(I bumped into my Social Studies Teacher by accident at a remote resort!)

~

To my own surprise, I hit the repeat-1 button on my MP3 player this morning while "Eternal Flame" was playing.

I did a week-long workshop with Marco Berettini last July at ImPulsTanz. The premise of the workshop was pervertedly simple. He played a bunch of songs, and asked each of us to identify which songs make us cry, which make us happy, which compel us to observe another person, and so on.

Fair enough.

The next step was oddly logical. Marco would play, say, Lionel Richie's "Hello". Those who said that this was a song to cry to (yes, there was actually a number of us) would then, well, cry.

The intellectual/linguistic tweaking required to understand what Marco was getting at was questionable but intriguing. We weren't required to cry. We weren't forced to cry. "You said this was a song you would cry to," Marco said.

"So cry!"

Anyway, "Eternal Flame" was one of the songs chose to kiss to.

I think when I hit that repeat-1 button this morning, I finally came out of some sort of musical-taste-closet. The Bangles has finally joined the ranks of Bach, Bartok, the Beatles.

It took two people. One knew where your parents currently were. The other one knew where they were supposed to be taken.

That way, if either got arrested, they ... you know. Wouldn't be able to give the military all the information.

I remember your mother's brother... which one was he... Pol? Yes, I think it was Pol. Pol and I were supposed to take your parents to Malabon. After a while, we noticed a man in a green shirt following us. After several buses and jeepneys, he was still on our tail. Pol and I decided to go the market and buy produce. We spent an hour and half inspecting to detail of every tomato, calamansi, and pineapple.

By the time we shook him off, we were two hours late for the rendezvous, and your parents were gone.

Do you feel my heart beating? Those were nerve-wracking times. We were suspicious of everyone, everywhere we went. Anyone could have been part of the Metropolitan Command.

Your mother was released after 3 months of political detention for 'compassionate reasons'. Your father was there for 2 years. It took an Amnesty International group in France and European authors sending in signed copies of their books to the prison authorities to show the Filipino government that international eyes were turned towards the Philippines. Something like a hundred books were sent.

... Didn't you know that? Hell, you were conceived in prison. Conjugal visitation. There was a row of beds in Bicutan with curtains between them.

The intensity in that room was unbelievable.

Life in Manila is like one big soap opera. Take the following daytime series, "Living with My Family".

One of my relatives, "Joseph", has lived in the US for the past decade or so with his wife. He has a daughter in Manila, "Luzviminda". Last month, his wife died of brain cancer (she was given a month to live, and she had just about that). So he comes back to the Philippines, carrying the urn containing her ashes. He can't go anywhere without it.

Before he returned to Manila, Joseph liquidated his entire retirement fund to pay for repairs to his daughter Luzviminda 's house. Upon his arrival, a thousand US dollars disappears from his suitcase. Luzviminda is the prime suspect, in spite of the fact that Joseph had been sending money to her and her family (husband + 2 kids).

Since her father returned, Luzviminda has been getting her 8-year old son to wear his school uniform in the mornings... because, apparently, the kid hasn't been going to school at all. But they do want to put on a good show for dear old papa.

The bottomline is that Joseph feels unable to confront his daughter about any of these issues, because Luzviminda tends to attempt suicide when confronted with her wrongdoings.

In tonight's episode, Joseph decides to leave the Philippines the next day and never ever return. As he is about to go get drunk at some stand-up comedy bar for the last time, his daughter bursts into the house, sobbing, "Daddy, I'm so sorry! I really wanted to see mommy before she died, but the US Embassy denied me a visa twice in a row! I'll change! I will!" He forgives her, they go to the stand-up comedy bar together. At the end of the night, Luzviminda pleads with Joseph. "Daddy, let's go home." Joseph meekly complies. The ratings go up.

A bunch people were there when Luzviminda cried her way to forgiveness. I was there. As everyone stood around with looks of varying degrees of incredulity and amusement, I quietly excused myself and made a quick exit.

