Photo Blog!!

Hey everybody! I started a photo blog!!!! Ya'll should follow it, and give me some feedback on my photos ;)

http://makaelavictoriaphoto.blogspot.com/

Goals, yeah I've actually got some

So I've come up with some new goals for my life. Some might seem far-fetched, but they would be awesome to achieve!

1) Learn Spanish, Arabic, and Korean. In the spring semester, I plan on attending Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea, which will give me the perfect opportunity to expand on my Korean skills. But who knows where I'll learn Spanish and Arabic... One day.

2) I'm gonna take up Kayaking. It has always looked so fun, and it would be such a thrill.

3) Seriously, my life has become a huge party. I don't remember many of my nights for the past few months. I'm taking a breather, taking a break from partying, and spending the rest of the summer relaxing and doing healthy things for myself. I plan on waking up early around 5:30, going to some spinning classes, and eating healthy. Maybe I'll take up rock climbing, and yoga-- I've got put my mat to use.

4) Hate is such a terrible thing. So are grudges. I'm erasing all that. I can't hate anybody. Nobody has seriously done anything to terrible to me. Life is life, so why should I spend it caught up in drama and being negative?

5) Time to start saving my money, well at least a good 15% of my paychecks.

6) I need to love everybody, and everything.

7) I need to be nicer. I need to be like my friend Van. He has unconditional love for everybody and does the sweetest things. Van is awesome.

8) Visit my family more. I can't live without them :)

9) I'm going to eventually start my own magazine. An outdoor travel magazine to be exact... I'd like to travel to a place for a month or so, and completely get to know the culture and the fun things to do--like kayaking (yeah, I might have a bit of an obsession)... It'd also be cool to work for Outdoor Magazine. Way awesome.

--Note to self: stop talking in my sleep-- I think I say some pretty inappropriate things...

10) I've kinda given up on trying to go to Yale for my Masters in Art History--don't quite think it
s for me.... (yeah, pretty sure this wasn't a goal. I just had to get it out there).

and Elizabeth Gilbert has pretty much inspired most of these goals, so I'd like to thank her and her novels.


Amen.

i <3 my Lalas!

Best friends are so great, so much fun, and so dependable. Lala, which is Chinese slang for lesbian, is what we call one-another, even though none of us are true lesbians. Maybe some people think we are ;) cuz we're always together. There's four of us altogether, me, Allison, Courtney, and Xuli (pronounced shoolee).

Xuli is from Beijing, and she is just the cutest little thing. She's so beautiful and ladylike. Funny girl.

Allison... oh Allison... I met her in Beto's. Yeah. That pretty much explains a lot.... Beto's. She's crazy.

Courtney, oh how I miss Courtney. She just moved to California not even a week ago. She was my roommate, and the one who always get picked on :p

I just wanted to so say that I absolutely LOVE these girls!!!

It's been about a year now.

I started this blog nearly a year ago. It was finals week my Freshman year of college, and now I'm nearing the end of this wonderful Sophomore year. It's been tough but exciting and I love all the new people who've passed my way.
It doesn't seem like this semester is almost over. I had my very last class today, and now all I have left is finals.
In 10 days, I will be catching a flight to Korea to study abroad for a week. So excited. So scared.

Huffing or Photographing?

Sunday night, my friends and I decided to do a nude photo shoot. It was pretty spontaneous but being the art and photography freaks that we were, we went with it. Jeff spray painted words onto my back and Courtney's back, and we showed it off. Ben photographed digitally to enhance his portfolio, and Jeff was the monkey (the one who does all the dirty work the photographer can't). After we finished the shoot, Courtney took a shower to get rid of the paint and I was sitting in my room wrapped in a towel, waiting to get in the shower. I got a knock on my door, opened it, and saw 3 police officers. I was so shocked and had no idea what I did wrong. But apparently my roommates and other people in the building had smelled the paint and thought we were in my room huffing it. They didn't knock on the door, didn't call, didn't say a word to me or tell me how they were feeling. Instead, they had called the police. Luckily, the police thought this was just funny and didn't press any charges. They all just laughed and checked our I.D.s.
I apologized to my roommates, but didn't get a very positive response. I guess I really screwed up on this one.

L.H.O.O.Q.

"It appears not to be a stretch to say that this is "Duchamp's most famous ready-made" (Ramirez 46). Many people, including those outside of academia, recognize this now infamous image as inextricably attached to Marcel Duchamp.

