A Paean to Photoshop, Or Sadie Takes Pictures of Herself in a Green Wig

Photograph is really of Sadie, as bizarre as it looks.

I finally decided that it was time to stop pretending that I’m Carrie Fisher on my various profiles and change my profile pic back to one that is actually me. While I still bear a phenomenal resemblance to Ms. Fisher, I don’t want to irritate her by perpetually passing off her “Return of the Jedi” metal bikini pic as my only. Credulity on the part of viewers only goes so far. No, I wouldn’t step one foot into that bikini. 

So, I came upon a short but interesting article about how to take good photos of yourself, and it had a few tips for Photoshop optimization, backgrounds, and so on. The green wig was a mere impulse accessory, but I don’t think it looks bad. Why wouldn’t I want to look like an anime babe? Anyway, the bright green hair straight from China and the three fighting silhouettes on my shirt made for an interesting set of referents as I played with a function on Photoshop called “curves.” 

Hitting Cntrl-M as the helpful article above directed, I saw a grid with a straight line diagonally across it. I had the choice of altering the shape of the curve (by dragging it at several points) in the RGB or individual red, green or blue. The table at the top will show what fun I had with this function.  The top left photo is the original. Some of them are not curve altered but have been modified with Color Balance on the Adjust menu to yield those funky, unnatural skin tones. (Oddly, my resemblance to Carrie Fisher seems to be amplified when I turn my skin magenta or yellow, wonder why?)

Anyway, the laudatory bit comes now. I have owned my copy of Photoshop since 1999, when I was a part-time student. At the time, it was Photoshop 5.5. Now,  13 years and 4 computers later, I can still run this old copy of Photoshop, meant for Windows 95 or 98 (and I think the brand new Windows ME at the time), on Windows 7 Home Premium, follow relatively up-to-date advice on modifying images in the program and come out with great results. Since I was a student at the time, I got the program for a reduced rate of about $300. It is the best $300 I’ve ever spent on a computer-related item. So, Adobe, want to make me an official cheerleader for Photoshop? I can’t really afford a copy of the new version, but the old version is so robust for what I use it for, I am continually flabbergasted (in a good way) with the results I get.

As an endnote, you see those funny little guys on my shirt, the ones who change color as I play with the color settings in Photoshop? Well, that’s a shirt exclusively from animeigo.com , purveyors of great old samurai flicks that I love to watch and imitate in the shower (j/k). I won the shirt in the 2010 Samurai Fiction contest for a story I wrote entitled, “The Samurai Who Lost His Head But Found Another.” If you enjoy a taste of Edo era bathos, read it here.

A Declaration of Disorganization

I suppose you could say I’ve been suffering from writer’s block, only I have about 10,000 words of nonsense written down about it that no one is going to see—ever. Every night, I attempt to create a blog post that I would not mind showing to the world (not that the world reads my blog or anything). Night after night, my efforts fall short; my theme hijacks itself to another realm, and the post dwindles into an inchoate rant about something totally unrelated to what I intended to write about. I am hoping this post will not be yet another of the same in a long string of pointless verbiage.  After all, I am writing about my inability to write, aren’t I?

Cluttered House, Cluttered Mnd

My house should be on “Hoarders,” only circumstances prevent such an option in the land of next-door in-laws and the desire for a measure of privacy. So I resolve every morning to make a dent in “Mount Filthabachi,” as I call the stacks of boxes and tottering towers of books. Some days I actually get some organizing done, but there is a strong tendency towards distraction. I have daily chores that take up a large chunk of the morning and afternoon.  In the evening, my time is hijacked by my unofficial position as personal secretary to my husband (an unacknowledged time-eater) and from-scratch cooking maven. The in-laws are constant loose cannons, placing unpredictable demands on our time at short to no notice. Between all this and my dependence of late on narcotic painkillers for long-standing chronic pain problems, I have found coherent writing to be next to impossible.  I am looking for solutions. Writing this post is a step towards that goal. 

If I drink enough coffee will I magically be able to handle this mess?

Online Clutter: Social Networks and Startup Madness

As I have waded into the waters of Wahooly, a nascent “startup for startups” venture that promises to create a marketplace for social currency and reward social influencers with equity in startups, I find that there is a need on my part to consolidate and organize what social networks I now frequent. According to Klout , I wield sufficient influence to have rated the opportunity to participate in the Wahooly venture, but now I find that I am rather outclassed by my fellow Wahooligans in the realm of social networking savvy.  So naturally, I want to learn. 

