Who Am I This Time?*

The long version of my profile description:

This is the transparent blog of Chelvanaya B. Gabriel. That is to say, I am not hiding my online identity here because the things I have to say are meant to be heard, not archived on the web and thought of as random web commentary amidst the sea of such things.

The things I will say are simply thoughts on the world, on film, on collaborative projects, on writing, and anything else that seems relevant to me (or to you - just ask and I'll see what I can do).

I am a "recovering chemist" because that is an identity that I held so dearly for so long and yet now I am quite sure that chemistry is not what defines me as a human being. LOL It did for a time, and it was a good thing. Note: I live near Martha Stewart's house and I am told by my father that perhaps she has an influence on us New Englanders such that we are bound to say things like "it's a good thing"...

Now, I define myself far more broadly, some would say loosely, as in perhaps I no longer have direction. And yet, that is so subjective. I am not working for "The Man" any longer - am not making the "big bucks" as a lab monkey, helping to bolster Pfizer or Merck's bottom line. But that - to me - is not direction, it's static. It's dull and exploitative and saps the soul out of you. Working for anyone other than yourself or your family or your community (including non-profit work), it's soul-sucking, soul-destroying, soul-twisting, soul-perverting work. And I'm not interested in occupying that place in the world any longer.

Mind you, it means considerably less financial security but it also means spending time with my family. It means reconnecting with me, rediscovering who I was and who I am and who I want to be. Questions that you cannot possibly hear when you are running the "rat race". The pounding of your own feet is too loud. The thunderous pounding of all the other souls on this planet who run with you, ahead of you and behind you is not only deafening, it's downright eardrum-shattering.

Anyway, enough metaphors. Enough cliches. The point is - I once was a chemist. But I also once was, and am once again, a daughter, a sister, a granddaughter, a cousin, a niece, a friend. I am once again a creator of things: a writer and an artist; a person who sees things others do not; hears things others ignore; shares this vision, this hearing, with others as a fellow artist and as a storyteller/creator of visual art.

*Apologies to our dearly departed Kurt Vonnegut for the title of this section. The short story and Jonathon Demme's tv movie with Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken :) still have a direct and powerful influence on who I am. I couldn't have predicted it, but it makes sense.

For that last line I have Dr. Peter Setlow at the University of CT Health Center to thank. What a great guy. One can never look upon gluconeogenesis the same way ever again after listening to him. Nay, _experiencing_ his lectures.

Glimpses of Hope (A Collaborative Photo Shoot)

This was written for the Little Book of Man project started by Ron Modro, wherein a number of people all around the world took photos at the same time, the time of the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima (and then later Nagasaki) in 1945 during WWII. As a commemoration of this event and other tragedies since then, we all submitted our photo and associated stories for posting on the website. Please go there and check out the other photo stories! I am posting mine here as well.

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Title: Glimpses of Hope

I hadn't had much sleep the night before so I woke up barely in time for our 8:30am August 6th commemorative, collaborative photo shoot. I wasn't feeling too creative because of that but I had purposefully not decided to do anything in particular. Instead I had spent the time since I signed up for the project honing my photography skills and getting more comfortable with my camera.

Mind you, this is not to imply that I have any vast skill - just an explanation of my process preparing for this event, to the extent that I did prepare that is.

The event that we all were referencing, that is to say, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, both informed our photos and informed everyone else's actions that day if only in the overdetermined way that everything that has happened before has a lasting effect on all timepoints thereafter. Little Man and Fat Boy were hardly anything like butterfly wings but the saying that a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world and causes it to rain in another, is more broadly relevant in a temporal sense.

Back to the photo shoot. I stumbled outside and was awake almost instantly, both from the fresh air of the morning and from the anticipation/realization of what we were all doing, all around the world, at the exact same time. The fact that I was holding my camera in much the same way that most of the rest of you were holding yours (for how many ways can one hold a camera, besides changing the angle or adjusting telephoto lenses) just about overwhelmed me emotionally. It is a very powerful thing when any group of people get together as a collective to take any action, and an extra element that I cannot put a name to is added on to that when those people that combine their energies are complete strangers to one another (with some exceptions?)...

