p /><div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px;"><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/pWLhLD7Ox_g&hl=en_US&fs=1&" /></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /></param><embed allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/pWLhLD7Ox_g&hl=en_US&fs=1&" allowscriptaccess="always" height="344" width="425"></embed>&lt;/object></object></div></div><p /><div>She spoke to Terry Gross on Fresh Air on November 19. The podcast kept me company on my walk through the dark condominium grounds tonight. The exchange between the two women provoked contemplation about my interest and work in photography.<p /><div>I haven't done a photo shoot since the&nbsp;abortive shoot with Greg last May.</div><p /><div><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/fxSlEQWl1Oxl1fKEgcANhpezXTqVCYPVAQzlE14y2ak5oprCt8sjNaC51ird/Greg_1276.jpeg" width="466" height="699"/> </div><p /><div>Now I am poised to resume deliberate, "serious" photography again on Friday. A friend asked me to do portraits of her family when they come together this weekend for Thanksgiving. I am excited about breaking out my professional background and lights again. I checked my two Canon cameras tonight and ascertained they were relatively dust-free, dust being a frequent bane when using older cameras with interchangeable lenses and without digital lens-cleaning systems like newer cameras have. I chose the lenses I plan on using at the shoot and after putting together my kit decided I might as well take it to the Thanksgiving dinner at Ria's tomorrow. She said she'd like it if I took photos of her and her family.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>The ebb and flow of creative activity intrigues me. A week ago I didn't know how I was going to jump-start project-working again. On Saturday, Visha and Babu came for meditation and asked if I could do her family portraits. Last Monday I had lunch with Arron and Seth and we talked about my doing a documentary of Arron's cage-fighting activities. I would shoot him training for MMA fights, lifting weights with Seth (who is acting as informal weights trainer for his roommate), his actual fights (if he can secure permission from the promoters), and interviews about his dreams and experiences. In fact last Monday as we talked I identified a topic that would be very interesting to shoot in a video. His description of what he felt before, during and after a fight was eerily similar to what I feel after vipassana meditation. I am intrigued by the possible links between intentionally violent action and the non-action in meditative absorption. At heart my interest remains what it was during my 30-year career dealing with clinical mental states. In fact the interest antedated the career. Some of us are born actors, some, like me, contemplative from the get-go.</div><p /><div>Fox's husband, Dr. Edmund Ackell, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's just three years after the then fifty-four-year-old Fox married him. He was even then an eminent surgeon, a pilot and golfer. In ten years he lost all these abilities. Now he could barely shave himself and just months ago Fox finally moved him to a facility that could better care for his now almost totally disabling affliction. But in her interview with Gross, Fox said she started to photograph her husband after reading <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>The Model Wife</i></span> of Arthur Ollman, a book about iconic male photographers for whom their wives were both models and their muses. She wanted to photograph her own muse, her newly married husband who was then seventy years old. Ed's only question to her was, why are you photographing me? She said her husband was a modest man and he couldn't understand why she would want to take his pictures. To her he was handsome and her muse. He was 16 years older than she was and she knew the risks she was taking when she married him. As his illness progressed and he began to lose control of himself she asked him if he was okay with her showing candid images of him. He replied that she could show his soul in her photographs provided she did not show his penis!</div><p /><div>Photography is about images captured from the relentless streaming that is life. For me, taking photographs is a special kind of looking, a creative way of seeing. A non-photographer skims through the images of his or her life, seeing what is useful to his strategy or purpose. A photographer combs through the flow of images for that one image that is somehow infused with energy, with what I dare call magic. More skilled and experienced photographers, painters, even writers, can describe what the magic is that they strive to capture with their photographs, with paint, or with words. I don't have that facility. Maybe if I did I would have a more productive time of it but I doubt it. Even these skilled, experienced artists talk about the struggle they undergo to find those sweet spots when creativity bursts out and their work sings.</div></div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/why-are-you-photographing-me">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-4429701843593894087?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-69591351279162134042009-11-25T09:05:00.001-08:002009-11-25T09:05:52.789-08:00NPR's Morning Edition carried a story this morning this morning by Louisa Lim (<a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120696816">In Japan, 'Herbivore' Boys Subvert Ideas Of Manhood : NPR</a>) about Japan's 'Herbivore' Boys. Here's a CNN video featuring Japanese journalist, Maki Fukosawa, helping the interviewer recognize 'herbivore' men in the passing Tokyo crowd.<div><br /><div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px;"><object height="303" width="500"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/XdrF_dAaZO4&hl=en_US&fs=1&" /></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /></param><embed allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/XdrF_dAaZO4&hl=en_US&fs=1&" allowscriptaccess="always" height="303" width="500"></embed>&lt;/object></object></div></div><p /><div><span style="font-size: 10px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;">Coincidentally, last Monday I watched cafe-fighting videos with my friends, Arron and Seth. Fight Club is alive and thriving in the Indiana hinterlands. Their ultimate goal to go pro and fight on UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championships for you that don't know), these young men fight mano a mano in a cage, no helmets, just gloves on, using whatever fight technique they know from boxing to wrestling and beyond. It is "full contact combat sport" that allows both striking and grappling technique and is said to have originated in mixed-style contests in Europe, Japan and the Pacific Rim in the early 1900s. It became mainstream after the founding of UFC in 1993.</span></span></div><p /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/vFMnNdo7s88SwUoJsYlKyzYJzfpwi94aXMrDPLTarWgDnzZFWANgguS9m408/Arron_4008.jpeg" width="466" height="699"/> </div><p /><div>I've never been one to spend the afternoon watching football, much less a boxing event. Bloodletting and injuries are something to be prevented not willfully invited upon one's person but chilling with Arron and Seth last Monday surprisingly intrigued me. Arron's description of how he felt before, during and after a fight strongly reminded me of how I feel after a powerful sitting. The adrenaline rush creates a similar mental state as meditative absorption! In both states ego is relegated to the background or even temporarily disabled. There is only the complete experience of physical sensations held together by a seamlessly whole awareness and time stands still.</div><p /><div>Japan's 20- and 30-year-old men are at one end and American cage-fighters at another but they are both expressions of masculinity in search of a character. In a post-nuclear age where battles are fought not in large-scale World-War type, heavy-armor-and-machinery warfare, where politics and religion play out man to naked man, men are re-inventing the masculine experience. We have no choice. The women have changed past recognition. Many of them, like the Japanese 'carnivore' women of Furosawa, have assumed the old-time fighting stance of what we now lambently call the patriarchal age. It looks to me like the eternal seesaw, the fragile dance of Yin and Yang that must preserve the Oneness. If it grows too big here, it must yield there. Or is this more of the hocus-pocus the Communists in China abandoned after its century of humiliation at the hands of the forward-thinking round-eyes, a painful cleansing that prepared the way for that country's current surge into an economic giant confounding the West's doctrine of requisite capitalism founded on democracy?</div><p /><div>Just when we think we know it all, the world shows another room in its many mansions of which we were totally unaware and we are spellbound again by its incomprehensibility, an unending fascination that may be at the heart of being alive itself.</div></div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/being-alive-rethinking-body-mind-and-spirit">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-6959135127916213404?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-5354139642106043432009-11-24T09:23:00.001-08:002009-11-24T09:23:37.827-08:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/31MFQPEaipqWJ8pt5DiLR1IHOhCLKfPQ9nXfptyJHoFTcp6L2MwcKHzuEKT2/Arron_0593.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/mXRiiuWY8hqWqtWThWRG4YB3Sv7o5GYjgt5PlRsxVuT3eGEKzHZe9wixaiSX/Arron_0593.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> </div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">Art in Asia, Edith Hamilton writes, is based on a fundamental attitude that what the senses sense is not real, is illusory and therefore not worth studying or depicting in art. What alone matters is the imagination unfettered by the restrictions of material reality. Hence Egyptian art is focused on the life hereafter and the Hindu religious images are phantasmagoric.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">In the West, the Fort Wayne native, one of the first American women intellectuals, writes, art is "the unifier of what is within and what is without." The artist studies actual representatives of the image he wants to paint, a woman, for example, and first looks for models from which he does "studies" before executing his vision of Woman. His art does not look like any of the women he has studied. She is more beautiful, or more noble, more motherly, more alluring, than the models. This is art in the western sense, according to Hamilton. It is based in the experience of the senses but the information is processed by the mind of the artist. He or she distills from the experience of the many the essence of all of them or those of them that fits the concept he or she wants to embody in art.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">Hamilton's book might be dated. Her statements about Greek sculpture suggest she knew the plain, unvarnished marble as how they originally looked. She praises their simple lines, the bareness of vision (similar, by the way, to what Buddhist meditation produces, something else Hamilton was ignorant of), whereas we now believe these statues were slathered in bright, gory paint when they adorned Greek temples and public places. But what she writes holds true for much of what we still hold as true today, eighty years after the book was published. Does this make her statements and our current beliefs true? Not so, but true enough to make us listen and pay attention.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">Art is only fable when based solely on imagination. It must either start from a fragment of reality, whether this be an undesired commission from someone wanting to pay us for the work or a glimpse of a vision that enthralls us for no reason, or somehow incorporate into its fabrication something impossible to ignore from our daily experience of life. It must grow organically out of the soil of our material existence. Art must spring as Pallas Athena is said to have done, full-grown from her father's thigh. Art must be coupled with our experience of the material reality on which and maybe from which life of the spirit, of the mind, of the imagination can then fashion something that in turn engages someone else's eye through his or her inner vision.&nbsp;</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">To be genuine, art must come from the gutter, as Oscar Wilde said we all lay in: some us though while lying there are looking at the stars.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/art-east-and-west">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-535413964210604343?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-61359198208949045402009-11-20T14:07:00.001-08:002009-11-20T14:07:24.462-08:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/pk5ZluFVFS7NEgGuEC7Se6cjHvEARbAx9eoVpPg39Uc1Z4QbDV4JsR2AjzYD/Cheung_Wall_Ornament_P1040987.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/SLd5DvBAElWf6abX8CHMbC3IocdMcwfyFvwU3o1clzgOhNrZnaaNs6PV9c4v/Cheung_Wall_Ornament_P1040987.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> </div><div style="text-align: center;">Wall Ornament, House of Cheung</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">Born in Asia and becoming an adult in the West I am an amalgamation of East and West. A native of the Philippines has inherent complexity. The Philippines is the cultural mongrel of Asia. His country a Spanish or North American colony for 300 years, Filipinos look Malayo-Polynesian but think and feel like a European or North American. Appearance doesn't quite jibe with what comes out when a Filipino talks about himself or his life. That I've more of my life in the U.S. than in my native land adds patina to the toss. I am an American but not your average American. I belong and not-belong. It's a conundrum that has haunted and inspired me, loaded me with&nbsp;cutting-edge advantage and disadvantage.