Chazzy Patel's Blog, page 4

Denver Fashion Week: The Serious Business of Clothes

New York, London, Milan, Paris, and Tokyo.Thumbing through a fashion magazine around most of the world, you’d be forgiven for thinking all sartorial styles were created in these fashion capitals. Nevertheless, look closer and you’ll shortly discover that, whilst fads are set on the runways that are at large, they frequently emerge elsewhere. Long before a brand name, shapes, patterns or vivid color hits a major catwalk shows, you can often spot the changes at fashion events that are less mainstream on the circuit.When talking about Denver Fashion Week (DFW), a variety of words characterize the occasion: unique, distinct, wild, chaotic, a community, beauty and art. For individuals who are still hesitant to go or may be new to the experience – this isn’t a fashion show that's typical lineup of showcasing clothing. This is some thing entirely different. It's an expressive art performance that truly shows Denver's spirit.In most nations I've visited, the fashion scene is focused on one major city, but it doesn’t mean other style-hearts don't have anything to offer. Not only is it generally less difficult to snag a tickets or press pass for these occasions, small fashion weeks often gear more retail-oriented setups, which means that you can buy direct from the runway. Some of Denver's own are:Femme Fatale Intimates by Angel -ffintimates.comGabriela Martinez -gabrielacouture.comMargaret SanzoRooted -rootedboutique.comAshley Smith Beauty -ashleysmithbeauty.comThe United States is so different and massive, it would be absurd to assume New York could showcase everything the entire nation offers. San Francisco, Miami, Los Angeles, Denver and Austin host their own Fashion Week, each displaying their unique take on American fashion. And Denver does not disappoint in this arena.Each designer has a unique vision for their portion of the show and they work to make sure that their vision transforms into entertainment for Denver's diverse crowd. They want their fashion to be consistent where folks think as individuals and take a look at the clothing as connecting personalities to an emotional fabric within.I get asked about my own style and reasons I have worked many of the larger fashion weeks around the world, but skipped the local DFW often until now. It has little to do DFW and more about my take on the serious business of clothing. My style. Well, I'm a pirate.We were dressed by someone else for quite some time in our lives. Parents picked out a T-shirt; the school ordered what color our neckties for our weekday torture. But at some point, we were given the opportunity to find who we might be in the world of clothing. We had to determine for ourselves about collars and ties, suit fit, colors, shapes, textiles and what matches, what doesn't. We learnt to speak about our personality through the language of garments. Despite the possible silliness and exaggeration of sections of the fashion industry and ourselves, assembling a wardrobe is a serious and meaningful exercise. These events can truly inspire us.When predicated on our looks, background, job or particular tendencies in our behavior, people are constantly liable to come to fast and not so correct decisions about who we are. Only too frequently, their ruling doesn’t quite get us right.They may suppose this because where we come from; we must be somewhat arrogant or rather disapproving. It may be based on our work, and in fact, get typecast as snobbish or superficial. In some cases, the physically proven fact that we’re sporty might lead some to see us as not terribly analytical; or an attachment to a particular political outlook may be associated with being unnervingly earnest.Clothing supplies an important chance for us to correct some of these narratives. We're, in effect, working as a tour guide, offering to show folks around ourselves when we get dressed. We’re emphasizing appealing or interesting things about who we're – and in the process, we’re clearing up misconceptions.We’re behaving like artists painting a self-portrait and by choice, directing the audience’s understanding of who they might even be themselves.In the 60s, the Birtish painter Peter Blake painted a self-portrait of himself wearing jeans, a denim jacket, and running shoes. He was purposefully menacing the perspective the majority of his contemporaries had a handle on him; based on knowing that he was a painter that was quite successful and somewhat intellectual. He might have been thought of as slightly aloof and exceptionally refined; detached from, and cavillous of average life. But his clothes speak about different facets of his character: they go out of their way to tell us that he’s rather a modest man; he’s interested in talking about pop music some evenings over a pint; he sees his art mostly as a kind of manual labor. Like ours – his give us a vital introduction to the self through his garmentsHis garments – like ours – provide us with a crucial introduction to our self-identity.This explains the interesting phenomenon when we’re with good friends. We usually can spend a lot less time contemplating our clothing compared with the stress on what to wear than gripped with strangers. They know who we are and they’re not relying on our clothing for hints.It’s strange – but a profound fact that certain items of clothes can excite us. When we put on them or see others wearing them, we’re turned on: a special style of coat, the right kind of the perfect shirt or dress might prove to be so erotic that we could almost do without the person wearing it.It’s tempting to see this sort of fetishism as merely deluded but we are being alerted by it to an extremely common and far more general thought in a very exaggerated way: that special clothing and styles make us happy, and being happy is not a bad thing at all.They capture our attention to get closer and indulge the values that attract us. The sexual element is simply an expansion of a sympathy that is general and clear that beauty is every item of clothes we’re drawn to featuring an allusion to another kind of well-being. A guarantee of internal prosperity for many.Some might see an extremely desired form of competence and self-confidence in a particular pair of brown leather shoes we take walks in. Or meet new generosity in a wool jacket we wear volunteering or feel a poignant sort of innocence in a bow-tie to dinner. A sparkling brooch may sum up dignity as a particular collar can render the human neck commanding and important when looking into another's eyes.The classic fashion fetishist might be motivated on their connections that specify a personal identity to the maximum and be instead limiting one to select items only they favor. They are latching onto a general theme: apparel can embody values that enchant and beguile us.By picking unique types of garments, we are highlighting our characteristics that are tentative or more delicate. We’re both strategically reminding ourselves and conveying to others who we are.Our personal wardrobes include some of our most carefully composed lines of autobiography most will ever read.You don't always need a pen to tell a story.Unlike fashion week shows across the world, Denver’s has always observed diversity on the runway. That’s so that as many people as possible can live out their vision to be a model and help us reveal that 'lovely' isn't only one idea why we host open model casting calls – with no height or weight requirement –. Whether a model is skinny, tall, curvy, short, old, young, gay, straight, transgender, covered and tattooed – Denver Fashion Week runway has seen it all and respects your self-discoveries and story.This year the city is very proud to host the first professional model with Down Syndrome, Madeline Stuart, to not only walk our runway, but to present her fashion line at DFW. Stuart is a worldwide sensation, groundbreaking model and promoter for the Down Syndrome community.For more information about Madeline, please check out her websitewww.madelinestuartmodel.com Please get your ticketshere.