I hate to sound callous, but this is what makes living in Manila so much fun. Drama unfolds right before your eyes! Once I got past the initial shock of how high-strung, brightly-colored, and ultra-emotional everything is (and everyone gets past the shock, eventually), then it's actually pretty entertaining. I simply turn up the volume on my MP3 player, munch on roasted peanuts bought for 20 pesos from a sidewalk vendor, and voila: instant cinema! The best part: when there's audience participation, the movie becomes even more interesting.

Posted by Diego at 6:07 PM | Permalink | Comments

This is currently in email circulation right now. Of course: "this country" = USA, "our"/"we"= Americans'/Americans.

I would not set foot in that country unless I absolutely had to ... or it was my sister's birthday. Which it is, on April 5. Which is my excuse for visiting New York from March 26 to April 7.

I also wouldn't mind giving Bush a piece of my mind. Michael Moore had this say to Dubya after the president's address to the nation.

Anyway. Here we go with the list of...

FUNNY (american) BUMPER STICKERS

1. 1/20/09: End of an Error
2. That's OK, I Wasn't Using My Civil Liberties Anyway
3. Let's Fix Democracy in This Country First
4. If You Want a Nation Ruled By Religion, Move to Iran
5. Bush. Like a Rock. Only Dumber.
6. If You Can Read This, You're Not Our President.
7. Of Course It Hurts: You're Getting Screwed by an Elephant.
8. Hey, Bush Supporters: Embarrassed Yet?
9. George Bush: Creating the Terrorists Our Kids Will Have to Fight
10. Impeachment: It's Not Just for Blowjobs Anymore
11. America: One Nation, Under Surveillance
12. They Call Him "W" So He Can Spell It
13. Who's [sic] God Do You Kill For? (The person who wrote this was probably in George's spelling group.)
14. Cheney/Satan '08
15. Jail to the Chief
16. No, Seriously, Why Did We Invade Iraq?
17. Bush: God's Way of Proving Intelligent Design is Full Of Crap
18. Bad President! No Banana.
19. We Need a President Who's Fluent In At Least One Language
20. We're Making Enemies Faster Than We Can Kill Them
21. Is It Vietnam Yet?
22. Where Are We Going? And Why Are We In This Handbasket?
23. You Elected Him. You Deserve Him.
24. Impeach Cheney First
25. When Bush Took Office, Gas Was $46
26. Pray For Impeachment
27. The Republican Party: Our Bridge to the 11th Century
28. What Part of "Bush Lied" Don't You Understand?
29. One Nation Under Clod
30. 2004: Embarrassed
31. 2005: Horrified
32. 2006: Terrified
33. Bush Never Exhaled
34. At Least Nixon Resigned

Says my sister:

Re #25, by the way: today, gas is around $2.40 a gallon. And, interestingly enough, several weeks before the November elections, they suddenly plummeted to $2.15 or thereabouts. The Republicans lost their Congressional majority and guess what? You got it--gas prices started climbing back up. Interesting coincidence, eh...?

Finally, check this out: spiders on drugs (WMV file, 3 MB). Thanks, Res.

Posted by Diego at 5:28 AM | Permalink | Comments

9:15 am

Read about how a commercial passenger airline, which was not only on the last leg of a tiring 9-hour flight but was also running low on fuel, was denied from landing at a local airport because of a "quasi-emergency"... which meant that President Macapagal-Arroyo was attending a glitzy, high society wedding, and her personal jet needed the runway more than the commercial plane did.

12:25 pm

Watched TV while eating fried tilapia. Jotted down all the commercials aired within a half hour period. Of the 24 ads shown,

• 3 were for shampoos or conditioners that promised straighter hair
• 3 were for soap and other body-cleansing agents, at least one of which boasted "superior germicidal action"
• 4 mentioned calcium
• 4 featured a smiling, healthy-looking, pale-complexioned, presumably-nuclear family of four
  
• 2 were for laundry soap, one of which employed a rather amusing stretch of marketing imagination, linking whiter sheets to happier snuggle times for the whole family
• 3 were for powdered milk or powdered food supplements (Ensure was touted as "the No.1 selling food supplement in the U.S.")
• 1 intimated that selling Avon products will provide you and your burgeoning family a house, a car, and an overall sunny future.

