I was absent for six days, and the five nights and six days felt almost like forever. I knew I badly needed rest from all the repeating and redundant pastiches of the academic life, and rest I got it. I felt readier, more poised this time to re-conquer the world.
Aside from another year added to my life (I just turned 24, but interestingly, my mind is telling me that I ought to think more like my age for once), I have a more even tan this time. How I regretted not having burned my skin even more. I want to be as dark as charcoal.
Thank to those who kept on reading and shared their thoughts here.
The most watched barbarity will finally close curtain on Friday. Calling it a barbarity is exaggerated, you say, for something as trailblazing and reeking with morals a teleserye as May Bukas Pa. One doesn’t call a multi-awarded program barbaric. It’s inappropriate, if not untrue.
May Bukas Pa is a story that has run too long, too long in fact that I am aching and itching to see its last day of showing. Thank God it’s this Friday. Obviously, the teleserye can extend to ad infinitum; its life dependent on the imagination of its über-original writers. If ABS-CBN wills it, it can even introduce new talents by having them play a role, say, a drug addict, a serial killer, a necromancer, a prostitute, who will then be changed by the wonder boy Santino into a repenting loser asking forgiveness from Bro, complete with a climactic cry that would rival a paid crying lady in the funeral of Manila’s richest Chinese businessman. This is a guaranteed way to raise them to stardom in no time.
But this barbarity did not start as horrendous as it now when the boy and the fathers in the seminary are about to say their adieu. The teleserye hinted a lot of promise when it began showing nearly two years ago, but whatever happened to that promise, no one knows. It could be that the people did not seem to notice because they were too scared to be the objects of ire of the omniscient Bro, that no one wanted to take the chance of being sent and thrown head first in the eternal lake of fire, or that the people are toying with the hope of being saved from the impending coming of the Messiah. I am only hypothesizing. This fear and the promise of redemption firmly grounded May Bukas Pa in the minds of the unthinking public, allowing it to last that long, a feat uncommon nowadays when the longest run of a good program is less than six months.
But the show is not entirely replete with any salvaging character. When viewed using a specific perspective, it’s noir-ish, only that lighting for TV will definitely not allow this treatment. The story, especially now that it’s about to end, is reminiscent of Ishmael Bernal’s Himala starring Nora Aunor. But ABS-CBN, of course, won’t do something not very bright as to experiment with this style all the way.
http://arthurofthechildjesus.wordpress.com/
So what will be done as has been done before is to have something akin to a high school reunion where all participants wear white as they cry their hearts out for the body of a dead boy, an innocent victim of blind faith of the people of Bagong Pag-asa. A background funeral song will be played while the faces of the stars whose lives Santino touched are given several seconds of extreme close-up shots.
The newscast on TV Patrol World the following night will be about the mourning of the entire nation over the death of May Bukas Pa lead star, Santino, and some talks about future teleseryes lined up for him.
Now, isn’t that barbaric?
The barbarity will finally close curtain on Friday. Calling it a barbarity is exaggerated, you say, for something as trailblazing and reeking with morals a teleserye as May Bukas Pa. One doesn’t call a multi-awarded program barbaric. It’s inappropriate if not untrue.
May Bukas Pa is a story that has run too long, too long in fact that I am aching and itching to see its last day of showing. Thank God it’s this Friday. Obviously, the teleserye can extend to ad infinitum, its life dependent on the imagination of its über-original writers. If ABS-CBN wills it, it can even introduce new talents by having them play a role, say, a drug addict, a serial killer, a necromancer, a prostitute, who will then be changed by the wonder boy Santino into a repenting loser asking forgiveness from Bro, complete with a climactic cry that would rival a paid crying lady in the funeral of Manila’s richest Chinese businessman. This is a guaranteed way to raise them to stardom in no time.
The teleserye showed a lot of promise when it started nearly two years ago, but whatever happened to that promise, no one knows. It could be the people did not seem to notice because they were too scared to be the object of ire of the omniscient Bro, or that no one wanted to take the chance of being sent and thrown head first in the eternal lake of fire.
“Don’t worry, Dorian, the world is yours.”