There is soooo much to figure out though, and many signals cross over each other in my correspondences with my fellows. I find the demand on my time to be greater than what I have in any one time block. Social networking will expand to fill all available space if you let it. That should be an axiom, really. It is so true, even for a somewhat introverted geeky type like me.  So I downloaded a socialnetworking infographic and started bookmarking sites that aggregate interesting articles about social media and business. But somehow I’m still overwhelmed, as I have all my home responsibilities plus these online ones now. Oh yes, I forget to mention that I run an online bookstore on Amazon.com as well. That takes up those straggling moments of free time as well.

The secret is to organize it all. And for me, the hoarder’s wife, it is the Holy Grail, hard to see when there are 25 boxes in my immediate field of vision. As with all things, perseverance wins. At least I keep the food waste cleaned up and mice at bay. But that’s part of my basic housewife job description.

Klaus Nomi: An Icon for the Outcasts and Unrepentant Abnormals Like Me

Klaus Nomi image from Wikimedia Commons. Might have been seen as nose art on the original spaceship that carried him here from Planet Nomi.

I recently watched a documentary entitled The Nomi Song about a famous (albeit in a niche market) New Wave singer from the late ‘70s and ‘80s. His name was Klaus Nomi, and he was from outer space. That sounds outlandish, but, in a way, I believe he truly was an alien, for there was no one like him, before or since. He was an operatic countertenor—that is, he sang in an expanded range that included notes commonly reserved for female singers. “Countertenor” is a somewhat archaic term reserved for early operatic music, and indeed, our alien Nomi sang not only modern pop standards but also hauntingly beautiful arias such as Purcell’s death aria from "Dido and Aeneas." He expressed a desire to sing with the Metropolitan Opera, while he took gigs as a bizarre kinetic mannequin at Fiorucci’s department store  in New York City and also had a day job as a pastry chef. In fact, his lime tart recipe has a cult following of its own.

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But the really compelling part of the Klaus Nomi phenomenon is not how he carved a niche in New York counterculture as a unique voice of the New Wave but how truly otherworldly he seemed, even when the mask fell. Nomi, whose regular human last name had been Sperber, presented himself as a doll-like plastic spaceman in a shiny sharp-angled tuxedo from a  cabaret-soaked Weimar version of the future, but the camera would seem to catch momentary transitions from space creature Nomi to regular guy Klaus Sperber. His ingenuous smile and somewhat nervous chuckle as he promises a “sweet/sour lemon tart” bespeaks a man who is not quite certain how to act like a human—as if he really is from outer space, the planet Nomi, as he claimed.

It is his inability to come across as human and his visible discomfiture that seems to be most endearing, as I can relate to being socially at sea in most situations. Klaus Nomi might have been a mask, a way of dealing with reality, but in a way, it was the highest truth for a man who lived as an alien—a German in New York, plunged into the East Village wave of musical experimentation that brought so many bizarre and creative bands to prominence. 

He was a serious artist in a transcendent way, though. His early years were spent as an usher at the Deutsche Oper, where he sang before the curtain after the main shows. He was the Old World and the New Wave thrown together, mixed with the apt metaphor of the Man from Space, the true outsider.  He sang arias to small packed rooms of 20-something partiers of the type I remember from my days as a DJ at a small college radio station. I can’t imagine what I would have done if someone like Klaus Nomi had joined the beer-soaked, guitar slapping wisecrackers of the crowd pleasers along the downtown bars in Auburn Alabama. But alas, we were not blessed with a visit from aliens, unless you count Man Or Astroman? (Come to think of it, they were probably from outer space, but I could never locate their mothership.)

There are simply no more words with which I can describe this freak of nature. His life was like the subject of a tragic opera: a meteoric rise, a loss of control of his future as he was taken up by record company stooges who made an even more plastic “brand” out of him, and his crash and burn demise only a few short years later, as he became one of the very first celebrities to die of AIDS, which was just emerging as a worldwide threat when it took his life in 1983. It was so terrifying in its lethality and novelty that his friends were afraid to visit him, being frightened they might catch what was being referred to at the time as the “gay cancer.” Even today, there are scores of admirers who claim that Klaus Nomi did not die, but he merely returned to his own galaxy. It is a comforting thought for us surviving outcast types who look to role models outside the norm. Who better to represent the fringe than a gay opera singing pastry chef from outer space? Cheers, y'all, and, as Jack Horkheimer always said, "Keep looking up!"
 

My Own Personal 9.0 Quake and Tsunami: Life After Losing My Stepmother

The world looks different now...

Do you ever feel like your life is a series of clashing tectonic plates, and the only time anything ever happens is when there’s a devastating earthquake? That is how my life for the last week or so has been. First, a 8.0 on the Richter scale: my stepmother suddenly on death’s door in Florida. I book a flight to see her, because my brother says she won’t last more than a few days.

The next morning, after rescuing the victims of the “quake,” i.e., booking a flight, rental car, packing, calling everyone in the family twice, etc., my brother calls again and tells me my stepmother is dead. No chance to see her now. I unbook the flight, car, call everyone, wait to hear about funeral arrangements, etc.. The aftershocks are drawn out, because arrangements are being made far away from here. I wait in my cluttered living room and resolve to clean up to take my mind off things.

The weekend is one long depressive episode of epic proportions, as I talk to everyone and relive the harrowing events at second hand several times over. The only times that tears flow are the times I am alone, staring at the computer screen, trying to write about it. Then, I have time to think. It is times like this that make me want to be somewhere else, doing anything else but this.

Luckily, I live in a hoarder’s hell, and if I don’t maintain it with constant diligence, it becomes indistinguishable from a high-end garbage dump mixed with a flea market. So there’s always a task that needs doing, like, yesterday or last week. The only problem is that now I have no motivation and no energy to do any of it. The best thing for me would be a good, hard workout. I manage to get a pale imitation of a workout on Saturday, dragging myself for ¼ mile of laps in the pool before my fatigue and restlessness combine to pull me out into a dreadful hot tub cooldown, followed by a quick, uncomfortable shower. Funny how normally pleasant things are hard to enjoy when one of your most beloved family members is suddenly dead. Well, no, it’s not funny, but hopefully you know what I mean.

So Monday, I have an appointment to get lidocaine shot into my sciatica in yet another attempt to stop the downward slide of chronic back and hip pain that has beset me for so many years it’s like a bad Star Trek franchise. Pain Clinic XII: The Needle, or something banal like that. Well, the in-laws finally consent to drive me to the appointment after making me wait until the morning of the appointment to tell me yea or nay, as if they want to drive home the point that they have complete power over my mobility (which they do, since I’m carless and stuck 20 miles from town). I ask for the kindness of being allowed a swim/workout during the trip, and I am refused, but I have to take the scraps I’m given. At least I’ll be able to get to the doctor to get my hip injection.

So I resolve to ask again for Tuesday; perhaps someone will take pity on me. But no, no one is going to town on Tuesday, so I am stuck here with my grief and a beautiful day outside. Oh yes, and add to that an admonition to “take it easy” on the hip, i.e., keep ice and heat alternating on it and don’t do anything like digging up the garden bed or playing a lot outside. Luckily, the hoarder’s hell beckons and all that. But all this is terribly depressing.

Enter Wednesday, where I now lie here anticipating rain and possible flooding, putting off the inevitable chores by writing about how miserable my situation is. Anyway, I’ve realized that I’m terrible about updating my blog, so maybe this is just filler. But in reality, I’ve written several attempts at a blog entry already, and I have this fear of exposing them to the world. This, my most conversational attempt, might be my frightened eyes peering around the vast psychological wall of exposure that is a public blog. I’ll have to work on this, of course. But thanks for having the patience to read what is probably a painful bit of business, a snippet of my life that will hopefully give a glimpse into some sort of truth. 

My stepmother's funeral is this coming Saturday, and I am sending card, donation, a short letter, and all my love. But I've chosen to remain here, as I can't face the entire debacle again in person. I'm all worn out...hopefully my next entry will be more cheerful. Stay tuned!

Watching Ryuhei Matsuda Cry and What Thoughts Arose Thereby...

Yesterday, I decided to liven up my chores by loading a bit of fluff on hulu.com for background noise.  I wanted something in modern Japanese, so I could enjoy the intonations and inflections and see if I could pick out words and phrases here and there.  The movie I settled on was called “Love Collage,” or “Renai  Shashin” (Japanese title). I picked it more or less at random.  It started as a fluffy romance, with two actors I recognized from other shows. Ryoko Hirosue, the elfish actress who played Ryoma Sakamoto’s first love in Ryomaden was the girl lead, and Ryuhei Matsuda, who portrayed the freakish homosexual Shinsengumi recruit in “Gohatto” (US title “Taboo”) played the boy lead.