The Good, Bad, and the Ugly: Creating Jobs in America

There are just some jobs in the world that shouldn’t be created.Cancer is a job creator.  I have seen war do its fair share. Prisons, death camps, and poison gas producers also produce jobs. Not to mention, constructing a massive boundary wall along a bordering neighbor can also be an excellent piece of employment generator!And havingpendejoAmerican spring-breakers chanting 'Build that wall' is a disgrace and dishonor for bothgringosand Mexicans (I will address a poor education system in the future. Too much to cover there.)But, which must be obvious by 2017, the fact that anything that generates jobs doesn't suggest it is worth doing the work.I could employ a squadron of British manservant to end doe-eyed puppies in a miserable death for my enjoyment to diversify cute kitten videos on youtube, and if I am a spectacularly wealthy gentleman, I've developed a good number of jobs killing cute puppies for likes and comments. I am now also a horrible human being who is driving the entire world to a cruel madness on youtube into thinking I would do such a thing, but my imaginary manservant Bosley has a job, a skilled worker, has a 401K and house in the burbs.Even conventional economists understand very well, the statement thatsomething doesn't necessarily become worth doing just because it generates jobs.The 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat famously argued from the naturally desirable proven fact that windows were a sound monetary plan since it held glass glaziers employed... Bastiat remarked that you couldn’t only look at one consequence of activity, you were to look at them all. Which means seeing not merely at that which you spend money on, but additionally on everything you didn’t. In his little tale about broken windows, Bastiat served to develop the present day idea ofopportunity cost.But while everyone understands that job design isn’t alone a dispositive justification for doing something but basically, mentioning that my new 'health plan' will generate a significant number of new careers for morticians... well the voting public may rightly be wary of its government's judgment and my regime of manservant Bosleys.The rhetoric of job development is indeed so strong a topic these days that it often prevents a sober-minded assessment of all that it effects, including human/environmental price and opportunity cost.I'm convinced, for instance, that constructing an enormous border wall will create quite a few jobs (mostly for Mexican laborers). It’s still just a colossal waste of concrete, human labor, and time. Every ounce of human energy spent on jobs that destroy human lives is being redirected away from improved humanity as a whole. Nobueno.As a veteran of the U.S Army, wars and militaries are a waste for a similar reason. Every ounce of human energy spent on careers that destroy human lives is diverted away from bettering them, meaning that the consequences of war are actually far worse than their observable destruction; they also comprise all of the construction that would have happened in their own absence. For those that stood peacefully at Standing Rock with me, they also saw the men and women hired to stand on their ancestors burial site with guns, sound grenades and tear gas to make sure lines were not crossed for GDP. Some of their eyes told a story of duty and honor they didn't respect. They are human but being Bosley pays the bills.It’s constantly going to be difficult to reply to job development arguments, which is why unions are signing on to fast-track pipeline-building jobs to Trump’s illegal plan.No Bueno, but how can anyone say NO to jobs? No one wants to say that job creation is lousy. "They'll scream individuals who don't have occupations frequently need trades!"True. Although what they actually need is money, occupations being the thing we make them do to allow them to have some green paper to believe in something.  Even with the unemployment rate is very low right now; it doesn’t mean anything to people that are unemployed... If you were offered a gig to gather wood for your own funeral, some would be forced to take it up and make a very shitty deal. I haven't read Mr. Trump's The Tale of the Deal. Rumi is more my deal. Better tweets.The world is better off without some sorts of jobs.The quality of occupations matters as well. Barack Obama’s presidency found the restoration of the lowering of the unemployment rate and also millions of jobs. But many of these jobs were temporary or places with highly variable hours and very few gains. If a political act by any administrate creates employment for the public but reduces workers’ bargaining power and caliber of life, then the occupations are an illusory gain.Folks on the left haven’t actually found an excellent means of countering job-creation rhetoric. After all, an optimal world doesn’t have these jobs; they’re filthy and dangerous, outsourced and we want a future predicated on clean energy that doesn’t contribute to climate calamity.But because, well, people genuinely like having occupations, SOS Clinton's pitch didn't go down as well as expected. So unless you’re offering better work (which Clinton was trying to say she'd do), you’re going to have a tough time against a pro-jobs puppet president playing with... legos and nuke codes... I didn't say what you are now thinking :PThe question is: what if an unpredictable president comes along offering to create millions of jobs? And what if the promise is genuine? So please imagine they're going to build millions of more jobs into your economy, but the occupations will be, as we are currently witnessing:(1) military occupations, i.e. ruining human civilization(2) Wall building and patrol work, i.e. erecting useless impediments to limit free human movement.(3) Coal and oil occupations i.e. destroying the earth.We all qualify and could be hired to ruin every last shred of life on earth if we think about it. I have and continue in my fair share...How much is it worth?Frequently, when jobs are promised by the current head of state, the answer on the left is to assert that Mr. Trump's plans won’t create many occupations whatsoever. This isn’t the primary issue! His ego will not allow this as we've seen.The main difficulty is that fossil fuel occupations are a deal with the Devil or blacksnake, as my Native American friends at Standing Rock, ND have always believed and continue to do so across America with many of their human rights and treaties in violation.And it’s crucial for Democrats and liberals to find a method to carry this information without appearing not to care about people’s employment possibilities and less focus on polling numbers. Talk to Bernie more! Grandpa's got some new tricks.The reality is that a perfect world has fewer jobs in it. The more jobs which can be achieved by automation advancement, the betterment of people to use time to explore more elevating peaceful thought and make bigger discoveries. The great news is that as automation improvements are always on the rise, and not as much need for particular kinds of dangerous work in the world. i.e. stubborn coal miners, oil exploits, and investors of primitive industrial energy consumption.Regrettably, in a capitalist economy without a serious societal safety net; displaced workers will likely be unable to provide for themselves. It'll then be tempting to buy into job-creation schemes; which create work that is harmful or unneeded. This includes construction of a particular border wall, increasing policing recruitment bonuses or any expensive 'Needto keep up withthe Joneses' pieces of military hardware.If nobody fears becoming unemployed because medical care, education debt, housing, as well as a basic livable income are guaranteed, then it will be simpler to make the argument to move away from fossil fuels or reduce the size of the American military. Once individuals aren’t so desperately dependent on their jobs for their basic material well-being in America's consumer driven market, they'll possess the luxury to be wary of the dangerous job schemes and puppet employment being offered by its government.Until then, This will continue under this current administration.We don't need any more puppy-snuffing manservants named Bosley! I, as hell, dont't want to hire them. It's not a sound investment for a better future.

