come leap into this compost heap

This blog has moved to "Run the Rays" (www.brewingmyke.blogspot.com)

2008-11-25T15:44:00.000-08:00

The more blogs change, the more they remain... Still here, but I hope we'd see each other more often there for my latest posts.

From here to there: Leaping into a sleepwalker's runaway romp to a brighter spot

2008-10-27T10:18:00.000-07:00

Only thing constant, as the cliche attests, is change. And yet it remains the same, dear visitor, as this site forks into another path en route to a brighter spot. Come on in, see you here.

Because Lapu-Lapu is neither good only as a fish stew nor a lonely statue

2008-05-15T10:18:00.000-07:00

You may take any true-blooded Cebuano out of the ground beneath his feet, but there's no taking away the homebound rhythm of his heartbeat. Wherever he may be, regardless how distant his corner under the sky may be and no matter if his mouth reeks and turns sloppy with the staleness of nostalgia in this age of diaspora, his tongue will always be tattooed with the taste of earth.

Recenly, I created an online hub--a sort of homecoming spot, a melting pot--for creative writers in Cebuano who've been riding the ripples toward the four winds in search of the so-called greener pastures. In strange lands, the ear keens for familiar voices that may be all we will ever need to hear our inner selves in the face of the goblin called globalization, to reclaim and remind ourselves who we were, to begin with, and who we will always be. To go far in the world, all we really need is to stay rooted, no matter the uncertain loam of elsewhere we've chosen to raise our stakes into.

Thus Kabisdak (Kalihokan sa Bisdak nga Katitikan) is born, out loud with something like a battlecry against the cold-blooded spawn of alienation spelled triple in scarlet letters: KKK (kalaay, kalimot, kamingaw). In the face of distance and displacement, may Kabisdak be a way as well for us to touch base with the magsusulat who choose to anchor the flight of imagination in the native shore. Our common ground. Our mainland of memory in the globe-embracing ocean of our saying and singing.

Na hala, dapiton ko kamo ngadto sa balayan sa Kabisdak. Ablihi lang ang ganghaan pinaagi sa pagtuktok-tuplok ning maong luna: www.balaybalakasoy.blogspot.com

candles for china

2008-05-13T09:30:00.000-07:00

And then came the end. Too sudden and mind-boggling to comprehend.

To make a long story no shorter than an epitaph, here's the dispatch: "The toll of the dead and missing soared as rescue workers dug through flattened schools and homes on Tuesday in a desperate attempt to find survivors of China's worst earthquake in three decades. The death toll exceeded 12,000 in Sichuan province alone, and 18,645 were still buried in debris in the city of Mianyang, near the epicenter of Monday's massive, 7.9-magnitude quake."

It could happen as well to us, God forbid. What else do we know?

Here's one certainty, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing." God bless all the grief-struck in China. And for the rest of us who, under our fragile place under the bell, can't tell for whom it tolls next.

ever again, all about her

2008-05-10T00:54:00.000-07:00

No contest, us fathers are no match to our kids' mothers. We have no wombs, to begin with, and most of us can only endure the sloppy shape of never-ending pregnancy borne out of all that booze and sloth. No matter if our kids fancy us to be their own Superman, it's often their mothers they run to out of their scraped knees and even when they get circumcised or crazed and dazed about their first monthly period.

Not that I'm complaining. See, I myself confess there's no outgrowing whom I owe the privilege of coming out of her womb. She whose frail frame has absorbed the usual burden, more a matter of choice than necessity every mother worth her milk, birthmark, or wrinkles has become--the stereotype of sacrifice.

My Mama Violeta, veritably nothing out of the ordinary. She who makes any grateful child graceful for simplifying the complicated choreography or stunt of selflessness only because she renders it all--like the lady being sawed inside a magician's box--so easy to see but tough to live up to: tenderness, patience, resilience. (My mother, who finished only grade one, could not read and would only wince at these words, these squiggles of abstractions she steeled me to come to terms with when she inspired me to read, write, read, write as if my life depended on it.)

Hands down, no matter how low we fall, misfortune is not so miserable as long as we have our mothers to call and cry our hearts for when it hurts. Indeed, wretched becomes the world left orphaned or deserted by mothers (or, worse, haunted by the reincarnation of Joan Crawford from Mommie Dearest).

How far some mothers go for the sake of their children? Spare me some feminist polemics or further bleeding-heart blather. Consider and see, instead, what Pedro Almodovar shows in his feast of a film, Volver. Yes, there's no magic like mother.

Can we hold a candle to the dark wind?

2008-05-06T18:54:00.000-07:00

Staggering, the blow of statistics after a cyclone scourged Myanmar. Consider what the locals call an unprecedented nightmare: 22,500 dead so far and 41,000 people still missing.

Last week, death and destruction also mades headlines as tornadoes whirled through the heartland of America. Just another dire reminder of our vulnerability against nature as our ravaged planet alerts us once more with its recurrent distressed call. Are we listening? Doesn't what happened in the Day After Tomorrow ring a bell? If we still think the worst is the stuff of movies only, we're in for some rough reality check.

Hope floats, yes, and may it stay that way a little longer than the glaciers and polar caps in the shiftscape of Antartica.

Happy endings? It's up to us, really. Or so dares another documentary in the wake of An Incovenient Truth. If what's rendered loud and clear in The 11th Hour are any indication, we have more than enough reason to pray what we see isn't what we now get:

Bottoms up, or what's outrageously over the top?

2008-05-05T00:21:00.000-07:00

Shit hits the fan when fact proves stranger than fiction. No end to the utterly unthinkable, certainly. Hang on, handy as always is the stunt of suspending disbelief.

About the lower depths some men often descend into, here's a reprint of my regular column, "So To Speak," published in the op-ed pages of Sun.Star Cebu (29 April 2008):

Loo life

WHO does not give a rat’s ass and wish devoutly to avoid--simply because it does not sit well with us-- a headache on top of a hemorrhoid?

Sweat ourselves shitless. Thus, we do sometimes when confronted, if not confounded, with the manure called human nature. Surreal, how things happen to some people the way they do.

Talk about dumping logic into the loo, and hardly anything can be more utterly absurd than the recent report about a 35-year-old woman in Kansas who got stuck in the lavatory for—hold your breath—two years. So much so that some parts of her butt and the backside of her thighs have leached like second skin to the toilet seat. The police who came to rescue her had to carry “the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital,” narrated the news.

One of her neighbors, who had not seen her for the last six years, could only shake his head. “I don’t think anybody can make any sense out of it,” he said. But her boyfriend deemed nothing strange. “It just kind of happened one day; she went in and had been in there a little while, the next time it was a little longer.” Tried to coax her out of hiding and fed and bathed and brought her clothes, he did. Or so he claimed “an otherwise normal relationship, except it all happened in the bathroom.”

Vouching for her phobia of being seen in public after she allegedly endured a traumatic childhood, he figured “like it was a safe place for her.”

Ah, the idea of a comfort room. Now that’s stretching the imagination down the sphincter and doesn’t hold even urine or hogwash for those who live in some 18,000 households in Cebu City. They, reportedly, “don’t have access to sanitary toilet facilities and 11,400 others that don’t have access to safe potable water yet.”

That doesn’t sit pretty for those preening bubbly in the mouth about the beauty of living in the so-called “Queen City of the South.” Fact is stranger than fiction when ordure flies in the face of daydream. No less perplexing than a Sphinx’s riddle for the city mayor who can’t figure out why Cebu—ostensibly one of the “Top 10 Asian Cities of the Future”—ended up a laggard and made it only in the bottom spot in a business magazine’s list of 20 “Best Places to Live” in the country.

Now that’s hardly the stuff of rocket science when the dispatch comes like a kick in the butt of City Hall officials: “Some had to share toilets with their neighbors. In the mountain barangays, some households do with dug-up holes as their makeshift toilet facility, while some still defecate on old newspapers or plastic bags to be thrown away somewhere.” Less bothersome if only Cebu had as much carefree space as the prairies of Kansas, with more than enough breeze to blow away and wipe out the reek of recklessness.

No wonder my nose, now stuffed with allergy against the pollen-filled scent of spring but still runny with a Cebucentric sensibility, gets perennially itchy with infestation of disbelief. The ooze and whiff of outrage. Or shame steeped in intimations of doom. And it’s not only about a woman’s butt wedged too long in the toilet seat, or the YouTube post straight from a surgery room--rowdy with chuckles and celebratory yelps--about a gay man’s rectum jammed with a bottle of perfume.

Let there be library

2008-04-30T01:49:00.000-07:00

Where on earth do angels delight to hang out? Not inside cathedrals, no! As shown in my most cherished film, Wings of Desire, nowhere else are angels nearer to heaven than under the roof of a library. How they tarry and eavesdrop where silence hums in chorus with the constellation of words between the covers, hovering around readers.

