-N- – Page 706 – Ink, Yarn & Beer

War, Anger, Cancer

Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

–Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dec. 10, 1964

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War: Today, North and South Korea have traded fire.

Anger: There is a person in my life – and those around this person – who is always angry about something. Drama everywhere, whether it is personal tragedy, dysfunctional family, or the fact that something is not a concrete, black and white, absolute fact. Nothing seems to give pleasure. Personality temperature runs hot, then cold. No shades of grey.

There is always a reason behind each outburst, something which triggers it: a season, a holiday, an event, a person, a circumstance, a moral stance, a perspective, a memory. These reasons are excuses for abuse.

Cancer: A friend of mine died about 5 years ago, and the world is a sadder place with her passing. She had cancer, and during her course of treatment she mentioned how tired she was of being told to “go to battle against the cancer,” “fight against the cancer,” and on, and on, and on. Why, she wondered, is everything in our world couched in terms of war, battles, fights? Why is there always a need to be victorious, to conquer, to win? What about adapt, accept, modify, negotiate?

I couldn’t agree with her more. In fact, out of all my years of friendship, the things which remain as her legacy to me are love and peace and cooperation.

Aggressive, angry people are to be pitied. They spread disease and contagion of the mind, heart and spirit. Constant complainers who find only the negative are the same. Who benefits from this? Certainly they don’t, but more, those around them become poisoned, oftentimes without realizing what is going on. Anger is infectious, just like a cold, and it makes the rounds. On the surface, it may disappear, but underneath, it can lie dormant in the form of resentment, which can flare into anger at a moment’s notice, with or without justifiable cause. It lurks, ready to attack.

So, how do you get rid of it? How do you get rid of it in your own life? Sure, avoid these kind of people – easy advice – but not necessarily easy to do. You find them at work, in your family. How do you keep from internalizing the poison these people spread? Hey, in today’s vernacular, you have to battle it! And that is just fighting fire with fire. Aggression steps in, the need to win enters.

What about honestly acknowledging the fact that these people exist, are there, and are not going away? How about realizing you cannot change them? How about admitting to a resentment about their toxic effect on your internal landscape? This is called reframing, and this is what can begin an attitudinal shift along with a simple acknowledgement of the reality that is. Not always easy, but certainly a far more peaceful solution than loud confrontations with those people, and a more harmonious way to continue on your life journey.

I cannot change these people, I cannot save these people, nor do I find I have any desire to do so.

Most interestingly, I learn a great deal from these people, about them, and about myself.

Beast Stew & Dumplings

Cold weather, wet weather, snowy weather all bring out the hibernation instincts. Cup of cocoa, hot toddy, fireplace, a good book. Comfort food, too, which for a lot of us is in the form of stews with dumplings, or hearty soups with crusty bread. My little brother asked for a stew recipe . . . he’s in Wisconsin, watching the Packer’s game on a dark and gloomy day. Here, in California, we have had rain and it is chilly in the mid-50s. So, here is what my brother will be cooking up – and what I decided to do after talking to him!

Sauteeing Onions and Herbs in Dutch Oven

Beast Stew with Dumplings

1 1/2 – 2 pounds cubed meat (I use chuck roast, but regular beef stew meat, pork, or lamb work very well)
1 pint black beer
1 pint water
4-6 onions
potatoes
carrots
garlic ground up with different herbs. I used coriander, ancho powder, sage, rosemary, thyme, parsley, marjoram, peppercorns
2-3 T tomato paste

Preheat oven to 325 F if you want a long, slow cook. Or, plan on cooking time of about 2-3 hours if done stove top. You might also try this in a crock pot, but before you start, be sure to brown the onions and meat for best flavor.

Brown meat in heavy dutch oven with lid in olive oil. Remove from pan. Brown onions – a bit of caramelization is nice. Grind up herbs and garlic, add to pan, sauté a bit. Return meat to pan. Add beer and water, cover, bring to simmer. Add tomato paste, stir in to dissolve. Continue to cook on stove or place in oven. Check liquid status periodically to keep from scorching. Be sure to put the lid on the pot!

On stove top, after about 2 hours – when meat is tender and begins to fall apart – add potatoes and carrots; continue to cook until vegetables reach desired stage of done-ness. Allow about 20 minutes for dumplings before serving.

After about 4 hours in the oven, add quartered russet potatoes. 30 minutes after that, add coarsely cut carrots. Continue to cook about another hour in the oven, then remove and place on stove top to finish with the dumplings. Bring to simmer on stove.

Dumplings

2 cups all-purpose flour
3 T butter
2 tsp. baking powder
pinch salt
2/3 c. milk, cream, or kefir

Mix together flour, powder and salt. Cut butter into flour mixture. Stir in liquid just enough to mix ingredients together. Drop by tablespoon onto simmering stew. Cook 10 minutes with the pot lid off, then 10 minutes more with the lid on. Note: I find that a thinner liquid stirs in better than the thickness of cream or kefir (or sour cream), so it is not a bad idea to thin any of them with a bit of water.

Persimmons, ii

With this entire week off for Thanksgiving, I have free time. No rush like at Christmas. Other family members will be serving up dinner, which means I don’t have anything to do, other than show up and be charming! Josh is making tiramisu for dessert – off the hook there. So easy.

Not really. I’ve brought work home to do, such as contracts and letters of recommendation, but in that mix I certainly plan to do some fun things. The latest Harry Potter movie is slated for the next couple of days, as is time to knit and paint and work out and walk and take some photos and read and learn some software. Maybe a day trip to Santa Monica, too.

And paint I have – with disastrous results. Persimmons are far harder to do than I was thinking – and I can see what not painting has done as well: I’ve lost the knack. Sure, I know I will get it back, but it is not a lot of fun to be frustrated! More importantly, though, is realizing that, although I enjoy photography, I also love having things in my hands to manipulate – a brush, a knitting needle, a trowel, a mixing spoon. Photography is a bit more intellectual even though I like the gut approach, too, of thinking of something, and trying it out. It also can be cumbersome, and I really like to travel light. Lugging around a dog and a camera is not fun, especially if the dog sees a squirrel!

Here are my persimmon paintings. Yuck.

I certainly plan on working on the subject matter a lot. The part where the fruit attaches to the tree is rather interesting – the area is square and continues that square shape into the leaves at a 45 degree angle, creating a rather interesting pattern of diamonds within diamonds. The shape of the hachiya persimmon is longer and pointed, sort of like an acorn, while the fuyu persimmons are squat. Luckily, both are available in the market right now. Mine are getting moldy.

Light

Probably the part of the short photography course I took that has stayed with me the most is light. We take it so for granted. Without it, we could not see colors or shadows or reflections in the mirror. Setting up the wine glass and paperweight for a photo shoot made me acutely aware of just how light plays on, and through, and past an object. Color, too, is certainly impacted by light, by too much as well as too little.

I have no strobes or flashes to use with my borrowed camera, only the pop-up flash. I have a diffuser for it, one which acts to disperse the light as it flashes, softening it so that it is not harsh and casting odd shadows in the wrong places. As a result, I took a shop lamp with a broken switch – the light was on all the time unless I turned off the surge strip – flashlights, overheads, and daylight coming in from the windows. I also used an Ott light, which has a full-spectrum (all the colors) bulb. White foam board reflected white light back onto the objects. Below, you can see the set-up, as well as the fact that daylight was behind the camera.

I bought two packages of colored construction paper, one white, one with about 10 bright colors in it. These were used as backdrops as well as to the side of the wine glass to create reflections of color from the shop lamp, and the flash when it went off. The shop lamp is so beat up I had to balance it on the foam board – no clamp!

Placing the shop lamp in different areas bounces the colors back in different ways. I set up lamps and lights in a number of ways.

Ott Light and Paperweight with Paper for Back Drop

For both the paperweight and the wine glass, I went through all the colors of construction paper! The paper was under the paperweight, and to the side of the wine glass. Lots of colors for really lovely reflections.

It took a lot of time to do these – but not as much as I expected once I settled on the final light and paper set-ups. Then, it was factory work! Change colored paper, click! I changed lenses for the paperweight, using the 70-300 zoom, while using the 35 mm prime lens for the wine glass. For all but one of the wine glass shots I used flash, which resulted in some reflections of light on the background. The one which I forgot to flash turned out the best, I think, which I showed two posts ago. If you want to see all the pictures, you may find the paperweights here, and the wine glass here, both on Flickr.

Persimmons, i

I love the color of persimmons – bright orange fruits silhouetted against the sharp blue of the autumn sky. These are the hachiya variety, and when you buy them in the store, they are hard. As they ripen, they become blacker and squishy.

Honestly, I bought these with photographs as my primary thought, but in the back of my mind, ah! persimmon bread! And now, having photographed them, my current thought – before turning them into bread – is to paint them. And so I shall, later on. Right now, though, on to photographing them.

The photo shoot took place on the south side of the house, with the sun rising from the east. No clouds, just a bit of wind. Above is the set up – you can see the directional cast of the shadow. Light was quite contrasty. The camera shoot involved about 100 or so images (ah, the glories of digital photography!), at all f/ stops and exposures, with a polarizing filter and without. Add to that, some with flash and some without; some with filtered flash, some without.

The final images here were done with a filtered flash, using f/32 and 1/60 second for exposure. Post processing was done to clean up spots in the background in the paper, as well as to clean up a few flaws on the fruit. Color was adjusted to some degree, with the final photo given a slightly warm setting to give an impression of reflected light from the fruits, or from a bit of a glowing evening light.

I pulled on compositional elements in painting – three items, three directions. I also cropped the photo at one point to create a different image, using the two persimmons on the right. However, the last picture, supposed to suggest an evening glow bombs now that I think about it! The reason is because the tint of the background is too consistent – certainly not something one would paint! So, in the final analysis, the ones with the white background are more pleasing to me, and so is the black and white one below.

Final Image in Black & White with Contrast Enhancements

I expect I will do something in sumi-e with these persimmons in the next few days, with and without color. I need to pick up that paint brush!