-- Keep Moving Because --

This site is way too funny.

It appears that I'm doing a series on G8 leaders. Interesting.

Posted by Diego at 4:31 AM | Permalink | Comments

Did you know that
Vladimir Putin was
this buff?

I certainly didn't.

Posted by Diego at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments

Eight hundred: that's the number of military bases that researchers from the Transnational Institute and other institutions have mapped using Google Earth. "Now you can for the first time see the global reach of foreign military bases from outer space and then zoom in close for aerial shots of key bases such as US base Guantanamo Bay in Cuba."

You can download the Google Earth file from the TNI site, or get this version accessed on September 7, 2007.

Posted by Diego at 7:23 PM | Permalink | Comments

My colleague Sara Coffin will host an Open Source Dance "choreography copylefting booth" at the New Forms Festival 2007 Artcamp in Vancouver, Canada. The booth will feature on-site video recording for impromptu choreographies and on-site registration on the OpenSourceDance.org site. Please see the Artcamp schedule for details.

An initiative I started this year, OpenSourceDance.org is a site-in-progress where you can license your choreography under a Creative Commons license. The site hopes to provide tools to help you discover existing dance works that you can legally use, reuse, and sample.

OpenSourceDance.org envisions a world where dance artists actively invite others to build upon their work. Through this framework, the use of artistic material is explicitly and conveniently attributed.

Labels: copyleft, creative commons, open source, open source art, open source dance, public art, web 2.0

Posted by Diego at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments

Jane Osborne's 15-minute dance film Drive will be screened at the following film festivals:

Dancers: Vanessa Mayrand & me
Music: Melissa Bandura
Production Support: basetwomedia

Labels: dance film

Posted by Diego at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments

I'm usually "too serious" to post stuff like this, but I think of this as a preventative dose of good-naturedness, so that when I'm older I don't turn into a bitter, friendless, misanthropic atheist, or a religious flake with a manic perma-smile who trains butterflies to follow me wherever I go. (-:

Mabuhay ang buhay!

Labels: cheeze

Posted by Diego at 6:31 PM | Permalink | Comments

I recently posted a link to Richard Dawkin's The OUT Campaign on Facebook and Multiply. A friend criticized the initiative and pointed out that "just because Richard Dawkins needs to be obnoxious in his rejection of God" doesn't mean that we should resort to "divisive labels". Though in many contexts he would be right (particularly in North America and in Europe), I pointed out that in the Philippines, there is a need for a strong, unified secular voice that will oppose the overwhelmingly Catholic dogma underscoring, say, the utterly backwards population control program of the Philippine government. (And I don't care what you think about Malthus or "The Limits of Growth"; there are restrictions on the carrying capacity of the Earth, and population growth must be checked.)

When I was in Grade 2, my homeroom teacher distributed personal information forms to our class to be filled out by our parents. Along with fields for my last name and my birthday was a field for my family's religion. My mother, who believes in utter honesty in all but the most dangerous situations, truthfully put down, "Atheist." And indeed we were.

The next day, I came back from school crying. "Nanay!" I sobbed. "My homeroom teacher gave me back my form. She said that 'atheist' wasn't an appropriate answer." Or something to that effect. I can't remember what my homeroom teacher said, but whatever it was, it hurt me that whatever it was my family believed in wasn't acceptable to everyone else.

My mother, exasperated, nevertheless acquiesced and wrote on the form what she knew my homeroom teacher would want to see: "Roman Catholic".

So when I talk of "atheists coming out of the closet" in the Philippines, I do not employ the metaphor lightly. Atheism is rarely seen as the product of a long, deliberate process of intellectual inquiry in adults or, in the case of children, perhaps a built-in response to the world (as it was with journalist Christopher Hitchens, who "was made as not to believe"), but rather as the result of bad parenting decisions that lead to the absence of appropriate role models coupled with excessive exposure to Western ideas—that is, the same reasons often given by the religious right for the the "rise of homosexual behavior" in contemporary, urban, Filipino society.