With the recent celebration of the National Library Week (April 13-19, 2008), here's a curtsy to retired Maine librarian Glenna Nowell as she piques public curiosity on books.

Since 1988, Nowell has been writing to celebrities (presidents, actors, athletes and a couple of United Nations secretaries general) to ask and take note of their favorite page-turners. “I was looking for a hook that would get people to read a book,” explains Nowell, who wishes to steer literate folks toward stuffs beyond the bestsellers.

Check out Nowell’s Celebrity Reading List over the years and take your cue on “Who Reads What?”

~~~ * ~~~
"Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

True to the words of Sir Francis Bacon, 27 culinary bibliophiles in Topeka, Kansas recently whipped up their imagination as sweetly as literally possible. The cake of their creativity took the spotlight at the reception and exhibit of the annual Edible Books Festival last April 4th at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library. Up for grabs were prizes for Best in Show, Most Book-Like, and Most Likely To Be Devoured that were chosen by votes from the exhibit’s audience.

While my kids tarried longer in front of the “Cat in the Hat” and “Snowballs” cakes, I slurped over the gothic confection patterned after Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

For more pictures of the entries and the winning edible books, check out the photo album in the library’s website.

Who in the world are we?

2008-04-30T00:43:00.000-07:00

We're all alone, avers a song. But now that connectivity is just at the tip of our fingertips in this Age of the Internet, isolation takes a common and ironic turn.

Along that line goes the gist of one of my recent columns "So To Speak" in the op-ed page of Sun.Star Cebu (April 24, 2008). Hereunder is the reprint:

Sharing our story

BLOOD boiled up to their eyes. Upset by the ugly comments about them in their classmate's blog, eight high school students in Florida are now facing charges after they reportedly battered the poor young lady and left her almost unrecognizable.

Such blind rage, indeed, after they felt belittled in her MySpace page. What an oversight for her as well to have raised an eyebrow, looking for trouble by seeing other people in a bad light. In the netherworld of “nada” where one is degraded or rendered insignificant, invisible.

Who wants to be written off into the ignominy of anonymity? Not those who admitted to have Googled themselves at some point in their lives. They comprise almost half of the respondents (47 percent) in a recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project that aims "to produce reports that explore the impact of the Internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life."

One's sense of self, in this age of Net surfing, can either sink or stay above water. "I Google myself to see what kinds of waves my life is making in the world," affirms travel writer Frank Bures in the latest edition of Poets and Writers Magazine. "Isn't that why writers, artists, and other egomaniacs obsess over the Amazon ranking of their book, the comments on their blogs, the hits on their websites?"

Almost desperate, what seems an emergency to make our presences felt—upending our universal isolation---in the grand scheme of technology. In this digital world, the democracy of bloggers and YouTube uploaders means never having to say sorry. Particularly in a pell-mell attempts at autobiography, a puny and slapdash binge at shaping some moments—no matter how trivial, or utterly devoid of larger-than-life hallmarks of heroism—against the flux called history.

Never mind if one can't cast one's words in gold with the touch of a Resil Mojares, who laments the lack of memoirs and autobiographies. "Since people do not leave behind written accounts of their lives, we miss out on a lot of the personal, human details of how larger histories are made," explains Mojares at the book launching of "Shapes of Memory," the biography of Cebuano labor leader and trade unionist Democrito T. Mendoza.

Sweat the small stuff, baby. "Little things can lead you to big events…," attests Mendoza, explaining the necessity "to write the details of his life…to encourage young people to face challenges and be ready to risk everything to achieve a better life." For a broad base of contacts, Mendoza might try to open a Multiply account.

Uploading himself at YouTube for a wider audience of his inspiring tale, however, might be a strain for him. He won't stand a chance, no matter how noble he is, compared to the almost extra-terrestrial dimensions of human condition shown in the unlimited scope of its videos.

It's where one can spot, for instance, a perfume canister stuck into someone's rectum. And how the victim ends up literally the butt of jokes, sprawled in the surgery room as the cameras zoom into the twilight zone of his anatomy. Behold the sharp edges of laughter cutting him to pieces, piercing us who witness into complicity. So much for a shared story.

Give us this day our daily verse

2008-04-26T00:16:00.000-07:00

Reality bites for those rabid about reading. The news, particulary. The stuff of headlines, the wounds we have to lick, the bloodhound smell of fear and loathing--all the stomach-churning facts never go prosaic.

How to deal with a deeper hunger? The French poet Charles Baudelaire replies, tongue in cheek: "Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry."

For those in dire need of words as soul food, so to speak, watch and listen to this video inspired by the poem titled "Eating Poetry" by Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Strand:

Past food

2008-04-25T22:51:00.000-07:00

Unappetizing, what's often up in the air lately. Even the so-called land of plenty is getting jittery, with two major American bulk retailers--Sam's Club and Costco--reportedly "rationing the sale of large bags of rice to consumers amid a growing global food crisis marked by skyrocketing prices and heavy pressure on demand. "

Last week, Sam's Club--a chain owned by retail giant Wal-Mart-- announced a "temporary cap," placing a limit of four 20-pound (nine-kilogram) bags per person for imported jasmine, basmati and long grain white rices as a "precautionary step."

If America is bracing for some belt-tightening measure, imagine how some people elsewhere in the world are putting up with an empty stomach. As a Cebuano phrase puts it, "pasmo hasta bitok."

Hereunder is a reprint of one of my recent column "So To Speak" in the op-ed page of Sun.Star Cebu (April 15, 2008):

Wish Upon the Starved

WHEREVER poverty prevails, America is a finger-licking fantasy. Thus out on their limbs go the dreamers in droves—and not a few would go as far as to swallow swords—to have their fill of the “land of milk and honey.”

That sounds like the end of a bedtime story, true. Especially when it goes against the grain of current events where rice, or the lack of it, has become grist for the mill.

Toss restless in the dark as empty innards turn. So goes the rabble roused by the nightmare in Haiti, where the prime minister got himself booted out to appease a famished populace protesting against soaring prices of food.

Mouthfuls of rage also echo in Egypt and Bangladesh where dissent have turned deadly over the same intestinal issue. A worldwide trend, explain the experts who see “a widening gulf between those who can afford to eat and those who cannot.” It looms over much of the world’s population now reeling under the specter of climate change and escalating fuel prices, according to the United Nations.

Simply one plus one—how the transport of food all over the world entails diesel, driving its cost up the stratosphere. Not hard to digest why not only rats are bracing to end up in the sewer, with their bellies up.

In the Philippines and other Asian nations, superstition abounds about the deadly outcome of sleeping with a full stomach. Tongues wag hairy about a nocturnal malady allegedly caused by carbohydrates in rice—the common staple in our table—that mysteriously transmogrify into a “batibat.” An overweight witch-like creature in Ilocano folklore, the “batibat” would supposedly immobilize and suffocate the sleeping victim—mostly male—by squatting on his face.

Clear as day, what we call “bangungot” or “urom” has become too real as the rice crisis haunts the country. Will the protest-plagued leadership weather another thumb-biting spell of insecurity?

To spare the people from the “gut-wrenching pain of hunger under these very difficult times,” Cebu City Councilor Edgardo Labella has proposed “a resolution for the creation of an anti-hunger task force to expedite the implementation of the government’s hunger mitigation programs.”

But where the rule of law is often sidetracked, how far will state initiatives to distribute crop goods to urban areas and metropolis go?

Here in America, now in the throes of an economic recession, there’s also a lot to bellyache against the domino effect vis-à-vis the escalating costs of energy, housing, health insurance and grocery items. According to the US Department of Agriculture, 38 million Americans—13.9 million of them children—live in households at risk of hunger.

Look how it renders the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), a national nonprofit organization, in full steam “to improve public policies and community partnerships to eradicate hunger and undernutrition in the United States.” On behalf of those who need help to stave off starvation—the elderly, the unemployed, low-income workers, the ill, and the homeless—FRAC has been providing information to strengthen federal nutrition programs, like the distribution of food stamps.

And so, if it’s any consolation to those yearning to flee from Third World reality, often deemed doggone, hunger is also a persistent stalker here in dreamland.

Six years of the rest of our days

2008-04-17T22:28:00.000-07:00

THERE'S NO perfect marriage, true. Sex is not always sensational. The piles on the kitchen sink and the trash can often lay more precarious and shudder faster than the tectonic shifts of one's patience. The wedding ring might as well grow fungi around one's dirty finger. Et cetera, et cetera.

