Sitio de Autor de Jose Miguel Vasquez jmv@jomiv.com

Photoshoping the world

There is no one ugly in the world anymore. If you don’t like your appearance is not the fault of DNA but laziness. We are all beautiful, ask Photoshop and see. Few tools for human deception have bitten, with such success, for the jugular of the perceptions of others. It’s devious, but democratic style, has achieved in less than a generation, which the Spartans -with Taigeto- and Nazi eugenics -with their laboratories- could achieve. Photoshop is the new brush of the gods.

With Photoshop, the whiteness of models that don’t know what a ray of sunshine is in the tropics is reduced, flirty eyes of women and men with lycanthropic interests are clarified; orange peel dims until blending it with the texture and volume of a medicine ball. With this tool, available to any with tutorials on the network -and a click away from a free download- you can get into the tightest jeans, fitting gracefully into dresses, conform to tiny shoes, and shine without dark circles –or wrinkles- in the eyes, supporting even the perfidious extreme close of the most candid camera.

Now, this lethal creation of technology has its perfect moments, most of them distant from physical contact, but what to do when the magic of digital life ends? How to cover when the virtuality breaks and you end up face to face with the victims of deception in an elevator… especially those miserable ones with dim light, direct self-esteem aggressors?

Nothing better than taking the following precautions:
1.If they recognize you, act like you know nothing. Speak another language, babble, touch all the elevator buttons, go against the natural flow of traffic channels, disappear. 2.If cornered, say you’re the brother or sister of the person they’re talking about. Again run like the wind. If you are not there, you never were. 3.Invent an acting career. Say you are fatigued by the intense work of the Stanislavsky method and therefore, in addition to an aging makeup you’re a little thinner and sleepless. Blame it all on the method, the director, the cosmetics, the requirement of the role to interpret. 4.Speak in a conceptual, artistic, cinematic tone. Make everyone believe they’re located within a Reality Show, invite them to greet nonexistent cameras and leave them talking with an ice cream seller, which supposedly is the director of the outdoor unit of the super production. 5.Finally, don’t answer, don’t see or interact. Remain silent, levitate … try to enter a mystical ecstasy. Turn your eyes and produce foam from the mouth. Never before a false attack of epilepsy had been so well seen, as in these times of great double edge, inaugurated by the terrible and never well weighted Photoshop.
En twitter @ortegabrothers

Editor’s Note: Joaquín Ortega delivers this issue to us, Photoshopping the world, which lets out not only his good prose but delights us with the subtle humor that characterizes him. I see Photoshopping the world as the mischievous brother of any of the wonderful issues from his latest text, The Millennium Culture, now available in digital format. Photoshopping the world is part of the emerging column Humor. An article by Joaquín, Madman of God has just been published in the IWP (International Writing Program), a very interesting project I will write about soon.  

Joaquín Ortega is a political scientist, writer and film producer from Caracas. He still believes Lotteries and in the existence of Space Wolves. He leads the program “La Hora Verde” (The Green Hour) in Caracas, on 92.9FM from Monday to Friday from 4 to 5pm. His most recent book is “The Millennium Culture” and is emerging as a best-seller.

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