PS: I also think that wearing a scarlet A is pretty funny.

Posted by Diego at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments

Lihim, Liham translates roughly as Secrets, Letters. It was a secret blog that I started keeping several months ago, meant to be a private compilation of still-unsent letters to close friends, unexpectedly intimate acquaintances, and that most profound driving force in my life up till recently: unrequited loves.

When you're 18, unrequited love makes you feel alive, spurs you to poetry, and fits really well on your room's wall right next to your signed poster of Boy George. If you're 28 and you still harbour unrequited loves, you're only a few nominations away from a Darwin Award. Love, after all, is less feeling, more decision.

Here's the first letter. I never wrote all the letters I wanted to. I always intended to unearth them one day; I just didn't think I would do it so soon. I'm happy that I did. You can view all the letters here

Dear K,

You cropped up in my dream last night. This is surprising.
It went like this:

~ ~ ~
The apocalypse has happened. Canada is now a totalitarian regime that hunts down and punishes all undocumented immigrants, of which apparently I am one. I am in hiding, living in the many abandoned houses and backyards that litter the suburbs, scrounging for food to eat.The police are looking for me. I am afraid for my physical body. {In waking life, I've experienced the terrors of the mind---the black vortex of recursively annihilatory thought. But this fear for my corporeal body's well-being is new.}

A middle-aged white man is kind and foolish enough to take me into his house, lying to the police in order to protect me. I am grateful.

The scene shifts. I am now in a spacious and actually rather cozy underground bomb shelter. Nuclear war has not only happened, but also prevents me from leaving this bunker, ever. I am hiding with an even greater urgency. For the first time {even in real life} I understand what it is to be truly lonely. Everyone I know is dead or impossible to reach. {I realize that as long as my friends, family, and colleagues are actually still alive, any sort of loneliness I feel is utter bullshit, a made-up fantasy of someone craving attention, because at any point I could actually reach out to them and communicate.But this.. } This is a different kind of solitude, less lonely than it is alone. It is vast and deep and heavy... and incredibly liberating. It feels like a blank canvas on which I can recreate myself and history can reconstruct itself... in that canvas, you never met your current partner (who is lovely, incidentally), I wrote you a beautiful letter in response from the one you sent that summer while you were in a prairie farm, and things would have, I don't know, "worked out".

At any rate, in this bunker, the conceptual canvas transforms into a blank sheet of paper. A pen appears in my hand. I begin the project I had been wanting to do {in real life}for many months, which is to write letters {like this one}to my friends, using their viewership and our specific relationships as springboards to tell them about things I've always wanted to say, but never did or could. Now, of course, they're all dead or incommunicado, so I hardly have an excuse to hide anything anymore.

I try to decide who to write the first letter to. To my own surprise, in this bunker, in this dream, I find myself writing in clear, dark longhand:

Dear K

~ ~ ~

I still harbour a faint teenage crush on you, thought it grows fainter by the year. Delia once likened love to a leaf in a river: sometimes the leaf rises to the top and goes for tumble along the currents. Other times it quietly skims the bottom of the river. Eventually it will decay and diffuse into simpler things that serve to nourish the river. But once the leaf falls into the water, it stays there.

Just for the record, let me state that you occupy a special place in the pantheon of my objects of affection. You are the first white man---and without a doubt the most gorgeous of them all---that I obsessed over. And my obsession for you ran deep. Obsession, not love, which I thought it was then.. I do not talk about love anymore. Love is far more elusive and complicated than mere obsession. If feelings were served as dessert, love would be fruitcake: it's mature, too eager or too sparing with the brandy, and filled with rather questionable things like candied fruit peel. It also tends to be passed around or passed over. Obsession, on the other hand, is shortbread: simple, monochromatic, never entirely satisfying, but nevertheless requires severe discipline to resist.