This cheap reproduction of the famous ideal of beauty that is Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa has been adorned with a comical moustache and goatee, thus deserving its alternate title Joconde aux Moustaches. L.H.O.O.Q. is two-dimensional, like only several other Readymades including Apolinere Enameled, Pharmacy, and French Military Paper.

The title is essentially a phonetic game. As Duchamp himself noted in a 1966 interview, "I really like this kind of game, because I find that you can do a lot of them. By simply reading the letters in French, even in any language, some astonishing things happen" (Cabanne 63). When read quickly in French, the title L.H.O.O.Q. sounds like a sentence translating to "She has a hot bum/ass." This is the most commonly sited meaning of the phrase, but many other ideas also surround this intriguing group of letters. Duchamp gave a "loose" translation of L.H.O.O.Q. as "there is fire down below" in a late interview (Schwarz 203). Steefel points out that, when spoken in English, L.H.O.O.Q. sounds like "LOOK" (50). Thus the piece could have a further function as a commentary on the relationship between artist and viewer, which Duchamp was admittedly very interested in. Kuspit supports a much more overtly sexual interpretation, explaining, "It is a multilayered pun: the letters become words which become a devaluing male comment on the beautiful, dignified woman - she's just another slut. She's smiling because she's thinking of being fucked - more probably, of masturbating, that is, fucking herself" ("Laugh" 111).

The viewer should be wary of reading too far into something that is really only grounded in speculation. Could the artist have not intended such a reading? We may never know for sure, but Philip Larson argues an interesting point (although without citing a source for this fact, his assertion seems just as ungrounded as the speculations he argues against): "Not found in most writings about Duchamp is the faintly amusing fact that Duchamp intended us to read the inscription as a series of enunciated French letters, like O.U.R.A.Q.T. in English. The Duchamp blurb comes out as something more unforgivable than 'She has a hot ass'" (213).

Finally, Duchamp's choice of the Mona Lisa may not have been as arbitrary as often assumed. There may be a more personal reason why Duchamp focused on this particular example of ideal aesthetic beauty. Duchamp's friend Guillaume Apollinaire was falsely detained in connection with the theft of the Mona Lisa and some small sculptures from the Louvre several years prior to Duchamp's creation of this Readymade. This may be Duchamp's way of indirectly referencing his friend Apollinaire."

http://arthist.binghamton.edu/duchamp/LHOOQ.html

SPRING!!!!

Spring is finally here!!! It's so warm outside!! No more jackets, snow boots, or ear muffs. Time to pull out the sandals, dresses, and bikinis!!

=]

<3 spring

We could all die at any moment.
Somebody could drive by, shoot us.
A plane could crash into our house.
Our subways could collide.
We could choke on our food.
We could get hit by a drunk driver.
Blown up by a suicide-bomber.
It's an eerie feeling.
Moral of the story:
Live every day like it's your last.
Have fun =]

you know who you are

stop reading my blog. and stay out of my life.

Maybe Memories....

I miss all these fun times:

ummmmhummmmmmm Love.... <3

Tonight I discovered that all of my cousins had blogs--which I am now anonymously following. It gives me this joy inside to know they are still crazy about their husbands and wives and absolutely love their children. My cousins write about the nicest, most genuine things. Love, friendship, happiness. <3 I hope I can love the way they do...

Anyways, now that I got that tangent out of my head, I want to tell you about my week. I GOT MY WISDOM TEETH OUT! Day 1: My cheeks are starting to swell... and it doesn't look like I'm in too much pain.... I'm still numb...
Day 2: Yeah... here comes the swelling, and the pain.


Day 3: Not so bad, but now I have a black eye...

Later that day: Here I am on the phone with beloved Mika... he is trying to comfort me:


I just wish I could go back to the way I looked exactly a year ago:

There's a big difference between this year and last....

I have become a Tiny Fey-Look-A-Like-Book-Worm-Photo-Lab-Mutant-Geek ;)

It's All Fairly Deserved, Trust That Is.

This school year has been one crazy one. Seems like one friend comes along, and another leaves. And this process just keeps happening, over and over. I've kicked rude people out of my life, and because of that, many people hate me. I've had many rumors started about me. Many prank phone calls and texts all saying nasty stuff. I've had people whom I thought were amazing friends betray me, cheat on me, scream at me, and completely kick me out of their life as well. I've replaced old friends with new friends, and they've replaced me too. I've met amazing people, learned from them, and I look up to them. I respect them. I respect mostly everybody, and everything. I even respect the people whom disrespect me and kicked me out of their lives. I don't care if I'm highly disrespected by them--that's their decision-- and to be frank, I'm sure I deserve it. I can't be the best person. But I can try to give you my best. I can give you my friendship, and love. I can care about you, and I would love to spend time with you. But most of all, I'm gonna have an extremely hard time trusting you.