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">For years I've simmered in this poly-cultural stew. I came to America fleeing from a life where I felt I didn't belong. America liberated me intellectually. The mind and the life of the mind was at home here but a new force came into being. If in the Philippines I longed for a bigger sea in which to swim, in America I have that ocean of almost infinite dimensions but curiosity has transmogrified. Now I am even more curious about a visionary divide. I switch spectacles every moment or so, now looking about me as Asian-born, now as West-acculturated. That edge between fascinates me no end.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">Edith Hamilton's 1930 book (republished with additional chapters in 1942), <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>The Greek Way</i></span>, added fuel to my schizoid identity. She has reminded me wherein conflict occurs and the delicious taste of my fence-straddling persona. This is an issue that only now perhaps I have the wherewithal to confront. All my working life I thought someday I would retire and then have the time to read all the books, listen to all the CDs, watch all the DVDs that I've accumulated since coming to consumerist America. I don't consider myself retired today because I can't accept the idea of sitting still and enjoying the leisure. Hamilton pointed out that the word school is akin to the ancient Greek&nbsp;<span style="">σχολή,&nbsp;<span style="">which according to Bill Casselman (<a href="http://billcasselman.com">billcasselman.com</a>), meant "leisure time to use for learning important life insights."&nbsp;</span></span></div><p /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style=""><span style="">I am not retired; I am in school, closer to the Greek idea than our driven, modern experience of school. Casselman again wrote that for Aristotle, </span><span style=""><span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>schole</i></span></span><span style=""> or leisure was not do-nothing time. It was the "most useful of times, time you set aside for your learning." He quoted Aristotle who in his Politics wrote: The first principle of all action is leisure. Both are required, but leisure is better than occupation and is its end." How true!</span></span></div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/leisure-according-to-the-ancient-greeks">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-6135919820894904540?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-44140970881926584072009-11-06T06:26:00.001-08:002009-11-06T06:26:07.574-08:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/w4KB5CmGzzXkEZEbeWPMDGnrWuMntvwGytNydnftgNkfBIU7xOW5PGiIrf6n/Red_Rock_Canyon_Me_9214.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/h34014ouYN239PDl6DEB5bn3P7BRzZCCIwqpJ2KvTwe5LxsE0bGQWV7Jm1D3/Red_Rock_Canyon_Me_9214.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="301"/></a> </div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">Since early September I have been on the road a lot, since October 2 with family. We're on our way back to Kansas from a five-day stay in Las Vegas. While Maria attended a conference at Mandalay Bay Resort, we explore the Filipino subculture in Vegas and one day drove out to Red Rock Canyon where this photo was taken. I should be back in Indianapolis on Sunday.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/long-absence-from-family-trips">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-4414097088192658407?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-20295737092460909922009-10-25T07:44:00.001-07:002009-10-25T07:44:20.696-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/y0W4tF1S8UlmpRxCPwXwh9YLfKPCu2qt8S6Rs8SNoyjMI1ohJ7tXeis46zEh/Brandon_7441.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/Csvt21j9TmhAUI8fak9eb7qCEIXBCHXrxXynxOdFGXnqZhHHN2cjTcAh9Pnq/Brandon_7441.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> </div><div style="text-align: center;">Brandon Butterfly</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">I have been quietly refining my photography and video website. Most of the additions are in the hidden sections like photos of my sisters' visit on the Family and Personal Photos page and my personal blog but I also started collating images for the Go Ahead Travel tours in the Travel section. Based on my interest and inclinations, travel images and videos have the greatest potential for earning money. I also resumed processing model images.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/additions-to-wwwduendeartscom">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2029573709246090992?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-48305571904193857562009-10-16T12:07:00.001-07:002009-10-16T12:07:25.757-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/pvwIaSMAMQMogRmzeKrWgGHByvxCSt0A4UafFUX4vnn953wyrdqfp9z7XFOR/Michigan_Street_Bridge_April_A.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/TZlhFlgZ3JydMmfb0CUBx6QRFs565vicRwx3zqhBLl3XwEHuU3soYutNjqQF/Michigan_Street_Bridge_April_A.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="296"/></a> <p>My sister and brother-in-law left on Wednesday. I re-organized the house and office yesterday and today resumed work. I am going to first process the images and video clips from their visit into a small movie and slide show on duendearts.com and Flickr. Meanwhile I want to resume doing tutorials for Photoshop and start tutorials on videomaking, for starters, Final Cut Pro. I am joining my family again October 29 to return mid-November. The remaining two weeks I have in October I plan to use to clarify my work and career goals, while also rethinking what I call my "sabbatical." This is probably too much for the time I have considering that I want to continue the repair and re-organization work on the house and garage started by Arturo. All I know is that I need to get back to working on photographs and videos, while resuming my learning curve.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/returning-to-work-and-the-plan-for-the-next-t">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-4830557190419385756?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-9735120031296784982009-10-10T07:06:00.001-07:002009-10-10T07:06:46.538-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/8mjDzAuOw8JCskoEYEhkkGxbiuNjD7dwqJIeuQap1MKOhkKBII2D77jvEWeO/Santiago_Park_6848.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/rU8eDNbD2pkGD3cVHo05J3nPfet4NCCYFTKWQblLlJXwS60cSNmPreYIzH53/Santiago_Park_6848.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="300"/></a> <div><div style="text-align: center;">Families at Play, La Alameda, Santiago de Compostela</div><p /><p /><div><div>Many times life throws us a curveball. Things do not work out as planned or anticipated. That's just life. As Scottish bard, Robert Burns, has it:</div><p /></div></div><blockquote class="posterous_short_quote">The best laid schemes o' mice an' men<br />Gang aft agley,<br />An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,<br />For promis'd joy!</blockquote><div><div><p /><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>To A Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest, with the Plough</i></span></div><div style="text-align: right;">Written 1785</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">In modern English:</div><p /></div></div><blockquote class="posterous_short_quote">The best laid schemes of mice and men<br />Go often askew,<br />And leaves us nothing but grief and pain,<br />Instead of promised joy!</blockquote><div><div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">To live with wonder our appreciation of life comprehends both those schemes that work out as planned and those that don't. In fact, it often happens that the unplanned proves better for us than what we wanted. For desire is based on petty and fickle momentary feelings and thoughts whereas the universe of events and happenings is vaster than our three or four scores of wisdom permit us to know much less understand. The universe is really incomprehensible; that is, we are incapable by nature of possessing the knowledge and wisdom to control events and their outcome. We are tiny, finite creatures like drops of rain falling on the immense ocean of time and space that is the universe where for a moment we live and exercise consciousness and choice.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">So with a little more wisdom (understood in our later years as "common sense") we grow to appreciate curve balls. We dream and plan our future but cultivate an attitude of wonder, willing and empowered by a capacity to be surprised. Living loosely and lightly we navigate the short span of our lives with immeasurable joy and delight. We acquire Burns' "promised joy."</div><p /><p /><p /></div></div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/living-with-our-schemes-in-wonder-and-joy">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-973512003129678498?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-29762305107293405182009-10-08T07:13:00.001-07:002009-10-08T07:13:16.777-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/kpIsADi3LZqIq4CGvchduHtHF0ZcwnPOCl2b3QZhrTsZ4Ce4Xb8luRxA4ybC/San_Francisco_at_Santiago_6962.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/lFR988th3jNM2bqM6DjK0OzrueGwnNkBATqyz5ViZCpdTgfVX3cL7eM5zuVn/San_Francisco_at_Santiago_6962.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="334"/></a> <p>How quickly the reality of the present moment overtakes memories no matter how precious they seem to us. For thirteen days we were traveling through intoxicating landscapes of verdant mountains and valleys, crystal streams, rolling farms and quaint towns of Northern Spain. Our destination was Santiago de Compostela, a medieval center of pilgrimage that even today attracts hordes of people now coming from all over the world. Traveling the highways and roadways through Navarra and Galicia we caught apparitions of staff-wielding dark-clad pilgrims, with their nylon backpacks and space-age hiking boots as the ancient routes periodically emerged from the forest and farms into the modern age.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/spanish-art-and-culture-in-indianapolis">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2976230510729340518?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-76315838460525079142009-10-02T09:50:00.001-07:002009-10-02T09:50:18.233-07:00<div><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/oh3x6WsAtFK3ZwZZrHjGXISyYMtKzmbSwF0PisfUsBtlvfr25wRwrNBeuVhF/Cathedral_Square_7518.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/cLjPFOMevXNBfw84CsPYeY6jjzNPxZT2mwx7KOIkqPIMt4BlY4zQ11A9yzdJ/Cathedral_Square_7518.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="266"/></a> </div><div style="text-align: center;">Cathedral Square, Santiago de Compostela</div><p /><div>Travel away from the normative environment that we've grown blind to and we see the world with new eyes. Traveling for me is both exciting and stressful. Away from home I don't have the daily routines that comfort and inure. I go to bed and wake up at different times, to different places. As simple a change as this turns my world upside down.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>The Go Ahead Travel group to Barcelona and Northern Spain was composed of retired people, a few who still worked part-time but were for the most part retired, too. My sister was the sole person who still worked full time. When people asked me, I told them the same fable: I was on a sabbatical nearing two years. One co-traveler was a social worker therapist in New York. Merma opined: The good thing about being a psychiatrist is you can work as long as you want. She was referring to the comparatively less physical demand of working as a psychiatrist or therapist. One worked with the mind, usually comfortable sitting in a chair across from the patient or client.</div><p /><div>For all intents I am retired. I just didn't want to acknowledge the fact. I am retired in the way I live one day after another. But I am also retired in a whole new way. I can consider other tasks and challenges being a regular member of the social-security-paying, economy-propping American citizenry I couldn't see or undertake.</div><p /><div>One idea that struck me after I came home last Tuesday night was to look into moving my giant collection of books, DVDs, and CDs to a not-for-profit library/media center in the Philippines. I left the Philippines because I wanted access to a larger world where individual differences would be seen as valuable when the whole was seen completely. I felt odd in the small-world mentality where I grew up and lived. I stuck out and looked weird. I found the larger world in America. America is a big country but the vastness of the world humans lived, dreamt and experienced was to be discovered not in the coast-to-coast geography but in the books and media the country supported. The Fourth Estate is not just journalism and newspapers and magazines. The Fourth Estate comprises the various ways we communicate ideas. Today this is inexorably moving into the non-spatial realm of digital media and the Internet but in the 1970s when I first came I found the mind-expanding world in books and the arts and diverse cultures of the New World.</div><p /><div>Books, digital media and the Internet are the vehicle by which I could help other Filipinos who like me don't fit in the narrow world of traditional Philippine society. I have this embarrassingly huge collection of media, too big for one man to use and digest. It can be a boon to a whole lot of other people.</div><p /><div>The mind is a awful thing to waste, says a group encouraging educational opportunities for what used to be referred to as "Negroes" in America. I've long harped on values being central to how a person lives. I believe it is vital to the transformation our global societies require for people to have access to the total pool of history and culture that belong to us all. With this knowledge maybe we can move past sectarianism and begin to cooperate as one species inhabiting one small planet moving in a giant universe.