In that period of obsession with you (which lasted from that moment in 1999 when you served me dinner at the college, until about the same year Bush finally admitted that there were no WMDs in Iraq), I had thought of compiling letters to you, written but unsent until the day when I am near death, which is when I would finally have them shipped off to you as a final affectionate gesture of goodwill/bitterness/fury. Don't bother trying to figure that one out, because unrequited affection is like dark chocolate: it's not meant to be a food staple, but some people live off that shit forever.

My point is that the first letter of this project, it turns out, is still best written to you. And here it is.

With much affection,
Diego
PS: You and your boyfriend are a beautiful couple. When the two of you are together, it's pretty fucking dazzling.

Labels: lihimliham

Posted by Diego at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments

Lihim, Liham translates roughly as Secrets, Letters. It was a secret blog that I started keeping several months ago, meant to be a private compilation of still-unsent letters to close friends, unexpectedly intimate acquaintances, and that most profound driving force in my life up till recently: unrequited loves.

When you're 18, unrequited love makes you feel alive, spurs you to poetry, and fits really well on your room's wall right next to your signed poster of Boy George. If you're 28 and you still harbour unrequited loves, you're only a few nominations away from a Darwin Award. Love, after all, is less feeling, more decision.

Here's the second letter. I never wrote all the letters I wanted to. I always intended to unearth them one day; I just didn't think I would do it so soon. I'm happy that I did. You can view all the letters here.

Dear R,

I watched an episode of The Sopranos today, and I've never seen a TV show that captures so well the tug-of-war of responsibilities. You know why we often choose friends over family? It's precisely because of the act of choosing. Even though our family have as much or more in common with us than our friends do, we are intoxicated with the idea we (as in, the Individual) chose (as in Free Will). That is, we choose to love our friends over our family because we would like to continue to believe that we are individuals in possession of the free will to make decisions about love and companionship. We would like to believe that we can transcend our inheritance.

Labels: lihimliham

Posted by Diego at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments

Lihim, Liham translates roughly as Secrets, Letters. It was a secret blog that I started keeping several months ago, meant to be a private compilation of still-unsent letters to close friends, unexpectedly intimate acquaintances, and that most profound driving force in my life up till recently: unrequited loves.

When you're 18, unrequited love makes you feel alive, spurs you to poetry, and fits really well on your room's wall right next to your signed poster of Boy George. If you're 28 and you still harbour unrequited loves, you're only a few nominations away from a Darwin Award. Love, after all, is less feeling, more decision.

Here's the third letter. I never wrote all the letters I wanted to. I always intended to unearth them one day; I just didn't think I would do it so soon. I'm happy that I did. You can view all the letters here.

Dear S,

You know what was hard for me? Learning idiomatic English. Before going to Canada, my formal English was excellent. Note the past tense; now I can speak neither idiomatic nor formal English with any degree of confidence or coherence.

The clear structures (which, I've realized, I've only understood on a simplistic level) of English, I have a grip on. But idiomatic, streetwise English obeys its own set of rules.

I can hardly speak to people in English anymore without feeling the premeditation about it all. The care by which I pick slang, or which to accent to employ. I am very well aware of the Manileños' perceptions around Filipinos with North American accents speaking in English: jerk-offs who love to flaunt the fact that they have lived in the Amerika.

So I choose when I speak in English, when in Tagalog. When I speak in English, I choose whether to "Filipinize" it (dropping nouns and direct objects, turning all the verbs into simple present tense, softening voiced consonants like "th" and "v") or not. Everything is a fucking choice.

Labels: lihimliham

Posted by Diego at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments

Lihim, Liham translates roughly as Secrets, Letters. It was a secret blog that I started keeping several months ago, meant to be a private compilation of still-unsent letters to close friends, unexpectedly intimate acquaintances, and that most profound driving force in my life up till recently: unrequited loves.

When you're 18, unrequited love makes you feel alive, spurs you to poetry, and fits really well on your room's wall right next to your signed poster of Boy George. If you're 28 and you still harbour unrequited loves, you're only a few nominations away from a Darwin Award. Love, after all, is less feeling, more decision.

Here's the fourth of the letters (I never wrote all the letters I wanted to), which were all written in May 2007 and which I always intended to unearth one day; I just didn't think I would do it so soon, and I'm happy that I did. You can view all the letters here.

Dear S,

I briefly mentioned to you over facebook (that spawn of the devil that I just can't live without) how there are times I feel exhausted or panicked at the variety of choices that every moment presents, given the fact that I often try to choose to do what I think "best suits" the situation. ("I could say this, or I could say THIS, but in this context it would probably just be most appropriate to respond nonverbally with a facial expression.")

Among my friends in Vancouver, I strongly suspect that had I shared with them this particular fact about me, some (and a few people particularly spring to mind) would counsel me by saying, "Oh come on, Diego, you should what you want to do." Or, "You think too much." The problem lies in that such well-meaning words of advice are offered unexamined, and we may not necessarily agree on what the words mean. Anyone who has spent some time both in individualistic and in highly communal social contexts (peer groups, families, societies, or communities, either ad hoc or fixed) knows that both the concept and the value of individual desire are contestable.

[SCENARIO 1]
A: What do you want to do?
B: I don't know. What do you want to do?
A: Well, I'm not sure. Maybe we could watch a movie?
B: Or we could go to the night market.
A: Yeah. Maybe.
B: Well, if we watched a movie, what would we watch?
A: We could watch Spiderman.
B: Hm. Well, I've already seen Spiderman. Why don't you ahead and watch Spiderman and maybe I'll read a book.
A: Well, we don't have to watch a movie.
B: I wouldn't mind going to the night market.
A: Yeah? Are you sure?
B: Yeah.

[SCENARIO 2]
A: What do you want to do?
B: Well, I want to watch Spiderman. Do you want to come?
A: Nah. I've already watched it. Well, I think I'll read a book.
B: Okay. Well, have fun with your book.
A: Thanks, have fun with a movie.

Today, I came across a great Edward Said quote that could help me manage my internal cross-cultural conflict: "Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision give rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that---to borrow from a phrase from music----is contrapuntal... There is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension, especially if the exile is conscious of other contrapuntal juxtapositions that diminish orthodox judgment and elevate appreciative sympathy. There is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one were at home where one happens to be."

~
If you do respond to any of the letters I send you (and I don't expect you or anyone to), the unmitigated, raw truth is what I want. Whatever that means to you.

I'm thinking of doing this as part of a project about guilt. "The Guilt Project." I saw this dance piece in Vienna last year where it was part of an entire project around the subject of Hell. They had a monograph printed. They had academics and critics and artists contribute pieces around the theme. They even had a perfume launched. A perfume. Launched as part of a dance piece about Hell. Fuck. I love Europe. They should finish what they started millennia ago and take over the whole fucking world.

Labels: lihimliham

Posted by Diego at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments

Lihim, Liham translates roughly as Secrets, Letters. It was a secret blog that I started keeping several months ago, meant to be a private compilation of still-unsent letters to close friends, unexpectedly intimate acquaintances, and that most profound driving force in my life up till recently: unrequited loves.

When you're 18, unrequited love makes you feel alive, spurs you to poetry, and fits really well on your room's wall right next to your signed poster of Boy George. If you're 28 and you still harbour unrequited loves, you're only a few nominations away from a Darwin Award. Love, after all, is less feeling, more decision.

Here's the fifth letter. I never wrote all the letters I wanted to. I always intended to unearth them one day; I just didn't think I would do it so soon. I'm happy that I did. You can view all the letters here.

Dear C,

I am so angry. I don't know even know why. All I know is that three months ago, I heard of the term "Angry Asian" from a friend (he used it in a disparaging way) and I instantly bonded with it, like a long-lost friend. I'm angry. And I'm bitter. And I hate everyone, because no one can even begin to understand what exactly is going on.

There's one night in my life when I remember something that James Lee said. It was at one of the Bent parties at the Anza club. He said that he was jealous of my hair, and I, ever so magnanimously, said, "Oh James, don't be jealous." He looked at me for a second, then said, "Never mind. You don't understand."

It was the first time I was so squarely confronted about ignorance about something of utmost significance that I felt like I should have known, and for some reason I suspected that it bad something to do with about lived experiences and race relations that only a Canadian-born Asian would know. I don't have any evidence to back this up, and James will probably laugh at my version of these events.

But still. I began to doubt the integrity of my Vancouverite soul.

Labels: lihimliham

Posted by Diego at 7:09 AM | Permalink | Comments

Lihim, Liham translates roughly as Secrets, Letters. It was a secret blog that I started keeping several months ago, meant to be a private compilation of still-unsent letters to close friends, unexpectedly intimate acquaintances, and that most profound driving force in my life up till recently: unrequited loves.

When you're 18, unrequited love makes you feel alive, spurs you to poetry, and fits really well on your room's wall right next to your signed poster of Boy George. If you're 28 and you still harbour unrequited loves, you're only a few nominations away from a Darwin Award. Love, after all, is less feeling, more decision.

Here's the sixth letter. I never wrote all the letters I wanted to. I always intended to unearth them one day; I just didn't think I would do it so soon. I'm happy that I did. You can view all the letters here.

Dear D,

I've lost my sense of empathy. When I was younger, I think I was more attuned to people's desires, their impressions of me. Now I feel like maybe I've lost some of that skill, but though I am not as good as feeling what other people feel, perhaps I am better at thinking like others think.

But feeling and thinking are two different things, and with some people one of the two is about as important as the dirt under their fingernails. (I just made that expression up. "Dirt under their fingernails." Don't know if that has any emotional resonance at all in some language or another.)

Labels: lihimliham

Posted by Diego at 6:12 AM | Permalink | Comments

Lihim, Liham translates roughly as Secrets, Letters. It was a secret blog that I started keeping several months ago, meant to be a private compilation of still-unsent letters to close friends, unexpectedly intimate acquaintances, and that most profound driving force in my life up till recently: unrequited loves.

When you're 18, unrequited love makes you feel alive, spurs you to poetry, and fits really well on your room's wall right next to your signed poster of Boy George. If you're 28 and you still harbour unrequited loves, you're only a few nominations away from a Darwin Award. Love, after all, is less feeling, more decision.

Here's the seventh letter. I never wrote all the letters I wanted to. I always intended to unearth them one day; I just didn't think I would do it so soon. I'm happy that I did. You can view all the letters here.

Dear D,

I am waaaay too stretched. How did it come to this? I started off with a very limited set of goals. Suddenly, things have spiraled off into a hundred different directions and I find myself committed to a hundred different things.

Part of the problem comes from expectations that I've internalized about what I ought to be doing: being a good citizen, doing my part in saving the world, balancing inner desires and outer realities, fulfilling my supposed destiny.

Here's the story I tell everyone about myself: The son of imprisoned political activists during the Marcos dictatorship, I was conceived in prison during a conjugal visit.

My father is a sensitive and brilliant writer who spent the last 15 years languishing in a small office in the attic of a London building. Because of this self-imposed exile, he effectively distanced himself from the Filipino writing community and never received the recognition that many of his peers now have, in spite of the fact that he really is a witty, sensitive writer with an excellent grasp of the form. My mother is a very smart, tough, grounded woman who has survived humiliation by both her enemies and her comrades. Both my parents were survivors of military violence.

Somewhere in my heart, I feel that I need to atone for the sins the world has committed against my parents. Somehow, I feel that I need to be every bit as (if not more) forceful, intelligent, and fierce as my parents were.

