On Nude Photography

It’s 2013 but there are those who still see nude photography as a hobby for the perverted; that it’s a sort of peep show for us photographers. First off, let me say that I and those who shoot with me are very respectful of our models. I’m sure that there are exceptions among photographers but we are more or less the norm. When I or any of my friends organize shoots, we make sure that nothing other than photography happens during the shoot. Also, about 20-30% of the photographers I shoot with are straight women who also exclusively shoot women. 

While those of us who started off as straight men are still very straight men, we’ve seen enough nudity that, like a doctor who does breast implants on a regular basis (or perhaps a gynecologist?), we can be around a nude model and act normally, professionally and very respectfully. We’re not eunuchs but we know that there’s a good place and time to be proper perverts and that’s usually with our partners where we won’t risk tarnishing the image of nude photography. In contrast, some of those who aren’t as exposed to the naked human body salivate or go into rape mode at the mere sight of an exposed cleavage, some at the sight of an exposed ankle. Perhaps, unlike what the ultraconservative are suggesting, more regular exposure to nudity would have an inverse effect on the number of rape cases? Just a hypothesis =) 

While I’m not exactly advocating nudism, we’ve gone a long way from the olden days when a fully exposed human body was considered dirty. The human form in its full glory can be appreciated in more ways than what we’re normally used to. I’m a fan of the female form. I know it almost sounds like a pick up line but I mean that in the most innocent and the least perverted way possible. Capturing the beauty of the female form can be like capturing the undulations of a vast mountain range or the intricate curves of a winding river in a photograph. The beauty of the human form doesn’t always have to be sexual. 

Art is subjective. One may see it on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel or one may see it in a heap of scrap metal. I don’t see anything wrong with seeing it in the human form, whatever gender that human form may be.

On Dancing

The geek in me never could understand modern dancing. The appeal of bobbing up and down to repetitive music escaped me. I wanted to try it though at least once in my life It seemed like something that was easy to do. That was until I actually tried doing it in public and found myself frozen. My feet suddenly felt like they were made of concrete. And then my inner geek kept telling me”don’t do this. You’d look awkward.” Or “this is herd mentality. Don’t be part of the herd”. I made a vow to be more adventurous at this point in my life though so I tried doing what the others were doing. It’s amazing what alcohol can make you do as a few beer bottles later, I was actually enjoying myself already. Most of the satisfaction came from being able to tell the inner geek to shut the **** up and let me move to the beat

 

At Urbn. In this supposedly posh and exclusive ecosystem, they'd throw you out if you don't look the part.

Reggae music at B-Side:

On the internet and superegoes

Now that we're about to have another addition to our family, I look back to this tribute http://internetjaywalking.blogspot.com/2008/09/her-name-was-katherine.html that I wrote about a member of the family we lost a decade and a half ago. It's possibly the only detailed record of her life anywhere on the internet

They say that the internet has given birth to superegos, a generation of regular people who think too highly of their own importance. In a way that's true. I think we have statistics to prove this. The internet has given more power to the individual in a way that no other medium ever has. It is the ultimate "democratizer" where the loudness of your voice isn't always proportional to the amount of money in your wallet, the number of celebrities that you know or which cabinet positions your parents or uncles hold. If you have something to say and people wanna hear it, they will find you.

The internet also has become a record keeper of sorts, a place where you leave your, more or less, permanent imprint wittingly or unwittingly. In the words of someone who now lives his life as an internet demotivator : “don’t be an internet meme cos you’ll live on forever in a way that you probably don’t want to.”

The footprint in life that one leaves behind is so much bigger now. Anyone who passes away now, leaves a facebook profile, possibly a blog, an online photography album, a resume of accomplishments, a compilation of poems, photos, personal musings of various depth which anyone from the present or from the future would be able to find by googling his or her name

In contrast, anyone who passed away before internet became mainstream, unless they became popular for some reason or they made a significant contribution to a certain group, left very little to no trace outside the photoalbums and memories of their immediate friends and family. Google their names and it’s almost as if they never existed. 

The internet is a place where one's popularity is not commensurate to the availability of public information on him/her. A public filing system that makes sure that each individual can be picked from from a sea of nameless faces, put under the magnifying glass and be appreciated (or scorned?) as individuals. Under the magnifying glass of the internet, each individual has a voice which can be heard and that voice doesn’t have to die with him. If that does make him feel more important than his pre-internet counterparts, I can’t say that I blame him.

Kathy... you’ll find her on the internet, if you search hard enough.

Anatomy of a Car Accident (fiction?)

 

Diffused by the pouring rain, the beam from our headlights bathed the scene with an eerie white glow.  There was an overwhelming atmosphere of dread.  The air smelled of pain, fear, panic and confusion.  The scent seeped from the capillaries in my nostrils to my brain where it built up pressure until it felt like my skull was going to explode. Near our vehicle was an overturned tricycle.  Scattered around it were 7 badly injured people, most of them moaning in pain.  I say most because one of them wasn't.  The driver of the tricycle lay underneath his vehicle, silent.  His head was bloody, his limbs were contorted into unnatural angles.  It was a scene straight out of a twilight zone episode.  All that was needed was a grayscale filter, which would've been particularly useful to hide the blood and the gore.  I didn't have that grayscale filter though.  The colors around me bombarded my eyes in the most unwelcome fashion.  For a few minutes, I was paralyzed. Thoughts blazed through my head at lightspeed.  The scene was right before my eyes but the mind would not believe that it was real.  As I tried to make sense of what I was seeing, the immediate past, the present and the future all tried to squeeze themselves in my head at the same time.  Through all the confusion, I tried retracing what had happened a few minutes earlier.

It was almost midnight and there was a slight drizzle. I was making a left turn from Congressional Avenue towards a perpendicular road.  It would've been a sharp, right-angle turn across a 3-lane highway which curved a little bit.  In between my side of the road and the other side was a center island strewn with trees which slightly limited the visibility of the cars coming from the other side.  I approached the turn. I looked for oncoming vehicles.  I only saw one vehicle which was still quite far away so I decided to take the turn.  I had already occupied one lane of the road when I saw a tricycle with its lights off speeding towards us.  It was moving along the lane closest to the island. It was travelling at a really fast speed so I had very limited time to react.  In another split second, it hit the passenger side door of our vehicle.

Being on the driver's side, I didn't feel the impact as much as my passenger did. Immediately after the impact, I stepped out of the vehicle and I cursed at the driver, telling him that he didn't have his lights on. That was before I saw his body lying face-down on the road and the carnage that surrounded him. Whatever I was thinking or whatever I was saying came to an abrupt halt and everything froze.

Before that night, I had never been in an accident that resulted in anything more than a minor dent and I wasn't at fault in any of them, save for one.  I had never seen a wound that exposed anything underneath the skin.  I had never seen a broken limb, I had never seen an exposed eyeball.  I had never seen a dead body.  I lost my innocence that night and I lost it in one of the most brutal ways possible.

After a few minutes, I was able to partially collect myself.  I tried to comfort my companion who looked like she was in shock and asked her to go back inside the vehicle.  I tried to get the tricycle upright again so it wouldn't rest on top of the driver.  At this point, the moans were getting louder. There was a certain grogginess in their moans that made them sound almost ghostly. It was just another unwelcome addition to the barrage of sensory inputs that I was getting.  I was panning around the scene trying to absorb everything when I saw that the driver was still moving.  It was more instinct than anything else when I thought that something had to be done. I thought in the back of my head that he shouldn't be moved but at that point I didn't know which number to call and no one among the gathering crowd of onlookers seemed to be doing anything.  Rather than wait for nothing and let him die on the street, I decided to lift him up myself onto another tricycle which carried him to a nearby hospital.  I had blood all over my arms and hands.  At that time, I thought that it was true both figuratively as well as literally.

My passenger was driven to a nearby hospital to have her head checked as she hit it pretty badly during the impact.   Police officers escorted me towards the nearest precinct.  I was broken and humbled.  All my pride had to be surrendered.  It felt like my brain had shut down and my body was being moved by outside forces, almost like a puppet.  It was at the police station where they told me that the driver had expired at the hospital. I expected it but the news still hit me on the chest with a dull thud.

