Again with Mendoza, and “long-poem” poet Vince Serrano

I finally saw Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay at Greenbelt as part of the week-long film festival sponsored by the Italian government. Kinatay (“butchered”), the gruesome story of the kidnap/murder of a junkie prostitute in the hands of corrupt cops, won Mendoza the best direction award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.

It was a contentious win. Variety bemoans the “obvious statements made banal by heavy-handed ironies”. Critic-blogger Benito Vergara also noticed the numerous lack of subtleties:

The prostitute’s stripper name, for instance, is Madonna. There’s a quotation about never losing integrity on the back of Peping’s criminology school uniform. There’s a faded poster of Jesus, heart surrounded by thorns, just above the basement room where Madonna is about to be raped and murdered. There’s a massive billboard that reads, “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.”

(from filmeyeballsbrain.com)

There is nothing of the sort. If anything, it was the subtitling that did the movie a disservice by underscoring what were actually not so obvious. Madonna is not an unusual stripper name in Manila. The motto on the uniform is in fact indecipherable in the muted lighting. Even the billboard signs that supposedly comment on the action were not gratuitously used at all. Yes, Mendoza is making “legible” ironic gestures, but these are hardly in your face, and are quickly drowned out in the white noise and frenetic kaleidoscope of the city.

Roger Ebert decried Kinatay as the worst film in the history of the festival. Nothing is further from the truth. Ebert’s comments are actually more telling of his inability to grasp new cinema. In McLuhan’s terms, his bewilderment is symptomatic of the visual, literate man’s helpless flailing before the audile and tactile.

He complains:

On the sound track, there are traffic noises, loud bangings, clashings, hammerings and squealings of tires. They continue on and on and on. They are cranked so high we recall the guitar setting of “11″ in “This is Spinal Tap.” They are actively hostile. They are illustrated by murk. You can’t see the movie and you can’t bear to listen to it.

(from Cannes #4: What were they thinking of?)

But the the movie is all about sounds and textures. It simply follows the character of Coco Martin, a neophyte cop, as things unfold in real time without rhyme or reason. Pretty much like how much of life happens.

Ebert reads movies like printed text. This habit enforces the narrative elements of 19th century novels with the strictness of grammar schools. Hence, his typical aversion to comic book adaptations with their lack of psychological realism and lineal logic.

The adventures of Captain America are fabricated with first-rate CGI and are slightly more reality-oriented than in most superhero movies–which is to say, they’re still wildly absurd…

(from rogerebert.com)

When the mild-mannered alter ego transforms into the superhero, Ebert fails to see the glamour conferred by the costume, and instead dismisses how “the new Steve Rogers, is now [simply] a foot taller and built like Mr. Universe… [adopting] a costume and a stars-and-stripes shield, which serve primarily to make him highly visible…”

This inability to grasp the iconic is brought about by the pressure of lineal logic imposed by the sequential nature of printed text. According to McLuhan:

Literate people think of cause and effect as sequential, as if one thing pushed another along by physical force. Nonliterate people register very little interest in this kind of “efficient” cause and effect, but are fascinated by hidden forms that produce magical results.

(from Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan)

In a way, we cannot blame Ebert because his reading is within the nature of the movie as a medium: “movies assume a high level of literacy in their users”. Furthermore, it is a hi-def medium, or “hot” in McLuhanesque, as opposed to “cool” TV with its mosaic-like pixelation (actually, “snowiness”). What Brillante Mendoza accomplished in Kinatay, with digital filming technology, is to turn down the resolution of the movie, immersing the viewer in the black ink of night with ambient lighting (or lack thereof), as the protagonist makes his unwitting descent into hell. We are literally left in the dark as to what is happening in the scenes, and are forced to rely on our other (audile and tactile) senses to orient ourselves in the penumbral landscape.

And, not surprisingly, this is precisely what Ebert complains about!

For at least 45 minutes, maybe an hour, maybe an eternity, Mendoza gives us Queasy-Cam shots, filmed at night in very low light, of the interior and exterior of the van as they drive a long distance outside Manila to a remote house.

In turning the movie into a cool medium to tell a hot crime story (the butchering of a hooker), Mendoza gets the audience involved in depth in the characters’ experiences. This is reinforced by the use of nondescript performers, which makes it even more similar to TV’s use of everyman actors as opposed to the hard glamour of old Hollywood stars.

Ebert preempts contrarian views from likely avant-garde “theoreticians” by declaring his stoic indifference and recusal from any rebuttal:

There will be critics who fancy themselves theoreticians, who will defend this unbearable experience, and lecture those plebians like me who missed the whole Idea. I will remain serene while my ignorance is excoriated. I am a human being with relatively reasonable tastes.

Yes, his tastes are indeed “relatively reasonable”. That is why he is the go-to reviewer on a movie night out. Ebert works best as a middle-ground critic for the middle-brow–as the cultural arbiter of taste for the bourgeoisie. His audience do not need to be subjected to such real-world grisliness after a good dinner, coffee and mints. They need his little sensible narratives with character development and dramatic arc. It is the reassuring order of print for the visually literate. They cannot handle the delirium of real space and time, where nothing seems to happen, or, more correctly, where things simply happen without purpose. Like Peping, we are unwittingly implicated in a crime that unfolds casually and told as a matter of course. (“No drama is developed. No story purpose is revealed.”)

It is no surprise that Ebert and his literate audience feel “alienated” because narrative order is expunged in real space and time. It creates a morally chaotic, or at least indifferent world, where savagery, such as depicted in Kinatay, truly exists. Moreover, their most reliable orienting faculty, the visual, is purposefully impaired, and they are forced to deploy their audile and tactile sensoria to navigate the free fall into the lower depths. They cannot remain aesthetically detached, and are recruited to participate in depth as they are dragged into the muck. Getting your hands dirty is the risk of using the sense of touch.

But this is not just a “theoretical” quarrel about the formal biases of Ebert’s literate culture. I was riveted in my seat and felt sick in my gut while watching Kinatay–not by the ostensible violence as one would for Noe’s Irreversible or Passolini’s Salò–but from a deep disgust at the moral nihilism at the base of Philippine society. Kinatay is Mendoza’s singular outrage against this latent animal viciousness in people, from the Maguindanao massacre to the piles of decapitated corpses dumped by drug lords in the streets of Mexico.

Kinatay is ultimately a Sadean mockery of the Enlightenment’s confidence in a rationally ordered Nature. Ebert’s “civilized” audience (the printed word is the civilizing medium) needs exquisite surfaces and an organizing principle even in their depictions of the Holocaust.

What is most amazing about this film [Schindler's List] is how completely Spielberg serves his story. The movie is brilliantly acted, written, directed and seen. Individual scenes are masterpieces of art direction, cinematography, special effects, crowd control.

(from rogerebert.com)

They cannot fathom that such a hell on earth indeed exists. Well, Mabuhay! Welcome to the Philippines.

Addendum (12/22/11):

Wanted: Gen. Jovito “The Butcher” Palparan

Two days after Jovito Palparan Jr. was stopped at an airport in Pampanga province from leaving the country, the government launched a manhunt for the retired major general tagged by activist groups as “Berdugo (Butcher)” for the string of extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances attributed to him. (from the Philippine Daily Inquirer)

Indigenous peoples in the Cordillera are pushing for the arrest and detention of General Jovito Palparan believed to be behind the torture and death of many highland leaders… Palparan was assigned to the Cordilleras from 1991 to 1994 and has been pointed out as the mastermind in the torture and killing of Marcelo Fakilang. Fakilang was tortured and killed in his own hometown in Betwagan, Sadanga, Mountain Province in 1992. (from Sun Star Baguio)

[Human rights] violations are part of Arroyo’s policy… [Arroyo] praised Palparan during one of her State of the Nation Address… “Gloria [Arroyo] recognized Palparan for going after activists whom they regarded as criminals. It is a policy of government. Gloria should also be punished,” Mrs. Cadapan [mother of an abductee] said. (from bulatlat.com)

Pitik-pitik, a lobster-like crustacean endemic in our fishing village of Estancia, Iloilo. They’re called Moreton Bay bugs Down Under.

Is the price right? That would be $1.30 a pound!

I also detest the “whole foods” industry–yes, it is an industry–for branding health and well-being (organic, natural, green) as luxury. Just look at the prices, and who goes there to shop. I don’t mind this industry ripping off affluent hipsters–those who have commodified the 1960s counterculture values–by selling them basically the same things but more exorbitantly by slapping on the “organic” label. It is as much a smokescreen for profits as the stone-wash of designer jeans that sell nostalgia for the Summer of Love. What I contest is the perception they prop up about healthy living (and eating) as not affordable to the average joe. Even fast foods have caught on and put a premium on salads and fruit bowls in their menu. Lettuce can’t be more expensive to produce than beef!

Organic hummus and pita bread at the co-op should not be the only alternative to burger and fries. Asian stores offer much more reasonably priced items, that is, if you learn the cuisine, embrace their funky smell, and are able to navigate their cramped, labyrinthine aisles.

Super H-Mart: the mothership of Asian grocery stores

This brings me to another of my pet peeves: vegetarianism, and its more straitlaced sister, vegan asceticism. As a life-loving epicurean, I refuse to foreclose on the pleasures of eating meat. The vegan fatwa over the killing of animals for food borders on religious fanaticism. These hippie, urban prigs have probably not been to a real butcher. I come from a culture where innards are sold as street food (isaw), duck fetuses are a delicacy (balut), and chickens are ritually tortured for flavor (pinikpikan). In short, we do not romanticize our dinner…

Isaw, Balut, Pinikpikan

and apparently so do the Japanese! Yum!

Vegan abstensions on food is more reactionary of meat-and-potatoes in the WASP diet (translated to burger-and-fries in fast food) than offering real, substantive health benefits. It is no different than stringent chastity enforced in Medieval nunneries to keep Roman decadence at bay. It becomes more insidious when conflated with the feel-good religion of Climate Change. Filipinos don’t need these trendy dietary prescriptions from the West as indigenous cuisine provides a healthy balance of vegetables and meat. We did not have to grow out of macaroni and cheese.

Such is the recipe for Kadios, Baboy, Langka (or KBL) that is typical in Ilonggo cuisine. It is a challenge to cook Filipino dishes in a foreign country, but even more so a very regional one as KBL. It was such a delight to discover that kadios or pigeon pea, a black bean that is essential to the dish was available in the frozen section of the Filipino store. It was sold as dry beans in a sealed bag, so it confused me why it was stored in the freezer. The proprietor tells me that only Ilonggos recognize the stuff, and that he ships them to Ilonggo customers as far away as New Jersey. It must be that precious.

Kadios are thrice bigger than mung beans and also takes about three times as long to rehydrate. Put the bag-full in a pot of water and let it boil at medium-low heat for an hour. (By the time I return from the gym, the beans were soft to the bite, but not yet quite cooked.) Let it sit in low heat as you stir fry garlic (4-5 cloves, minced) and onions (2 pcs, cut into wedges) in a separate pot. Add the meat into the stir fry to brown it and let the juices extrude, while seasoning with salt and pepper. The pork cuts (baboy) I used for this dish consisted of meat close to the bone, such as neck bones or ribs. These are the cheaper parts of the animal, but are ideal for these types of stews as they give off a rich, savory stock.

Once the meat is brown, add water from the kadios until the meat is covered, throw in lemongrass (tanglad), and turn up the heat to let it boil. Lemongrass from the Asian stores are usually already yellowish and desiccated, so you would need to peel off the dry husk and use only the heart near the base. When the meat is almost tender, add the kadios–now strained from excess water–and tamarind powder to taste. I would use the Sinigang sa Sampalok mix, but only about 1 tbsp, as KBL should not be as sour. The souring principle in authentic KBL actually comes from batwan, a fruit that seems to be only known in Iloilo and thereabouts, and is impossible to obtain even in Manila. The use of a souring agent (tamarind/sampalok, cucumber tree/kamias, guava/bayabas, and batwan) as a counterpoint to the umami of meat seems to be a common theme in Philippine cuisine.

Tamarind powder as “Sinigang sa Sampaloc” mix, Batwan

Finally add taro roots (gabi) and young, green jackfruit (langka), both chopped into small chunks, and cook another 5-10 min until these are tender. Taro roots have fine hair that trap dirt, so a thorough washing with a brush is needed before peeling. They are also slimy when peeled and have a mild toxin (calcium oxalate) that is removed upon cooking. Young, green jackfruit is available in the canned vegetables section of most Asian stores. It is different from the yellow jackfruit in sweet syrup that is used in desserts such as halo-halo.

Taro roots (upper left) and Jackfruits

Add kangkong (water spinach) towards the end, and let it just wilt in the liquid’s ambient heat. Serve over steaming jasmine rice.

This is why I can never turn vegan.

This dish brings back memories of my mother’s hometown, a small fishing village, where I spent most summers growing up. It was, every time, an impressive voyage for a child: an overnight journey by ship from Manila Bay, through the rough, open waters of the South China Sea, to Iloilo City, followed by four hours on a bus through the red dust of dirt roads on Panay Island, to the village of Estancia.

One summer, there was a draught, and the whole clan had to make a trip to Batwan Island to do our collective laundry. Water there gushed from the rocks and had a tang just like the fruit of the batwan trees that grew everywhere. The soil was soft white clay. This was the same island the clan escaped to from the Japanese during WWII, and my grandparents, uncles and aunts, began to tell stories of that idyllic time in the very midst of the upheavals of the Pacific War. My mother, born at that time, spent her first years on that island. Milk was so scarce they gave her sweet coconut sap in its place. This memory has stayed vivid with me, and has in turn become an idyllic part of my childhood. I even wrote a poem about this a while back, when I still considered myself a poet. It was even published in a book (an anthology) of limited copies.

Washing Day
(Batuan Island, Iloilo)

          1.
Wells have gone bone dry.
Silt once quickened now cake and crack.
What spindly water is left
Frays into fractals like cut glass.

Only wind plies into that hallow
That was the river,
Sashays among the reeds,
Swirls over simmering gravel.

          2.
Bamboo outriggers
Skirt an enclave of mangroves
That had once tucked away a haven
From the great War of the Pacific.

Thick roots impale the water
Like abandoned plumbing,
Firm as udders,
And barnacled with silence.

          3.
We tightrope ashore,
Arms sprung open like seesaws.
Refugees of the dry spell.
Pilgrims to brackish waters,

Ankle-deep in white clay.
Batuan: tang
Of eponymous fruit trees,
Lip to the spouts of providence.

          4.
Laundry relieved from baskets
That unbalanced the pump-boats,
Now bleach in the sun,
Quilting into Klimt-fabric.

The grassy hillsides
Line with linens, white like ship sails
That balloon into leviathans
Fattened by wind.

For my mother, Lucia, who first saw the light
sparkling in these waters in 1943.

I have never been back to that island. Perhaps I have never wanted to.

Farrah Fawcett Barbie, posing like in her iconic poster in red swimsuit and famous blonde curls, complete with a replica of the throw rug behind her. Deborah Harry Barbie, lead singer of Blondie and punk icon, dressed in hot pink vinyl, and sporting two-toned shaggy hair. These are not Barbie dolls for little girls.

Online, I found one more for the cult fans: a Tippi Hedren Barbie from the Hitchcock film, The Birds. She has the iconic mint green dress, the tall platinum-blonde coif, and–to my delight–three rabid crows pecking at her (the incarnation of maternal jealousy, according to Paglia). I want one! ($117 at Amazon). [Hey, it's not as bad as these broheims hooked on My Little Pony... Ok. Maybe it is.]

You know you’ve attained an iconic status in popular culture when you get your own Barbie. It is, however, not the person per se, but the persona–the projected image–that is iconic.

It is also the pervasive iconography of Barbie herself that drives feminists hysterical over its ideal of body proportions that supposedly turns WASP girls into anorexics. Barbie is certainly no lumpy fertility symbol, but turning her waistline into a matter of feminist politics is just ludicrous. How they underestimate the intelligence of girls.

So what did I end up getting my niece? The Great Shape Barbie from Toy Story 3, accompanied with the DVD. I think she’ll enjoy the doll more by seeing that it’s also in a movie. This produces what McLuhan calls the “excitement of translation”–the re-cognition of experience in new material (or medium). The rug rat is already media savvy anyway: she knows by now how to play with iPhone apps. Kids these days…

It turns out that Great Shape Barbie has been around for a while. I found this TV ad from 1983:

She does look like Jane Fonda during her 1980s Workout phase, albeit glitzier and ditzier, or more West Coast Elle Woods than hardcore aerobics junkie. And there is nothing more antipodal to Gwyneth Paltrow’s spartan yoga/vegan ethos than those dazzling turquoise leotards.

Jane Fonda herself appeared as the ditziest blonde in the 1968 camp flick Barbarella that established her as sex symbol. This was before she controversially posed with the North Vietnamese Army and their anti-aircraft gun.

“Hanoi Jane”, circa 1972, in her anti-war activist phase

The press photo shows a plain Jane, stripped of Hollywood glamour, fraternizing with the NVA in the jungles of Indochina. Was this, in part, a form of contrition for her decadent life with French filmmaker Roger Vadim in the 1960s? This image, an utter abdication of sexual glamour, has become as iconic as its space heroine opposite. It is a powerful image that still haunts her even today.

How about a Hanoi Jane Barbie?

Summer has definitely set in. After a bitter winter, and spring weather that lingered till mid-June, we’re finally getting stretches of sweltering days in the 90′s. My kind of weather. I love solar heat that is palpable to the skin. It turns golden as if touched by King Midas. I love sweat cooled by wind when I ride my bike in the cornfields, now almost tall as myself. Joseph Black, a fellow of the Royal Society in the 18th century, called it the latent heat of vaporization. Heat that is hidden–that does not register as a temperature rise, but as a change of state. The skin is said to be the largest organ of the body. This supple shell is also our heat sink.

The first route is a big loop around the twin towns of Urbana and Champaign, which shares the University of Illinois, split in the middle between the two at Wright Street. I start by going south on Race, turning west on Windsor, north on Matthis, and finally east on University. This route gives me a good spatial sense of its extent, its environs, and the distance from one downtown to the other.

The second route takes you east of Urbana on Washington, past High Cross, and into the maze of cornfields. It’s pretty straightforward, except for a couple of jogs, and a gentle southward bend that takes you all the way to Homer Lake, where the country road becomes State Road. As a lawyer in the late 1840′s, Abraham Lincoln used to frequent this road, which was the main artery that connected Urbana and Danville.

Homer Lake is halfway to Kickapoo State Park, which would be another hour and a half biking on Lincoln Trail Road. The park is just west of Danville, the last Illinois city on I-74 before Indiana.

Winter

It’s amazing how snow instantly transforms the landscape. I peered through my curtains one evening, and lo, everything was white. It had snowed, perhaps for a couple of hours, and the world outside has changed completely. It has become dreamlike, otherworldly. I stepped outside with my camera. It was midnight, but the veil of whiteness made it bright as dusk. Johann Heinrich Lambert, an 18th century Swiss astronomer, called this diffuse reflection the albedo effect, from the Latin for white.

Snow had also leveled everything. It was disorienting. I did not know where the driveway ended and the street began. This glittering powder, twirling as it fell, accrued into a white crust that made the streets disappear. It removed all human demarcations, and re-imposed a continuous, undifferentiated natural order.

Spring

Mid-April: Daffodils, Hyacinths, Magnolia, Tulips

Daffodils signal the arrival of spring. They are the first to flower once temperatures become mild, along with hyacinths and tulips, but they quickly wilt away when it gets any warmer. They are also called the Narcissus, after the Greek youth who became enamored with his own reflection. Vegetation quickly fills the barren ground with life. I swear the ferns in the backyard grew two feet overnight. As the season waxes, the various species of flowers come and go in a set progression of blossoming and withering. What gross expenditure in but a transient opulence! But flowers are angiospermous sex organs. They are nature’s investment in fecundity.

My favorite flowering tree is the Japanese magnolia. Its enormous flowers with pink-to-purple ombré shading bloom dramatically from bare branches, and hang around for only a couple of weeks before they are replaced by deciduous leaves. It is glorious to be standing underneath this canopy of daintiness, like being in attendance at a royal court or a Kurosawa dream of a peach orchard. In the fall, it will change color again, for the third time.

Dreams (1990), Akira Kurosawa

Late-April: Tulips

Tulips are not all red, or yellow, or pink. Some of the most surprising colors are tangerine and purple, sometimes so deep they are almost black.

Mid-May: Poppies, Onion

Poppies also bloom only briefly. Their petals look as delicate as crepe tissue. They teeter in the wind on long gnarly stems, which make them look even more fragile. While I meant to take pictures of poppies, I also saw these interesting globes of small, lavender-colored flowers. It took me a while of image searching to find out what they were, which all the more added to my surprise: they were the common onion.

I love photographing flowers up close, so their visage fills the frame of view and spills over the borders. This simple change of scale creates a dreamy, surrealistic quality. The flower becomes an abstract object, like the voluptuous flower paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, or the bold color fields in post-painterly abstraction.

Red Poppy (1928), Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986)

Late-May: Peonies, Irises, Roses

These are the royalty of flowers, much celebrated in the canvases of Dutch School flower painters (van Huysum, de Heem, Mignon). Peonies are exceptionally florid and typically form the centerpiece of their still life’s. I’ve always wondered what those monumental things were. The flower heads mature to a great size until their weight makes them stoop to the ground, in what seems like a comeuppance for their proliferative hubris. Owing to this, they get dashed, stepped on, or pelted by rain. Nature is no respecter of beauty, no matter how exquisite.

Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, detail (c. 1715), Jan van Huysum (1682-1749)

Mid-June: Lilies, Dasies, Hydrangeas

Lilies seem to be the sturdiest of the bunch. They have been abloom for weeks, well into the summer, but don’t seem to be bothered by the intensifying heat. Across where I lived, there’s an orange fire hydrant, beside which tiger lilies flourished. Their long narrow petals curl back, exposing tender, antler-like stamens. This opening up that risks vulnerability in the impulse to flourish makes the flower a central metaphor for the loss of innocence. This was best exploited in the opening titles of Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Ironically, I think it is not May Welland (Wynona Ryder) nor Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), but Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) who was the flower in the story.

The Age of Innocence (1993), Martin Scorsese

Autumn

from The Leaves are Falling (26 Oct 2009):

Leaves have finally turned color! I had been waiting for this all summer, not having lived north enough before to see the four-season cycle. The streets are covered in opulent gold and red, and gleam in late afternoon light. Color changes first at the fringes. It is not so much the production of yellow, as the retreat of green–the disappearance of chlorophyll–that light-harvesting molecule that transforms air into the trees’ very substance. Now, it is shutting down operations, one-by-one dismantling its photosynthetic accoutrements, until a mere black skeleton remains of a once dazzling fullness–a naked stick to stand up to winter.

Reds and purples also appear, at the right conditions, as excess sugars of winter hoarding are transformed by light into color. An occult conjunction of moisture and weather, the onset of spring, the end of summer. No two autumns are thus ever alike.

Hero (2002), Zhang Yimou

Fourth of July

I had since moved to a new place, just a couple of blocks from where I was staying. Shelley, the woman who owns it teaches yoga, but is an artist at heart. She paints in the abstract expressionist mode, a form (or formlessness) that I have recently come to appreciate. Her house is somewhat in a purposeful disarray, like an unfinished canvas. It feels scuffed by life. Friends openly come and go. In the evenings, things may suddenly get energized, and jazz music would play on the piano.

It’s been two years since I moved here in Illinois for a job at the university, and seven years since I relocated to the US. It is a long time to be away from my country, but I have also grown fond of this one. Shelley invited me to a party for her yoga class on the Fourth of July. It was at a house in Homer surrounded by trees in the middle of soybean fields. As the evening set in, thousands of fireflies rose from the ground. The children brought out jars to collect the “lightning bugs”. A sickle-shaped moon appeared on the indigo sky just above an orange horizon. Soon the fireworks began. We had a wide view of three towns in the backyard, but our attention turned to the kids. The jars were forgotten in the grass, and they started playing with glow sticks, twirling them in their arms. “Oh, how beautiful!,” Shelley cheered. “Who needs jazz when you can watch children play with colors!”

Links:

Urbana Slide Show

A Message Inscribed on the Body (01/24/2011)

First witness video moments after Moscow Domodedovo airport bombing

Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak calls suicide bombing “a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through.” No other means? And I thought “Marxist-feminist-deconstructionists” never deal with absolutes.

There is, however, another means: ahimsa. It is the non-violent struggle that her fellow Indian, Mahatma Gandhi, used against British colonizers.

As a practitioner of ahimsa, Gandhi swore to speak the truth and advocated that others do the same. (Wikipedia)

Yes, there are things such as truth, and we can speak it with confidence. We do not need to strap our women and children with bombs and send them to their deaths. Gandhi has shown by example that truth has its own power, and has no need to resort to violence.

Decadent Connoisseurship (02/06/11)

Piero Scaruffi is also an omnivorous connoisseur. He has lists for the best music (rock, jazz, avant garde), movies, and books. It is a snooty canon. The Beatles don’t even make the cut. (“They wrote a bunch of catchy 3-minute ditties and they were photogenic.”)

He reminds me of Camille Paglia’s decadent connoisseurs: Huysman’s Jean Des Esseintes, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry Wotton. Some part of me envies this obsessive devotion (and perhaps my blog is turning into this). Decadent aestheticism, however, is a “sophistication without humaneness or humanism,” Paglia warns. It is self-indulgent, “a disease of the eye” or in this case, the ear.

Sheen, the Nietzschean (03/04/11)

Everyone thinks that Charlie Sheen is having a very public mental breakdown, as he goes around TV and radio shows ranting about his cancelled show. I’m not so sure. Yes, he’s manic and grandiose. Maybe even narcissistic, delusional, and in denial too. He certainly looks rough with that raspy voice and sallow face. But he also strikes me as very self-aware, and in fact often regards himself with irony.

Charlie Sheen has fully embraced a life of hedonism that is both decadent in its excesses and aristocratic in its imperiousness. He disdains the dull plebeians at CBS–those bean counters in stiff suits who fret over decorum. If anything, his aphoristic pronouncements reveal a Nietzschean amoral will-to-power. He lives life large and in-the-moment, because he can–like Nietszche’s tyrannical Übermensch, or, in Sheen’s words, a “total freaking rock star from Mars”. He also seems to understand, from his many interviews, that stars shine brightest when they’re about to burn out.

Lara Logan on the Front Lines (03/13/11)

I had not heard about Lara Logan until reports circulated about her assault by a mob of Egyptian men during celebrations after Mubarak vacated power. News outlets specifically emphasized the sexual nature of the assault. Lara is blonde and beautiful. She looks fragile as a fashion model, but reports right from the battlefields of the Middle East–not exactly the most egalitarian of societies for women. What disturbed me about this story was the nasty hint of salaciousness in the tone of the coverage. It went beyond the reporting of facts by amplifying a sense of scandal to drive interest in the story. The subtext is that it was doubly atrocious because it involved the spoiling of what was beautiful, pure. It’s the same way Nancy Grace exploits the innocence of child-victims to rack up ratings.

The more I learn about Lara Logan from her videos the more I love this woman, who is smart, opinionated, passionate, and brave. She reports on what American soldiers actually experience on the ground–the military’s “point of view”–and criticized Rolling Stone’s piece on Gen. McChrystal. She reminds me of another fearless and beautiful journalist, the late Oriana Fallaci, who is also not afraid to speak her mind against the PC herd. Fallaci also survived a brutal attack (in Mexico, 1968) while covering a story. She was “shot three times, dragged down stairs by her hair, and left for dead by Mexican forces” (Wikipedia).

Black & White (04/30/11)

After watching the hot mess of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, I had to clean my visual palette with some of these crisp, tightly constructed videos from the true mavens of pop.

Unlike other Madonna videos that portray sexual deviance for shock, there’s surprising levity here in the treatment of leather fetish BDSM. There is no dragging ennui like in Justify My Love, just cheeky fun. The choreography is also impeccable–evoking the tension, snap, and release of latex.

Secretive & Shabby (05/07/11)

How shabby the Americans are. How secretive and stupid.

(from http://www.abc.net.au/)

Bob Ellis is clearly mesmerized by the persona of Osama bin Laden–reciting sweet, poetic elegies to this fallen master terrorist of 9/11, and canonizing him with the left’s most beloved radical, Che Guevarra. It is easy for cynics like him to throw potshots at America from a safe distance. How easy to take for granted the blessings of living in the comfort of a Western-style democracy. I’d like to see how long this fat cat endures under Sharia Law.

Bob Ellis is living in a world constructed from the liberal fantasy that all men are good–a fantasy he can afford to enjoy over beer in his den, fenced in by the wealth and military power of the West. These terrorists are not really morally responsible for cowardly strapping their women and children with bombs to target civilians. America must have forced their hands to it.

Bloomsday (06/19/11)

yes I said yes I will Yes.

What struck me about the event was how Joyce’s ribald work–once banned for lewdness–is now regarded with high seriousness in polite academic circles. The tone of the readings, profound and literary, was all wrong. The urination scene cannot be delivered in the low, sibilant speech of decorous NPR announcers. It must be bawdy, piddled with a wicked grin and a leering eye. Something like Monty Python, not Amy Goodman.

Ulysses is above all sensuous, auditory, tactile–not “literate” (in McLuhan terms).

This was respectable Joyce for the genteel, organic tofu crowd.

Recruiting Bitterness? (06/19/11)

Finally, a movie about the Philippine-American War, by no less than indie director John Sayles (Lone Star, Passion Fish).

I look forward to watching Amigo when it opens here in the US on August 20. It opens in the Philippines on July 4, the Philippine-American Friendship Day. I only hope this film is not a political tract recruiting Filipinos to bitterness. It is time to end the hysteria of anti-Americanism–we are not in the radar of American popular consciousness anyway–and instead use our longstanding (and bumpy) relationship with the US in a more pragmatic way, to secure our own economic, political, and diplomatic interests. Look at Vietnam, they’re now playing chummy with the US to help them thwart Chinese encroachment of their borders in the South China Sea. This colonial soap opera has to end.

Fanzines (06/19/11)

What attracted me to the fanzine format, aside from its essential role in punk, is its close affinity to the blog: its amateurish do-it-yourself production values, its slapped on together images ‘poached’ from commercial sources, its underlying motive force of fan obsession. Fanzines were for the pre-Internet 1980′s what blogs were for the wired 1990′s. The DIY revolution lives on.