nato tuke, the light, and the ocean… and, of course, skin

July 26, 2008 at 10:39 pm | In philosophizing, sensualism | 1 Comment

My friend eric just posted a bulletin on myspace about his friend’s photography. Her name’s Nato Tuke (pronounced naaahto), and she grew up on Bonaire, an island in the caribbean, until she was 12, then lived in Florida. You should read her bio, it’s very nice and interesting. She sounds like a very intelligent and excited person. She’s now 19 and doing a 3 year program at Brooks Institute of Photog in Santa Barbara.

I was checking out her website and there’s some wonderful stuff on there. I could not snag her photos off there to post them here, but here is the site nato tuke
I’m really enamored of the following:
Portfolio 1, the 1st photo and the 3rd photo
Portfolio 3, the 3rd photo

I like the way she lights things, and there is an air of sexiness, but still a lot of color and approachableness, and friendliness in her shots. Really great energy, and tangibleness as well. She talks in her blog about how she loves the ocean, which is awesome because THE OCEAN IS AWESOME. I’ll have to check back later and see what kind of sea centered shots she does. There are also a lot of really beautiful heavy but energetic blue colors she uses in some of her shots. I love blue. Pretty much my favorite color. Also, I like how there’s this sexiness in her photos, but it’s calm and nice. She has some great nude photos up there (portfl. 3, third photo), they’re very sensual, but inviting, not intimidating or crass. I like to use the word gorgeous to describe stuff like that. I also like how in the 1st photo in portfolio 1, the portrait of this girl with major freckles, her skin is so clearly shot and it’s like you can tell how it feels, and her eyes are so bright. Very cool.

I really wish I was more like people like this. She’s pretty young, but totally knows what she wants to do, and knows that she can do it, and wants to do it in this world. She seems really comfortable with herself, from reading her bio. It also kind of seems like she understands the world around her from a more mature and sure point of view. She talks about her diverse upbringing, and how she has a good perspective from being around so many different nationalities in Bonaire.
I really love the idea and the practice of worldliness and internatonal-ness (not a word huh?). I think I started to get really into this idea around the age of 14 or 15. Maybe it started in french class in high school… I love the sound of french, and speaking it is really fun as well, so I already thought things from other cultures were really great. I remember my teacher telling us about how in france people usually buy fewer pieces of clothing that are much nicer and just end up wearing the same thing more often, whereas in America we buy larger amounts of clothing that are of average quality. That was really significant to me, because I remember really liking the idea of wearing something i really loved that had fine details and fit well and was really beautiful, rather than having a bunch of clothes that fit terrible and felt horrible. But I couldn’t put this into practice because all the kids would have thought I was a weirdo for wearing the same 3 or 4 outfits (Side bar: that reminds me of Beven Herbekian who was the coolest kid in sixth grade and then everyone started to think he went crazy and was weird when he decided he just wanted to wear a couple different pais of sweats and sweaters over and over again. Didn’t ever know if they were clean….). I had very expensive taste and no way to fulfill it from a pretty young age, too, so the french way appealed to me on that point.
Mainly I just like the idea of knowing different ways of doing things and understanding why different cultures do different things. It can help you lead the kind of life that you want to lead (perhaps not in the style that you were raised in), and it also helps to understand, get along with, and feel more comfortable in other cultures.
Plus I just think that American culture can be very unhealthy a lot of the time, and I really like being exposed to the rest of the world’s ways.

the fall

July 6, 2008 at 1:54 pm | In personal, sensualism | Leave a Comment

I really love visual movies. I actually get annoyed when a movie is only visual and doesn’t have a discernible plot, or has a half-baked plot; but I really do love a good feature length visually beautiful film. I know I will be able to go down to the theater and sit and enjoy a world as beautiful as everything should be around all of us all the time. In an ideal world, that is (maybe someday).

I drove to Agoura (about 30 mi north of Los Angeles) to visit my friend Mer and see The Fall. We both love going to the cinema and wanted to see this film, so I was glad this was still playing somewhere. I thought it had left theaters for good already! The film was made in 2006, and was just released widely this spring 2008. I’m SO GLAD I heard of it because it’s the kind of film I would love to see, it’s the kind of indipendent film my mother would have found at the video store and brought home for us to watch. Here’s what I love about it…

 

le bandit et sa fille

The film was well casted, and the two characters I enjoyed the most, Roy ( the hospital patient telling the epic tale) and Alexandria (the little girl in the hospital with a broken arm the tale is being told to) were really good. The colors were so great, great filming choices. There were so many beautiful buildings and locations. Some of the costumes were a little cheesy, but for the most part it was appropriate and visually pleasing. Lee Pace played Roy, and it was a really good acting job. The character is this cowboy-like guy, an actor working as a stuntman until he gets in a bad accident on shoot. The dialect Lee Pace speaks with is perfect for that character. And the little girl, Alexandria is really natural, she’s very young and isn’t supposed to know very much english, so their relationship comes out very realistic. I really hadn’t known anything about Lee Pace before I saw this film, and I was like, “How have I never heard of this guy??” Well, I had, he stars in Pushing Daisies, which I have never been moved to watch, but maybe I’ll check it out now ( the plot seems too gimmicky though, so I’ll have to see how it is. I’m sure he could do really well in much cooler stuff). So yeah, I fell in love with him for the rest of the evening last night and read up a little. He’s only 29 – would NEVER have guessed. He has the kind of face that changes at every angle you see it at, and he really doesn’t look that young, so interesting. The girl who plays Alexandria, Catinca Untaru, is romanian, and it was so interesting a fun listening to her speak in the film. So many times I was thinking her accent started to sound like spanish, and then other things, but very eastern. I love language, it’s all so related and melodic and so enthralling to listen to. Anyway, they were very cute together.

Alright. I need to go outside now. And probably eat sushi. Yum.

gay marriage, etc.

July 2, 2008 at 8:24 pm | In philosophizing, race & racism, social critic | Leave a Comment

I’m actually not really gonna talk about gay marriage in this post. I’ll sum my views up for that for now with this: I don’t believe being gay is wrong. I believe anyone should be able to marry anyone they love and care about, they should be able to say they are married and have those legal benefits, and we should not expect any religions or belief systems to change the definition of their beliefs. There’s a reason they came up with the “church and state are separate” thing all those years ago.

 

I wanted to talk about an episode of 30 Days I saw in re-run the other day. It’s the episode on the issue of gay couples adopting children.

A Orange County woman who had been adopted as a child and has adopted children of her own, and also has religious beliefs that say homosexuality is wrong, believes that homosexual couples should not be able to adopt children. She goes to live for a month with a male couple who have 3 adopted children. They live… somewhere in Michigan, something like that, and the woman and the couple, to me, seemed like pretty similar types of people. Relatively conservative and laid back, pretty average people, all beliefs aside.

Through the episode the woman spends a lot of time with the family, she meets people who support gay couples adopting kids, and she actually has to do some volunteer work for an organization that supports it as well. She has a very hard time with the volunteering since she basically has to go around promoting exactly what she really disagrees with. I can totally understand what a challenge that would be, it’s totally opposite of what she thinks is right.

Throughout the episode, pretty much everyone she meets she really likes, and really thinks that she respects the people she’s with – she just totally doesn’t believe they should be able to adopt children. She also even meets two young adults who had been adopted (I think by heterosexual couples) but spent most of their time in foster homes, and she hears what a horrible hard time they had, and she doesn’t believe it would be good for them to be left in foster care, but doesn’t think they should be adopted by homosexual couples instead.

 

There were two parts in the episode that really bothered me and made me sad. The woman was at a barbeque with all these people who are gay and straight but all support gays adopting. The woman is talking to this other older lady about her beliefs and how uncomfortable she is at the party. And she’s telling this older gay woman that she still respects her as a person and thinks she is a nice person, but just doesn’t believe she should be able to get married to some one she loves. That’s not respect.

Then toward the end of the episode the woman and one of the men of the couple she’s living with are discussing how the situation is uncomfortable because of their difference in beliefs. He tells her he doesn’t have a problem with her beliefs until it starts to step on his toes (I feel like he puts it this way for lack of better wording, they were all a little tense in the conversation). Pretty much anyone can understand that what he means by this is that he mainly has a problem with her beliefs when it becomes law and prevents him from having his family, or would cause the circumstance where his children would be taken away from him and his husband – those sorts of impositions. She then replies with, “Well what you believe, if you can adopt, doesn’t that step on my toes? It offends my beliefs.”

It’s this kind of thinking that SCARES me. Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand what this woman is saying, the idea that gays can adopt when her beliefs say it’s wrong does offend her beliefs and that’s not nothing – but it doesn’t stop her from LIVING HER LIFE. If beliefs become LAW then everyone has to live by your beliefs. She makes the point more than once that people will vote and they’ll see who wins, but that’s just absurd. This is a free country where we are allowed to believe what we want and live our lives how we want as long as we do not significantly hurt one another.

Again and again I hear things that fundamentalists or conservatives believe, and everything they want politically is something that will force some one else’s behavior: you must have the baby, you cannot get married, you cannot have children, etc. From the other side it doesn’t force anyone: I can’t handle having a child, I want to marry this person, I want to have children. Those things do not affect the other person directly. Yes they will happen and exist, but it does not impose directly on anyone’s life who disagrees with it. And frankly, laws and government are only supposed to protect us and make public life possible. What we all do in our personal lives is not a federal, state, county, or city issue. It’s between us in life, not through laws. Government and law should be the well planned, effective skeleton that holds up our country, not the meat of it’s life and culture.

 

Lastly, this woman said something that was very sad. She said she was having such a hard time because she didn’t hate the people she met or anything like that, they were great people, etc, she said something like, “It’s just so hard trying to talk to people who are trying to do the exact opposite of what I’m trying to do.”

 

They are not doing the opposite thing. They are doing the exact same thing. Trying to have a family and raise happy and healthy children, and have positive values. I can’t imagine how many people there are  out there who have the same beliefs as this woman whose behavior she would find totally deplorable. People need to stop looking on paper, and in books for some answer so they don’t have to think about anything. LOOK RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU! They are the SAME.

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