I must've been in a daze because it took me a while to realize that a security situation was starting to develop.  The relatives of the injured started arriving at the precinct.  Some of them were probably still emotional and were looking for the driver of the vehicle their trike bumped into.  I was texting people with my blood-stained hands in front of them. Good thing none of them noticed.  The officers escorted me to an isolated room to hide my identity and so I wouldn't do anything stupid in front of the relatives again.   There was fear but I was mostly surrendered. If any of them came at me, I don't know if I would've defended myself.

They say that your life flashes before you right before you die.  I don't know what the tricycle driver saw but I saw flashes that night.  In my mind, I saw scenes in my future that scared me.  But what scared me more was what I couldn't see.  I saw my life end before my eyes that night. In my mind, my life would never be the same again. In my mind the, tricycle driver and I were in the same boat.  I stayed the night at the police station.

A lot of those who go through a traumatic experience such as this end up talking to themselves a lot.  There's that inner voice that constantly berates you, questioning everything that you've done.  Most people call it conscience.  I call it my pessimistic little half brother.  I relieved myself of some of the guilt by saying that the tricycle was driving recklessly.  That it was speeding without its headlights on.  That it was way overloaded and it had no chance of stopping on time if ever it needed to.  The support of friends and family helped as well.   Gradually the voice got muffled enough that I no longer heard it.  I wasn't at fault.  I came to terms with what had happened - that this was real and this is something that I would have to live with - something that I can live with. After 18 hours of detention, I was released.  No charges were filed.

It's now been 6 days since the accident.  I'm back home.  The atmosphere here in my room is starkly different from the chaotic mess of that fateful night. The airconditioner hums silently.  I'm sitting on a reclining chair, having coffee while typing on my keyboard. I am uneasily relaxed.  I am coping. To be able to live with yourself after being directly in the collision path of another human life, one must develop a certain coldness.  The coldness helps me get by but it also colors everything I see with a slightly darker tint, including the image that I see in the mirror.  You don't quite see yourself the same way after something like this.  At least not for a while. It's midnight as I'm writing this. There's a slight drizzle outside.  That section of Congressional Avenue should look uncomfortably familiar right now to a few eyes.  Memories will be replayed there over and over in the minds of those who saw.

Things are no longer as they seemed.  When I was at the police station, I thought that my life had ended. But it didn't really.

I'm writing this now wishing that it was a work of fiction but it's not really.

On the Definition of a Certain Word

Love ---a woman asked me once what the word meant. I didn’t know what to tell her of course. I wasn't well versed on subjects concerning the softer emotions. All I knew was that it’s a word that manly men should only use when referring to food, cars or gadgets. Using the word when referring to another person is highly inappropriate and should be frowned on. Writing about the definition of love in a public blog is an offense that should be punishable by stoning.

I told her that I may need time to figure out how to define it and I told her that I may need her help. Over the course of getting to know her, I slowly got to know what love does to a person. (This is on a case by case basis of course.)

• Love will make you eat exotic food
• Love COULD make you eat kuhol, given enough time
• Love will change your sleeping habits
• Love will make you go out of your comfort zone
• Love could make you more sociable
• Love will make you throw the man code out the window occasionally
• Love will make you more outdoorsy
• Love will make you a sentimentalist
• Love has an entirely different set of special logical rules which may be contradictory to normal logical rules. Love’s special logical rules will almost always win out.
• Love will make you join a race in which you may possibly have to endure a great deal of “bossing around”
• Love will make you emo occasionally
• Love will make you feel happier in general
• When the object of your love wraps her arm around your arm in a movie theatre, love will make you feel comfort, the likes of which you’re unlikely to feel anywhere else
• Love will introduce you to his cousin, jealousy
• When love leaves, it will leave a void in your chest that would be very difficult to fill

After a few months, she asked me again to define the word. I already knew what the word meant but I still couldn’t define it. So I said it’s like the color blue. How do you define blue without referring to things that are colored blue? You can try your best to define blue to someone who’s blind but you will never come close to giving that person any idea of what blue looks like. The person will need to have perceived the color to understand what it looks like. In the same sense, I don’t think that love, as a feeling, can be effectively defined to someone. You could describe things that are affected by it but He or she will have to have experienced love to fully understand what it is.

It took a while but I can finally say that I now know what love is. You wouldn’t know what you’ve been missing out on until you finally feel it and realize that your life wouldn’t have been half complete without it.

This is the color blue:

And this is love:

Rumminations on Blogging

I’ve neglected blogging for almost a year now. I feel like I’ve become a shallower person as a result.  A friend asked me once for my opinion regarding a suitor of hers. The first question I asked her was: “does he have a blog?” As soon as she said no, I said that he was not worth her time.

I judged a lot of people that way.  The people whom I found interesting were usually those who wanted to keep concrete records of their opinions, convictions or feelings, whether that be through writing, art or even video/audio recordings.

I had a certain respect for people who felt that their thoughts or opinions were significant enough for them to be ascribed some sort of permanence.  The human mind is always in a state of flux. Thoughts are generated, morphed and oftentimes lost. Thoughts are so fundamental to a person’s existence that losing them forever almost seems like a sin. And there’s a finalizing quality to writing in that when you write down a thought or an opinion, it becomes, in a way, final. It acquires a definite and tangible form and structure and ceases to be just a jumble of spontaneous thought bubbles that pop in and out of existence.  It becomes like a photograph, only not of one’s face but of one’s mind

I’ve been re-reading a lot of my past entries. When you revisit memories they’re usually not the same as when you first experienced them. Even the strongest of feelings subside eventually and with them, go the thoughts that they produced.  It’s nice to read your thoughts at the time that they were conceived, thoughts that may otherwise have been forgotten. It’s nice to know what your convictions were or if you had any. And it’s nice to know if you still feel as strongly about them

I feel like I have changed a lot the past few months. Whether for the better of for the worse is a matter of perspective. I’ve modified some goals. I'm not as profit oriented anymore
I got into photography, I went dating, socializing, clubbing(WTH?!), expanded my group of friends, acquired a new appreciation for fireworks. I also experienced betrayal, jealousy, I almost got into a fight, felt the highs of passion and the lows of inadequacy -Normal things for most normal people but keep in mind that I used to spend months not interacting with a single person.

Such a drastic change in lifestyle would probably lead to an equally drastic change in personality. But I take comfort in the fact that even if I change or even if I lose half of my brain mass due to intellectual inactivity, I’ll have a record of who I was.

I write for a variety of reasons. But most significant of all, I write for the same reason that people erect monuments to fallen heroes, or for the same reason that people seemingly waste large areas of land to preserve historical structures - to create a permanent imprint of that which is fleeting, time

Her Name was Katherine

The internet has become a record keeper for all sorts of personal information, from the most trivial to the most intimate. Wittingly or unwittingly, almost everybody has left a left a trace on the internet open for google to find. If a person mattered then there might be an article created for him/her by those whose lives he/she has affected Or he might be a subject of an entire article on wikipedia if he affected the lives of a lot of people. If a person wants to matter then he may create a dent on the internet himself by creating a blog like the one you’re reading right now.

Every year, my family gathers in a small patch of land somewhere within the forest of crosses and tombstones of manila north cemetery to commemorate the life of a person we lost 11 years ago. Her name was Katherine. We called her Kathy. She was the 2nd youngest of us four siblings.

She had a lot of things going for her. She was pretty, she was smart, she was studious and she had the gift of gab. She was too young to have decided on a career path but my mother used to suggest to her a lot that she be a dermatologist (I think she had expressed some interest in the idea as well). One, because it’s a lucrative career. It’s common knowledge that dermatologists are professionally trained to suck every peso out of their clients’ wallet. Two, so she could cure her own skin problems.

She had a lot of infectious and unique mannerisms. I think she started the trend of babytalking in the family. Both of my other sisters do it now quite extensively. She also was into the habit of inventing words. A habit which I think I may have picked up from her. Whenever she would watch TV, she had this weird mannerism where she’d face the tv sideways and she’d watch from the corner of her eye. Whenever I would try to access an image of her from my memory, the image of her watching tv always stands out as the clearest. It’s funny how the habits that I used to think were annoying are the ones that I remember the most.

She was born on the 6th of December, 1984. She succumbed to asthma on the night of September 17, 1997. She was just about to turn 13. I remember waking up to the sound of commotion. My mother was panicking and Kathy’s struggle was quite audible. My parents tried to calm her down (because stress would just aggravate her asthma) and then they rushed her to the hospital
I tried to ignore it but at the back of my mind, I had a very strong feeling that she wasn’t going to make it. I also had suffered from severe asthma attacks in my youth and I knew the feeling of fighting for every breath to the point where you feel like you don’t want to anymore.

It was like drowning but, in some ways, more torturous. When you’re drowning, your ordeal would just last for about 10 or so mins and then you’d pass out and die. My worst asthma attacks lasted for almost a month and the apex would last up to 5 days, during which I’d be bedridden and any attempt at exertion would leave me close to losing consciousness.
I saw what she went through and I knew that it was worse than anything I had ever experienced. That night, before my parents rushed her to the hospital, I heard her say “ayoko na” (I don’t want to anymore)

I think the call came at around midnight. I think It was my mother who delivered the news. I remember vague details about what happened exactly.  My youngest sister was playing jackstone. I was on my bed. I don’t remember the exact sequence of events but I think I slept again after I heard the news. Maybe because I wanted to wake up and realize that it was all just a bad dream or maybe because I wasn’t quite sure how I would react yet and I wanted to postpone it till morning.

It was strange because I felt sad but I didn’t feel as sad as I expected to be. I got a bit teary eyed but I don’t remember crying. The full impact of what happened didn’t catch up with me till much later.

I used to call her “bispringe” (bestfriend). Kathy and I were quite close when we were much younger but we weren’t in good terms when she passed away. I think we weren’t speaking for more than a year. It was a long time ago so ¬I don’t exactly remember what started our fight but I remember calling her “ketong” (leper). Kathy had allergic dermatitis which caused certain areas of her skin to form scabs. We were calling each other names at the time. She brought up some of my insecurities so I thought it was a fair trade. But of course it wasn’t and it was really insensitive of me. She cried so to say that she was affected would probably be an understatement. I never got to say sorry. We never got to make up.

She was already a young lady when she passed away but my clearest mental image of her is when she was much younger, when we were still quite close. She didn’t have a lot of pictures in her latter months and we didn’t get to interact much so it’s hard for me to remember clearly what she looked like. I remember that she grew her hair longer, her skin improved and she got slimmer. (she was chubby when she was younger) but it’s hard for me to assemble a full picture in my head. There’s very little to remember her by.

I never got to know what kind of life she got to live in her latter months. She kept a diary but due to a misdirected gesture of sentimentality, we never got to read it and we never will. Her thoughts and secrets were buried with her literally.

She passed away before the internet went mainstream here in the philippines. She never had a friendster profile, no myspace, no facebook, no blog. You won’t find any picture of her online. There’s no record of her thoughts, no record of her hobbies, her favorite movie, no record of whether her status was “single”, “in a relationship” or “it’s complicated” when she passed. No information about her will appear in any google search.

There is no significant record of her existence outside the memories of her immediate friends and family. I’m not even sure if her friends still remember her. She may just be a tiny speck of memory to them now. All we have left of her are the very few pictures that she left us and memories that get more and more vague as time passes.

When I first created this blog, I wanted it to be a shrine to me. A record of my existence that exists outside of the people who know me. A depository of my thoughts at different stages of my life that I (or anyone interested) can look back to someday. It doesn’t matter if anyone cares to read it. It’s for me.

I write this entry now for her so that the memory of who she was would not just exist in our heads and in our old photo albums. So that if you’d search for her name, it would appear somewhere within the deep recesses of google. As a record that she existed and that she mattered! …a humble shrine to her existence and an apology that is 11 years overdue. It doesn’t matter if anyone finds it or cares to find it, it’s for her.

Her name was Katherine M. Zosa and this is her online memorial