Colorado Living: A Spoiled Lifestyle

How I stay so calm and at peace in Colorado?It's not just the quality weed, ski towns, growing number of hybrid yoga studios and overpriced teahouses. And we love them this high in the clouds!There is a spoiled lifestyle in the Mountain State but the secret isn't just about visiting the many legal marijuana dispensaries and aura cleansing gong baths in Boulder.Not many, likely, have ever considerably questioned these as pleasantries and attractions in Spring 2017. And others can't live without them as the snow melts west of I-25.Clouds, creeks, and trees symbolize character in its many tender, peaceful guise in this hipster magnet state. Their allure is natural and comforting. Their attractiveness is instinctive. But we take them for granted, not all the time. It happens. Colorado has become a state of many new, wonderful distractions to its residents and visitors.But all three form a background that is helpful to other things in our lives; Out of an airplane window leaving DIA, we catch sight of a sea of clouds over the mighty Rockies. Lovely for a moment until the crew delivers your beverage and your attention tunes to what new stupid thing Donald Trump has done.Your good friend’s wedding was in a garden of massive old trees, they were stunning, and you climbed one to just sit in it to smoke his weed and take a nap in a bridesmaid's lap – but that was years ago, you could not have looked at a tree like that since.There was that creek you used to love playing next to as a kid, damming up the flow like a concrete wall till your rocks were swept and finally protested away by the fresh agua. There must, theoretically, still be lots of imagination enhancing creeks and trees out there. In Colorado, it's hard not to notice them or find them if you turn around or look up. However, in most of the Adulting world, cloud, creek and tree adventure can be a rarity.The issue is a lack of encouragement to concentrate on these components as natural teachers wherever they are. Not just the Mountain State!In a remorselessly and busy age that is commonly practical, there are few explanations around as to what the real point of 'focus' should be. And spending seconds of close observation with clouds, creeks, and trees may, in fact, play a minor but significant supporting role in the interest of a balanced and more or less reasonable life.Bubble-Gum CloudsWe're preoccupied with ourselves in unhelpful ways. The clouds, however, are indifferent to all our worries. They don’t care about fashion or world politics. They're uninterested in rumor and gossip. They're not receptive to our social statuses or care if we're gracefully aging.We are constantly close to these huge, things that are quiet giants looming in gravity above us. They inch their way across the skies, slowly losing definition as we figure out if their Pictionary clue is a fierce dragon or the face of your 10th grade math teacher (same-same). Ten minutes later it is scarcely recognizable to anything. And not soon after that, it merges with another cloud, and its short individual career is over!Islands of clouds form, make chains, states, empires, subsequently, float and break up – like a peaceful, quiet, painless repetition of the violent mayhem of human history. There's a constant drama above our heads: tears, wrecks, swirls, separations. Human life isn't any less busy, but nevertheless, it can mean a moment of relief from our particular involvements to look up on occasion and be returned to a more comprehensive perspective. A cloud from where agitations of the present moment will appear less significant – as they will for us also with time.TREESThey are a picture of patience, and resolution. Their gnarled, distressed barks speak of the hundreds of seasons they've endured along the Colorado front-range. They've bent and lost branches in winter winds, they've been gnawed at by worms and bugs across the airless days of July. They are hacked and have been knocked about by farmers and gardeners for generations. However, they last as we might learn to do through their examples. It’s an unhelpful bias of the Western mind to think about philosophy as emanating just from books rather than as the Eastern tradition shrewdly points out, from the volumes of nature.The trees sit out rainy days without criticism, adjusting themselves to the slow shift of the seasons. Showing no ill temper in a storm, no desire to wander with their many slim fingers deep in moist soil. Their main stalks support meters away from wet dirt and far from the tallest leaves that harness rainwater in some 40,000 of their little palms.The trees are a meek instruction in the cycle of life as well. Resplendent in the summer sunshine, all those leaves, will be gone by the end of October and return in springtime. Human life is also unstoppable, but nevertheless, it could be the grounding teachings of trees that we can come to take the lesson with greater ease. The stiffening of our skin, facial lines, as well as our thinning hair may recast as a melancholy requirement as opposed to an unreasonable tragedy or gift.CreeksCreeks are regularly communicating: whispering, exclaiming, claiming a rock or twig, confiding in a quiet vortex, dozing in summer or yelling after a massive storm.Like good old fires, they offer a great object of contemplation for us when we're striving to think. Their constant task enlivens our imaginations. They deflect our heads only enough that the great thoughts; the ones that hate to be requested immediately to an issue, can feel relieved of pressure and just slip out. We follow water as it rises gracefully to meet the objections of a group of stubborn rocks just below the surface of our minds.Creeks warn us also that we must take care to hold on to those ideas, for our minds are no less fugitive than their natural lifestyle. We get an insight, but in moments, it'll vanish like a twig in the current, unless we grab it at once.We should not leave the encounter with creeks, trees or clouds to chance alone. We should ideally have events and collective routines around them to edge us into healthy habits. Maybe for a moment before lunch, we'd ritually pause and look in the clouds sitting in a tree talking to a creek.If it does not contain five minutes given over to a river, tree or the clouds; no week ought to be counted as a whole.We too quickly lose touch with all the saner and better aspects of ourselves. Someplace inside us, we've got the capacity for reason and calm, tenderness and thoughtfulness. Trees clouds and creeks are on handto help us :)Happy Spring Equinox.