Then again, there's also no adventure more awesome than this: A man and a woman daring to commit themselves into a leap of faith smack into the tightrope of a balancing act, transcending their differences across the uni(que)verse of their individuality. Or through the uncertain spaces--at the edge of solitude--where two people decide contra mundum to belong to no one else other than the separate spheres of each other's evolving selves.

Theologists say we can never be at home until we become one with our God. But finding bliss, a spot under the sun of Divine Providence, is possible in the company we keep because they come to us like a cherished answer to a prayer. Like my Arlaine: wife (nagger, usahay :), mother of my children, lover, friend, conspirator and witness to the weather of my ever-changing sense of becoming a better version of myself each day.

Today, in our 6th anniversary as man and wife, I can only gaze at the uncertainty of the future and whatever it takes heaven may come our way with the gratitude and hope of an open heart.

For the time being, allow me to hum "Amen" to Luther Vandross as he sings a hymn for "All The Woman I Need." Thank you, dearest Wawa.

Forked tongues and the lip-smacking Cebuano language

2008-04-11T14:45:00.000-07:00

ON THE MATTER of my mother tongue, there's no ifs and buts. Either I wag it with the earnestness of the dispossesed rabid against the insidious infestation of forgetting, a betrayal against my birthright. Or, be struck mute by the blinding flash and haze of a colonized consciousness.

That I also write in English is no less a privilege, yes. Yet it also cast upon this Bisdak dog the added burden of responsibity to be steadfast with the umbilical words of a vernacular on the verge of extinction. Unrelenting, after all, are the inroads of globalization and an unenlightened state policy that spawns negligence, niggardly attention and a culturally decentered outlook of this generation of native speakers.

Pastilan intawon, pagka-serious! Maybe because Yoyoy Villame is dead, and Max Surban is no longer as loud as the cat in heat on the roof.

Hereunder are variations on the Bisdak theme I wrote for my regular column, "So To Speak," in the op-ed pages of Sun.Star Cebu:

La Vida Local and Being Vocal

/Sun.Star Cebu, 8 April 2008/

KIDS say the darndest thing, concedes an eponymous American television series several years ago. But what comes out of the mouths of babes does not always disarm adults with amusement. Bile drips and foams as well from their milk-smacking lips.

Look, for instance, at a clique of child rockers called the Naked Brothers Band. It might as well be a bomb's detonation, what they revealed at the recent 2008 Kids' Choice Awards over the cable channel Nickelodeon. Simply piercing like shrapnel in bare skin, the lyrics of their latest hit: "And I'm really tired of being treated/ Like a fool./ I don't want to go to school…You always tell me to stop/ To stop comin' around/ I can't even make/Make make no sound…."

That struck a cringe-worthy chord, indeed, with the alleged conspiracy of third-grade classmates out "to harm or kill their teacher with a serrated steak knife." Nine pupils at Carter Elementary School in Georgia could be facing "unruly child" charges after they reportedly plotted revenge against their teacher who disciplined a girl for "standing on a chair." Did she say something that reeked of impudence, the tactless assertion of innocence?

As a parent, whittling down the tongues of my two boys into timidity would be no better than bearing my neck down the chopboard. Mince no words, and mean it with due respect. Like, well, saying I look like a hobgoblin and hugging me anyway.

May they grow up to be outspoken but neither intimidating nor insincere. And, yes, to stay true and rooted—even if their vocabulary branches out to the lush forest of other languages—to their mother tongue.

So far, it warms the cockles inside my chest to hear my eldest son Gabriel Ollivan, a minority among his white classmates in preschool, asking ardently, "Unsa'y Binisaya…?" for some things he absorbs from his teacher and his books utterly awash with information and expressions of all things American. Rest assured I do as well when Golli's younger brother Raphael Gandalf, scared of "agta" and "ungo" lurking in the thicket of his two-year-old imagination, easily takes comfort with a bedtime browsing of Mother Goose rhymes no more than the lull of lisping into a medley of native memory about, among others, the "alimango sa suba, gibantog nga dili makuha" and "balay ko sa langit nagasidlak-sidlak luyo sa panganod…." Or the wisdom of "bugsay, bugsay, kiling-kiling dyutay...sa barotong gamay."

Rock and bring it on, Bisdak! Thus I have only the best wishes for the brainchild of Cebu Provincial Board (PB) member Victor Maambong who recently sponsored a resolution for the Department of Education to prescribe "Sugbuanong Binisaya as the indispensable bridge language in teaching English and Filipino" in grade and high schools.

Noting the dismal results of the national achievement tests and taking the cue of scientific studies, Maambong's resolution avers: "The use of the first language to bridge English and Filipino will facilitate a more efficient cognitive process in the language development of our students…," who, certainly, will find it easier to sway along the tune of Naked Brothers Band's "I Don't Want To Go To School," if they fall in the gap or in the shadow between the idea and the act.

Getting a failing grade deserves better, indeed, than the silence of the dumb. Or the stench of cliché while invoking, "Shit," if not the four-letter word. As a matter of fact, they can be more emphatic by exclaiming, "Hinampak!"

Watch Your Mouth

/Sun.Star Cebu, 12 February 2008/

"HE SAID a bad word." So went the accusation of a little Fil-Am boy whose twang-laced tongue has been irradiated with a smattering of Cebuano words from his constant exposure at playtime with my five-year-old son. "He called me stupid, mom."

Even if there are times I won't begrudge "stupid" as an apt adjective for me, my wife can swear we never use that word at home, although I'm fond of ejaculating, "Bulay-og baya!," if anything went out of whack. Now, where did my son get the word that whipped his friend into such distress? My disconsolate wife and I learned later that the infestation in my son's vocabulary was the latest he cottoned onto from his American classmates in pre-kindergarten.

But what alarmed me, more than the likelihood that I might have spawned a ruffian who would grow up calling a spade a blunt spade, was that he didn't call his friend "amaw." Or, if he were a sharper chip off his old block, he could have stumped even Dennis the Menace with this snarl: "Hungog!"

What other homegrown words, even the hair-raising ones, would soon be watered down into the milk and honey of American speech?

When we flew into the heartland of America nearly a year ago, our baggage bristled with a stack utterly Bisdak—a Cebuano bible, a Jesuit-authored English-Visayan dictionary, booklets from the Cebuano Studies Center featuring a trove of riddles, proverbs, folktales and native songs as well as a slew of CDs (the discography of Yoyoy Villame and Max Surban, three volumes of Visayan Greatest Hits by various artists, Susan Fuentes' "Awitnong Bahandi" album and "Sine-sine" by Missing Filemon.) These, I hoped, would suffice to slam the intrusive clangor of dislocation out the door.

But the new culture, with all its colors bleaching into the televised cartoons, has been unrelenting in weaning my two kids away from their mother tongue. Even if my wife and I have made it sacrosanct for our relocated household to be steeped in the stew of our vernacular, not a day passes without my youngest son blurting out, "No way!"

Out loud, such obstinacy echoes how I feel about one Cebuano lawmaker whose brainchild in Congress now braces like a bulldozer against the dwindling wilderness of indigenous languages. If Rep. Eduardo R. Gullas (Cebu, 1st district) will have his way with House Bill 305—set to revive English as the mandatory language for teaching in all school levels—superseded becomes the Department of Education order implementing the bilingual teaching policy. Which has stunted the potentials of students to compete in the global economy, according to Gullas. His bill would correct the defects of the current education program where "learning two languages (English and Pilipino) is too much for young Filipino learners, especially the non-Tagalog speaking children." But don't impressionable minds work like a sponge? Or, to begin with, must the bilingual system be thrown with the bathwater because it has been childishly conceived and carried out by a way of teaching slightly better than baby-talk?

If the national language — predominantly Tagalog — languishes, where does that leave the rest of the regional languages? Must progress be paid by selling what little remains of oral heritage down the river?

First things first, suggests a study recently printed in the Jakarta Post: "Students learn English or acquire a second language more rapidly and effectively if they maintain and develop their proficiency in their mother tongue." Swords, no more than the tongue's artillery of words, are better if they are double-edged.

Next time my son said "stupid" I would know for whom it's best suited. And I swear to add an expletive, crispier in Cebuano, for a deadlier effect.

An earful of angels

2008-04-11T14:21:00.000-07:00

Feeling small and separate? Here's a soothing reminder from "Far Away," one of the uplifting songs of the children's choir Libera: "...Whenever I cry/ Far away and anywhere./ You hear me call when shadows fall/ your light of hope showing me the way."

Ode to the ordinary, an epic of simplicity

2008-04-02T23:54:00.001-07:00

The Radiance of Satyajit Ray's 'The Apu Trilogy'

THREE is a mystical number, and cinephiles would concur thrice about the best in cinematic history. Francis Ford Copolla's The Godfather series. Krzysztof Kieslowski's poetic reverie on White, Blue, and Red. Peter Jackson's monumental Lord of the Rings saga. All have thunder and lightning all over them, the lush light of grand design, the flourish of an operatic aria.

And then there's Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy. Unerring, almost God-like, the way it weaves a spell of beauty through scenes illumined with the randomly familiar, catching the world of its characters in the spider-web rhythms of the ordinary. No larger-than-life gestures here. No highlights of blinding virtuosity. No soaring musical score other than the simple but haunting strain of Ravi Shankar's sitar.