I decided to do exactly as I had "planned" and let something that is both outside of myself, and at the same time deeply nestled within me in some intangible way, guide my photos. I think I took 7 photos that morning all around the 8:30 timeframe. I figured that a few minutes one way or the other would not matter given the variability in the accuracy of timepieces, et cetera, etc. That, and I'm hardly a stickler for precise timing at any time of the day, least of all first
thing in the morning.

After a bit of a walk, my eyes and my camera rested on a porthole attic window with an old bedpost resting against it. The colors of the brick, the worn window casing, the design of the bedpost and the symmetry I found in the angle of shot that I ultimately used felt right.

But I continued, taking all manner of other photos also, by 'all manner of' I mean four or so but they ranged in content: a bee methodically collecting pollen from a rose inches from a thick mass of Japanese beetles devouring the petals of another; my hand holding a cherry tomato from the garden turned just so in order to make it look like an eye staring back at me from my palm; and echinacea, lobelia and phlox recovering from a heavy storm the night previous.

Then I sat on the photos until the deadline (I'm a procrastinator by nature I guess) and a few days before, I decided not only to use my first photo but to also tweak it gimp-style (If I'm going to advertise a product, I wanted it to be an open source product rather than the more popular graphics editor that starts with a "P"). I adjusted the color balance, saturation, and a few other settings (all to the whole photo not to portions of it) to discover that there was something magical hidden in the photo I had taken!

The morning light pushing its way through the maple trees was reflected in the glass of the window but when I adjusted certain settings in just the right way, that light became multi-colored and hazy whereas the rest of the photo was not as much. Then some other changes were made, such as making the color of the brick stand out more powerfully.

The lights in the left half of the window appear as if they are fleeing from the window into the bright white triangle of sky-space at the top right of the photo. Are they the souls of those who were so heinously murdered and tortured (for many did not die right away)? I leave that up to your interpretation. In fact, I leave the whole photo and my poorly described photo shoot process up to your collective interpretations, those of you who will read over our photo-stories. And I thank you for also being a part of this collective experience, your presence as a photographer and/or reader and/or Ron Modro, wondrous organizer of the whole thing enriches us all and it is that precious touch of enrichment in our world that just might signal that there is hope yet in these increasingly hope-scarce times.

Hope is a fragile concept and one that does little good, in my humblest of opinions, if it is not channeled toward action. But the beautiful thing is, any action that is informed by love, compassion, tenderness, understanding, open-mindedness, mindfulness, self-awareness, peace and intelligence - any action at all: a smile, a hug, a wave, writing a letter, protesting, writing a book, forming discussion groups, joining discussion groups, being present with your family and friends, organizing fundraisers and awareness events for Darfur, for Peru, for Bangladesh, for the poorest of poor right here in the U.S.!, for whatever cause you can connect with - these actions, by their very nature will be the butterfly wings of our world and we will all feel the effects, even if we don't know it.


Peace and Love,

Chelvanaya Gabriel
North America

Lars von Trier is one of my new favorites in the cinematic world. I could have simply said that he is one of my favorite directors but Lars, if I may use the familiar address, is far more than that: he is also a writer, an innovator, a visionary, a satirist, a comic, a man in limbo between darkness and light, among other things. Apparently he is also a father and a husband (a few times over) but I know nothing of Lars in either context, which is just as well - celebrities tend to expose their family lives to all manner of voyeuristic impulses from the public. So it is refreshing to not be able to learn such details about Lars, though I am hardly immune to such impulses myself and therefore, I do wonder.

My experience with the films of Lars von Trier began, ignorant of who the director was, with Dancer in the Dark and I thought it was a beautiful film (it made me cry) and a bit odd but to be honest I attributed its avant-garde nature more to Bjork's influence than to the director's. That is, until I had seen a few more of his films.

In fact, the real moment of realization was the second film of his that I watched, The Five Obstructions. I had no idea this was the same director at the time, it was a random Film Movement selection from the local library. I tend to have a great deal of trust in the movies that Film Movement has in their collection. And this one is just another reason why that is the case. It also happens to be one of the best ways to get inside Lars' head and understand who he is as a person, and as a director. It does seem as if this is one of the main goals of the movie, given the structure of it.

And, this past summer, a friend and I spent a couple of weeks devouring von Trier's singular creations. Epidemic, Dogville (the first of the U.S.A. trilogy), Dear Wendy (he wrote this but his friend directed it), and I've yet to actually finish Medea.
Epidemic is a funny film, and I was shocked to learn that it was slammed by the critics. When I say that it is funny, I mean that quite literally. It's meant to be a horror film perhaps but it is also quite clearly meant to amuse in a satirical fashion.

Dogville is the first of the USA trilogy. It isn't an easy film to watch. First you must get used to the set - though if you have been indoctrinated into the World of Lars von Trier, this isn't that difficult. Then there is the creepy Pleasantvillesque nature of the little town wherein the events of the film take place. Maybe a 1/3rd of the way in, the creepiness gives birth to unrelenting in-your-face horror. I have to give some serious praise to Nicole Kidman for her starring role in this film. I am sure it must have been very hard to play that role, and to act with von Trier as director - in fact, I think she's said as much. But they pulled it off beautifully. I don't think I breathed properly while watching, I was on the edge of my seat through the whole latter two-thirds of the film. I have yet to see Manderlay (will do so soon), the second of this series, and will be very much upset if he cannot pull himself out of the slump he is in now and finish this trilogy before the upcoming elections in the U.S. - not that I expect the voting public to pay much attention to his work but you never know... Because this series is called the USA trilogy, it is undeniable what the purpose of Dogville is, and what the message is. Furthermore, the song at the end of the movie clarifies any doubts. But the message(s) implicit are also universally applicable. The violence of oppression and the violence of denial and silent acquiescence are some of the most obvious and central themes explored in this film.

Thanks to Lars, I have learned something of the auteur theory of film criticism, and so far I agree that Lars exemplifies this concept: his films reflect his own personal creative vision. Indeed, he has taken steps to protect this by creating his own film company as well as developing the Dogme95 Collective/movement with its "Vow of Chastity", a set of guidelines of filmmaking (which even he has not followed precisely except for perhaps Idiots though the reprimands have yet to be written, and I have not seen it to comment).

I don't think you can participate in the creative process of someone like Lars without learning something about who they are as a person. And given what I've learned, I believe this is part of the purity that is at the core of the Dogme95 philosophy.

Lars' past, that much that I have read about, is clearly a strong influence on his work and his person but can we not say this of anyone? It is true, however, that some influences are more obvious, more clear-cut, than others.

It seems to me that Lars has insecurities, again just as we all do, that he copes with as some do, through a kind of righteous arrogance that pervades everything that he does. Watch any of his interviews, any of The Five Obstructions, or the Dogme interviews, and you are hit with this arrogance. But I cannot fault the man for it - as he is completely honest about it, or so it seems. Arrogance without honesty is just arrogance meant to only elevate yourself above others. Arrogance for the sake of superiority alone. With honesty and a clear vision, arrogance can simply be a tool that one like Lars uses to bring his vision to the light of day so that it might be seen by others and, presumably, have an impact on society. And anyway, with a smile like his, and the beauty of his films, can you really blame the guy?

Like Epidemic, I fear that Lars has infected me with his vision and I will never be the same. But again, if we understand the principles of overdetermination, we know that this can be said of anyone and anything that we come in contact with. So, knowing that it is an illusion, I will say that Lars' influence on me (particularly in terms of my own creativity) feels more powerful than some others.