The Slum of the Lepers

I'm reading a book right now, Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, and two of the characters are visiting the slum of the lepers in Bombay... This little blurb has truly inspired me. You will see why this has inspired me to go photograph it.

"'Hey! This isn' the way back to the slum. Where are we going now?'
'We are going to visit the place where you will be getting your medicines.'
'My what?'
'Khaderbhai has arranged for you to get medicines, every week. The thing I brought you today--those are the first. We are going to the medicine black market.'
'A black market for medicine? Where is it?'
'In the slum of the leprs,' Abdullah answered, matter-of-factly. Then he laughed again as he pushed the bike to greater speed through a gap in the traffic that opened for him, even as he reached it. 'Just leave it to me, Lin brother. Now you are part of the plan, isn't it so?'
Those words--now you are part of the plan--should've woken some fear in me. I should've sensed. . . something . . . even then, right at the start. But I wasn't afraid. I was almost happy. The words seemed exciting. They rushed my blood. When my fugitive life began, I was exiled from my family, homeland, and culture. I thgouth that was the whole of it. Years into my banishment, I realised that I was exiled to something, as well. What I escaped to was the lonely, reckless freedom of the outcast. Like outcasts everywhere, I courted danger because danger was one of the few things strong enough to help me forget what I'd lost. And staring into the warmth of the afternoon wind, riding with Abdullah into the web of streets, I fell as fearlessly into my fate, that afternoon, as a man falls into love with a shy woman's best smile.
The journey to the lepers' camp took us to the outskirts of the city. There were several treatment colonies for Bombay's lepers, but the men and women we went to see refused to live in them. Funded by state and private contributions, the colonies provided medical attention, caring suport, and the clean environments. The rules and regulations that governed them were strict, however, and not all the lepers could bring themselves to conform. As a result, some chose to leave, and some were forced out. At any one time, a few dozen men, women, and children lived outside the colonies, in the wider community of the city.
The elastic tolerance of sum-dwellers--who accommodated every caste and race and condition of person within their sprawl of huts--rarely extended to lepers. Local councils and street communities didn't endure their presence for long. Feared and shunned, the lepers formed themselves into mobile slums that settled, within an hour, in any open space they could find and made a traceless departure in even less time. Sometimes they established themselves for several weeks beside a rubbish dump, fending off the permanent rag-pickers, who resisted their incursion. At other times they set up their camp on a swampy patch of vacant land or some outfall for industrial waste. When I first isited them with Abdullah, that day, I found that they'd built their ragged shelters on the rusty stones of a railway siding near the suburb of Khar.
We were forced to park Abdullah's bike, and enter the railway land as the lepers did, through gaps in fences and across ditches. The rusty plateau was a staging area for most trains on the urban route and many of the goods wagons carrying produce and manuactured articles out of the city. Beyond the sub-station itself were office outbuildings, storage warehouses, and maintenance sheds, Further on was a vast shunting area--an open space marked by dozens of railway lines and their confluences. At the outer edges, high wire fences enclosed the space.
Outside was the commerce and cosiness of suburban Khar: traffic and gardens, balconies and bazaars. Within was a aridity of function and systems. There were no plants, no animals, and no people. Even the rolling stock were ghost trains, trundling from shunting stop to shunting stop without staff or passengers. Then there was the lepers' slum.
They'd seized a diamond of clear space between the tracks for themselves, and patched their shelters together in it. None of the huts was taller than my chest. From a distance, they looked like the pup tents of an army bivouac wreathed in the smoke of cooking fires. As we neared them, however, we saw that their appalling raggedness made the slum huts where I lved seem like solid, comfortable structures. They were made from scraps of cardboard and plastic help aloft with crooked branches, and braced with thin string. I could've knocked the whole camp to rubble with an open hand., and it would've taken me less than a minute, yet thirty men, women, and children made their lives there.
We entered the slum unchallenged, and made our way to one of the huts near the center. People stopped and stared at us, but no-one spoke. It was hard not to look at them, and then hard not to stare when I did look. Some of the people no noses, mst of them had no fingers, the feet of many were bound in bloody bandages, and some were advanced into the deteriorations that their lips and ears were missing.
I don't know why-the price, perhaps, that women pay for their loveliness--but the disfigurements seemed more ghastly for the women than they were for the men. Many of the men had a defiant and even a januty air about them--a kind of pugnacious ugliness that was fascinating in itself. But shyness just looked cowed in the women, and hunger looked predatory. The disease was indiscernible in the many children I saw. They looked fit, if uniformly thin, and quite well. And they worked hard, all of those children. Their small fingers did the grasping for the whole of their tribe.
They'd seen us coming, and must've passed the word because, as we appraoched the hut, a man crawled out and stood to greet us. Two children came at once and supported him. He was tiny, reaching to just above my waist, and severly stricken with the disease. His lips and the lower part of his face were eaten away to a hard, knobby ridge of dark flesh that extended downwards from the cheeks to the hinges of his jaw. The jaw itself was exposed, as were the teeth and gums, and the gaping holes where his nose had been (Roberts 207)."