But listen how the great Akira Kurosawa raved: "Not to have seen the cinema of Satyajit Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon... It is the kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river."

And so, taking Kurosawa's cue, it was with nearly erotic abandon that I went to the screening of Ray's The Apu Trilogy during a retrospective film festival at SM City Cebu several years ago.

Seduced by Ray's evocative rendition of a poor family's life in a small Bengali village in Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) and their migration to the holy city of Benares in Aparajito (The Unvanquished), imagine nothing less than coitus interruptus when the projector conked out unceremoniously on Apu Sansar (The World of Apu), the trilogy's last installment.

Imagine, therefore, how orgasmic I felt when I got hold of the trilogy's DVD set recently. With almost masturbatory focus, I filled April Fool's Day with a complete viewing of it in one setting.

Truly, the trilogy more than holds a candle to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane as one of the most promethean debuts in the annals of filmmaking. Nothing less than miraculous, indeed, how Ray edifies everyday life in each of the three films, "refusing to divorce beauty from tragedy, rendering the ordinary majestic and discovering insight and ironies in the smallest of moments."

Hereunder is a review from Roger Ebert (the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize):

THE great, sad, gentle sweep of "The Apu Trilogy" remains in the mind of the moviegoer as a promise of what film can be. Standing above fashion, it creates a world so convincing that it becomes, for a time, another life we might have lived. The three films, which were made in India by Satyajit Ray between 1950 and 1959, swept the top prizes at Cannes, Venice and London, and created a new cinema for India--whose prolific film industry had traditionally stayed within the narrow confines of swashbuckling musical romances. Never before had one man had such a decisive impact on the films of his culture.

Ray (1921-1992) was a commercial artist in Calcutta with little money and no connections when he determined to adapt a famous serial novel about the birth and young manhood of Apu--born in a rural village, formed in the holy city of Benares, educated in Calcutta, then a wanderer. The legend of the first film is inspiring; how on the first day Ray had never directed a scene, his cameraman had never photographed one, his child actors had not even been tested for their roles--and how that early footage was so impressive it won the meager financing for the rest of the film. Even the music was by a novice, Ravi Shankar, later to be famous.

The trilogy begins with "Pather Panchali," filmed between 1950 and 1954. Here begins the story of Apu when he is a boy, living with his parents, older sister and ancient aunt in the ancestral village to which his father, a priest, has returned despite the misgivings of the practical mother. The second film, "Aparajito" (1956), follows the family to Benares, where the father makes a living from pilgrims who have come to bathe in the holy Ganges. The third film, "The World of Apu" (1959), finds Apu and his mother living with an uncle in the country; the boy does so well in school he wins a scholarship to Calcutta. He is married under extraordinary circumstances, is happy with his young bride, then crushed by the deaths of his mother and his wife. After a period of bitter drifting, he returns at last to take up the responsibility of his son.

This summary scarcely reflects the beauty and mystery of the films, which do not follow the punched-up methods of conventional biography but are told in the spirit of the English title of the first film, "The Song of the Road." The actors who play Apu at various ages from about 6 to 29 have in common a moody, dreamy quality; Apu is not sharp, hard or cynical, but a sincere, naive idealist, motivated more by vague yearnings than concrete plans. He reflects a society that does not place ambition above all, but is philosophical, accepting, optimistic.

He is his father's child, and in the first two films we see how his father is eternally hopeful that something will turn up--that new plans and ideas will bear fruit. It is the mother who frets about money owed the relatives, about food for the children, about the future. In her eyes, throughout all three films, we see realism and loneliness, as her husband and then her son cheerfully go away to the big city and leave her waiting and wondering.

The most extraordinary passage in the three films comes in the third, when Apu, now a college student, goes with his best friend, Pulu, to attend the wedding of Pulu's cousin. The day has been picked because it is astrologically perfect--but the groom, when he arrives, turns out to be stark mad. The bride's mother sends him away, but then there is an emergency, because Aparna, the bride, will be forever cursed if she does not marry on this day, and so Pulu, in desperation, turns to Apu--and Apu, having left Calcutta to attend a marriage, returns to the city as the husband of the bride.

Sharmila Tagore, who plays Aparna, was only 14 when she made the film. She projects exquisite shyness and tenderness, and we consider how odd it is to be suddenly married to a stranger. "Can you accept a life of poverty?" asks Apu, who lives in a single room and augments his scholarship with a few rupees earned in a print shop. "Yes," she says simply, not meeting his gaze. She cries when she first arrives in Calcutta, but soon sweetness and love shine out through her eyes. Soumitra Chatterjee, who plays Apu, shares her innocent delight, and when she dies in childbirth it is the end of his innocence and, for a long time, of his hope.

The three films were photographed by Subrata Mitra, a still photographer who Ray was convinced could do the job. Starting from scratch, at first with a borrowed 16mm camera, Mitra achieves effects of extraordinary beauty: Forest paths, river vistas, the gathering clouds of the monsoon, water bugs skimming lightly over the surface of a pond. There is a fearsome scene as the mother watches over her feverish daughter while the rain and winds buffet the house, and we feel her fear and urgency as the camera dollies again and again across the small, threatened space. And a moment after a death, when the film cuts shockingly to the sudden flight of birds.

I heard a distant echo of the earliest days of the filming, perhaps, when Subrata Mitra was honored at the Hawaii Film Festival in the early 1990s, and in accepting a career award he thanked, not Satyajit Ray, but--his camera, and his film. On those first days of shooting it must have been just that simple, the hope of these beginners that their work would bear fruit.

What we sense all through "The Apu Trilogy" is a different kind of life than we are used to. The film is set in Bengal in the 1920s, when in the rural areas life was traditional and hard. Relationships were formed with those who lived close by; there is much drama over the theft of some apples from an orchard. The sight of a train, roaring at the far end of a field, represents the promise of the city and the future, and trains connect or separate the characters throughout the film, even offering at one low point a means of possible suicide.

The actors in the films have all been cast from life, to type; Italian neorealism was in vogue in the early 1950s, and Ray would have heard and agreed with the theory that everyone can play one role--himself. The most extraordinary performer in the films is Chunibala Devi, who plays the old aunt, stooped double, deeply wrinkled. She was 80 when shooting began; she had been an actress decades ago, but when Ray sought her out, she was living in a brothel, and thought he had come looking for a girl. When Apu's mother angers at her and tells her to leave, notice the way she appears at the door of another relative, asking, "Can I stay?" She has no home, no possessions except for her clothes and a bowl, but she never seems desperate because she embodies complete acceptance.

The relationship between Apu and his mother observes truths that must exist in all cultures: how the parent makes sacrifices for years, only to see the child turn aside and move thoughtlessly away into adulthood. The mother has gone to live with a relative, as little better than a servant ("they like my cooking"), and when Apu comes to visit during a school vacation, he sleeps or loses himself in his books, answering her with monosyllables. He seems in a hurry to leave, but has second thoughts at the train station, and returns for one more day. The way the film records his stay, his departure and his return says whatever can be said about lonely parents and heedless children.

I watched "The Apu Trilogy" recently over a period of three nights, and found my thoughts returning to it during the days. It is about a time, place and culture far removed from our own, and yet it connects directly and deeply with our human feelings. It is like a prayer, affirming that this is what the cinema can be, no matter how far in our cynicism we may stray.

A season to sing for

2008-03-28T01:27:00.001-07:00

After the infernal interlude with winter, here's an ode to all things bright and abloom.

Buzzing back!

2008-03-28T00:26:00.000-07:00

It's been a cold long spell since my last post, I know. Blame it on the snow.

Bitaw, no other season can be more convenient for being lazy than the woebegone months of winter. Cars getting sidetracked due to the slick, that's no far-fetched metaphor for all things, including blogging, gone off kilter. (Pathetic fallacy, you'd say.)

But winter did get into my skin (and also into the sewers of my sinus). Now it's no sweat (or snot) to thumb my nose down at my colonial curiosity for snow. Bitaw, maayo ra gyud nang snow sa pictures, particularly when the landscape of ice sprawls like a coating of fondant cake in the distance, away from the icy slick and sludge down the road nga mora gyu'g sampurado nga gisagola'g ginamos in the vehicles' tracks). Inahak kaayo ning snow, way sama. Kaduha nako madakdak. Sometimes, you have to toddle through a foot of frost. Sangpit pud ka sa tanang santos when driving kay lisod kaayo control sa sakyanan, mosayaw la'g kalit ang ligid because the road can get more slippery than a skating rink. Plus it's no joke having to scrape the layers of icy crap from the windshield in the midst of sub-zero temperature when you have to go out for work or run an errand. Mora pud ka'g tubol tan-awon kay motibugol gyud ka with all the strata of jackets and sweaters, paet! Pagkalami ilupad og balik Cebu.

So now that Spring has come, all I can say is, "Good riddance, Winter!" And while skeletal trees now brace to burst its shades of greens along with the birds and gardens get into the rhythm of bees again, this is just to say it's timely more than ever to get back into the groove of blogging.

bookylicious (three days of lust out of the library)

2007-10-21T01:12:00.000-07:00

NOW I KNOW what a libertine would feel in a harem. It was a bibliomaniac's wet dream come true when the public library of Shawnee County and Topeka (capital city of Kansas) hauled out its slightly-used books--hardcover and paperback--to the sprawling space of the Kansas ExpoCentre for its annual three-day book sale last month. Whoopee, indeed, as the books were unbelievably cheap (from as low as 25 cents to three dollars!).

Though it was an eye-popping affair taking one's pick from such an orgy of authors, the library's staff and volunteers made the whole shebang in so orderly a manner worthy of a monastery by arranging the books on separate tables according to various genres and classifications. And so despite the throng of readers, it was a breeze to navigate from one book section to another. It was a thrill on the last day of the book sale when all items were for the taking--get all you can--for only three dollars per sack! My wife also had a blast picking up books for our two kids and some health/home therapy manuals.

All in all, I spent only $27 for a stash of magazines (Harper's, National Geographic, Audubon, and Scientific American) and an entire bookcase of a hoard listed below:

Novels

- Paradise (Toni Morrison)

- The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood)

- Elective Affinities (Johann Wolfgang van Goethe)

- The Accidental Tourist (Anne Tyler)

- Breathing Lessons (Anne Tyler)

- Searching for Caleb (Anne Tyler)

- The Big Sky (A.B. Guthrie)

- A Sport of Nature (Nadine Gordimer)

- The Mission Song (John Le Carre)

- The Russia House (John Le Carre)

- The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (Oscar Hijuelos)

- The Story of Lucy Gault (William Trevor)

- Saturday (Ian McEwan)

- The Hours (Michael Cunningham)

- The Five People You Meet in Heaven (Mitch Albom)

Short Stories

- Cathedral (Raymond Carver)

Poetry/Criticism

- The Poet's World (Rita Dove)

Spirituality

- The Glorious Impossible: Illustrated with Frescoes by Giotto (Madeliene L' Engle)

- Finding God in the Garden: Backyard Reflections on Life, Love, and Compost (Rabbi Balfour Brickner)

Memoir/Biography

- Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life (J.M. Coetzee)

- In the Company of Writers: A Life in Publishing (Charles Scribner)

- Another Life: A Memoir of Other People (Michael Korda)

- Makers of the Modern World: The Lives of Writers, Artists, Scientists, Philosophers, Composers, and Other Creators Who Formed the Pattern of Our Century (Louis Untermeyer, editor)

- War Letters: Correspondence From the American Civil War, World War I and II, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Somalia and Bosnia (Andrew Carroll, editor)

- Great Biographies: Elizabeth I, Charles Darwin, Martin Luther, Mark Twain, Charles Lindbergh, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Edison, Hans Christian Andersen, P.T. Barnum, Pearl S. Buck, Adolf Hitler, John Quincy and Louisa Adams (Reader's Digest series)

Essays/Non-Fiction

- Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (Barry Lopez)

- A Stay Against Confucion: Essays on Faith and Fiction (Ron Hansen)

- A Circle of Quiet (Madeliene L'Engle)

- Face To Face: A Reader in the World (Lynne Sharon Schwartz)

- Enough's Enough... And Other Rules of Life (Calvin Trillin)

- At Large (Ellen Goodman)

- The Rising George: America's Master Humorist Takes on Everything from Monomania To Ernest Hemingway (S.J. Perelman)

References (Current Affairs, Religion, Nature, Food, Photography, etc.)

- Fruitcakes & Couch Potatoes and Other Delicious Expressions (Christine Ammer)

- The Faith: A History of Christianity (Brian Moynahan)

- A World of Ideas: Conversations With Thoughtful Men and Women About Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future (Bill Moyers, editor)

- A World of Ideas II: Public Opinions From Private Citizens (Bill Moyers, editor)

- Genesis: A Living Conversation (Bill Moyers, editor)

- Into the Unknown: The Story of Exploration (The National Geographic Society, editor)

- Weird and Wonderful Wildlife (Martin/May/Taylor, editors)

Anthologies

- Modern American Poets: Their Voices and Visions (Robert Diyanni, editor)

- This Is My Best: America's 85 Greatest Living Authors Choose Their Best Work, and Explain Why They Have Selected It (Whit Burnett, editor)

- Treasury of Great Humor: Wit, Whimsy, and Satire From the Remote Past to the Present (Louis Untermeyer, editor)

- The Heath Introduction To Fiction (4th edition, edited by John Clayton)

- The Harper and Row Reader: Liberal Education Through Reading and Writing (Booth/Gregory, editors)

- Literature: An Introduction To Reading and Writing (4th edition, edited by Roberts/Jacobs)

- Best Newspaper Writing: Winners of the American Society Editors' Competition (Christopher Scanlan, editor)

- The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (with commentaries by William Bennett, editor)

- The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Writing, Thinking (5th edition, edited by Michael Meyer)

- The Conscious Reader (8th edition)

- The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Expository Prose (9th edition, edited by Linda Peterson)

why clowns ought to cry

2007-10-21T00:18:00.000-07:00

IT'S A WAIL OF A TIME for the usual sob stories that have become the stuff of headlines, and that's enough to know why a clown's job is herculean more than ever. With the Glorietta blast recently reminding us, albeit rudely, of the forthcoming cemetery-centered holiday come November, it has gotten awkward to sustain one's self in a merry mood. But no matter if laughter nowadays is grimly in short supply, sigh, irrepressible remains the weakness to be jolly with a joke. Which reminds me of a sad attempt by a Cebuano congressman for a rib-tickling effect last week.

Hereunder is a reprint of my recent column in the op-ed page of Sun.Star Cebu (October 16, 2007 issue) about an explosion in the face of a joker-wannabe:

Grin and grind your teeth

WORTHY enough for angels to blow theirs trumpets, those who can make people laugh. Ah, an honest-to-goodness humorist! Isn’t he more companionable than many a columnist, or someone who speaks like faith were something to bleed out of one’s wrist?

All right, here’s a confession: What gets me going to wear my Sunday best is the hope of hearing a priest who can drive the sermon home with the tongue-in-cheek grace of a stand-up comic.

Heaven, I believe, is when we feel the lightness of suspending disbelief.

Hang on, or so Rep. Tony Cuenco tried to pull off such a stunt until he winds up with his tongue now coiling tight around his neck. He went on air for a radio interview, only to somersault and spit out his words with a grin. “I was only cracking a joke,” he averred after admitting he received P200,000 —a “Christmas gift”— from the President. Nope, it was not for him to behave like an acolyte as soon as Congress beats hell’s bells for the President now in the heat of her foes’ allegations of bribery and haunted once more with the horror of impeachment. But, sorry, his avuncular vibe and baritone voice—perfect for beating his breast at the pulpit till holy water comes out of his nostrils—are just too solemn for side-splitting chortle.

How to tell a good joke?

Beats me, but I guess comedians are better hogging the limelight alone. So I think, if you dare to go on air, better to gag the interviewer and crank up canned laughter while you gnash the microphone with your dentures. And please be down to earth so you’re not far off and thus would hurt less when your face falls flat.

It will probably help not to kid one’s self that all it takes to be funny is to swallow and stick one’s tongue out. That’s what makes most politicians such a yawn, no doubt. Then again, the irony is how they become drop-dead laughable when they try utterly hard to be taken seriously. Honesty and its timing is of the essence, too. As when deaf people joke about not being able to hear.

In the end, nothing beats the coup de grace of the unexpected. Like the confession of Andy Kaufman, the self-styled “song-and-dance man” that Jim Carey played in the film Man on the Moon: “I’ve never told a joke in my life.” Doesn’t that beat Beelzebub saying he has never been on fire?

It’s all about absurdity, and anything else would be the sad spectacle of a clown seeking refuge in reckless slapstick, the grimness of the grotesque. And Nietzsche was not out to pick someone’s funnybone, certainly, when he muttered how “man alone suffer so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

Inventions, however, ought to be original. How wonderfully out of the ordinary, for instance, if a politician would dare swear his armpits out and just admit for a change how badly he wants another pair of hands to clap at his dexterity to accept what power brings under the table. Really, won’t he need to grow more dirty fingers to poke through a crack a joke leaves on his bloody head?

coming soon: a countdown of must-see movies

2007-10-02T02:55:00.000-07:00

WITH THE FALL SEASON COMES the upsurge of big studios piping up their chances for the Oscar Awards next year. Taking the cue from the early buzz as well as the track record of its creators and sheer star wattage, here are 20 films--a forecast of contenders for the critics' nods--I crave to see before the year ends:

LUST, CAUTION. "An uncompromising and incredibly seductive piece of filmmaking," raves an early review of this Best Picture winner at the recently-concluded Venice Film Festival.

After scoring the Best Director trophy at the Academy Awards two years ago, Ang Lee returns with an espionage thriller set in WWII-era Shanghai.

Asian cinema icon Tony Leung (star of Happy Together, Hero, In the Mood for Love, etc. ) stars as a powerful political figure in Shanghai who gets embroiled in a passionate game of emotional intrigue with a young woman.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA. Though screen versions of literary heavyweights often wind up a dud (consider the ill-fated filmizations of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Isabelle Allende's The House of the Spirits, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, and Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, etc), who can resist a celluloid rendition of one of the masterpieces of Nobel Prize-winning Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

Directed by Mike Newell, this sprawling saga of obsession gathers three of Latin America's acting sensations among its stellar cast: Javier Bardem (Before the Night Falls, The Sea Inside, Mondays in the Sun), Fernanda Montenegro (Central Station), and Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace). Hopefully this time, Newell will weave a magical exception to the rule of literary-cinematic mismatch.

THE KITE RUNNER. Based on novelist Khaled Hosseini's bestselling phenomenon about redemption, this is an epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal againts a barbaric backdrop (the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy up to the atrocities of the Taliban reign).

Mark Foster (whose work in Finding Neverland is breathtaking) directs this story of a man who returns to his native Afghanistan to seek redress to a long-standing wrong and rescue the son of a childhood friend.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Yet another literary adaptation (from Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!), it has magnum opus written all over it. To begin with, it blazes with the presence of my favorite actor Daniel Day-Lewis under the helm of the great Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love)

A sprawling epic about family, greed, corruption, and the pursuit of the American dream, this film is set in the booming West Coast oil fields at the turn of the 20th century.

I'M NOT THERE. Described as an "utterly bizarre" biographical film celebrating the genius and the legend of singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, this promises to be another cinematic gem from Todd Haynes after his critically acclaimed Far From Heaven.

So far the film has snagged a Special Jury Prize from this year's Venice Film Festival where the splendid Cate Blanchett also won the Best Actress for portraying a male role. Yes, Blanchett is one of the six different characters who embody Dylan's spirit (along with Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, among others), depicting different stages of the artist's life.

SWEENY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET. Brace yourself for genre-bending delight only Tim Burton can whip up: a horror musical straight out of the a Tony Award-winning dazzler showcasing the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim.

Featuring the great Johnny Depp in the title role, the story of Sweeney Todd is of a wrongfully imprisoned barber in Victorian England who sets out to seek revenge on the judge who imprisoned him. The plot is foreshadowed in the first lines of the opening number: "Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd./His skin was pale and his eye was odd./He shaved the faces of gentlemen/Who never thereafter were heard of again." Helena Bonham Carter also stars.

ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE. For her phenomenal performance as Bob Dylan in Todd Hayne's I'm Not There, Cate Blanchett seems poised to compete against herself come award season with an encore of her star-making portrayal in Elizabeth.

She reunites with Shekar Kapur in this period piece about the queen's crusade to defend her empire while dealing with conspiracies against her rule on top of her heart's vulnerability.

Geoffrey Rush also reprises his role while Samantha Morton joins the cast as the scheming Queen Mary of Scotts.

AMERICAN GANGSTER. Expect a masterpiece as the fusion of two of the finest actors in the industry whips a cinematic coup under the deft directorial hand of Scott Ridley.

This mob movie set amidst the tumult of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights era is a biopic of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), a self-driven fugitive of the segregated South who became a drug kingpin in Harlem. He built his empire by smuggling cheap, high quality heroin in the coffins of soldiers who died in Vietnam. Probing the parallels between Lucas and the cop who ultimately nailed him down, Detective Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), this film tackles how these two disparate men stick to their own personal code of ethics amidst a culture of corruption.

ATONEMENT. Out of the haunting novel by Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan, this psychologically incisive adaptation explores the life-changing consequences of a lie.

A domestic crisis explodes in the wake of an imaginative 13-year-old girl's accusation of a sexual crime, altering the fates of two lovers and other people in an upper-middle-class country home at the onset of World War II.

Finetuning an epic theme on guilt, fear, hope, and redemption, Joe Wright (the director of Pride and Prejudice) orchestrates an ensemble lead by Keira Knightly and James MacAvoy.

EASTERN PROMISES. “A mesmerizing power punch,” declares a rave review from The Rolling Stone of this David Cronenberg thriller.

Voted as the Best Film at the recently-concluded Toronto Film Festival, it stars Viggo Mortensen as a charismatic and ambitious driver for one of London's Russian mob whose cool existence gets jarred after he got enmeshed with a midwife (Naomi Watts) in the wake of young teenager's death after giving birth. Anna resolves to try to trace the baby's lineage and relatives after she discovered the girl's personal diary whose revelations cast shadows in the two protagonists' lives.

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY. For this film, Julian Schnabel (director of the gorgeous After Night Falls) won the Best Director award at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. More than enough reason, indeed, to watch out for this mind-over-matter tale about the indomitability of imagination.

It zooms in on the real-life plight of Jean-Dominique Bauby (editor of Elle France) who suffered a stroke that paralyzed his entire body at the age of 43. With only his left eye spared from the paralysis, he used his remaining faculty to write his memoir using a machine that records his blinks.

Based on Bauby's book, Schnabel has the epic task of mapping the interior world of a man in the purgatory of a psychological torment: being trapped inside his body while staking out pieces of heaven out of imagined stories from spectacular vistas visited only inside his head.

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE. A musical fantasia woven out of songs by the Beatles, the gritty world of the hippy counter-culture turns whimsical in the hands of director Julie Taymor (Frida, Titus, and the Broadway hit musical The Lion King).

Weaving a love story in the middle of the anti-war protest, mind exploration and rock 'n roll, Taymor's film moves from the dockyards of Liverpool to the creative psychedelia of Greenwich Village, from the riot-torn streets of Detroit to the killing fields of Vietnam. Tumultuous forces tear apart the young lovers Jude (Jim Sturgess) and Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) until they overcome the odds along with a bunch of friends and musicians all swept up in the maelstorm of a memorable era.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. The Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan) cast their cinematic nets wide and deep into the oceanic complexity of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem lend gravitas to this morality tale of hustling and drug-running in small town America.

When a film like this strips down the conventions of American crime drama and broadens its scope to encompass Biblical themes and the stuff of today's headlines, expect a powderkeg matched only by the Coen brothers' creative cool.

RENDITION. Indie sensation Gavin Hood (director of Tsotsi, winner of the Best Foreign Film in the 2005 Academy Awards) gets a royal mainstream treatment with an ivory-tower casting: Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon, and Jake Gyllenhal, and Alan Arkin.

Rendition is the CIA's antiseptic term for its practice of sending captured terrorist suspects to other countries for interrogation and torture.

Innocence and evil intertwine in this thriller set in the vortex of international terrorism and surveillance. Reality check, indeed, can be no less a spine-tingler in the ways of the reel.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS. Who's impervious to the honest-to-goodness spell of fantasy? After Tolkien and Peter Jackson loomed gigantic with their tales about hobbits, the film adaptation of first story of Philip Pullman’s award-winning trilogy (His Dark Materials) is set to find again the true north of epic entertainment.

Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig lend their larger-than-life presence in an alternative world full of witches where people’s souls manifest themselves as animals and talking bears fight wars. At the film's epicenter is Lyra (played by newcomer Dakota Blue Richards), a 12-year-old girl who starts out trying to rescue a friend who’s been kidnapped by a mysterious organization known as the Gobblers - and winds up on a lgendary journey to save the world. Chris Weitz directs.

INTO THE WILD. Here's one story Thoreau would have gone the distance for: An idealistic young man literally goes out on a limb in search of a place where untamed authencity exists far from the madding crowd: an American way of life ruled by hypocrisy and materialism.

Sean Penn also dares a tightrope act in his debut endeavor as screenwright and director to dramatize the bestselling book by Jon Krakauer about the true story of Christopher McCandless, an over-achieving college student and athlete Christopher McCandless. Turning his back to civilization, he abandoned his family and possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity, and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness. Along the way, Christopher encounters a medley of characters who helped him find meaning in his life until his death.

IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH. From the hand who aced the Academy Award for writing and directing Best Picture materials (Million Dollar Baby and Crash), here's one poised for a high-five.

Paul Haggis explores the minefield of love and loyalty for family and country against the backdrop of intolerance and the Iraq war. It tells the story of a war veteran (Tommy Lee Jones) and his wife (Susan Sarandon) as they search for their son, a soldier who recently returned from Iraq but has mysteriously gone missing. A police detective (Charlize Theron) helps in the investigation that rears more smoke of inhumanity from the inferno far from the warfront.

RESERVATION ROAD. It's a bumpy ride down the crossroads of grief and guilt as this film paves the way for exploring moral choices no less hellish than the devil and the deep blue sea.

Out of John Burnham Schwartz's novel, Terry George (director of Hotel Rwanda) probes the purgatory of loss and revenge as the fate of two fathers collide in the wake of a fatal car accident.

Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Ruffalo, two of the most gifted actors in American cinema today, unleash thespic fireworks with Jennifer Connelly and Mira Sorvino.

LIONS FOR LAMBS. Talk about helluva casting, and this one looks like Rushmore carved out of Beverly Hills: Robert Redford, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise.

Redford, who scooped an Oscar for his directorial debut in Ordinary People, returns to call the shot in this "powerful and gripping story that digs behind the news, the politics and a nation divided to explore the human consequences of a complicated war."

JUNO. Mythic is its meteoric appearance at this year's Toronto Film Festival. Better believe the rapt review from the critic Roger Ebert regarding this "fresh, quirky, unusually intelligent comedy" about a 16-year-old girl who deals with the madness of an unwanted pregnancy with an offbeat aplomb.

"Magical screenplay," Ebert raves of the first-time script by a former stripper who calls herself Diablo Cody.

From the Toronto fest where it ranked second to Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, Ebert reports with rapture: "I don’t know when I’ve heard a standing ovation so long, loud and warm as the one after Jason Reitman’s Juno, which I predict will become quickly beloved when it opens at Christmas time, and win a best actress nomination for its 20- year old star, Ellen Page."

health and the muscle of mirth

2007-10-02T02:22:00.001-07:00

Laughter, after all, is the best medicine.

surge of the slowpoke: take three

2007-10-02T00:46:00.002-07:00

PROCRASTINATION IS A COUNTRY where I'm a constant inhabitant. That explains the laggardly pace of this blog lately, I concede. Allow me to cram and make up for the delay by posting the last three of my opinions columns in the op-ed pages of Sun.Star Cebu for last month. As they say, better late than...

No Hurry, No Worry

NO way, speed is not for snails.

Neither do they smash each other’s shell to smithereens down the road and turn turtle.

Of happiness and contentment, the secret may be for the snail to tell. But, come on, who’s not in a hurry to spare time enough to lend an ear?

Not the Mandaue City police official who might as well have heard thunder after his car collided with that of a TV news crew. Neither they who got more than deadline to beat, according to the allegation of the browbeaten officer.

Suffice it to say that the whole affair was too tawdry to stimulate the offbeat characters in David Cronenberg’s “Crash” who, by the way, are sexually excited with injury in the wake of highway wrecks — an awful metaphor for the mishap of human connection in the age of technology.

Last we heard, both parties were reportedly driving drunk. Did they deem it liberating to leave sobriety at full throttle, in the thrill of living in a whirl? So that there’ll be no more time left, perhaps, to fret about the drudge of catching up with criminals who are often faster at cutting corners with the law; which, by the way, always leave the TV news crew and the rest of the media breathless in the blur between the quick and the dead.

In a culture that covets what’s instant —from noodles and coffee to reality show on fame and luck in the way of lotto — there’s nothing faster than the flyblown irony of the essentials — justice, truth, progress, peace — moving with a worm’s poise.

But fast is not how bliss could be found, we know. In the same manner that satisfaction can hardly be reached in the dismal distance between premature ejaculation and orgasm.

In sex as in eating and the rest of human exertions, nothing’s more desired than deceleration.

That’s the favorite word of Carl Honoré, the best-selling author of In Praise of Slowness as he spreads the gospel against the tyranny of time in modern life. With its cocktail of reportage, statistic, anecdotes of personal testimony, history and intellectual inquiry, the book clarifies “how the world got so fast and why slowing down can pay dividends in every walk of life.”

Consider the advantage of deceleration as the book unravels what happens in “a Tantric sex workshop in London to a meditation room for executives in Tokyo, from a Chi Kung squash class in Edinburgh to a SuperSlow exercise studio in New York City, from a TV-free household in Toronto to Italy.”

Beyond the exigencies of a deadline, there’s a lifeline. So argues Honoré: “These days, many of us live in fast forward — and pay a heavy price for it. Our work, health and relationships suffer. Over-stimulated, over-scheduled and overwrought, we struggle to relax, to enjoy things properly, to spend time with family and friends.”

Lest he be misconstrued as a Luddite out to mock the convenience of all things modern, he avers: “You don’t have to shun technology, live in the wilderness or do everything at a snail’s pace.”

Just breathe for a change. Yes, after spitting and cursing. You, too, can burn slow. (September 25, 2007)

On Our Feet

LET the others dream of flying. Long after the invention of rubber shoes, leave it to me to levitate horizontally with the repose of walking, to have a whistle of a time even if it means startling the birds away.

It’s good for the body, they say. Never mind if the obstinate inhabitants under the skin of my beer belly strains to disagree. It bodes well, too, for the business of footwear and all related products for preventing the spirit of a dead rat to emanate from the purgatory between our toes.

If I follow those who spread the gospel of a good hike, it’s also because it seems devoid of the breathless distress of joggers. Can’t hum or whistle, see, while they appear desperate not to bite the dust, or fall behind their inner slobs.

Against the motions of the overweight trotting around Central Park, consider the condescending soliloquy of Woody Allen’s character in Hannah and Her Sisters as he goes on walking, waxing morbid about our common ground. Death, he ruminates, will overtake us all, health buffs or not, just the same in the end.

Thus a sage once snorted: Why hurry if life is short?

Maybe we walk to steer clear from the awful possibility that we’re better off crawling or groveling in the growl of everything gone awry with the world.

See how the streets pave the march of placard-waving militants. Or the Zen-like rhythm of those rambling out of dire straits, like the jobless man kicking a can down the road.

Walking affords one ample space to keep apace with the voices in one’s head, as Allen’s character in Central Park proves. That may explain why the deranged would rather loiter out of asylum walls.

Here in America, where hikers’ trails under the shadows of trees would soon be carpeted with leaves falling colorful in autumn, nothing’s stranger than stray thoughts gravitating towards home.
Where, last I looked at the news, there was nothing more relentless than rain. Where dead rivers often roar back in fury to sweep houses away, swamp the streets, and sometimes suck a toddler down a manhole. Which, by the way, ought to stay yawning wide if this were all it would take to swallow cell-phone snatchers off their tracks.

That’s when homesickness becomes a watered-down version of happiness.

That sounds off-kilter, off course, and utterly cloying like Charlie Chaplin, declaring, “I love walking in rain, because nobody can see me crying.”

Last I heard, the Cebu City Council seemed like a bunch of rain-soaked chicks, squeaking while stumped about the city’s congested roads. Now here comes City Hall needing more money to construct mini-dikes in rivers often flaunting its habit of overflowing. Oh, as if their concerns are not up their necks, the City Council is also asking all barangay officials “to apprehend under-aged youth seen loitering in the streets beyond the 10 p.m. curfew to deter the prostitution of minors.”

That, of course, is no less ill-fated than our boys and girls falling in manholes or drowning in the flood.

Calamity funds are afoot, they promise. The city will stay above water, they say.

Wish they can walk their talk. (September 18, 2007)

In The Mood For Blood

SO it happened that criminals up for execution were privileged to have their fill of their request for a last meal. There’s even this joke about a death-row fellow who dreamed, before the executioner could say grace, of getting a big bowl of strawberries.

“Sorry, but strawberries are out of season,” the warden mumbled. “Ah, no problem,” the prisoner replied as if he got the luxury of time to relax until harvest. “I’ll wait.”

But gallows humor like that does hit home. Go ask those gnashing their teeth, grieving for the victims of “vigilante killings” in Cebu or thumbing down the daredevil stunts by serial murderers gung-ho against alleged criminals.

Confronted with such callous scorn of what he calls “the gift of life,” Cardinal Vidal reportedly muttered “with a laugh” regarding the recent slaying near the Archbishop’s Palace of an alleged robber who just got out on a bail: “It was very near my house pa naman. Is it coming my way?”

