Envelope / Develope

Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash The social distancing forced families to stay together and live confined for many hours in a row. Habits exposed at work were transferred in  the family setting and did not fit or led to conflict. The simple way of spending time revealed that suddenly when the time is lapsing slower than usually, people don't know how to stare or leave in contemplation. For unknown reasons: 1. what became obvious to everyone during the corona virus: people have time to think and question and fall on the same old theories - the gods are cheating on us, there is a large conspiracy of big pharma, the government is sold to big corporations, etc.. 2. when there is no skin in the game, there is no incentive to innovate - education, health, management of limited resources, cooperating among nations at safeguarding resources  3. there is no planning for all elected officials and there is no pay-back for the ones who really played the system - I ...

Photo by Kyle Head on Unsplash You probably heard that swimming in rough waters in life will reveal your own character and of all the people with you, caught in that moment. It is always unexpected and, exactly as in movies, it begins with a peaceful background and a monotone sound. Everything is unfolding slowly and without any clues that deep gaps will be revealed in any way. It is like a crack in someone's emotional fabric which becomes a wrecking ball for the characters caught in the event, for a short time span, sufficient to project them on a different life orbit, for good. Some people are calling those events "interventions", others fear them as "dark spots" where secrets are emerging as an iceberg unbalanced by some life event. The repercussions are deep and memorable and entail subsequent turmoils, like a burning lava which will flow down for many days to find a peaceful landscape to cool off. The characters are the same like in normal life ...

Photo by Braden Jarvis on Unsplash If you read the biography of Freeman Patterson you will be puzzled his first call of what to do with his life was not photography. The man has a Master in Divinity degree and a bachelor in philosophy. He worked as a photographer for some newspapers as a temporary job and then decided to pursue photography full time. It is an interesting life trajectory to veer from seriously thinking in God to dream in banal images! You will find many photographers who will show an interesting image but will not have the inner structure to explain the thought process or whether it represents more than a fantasy. The scaffolding process on reaching a certain image, which reflects an emotion, a thought or just life, is appealing when you read Patterson's books about photography. If you juxtapose the education with his images, some of them have an eerie feeling, something that gives you pause and wonder what is a photo for human psyche. Yes, he is fro...

Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash Podcasts are having a second life in the current media environment (2020). People are reviving the old habit of listening to stories on different subjects and being close to interesting or "out-of-normal" events in a disconnected-when-I-have time manner. Podcasts are the new way to be informed with specialized info channels, when your life allows it. If Apple managed to monopolize and to spear-head the streaming music industry with the iPod/Apple store, some new companies are trying to grab the audiences build by niche players in the podcast world  - Spotify, Soundcloud. On the same vein, the broadcasting companies are trying to have a second wind from podcasting their shows, by making them free and then getting money from advertising by having millions of listeners. I compare the podcast industry with the auto industry of 1920s: many attempting to break the ice, a few with an effort to monopolize the streams. My predict...

I love Chef's Table (on Netflix), not necessarily for the food stories but mostly for the cooks' life stories: coming back from death sentences, finding love in foreign countries, leaving established careers and mostly the defiant fight to find their path. It is about normal people with a sudden discovery of passion for food and proving how small turns in life lead to greatness. The music is so engaging, the images are vivid to accentuate you the eccentricity of the dishes and punctuates fast victories in a life so short and ephemeral for a chef. One of the stories seems to stuck with me, the incredible life of Ivan Orkin , the ramen chef from New York, and his quest to conquer Japan on ramen. You will hear him describing how he was floundering life when young, and then going to Japan just because he learnt the language, finding love by accident, becoming widow with a kid and in the end finding his call in cooking ramen. More surprisingly was his adventure to find love a...