Panama's Deadly Darien Jungle

An expanse of tropical woods wild calledThe Darienhas conquered travelers for hundreds of years.Explorers attracted to the Darien Gap are many, but the results have largely been devastating. The Spanish made their very first settlement in 1510 here in mainland Americas, simply to have it torched by native tribes 14 years later. It stands as it was during the days of the conquest, and in lots of ways, the place stays just as wild.It's remarkable considering that we live in the 21st Century, in a nation that adopts technology and is infamous for joining oceans, cultures, and world business at incredibly rapid pace.Following the conquistadors, the Scots also wagered poorly here. The Scots having created a coastal trading colony in 1698, most settlers perished from the Spanish and diseased events. The loss would deplete enough riches that the Scottish were forced to sign the Treaty of Union; undermining their autonomy less than a decade afterward.It was only in 1960 that some folks managed to cross the Darien Gap in a Land Rover dubbed 'The Tender Cockroach' plus a Jeep for support and supplies. It took almost five months, averaging only 200m per hour. Palm-chopping their way through the jungle with large machetes, they improvising bridges from palm trunks that didn't always last and bridged hundreds of rivers with what they had. Their study later helped establish the Unesco World Heritage Site, the Darien National Park.The team comprised of Panamanian anthropologist and her cartographer husband, Amado Arauz, and Reina Torres de Arauz.Twelve years later, a crazy explorer named Col John Blashford-Snell, directed a 60-man crew in Range Rovers on the very first whole road trip from Alaska to Cape Horn, via the Darien Gap.This short segment of the route through dense jungle, he describes as the most demanding challenge of his adventure career. The seasonal rains arrived and locked the vehicles in mud. "Something had to go, and it was the rear axles," He recounts in his book. "They burst like shells with shrapnel coming through the floor of the rover."Nowadays, custom built vehicles floated around the issue region of the Atrato swamp that is one of the most difficult parts to cross in this region.The narrative of the ill-fated Scots colony at Darien lives in the oral history of the Kuna Indians, who are the few individuals who have settled in this inhospitable region.In 1698, a fleet of five boats sailed from Leith docks near Edinburgh, taking 12,000 settlers to a colony in the New World. Panama.Half a century on, the number of successful crossings that motorized their way through this lush green beast, can be numbered under two digits. Nowadays, there's ample sightings of  brave immigrants escaping cruel lives for northern prosperity, armed drug runners are largely the risks one takes, mixed well with deadly pit vipers hissing at your intrusion. The DarienBoth Columbian and Panamanian governments have set up check stops. At these points, Passport/Visas are checked and rechecked with the keenest eyes. At any point, if the official sees fit, an explorer might have to turn back the other way involuntarily or arrested.Rivers are the highways of the Darian with dugout canoes and little motor boats supplying infrequent and high-priced passage. The trips need to be timed to coincide with ocean tides frequently. The destination is the town of Turbo in Colombia.Traveling inside is worth the effort for conservationists, for who the Darien is a site that is key to solving some of the largest genetic diversity in the world undiscovered.[image error]Over a giant bowl of Sancocho(soup) in a village near by, my hired guide told me of a doctor from Canada headed to Pena Bijagual. With just a handful of pupils and eight other co-workers, the biologist led them there to examine a weak-studied electric fish. This special fish uses electrical signals for communication and navigation.Pena Bijagual. A hamlet of thatched huts, a 45-minute excursion via motor canoe from Yaviza, was the research base that was close to perfect for this group of explorers. Their Embera hosts served them with incredible hospitality and offered security, culinary specialty most evenings. The researchers had so far merely examined the macana, a one-metre-long fish.However, this year, there clearly was no village to return for the scientists. In 2013, Pena Bijagual was invaded by a group of armed outsiders. In which Senafront, Panama's border patrol, participated in a shootout which killed one assailant and two injured officers. Not all villagers have not returned months later but the spirits were still high with those home.The dilemma with drug trafficking has grown even as marine patrols are stepped up, as well as the major commerce being pushed inland.My friend, says the traffickers demobilized guerrilla groups and came from the remnants of Colombian drug cartels.They employ local people, mainly indigenous natives, like rebellious teens, porters or guides - to the misery of regional cacique, Tino Quintana or leader of the Comarca Embera, a semi-sovereign native territory. A portion of the problem, he says, is isolation which reduces trade and work chances. "They offer significant amounts of work to our youth, and as you know, ingenious natives aren't always on the priority list."Once in a while, the vision of finishing the Pan-American Highway is resurrected. The past drive arrived a decade ago from former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who expected a boom in business as the clash between the government and guerrillas waned for awhile. It is bandits who gain from keeping the Difference a no-go area. With recent peace talks, I am sure they will be discussed once again.But Panama, together with local native people and the US, have a variety of objections. A road hastens deforestation, would present a danger to native cultures and permit the spread of much disorder - such as foot and mouth cattle disease, which the Difference has so far efficiently prevented from spreading to North America.Rainforest destruction is evident to Yaviza. In 2014 the sale of cocobolo or rosewood was frozen in Panama after it was discovered that much of it was flowing from prohibited sources, and mainly from the Darien. The exotic hardwood was valued at $2,000 per cubic meter. It is still a very high black market product in 2016.As we arrived to checkpoint, my guide pointing out, "The worst thing that could happen to the mighty Darien would be the finish of the Pan-American highway across the Darien Gap. The loggers will follow the road, woods will fall, and enormous chunks of heaven will likely be wept for and lost eternally."I completely agree.

Darker sides of Bangkok, Thailand

To a world I know under the surface, “The Doctor” opened doors for a few thousand bucks, delivering rebels and gangsters knocking at your door with fake passports that are pristine for the ones who enjoy living in the shadows; ones mischievous enough to walk a different edge. Many different walks of life went seeking The Doctor. Bring hard currency, and they'll deliver in days is promised. Lock and stocked. That was the buyers that were able to make the many ATM trips for the kick to skip borders.But most of their customers are war refugees and migrant workers. Women as well as guys that endured life as prostitutes in their very own motherlands and thieved to dream in a different man's land with forgers jacking up the price to their liberty. All operated from the Doctor's handy shop; a humble, scruffy home within Bangkok's suburbs.But this master forger now dwindles in Thai arrest after having a rare slip unspooled in his international criminal business that helped 1,000s of people fade beyond their real identities passed bordered countries with ease.In late 2016, Thai authorities said they had finally dismantled his system adhering to a five-year probe, also sending a hammer strike to a many that provided A- quality forgeries to international trafficking syndicates.From my travels to Southeast Asia, getting a forged or stolen passport (most documents) on the streets of Bangkok isn't a difficult task with the right new drinking buddy who has an uncle. There is always an uncle.On the dark web, it's even easy, but it’s not economical. Stolen or fake passports can cost a huge number of dollars determined by the standard quality, the nation named on the travel document, and the envy of the purchaser. The Danish is by far the priciest passport on the Internet and the streets of Bangkok. Being voted 'happiest country in the world' has a clear message to what most of these war refugees would like a crack.Doing some extra research on costs for forged or stolen passports sold on certain websites and a past of nosing around narrow city streets, I found that Danish passports could be the most pricey document out there! I am not going to publish prices, but under $10,000 USD to go chill with the Danes.Nevertheless, it isn't the most useful and only ranks fourth on the Passport Index, a database that provides a “power position” to travel documents based on the amount of states to which an individual may see with no visa.What isn't surprising and widely shared knowledge, the index ranks the UK, as well as the U.S. as the two most strongest passports, each permitting accessibility to 147 countries without a visa. Also with one (the U.S) being the easiest and most forged document on the planet. Not just The Doctor's office.The U.S. White House or State Department have not immediately responded to my requests for answers. Busy with 'The Wall' I'm guessing and thinking about setting a budget to tackle document protection and forgeries of passports that allow you to cross international borders with a smile and duty-free whiskey...Last one, I assume.There is an assortment of motives on why a less “active” passport is worth more cash on the black market. It has been theorized it could be something related to the issue of counterfeiting operations access, stolen items from tourists or the complexity of passports themselves.Thailand has emerged as one of many leading countries that supplies forged or stolen passports, according to multiple media reports.A 2014 post in the Guardian described passport larceny in Thailand as a “routine happening” after it was disclosed that two guys used fake passports stolen in Phuket to board the ill-fated Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, which vanished during a flight from Malaysia to Beijing in March of 2014 and is still missing.In the year 2012, a tremendous passport counterfeiting operation which was allegedly behind the creation of 3,000 fake passports over a five-year period and finally was dismantled by officials in Thailand and taking down The Doctor.The draw of Thailand—specially Phuket(more direct flights)—for theft operations and passport counterfeiting is the lax limitations on the tools needed to fight counterfeit work files, together with a lot of tourists, it's become a fierce battle to enforce.Even the head of Thailand’s Department of Special Investigation that was created to target the gangs accountable for the passport larceny and forgery rings, Tinawut Slilapat, described Thailand’s appeal in the year 2012 to a Bangkok magazine.“Finally, it is easy to buy any kind of sophisticated equipment in Thailand to make forgeries,” he said. “All you need is money, and we are talking about a very lucrative revenue source for criminal organizations.”Authorities say some criminal networks have winded since taking out The Doctor. But just briefly while gaping holes stay in the system and things simmer down.Thailand does not assess passports against Interpol’s stolen or lost passport database which registers tens of millions of files. If it were, “we'd understand instantly, when a file was presented on Thai soil ”- head of Thai Interpol, Major General Apichart Suriboonya. “It was worth it ... but we didn’t do it,” he added when asked about Flight MH370 discovery.Building a wall won't battle this problem, dip-shits. And get the bloody White House phone fixed!