 I managed to wash dishes through the exposition of their relationship building and destruction (thankfully), but I sat down, exhausted after many chores and got interested about the time Matsuda followed a letter from Hirosue from Tokyo to New York, looking for her. Lots of dangerous gangsta stereotypes appeared, and his ghetto savior was a gay man who had a thing for Kimutaku (Takuya Kimura—just what New York needs: a gay SMAP-head). It evolved into an episodic but suggestive nightmare romp for Matsuda through NYC, where he finally learned that Hirosue had been murdered by a woman who had befriended her and then scammed him when he showed up.

Anyway, the morgue scene, wherein Matsuda cries over the dead Ryoko Hirosue brought a thought to mind that had no completion or even a real focus beyond an understanding of how we are worn down in life. It is a credit to Matsuda’s acting that he brought this thought to my mind at that moment. The idea: “These are the things that fill our lives.” The imprint of his loss of a girl he loved and lost hammered the signature of suffering that is just one of myriad ways a human animal can experience wear. It made me remember the expressionless face of Matsuda’s Kano Sozaburo as he killed his many Shinsengumi lovers and how this sort of wear is a dangerous ugliness of character that required that he be executed. The symbolic scene wherein  the cherry sapling was felled was the most memorable moment in that film, a  recognition of the effect physical beauty can have on our capacity to judge true beauty, the kind that transcends the mere visual.

In “Love Collage,” Matsuda is few years older and there is a subtle maturation to his features. Whereas the young creep in “Gohatto” was deemed beautiful as an object, I found him repulsive and freakish.  A few more years and a more empathetic countenance made Matsuda more attractive, the moment of suffering yet more still, because it gave him some depth to go with the plastic bishounen exterior.

I think back to reading Heinlein’s  Stranger in a Strange Land and how the secretaries who have learned the Martian way from Valentine Michael Smith marvel at the beauty of the lined, old face of their boss, Jubal Harshaw, because of the wear and the many shocks his flesh has undergone and weathered successfully. His aged appearance makes him beautiful for this reason. This goes beyond the object beauty represented by Ryuhei Matsuda’s  beautiful boy in “Gohatto.”

Photo adapted from Wikimedia commons. user: Dd-b http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RAHeinlein.autographing.Midamericon.ddb-371-14-750px.jpg

I suppose beauty lives in the combination of a physicality that pleases a particular observer and a deeper character-driven beauty.  It is always nice when the two combine. Somehow, fellows like Toshiro Mifune seemed to embody that Heinleinian fine wine quality in a cinematic sense. He was a dashing and handsome fellow in his young badass days, but he wears that history with a mantle of maturity well in his older countenance too. And he’s one of the few men whose strong handsome features allowed him to look really good with a shaved head. He also escaped the “seedy look” that besets many older men.  The fact that he attacked his roles with his entire soul and being added a certain depth to the outward beauty we see onscreen; this character enrichment is essential to the totality that proclaims a person to be “beautiful.” If Mifune had been merely an adequate actor, he would be nowhere near as beautiful.

But back to the idea sparked by Ryuhei Matsuda’s crying fit: the idea that we are an amalgam of our experiences is not a new one. It is an old concept. It is behind the marks of honor signified by the Heidelberg Dueling Scar or perhaps more fittingly for Matsuda, the character-defining eyepatch worn by Sengoku warlord Date Masamune, who Matsuda portrayed in the 2009 Taiga drama “Tenchijin.” According to Samurai Wiki, “In his youth, Masamune had suffered a bout with small pox that caused an infection in his right eye-which he plucked out himself. Combined with his early aggressive and unstable demeanor, Masamune would earn the tag 'One-eyed Dragon'.” The visual cue of the eyepatch made him more iconic and terrifying in combination with his personality .

The one-eyed general’s outward appearance becomes tied to his inner character traits and thus his “beauty” is made of legend, story and the transformation of physical traits. The “eye of the beholder” has swollen to encompass the whole of historical literature, and thus the beauty of Masamune and, by extension, of Matsuda who portrayed him, is amplified and given a deeper meaning than the one-dimensional plastic bishounen where he began. And this traveled path is a battle scar in itself. Forgive the rambling, not-quite-to-the-point nature of this blog post. After all, I have been shamefully neglecting the blog for a long time now, and I had to push myself to put something up here—anything. I hope it at least made a little sense to someone!

Friends Met Along the Road to Mount Doom and Walking to the Lonely Mountain

I am a fan of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, mainly the Middle Earth tales which concern hobbits. One could say I’m a hobbit fan; they have a plain-spokenness and efficiency that mirrors the best in rural culture. While they do have their small-town peccadillos, they are mostly clear-headed and won’t tolerate injustice or prolonged oppression.

The Shire and the surrounding hobbit-realms of Eriador in Middle Earth are a blueprint for what I wish rural life was. I live in very rural southern middle Tennessee, and I can tell you, things don’t happen here like they do in Middle Earth. But the scenery is similar, and, if I close my eyes to the heavy farm equipment, planes flying overhead and the postman who speeds down our road like it’s the Indy 500, I can almost imagine I live in the mounded hill behind my cabin, like the huge extended family of Peregrin Took does in Middle Earth.

In the heady days when the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films were being released, there seemed to be a lot of Tolkien fans, although most were Viggo Mortenson or Liv Tyler fans. It didn’t matter though; I could finally talk to others online who enjoyed and thought about matters in Middle Earth. I went online to a serious forum (i.e., one where they actually talk about the books) and signed in.

On one section of that forum was a curiously long thread entitled: Walk to Rivendell. I learned that this was actually an idea that Weight Watchers had come up with, and it had spread to many LOTR fan sites, ending up on its own site, the Eowyn Challenge (see the site for the explanation of the name).  Thousands of fans of Lord of the Rings were taking to the streets daily and logging miles on a website. A map or app would then tell you where you were according to the progress of Frodo Baggins and his hobbit companions from Hobbiton to Rivendell, the stronghold of Elrond. It was a trek of 458 miles.

So I signed up and started walking. I walked about 3-4 miles every day, and by the deadline, which was the release of Return of the King in December of 2003, I had made it past the Ford of Bruinen, waving my sword at the Ringwraiths and shouting, “By Elbereth and Luthien the Fair, you shall have neither the Ring nor me!” The neighbors peered nervously out of their screen doors, but since I had been tromping the road for months with a replica of Frodo’s sword, I don’t think they were too surprised.

So, once the hoopla was over and everyone had made it to Rivendell, I knew the next step. I was going to Mount Doom, come Hell or the crazy postman. So every day for over a year (I think it was more like a year and a half), I walked 3 miles a day, enduring a hellish case of bronchitis, two sprained ankles and an encounter with a rabid raccoon. By the time I had entered Mordor, I had two companions.

They were the neighbor’s boxer dogs, a mother and her very frisky daughter. They followed me every day, and eventually they started following me home. The neighbor was never at home. I began to wonder if he fed them properly. The daughter was a spitfire; she knocked over planters on our porch, ate a chair and killed a possum. Needless to say, my father-in-law ran them off most angrily.

Then one day, I made it to Mount Doom, a total of 1800 miles. Strangely, it didn’t have the feeling of accomplishment that making it to Rivendell had. I had gotten used to the walk, but I had a hard time at the end, having had to refrain for weeks at a time while my sprained ankle knitted back together. Finally, after the weary last step, I decided to join a health club so I could swim for exercise instead of walking. I wanted to keep my ankles, and my knees were threatening me with rebellion as well. 

Walking from Nagakubo Post Station on the Kisokaido to the Lonely Mountain? Not bloody likely! Apologies to Ando Hiroshige.

The most lasting and rewarding part of the walk was a friendship forged and fulfilled. The older boxer girl appeared one day in the neighbor’s front yard, long after he had moved. Apparently, he had abandoned her, and she was gnawing on a deer head. She was obviously nursing as well. The horrid neighbor had taken the feisty daughter and abandoned the pregnant mother.

So we rescued the lot—mom and 6 pups. We found homes for 5 pups and kept one for mom to play with. Mrs. Prettypaws and her tiny son Kamikaze (who is now huge) reside here still, our dearest family members, found along the road to Mount Doom so long ago, at least in dog years.

So, now that Peter Jackson is making The Hobbit into two films, the whole “Walk to Rivendell” challenge idea has returned in places. Of course it is now the Walk to the Lonely Mountain . Come to find out, it’s a total of 1934 miles from Bag End to the Lonely Mountain and back again. I’m not sure this old hobbit has it in her. What do you think, ankles? Knees? I’ll get back to you on this one!