Drowsy Driving.... Almost as Bad as Drunk Driving!

Wooooo, I've driven so much lately, and it seems like every time I set foot in my car I instantly want to fall asleep. It's so dangerous! I've never had such a hard time keeping my eyes open while driving. It scares me.... I think stuff like, "I can shut my eyes if I just drive in a straight line...." BAD IDEA! So I adjust my seat, stretch, turn on the AC (full blast of course) and roll down the windows even though its only 15 degrees outside... rolling down the windows actually helps! I'm starting to believe what they taught me in drivers ed.... However, after I roll up the windows, I'm freezing so I turn on the heat full blast and start nodding off again... My eyes fill with water and my lids nearly shut. I start drifting into the other lane or off the road completely.
Why does driving put me to sleep?
It scares me....(yes, my driving scares me....)

Oh Randizzle

Seems like every time we hang out, something bad happens. A few years ago Randy and I went 4wheeling up on this mountain. We were having such a fun time, then Randy turns around to see myself laying on the ground trapped underneath the flipped over 4wheeler. It was such a scary moment. He thought I was going to die, as well as everybody else around, but I was ok.
Today Randy and I hung again for the 1st time in a very long time. We went up on that same mountain so I could get some pictures for my photography class. I got some pictures and then started to reverse down this long muddy path with snow banks on each side. Not really paying attention to what I was doing, I ran my car right into a snowbank.... Oops. We spent forever trying to get it out, and then we saw a police man parked in his truck a few hundred feet away. Luckily he saved the day and pulled my car out of the snowbank with his mighty truck.
But damn Randy, we sure do have some adventures.... hehe, especially on that mountain.

and now it starts

Have you ever wanted something so bad? So bad that you are willing to do anything to achieve it? That's how I feel right now. February 1st--it starts. I spent this weekend having one super indulgence of my villain, and now that will be the last time I shall ever enjoy it.

Dad:

Happy Birthday Daddy! Without you, daddy, my life would be a mess. Without you, I wouldn't be the person I am today, nor would I be achieving my goals. I just want to thank you for raising me, pushing me to be my best, teaching me wrong from right, and for just being my father. I love you more than anything! You're humble, kind, wise, intelligent, and have an exuberant sense of humor. That's for being a wonderful role-model and endearing father. I love you!
Happy Birthday!

Love Your Daughter,

Maki

I light your cigarettes
I bring you apples from the vine
How quickly you forget
I run the bath and pour the wine
I bring you everything that floats into your mind

But you don't bring me anything but down
You don't bring me anything but down
You don't bring me anything but down
When you come 'round

You are a raging sea
I pull myself out everyday
I plea insanity
Cause I can't leave but I can't stay
You say, won't you come find me and yes is what I say

You don't bring me anything but down
You don't bring me anything but down
Everything is crashing to the ground

Maybe I'm not your perfect kind
Maybe I'm not what you had in mind
Maybe we're just killing time

You with your silky words
And your eyes of green and blue
You with your steel beliefs
That don't match anything you do
It was so much easier before you became you

You don't bring me anything but down
You don't bring me anything but down
Everything just crashes to the ground
When you come around
When you come around

No more playing seek and hide
No more long and wasted nights
Can't you make it easy on yourself

I know you wish you were strong
You wish you were never wrong
Well, I got some wishes of my own

I dig this chick: sheryl crow

I am strong
I am able
I spill milk on your table
Then I cry like a baby
Just to see if you save me

