Envelope / Develope

  When pictures are more than a frozen moment in time and you can construct your story from just it You build the story from one frame, from many small details captured in the picture. It is rare, because we, as humans, probably more in these days than before, crave for simplicity, for design, for simple forms/shapes/compositions. Maybe that is the reason that we buy industrial canvases that are just simple decorative objects. The pictures I will refer to are not decorative, they convey a story that is your to build it if you have the sensibility to be moved by the elements present there. In general, as humans, we are moved by humans captured in pictures rather than landscapes or still compositions or abstract representations.   I will start with a picture of Cristina Mittermeier , “Last hunters of the North". It shows an Inuit hunter looking at the sky with a resigned face. It tells you the eternal problem of his people , for generations, to survive in the North lands...

  Photography by Gabi, August 2020, Niagara on the lake, Ontario   If you are interested in photography probably you have been browsing some of the storing/managing/commercializing photo platforms - 500pix, Unsplash, Photo.net, Dpreview, etc.. From time to time, they ask you if you want to send photos encompassing an idea or a concept, like - B&W in the city, Smiles, Dancing, Blazing light, Winter dreams, etc... The concept is not new and even for film-makers they have those spread over time periods when an idea is coming to fruition based on an urge to express something which is dear and close to you. From an idea, to concept, to gathering chapters for the movie, it is a long time and often it might be buried along the way. With photography is like a bookmark in a book, you come back and refresh it or have a new revelation and express it. I was thinking in the same vein when perusing my own photos. I really enjoy photos combining images, reflections and shadows. Very heav...

  Photo by Jessica Rockowitz on Unsplash Coming from a communist country I was always circumspect of people who were smiling all the time.  Life is hard and how can you be so radiant, how come events and people and years of living have been giving you that wide smile you brandish like in advertisements? Smiling was a proclamation of happiness in a regime known for oppressing and regimenting people in an universal mold. Laughing was questionable and at a certain point viewed as an act of opposition, underground fight. Then you read on many studies about the benefice of just "faking-till-you-making" - physiology winning over your mind and creating an overall well-being state. I was told by my mother that I was a curious kid, whenever it happened to be among people, looking intensely and scanning their gestures, talks and faces. I was probably absorbing life in its manifestation, interested to see how we interact, how we react, looking for fragments of life in people's fac...

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 Kyle Glenn on Unsplash It probably happened to you, when getting in a place where you have this uncomfortable feeling you don't belong to, all things are not common to your life and people have the easiness which seemed cultivated to you. Joining a group or conversation and, poof (as my daughter says) someone is bludgeoning you with a question which splits the audience in two: - Have you read ... (and put here the title of a book in the top of the lists from a prestigious newspaper)? The polite answer would be to tell the truth, listen to a glorious summary of the book, or to bend the truth and play noob. Many times, although, when I have the feeling that people are just flashing their "cultivated" image, I want to pull them in a "social bloody" embarrassment by luring them in the waters they might not comfortable with. My strategy is to pick on the display of the ideas in the book and then pull together references from  other books and ...

Photo by Rob Schreckhise on Unsplash In times like this I wonder if the people with their hand on the power lever have second thoughts - about handling the major problems instead of wasting our money and their life time in petty quarrels or egocentric show offs. They can be in a hospital fighting for their life or looking at someone close to them separated by a thick glass. If you are a doctor, sick on a hospital bed, will you relinquish a ventilator for a younger bum? Is any doctor going to apply the same rule, the younger have priority over a ventilator? Or, if you are a famous basketball player, are you going to make that gesture? Yes, I know that at this moment nobody wants to think about it, but how about doing more that just staying put within your four walls? Is this crisis going to move a few marbles and change your view on life and what you will do from now on? You probably may understand there are more barriers the wealthy and the powerful are putting betwe...

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash I reached this conclusion, influenced by one of my dates. She was an attractive grand-mother I met through some friends and in one of our dates she mentioned that, through life, she always wanted to celebrate small events in her life: kids managing to ride a bike first place in a school competition for kids learning something new and applying it (first time) successfully in life  getting the first client in a business moving to a new place working hard and failing successfully and learning the hard way something I was not that type of person, but having a daughter and "suffering" with her through failures and small victories, I understood in the monotone rhythm of life there are not many "grand" celebrations and we should punctuate our existence, enjoying small victories. Sometimes, life is not giving you many big victories and you have to have the next prize on the horizon to keep you going. And here I am, ...

Here in Toronto, there is an intermittent radio show called "White coat, black art" about being a doctor nowadays or the dilemmas of the health system in Canada. The whole accent is about how difficult is to navigate the current medical problems when in fact, almost everyone is more interested about the ethical questions, economic factors (why some procedures are supported or not) and obviously the transparency of the personal skills of the medical staff. The public services are served as a "block" for everyone when the reality is that it counts on whose hands are you under medical care. What is not touched in any way (the guest making the show is a doctor) are conflictual and controversial views about doctors. The show is mostly about raising big questions, not touching constant slippage of the system and the self-empowerment of the job due to the social contract of how the doctors and the medical system are provisioned in Canada's economy. In this post I...

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash I am not a reader of fiction books, mostly because I devoured them as a teenager and young adult. My taste was spreading from the classics - like Montesquieu, Gustave Flaubert, Emile, Zola, Marcel Proust, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Descartes and ending with the titans of the 20th century - James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, Sam Below, Thomas Mann,Sam Becket, John Galsworthy, Max Frisch, John Fowles. It is hard to recognize that I enjoyed those authors, but in my youth, Internet was not present and killing time had not many avenues among us - sports, reading, scarce parties. I read some of the South-Americans authors - Garcia Marques, Jose Saramago, Mario Vargas Llosa - and enjoyed it as the writer's imagination and the reality of those countries had something in common with the reality of my country and Romanian authors being forced to write in parables and still lived under a heavy hand of the dictatorial/communist regime. ...

Photo by Yohann LIBOT on Unsplash Nu stiu cum am ajuns la website ( www.teleleu.eu ), probabil am citit un articol pe unul din site-urile ziarelor din Romania. Este povestea a doi oameni care au avut curajul sa spuna lucrurile asa cum le-au vazut, lucruri pe care le auzim dar nimeni nu prea le aduce in fata, si cum mai toate proiectele lor necesitau multe zile "pe teren" s-au mutat intr-o rulota si au inceput sa colinde Europa (in special). Am citit majoritatea posturilor intr-o singura zi, cu lacomia celui care ar visa sa faca asemenea "nebunii" dar poate nu are destule motive, sau se teme "de gura lumii", sau pur si simplu este prins in angrenajul vietii ca o povara. Ce este interesant despre reportajele lor? Varietatea, tonul care nu judeca ci doar trasnmite mai departe ce personajele lor spun, din cind in cind observind comportamente si gesturi. Nu este nici o interpretare ci simplu documentare pentru un subiect. Majoritatea sunt oameni ca...

Writing as breathing Or Thoughts dumping Or Free wheeling writing The whole concept of starting by listening to your breathing and then leaving your mind to spit out thoughts and ideas and images and hidden wishes and dreams and memories and people as characters and   ... is nauseating. The implicit statement is that you can be able to do it, like everyone was born a writer or trained to release the mind valve and put words out from the inner life. Are we all capable of that? What is the purpose, just leave it out in the open? How do you make use of it by reading it? It is like an expectoration of thoughts and then who is able to inspect it (to be captured by the words or the tempo or the images). I started "back in the game" just to anchor feelings and raw emotions, just to freeze them on paper and analyze them as (maybe) deeper/unknown desires I cannot manage to unearth just by thinking of. It is harmless for any reader or third person. The words may resonate ...

It was obvious the picture posted on the website resembles so much an Enya's picture - the deep cleavage shirt, the lost gaze and the hands together offering something. Her interest in gem stones and healing was like a modern take on witchcraft in our times. Her mind was intriguing and the poems sounded like a modern haiku with a merry tempo. Hard to associate the hopping tone with the somberness of the words. Clearly she was hurt, by someone, by misunderstandings or by some twists in her life. She was smiling though, and at peace and content that life events can create such lines, like a kid amazed to the power of words (where are they coming from?). She was in her own bubble (or ivory tower). Fragments of her life are online, and exposed to anyone interested - how much more open can you be? She is still looking for answers or meaning or love or friendship. Just waiting for the life to happen. And here are a few quotes that I really liked and I discovered Mark Gro...

Photo by Gustavo Lampert on Unsplash   I remember an interview with Li Na (the famous Chinese tennis player) who was asked how can she be so positive with all the attention and burden of carrying the dream of all Chinese people and having all the health problems the majority of professional tennis player have. She was smiling and said, every morning, when you wake up, you have two choices - gloom&doom looking to all the problems in your life or smiling and being grateful for the life you have. Her choice was to look to the bright side of her life. It is not coming easy, to smile and virtually forget the problems you have, but continuing with a positive attitude will make you cruise easier and not be consumed by the life events. Being down is mostly being too much on the dark side of your soul and over-thinking, over-planning, over-ageing. If you are grateful for the life you have, then you can turn around and see the beauty in your life, you can make people feel good, lis...

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...