Forelsket with Words - How the right words help us with the right feelings!

You get lost in a part of the city you lived when you were ten years younger. You walk past the place of a girlfriend you once knew in your twenties, but remember little, almost missing it completely. You look up at what use to be her window. From the exterior, everything still looks the same from small snippets of memories. Somebody else lives there now. All the neighbors that were; gone and she only lingers minutes in mind, but you feel a searing nostalgia to everything that was, and what no longer is.Moments like this have been a very common occurrence this last year in many places and memories. It's not so much her or the others thats missed, what we had, or even how things looked back then. Most of the emotional memories haven't connected yet, and I am not sure if they ever will.It's hard to explain what the surprising feeling was at that moment standing outside that old building. It was so confounding in its intensity!Then at that moment the phone rings, and it's my annoying, then pregnant tri-lingual therapist asking "How are you?", and sitting on the street steps, you're just at a loss. You don't quite know how to convey emotions, and after a few attempts, many blanks, things just move on to other subjects. Her just lecturing about exercises I have been known to ignore.That is unless you speak Portuguese like she does! Because if you do, there is no need to panic, you'll have the perfect word to fire off the minute when this happens to you. You can just tell them that you're experiencing, 'Saudade' and they will completely get you with a big blue thumbs up emoji! But I can't promise they'll leave you alone. It hasn't worked with my doctor.'Saudade' doesn't have a direct translation in any other language as she pointed out. It means 'a bittersweet, melancholic yearning for something beautiful that's now gone.'A sort of love affair, childhood home, a hug, or friendship can ignite them. It's a blend of pain, loss, and pleasure that some piece of loveliness once graced our lives and made us smile.The underlying issue is the relationship between language and feeling has long created debate and writers. It's been proposed that feelings are independent of words in many circles. Babies, for example, can feel things long before they know how to paint words to tell their sensations and wetting their nappies.         But many others have insisted that certain feelings would remain virtually unknown to us if we didn't have the phrase to help us recognize them. The truth, as so often, sits waiting in an intriguing middle area. Language may not selfishly create feelings, but it beautifully deepens and clarifies them.The right words help us to know and free ourselves. In turn, allowing us to connect again and help others. Through their assistance, we can more accurately and securely identify the contents of our inner lives as I am now learning through my many involuntary memories.The phenomenon becomes especially evident when coming across words in other languages that zero in on an emotion that our language doesn't have a synced term. Noticing just how much a good word can do to bring a feeling into focus and often make me smile.A cheery favorite is 'forelsket'! from the Norwaigens. A word that captures the euphoric feeling at the beginning of love when we can't believe someone so wonderful could have walked into our lives and has the goodness to think well of us and our future.We might say 'I was overpowered byforelsketas our fingers interlaced watching the northern lights freezing our asses off in fucking Scandivania!' But it isn't just a few magical words and foreign languages that clarify our minds. This very well may be all that great books do for us!What we call a good poem or novel is ultimately one that has been reduced extents of our own self-alienation, misunderstandings and tries to return us to ourselves in some orderly manner. (Fingers crossed for my new book to do the same!)After years of reading, we might know to pinpoint words and sentences to nearly everything we feel. However, transient and fragile it might be, it was this gift that Billy Shakespeare praised in A Midsummer Night's dream when he wrote:The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, does glance from heaven to earth. From earth to heaven. And as imagination bodies forth. The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing. A local habitation and a name - Billy Shakespeare :)Thanks to literature, we can be rescued from the closed rooms we are locked into inside our minds. The right words can break our isolation. They are the agents of, and true conduits to love and the human experience.Fun tip: Words are also an excellent way to tell your overly caring doctor to go to hell and piss off. Works every time! For the most part, it seems like she knows a thing or two and worth a call when I need a ear. Thanks Doc :)

Pro Media Magazine Interview

I had a fun interview with Pro Media Magazine in January. I thought it went pretty well. Please check it out here atPro Media Mag!