I am sweet
I am ugly
I am mean if you love me
I try hard just to please you
When I say I dont need you

I dress up with a conscience
When I think youll be watching
I say all the right things
I dont know what I mean

Am i
Am i
Getting through
Am i
Am i
Getting through

I am ignorant and rude
I am fashionably crude
And sometimes when its quiet
Im an angel in white

When I pose in the mirror
I want everyone near me
I am scared that Im weird
Im afraid I am queer

I am lovely and weak
I am foul when I speak
I am strange when Im kind
I am frying my mind

Am i
Am i
Getting through
Am i
Am i
Getting through
I dont care I dont care

Jesus loves me I know
For my mom told me so
Im a loser at love
Im a flower in the mud

Am i
Am i
Getting through
Am i
Am i
Getting through
Am i
Am i
Getting through





Dont you hate it
When the money starts to running out
Your esoteric rants
Were made to twist and shout
I heard you moved
Now youre hangin on the moulin rouge
Dont you know no matter where you go
Somebodys always watching you
Thats what they say
Thats what they say
When the pages fade the love you made
Will seem one hundred light years away

Eggs--by maki and emily

More.

Bali, Indonesia.

Enjoy the Beauty

Sincerely,

Maki

A lil' bit of Photo History

I found this in the first chapter of my photo history book, Seizing the Light by Robert Hirsch:

"The idea of photography existed long before the invention of the camera. A primary function of visual arts originates in the desire to create the likeness of something or someone that was deemed worth commemorating. This human urge to make pictures that augment the faculty of memory by capturing time is at the conceptual base of photography. Since ancient times, artists and inventors have searched for ways to expedite the picturemaking process, eventually concentrating efforts on how to automatically capture an image directly formed by light.
"As early as the fifth century B.C.E., the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti discovered that light reflecting from an illuminated object and passing through a pinhole into a darkened area would form an exact, though inverted, image of that object. offering a prototype of the pinhole (lensless) camera. In the West, the first recorded description of the pinhole was made by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who around 330 B.C.E., during a partial solar eclipse, observed the crescent-shaped image of the sun projected through a small opening between the leaves of a tree. When these observations were first formalized into a camera remains uncertain, but by the tenth century C.E., the Arabian mathematician Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haitham) demonstrated how a pinhole could be an instrument and that images formed thrugh an aperature became sharper when the opening was made smaller. Although Roger Bacon's treatsies, Perspectiva and De multiplicatione specierum (ca. 1267), do not specially mention the camera, they indicate he used the optical principles to contrive an arrangement of mirrors in order to project images of eclipses as well as street scenses and interior views of his house. In Perspectiva communis (1279, John Peckham, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a likely student of Bacon, remarked about observing a solar eclipse through a pinhole in a dark place."
.... a few paragraphs later, it describes how Leonardo da Vinci, in 1490, wrote the earliest suriving description of the camera obscura (dark chamber), a device designed to reproduce linear perspective. "The camera obscura, the prototype of the photographic camera, was a large dark room that an artist physically entered. Light filtered through a small hole in one of the walls and projected a distinct, but inverted, color image onto the opposite wall that could then be traced."
Since then, many artists, mathematicians, scientists, and photographers have developed small, more compact and better photo taking devices. "Johannes Kepler had built a proto-portable camera: a human-size tent that could be dismantled and transported to make drawing easier. By the mid-seventeenth century, a scaled-down modification of Kepler's device meant that one did not have to enter into the camera but could remain outside of it and view an image projected onto a translucent window, a forerunner to the first truly portable cameras."
"Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1765-1833) developed the first system for making images permanent through the action of light. Niepce was enthralled with lithography, but he lacked the drawing skills the process required. Originally, he sought to automatically transfer an image to a lithgraphy stone without having to draw it, but in 1814 Niepce and his elder brother, Claude, shifted direction and undertook experiments to "spontaneously" create original pictures through the camera instead of copying previous existing images. This make Niepce the first to actively pursue a process of making a permanent camera image.
"As early as 1824, Niepce used this process to make his first actual camera image from nature on a lithographer's stone, which he referred to as a point de vue. There is still disagreement among historians as to when Niepce first made permanent view from nature with a camera. Some state it was as early as 1822, others say 1827. A book written by Niepce's son Isodore in 1841 indicates 1824 was the first time Niepce "achieved definitive fixing of images from the camera obscura into his screen. Although these marvelous products were still imperfect, the problem had been resolved."

Joseph Niepce's creation: