Duende Arts - Journal with Photographs by Orlando Gustilo

June 15, 2009

Creating Priorities in Learning a New Trade

I have been working on iMovie tutorials the past week and processing images just with the little I learned from the first chapters of Chris Orwig's Photoshow CS4 tutorial for photographers. I stopped working on that tutorial just as Chris started to talk about RAW images. Maybe I should go back to that tutorial. I have all the time in the world and no time. There is so much to learn about digital photography and videography. I've assuaged my frustration by giving myself three years to learn a new profession and start earning money again but having to choose what I learn first is challenging enough. I also want to feel the delight of making something I am proud of.

Today, I did my usual routine processing this image. I pressed a keyboard shortcut that turned the image to black-and-white. I like black-and-white. The serendipitous action reminded me of the many other Photoshop techniques I want to learn. I have plenty of digital images to practice on. (I want to improve the quality of the images I am shooting but that's an additional complexity to the challenge of choosing what I do from day to day.) I know I can't zigzag back and forth too much or I won't learn enough of some aspect of the business to really apply what I am learning to products. I am well aware that the challenges I face are mosquito bites compared to what other people face. Still mosquito bites are annoying.

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June 12, 2009

Pioneers in Legitimizing Nude Male Photography as Art

In Naked Men, Pioneering Male Nudes 1935-1955, David Leddick tells a fascinating story of a group of American artists who bolstered the trend resulting in the legitimizing of nude male photography as art. Based in New York city, three men—Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and George Platt Lynes—began an intertwining professional and personal life in the early 1930s that changed art and culture in the city and eventually the country as a whole.

Kirstein started out as an artist, writing then taking dance lessons, but quickly found his forte as art impresario and organizer. With George Balanchine whom he met in Paris in 1933, he founded a ballet school and what became the New York City Ballet. NYCB is one of the triumvirate of quintessential American ballet companies and the company with the largest repertoire, thanks to the genius of its first choreographers, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins.

The bulk of the photographs from the period was created by George Platt Lynes. He did editorial assignments for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar but Leddick notes that he was easily bored by fashion photography. His creativity sought more exciting venues. Through his friendship with Kirstein he did all the program and promotional photography for NYCB and accumulated an impressive collection of male nude photographs featuring ballet dancers. The subtextual connection between ballet and homosexuality was established.

Lynes however did not want to trumpet his homosexuality with the prevailing cultural standards as they were. His nude male photographs were not recognized widely as art until just the last twenty years or so as American society became more comfortable with images of nudity in men. Lynn would recycle sets created for fashion photography to shoot his nude studies. He experimented with dramatic lighting especially back-lighting as in his photograph of Gary Garrett in 1954. Another technique he used that is now commonplace in fashion photography is lighting up the white background to sharpen the model's silhouette and create a three-dimensional, "modeling" effect with softer fill lights

I am a dyed-in-the-wool Freudian. Like Sigmund I conceptualize Eros as more than sexuality. Eros is libido, the primal urge for life that is at the core of desire and creativity. People uncomfortable with themselves try to hush up or deny the power of Eros and intellectualize beauty. Beauty can be intellectual but it would not have remained such a vital force in our lives if it were not intimately linked to body and our physical senses. Erotic energy can be destructive, too. Life and death are opposite sides of the same coin. When out of balance and immoderate Eros can limit our lives that it becomes trivialized and unhealthy. Obsessions turn subtle features into gross caricatures. To me the challenge of creating art is to find the thin edge between subtlety and denial, a target I have yet to find.

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June 10, 2009

Writing Fiction, Riding Horses

I am reading Paul Russell’s fifth novel, War Against the Animals. It pits the old-time inhabitants of a Hudson Valley town against the invading cultured, moneyed gay men fleeing Manhattan with their love for old things. The two protagonists come from the two camps. Cameron is an older gay man enjoying a remission in his AIDS illnesses. His last lover who had induced him to move to Arcadia had just left him. He reminisces about his past, about the boy who bullied him in grade school, about the Jewish boy he met in college who became his best friend, about the lover he was most fond of, the highlight of his love life. He talks about his continuing attraction to fresh, young men but when presented by the other protagonist, a 19-year-old closeted local, with the opportunity to act on his desires, Cameron chose to leave them in the realm of the imagination.

Writing fiction is beyond me. I recognize what makes up the artistic process. I dissected frogs in high school. That dissecting skill persists into the present. I can analyze how a group like Maroon5 worked to earn their first Platinum album. I can even see how a novel like War Against the Animals is constructed, how the Russell takes a piece of landscape and turns it into the stage for his work of fiction. I can see how characters are created and how they create the plot by being who they are. I can see how the reader can identify with the character and how this process too is created. On one hand, it appears so logical and too simple; on the other, how wonderful this sleight of hand!

Novels can be escapes from our ordinary lives. They can offer present conflicts beautifully solved. When written well, they are indistinguishable from the ordinary life we are living. Both, after all, are conceptual products, creations of the mind. What is real is long dead. When some event is happening, when it is still alive, we can't grasp it. We are in its grasp. Only after the moment to change direction has passed do we see what happened. The present flows through our fingers like the finest sand, impossible to keep in the hand; it must flow. Fiction is a reconstruction of flowing sand. It's art that I admire. It's art I envy but then if envy were horses, we'd all be riding!

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June 9, 2009

Houttuynia Cordata Invades the June Perennial Garden

Houttuynia cordata invades the border. It has taken over the largest border in the garden, even slipping under the concrete path to cross over to another border. I bought it for its many-hued leaves but most of the plants that come up every year have deep green leaves, which is fine with me. In early June, the plants are 2 feet tall and cover every available space in the border. They bring out tiny, stark white flowers that ordinarily may not be conspicuous at all but when there's a wide area of them the effect is stunning! After they bloom I hew them down to allow the other plants a chance to make it through the rest of summer.

Gardening is an ongoing revelation. I like the borders wild, packed with plants. It's survival of the fittest. I have one rose bush left. The others succumbed, choked out by the more invasive plants like houttuynia. Then again my modus operandi is laissez faire. I don't deadhead in autumn so plants seed themselves freely. I never quite know how the garden is going to look each year as the plants relocate themselves. I guess I am far from being a garden designer. I set some conditions for the plants and let them make their own space.

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June 6, 2009

Culinary Herbs

Summer is here! On the lake, families gambol and recline on colorful towels on the tiny beach near the entrance of the community. On the water pontoon boats float by silent as invading armies. Kayaks are the only speedsters allowed on the six-acre postage-size lake. On my porch herbs swelter in the sun. Soon they'll allow me perhaps summer's most splendid gift—fresh herbs and vegetables for the kitchen!

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June 6, 2009

The Perennial Garden in Early June

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June 6, 2009

Walking on the Monon Trail

Despite what local promoters (the city mayors, the convention center people) say, Indianapolis just does not pop up among the first places people, even people in the Midwest, think of driving to visit on a gorgeous summer day. For locals though the city has delights galore. One of these is the Indy Greenway the jewel of which, in my biased estimation, is the Monon Trail.

The trail follows the abandoned rail bed of the Indianapolis, Delphi and Chicago Railroad Company organized in 1869. The railroad line became known as the Monon because its two main lines, Michigan City to Louisville and Chicago to Indianapolis, intersected in Monon, Indiana. The first section of the trail, from Nora to Broad Ripple, opened in 1996. I was one of the first to enjoy it. The trail was later extended all the way south to 10th Street in downtown Indianapolis and up north to 146th Street in Carmel, a total of 15 miles of pure joy for bikers, runners and the slowpoke walkers like me. Throughout its course, the trail passes over the White River and a dozen other smaller waterways, past backyards and woodlands, through the busy Broadripple and Nora neighborhoods, under the Monon Center in Carmel, veritable slices of the cities' landscapes. The photo was taken just north of 96th Street in the Carmel section of the trail where it dives under the trees for a woodland look. The late afternoon sunshine lanced through the trees to create intriguing little images. You can see a few more images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/karuna71/. I have dozens of photos I took since early spring this year that I plan to post to the site as well.

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June 5, 2009

Return to Paradise, Dumangas, Iloilo

My sister, April, and her husband are visiting the U.S. this fall. I can't believe how fast the time has flown. Can it be more than two years ago when my older sister, Merma, and I visited them in the Philippines? I have not even looked at all the photos I shot on that trip! Here is one image from several that I am downloading to my Flickr site (http://www.flickr.com/photos/karuna71/) later today.

Our hosts had taken us along the coastal road running along the eastern shoreline of Panay Island. This road is new. It wasn't built when I lived there. We picked it up at Lopez Jaena Street where the street used to end in a dike. Beyond were farms planted to watermelon and peanuts and coconut groves. Fishermen went out in their boats from Baluarte. Old women carried the fish and shellfish, many still wriggling, the fish gills still pumping for air, in woven bamboo trays on their heads. They would pass by my grandmother's house. My lola had suki, fish vendors from she bought fish often. They knew what she liked and would come into the garden and up the walk to the kitchen door to show what they had. Those were times of innocence. Fish was poor people's food. Seafood was plentiful and I didn't appreciate the feast until now when the sea's bounty is no longer as plentiful. I heard much of the fish from the overfished surrounding waters were being exported to America where they sold for much wanted dollars. The locals have to content themselves with the rejects.

Sixty years later I bemoan the times long gone. Back then, the freshly caught deep-sea fish, crustaceans, and mollusks were so tasty they needed no sauce or other seasoning. The women would cook them over coconut husk embers or lightly simmer them in rain water with a few squeezes of native tomato and scallions.

My father owned land in Dumangas, about an hour north of the city. April has retained a small piece of the property where Arturo has planted mahogany trees he hopes to harvest in a dozen more years. They built a Lilliputian bamboo and nipa (a dwarf, swamp palm harvested for the leaves used for roofing) hut where my sister dreams someday she would retire to compose church music. Around the hut grew my brother-in-law's country garden, surrounded by irrigation ditches that overflow with water in the rainy season.

Dumangas used to be known for huge fishponds. A few has survived. We drove past this ramshackle restaurant by a small fishpond and decided to try our luck there for lunch. In the open air, the smell of the sea in the air, anything tastes good. When I came back to America I could hardly eat restaurant food here for several weeks. They tasted too rich. I missed the flavors of food that still tasted of the earth and sea, simply prepared, unadorned by herbs and spices and fatty sauces. We keep looking back at Paradise we didn't know we lived in until we have left it, of our own free will but uncomprehendingly. That we can live more conscious of the blessings we have when we still have them!

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June 4, 2009

Judaism and Christianity in the Philippines

Judaism has fascinated me from the first year I lived in New York City in 1975. I saw how Jews and Jewish structures so strongly influenced American culture if one knew what to look for. There were synagogues and the names of famous stores as well as Jewish listings in the city phone books. This is not surprising when one considers that Christians see their religion as the continuation of Jewish revelation but New York City is unique. The metropolitan area has the largest population of Jews outside the State of Israel. Walking in some city neighborhoods, one can almost believe he is in Israel.

Getting first-hand education in American history I soon learned how Jewish thinkers and entrepreneurs had contributed to the country's growth and evolution, surprising even more when one considers how Jews are such a small percentage of the total population. One may ascribe the influence to how commercial and cultural innovations often begin in cities and Jews are largely city dwellers. Then again, when one looks at Western culture in general, Jewish influence is proportionately huge as well, certainly larger than one might expect from the fraction of the total population in the West comprised of Jews. The names of innovators and thinkers in the West read like a roll call of Jewish names. One wonders at the link between the Jewish fundamental belief they are God's Chosen People and this dominance in science, commerce, ethics, philosophy, and many other areas of human achievement.

I grew up a Christian. As offshoot of the education I received in both undergraduate and graduate schools which were ran by Roman Catholic orders, I had eight years of Catholic theology. Religious practice and belief were central to my life as a child and later a youth. My family belonged to an indigenous church that was born at the same time the Filipinos were organizing their political revolution against Spain. The church had lost both attraction and members after the revolution was cut short by the arrival of American colonizers. Most people went back to the Roman Catholic fold, but not my mother's family. My grandmother was a pillar of the town Aglipay church. We went with our mother to the tiny, wooden church next to the imposing Catholic church fronting the town plaza. To attend and do well at Catholic universities I learned fast so I could defend my family's religious position. Before having to contend with Augustinian friars and Theresian sisters trying to convert me, the highlights I remember of my childhood revolved around our participation in the life of our small church. Religion has therefore been one of my major interests from the beginning.

Theology classes at San Agustin and, later, at Santo Tomás focused on Catholic dogma and the Gospels. I don't recall being encouraged to read the Bible for ourselves. The Catholic church, in contrast to Protestant churches, as a whole did not encourage communicants to consult the book directly. Lay people relied on priests and the religious orders (all religious schools were ran by religious orders) to interpret the church's teachings. Theology classes did include pertinent quotations from the Bible. I imagine selections from the Bible may have been suggested as well but I didn't see the teachers or any student bring a Bible to class. My family didn't own a Bible. I didn't acquire a Bible until I came to the U.S.

With access to books I began to read and collect literature on both the New Testament and the Old. Before long I wanted to read the Bible as accepted by Jews and acquired a bilingual copy of the Torah. The word "Bible" is said to derive from the Greek phrase Ta biblia, "the books." The phrase was used by Hellenistic Jews to refer to their sacred writings before the time of Jesus. Even after I admitted to myself that I could no longer consider myself Christian, my interest in biblical (to refer to both the Torah and the Christian Bible) continued to grow, especially as I became acquainted with the sacred writings (usually called scriptures, too) in other religious traditions. Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism and even religious movements that have long disappeared like gnostic sects had their collections of sacred writings.

Cultures and civilization in general fascinate me. Religions probably provide the core of most cultures. People through the ages have sought what their minds told them must exist, some power beyond their everyday existence and beyond what their physical senses perceived. In the West, Christianity is perhaps the main shaper of its culture. Arts, even sciences before the Age of Enlightenment, were sponsored by the Catholic church. But playing counterpoint to Christianity in the West was Judaism and to a lesser extent Islam (especially in the Iberian Peninsula and where the Ottoman Empire encroached on Eastern Europe, the remnants of the Byzantine Empire the Arabs took over since 1453). To understand Western culture one must know Judaism and the Jews.

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June 3, 2009

William Blake: Auguries of Innocence

For someone who spent much of his childhood indoors, nature and the outdoors are now vital to my health and productivity. After doing my morning routines, I go outside for a piece of sky and fresh air. Whether the sky is dropping rain or sunshine, just being outdoors completes my waking up. Midday, sated with work indoors I step outside, walk among the flowers, look up at trees, inspect the bugs and worms at their labors, and I am refreshed.

This was not always so. It was the first thing I did after I moved into a condominium twenty years ago. People move to a condominium to free themselves of mowing the grass and maintaining the shrubberies and trees. I dug up sod and planted a garden. I was fortunate to have the assistance of my friend, Don Choy, who had worked extensively in greenhouses in Chicagoland. He pointed to a shrub and informed me of its scientific and common names. Naming is how items from both Heaven and Earth become presences in our life. Remember Elohim in the Hebrew book of Genesis?

Donald told me the natural histories of each species he named, what it required to flourish, what color flowers it was known to bear, and how it was propagated. As we dug up rocks and stones from what had been a gravel pit, I listened to biographies of plants I had given short shrift to before. We threw in bags of composted manure and top soil, stuck starts and sowed seeds, and wonder in me growing, I had my first vegetal babies. Every spring thereafter, and in the fall, too, I added new plantings and dug up more sod. The garden grew until I decided to end warfare with the condo association and let the landscape crew henceforth widen my borders as they wished as they did their spring maintenance.

Plant life, I found out, was like human and animal life. Plants may not move about as much or as widely as we do; they may not express their preferences as quickly; they may not speak or growl or purr or quack but like us they are alive and to be alive is to change with unfolding circumstance. I learned about myself from watching plants grow, wither, flourish, procreate, die.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

The Poet of Righteous Fury was right. In Auguries of Innocence he linked nature outside us with nature inside. Both spoke in the same tenor, really of the same life or source of life.

A Robin Redbreast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage...

A Dog starv'd at his Master's Gate

Predicts the ruin of the State...

And for me, most touching:

Each outcry of the hunted Hare

A fiber from the Brain does tear.

Blake's hallucinatory images are as gripping today as they were in 1803. These lines may exculpate us of responsibility if we read them while asleep:

Man was made for Joy and Woe;

And when this we rightly know

Thro' the World we safely go.

To know that life inherently brings joy or sorrow is to try to name what joys we can propagate, what sorrows exterminate. Inside and outside, the same drama of loss and gain, of rejection and attraction, of hatred and love. I walk in the garden then come back in to compose my thoughts. Man is made for joy and woe....

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