I won’t be a hypocrite by saying that I don’t enjoy the more corporeal aspect of a film. As a matter of fact, most of the time, my approach to a film is that of an escapist desperately trying to break loose from the mundaneness of real life (at least for an hour and thirty minutes). I enjoy the lack of depth of most Hollywood movies. I silently dry my misty eyes after watching a Tagalog tear-jerker. And I shamelessly blurt uncontrolled laughter whenever I watch vintage Pinoy slapstick.
But when I am in my more serious mode, I can become very vicious, and yes, call me hypocritical because I am going to be one.
Based on the Gothic novel by Oscar Wilde classic The Picture of Dorian Gray, the film Dorian Gray (directed by Oliver Parker) is a story of a beautiful and naive young man Dorian (Ben Barnes) tempted to live a hedonistic life by his cynical friend, Harry Wotton (Colin Firth).
“Conscience is just polite term for cowardice.”
Dorian initially ignores Harry’s beliefs that people die of commonsense and that life is nothing but ‘moments that lack hereafter’. However, Dorian yields to the temptation when he finds out that it is the painting that absorbs all the effects of his sins and debauchery. He caused the suicide of the only woman he loves, Sybil. Little by little, Dorian falls into the pit of irredeemable sinfulness and hedonism. Leaving England for another country, he comes back unchanged physically, finding Harry and all the rest aging and moribund.
When portraying moral corruption and depravity in film, it is a wise decision to keep it subtle, subdued, and somewhat hinted. The line separating an art film from pornography, cheap comedy, and unpardonable chick flicks is rather thin, and a film cannot afford to cross that line without losing self-respect. Dorian Gray does just that.
Sex and anything kinkier than copulation are depicted with careless abandon. The film seems like a grand orgy participated in by the best looking people in England during Oscar Wilde’s time. Dorian Gray is an epitome of moral degeneracy, but a degeneracy that is too appealing, I wanted to be in his position while I watched the first part of the film; and I was sure I became Dorian Gray before the film ended.
Bad.
And the pleasurable feeling of being bludgeoned and bludgeoning somebody disturbed me.
I’ve been suffering from this for two days in a row now, and I am beginning to feel helpless.
It’s like my thoughts in comparison with the vastness of the crater of Mt. Pinatubo. I’m one of those dots.
To the author whose Catcher in the Rye accompanied me during my teenage years and whose writing style influenced me more than I would care to acknowledge:
J.D. Salinger (1919-2010), see you in the river or something, anywhere, except in a goddamn cemetery because we do not want people coming and putting a bunch of flowers on our stomach on a Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead?
Nobody.
“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
Mr. Antolini, Catcher in the Rye, 1951.
Living in the humid tropics gives everyone a hard time breathing. And mildews, they’re all over. I already opened all my windows to let air in and replace the stale night air trapped in my room, but it seems that opening them is futile. The air is still reeking with deadly spores from unknown species of fungi yet to be discovered by Science. But the worse part is that they all decided to make my room their giant petri dish.
Marlene Aguilar, notwithstanding her being a good mother to her son, should be incinerated head first with her tentacles-of-Ursula do be fed initially to the makeshift hell (as with the looks of it, the do will take longer to melt than the rest of her body).
I’ve been regularly seeing her on primetime TV newscast, and I beg to be delivered from her. With all understatement, her mouth is unstoppable. She kissed like a seahorse last night, blabbered like a koala, cried like a sea turtle, and neighed like, well, a horse (my apologies go to those members of the animal kingdom mentioned).
Oh, and she sang like a mutant armadillo.
Every time she spews a word, she becomes a grand spectacle of herself, relishing her much-awaited-but-long-overdue debut with all her diva-esque acts she has kept in her stacks all these times. She says something pitiful like this, then concocts another equally pathetic story, and then caps her statement with something laughable using that cute accent.
When will they finally gag her using the trimmings from her hideous do?
I’ve seriously considered writing ABS-CBN to ax Kung Tayo’y Magkakalayo when I completed watching one episode of a Kris Aquino-starrer teleserye last night. She can’t act, unconvincing, and sounded forced. Another wrong casting decision. No need to write the network, maybe, because it dawned on me that after an episode, I’ve had enough of it, and I will simply shut my eyes whenever it is shown in the carinderia where I have my dinner. Seriously, it is a badly made, badly cast, bad program.
Or can’t ABS-CBN consider moving it to the 4 am slot just before Umagang Kay Ganda?
The first thing I did when I woke up this morning was to watch a VHS ripped copy of Deep Throat, a 1972 American pornographic film written and directed by Gerard Damiano, starring Linda Lovelace. Why can’t today’s porn producers make something as interesting as this one? Yes, yes, yes, I am well too aware that the nature of a porn does not allow it to experiment with well-established, more developed, and less corporeal storylines. But we can have something more original than say a MILF wanting to be f*cked by a barely 18, an old man raping a barely 18, or a barely 18 doing herself, can’t we?
I do not want to conclude this post with anything nice to to say except to wish everyone a great weekend.
http://www.beckettinvermont.org
When was the last time you waited for something or someone?
At 23 there are some aspects in life where I am already a bit confident in making generalizations about. Waiting, which I’ve never been good at, is one of these difficult games whose rules I am beginning to learn, and am hoping to eventually master.
No wonder I was caught in the absurdist* play by Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. I first read the play when i was in high school. However, my 16-year old mind then, obviously, was not able to fully comprehend why Didi (Vladimir) and Gogo (Estragon) are waiting for someone they’re both unsure who or whether the man they call Godot is worth the wait.
Waiting is, for me, the hardest thing to do because it is the most intellectual of all activities. Modern society, owing to its tendency to simplify a lot of things, is slowly relegating this art to the dark cracks, away from the tip-of-your-finger comfort and convenience, away from the cerebral task of thinking while waiting. Contrary to what most people believe, waiting is never an empty exercise. The mind of a person who is waiting constantly wanders, always discontent with the explanations as to why he has to wait.
In the end, as one matures, he’ll realize that the act of waiting is more important than the reason for the wait because the act allows him to synthesize thoughts that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible should the person he is waiting comes too soon. So he endlessly waits, ignorant of the fact the Godot has arrived because the pleasure of thinking and the intellectual stimulation are more significant than finally meeting Godot.
*Absurdism posits that, while inherent meaning might very well exist in the universe, human beings are incapable of finding it due to some form of mental or philosophical limitation. Thus humanity is doomed to be faced with the Absurd, or the absolute absurdity of existence in lack of intrinsic purpose.
I could hear incidental giggles of people around in the audio file of my friend, Rodelo Pidoy, while he was being interviewed by a journalist in the iReport CNN internet site. In fact the sarcasm in the voice of that journalist was too perceptible that I felt bad for Rodelo. But it seemed that my friends was unfazed.
He was his usual serious self, speaking as if whatever he said was of utmost importance. He could not be bothered by his mis-enunciation of most words containing the vowel ‘e’ especially the long ones and some schwas.
He sounded prophetic, and at times like my old professor when I was still an undergrad at the University of the Philippines.
For most people, Rodelo comes so close to the edge that separates the black and the white. He transcends understanding because, unlike most of us, he neither seeks nor craves for it. The Comelec may simply refer to him as nuisance because it is meant to think that way – in simple terms. But Rodelo is unaffected. He is steely focused to a point of ‘rational’ obsession. He shall be, according to him, the 15th President of the republic.
No one believes he will be. Neither do I.
But Rodelo is too proud to found his beliefs on other people’s faith. He’ll pursue his plans of becoming the next president, and in the event he fails, I know he would be able to find something grander to run after.
If only all of us were as brave as the guy to present an alternative way of looking at the world and challenging both its spoken and unspoken rules. Only people like him can create revolution.
“I love that article you wrote about me, only that the part that says we drank beer in the afternoon is too unbecoming especially that I am running for the highest office in the land.”
“So you want me to crash out that part?”
“No, just keep it that way. After all it’s already done.”
The English god Woden, after whom ‘Wednesday’ was named.
I often find myself in the city on a Wednesday either spending the entire afternoon at my sister’s place reading or at the gym pumping iron. But not this Wednesday.
I do not have any particular affinity to this day of the week, unlike Friday which I always look forward to, or Sunday which I hate most because it means the next day is the dreaded Monday. Wednesday is a neutral week. It does not signify anything meaningful or extraordinary. Just like today. I woke up a bit late, cleaned the house, did some facebook-ing, replied to emails, and went on reading the book I was reading last night before I slept on it.
I feel well-rested today. No classes, no student consultations, just an entire morning and afternoon spent doing the thing I love most (that is, not doing anything).
And of course catching up on sleep.
To you who finally knotted the cherry stem
At last.
[texts will follow] d;-)
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