Does this make me immature? Isn't there a theory (Freud? Lacan? Butler?) that posits that the first fall from grace ensues when the child first identifies that she is not her mother? Or is it in this particular culture, in my particular family, at this particular time, identity is so much more distributed than in, say, Vancouver? (And by distributed, I mean that the concept of "self" is highly reliant on interpersonal relations, particularly familial ones.) And does that mean that by this measure at least, Filipinos are "immature"?

In Filipino culture, children very rarely leave the nest, unless it is to start a family of their own... and even then the option to continue living with the parents is still very much encouraged. There are some advantages to this, of course. Knowledge is passed from generation to generation pretty much seamlessly; the young benefit from the wisdom of the old. But the arrangement also tends to stifle radical and perhaps necessary change, because the old can exert a unduly powerful influence on the young. Conservatism starts at home.

I think about you once in a while. There is something about the frequency and the way in which I hear from you I strongly identify with.

Labels: lihimliham

Posted by Diego at 5:14 AM | Permalink | Comments

Lihim, Liham translates roughly as Secrets, Letters. It was a secret blog that I started keeping several months ago, meant to be a private compilation of still-unsent letters to close friends, unexpectedly intimate acquaintances, and that most profound driving force in my life up till recently: unrequited loves.

When you're 18, unrequited love makes you feel alive, spurs you to poetry, and fits really well on your room's wall right next to your signed poster of Boy George. If you're 28 and you still harbour unrequited loves, you're only a few nominations away from a Darwin Award. Love, after all, is less feeling, more decision.

Here's the eighth letter. I never wrote all the letters I wanted to. I always intended to unearth them one day; I just didn't think I would do it so soon. I'm happy that I did. You can view all the letters here.

Dear A,

I'm enjoying spending time with family here in Manila. My mother continues to inspire me with the political and research work she does; both my parents know so much about the state of national and international affairs from a longer historical perspective. I'm liking this whole intergenerational thing. On the downside, we just conducted national elections, and there was the usual mass cheating, vote-buying, and even killing. Two teachers (public school teachers are employed by the government to conduct polls in local precincts, since they are presumably neutral parties and hold the public interest in high regard... plus there's tons and tons of teachers) were burned alive. In the south of the Philippines, a feudal system of governance accounts for towns voting en bloc in support of candidates fielded by the current—and, needless to say, corrupt—administration.

But somehow, all of this excites me. I was born in trying times and spent my early childhood ata point when the political climate was moving from fear into simmering anger. And though I can't say that I am a revolutionary myself, I am so used to the activity of political dissent at home (I think I've told you about my parents) and to the densely absurd humour of postcolonial, metropolitan Filipino culture, that anything less stimulating or entertaining can drive me nuts. Recently, a military officer who staged a coup against the current president, ran for Senate while in prison for sedition. He won.

Anyway. I just wanted to entertain you a bit. I hope it worked. Let me know if there's anything I can do....

Diego

Labels: lihimliham

Posted by Diego at 4:19 AM | Permalink | Comments

Lihim, Liham translates roughly as Secrets, Letters. It was a secret blog that I started keeping several months ago, meant to be a private compilation of still-unsent letters to close friends, unexpectedly intimate acquaintances, and that most profound driving force in my life up till recently: unrequited loves.

When you're 18, unrequited love makes you feel alive, spurs you to poetry, and fits really well on your room's wall right next to your signed poster of Boy George. If you're 28 and you still harbour unrequited loves, you're only a few nominations away from a Darwin Award. Love, after all, is less feeling, more decision.

Here's the last letter. I never wrote all the letters I wanted to. I always intended to unearth them one day; I just didn't think I would do it so soon. I'm happy that I did. You can view all the letters here

Dear K,

you make me happy. i think of you, and the first thing i see in my mind's eye is your smile. and nothing else matters. when you're happy, it's like the entire world lights up.

Labels: lihimliham

Posted by Diego at 3:19 AM | Permalink | Comments