Photography Tips from a Himalayan Tubby Monk

When something looks interesting or beautiful, there is this natural impulse to want to capture and preserve it. I have my share of trigger-happy moments, years of addiction to a lens with only a hand full of images I even look at again without noticing my mistakes. And in this day and age, we are likely to reach for our phones and snap a photograph quicker than swiping left or right on another human being.Though this might seem like an ideal solution, there is a big problem associated with it that I'm reminded of by an old photography colleague currently working on her art residency in Japan. (I am very proud of my creative tree-climbing friend.) Please check out her work athttp://simone-engelen.com/about/Memories of some of our experiences in the Netherlands reminded me, we're likely to be so busy taking these amazing photos for our projects, we forget to look at the world whose beauty and interest aroused us to take a photograph in the first place.These problems seem to be very much of today's snap-happy lifestyle most us find ourselves. A consequence of the small phones in our pockets.But the consequence does get noticed after you've lugged around a camera long enough and take note of real beauty.It takes some photographers a couple of years and some longer to take notice. Hell, it took me almost ten years! And many follies of losing devices and mind over the years to see more of a silver lining.The camera-crazies, like myself, know the power of light and allure of cool buttons; mastering its wizardry is the glory! I was very impressed by cameras at first(and still get the itch when Canon or Mamiya announce a new release), but gradually I grew very suspicious of them, believing they blind us of the surroundings over time. A weird tunnel,or lens vision. Writing has since become a new friend to help tackle those demons.To try to correct this blindness, I was reminded of an old tubby monk I use to hang out with in the Himalayas in India, and some pleasant memories of my past.When all my cameras broke on a bike ride, and I lost all my cellphones in the stupid Indus river, he wobbled up to me in his tubby monk ways and said "You should take up drawing or more writing. Not with the view to becoming great artist at these crafts but simply because through the act of trying to recreate on paper, what we see in the world! It will free you in a different way." Then he told me, I was too skinny to be in these mountains and hurry up, help with groceries!We study and see the world in a way we never do when we only take a photograph. Summing up what he attempted to do in his tubby monk teachings on drawing and writing. He said 'Let two people go out for a walk. One being a good sketcher, the other having no taste of the kind. A boy, like you, stupid with a camera.""Let these two souls walk down a green lane surrounded by a beautiful lake. There will be a great difference in the scene as perceived by the two individuals. The one will see a green path and trees: he will perceive the tree to be green. Though he will think nothing about it but tinkering away on his phone, he will see that sunshine, and that it has a cheerful effect on folks around him, maybe snapping images on his nifty smartphone, and that's about it." Ouch, my tubby monk friend hit a nerve.But what did the sketcher see?Her eyes were accustomed to searching into the mysteries and cause of beauty; penetrating the minutest parts of loveliness. She looks up and debates how the beams warm her skin. How subdivided sunshine comes sprinkled down among the gleaming leaves overhead, till the lake glistens with an emerald light. She will see here and there a mystery emerging from the veil of leaves on her walk. She'll be able to see the jewel of the quickest hummingbirds and the variegated, fantastic flowered vines they explored. White and blue, purple and red, all mellowed and mingled into a single garment of beauty. Then floating cavernous trunks of driftwood and the twisted roots that grasp with their snake-like coils at the shallow bank and lakeside dock, whose turfy slope is inland with flowers of a thousand dyes fades away as boat departed.Are these not worth seeing?And yet if you are not a sketcher or take notes, you'll pass through the green lane walk towards that dock, and when home again, you'll probably have nothing to say or think about it but that you went down a such and such lane.For respect to Tubby's teachings, no images on this post, but he's not the boss of me.lol :)

My Fired Barista Friend is going to change the world!

When many think about an important or memorable place, most almost certainly will not picture a greyhound bus or an Amtrak train ride. As many picture them, buses are not exactly attractive. The design scheme is the same in virtually every greyhound bus: rows and rows of black seats, lingering smells, a thin aisle down the middle of the bus to a litter box closet, dozens of tinted windows with face oil impressions, and the great blue exterior with a running dog designed on both side. Not many people, I am guessing, would consider buses to be an important part of their lives. However, if someone were to think about it, they would realize that they've probably had at least had one memorable , good or bad, experience in their life that took place on a bus. It could have been as a kid or adult. It could have changed their lives or might have changed the world!I believe that could be the case with young Amanda waiting for her bus to Grand Junction, CO. She had lost her confidence in the world around her and the change she brings to it. Recently fired from her first attempt to alter the world with her barista flair art, industry changing ideas and wholesome views of people at a sweet age of 18. Now, she was heading home with dreams darker than a cup of Guatemalan coffee. Her excuse still burned in my head 'People are already doing it.'One of the things that separate confident people from diffident ones is their approach to history.Very broadly speaking, of course, the unconfident believe that history is over, but the self-assured trust for the most part that it's still in the process of being created. One day possibly by themselves at the reins of change.The way we enter the world, may it be 18, 37, or 50 years of age, carries with it a constitutional bias towards a consequence that 'change' has finished and that history has been settled. That everything around us conspires to give off a sense that thestatus quois entrenched. We're surrounded by great people who follow practices/traditions that have been in place for decades, some even centuries! The area we live in appears as immutable as an ancient temple people visit on holiday. The schools we go to look as though they have been performing the same rituals torturing children since the world began. We are constantly told why things are and encouraged to accept that reality is not made according to our wishes. But in Amanda's case and with many, it doesn't do anything for those dreams skipping in one's head.We come to trust that humans have fully mapped the range of the possible. If something hasn't happened for many, it's because it can't happen - or it shouldn't. The result can be deep wariness around imagining the words 'changing the world!' let alone do something about it. It tells someone, 'there is no point starting that new coffee business, the Denver market has a fucking Starbucks on every corner'. Or when pioneering a new approach to the arts, to the diffident, the idea is that 'everything is already set in a fixed pattern. Fuck throwing more paint!'... Please throw the fucking paint!When we study history closer, however, the pictures and photographs change sharply. Once time's accelerated and, we climb the mountain of minutes; surveying the peaks of centuries, change just appears very constant.New continents are discovered by those unaware they were always there, alternative ways of governing nations are pioneered and toppled in the process as we are seeing with Trump, ideas of how to dress and whom to worship are all transformed.Once folks wore strange cloaks, cock pieces and tilted the land with clumsy instruments. To see that now, it'll cost you a hundred bucks and a trip to Larkspur, CO for the Renaissance fair in the summer months.Years ago, they chopped a King's head when they didn't like him. Nowadays, a mean tweet is about as closest you'll get to the idiot running your country. Even way back, people got around in fragile ships that couldn't hold a barrel of Colorado whisky, ate elephant trunks, used chamber pots to shit and piss in, and didn't know how to fix teeth in these mountains. Which lead to many strange deaths.(Mix it the food with water and drink that shit, weirdos. You're digestive tract gave you a demonstration already!)We walk away from Union Station knowing, at least in the most simple theory, that things do change, and constantly.But in classic form, almost without noticing, we tend to distance ourselves and our societies from a day-to-day belief that we belong to the same ongoing bumpy narrative and are, at present, its central actors on a shitty bus ride home. History, we feel, is what use to happen. It can't be what is going on around us in the here, and now. Being defeated to the notion that things, in our vicinity at least, have settled down.I am still awaiting a response to their reason for posting this poem on a Facebook bookclub group. Until then, to make us braver about the idea of changing; we might want to turn to three lines in T.S Eliot's peoms - The Four Quartets.So, while the light fails on a winter's afternoon,in a secluded chapel.History is now and England. -T.S EliotWinter afternoons, around 5 pm, have a habit of feeling particularly resolved and established with many. Especially in quiet small mountain towns of Colorado. Many of which date back to when frontiers first come to these lands. The air in such towns is still and musty taking you on an old smell adventure equal only to a nursing home in Kansas. The large wood floors of these places have been slowly worn away by feet of the faithful and punctual. These are not venues and times to think about changing the world. Everything hints that we would be wiser to accept the way things are, head home this evening, light a fire and settle down for quiet night catching the local weatherman sound optimistic about tomorrow and pondering only change in the Broncos lineup next season.Hence the surprise of Mr. Eliot's third line, his resonant:'History is now and England' (the Brit in me smiles)In other many words, everything that we associate with history - The impetuous daring of great people, the dramatic alterations in moral values, the revolutionary questioning of long-held beliefs, the upturning of the old order.All this is still going on! Even at this very moment, in externally peaceful and apparently, in seemingly unchanging places like the mountain towns where my new friend Amanda was heading.We don't believe it only because we are standing far too close to the fireplace. But the world is being made, remade, and made again at every instant by almost 8 billion people minus the ones we have around us.And therefore, anyone of us has a wicked chance of being a secret(or not so secret) agent in history. It can be a CIA level or small scale WikiLeaks basement operation! You choose how you change the world! It's open to our own timelines to build a new city every bit as unique and beautiful as Venice in its grandeur, to change ideas as radically as the Renaissance, to start an intellectual movement as resounding as Buddhism or the thinkers of romanticism.The present has all the contingency of the past and is every bit as malleable. It shouldn't intimidate us but attract us to a new confidence in ourselves and dreams. How we love, travel, approach the arts, govern, educate ourselves, run businesses, age and die are all up for further development. Current views and limits may appear firm, but only because we exaggerate their fixity to ourselves. The majority of what exists is arbitrary, neither inevitable nor right, simply the result of chaos and happenstance.We should be confident, even on a purple sunset on a winter afternoon waiting for a bus home, of our power to join the Livestream feed of history and however modestly you choose to do so, change its course!Even if it starts with creating an fancy aspen leaf in another person's coffee cup and not taking that memorable bus ride home. You can change the world instead!

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