I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art.
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net (2011)
A seven minutes video that is an excellent introduction to Kusama’s life and work.
Keep Creating Art
Autumn Is Advanced
The autumn is advanced.
What sort of people can my neighbors be?
Matsuo Basho
Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694) was the most famous Edo period poet and a haiku master.
The Diva Dance
The Diva Dance is an otherworldly song performed by an alien opera singer called Diva Plavalaguna in The Fifth Element, an iconic Science-Fiction movie and, incidentally, one of my favorite movies.
Plavalaguna’s song, written by Eric Serra, starts with Il dolce suono, an aria from the opera Lucia de Lammermoor by Gaetano Donizetti; then continues with the Diva Dance.
Eric Serra had written the song so that it wouldn’t be possible for a singer to hit some of the high notes so quickly after another. The original song was performed in the movie by the Albanian opera singer Inva Mula, and she had to sing those high notes individually; then they were arranged digitally.
Here’s the (digitally enhanced) original. Rumor has it that the wonder you see on Bruce Willis’ face when he listens to her is real. That was the first time he heard the song and seen the actress in full costume and makeup.
I remember seeing the movie and listening to the song for the first time. It still gives me goosebumps. The song and Mula’s performance are not of this world.
Bonus: Eric Serra talking about the scene.
Jane Zhang, a Chinese opera singer, took on the challenging song and hit all the notes without computer help. Listen to her amazing performance from 2015; it’ll give you goosebumps!
Bonus: Jane Zhang’s Italian fan site describing that 2015 evening (the text is in English).
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The Zone: No.4 – Nov 5, 2020
This week in The Zone: Sean Connery reading Cavafy’s Ithaca, Ninja studies (is this real?), Finnegan Fox laughing, and more.
- Each week Robert Fripp releases ambient instrumental soundscapes on YouTube. An oasis of calm in the middle of the 2020 whirlwind.
- November 3 was World Jellyfish Day. Who knew? OER has compiled their jellyfish greatest hits from deep-ocean exploration expeditions in the Pacific, and they’re mesmerizing, which cannot be said about Project Management Day (today) or Love Your Lawyer Day (tomorrow).
- Astrophotographer Matt Harbison has spent more than 500 hours in the last five years to capture the Orion constellation in minute details. The result? An unfathomable 2.5 gigapixel image composed of 2,508 individual shots.
- Want to become a ninja? The International Ninja Research Center at Mey University in Japan offers a master’s degree program for ninja studies.
- RIP Sean Connery. Granted, he was 90, but still, it’s a huge loss. Listen to him reading Cavafy’s epic poem Ithaca set to the music of Vangelis. You can read the whole text of Ithaca here.
- Will animators inherit the post-pandemic Earth?
- And, to end in a more positive tone: Finnegan Fox laughing. You’re welcome!
Quote I’m Pondering
“Be “selectively ignorant.”
Ignore topics that drain your attention.
Unfollow people that drain your energy.
Abandon projects that drain your time.
Do not keep up with it all. The more selectively ignorant you become, the more broadly knowledgeable you can be.”
James Clear
From My Photo Archives
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What 2020 Taught Me … So Far
I’ve been struggling to make sense of the world lately, like many others, I suspect. Burying my head in the sand and trying to carry on with my work as nothing had happened. While, of course, the world around me continued spinning faster and faster.
I’ve missed two family anniversaries that I was looking forward to. Before what now seems to be the second Covid-19 wave, I thought I could attend, observing all restrictions, of course. With family and friends scattered in several countries on four continents, it’s been a trying time, to say the least.
As for my work, my new book and some photo projects, well … slow progress. I’ve reached an all times low in terms of creativity. I had all this time on my hands and no lust to do anything. I forced myself to show up and do the work because I know that in the end, there’ll be something. A shitty first draft. A few photos worth including in the series. But it’s not a solution.
How to keep going? Retreating into a shell and ignoring the world is not a life strategy; it’s escapism. As always, writing clarifies things for me. As Joan Didion once said, I write to find out what I’m thinking.
Here are a few things that I’ve learned this year of the plague. So far.
Accept the current situation. No amount of wishful thinking will make Covid-19, and its restrictions go away. I’ve come to accept that I cannot travel, for example, not only in 2020 but very likely not next year either. Would a trip be possible in 2022? I hope so. But if not, I’ll accept that travel would have to wait a while longer. If I cannot go to Australia for my planned photography project, I’ll try doing it in Sweden. If nothing else, this would be an exercise in creativity; creativity thrives on challenges.
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Acceptance is key to get through this trying time. Humans don’t do well with uncertainty, and Covid-19 is the biggest uncertainty of them all. Accept that there are things that you cannot control.
Technology can be friend or foe. When I moved to Sweden, I was still writing letters (yes, real letters, handwritten et al.); compared to that, it’s never been easier to stay in touch. One of the small things that made a great difference was using a private cloud service where all family members can upload and comment on photos and videos. We can follow what’s happening in each other’s life in real-time, and can easily call each other or have several parts conference. Technology became my friend.
However, technology can easily become your foe. Like everyone else, in the beginning, I’ve spent a lot of time watching the news and reading everything about pandemics and viruses, antibodies and vaccines, intensive care and protection measures. How could I not? Everything was so readily available. The whole world at my fingertips, everywhere I turned. But the more I learned, the less I knew; even the experts had more questions than answers. The news reports became harbingers of doom. I was sucked into a maelstrom of catastrophic news reports (when it’s the last time you’ve seen good news?), comedy sketches, and cliffhanger series that made me even more depressed.
With no end in sight, the pandemic, combined with the recent changes in my life, was getting to me. I realized that I needed to make some drastic changes in my life. Covid-19 clarified my priorities.
I’m watching less TV now, especially the news. I keep informed, but that’s about it. I (no longer) binge-watch series but decide what really matters to me and stick to it. I didn’t watch Games of Thrones or The Crown. I did watch Stranger Things and Chernobyl. I have limited time and more important things to do.
Doing things around the house and crossing off tasks on my To Do-list make me feel good, as I had accomplished something (which, in fact, I had) and helped silence the monkey mind.
Since we moved into our new house last year, we had a lot to do, and boy did we do it! We still have a few pictures to frame and the home office to figure out, but everything else is pretty much done. All that work did take my mind off things, and, in the process, I knocked off almost all items on my moving to-do list. Note to self: keep busy; keep busy; keep busy; keep …
Doing things I love with no ulterior purpose is relaxing; do more of them. I’ve started drawing again for the first time in several years. My drawings don’t look like much yet, but the concentration they require and my pleasure in what I’m doing make me forget the world. Right now, that’s a good thing.
Photography is work, of course, but taking photos of my cat or my garden just for us, for the family album, with no pressure, doesn’t feel like work and allows me to get into the zone and shut off the world.
Spending too much time on social media is counter-productive. Using Facebook to stay in touch with friends or YouTube for tutorials is one thing; spending hours scrolling through Instagram mindlessly and calling it “staying updated” is just wasting time. And likely to make me feel inadequate. Ask me how I know.
If you’re struggling as I did, I hope you’ll find this post helpful. I found that knowing you’re not alone is one step towards feeling better.
Stay safe, stay healthy, stay calm and soldier on. And don’t forget to laugh.
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The Autumn Tempest
How the autumn storm roars,
Blowing along even wild boars!
Matsuo Basho
Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694) was the most famous Edo period poet and a haiku master.
Why Buying An Expensive Camera Doesn’t (Always) Matter
A recent contest for mobile phone photos made me think about the old discussion about photo gear. ”What camera do you use?” is a question I get pretty often; it seems that many people still think that great equipment equals good photographs. While it is true that a DSLR camera does have more ”horsepower” than a mobile phone, a good camera does not a photographer make. As Thoreau reminds us, what’s important is not what you look at but what you see.
I have chosen three photographs here, all taken with an iPhone, where the difference is made by ”seeing” the potential of what’s right in front of you, not by having a good camera.
1) The image above was taken with an iPhone 6 Plus in a Nespresso shop while my husband and I were waiting for our turn to be served. It’s a lamp in the shop that nobody paid any attention to. My husband was mystified as to what exactly I was shooting; he couldn’t ”see” what that lamp could become. The only processing done on the iPhone image was converting it to black and white using the Snapseed app and then doing some slight editing such as highlights and contrast. And voilà, you now have a great black and white abstract photograph instead of an ordinary lamp in a shop.
2) This one was taken with an iPhone 7 Plus and depicts the roof of the Menara airport in Marrakesh. Again, minimal editing, the same as above, converting to B&W in Snapseed.
This is how the actual roof looked like.
For more context, a quick shot of the airport (mobile phone photo).
3) And this a photo of a skyscraper in Tokyo, taken with an iPhone 6 Plus, and converted to black and white in Snapseed. The composition would have been helped if taken in portrait mode, but you get the point.
As you can see in these examples, there’s more to good photography than the photo gear. You need to train your eye to really “see” beyond the ordinary. As always, practice makes perfect.
I’ll post some more phone photos in a future post, and you’ll see that you don’t need an expensive camera to take good photographs. Use the camera you have and learn to see, really see; that’ll get you far.
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