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/travel-brings-out-refreshingly-new-perspectiv">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-7631583846052507914?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-79834724067997901722009-09-28T21:54:00.001-07:002009-09-28T21:54:13.736-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/OyCYo094DGeG98IDELX4d1IuIs0LqCYVFK8O1UHHIOzIdMHAx6wOqMT5R5fr/Raciones_at_Santiago_6941.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/pytAx4ltKZTDusnjq1LeJFBKObLnUr0LONmzyHqvONQRxMqNiEMkVhvGfdbz/Raciones_at_Santiago_6941.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="269"/></a> <p>The tour of Spain, highlighting the green, mountainous north, ends today. I am flying back to the States on Delta at noon. <p /> Travel is exhilarating. I love sampling the breads, cured meats, cheeses, and pastries of various parts of the world. Food encapsulates the culture of a country and its people, and reflects the regional experience which fascinates me no end. <p /> Some people on the tour spoke of how they didn't like Spanish food. For me Spanish food is the dark side, the opposite side of food I knew as a child in the Philippines. I love the spices the Spanish use because they are the same as those used on the islands they once ruled. <p /> We're in Madrid, cosmopolitan and stylish in the area around the Cybele fountain, touristy and historical around Plaza de Oro but I can understand why the early Filipino illustrados largely lived in Barcelona where art is softer and divergence from the mainstream is cultivated.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/spanish-food-and-culture-adios">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-7983472406799790172?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-61993650034699450072009-09-27T22:29:00.001-07:002009-09-27T22:29:15.217-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/1YvOWLHAPjM9H3Q1hsUDU49aInuN9KazdYhRfm9SWyHWU1c4aUA6Z3CPjGhC/Santiago_Park_6848.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/Oy75p9x2lO9J7Z2DalRv9RgsYcBVVz0a3vHiaPfZZVtTr8FoUOPMD47X9x5D/Santiago_Park_6848.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="300"/></a> <p>This is the second hotel we've been in with free WiFi but I have not posted to the Internet except for some photos to my Flickr photo stream. This one was shot at a public park near the Old Town area of Santiago de Compostela. A co-traveler, Wil, and I took a walk the afternoon after we arrived in the pilgrimage city. I enjoy visiting tourist spots, the remarkable features of the cities we visited, but I am most interested just in seeing how people there live. <p /> In Spain, by five or six in the afternoon, public squares, parks and pedestrian malls are full of families enjoying themselves. What a refreshing change from the States. Children run and play while their parents, often both father and mother, watched them and chatted with each other. The public spaces become Spain's giant living room. <p /> We're flying to Madrid at noon, then back to the U.S. tomorrow.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/trip-to-northern-spain-coming-to-an-end">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-6199365003469945007?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-83414642566261251992009-09-09T08:05:00.001-07:002009-09-09T08:05:52.154-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/YT4NfALPyCofqj9ZmBxCBhOTwPzcDQ8a1RA4TSN6CPKjJRdiQirQjAGmlIdn/Amalfi_Coast_2120.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/DAAPrNUCgf421Mr6J4MmicQdTRh1mFXOPPJ4MqmZAa8oFHMdc7K3K1Bnz45K/Amalfi_Coast_2120.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> <p>On the eve of my scheduled travels the next two months, these photos of my previous trips bring up even more feeling. I look at landscape images from other photographers and marvel at the quality of their images. In particular I like the vividness of the images, not so much the composition i.e. the crop they choose to make of the 360° world they are standing in. On the other hand I believe I've improved my own skills at both photography and processing the images after the shoot but the way to where I want them to be is very long, shrouded as always in clouds and mist!</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/the-way-shrouded-in-clouds-and-mist">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-8341464256626125199?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-7493862790789010462009-09-08T14:37:00.001-07:002009-09-08T14:37:07.182-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/DhbrHXuT7AexffA7MQSperH78GbVJ3NiM6mvrExH7tRXxb5I7dxXcaX271N1/Home-grown_Tomato_2853.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/C7nsPC8l3yUJaIlcaCw3bRSDHZc9JnFrH3BpWciiFiyAgWMwDsQcO9Www0Kz/Home-grown_Tomato_2853.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="528"/></a> <p>In his 1995 book, Becoming a Chef, coauthored with his wife, Karen Page, sous chef Andrew Dornenburg wrote: "This profession requires a tremendous amount of hard work. There is more to being a chef than creativity, just as there is more than creativity to being an artist. As in any other craft, chefs must practice, practice, practice. Perfection is the only acceptable benchmark." <br />&nbsp;<br />Reading this was reassuring. We have our innate, gut sense of what looks, sounds, tastes, smells or feels good but as human beings that mostly do things with their hands, art is also craft, the manipulation of objects to align with what we see in our minds and hearts.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/more-than-creativity-to-being-an-artist">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-749386279078901046?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-23761317191474579472009-09-07T20:54:00.001-07:002009-09-07T20:54:24.541-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/uEkSqm7YDXOLr5GlWFRVMua7sLYsrbnnHOWWmRxE4MCQxwEnE5I19YqqVsS0/Trail_House_P1030775.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/71NR6GZp5HaBlXyfHvVLTTsMxx83HKqoFEgkmE6qnaiTOHbbVwbRY7fbMjT4/Trail_House_P1030775.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <p>Scott Bourne, interviewed by Jason Anderson on the latest Learning Digital Photography podcast, had some attention-grabbing comments. He quoted someone else saying some 99% of camera lenses are better than 98% of the photographers who use them. Humbling! He told Jason that when he did portrait and fashion photography he shot with long lenses, 400 and 500 mm babies! He said photographs in fashion magazines like Vogue are taken with long lenses for richer detail. Use side lights for maximum texture in landscapes but direct frontal light (light behind your shoulder) for shooting nature and birds. He started his photography career in the 1970s when his father who worked for an Indianapolis/Bloomington paper got him a pass to shoot pictures at the Indy 500. After doing motor racing photography, he did the usual wedding and portrait, fashion and product photography before he was lured into nature and finally avian photography. Shooting with a Canon for 17 years, he switched to Nikon D7s that focus more quickly and have less noise at high ISOs. <br />&nbsp;<br />His one comment that floored: he is a businessman, not an artist. He spends 80% of his time selling his photographs (and now videos), only 20% on actually doing photography. I'm not there at all. <br />&nbsp;<br />The podcast host, Jason, writes in his photography website that he has been shooting pictures for three years. His portraits are ordinary but his landscapes are very good. Like me he wants to shift from doing IT to making his photography his bread-and-butter. He is married, apparently with children. <br />&nbsp;<br />I shot the photo above on my walk up the Monon Trail to 116th Street this evening. The sun came out after a rainy morning and a cloudy afternoon and the light was great. I had not walked on the Monon since I walked there with the Banthias in early August. I fall into other routines and forget how pleasant it is walking on the trail in the late afternoon when the air is cooler and the light perfect for taking pictures.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/a-serious-photographer-is-a-businessman-first">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2376131719147457947?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-69828367774958867552009-09-07T19:25:00.001-07:002009-09-07T19:25:02.604-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/kvcieBnDq9dOsjTeFzn5AMHOYjT1Wg096d8y7DFVmeQSbscH7fa8foNwEZxn/Napa_Cabbage_Noodle_Soup_2842.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/FN2tXAM2izJBw2nT4GpnHkyJqAyTn3cUT3Xvb6DEMT9GaT0B32qWc4HGic3G/Napa_Cabbage_Noodle_Soup_2842.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> <p>Ah, the joy of creating a meal from refrigerator leftovers! I rather like the balls of white sushi rice studded with raw Pepita. I know I need to eat pumpkin seeds for the estrogenic effects on the prostate so any way to encourage consumption through taste sensations is welcome.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendejoes.posterous.com/napa-cabbage-soup-with-pepita-rice">Duende Joes</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-6982836777495886755?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-79153954629428199342009-09-04T10:17:00.001-07:002009-09-04T10:17:27.923-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/iW5CjntnRvUhp7vtbvs1p4v5lRYPSy0vEjRppVi5Fmtu8Mxpz6CtfdD1Hn9D/Brockmovcapture.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/b0K9VrzjzcCcE1auwA7gn3rvWO9fXs9ZUiVuS4eat4iXtnCZKkr0zDFHgIUu/Brockmovcapture.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="291"/></a> <p>To finish the new website I am working on the video page before tackling the text (currently called blog) page but I didn't anticipate diving headlong into video compression. Compression, like motion and color, are the most intimidating phases of preparing a video for delivery. The videos I have completed are all large files. I worked under no file size constraints. They are too large for the iWeb software I am using. I can post them but streaming would be stringently slow. <br />&nbsp;<br />So, I'm stuck here whereas I had envisioned flying through these last two sections of the website. <br />&nbsp;<br />The image above shows the video display on QuickTime Player 7 and the new QuickTime X that is included in the recent Snow Leopard Mac OS upgrade. I exported the Final Cut Pro movie file as a 1280x720 video on QuickTime with an appreciably sharper and more vivid picture but the size fourfold! <br />&nbsp;<br />More than ever I feel mastery of compression is the final Holy Grail of video production. This should not be! Shooting and editing should be at the heart of the beast!</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/quicktime-x-versus-quicktime-7-for-video-comp">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-7915395462942819934?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-45848634235246229132009-09-03T13:07:00.001-07:002009-09-03T13:07:36.732-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/NV1j1ajlr1xXxlMLtp24LOfaxtrqEuH2o93SrhUfZHS0QwWZwNRNaj5Aojpr/Lenny_5605.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/GXPYf7MS1mMqZ3irvyQX3AWbBoSSthEx29Wob22y35y6c9AP9wuDSkcxCRe9/Lenny_5605.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> <p>I am excited to revisit my old photo shoots and look at the images again, processing them as I see images today. Instead of using previously processed images I am starting from scratch, and the images are surprising me. This shoot with Lenny lasted just four hours but he was such a natural that he executed pose after poses easily. Compare this with the shoots I did with Brandon. Over nine hours and I got so few usable images. Brandon has done more modeling than Lenny but he generally models for commercials and ads. There shoots are often more straight-forward and probably heavily directed. Model photography for me is a more creative process. My most successful shoots were done with little planning. The results came from the intense collaboration between the model and me. <br />&nbsp;<br />The new website is live and the model portfolios are growing steadily. Pretty soon I want to weed them down although I am rethinking the concept of "portfolio." I may redesign the site and have a separate page for my best images on a separate page that I'll call 'Portfolio." <br />&nbsp;<br />I want to post more videos on the video page then decide what I want to do with the blog page. What I really want is a page containing the equivalent of my writing "portfolio" - the more disciplined work I want to get into. <br />&nbsp;<br />Once I am done with these, I'll continue to revise the web site but will shift my focus to doing new shoots. Before I do new shoots (unless a new shoot hits me on the head), I want to work on my shoot technique and learn additional skills in Photoshop.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/a-second-look-at-old-photo-shoots-brings-plea">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-4584863423524622913?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-26888487408006366872009-09-02T11:59:00.001-07:002009-09-02T11:59:07.409-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/mV6Q4rgelNnXJ8Mhi2WCUFoaLpUYmH7c28buWMtAMDUAgX9Q3on9s3U0QWgU/Fall_Greenhouse_P1030664.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/KnoRMeQyqsAFINYiMeas4LFmxfbWVzh43JROwpLbbStbv6KVl0FkCOTbts3D/Fall_Greenhouse_P1030664.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <p>I took this photo yesterday afternoon during my end-of-the-day walk. I love shadows. I think they give images not only depth but mystery. This is a shot of an alley beside a Chinese restaurant. The front of the restaurant is painted gold and red with plaster dragons and faux pillars. <br />&nbsp;<br />Days are crystal-clear and cool, suggestive of fall that technically is not here yet. Already I feel nostalgia for summer even as it dwindles into fall. Nostalgia is okay. Any feeling is better than no feeling at all. Feelings help me identify images to composite and shoot. Isn't creativity largely feeling?</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/nostalgia-for-summer-not-quite-gone">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2688848740800636687?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-73877496797393313102009-09-02T11:56:00.001-07:002009-09-02T11:56:52.071-07:00<div><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/DWg3UHNRGdyr7cVLk2x7L3S0D77BFRBsn6E8sEtMQS4KYqu1rvoN0AZfHNXX/Chinese_Restaurant_Alley_P1030.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/dOnfWTHBfqFklbHsOjTnoFYCfcU0HWKnSRT84DIVV0Gd7kV56etYwOsAFmy5/Chinese_Restaurant_Alley_P1030.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> </div><div><p class="Body">Peter runs a small Chinese restaurant on a side street near busy Keystone Avenue. I stopped having lunch there ten or more years ago when I became embarrassed by his mother’s attention. Walking by the restaurant yesterday afternoon, I decided to check it out again. I had fully expected the restaurant to be gone by now. The larger, more successful Chinese Ruby closed this spring, before the economic downturn began to affect other businesses.</p><p class="Body">Peter is ebulliently friendly as always. He treats me like a long-lost brother without mentioning that I have patronized his restaurant in years. No recriminations, everything as though I had been going there all these years. I am older and Peter, too, is older. He has gray in his sideburns. His father who used to be the main cook passed away a year or so before I stopped going. His mother now stays at home.</p><p class="Body">“She walks slowly, moves slowly, but still talks fast,” he says. He spends as much time at the restaurant to get away. She is 81 years old.</p><p class="Body">Peter talked about the new China. There are 300 cities with over a million people. The people have idolized American capitalism but since the recession their adulation turned them from being disciples to leaders in their own right.</p><p class="Body">“They come to Chicago,” Peter says, “and are disappointed.” The buildings are old. In China, because they “started from scratch,” the buildings are spanking new and glitter in the newfound prosperity of abundant, cheap labor.</p><p class="Body">They have evolved a kind of communism different from that of Soviet Russia. The politburo collects information then makes decisions that affect the whole country. One size fits all. It works for the country if its economic triumph is any indication. Peter admits there is no room for protest. There is no room for the individual.</p><p class="Body">Peter himself is a product of the old China. He has been running his restaurant for decades through sheer perseverance and hard work. He told me he planned to keep working for another ten years then will retire to Hongkong. “There,” he told me, “he could hire a Filipino to do his household work at $500 a month. Your money there goes a long way.”</p><p class="Body">Unlike the new Chinese immigrant businessmen, Peter is not looking to rapidly expand his business or build a franchise. He does most of the cooking himself. He greets each customer personally, chats with each one before he seats them, and takes their payment after they finish. As I was leaving today, I told him his food is as good as it was when last I ate there. He told me he cooked Cantonese and now Sichuan. A young woman helps with cooking in the kitchen.</p><p class="Body">When I think of business, my model is similar to Peter’s. Personal touch is high on my values. Customers are treated like old friends. Like Peter I would like to be generous with freebies. Lagniappes is how I think of the most successful small-time business owners in the Philippines. After you conclude your business, they add a few more prawns to your heap while making small talk, never making a big deal of the tiny addition. Those little gifts are what the customers remember, what keep them coming back again and again. They become <i style="">suki</i>, regular patrons.</p> </div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/peter-cheungs-china">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-7387749679739331310?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-40404332959507914652009-09-02T10:05:00.001-07:002009-09-02T10:05:49.030-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/HyPtoDglVvAqDeRkV5ml4K1fpXMWkDhpjaTiaI3IY6yfiLI4pleIjnBg7gTW/Dubrovnik.tiff.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/wEsi5xjgZAl4S3ZqysMZ2x5kiJlwuOfZRTTbYAVlK3ilB0s3Jiml5sN3oklX/Dubrovnik.tiff.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="271"/></a> <p>I'm finishing the new website (<a href="http://www.duendearts.com">www.duendearts.com</a>), creating links to my Internet sites on the home page. I've had an account with YouTube for years but never posted a video there. I think the Dubrovnik video I made in July is the best I've done. Watching it again yesterday I revisited the memories of that trip. I had not planned this video but somehow the footage I took worked really well in editing the 22-minute video. <br />&nbsp;<br />YouTube has limitations for free account holders: no more than 2 GB, no longer than 10 minutes. I couldn't upload the video. As I get back to editing videos I have to consider the YouTube limitations. Vimeo has a .5 GB weekly limit and only standard, not high defintion, Vimeo Plus 5 GB with a limit of 1 GB per file. I knew short videos are more effective (I've seen enough director commentaries on DVD to see how feature movies are edited down and down, often eliminating the director's favorite clips all in the interest of creating a more powerful movie) but ignored caution. If I want to post my videos they'll need to conform to these requirements.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/posting-to-youtube-and-vimeo">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-4040433295950791465?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-87799115839124410172009-09-01T13:58:00.001-07:002009-09-01T13:58:22.048-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/qZ28bUadc7ywBI1xe5j2zcjRPVEXV1BtsNzF6xAGbFXCMFM1hPXotR7glMZg/Arron_2040.jpeg" width="466" height="699"/> </div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">A year and a half into my learning sabbatical and I see the progress I've made not only in the craft of taking and processing photographs. I also see the weaknesses in my work more clearly.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">While driving to the Final Cut Pro Users Group meeting a week ago, I had a comforting insight. The time and money I am using to learn the new craft in graphic and video production is what a young person would be spending going to college. The main difference: I don't have as much time as that young person. What I do have is perhaps a clearer vision of where I want to go, and maybe a dose or two of maturity or common sense.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">I have my doubts about the clear vision. I had another insight, this time at the meeting itself while the group leader described his experience making an HD video with the Canon D5 Mark II. I've ruled out narrative video features and thought documentaries were what I wanted to shoot for. Documentaries are easier to do with no experience and no money to hire writers and actors and I enjoy watching documentaries, especially travel and history documentaries. But most documentaries are ho-hum. I want my work not just to document experience but to move the viewer either emotionally or artistically.&nbsp;</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">I've had no prior experience in artistic movement, only some experience in creating emotional movement but this in a totally different field and for different objectives. I want to move people emotionally so they can have insights into themselves or their lives with impact considerably more powerful and effective than the clinical insight patients get in psychotherapy. I want impact that strikes below the belt, under the skin, beneath the surface of consciousness. This would mean impact more appropriately classed under art. Intellectual insight is too frail. When it comes, it swims on the surface of thought and hardly dives deep enough to change the ocean bottom where the reside the structures that shape most of our lives.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">I don't make as much progress as I wish I could make in part because I am torn between learning the technical craft of software and the craft of artistic creation. I need to focus on learning more creative ways of compositing and processing images, while spending some part of my daily schedule continuing to learn the software and shooting technology.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">Last Tuesday I thought I should go back to the idea of learning to create effective commercial images and videos. I am not interested in doing weddings or events photography. If I want to make money by early next year, I need to revive my aspirations for commercials and corporate videos. To reach that goal I shall need to shoot and process more videos. It’s this simple when you’re at the very bottom rung of the ladder that you want to climb.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/moving-from-documentary-to-emotional-and-arti">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-8779911583912441017?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-64447548325100667452009-09-01T12:32:00.001-07:002009-09-01T12:32:51.640-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/1z0gcBv5Wjs6FLe3Oo3bSnuHwWmNAs6BeVZb5PcLvFsKrhOP0QeqssSmuNp3/First_Pizza_2797.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/6WVIz8CT7ZvDYlkXtg3EgtBNiDiXbIRHf4ncVHOvWjjLGZmTd0Fcov5qZ0f7/First_Pizza_2797.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="333"/></a> <p>Visha did the honors of rolling out the pizza dough that I had prepared Sunday morning for a successful launch of my home pizza-making enterprise. The crust was heavenly—thin and nutty, the filling of Mozarella, tomatoes, and fresh basil leaves just right. We ate it hot out of the oven, with a salad of fresh greens from the deck garden with a simple balsamic vinegar-olive oil dressing. <br />&nbsp;<br />Yesterday I rolled out my own pizza, this time adding strips of Prosciutto and more fresh chili. I overloaded it with seeded tomato, even adding a few Kalamata olives. It was not as good. Sunday's pizza was thinner like Neapolitan pizzas. I ignored everyone I consulted who urged a thin crust for the best Margherita and rued my disobedience. The center of my pizza was thick, like bread, or, I guess, like Sicilian pizza and I missed the crunch and flavor of Sunday's pizza.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/my-first-homemade-pizza-margherita">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-6444754832510066745?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-8387581226026903972009-08-29T08:02:00.001-07:002009-08-29T08:02:57.520-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/gIG6awvxNtmHLeg2q9ISb407s63TC5eL0Oe2UVQVdYkjPk6CqWbNzPvY6lld/Not_so_simple_2789.jpeg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/7klPrmPpCwPyQs4Mnu5oqjNTwFwfITOF2vPCycLqLCv46eKl6a1RrHXZ8s1J/Not_so_simple_2789.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="306"/></a> <p /><div>Thirty years ago when I still drove around getting to know the country I stopped by Lancaster County in Pennsylvania to see how the Old Order Amish lived. Solid-color buggies with the color-glow orange caution symbol in the back, men, women, girls and boys all dressed alike in solid blue, gray and purple clothes, small, tidy farms and the lack of modern-day rush and clutter: there was a simplicity that bespoke bygone times of unadulterated joy.</div><p /><div>Last night, reading Bob Brooke's <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>The Amish Country</i></span> for American Traveler ($1 at Half Price Books) reminded me why I was interested in the Amish. I probably would not have survived in an Anabaptist community where one size fit all. That's not what drew me to the Amish. Maybe it's what I've salvaged from growing up in the Philippines. By American standards we were poor in material goods but when I take away the subjective feelings of not fitting in (I didn't fit in back then either) the childhood memories shine with what today I perceive as lost down-to-earth simplicity.</div><p /><div>In the 80s I drove around studying the alternative spiritualities that the American tenet of freedom allowed to sprout in tiny, unobtrusive pockets around the country. I discovered yoga and Buddhist meditation. On a trip to Yellow Springs in Ohio to attend a weekend vipassana retreat I met several people who influenced the lifestyle I was shaping. Paul, a psychologist at the Dayton VA, introduced me to the Buddhist center in Barre, Massachusetts where Buddhist practice became established. Buddhism drew me for being an Asian tradition of spirituality but like my attraction to the Amish and the early Christian desert hermits a more powerful draw was the aesthetics of simplicity and of "fewness of desires."</div><p /><div>When I undertook a protracted sabbatical last year I was motivated by several factors. Among others I wanted to simplify my life in both its material and process aspects. Instead of chasing after material aggrandizement I wanted to deepen my inner life. How well have I succeeded? Not as well as I wanted. But I am recognizing that life is not so much about reaching the other shore as living each day as it comes. Goals provide us with set patterns when fate does not provide the surprises that energize and renew our spirits. Goals are default behaviors. More vital to a life of inner richness is the openness to what lies beyond goals and desires. To walk through life minimally encumbered with expectations: this is a more genuine simplicity.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/the-amish-and-a-more-genuine-simplicity">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-838758122602690397?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-16361721212376503382009-08-28T07:53:00.001-07:002009-08-28T07:53:37.228-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/OXOZ60tPRf6C3bwbpbeLVw7UDqUvdYTkUCWXJYim8Uw0EUeAqpNTCdZNwTYE/Thai_Taste_P1030510.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/wMYmA1nHguq380kf4yihDE9fHpDOscSdOMtKH8KKjI0HIpzoHaF5sbBpXrqD/Thai_Taste_P1030510.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/J7caMTWUgcC3h9ub9z5GIfjLcOmndfqgiGgWXe1pPMGL2YDg9FfPusWcsiDN/Thai_Taste_P1030511.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/GYoxoplRfVtZgrgi17JGniCJW6CKrHOAv7k1xp6nYqIe3qeSbwr04B2iL77E/Thai_Taste_P1030511.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <a href='http://duendearts.posterous.com/gourmet-asian-restaurants-in-indianapolis-tha'>See the full gallery on posterous</a><p>Last night, our Thai friend, Usana, invited us to the Thursday night buffet at Thai Taste on the city's north side. My Chinese friends, Allen and Helen, had been urging me to check this out for many years but last night was the first time I went. I'd been too attached to Chinese food when I do go out to eat. <br />&nbsp;<br />As it happened, Allen and Helen, were there, too, last night. They asked me where I'd been. They had not seen me at the usual restaurant haunts where we often meet. We're Asian buffet aficionados. They told me that the Saturday lunch buffet at The Journey is the place to go on Saturday, better than the dim sum buffet at 8 China Buffet. For Sunday lunch, they go to Mandarin House in Carmel. <br />&nbsp;<br />The spread at Thai Taste was okay and most of the tables were occupied by six o'clock. Service was excellent. I do love Thai food but compared to Chinese food it tends to be a tad more expensive. Not as expensive though as Japanese food which is probably the top of the heap in terms of price, especially Japanese steak houses. <br />&nbsp;<br />Outside the restaurant after the meal, I met a friendly Caucasian guy. The front of his white tee shirt was splattered with chili sauce for which he kept apologizing. He told us he discovered Asian foods when he lived in California years ago. There he had a Vietnamese friend who introduced him to Asian cooking. Thai Taste was his favorite but he also loved Korean food. For Korean he went to a restaurant (Ma Ma's Korean or Bando) on Pendleton Pike and E. Miracle on Allisonville Road. <br />&nbsp;<br />The evening reminded me there is a small group of local people into East Asian food. Our party consisted of three Filipinos, a Thai and a Japanese. Yoichi loved the food. When eM invited him to join us, he was incredulous. He hadn't known there was good Thai food in Indianapolis. He was going to Golden Corral for dinner on the nights he didn't want to cook after work. <br />&nbsp;<br />Maybe I should a food blog since food obviously is high on my value list. I can easily add a food blog to my new Duende Arts site. iMovie does not allow me to group the blogs together into an album page as it does photograph pages. I am still looking for how I can put my text products into the site.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/gourmet-asian-restaurants-in-indianapolis-tha">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-1636172121237650338?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-84652113708228322412009-08-27T14:05:00.001-07:002009-08-27T14:05:33.581-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/t7tZHClyVZihazhxieQ3dfiuY8gKVT83snBHZZYCNNjeAZoeT5Qdaekg9Lg3/The_Father.jpg" width="428" height="640"/> </div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">For years I have wanted to write what I remember about this challenging, rich, ever-changing panorama that I call life. Only a handful of novels and nonfiction books on life in the Philippines is available even today. The near vacuum begs for more content!</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">At our last visit to my parents' old hometown in Iloilo in 2007, my younger sister's daughter scanned photographs from the old family albums and gave us a CD copy of the images. I made my own copies using my Canon camera which are what you'll see when you visit the Family Photos page on the Duende Arts website (still hidden behind the current website).</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">As we grow older, more of our life appears in the past than in the unforeseeable future but I've had this idea for writing about life in the Philippines as I was growing up for at least two decades now. I remember the heartache I felt when I put together my first photo album in the early 80s. Here were pictures of places and people that no longer figured in my life. I was struck by the ephemeral nature of life. Without looking back, we get the feeling we are going to new places and creating new patterns. Going back we see the handful of themes that repeat like a looping filmstrip. The scenery changes, the characters change, but the energies stay remarkably unchanged. The life we live feels to me so much more fantastic than any fiction work can be!</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">The first pages of that album comprised photos that I took o f those last days in the Philippines in 1975. I bought a camera to document the upcoming adventure in the New World. I came to America to reinvent myself. I was not concerned about holding on to images of the past. I blamed these for my discontent with life. I was going to push beyond the known into the truly new.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">In America, I took candid shots because everyone took pictures. I had no grand plan to use images to redefine personal growth. I discovered the world of photography when I bought my first SLR camera, a Minolta. The Minolta showed me that photographs did not just document memories but hint at something I'd like to think goes beyond the ephemera of our unstudied lives.&nbsp;</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">As young adults we approach life purposefully. We are schooled to believe we map where we are going. Six decades into a life I find purpose comically wanting. &nbsp;When we dig beneath the skin, we are not very different from each other. Perceptions, like clothing, lifestyle, and occupation, mask the underlying sameness with which we all must struggle to make sense of ourselves, and the lives we can live. In the sameness I believe lurks something awesome and grand that we might touch with well-considered words and images. With purpose we can only see so much. What is the world like beyond the designs of purpose and memory? Here is the stuff of creation, of marvelous tales and breath-pausing images.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/images-and-words-together-may-help-us-pin-dow">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-8465211370822832241?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-16767243878730650112009-08-26T11:19:00.001-07:002009-08-26T11:19:48.211-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/KMUNPPmD1maa1hezSK0E0JfYXl0bREv8cgUFBtjuW6tZ16fhg6R2gGUhvD4S/Cauliflower_Tomato_Basil_Tarra.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/Z6ZC0xd9RMcDviHc6NBllOk3EJsdZZtKsXASifLFz8E3u5JPt1Hf2g0C2uqU/Cauliflower_Tomato_Basil_Tarra.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="334"/></a> <p>As summer comes to a close, my herb garden on the deck facing the lake morphs into everything I shall miss when the season ends. Tarragon, I discovered today, is wonderful in salads. I didn't even tear the leaves up so when a leaf is included in the mouthful the flavor and aroma stands out, pure gustatory sensation flooding the tongue and mouth. <br />&nbsp;<br />Cauliflower is also underrated but its texture is priceless especially when simply stewed with fresh tomatoes and herbs and a few drops of extra virgin olive oil.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendejoes.posterous.com/tarragon-in-later-summer-dishes">Duende Joes</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-1676724387873065011?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-35263731251718385402009-08-25T14:50:00.001-07:002009-08-25T14:50:43.120-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/Ywgnl8b6zYOyL2qhRQVEqW4uh4jAlCJMn5dihHS5xfpWs1khScMTABc3G6JS/Blueberry_Rice_Supper_2744.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/CpoGNdzJPyYWCdTrZ0IPBT6eBPzOKF6aX4oy0dlfP9EFd2w8aBNn9hN7YjhF/Blueberry_Rice_Supper_2744.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="334"/></a> <p>I have not done much cooking at home this past month. Quality Improvement applied to lifestyles is ongoing as it is in the corporate world. Unlike the Obama administration on the abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects I must move on. Dukkha (in Buddhist practice, what we feel when we don't have something we want or have something we don't want) eggs us to make karmic changes in how we live our lives. <br />&nbsp;<br />Last night's supper resulted in discovering how blueberries can add not only color but flavor to rice. The inspiration came from a book on Spanish foods featuring a simple recipe for rice cooked with fresh tomatoes and herbs. No sauces, just veggies sautéed in the lightest film of olive oil and cooked rice added to the pan. It's a gentler version of Chinese fried rice, the flavors at once fresher and more refreshing.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendejoes.posterous.com/blueberry-rice">Duende Joes</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-3526373125171838540?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-78283265287380615742009-08-25T14:15:00.001-07:002009-08-25T14:15:20.590-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/26K53hENthBBOWoceiMvCG6MSaNMPprhstq4IWE0i8WriwWBPrQB7oCKOeT0/Arron_7244p.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/1xKeg9Ap42bVlJ8sQa3pKvcNTB4EUX6CyMEUvfOZREV91nHpM5IBEJgb07wV/Arron_7244p.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="519"/></a> <p>I have been reviewing my model shoots to see what photo images fit my idea of what to post in the new website. This time I am not going to post all the photos from the shoots that I have processed. The new Duende Arts website will have a specific objective: to post products to begin to move into a money-earning phase of the business of photography, videos and writing. <br />&nbsp;<br />Even more than I felt before I started this review I find myself wanting to hone my image processing skills. The images are considerably better in terms of color correction than the images I have on my current website but now I need to work on making these images of striking quality. <br />&nbsp;<br />As I contemplate reviewing Photoshop techniques for image-processing, I am reminded how I need to work on lighting and exposure techniques again. I also need to resume working on videos while dipping my foot in FCP again. <br />&nbsp;<br />Meanwhile Apple has announced its new system upgrade, Snow Leopard, from Leopard. The slight change in name might reflect Apple's acknowledgement that this upgrade does not bring about major changes in the OS although full support for 64 bit should, once implemented by software developers, make for a significant increase in processing speed for those of us with multi-core computers. <br />&nbsp;<br />I especially look forward to integration with Microsoft's core software so that using Apple's iCal and Address Book I automatically access the comparable data in my Microsoft business software. Apple takes an important step in making Apple software more attractive to business and corporate users! <br />&nbsp;<br />But where's the Blu-Ray support?</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/rethinking-model-photography-in-light-of-the">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-7828326528738061574?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-81816851049802936902009-08-21T10:23:00.001-07:002009-08-21T10:23:27.978-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/U9OuDij1Ei5UoI3UA4bcpnyXFzh0wRQ5MZQEgPt5MfARiS1ZzL4HrsDOEXqJ/DA_Web_Home1.tiff.converted.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/6TOVknJOJr4pxPxvrV92s9Xi3jA4o1NhacT1iBiBZt8N6dIm6E43NqCRmpSG/DA_Web_Home1.tiff.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="588"/></a> </div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">This is, so far, how the front page of the new Duende Arts website looks. I want a more modern look to the site. Black is elegant but I want change. I still want simple but not too simple, and not the elegant look many art photographers have on their site. I like a straightforward, simple look. I have learned from launching that first iWeb-created site. Less information, more white space, ease of use, presenting just the information I want visitors to have.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/the-new-duende-arts-website-takes-shape">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-8181685104980293690?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-84959743753237111932009-08-20T11:15:00.001-07:002009-08-20T11:15:49.010-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/aJgvAXlWXSbnZFKc4as0oKyODndZsIIKIXAFKlVgbpJ0IRiLpEUk3oKi13uY/Greg_1229.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/ETAFH7k6V0kged0Mt6FLVvBIWZe7An2mnTuPKyuXmRJnnT5L8c5fE98KR7Jv/Greg_1229.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="311"/></a> <p>I have been looking at the images I shot of Greg and his girlfriend, Jaz. Since completing the shoot is unlikely now I have decided to process the shoot as I would have done had we finished it. I am pleasantly surprised at how many good shots we were able to take in the uncompleted shoot. This is one of my favorites, with an element of unintended humor. I hope Greg goes farther with his modeling ambition. If he can get over some of his natural qualms he has the potential. <br />&nbsp;<br />You can view the set so far posted here: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/karuna71/3840568992/in/set-72157618679412656/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/karuna71/3840568992/in/set-72157618679412656/</a></p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/greg-redux-reviewing-images-from-the-shoot-wi">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-8495974375323711193?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-45255965156890553082009-08-19T09:23:00.001-07:002009-08-19T09:23:09.786-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/135rvmMpVK2IxM1NBKvMEROiNJKx3BylSEwqdJriWpP4FFbQLJXlXj4k26iB/Greg_BW1263.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/l6Gt8bOcEJO6yDHnRtePB6R7sZ8WwRKNfAlemCQJz07DSHw62CYrCfEkf2Cj/Greg_BW1263.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="749"/></a> </div><p /><div>I have not done a model shoot since May when I shot Greg and his girlfriend, Jazmine. He was going to come back and finish the shoot but the shoot was never completed. I have not processed most of the shoot because I was waiting for it to be completed so I could view the shoot as a whole. That is not likely to happen now so little by little I am processing the images from the shoot.</div><p /><div>I still think I am not ready to offer photography and video services to the public. I am not happy with the level of expertise that I have acquired from exploring digital imagery the last two years. I think I have come some ways. Certainly, just being able to shoot live models was a major break for me. I still think of the end of 2012 as my business launch year. Meanwhile there is a lot for me to learn. However I have a feeling I'll be making major changes in my work activities by early 2009. I have started working with videos and I love videos even more today than I did when I took that first certification seminar on FCP.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>At lunch yesterday I perused the latest issue of Details. A dozen or more pages came inside the cover before any editorial page appeared. I was not impressed so much with the fashion photographs as I was with how the images were shot and displayed. I came home and started to process some model images, including this from the Greg shoot.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/change-is-due-in-my-imaging-activities-and-in">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-4525596515689055308?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-86484565172057916482009-08-18T13:41:00.001-07:002009-08-18T13:41:32.392-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/naadBSNaOTCzVHTq7SF6RtawQH68yB4G5xaxFPC7cCGZx8VAL6dDpPHc7aQQ/Brandon_Torso_6098.jpg" width="384" height="640"/> </div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">In the September issue of <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Details</i></span>, magazine editor, Daniel Perez, writes about overhearing a guy buying "skinny jeans" as Perez, too, was doing but asking his buddy, "Dude, do these make me look gay?"</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">Gay has definitely become more commonplace in our vocabulary. If homosexuality is still deemed a sin by the conservative majority, gayness (especially lesbianism) has become equated with cool. Straight guys have even adopted gay mannerisms and straight male lifestyle has slowly feminized as feminine values have grown in stature in the larger community, especially among the hip young.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">Last night I watched John Hamburg's <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>I Love You, Man</i></span>, a comedic treatment of this change in how we view masculinity. There was <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Will and Grace</i></span> in 1998, then <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Queer Eye for the Straight Guy</i></span> in 2003, then the Judd Apatow phenomenon starting with <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>The 40 Year Old Virgin </i></span>in 2005. I<span style="font-size: 18px;"><i> love You, Man</i></span> stars two from Apatow's stable, Paul Rudd and Jason Segel (seen together, too, in Forgetting Sarah Marshall). Rudd plays Peter Klaven about whom his new fiancée confides to her three BFFs that she was worried because he had no male best friend. One friend warns her he could become too controlling or too dependent on her if he has no male friend with whom to spend time and energy away from her. Peter shocked consults his younger brother, a gay man, about the fine details of finding a best friend. He was startlingly dismayed at his attempts until Segel, playing Sydney, walks into his open house to sell Lou Ferrigno's Hollywood palace. The two hit it off to the point that Peter's fiancée, Zooey (played by Rashida Jones) becomes jealous. At a Rush concert, the two guys are so caught up in the music and their male bonding that Zooey felt ignored.</div><p /><div style="text-align: left;">The movie is not without a flaw. Some of the acting appears too pat, too (I hate to say it) stereotypical but the behavior of the two new-found friends is not only hilarious but reminiscent of the playfulness that boys have with each other until hormones and sex enter the picture and peer approval controls how they express their affection for their buddies. I think the "new male comedy" invented by Apatow is just right on, including (and maybe, for me, especially) the crude sexuality of the jokes is refreshing. A viewer described the movie as "smarter than most." Comedy often tends to make us like fools again but sometimes under the ribald tomfoolery is a basic and profound wisdom about how societal pendulums swing from side to side, hopefully in time describing a full circle.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/our-changing-takes-on-maleness-and-male-frien">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-8648456517205791648?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-17765047276360621812009-08-18T10:31:00.001-07:002009-08-18T10:31:47.833-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/gAJmJP5332toxlYERSDs7EJ7kKymKBxdKOpoHPbtN42LU0nekpfyjSILOmCQ/Holliday_Park2_P1030056.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/hvvqj6KUy9KgGu4lx7IYlrLQXPZZtMvOoDMPipZOi9MwFdkTz3aItEEsWVVa/Holliday_Park2_P1030056.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="252"/></a> <p>Saturday afternoon, hot and muggy as it was, I decided to veer off my way home from Half Price Books on the West Side down Spring Mill Road to check out Holliday Park. I found a trail listing for the park in my $1 copy of hikes in Indiana and had planned to check it out some early morning and take pictures of the river where the trails ended. The park was a favorite decades ago when I would take out-of-town visitors to see the "ruins," a weird collection of walls and columns that at one time spouted water. There was no water on the unusual fountain when I first visited the park in the 1970s. I would enter by the south gate and park close to the ruins. I think I took pictures of the fountain although goodness knows where those pictures are now. I never explored the rest of the park. <br />&nbsp;<br />Saturday there was some kind of gathering of African-American families at the park. I didn't want to intrude into their activities so walked toward the nature center. It was closed. Behind it was a path that led to overgrown wildflowers taller than a man. A trail led out of the sunlit wildflower area into the trees. I didn't expect the trail to be the beginning of a system of trails, sometimes dirt, sometimes stone and concrete, sometimes wood that became stairs up steep hills and down into the White River. I spent more than hours exploring the trails. I was a little leery of being alone in the woods. An evil-minded stranger could easily have mugged me. There were few others on the trail. I asked a young woman who was there with her boyfriend where a trail led. She told me it went under the bridge to the other side of Meridian Street. This was the trail I had intended to check out. <br />&nbsp;<br />Down at the river I saw this other young woman who had loosed her two dogs to play in the shallows. At the other side of Meridian, I chatted with a woman who had brought her two boys there to play barefoot in the mud and water. They were about six and eight years old. While other people were thronging the malls, these people were in the middle of wilderness that looked unlike the city most of us know. <br />&nbsp;<br />I took 233 photos while at the park. Many of them were blurred. I was using my Lumix pocket point-and-shoot, the camera I use most of the time nowadays for being small and light enough to tuck into my back pocket when I went on a walk or hike. The resolution is not great but I've taken more photos with this tiny camera this year than I have with my Canon cameras. To think that I didn't use the camera for over a year after I bought it. I couldn't get the hang of composing on an LCD screen rather than in a viewfinder. Now I love it! I can hold the camera near the ground or above my head. This was what made me fall in love with digital cameras many years ago with my tiny 1 MB Sony. I still mourn losing that camera when someone broke into my office in Broad Ripple. I could tilt that camera for a view of the light that totally changed the picture I was taking. The Lumix does not seem to allow this but its small size makes positioning the camera in versatile ways that makes up for the stability of a tripod.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/holliday-park-is-a-hidden-natural-gem">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-1776504727636062181?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-63761536052561881192009-08-16T07:31:00.001-07:002009-08-16T07:31:29.252-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/Lmxx8B1GFOCW7mTYQ841G4yDvxXOpmDLhw2cKF16LaAcVxdGeQcIXzPUIjce/St._Mark_Tympanum_4623.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/2B81VxTUfq02hIG8jVYeSkUMpluyhgGcAknV6fdXNvjsWY2Vzqo9rceLQm3C/St._Mark_Tympanum_4623.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="267"/></a> <p /><div>A participant in the life and struggles of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. for more than a decade, I heard of John Shelby Spong many years ago. I first heard of the controversial former bishop of Newark when the media trumpeted his debunking of the dogma of the Virgin Birth of Jesus. I was caught up in my own struggle with my Christian faith and didn't look up the bishop's views.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>Half Price Books here at Castleton has been my serendipitous source of books. Last week it yielded me a dollar clearance copy of Spong's <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Why Christianity Must Change Or Die<span style="font-size: medium;">.</span><span style="font-size: medium;">&nbsp;</span></i></span>He was scheduled to retire from the bishop's chair in 2001 so&nbsp;this was in effect a manifesto summing up the 21 years he had spent as bishop (from the Greek,&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>episkopos</i></span>, from&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>epi</i></span>&nbsp;'above' +&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>skopos</i></span>&nbsp;'-looking') and defining his faith for himself and his flock. In particular, he addressed the book to "my audience of seekers and searchers, to those who are either members of the church alumni association or who still hang onto their Christian identity by the skin of their teeth."</div><p /><div>Today if forced to categorize myself between these two groups I would have to say I am a "church alumnus" but perhaps like the bishop himself since this book was published I don't merit even this category. I feel I have moved out completely from the two categories the good bishop addressed in 1998. What I am hanging onto by the skin of my teeth is not Christian identity or even &nbsp;theistic belief in God but religion itself.</div><p /><div>For years the people who have entered my life tell me they are "not&nbsp;religious&nbsp;but&nbsp;spiritual."&nbsp;These&nbsp;are&nbsp;largely&nbsp;educated,&nbsp;worldly&nbsp;sophisticated&nbsp;and&nbsp;materially&nbsp;successful&nbsp;Americans&nbsp;and&nbsp;Europeans&nbsp;whose&nbsp;fundamental&nbsp;stance&nbsp;was&nbsp;profoundly&nbsp;challenged&nbsp;on&nbsp;September&nbsp;11,&nbsp;2001&nbsp;when&nbsp;the&nbsp;U.S.&nbsp;was&nbsp;attacked&nbsp;by&nbsp;Islamic&nbsp;fundamentalists.&nbsp;Islam&nbsp;is&nbsp;still&nbsp;largely&nbsp;a&nbsp;religion&nbsp;of&nbsp;people&nbsp;who&nbsp;like&nbsp;the&nbsp;minority&nbsp;but&nbsp;vocal&nbsp;Christian&nbsp;fundamentalists&nbsp;cling&nbsp;to&nbsp;outdated&nbsp;notions&nbsp;about&nbsp;God&nbsp;and&nbsp;religion&nbsp;in&nbsp;the&nbsp;face&nbsp;of&nbsp;scientific&nbsp;and&nbsp;technological&nbsp;discoveries&nbsp;they nonchalantly use daily without seeing their incompatibility with what they believe.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/bishop-spongs-reinventing-christianity">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-6376153605256188119?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-70265796071276040552009-08-14T12:02:00.001-07:002009-08-14T12:02:30.817-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/IVf4jNna5VWARLh5RhCJCFMj86TpJKcMEbKoEunnaTJVShOGBqwChVrrMmVM/Summer_Lake_Boating_P1020976.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/HqSu7iwYJjtQmLjMGdV5hfiMShwKEqtbvnsNX9KNcMP4xd7375xRkFO4oayp/Summer_Lake_Boating_P1020976.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="269"/></a> <p>I was walking to the car intent only on getting out of the heat again when I saw my neighbor, Kelley, leisurely watering and deadheading his border. We exchanged pleasantries and the topic quickly devolved into the hot, humid weather. <br />&nbsp;<br />"I love it!" Kelley said. <br />&nbsp;<br />"This heat, this humidity? Even walking is a struggle!" <br />&nbsp;<br />"When it's summer I want to feel summer," Kelley explained. <br />&nbsp;<br />In the evening, he sits on his deck looking out on the lake. "Maybe I won't enjoy it as much if a pleasant breeze did not blow in from the lake. I've seen owls flying by with their prey in their beaks. One time I saw a hawk fly so low I felt the air stirred by its wings." <br />&nbsp;<br />After saying goodbye, I hurried on into the refuge of my air-conditioned car. Kelley's words kept echoing in my head. He's right. We should be so lucky. Our senses are intact and we can feel life on our skin, our eyes, and our ears, an ever-changing cornucopia of sensations we take so for granted. <br />&nbsp;<br />Kelley's words finally hit me today. I stopped at the community beach when I saw this pontoon boat moored in the lake. Oceans and seas are what I dream about when I think of water but this tiny bucket of water, this little backyard lake, is as pleasant to the senses, and imminently here now. <br />&nbsp;<br />Some people have the natural knack for enjoying the physical world. They glory in their bodies. Some of us, like me, spend our lives in our minds. There is no dichotomy here but shouldn't I enjoy the body, too, as I enjoy the mind? Summer gives precedence to bodily experience. The sun, the heat, the scarce and precious breeze, the laboring breath as we walk briskly through soupy air: instead of fighting off the sensations we can glory in it. <br />&nbsp;<br />Five times a day Muslim imams invite other Muslims to acknowledge the glory of the one God. God is all this, and heaven, too.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/the-annual-rediscovery-of-summer">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-7026579607127604055?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-22799758835644896972009-08-12T09:07:00.001-07:002009-08-12T09:07:35.558-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/gPZNjgKNOF4RYvDdUHjXUzym7nhgTuE6eGPDoJh4mbc6FmcuDnNYoClDNOGc/Oval_Beach_Dunes_20090803_0159.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/rI5YEhGjvM4AkQIoYoFaDBGcVlX5mZHUhZ1roYksrLCCWRligAcOvqgz7s4c/Oval_Beach_Dunes_20090803_0159.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <p>Still and video photography are coming together in the same device. Witness the amazing Canon EOS 5D Mark II and Nikon D5000. But for older camcorder owners like me, the old truism prevails. Forget taking a good still photograph on a video camcorder! Today I scrounged around for the USB cable for my Sony HDV HC7 to download the accumulated images I've recently taken with the camera when it was the only camera I had to take still photos. Processing these on Photoshop also showed the limitations of the camcorder for taking still images. Nonetheless, I would not have had even these images if the camcorder didn't have a still photo option! <br />&nbsp;<br />Michigan in the summer is my closest heaven. I love the sound of crashing waves, the fine-sand beaches that seem to stretch forever, and dunes to climb, feet sinking into warm sand that turn surprisingly cold as the feet sink under the sun-warmed surface. Michigan is sensory paradise for someone who grew up on islands surrounded by the wildly blue Pacific.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/michigan-summer-paradise-of-the-senses">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2279975883564489697?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-9334028403178293822009-08-11T08:32:00.001-07:002009-08-11T08:32:59.072-07:00<div><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/tdlFDhkiDgnzh4UIWkYXiXOKOj6qT16Z7NVk0PkJvrQrmBoV5A5FdRtGYRxt/Tunnel_Beach_Dune_Top_2612.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/CpMH8dGxvnpsKCwdiBEPSmX59Evk45emEVb74wXUmt6IcsFWmi2xaFgZ42LU/Tunnel_Beach_Dune_Top_2612.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="334"/></a> </div><p /><div><p class="Body">This morning’s practice involved additional readings from <i style="">Meditations from the Tantras</i>, a collection of essays centered around the teachings of the Dashnami sannyasin, Swami Satyananda Saraswati. Preceding the core of the book, a collection of specific meditation techniques taught by the swami, were essays introducing the teachings at the Bihar School of Yoga that he founded in 1964. Satyananda was a student of Sivananda whose books I have enjoyed through the years. This book on tantric meditations is &nbsp;more recent than Sivananda's books although it was published in 1983. Its teachings are decidedly more ecumenical, including in its broad statements about the efficacy of technique all the major religious traditions of mind-cultivating practices like Christian mysticism and Zen.</p><p class="Body">My practice is largely founded on the Theravadin scriptural and oral traditions. The bulk of my study has focused on the various Buddhist schools in Asia, and more recently, the translations and commentaries by European and American scholars. My work in yoga has been largely based on Patanjali's synthesis and teachings from Thakor Patel, a disciple of Shri Kripalvanandji. Satyananda's book blurs the distinction between Buddhist and Yogic teachings. The book proposes an end goal of practice not dissimilar from what Buddhism teaches: the elimination of ignorance. Ignorance, as also taught in Buddhism, is ignorance of who or what we are and the profound ramifications this has on how we perceive and live life.</p><p class="Body">In describing "the experience of dhyana," Satyananda waxes poetical: "Life becomes so joyful so that it needs no ambition, no justification, no reason: it is sufficient <span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>just to be</i></span>."</p><p class="Body">Manuals of style recommend that the writer avoid hyperbole. To make statements of exaggerated truth makes the whole work suspect. Ordinary life is imminently ordinary. Only in poetry is hyperbolic sweetness condoned. Perhaps only in poetry and in what to me is a similar state, the experience of the sacred, do our minds shift from immersion in the ordinary to be torn free to experience a fuller, more vivid reality unhindered by rationality and intellectuality. Bach's music is intellectually mathematical and perfect but its real impact comes when we forget the architectural construction of the pieces and lose ourselves in the music itself. Living the music is a different function of mind. Dhyana is understood as approaching the limits of mind itself. When consciousness breaks out of the confinement of mind, subject and object become identical. In that union is unlimited space and time, both aspects of experience dissolving into the simplest terms.</p><p class="Body">I remember a Japanese Zen monk at Barre when I was there to study the elements of Pali. The monk was not in his robes but had not yet given them up. He was seeking a way to return the robes, gifts of a community he was no longer in touch with. He described why he was not sure he wanted to pursue the practice. In his meditation practice, he felt he was losing himself and that was sheer terror.&nbsp;</p><p class="Body">The majesty of freedom is an amalgamation of all the possible emotions a human being experiences. Like flour, yeast, salt and water, they unite into a common substance, dough, although this metaphor too is flawed. Substance exists when there is someone outside substance that apprehends it. The agent that apprehends is what we refer to in ordinary, unenlightened life as "I". The concept is so ubiquitous that we don't see "I" anymore. We become absorbed in the delusion. This is ordinarily what we call being practical.</p><p class="Body">Satyananda writes that someone who touches and lives in the nameless still operates in the world of forms. There just is no longer identification with the forms. The forms, whether self or other, are shapes of eternity passing like the shadows of numberless days, numberless years, centuries and aeons beyond count.</p> </div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/this-mornings-practice">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-933402840317829382?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-72328666222466502832009-08-11T07:47:00.001-07:002009-08-11T07:47:47.672-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/8MoNK4BfdSN7I2WdFLb3AWY69y1HNHevogMF5cyt1cqpVWTUoUExF4Hj9YWX/More_Endive_2727.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/ye5XzgmV92EjAzgvviv94aGogLev8udjav9jPSEqyLs3UxP4wnzy10YhF0Lo/More_Endive_2727.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="301"/></a> <p>I came out to water the plants on the deck this morning and found that the endive has sprung a handful of flowers. Yesterday's one bloom had shriveled up. The flowers apparently live just a day. Dozens of buds continue to sprout on what now appears to be an extended flower stalk for the normally low-growing endive. Its surprise flowers are certainly among this season's most pleasant discoveries!</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/the-seasons-highlight-surprise">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-7232866622246650283?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-14352772846193007972009-08-10T09:01:00.001-07:002009-08-10T09:01:02.509-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/c5hVOcsDjvjBoSxqv5Ovpr8QiYNhR4qnE0kk2jRyebJq5YD1YB1TEfNSeklk/Endive_Flower_2694.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/DhffqqxNSRXDf36jfq2hotDrXWSA4hnhJJZdTQnexnp7xa84d8X0rWSPoquq/Endive_Flower_2694.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="300"/></a> <p>Lighting and the unusual make for interesting photography. This morning while watering the plants on the deck in anticipation of another sweltering summer day, I discovered that the endive that had grown an unusual foot-long growth from which extended strange appendages was actually blooming. This was the first of the buds to bloom. A discovery like this is one of gardening's chief pleasures, and coincidentally, photography's as well. <br />&nbsp;<br />I do want to resume doing tutorials in both Photoshop and the craft of taking photographs. I feel I've rested long enough and need additional processing skills to advance my photography work.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/endives-surprise-purple-flower">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-1435277284619300797?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-23414201082954494622009-08-05T05:15:00.001-07:002009-08-05T05:15:35.825-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/exXvli5Kv8YGBPootAeabfWsJf37hJBclxTqsnGtYjLnxE6aaZMf2wgUAxuj/Sunflower_P1020823.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/yRQkDIgm6JBp9LPR2bNzlHjpuZOlNmaFeNlPH8VqX2ElekWEVsVZd0OT6rWt/Sunflower_P1020823.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="266"/></a> <p>We're driving back to Indiana today and I'm ready to be back home again but the trip here to Holland and Western Michigan has been wonderful! I love the sound of waves on the lake and the landscape of cascading froth rushing and crashing on miles of smooth, sandy beaches. For two nights I indulged myself on 12-ounce prime rib, something I rarely have back home. Here at Spectators on the outskirts of Saugatuck, prime rib is at its best. Is it just memory perhaps that makes anything delectable, something we would travel miles to experience again? <br />&nbsp;<br />After visiting the Dutch sites in Holland, we drove down to Saugatuck where we spent the bulk of the day. Brock was delirious with happiness as he played at the children's area at Butler. He went back for seconds after lunch at Pumpernickel. Later we drove to Wave Crest where Linda bought plants for the shady hillside leading to the lake at her new/old home in Carthage. I bought a Japanese evergreen for the empty spot on shaded border for $25. Wave Crest has some of the most unusual plants but they apparently relocated their exotic birds to Grand Rapids eight years ago. One of the gardeners was incredulous when I asked her about the birds. She can't believe I hadn't been there in at least eight years. <br />&nbsp;<br />It was fun revisiting sites in the area I had not visited in ten to fifteen years. We drove out to Crane Farms and found ourselves in the You-Pick-It area where I bought a dozen plump peaches newly picked from the trees surrounding us. I sampled the fruit before buying the lot. It tasted of Michigan water, air and sky!</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/holland-on-my-mind">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2341420108295449462?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-54006345786108680982009-08-03T07:38:00.001-07:002009-08-03T07:38:55.424-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/R165SpIKcHsyXmwD1IKZxwcQjvOZkwQiYXgLKzAceMQfD2V1WZnXePBe2Wzo/Japanese_Festival_P1020738.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/0i7FYJFcrYuSvwouhaJg3WW9Wes0SRsD9PC0n0ETaTJ4NaDX7CprO0iskngP/Japanese_Festival_P1020738.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <p>For some reason, iMovie keeps reporting an error when I capture from tape with stabilization analysis. I end up having to manually stabilize as much as 3/4 of the capture. Still the feature has been incredibly useful for my handheld shots. At the Japanese festival yesterday, eM took over the camcorder. She is good with chatting people up while shooting them and their kids. The footage is very shaky. It reminds me of what I used to shoot before I got more careful to hold the camera really steady. It's hard to do with a small camcorder but small has meant I shoot more footage. Using the large, heavy camcorder I seldom took it out to shoot. It works best for studio shoots. <br />&nbsp;<br />August was the month I decided I would switch to capturing and editing video on FCP. I had not banked on FC Suite getting upgraded but that actually worked well. I have not yet started using FCP. I need to do the Lynda tutorial for the FCS3 but will need to do the essential FCP7 tutorials as well. It's been so long since I've used FCP. And I never used Motion or Color. The task is daunting but I can't let that discourage me.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/capturing-video-on-imovie">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-5400634578610868098?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-85791586937571565202009-08-02T19:10:00.001-07:002009-08-02T19:10:27.176-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/Re6hOSxsQu4jtqyajS3kCKMEpbiwfjqrinE04K7pl0jTGFFq687iWeruluEC/Japanese_Festival_P1020733.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/JWtB69asJwCoMz7WAbzMdJ275b9clPvxSvNVRMuOXZDoMwtJ6aGftDrxh0Of/Japanese_Festival_P1020733.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="269"/></a> <p>I just got back from attending the Japanese summer festival with Minda, Luz and Yoichi. We had a good time. Minda (who likes to be called eM) shot some footage. I can hardly wait to look at what she shot. She used to paint and I think has a creative streak. Yoichi won the best male dancer prize, a bag of short-grain Japanese brown rice! <br />&nbsp;<br />I am driving up to Saugatuck tomorrow at 10:30 with Linda and Brock and I have not even started packing. It is ten o'clock Sunday night and I am tired. So I'll probably go to bed and just wake up early to pack. I want to take pictures and videos although I finished my third video this morning called The 14 Weekends of Saugatuck. It's a compilation of video and still shots from two trips I took to Saugatuck in 2007. I didn't go up there at all last year.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/japanese-summer-festival">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-8579158693757156520?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-47291505197051163892009-07-31T07:48:00.001-07:002009-07-31T07:48:22.855-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/3b7KgBRJNVuGBivyERdek5glJqNtCc7rzvts7lpNttTt2wfBLhnwxIpEN0N4/Black-Eyed_Susans_P1020705.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/5TzK9AImO0ey1ZGjWc1LNBlWzl1rCvPoMf8KaKl2mQrAYVZVAKYeKnuh6quT/Black-Eyed_Susans_P1020705.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="281"/></a> <p>I was up before six this morning and on my cushion after a trip to the bathroom. For a change, I went for my daily constitutional before breakfast and took photos in the lovely morning light. The black-eyed susan (rudbeckia) is in their glory, along with autumn sedum.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/early-morning-garden-walk">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-4729150519705116389?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-10834358066742557462009-07-30T12:08:00.001-07:002009-07-30T12:08:23.817-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/gPhKMKdRxZUE2Kh6eMukWJdSNflS0SJfyzZMuvOhaAO2o6ylPVjaaRwrfLzS/Home-Grown_Tomatoes_Square_250.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/ZLhfTIxUzGgQuhob75lGNvMdE5tGvLLw6S2hD6blFRHUeLN07b1X7fmbHsQS/Home-Grown_Tomatoes_Square_250.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="481"/></a> </div><p /><div>When we strip our needs down to the barest minimum, there are only two things necessary for life: oxygenated air and food. Unless you dove below the ocean or flew above the troposphere five to ten miles above the earth's surface, oxygen is abundant and free. Food is ultimately what human beings labor for, according to Jewish scriptures, as price for their disobedience. Everything else is extra.</div><p /><div>No wonder then that food is at the heart of most if not all religious traditions. St. Benedict in his famous Rule that most Western Christian monastics follow devoted several chapters to food and how the monks took it. Chapter 39 deals with the apportionment of food, chapter 40 with drink. The saint recommended two cooked dishes at each meal so monks had a choice. There were two meals a day, at the sixth hour (noon) and the ninth hour (three in the afternoon). Each monk was allotted a pound of bread a day regardless of whether the monks have one or two meals. This was long before Dr. Robert Atkins. Recognizing that individuals had differing needs for the amount of food, St. Benedict did not specify amounts for the rest of the meal. In the summer, when vegetables and fruits are available he recommended a third dish of these fresh produce. In earlier times, monks grew their own vegetables and fruits. He also made allowances for the elderly, the sick, and those who worked harder than usual that day. The flesh of "four-footed" animals was reserved only for the sick.</div><p /><div>The saint wrote his Rule at a time when it was safer to drink wine than to drink water. He would probably have prohibited wine but decided his monks would not accept this so he suggested wine intake be limited to 1/4 liter or 8 ounces a day, again with allowances at the abbot's discretion for the sick and those who performed unusually demanding physical labor that day. Vespers were scheduled to allow for meals to be finished in daylight. All monks took turns at kitchen duty and waiting on each other.</div><p /><div>At Lent, monks were enjoined to observe the 40 days by depriving themselves of usual comforts or adding special activities like more prayers or fasting. The monks submit their intended observance to the abbot who approves or modifies the list based on his knowledge of the monk to avoid "presumption and vainglory." In his concise Rule, St. Benedict shows prescience and common sense, regulating only what needs regulating, and he recognized the importance of food as well as abstinence from food.</div><p /><div>What we know about St. Benedict is largely from his biography written by Gregory the Great who before he became pope himself followed the Rule as a monk. Gregory praised the Rule for its "discretion and clarity of language." I think we could all learn from this sixth century saint and teacher of men (and, later, women) that our lives in the 21st century become once more moderate and healthy.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/food-in-the-early-western-christian-monastic">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-1083435806674255746?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-4335660245791007432009-07-28T08:51:00.001-07:002009-07-28T08:51:24.603-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/qKYwab0NGsszypnJz5lRQtxAiT5uAaUtTtz8gnazOZzQw5wKg6ty1LGcET6K/Saugatuck_Marina_Walk_7143.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/Zx2Zxl1ToqJ18hEGC24kf3F2tNLOkXtzowir5g61niBe7D6HdozkiyvOOxFD/Saugatuck_Marina_Walk_7143.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="275"/></a> <p>Slowly, like an ant making the journey on foot from Indiana to Timbuktu, I am learning to use the many programs I need to master to do videos at the level I want. Doing both video and audio editing on iMovie has been great but I'm limited to the Jingles that come with the program. My royalty-free music comes from SmartSound. I need to start using their music-editing software, SonicPro. SonicPro this year came out with a turn-around plug-in for Final Cut Pro but the new Final Cut Pro Studio also has updated Soundtrack Pro. I also have Logic, for crying out loud! It's an embarrassment of riches and my pace is a crawl! <br />&nbsp;<br />Yesterday I placed over half the video clips into the Saugatuck video that I am currently working on. Editing video on iMovie when I intend to export just the video clips and transitions has been a different work experience. Doing all the edits in iMovie is so much easier but I need to advance to the more powerful programs.</p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/editing-to-music-on-sonicpro">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-433566024579100743?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-49646981508787766012009-07-27T10:41:00.001-07:002009-07-27T10:41:47.367-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/gejCiYAWHB7HPCJu9PcisPK4cvBEUNIrkTSf6DaR9Rs5DlOKU8xA9kyWCcLJ/Masaledar_Sem_Spicey_Green_Bea.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendejoes/wEJk3Yjr16bILa2mM2BIhC3LyEw4KuaAnamgVErOtoNsoy0312XvFUGfoykO/Masaledar_Sem_Spicey_Green_Bea.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="334"/></a> <div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Masaledar Sem </i></span>(Spicey Green Beans)</div><div><br /></div><div>New Indian friends have inspired me to look at Indian cuisine again. Last week, for the first time in years, I toasted spices in a skillet to cook some green beans I had in the fridge. The aroma of roasting cumin was wonderful! I modified the recipe I downloaded from the Internet and did not, among other things, set aside some of the roasted cumin to sprinkle on the finished dish for crunch. I love how in cooking with Indian spices there are so many ways of arriving at the end product. Ginger and garlic are a natural combination, a combination that is greater than the individual parts. When combined, ginger and garlic complement each other, much like two ballet dancers in a <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><i>pas de deux</i></span>. In Indian food, the ingredients are an entire ballet company!</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendejoes.posterous.com/the-strange-pungent-exquisite-indian-palate">Duende Joes</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-4964698150878776601?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-21907896066838840092009-07-27T10:13:00.001-07:002009-07-27T10:13:57.224-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/pe2g6cuKtYP4CF8n30VaHUg2IZkVUA4TCpOA7lVpdpyWIEXjJaLQsxuzvs0O/Open_Window_P1020568.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/HkT0xvlrjmmOeOYTqUEN12mT2ghDnboAf75aY7COrcnUP4dzqqZr75NPOa4A/Open_Window_P1020568.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="273"/></a> <div><br /></div><div>"Fasting had made me more alert and more appreciative of the richness around me. I began to comprehend the sense of life anew, more intensely. This sense is an increasingly rare commodity nowadays, because the sense of the Holy, of things that are completely different, of the profoundly secret, has gradually become lost."<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: right;">Bernhard Müller, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Fasting in the Monastery</i></span></div><div><br /></div><div>The early Christians fled to the desert where they confronted themselves. They called demons those features of the mind that even today, maybe more so today, tempt us to immoderation and thoughtlessness. Distinguishing themselves from other Jews, they set aside Tuesdays and Fridays as fast days (Jews fasted on Mondays and Thursdays) to remind them of the passion of their rabbi, Yeshua (Iesous in Greek, pronounced YAY-sus), that began on Good Friday.</div><div><br /></div><div>When we're fasting, the mind becomes clear as if a giant vacuum cleaner had sucked every detail from the sky—clouds, vestigial moon, flying geese—to leave it an empty blue hemisphere above. When we do see ourselves in this dwarfing landscape, we're as ants, insignificant specks on the vastness of timeless space.</div><div><br /></div><div>In this vast panorama, we are not the center or point of reference. We see how puny our desires are, how utterly silly our pretensions to power and importance.</div><div><br /></div><div>No longer the center of being, everything becomes transmogrified, luminous and fresh. We're back in the garden before we took things into our own hands and lost the primal vision. In the garden, every thing is new, pure and essential. There is nothing here extraneous or unnecessary, and every thing is good.</div><div><br /></div><div>We need to regain this vision of Paradise. All too often we are lost in our own world of thoughts and images, in the project-management attitude we learn early in life. Purpose is great. It pools our resources and directs these towards creation. After a while we forget the true nature of creation. We begin to believe we make things happen, all by ourselves, by our own resources and strength. We forget the deep roots that connect us to worlds of being so vast and empty they boggle the mind. We lose this sense of bogglement. Instead we become comfortable seeing the world from our tiny speck of a reference. Fasting restores us to the whole shebang.</div><div><br /></div><div>And in the whole shebang, everything we see is replete with light. We can even see death and life, not as tragic events we seek to ignore but as natural punctuation marks in a timeless, endless statement that being is. Each time, our sense of ownership loosens somewhat. We see as gods do, the whole panoply of human sadness and joys laid below us like a model train loop, or the valley below when we reach the summit of high mountains.</div><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/an-uncommon-commodity">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-2190789606683884009?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736047424483645579.post-71730080637692290612009-07-26T18:38:00.001-07:002009-07-26T18:38:18.514-07:00<a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/0jtcDVb7GA9Vh91o9mGaqlUrkintVxWODdlWkQI2jqdrxuYaVv7grI559On7/To_Shanghai.tiff.converted.jpg'><img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/duendearts/SWwCcSFnXDI9pv3X10IBPFEFSS1vGFQPJBG9H7YJXqhsv8vRhnJlFj9XCK1V/To_Shanghai.tiff.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" height="279"/></a> <p>This was the first version of the Banthia wedding greeting that I made. This took the longest of the three versions I eventually made from scratch and is, I think, the best of the three in terms of finesse. The audio here is more modulated and the ending almost perfect. <br />&nbsp;<br />The address: <br />&nbsp;<br /><a href="http://gallery.me.com/karuna711#100279">http://gallery.me.com/karuna711#100279</a></p><p style="font-size: 10px;"> <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via email</a> from <a href="http://duendearts.posterous.com/the-longer-banthia-greeting-posted">Duende Arts</a> </p> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5736047424483645579-7173008063769229061?l=duendearts1.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Orlando Gustilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09630593444299953462noreply@blogger.com0