Conspicuously absent were ads for whitening soaps and creams, which usually account for much of primetime TV. Of those, my personal favorite hawks an enticing advantage over competing brands: "It whitens without a greenish tinge!" And true enough, I see a lot of pale but sickly-looking faces in this city. How this is supposed to be attractive is beyond me.

3:35 pm

Picked up my new passport from the Department of Foreign Affairs. My name was listed on the International Cooperation for Passport Irregularities' lookout list because I had previously lost a passport. The whole thing was threatening to turn into a vastly annoying but not completely insurmountable state of affairs, when one of my relatives (a former government employee who heard about my situation) insisted on pulling some strings.

The result? An embarrassed me---unable to meet the eyes of the tens of people waiting in cramped corridors to file their applications--- being personally escorted through entire application process by my relative's former colleague. What normally would have taken 2 days took an hour and a half. That this happens as a matter of course, and that people have not razed government buildings in protest, is shocking. Then again, it's probably harder to aboilsh nepotism than it is simply to accumulate friends in high places.

For about hour and a half, I felt guilt and outrage on behalf of the struggling masses who have no direct connections to power.

Then I thought, to quote Brendan McLeod's thoughtful spoken word piece on testing negative for HIV, "Suckers."

11:59 pm

Came across PocketMod, "the free disposable personal organizer". Visited the newly launched Open Source Dance site for the 37th time, gazing at it with narcissistic/stage-father pride.

Posted by Diego at 6:22 PM | Permalink | Comments

I met this art group, ATSA, from Montreal during a workshop once. They do interesting work combining art and social justice; they say that they usually work from "a sense of urgency".

They once set up a refugee camp in the middle of Montreal, and somehow convinced the Canadian military to fund it. Another time, they created an exhibition consisting of "bank machine" ovens, where you could deposit or withdraw warm clothing (literally warm, since the ovens were turned on) during the winter; it was an illegal public exhibition, however, but they pulled it off by convincing each of two art galleries that the other art gallery was putting it on. Yet another time, they printed out thousands of fake parking violation tickets (and had them distributed by many volunteers to SUVs around town) which were actually "environmental infraction tickets".

Their name, ATSA, stands for Action Terroriste Socialement Acceptable. Cute.

Take Action with ATSA!

ATSA is looking for Volunteers to distribute their Citizen's Statement of Offence and to be present at the installation. Download our Citizen Statement of Offence

To know more about ATTACK
To know more about ATSA

Posted by Diego at 6:51 PM | Permalink | Comments

Last weekend, I visited the estate of artist Rafael Pacheco in Morong, Rizal. This is a photo of the first thing you see when you enter the estate.



No photo taken with my crappy, 2.1 megapixel camera can ever do justice to the sheer grandeur (hubris?) of it all. Here's the same picture with a little red man to give you a better sense of the scale.



The statue is called "Tribue to the Filipino Artist". On the one hand, it must be flattering for any Filipino artist to think that a statue of this magnitude has been erected in their honour. In his 50th year of creating art, Pacheco (or Ka Paeng, as he is called by those who are on a title-plus-first-name basis with him, where "Ka" roughly translates as "Comrade") is full of gratitude nowadays. His mission in life, he often states, is to serve others.

On the other hand, it takes a certain personality to create such grandiose gestures of thanksgiving.

On the way back from Ka Paeng's estate, I was seated next to a woman on the jeepney. The child she was carrying in her arms was bawling. "Ay sus, ang pangit!" she exclaimed, in an attempt to dissuade the kid from crying. Though typical, this statement had something odd about , and so as I often now do when warning bells go off in my head in social situations, I translated her exclamation into English.

What the woman said was, "Oh my, you sure are ugly when you cry."

Okaaaay. Um. I don't know about you, but I think that's totally fucked up.

Last week, my uncle, his wife, their kid, and I were eating in a restaurant. We were sort of in a rush, so to get the kid to eat more quickly, my uncle frightened her by saying, "Pag ikaw hindi mo bilisan ang pagkain mo, iiwanan ka namin dito." This is a typical scare tactic, and I remember being told this sort of thing as a kid. But again warning bells went off, and again, I did a quick Englishfication: "If you don't hurry up with eating, we will leave you."

Jesus fucking Christ. Is emotional blackmail the only way to get kids to follow orders?

Hey, to all you bicultural readers out there. Try this exercise once in a while. Take any social interaction from a particular culture where people are talking in a way that is considered socially acceptable. Then translate the conversation it into another language. Be as faithful as possible, and find a balance between the intent and the outcome of the speech. See what happens.

Another experiment for people with experience in observing body languages. Say you're conversing with your very close friend, Michelle. Now, remember you other very close friend, Fhaustina. Focus on a certain aspect of Fhaustina's body language, say, her eyes: how she closes her eyes to signify agreement, or squeezes her eyelids tightly but briefly as a sign of reassurance (something that MANY of the women I've met here do but I've NEVER EVER seen any of my Canadian friends do), or how she blinks her eyes rapidly while tilting her head slightly to the right to signify that she's being facetious. Remember how Fhaustina does all of that. Now imagine Michelle using her eyes exactly the way Fhaustina would. Any interesting findings? Let me know.

Go check out Pacheco's estate (and his artwork) if you get a chance. You can rent their swimming pools (one of which has a waterslide) overnight for a sweet deal. And in the morning, you can get served breakfast while watching the sun illuminate one man's staggering tribute to his colleagues.

Posted by Diego at 6:07 AM | Permalink | Comments

So. These are my New Year's Resolutions. I will

1. drink at least 2 liters of water a day.
2. turn in before 11 every night, and make my bed every morning.
3. stop picking my nose until it bleeds. Blood clots are not boogers. Neither are scabs.
4. read up more on current events and watch more news on TV.
5. use my lower abs more.
   
6. stop singing "Lascia ch'io pianga" from Handel's Rinaldo every time I go to the bathroom to pee. Or, at the very least, learn the aria correctly and completely.
7. not let fear prevent me from doing something I want to do.
8. say "I love you, and" instead of "I love you, but".
9. stop pretending that I am on vacation.
   
10. accept the fact that I am in Manila and that I should pay more attention to what's going on around here instead of constantly worrying about what might be going on with my friends in Vancouver. Or New York. Or Vienna. Or wherever else I was in but am not now.

Went to Baguio City two days ago to attend my father's sister's wedding. I was asked to "prepare a dance piece" for the reception program. On D-Day, I picked my music---Joni Mitchell's 90s rendition of Both Sides Now---and did a semi-structured improvisation. It went pretty well, although I got too excited at one point and smashed my head on the concrete floor as I was doing a backwards roll.

That night, in the middle of all the photo-taking, gossiping, reminiscing, eating, and drinking, I saw for the first time in my life the complicated yet remarkably predictable pattern that my extended family has fallen into, a pattern that many other huge, well-to-do, sheltered extended Filipino families fall into, a pattern that features various intrigues around money, sex, land, inheritance, kinship, class, and inclusion.


On the drive back to Manila, I sat in front ("shotgun") of the pickup throughout the entire 9.5 hour journey. The entire mountain range was covered in fog. Pret-ty.

Lance Corporal Daniel Smith has been whisked to the American Embassy in defiance of the ruling of the Court of Appeals that he remain in the Makati City Jail. Smith is the first American soldier to have been tried and found guilty of a crime---in this case, rape---in the Philippines. So much for Philippine sovereignty. Bet your bottom dollar that he'll never serve his prison term on Philippine soil at all. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is a spineless ass-kisser to the US. And the political killings have not abated.

Got the following forward from a friend:

Subject: Christmas wishes to the addressee from the before mentioned.

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the solstice holiday, practiced with the most enjoyable traditions of religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.

I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2007, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make out country great (not to imply that our country is necessarily the greatest or greater than any other country) and without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

I've gone through several stages with things like this.

• Stage 1: "Is this supposed to be funny?"
• Stage 2: "Stupid reactionaries and their supposed sense of irony. They have no understanding of the power of language to shape reality."
• Stage 3: "I think I might actually send this out to my friends. Sincerely. No, really, I mean it."
• Stage 4: "Ha! Ha! Ha!"

Happy 2007 to us all.

Posted by Diego at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments