Political Mumbo Jumbo

It's been so long since I've actually sat down and gotten everything that I have to say written, so here I am again ready to pour out everything that I have. I have realized that I have an exhibition to prepare for here in the next four weeks.

Starting on Sunday, I plan to be in Crete for 5 days or so and then I will be back here working like mad for the next three weeks trying to pull together everything that I have been working so hard here for. That involves a lot really to.

I am starting to write up and follow very closely the products that I wish to get here, and there really are a lot of things that I have riding on needing to be done. I love it though because I know that as soon as I come out the other end of this experience I will have grown so much as a person. It just thrills me so much to know that. I was in the darkroom printing the other day and something struck me very hard and very profoundly. I'm realizing now that I am paying for all of the shortcuts that I had taken as a photographer. I don't know what happened, but somewhere along the way, I took shortcuts in the darkroom and my lack of photographic knowledge dug me into a hole.

I have spent the last three weeks rediscovering that there is a hole and then finding where the bottom is. Now that I have reached the very bottom, I decided just to start over again from the top. John Pack is a super amazing photographer and he has studied with two of my most admired photographers of all times Ansel Adams and Jerry Uelsmann. Anyway, he has taken the care to really take me under his wing and help me really go where I want with photography. I went to the darkroom with him today and he gave me tips and answered some questions that I have had since day one of being in the darkroom, basically, he has saved my photographic career. I am now learning so much, and the learning curve of where I am at with photography is so amazingly steep that I can't even imagine where it is going. I'm so excited. My discovery of myself was that I was missing some of the basic parts of photography and I became so frustrated with the holes that I couldn't see that I quit altogether. However, that just got me deeper and deeper into the soup. Mainly the reason was that because I am a photographer and an artist and I had become so discouraged with my lack of technique (and ability to see my own holes) that I had quit art altogether and took up watching movies and doing other things. I was at a place artistically speaking three years that brings me to tears at the thought of it. Really and truthfully it has taken me these 7 weeks here in Greece to rediscover who I was before I decided to quit.

The help of the people here at the Center is so incredible and I am ready to forge ahead with where I am going now. I am SO SO psyched to actually go into the dark and make a print in an hour or so that I just CAN'T wait. I have come up with a photographic project here. I want a portfolio of 10 excellent prints. It is going to my Greece silver portfolio. What I am going to do is devote a roll of film (or more if that doesn't do it), to one single subject. Then I am going to print that subject in the most artistically sound way possible. I will bring home 5 copies of each of the prints. I just can't wait to work with them. My subjects currently are. A portrait of a donkey A portrait of the donkey produce man A portrait of Paroikia's cobbler A photo of an olive tree A lily An archway A photo of a church More will be added soon, but that's where I'm going.

Part of being detached from life here is the fact that I can think about things that don't often come into my head while I am worried about more practical things. Just for your interest, here are some of the thoughts and concepts that just continually appear in my head over and over. I think it is interesting that different words, nouns and concepts appear in almost all languages. Not necessarily that people have a word for chair (though it is odd that all cultures around the world have found it necessary to sit on something and to have a word for what you sit on), but I'm talking about more abstract things. The best example is the word for love. People in English say that there is no way to describe love, but it is obviously a thing because it appears in all languages throughout history. And, if it didn't appear in a language, how much would that limit the ability of the people of that culture to experience that emotion? Odd thought eh?

Since being in such an ancient land, I keep wondering to myself what they are going to find when they dig for us. You know, Ancient Greece was a great empire at one point, but even it fell and had it's dark ages. We are finding poems from some of the greatest poets in ancient times on the bodies of mummies because the Christians didn't find it necessary to pass down the traditions. What if in the future people look at us and think that our ideas of things are not appropriate for the culture. There is a song that says that they are going to find white plastic lawn chairs when they dig for us, but seriously, what will it be. Who will the famous poets be and will someone take the time to actually preserve us and our ideas to such an extent that the people of the future at least don't make our mistakes (obviously not because look at who we just elected as the pope.) I'm also wondering if our culture really is so full of hubrus that we believe that we will survive, that our culture will endure through anything.

Hello Bush, read some history books while you're at it. I can take you to some ancient ruins not 100 meters from here that were from a civilization far greater than ours (they even had running water and flush toilets). Where are the places to be going to have been in our century? Who is going to make them and how? Who of us are going to be remembered as the Picassos and the Degas? In other news, I had written down in my notebook that I should say something about the Pope. For whatever reason, being so close to Italy and Europe and the countries that the Pope had worked so hard to make tranquil, I have felt a very deep connection with what is going on in Catholicism. I'm just amazed at how much a unifying thing it is (as it was meant to be all the way back to Constantine). I think that our last Pope was a really, really great man and that we are regressing with where we are going. John Paul was able to really help keep his country free. There were so many things about him that were off (like that he was the first non-Italian pope in 455 years), but he really understood on some level that he would be able to really do some good. I think that he was one of the most calming factors in Europe during his reign.

Our new Pope, I believe, is his opposite, so it will be interesting to see where this goes. The position is famous for being corrupt, and I believe that John Paul was able to stay mostly good despite any crap around him. We'll have to see what this one says and does. Maybe he'll keep it all together or maybe he'll lead Catholicism into where the Greek Orthodox church is going, just look at the scandals and crap going on there. (Don't I sound like a political girl now?) A couple of other things that have come up with people here that I noted down to at least comment on. America is dumb, really dumb.

Sometimes I wonder if the people in government are taught history in school and if they just forget it. Look at what we are doing. I can understand in the 1700 colonizing America to gain more land and power and what have you. Of course we took the land from the Indians, but we were much stonger than them, and there were a lot less of them back then. Just look at how we can justify all this. Anyway, America, I really think is trying to colonize around the world again. Only we're not even looking into countries that could be of any benefit to us (hello, it gets to be 140 degrees in Iraq), we are doing it for much more corrupt reasons.

Here we have men and women being killed in the Middle East for all of the wrong, wrong reasons, and now we have to stay there to hold their hands. Hello America, can we move on from the colonization idea into a new era please? We have enough land on our own and what do we want with Iraq, there ARE such things as electric cars. Ok, now all of the lines of my notebook are clean and I can talk about other things.

Yesterday we had our art history class in the church. It was amazing. I was standing in a church that was personally built by Helen, finished by Constantine and then later remodeled by Justinian. Isn't that amazing. There are so many amazing things about the church. For example, it has the only standing Greek baptisery because they decided sometime after the founding of the church that they should do the baptizing of children (hence why it was so hard to get baptized in the Greek Wedding movie). There are also so many other things. We saw the tomb of a woman that was made a Saint. She is from this island, and there is a footprint from her in the marble of the church (from many, many years ago). We also saw a healing icon and all of the gold that was donated to the church due to it's healing powers. It was a super powerful church, and it is thought to be the most beautiful church in the Byzantine style.

I'm told that there isn't even a church in Athens as nice as it because THIS one was built by Constantine and his Mother. I have been informed about Easter here. It is really a week worth of celebrations and I have the film ready for all of the incredible things they do. People make pilgrimages to this island because of the church and there may be a million people here. I am so excited to eat lamb and just get the groove on. Easter is better than Christmas here by 500 times and I can't wait to take part in it! And now that I've gone off on so many political and religious tangents, let's come back to reality.