It would have been breezy for the bloodthirsty squad —believed to be responsible for summary executions in Cebu City that have claimed about 180 lives since December 2004 — to knock on the door of the good cardinal in case their knees would crumple down under the weight of a conscience. If that could happen, would the cardinal be sure they’re not kidding him?

Why can’t the police do anything about it, he whined in wonder. Now that’s enough to stir a stand-up comedian into rattling off a litany of rib-tickling reasons. Foremost of which, concur the cynics, could be that law enforcement has two faces enough for a clown’s masks handy for crying and chuckling his tonsils out at the same time.

Also funny how this cradle of Christianity, in a city where piety is often worn on its devotees’ foreheads, gangland gore loosens its hair down. All because the silence of public apathy resounds like a choric undertone of “amen” for the shadowy squad playing angels of an avenging god.

Most of the victims had been convicted or served time in jail, stressed the cardinal who believed they could have availed themselves of deliverance and the grace of second chance. Or, maybe the vigilantes are not vocal enough about humming along to the tune of “Let Me Try Again.”

Flaunting their sharp-shooting acumen, perhaps they’d be handy to win the war for American troops in Iraq. Or, considering their surgical precision at tracking down public enemies, why not push them to earn brownie points for Cebu by deploying them abroad and tracing the remnants of 9/11 terrorists or Osama Bin Laden?

A good career move, God knows, is long overdue for publicity-prone executioners who might be itching behind their bonnets for the chance to show their faces. (September 11, 2009)

a penis mightier than the sword

2007-10-02T00:46:00.001-07:00

Here comes a perfect match for the ballsy banana cutter! :)

why we need a kick in the head

2007-09-13T07:15:00.000-07:00

PROGRESS DOESN'T ALWAYS pave the way for a smooth-sailing life. Road congestion continues to be the bane fo urban living.

Regarding this problem, here's a reprint of my opinion column in the op-ed page of Sun.Star Cebu (4th of September, 2007):

All the way

TOUGH luck, but it’s not totally berserk to bring the “tartanilla” back.

For many motorists in Metro Cebu, getting kicked by a horse might be no more tragic than being trapped in the midst of traffic. With the former, at least, one would hurtle away from one spot to another really quick. Broken bones, too, couldn’t be more dismal than the headache and heartburn triggered by mayhem on the road.

As it is, finding a way out of the woeful state of our major streets soon looks as farfetched as discovering a unicorn.

Putting the cart before the steed, it seems, has long been the way of Cebu’s movers and shakers gone helter-skelter in pursuit of progress. No wonder Paul Villarete, the Cebu City planning and development officer, must have felt like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were just a snort away.

“Almost as many cars run in Metro Cebu as in Manila, but Cebuano authorities are not improving the major roads,” Villarete rued in a recent forum on Environmentally Sustainable Transport (EST). Only an escape artist like Houdini could have wiggled free from the cramped streets in Cebu City against these odds: at least 8,329 units of public utility jeepneys (PUJs); 5,788 units of taxis, and 952 units of buses and mini-buses.

Through all this, of course, the air doesn’t go straight to anybody’s lungs like mountain mist and ocean breeze.

Thumb your nose down, too, at Desiderata; there’s just no way you can go placidly amid uncollected garbage, flash floods during rain, the procession during fiesta, and the stream of mourners on the heels of a hearse. (Was the death due perhaps to road rage, cancer by recurrent inhalation of traffic fumes, or the burst of a blood vessel arising from existential anxieties only a traffic jam can cause?)

As if it’s not enough that there’s a shortage of new infrastructure improvements in the city in the face of its burgeoning motorists, making matters worse is the dearth of discipline: the uncurbed issuance of franchise for public utility vehicles, the surplus of motorcycles as public transport, as well as drivers and pedestrians who are up and about like they got nine lives.

Horse sense and time are of the essence, true. And while Villarete’s proposal for a “a high-occupancy bus” or mass transport system is long overdue, better count on the bureaucracy to get going in the back of the snail and the turtle.

And because such a proposal can be green-lighted only with the prerequisite of political will, could the vote-fueled leadership steel its stomach to buck the backlash from displaced PUJ drivers come election time?

Elsewhere in the world—particularly in Stockholm, London, and Singapore — the race is on to steer clear from clogged thoroughfares with eco-friendly innovations. By tapping the resources of corporations like International

Business Machines (IBM), these megacities have come up with the “biggest green initiative coming down the road these days,” according to New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tomas Friedman.

“Congestion pricing—charging people for the right to drive into a downtown area—is already proving to be the most effective short-term way to clean up polluted city air, promote energy efficiency and create more livable urban centers, while also providing mayors with unexpected new revenue,” writes Friedman.

Progress, in the long run, is about giving the will and imagination a full rein. So as not to be left behind, it’s up for Metro Cebu’s leaders to hold no horses with an open mind.

madeleine and her majesty

2007-09-09T16:25:00.001-07:00

DEATH HAS REASONS to gloat and romp around with the royalty of his harvest so far this year: filmmakers Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni, tenor Luciano Pavarotti, and most recently, author Madeleine L’Engle (She was 88.)

With her hoard of poetry, plays, childhood fables (particularly the children’s classic, A Wrinkle in Time, etc.) and religious meditations as well as science fiction, L'Engle has "transcended both genre and generation." So much so that the sheer range of her oeuvre has been cited in the Dictionary of Literary Biography for its “peculiar splendor.”

I've been a fan of her writing since I devoured her book, Walking On Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (which I bought at the Doulos ship when it docked in Cebu in the late 90s.) If there's one book that lifted my feet an inch higher from the ground since then, this is it. No other work of non-fiction, besides those of Diane Ackerman and Pico Iyer, has unleashed a rapacity to partake of its wisdom and grace with a pilgrim's need to mark it--with underlines and dog-ears-- for a revisit time and again.

Here are a few nuggets from L'Engle:

When asked where faith stops and art begins: There is no separating the two, she reasons, "it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory."

Encouraging her readers to shift gears and slow down through the helter-skelter compulsions of survival, she argues for the imperatives of inspiration to turn the "chaos of life" into the "cosmos of art" by staying attuned to one's creative spirit: "Unless we are creators, we are not fully alive."

"Complicated creatures we are, aware of only the smallest fragment of ourselves; seeking good and yet far too often unable to tell the difference between right and wrong; misunderstanding each other and so blundering into the tragedies of warring nations, horrendous discrepancies between rich and poor, and the idiocy of a divided Christendom."

When one interviewer told her that God doesn’t send more trouble than a person can stand, L’Engle replied that she sometimes asks God, “Why are you overestimating my capacity to this extent?”

“Why does anybody tell a story?” she once asked, even though she knew the answer.
“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

gone is the giant

2007-09-06T08:11:00.001-07:00

AN ERA PASSETH. SIR LUCIANO, GOODBYE AND THANK YOU.

overcoming the ocean

2007-09-04T08:40:00.001-07:00

"MAN WILL NOT ONLY ENDURE; HE WILL PREVAIL." - William Faulkner.

awry in uniform

2007-09-04T07:22:00.000-07:00

GUESS WHO'S ALWAYS getting bad press apart from the craven crop of politicians? Policemen, that's who. As much as one yearns for more exceptions to the rule of misdemeanors and maladroit conduct, there's just no stopping the rain of rotten tomatoes.

Here's a reprint of my recent opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu (28 August 2007 issue):

Of vice and men

Crows may turn white, but wouldn’t it be a mere flight of fancy to see the future of police in a new light? It may be a thing with feathers, but hope looks like it needs to be huffed and puffed up with hallucinogen to lull us into seeing doves instead of vultures and bats.

What’s the true color of our cops?

If you were on a psychedelic high, you’d probably see a swoop of low-flying creatures with the habits of chameleons. You’d hover into the Vice Control Section (VCS), for instance, and you’d end up winking at the way some of its operatives adapt so adroitly into the instincts of its enemies. Yes, until its itch and stench sticks like second skin, and you’d wonder no more how three policemen— “extortionists,” cried a businessman— reportedly evolved into birds of the same feather.

Fly me to the moon, you’d shrug, instead of the sun-lit frontline in the campaign against illegal gambling, prostitution, and prohibited drugs.

Asked if there are other VCS officers into the same rotten fray, the Police Regional Office (PRO) director in Central Visayas isn’t miming the monkey who neither sees nor hears evil. “We have reports of people involved in the organization, not only in the Vice Control Section,” he concedes.

Reality check, and it’s all right if you don’t mind being green-eyed with envy at the blind and the deaf.

And then we heard the VCS was immediately disbanded. True, morality may be a fledgling concept among a few cops floundering neck-deep in the sewer. But as a police’s brainchild against badness, doesn’t the disbandment seem like throwing the baby along with the bathwater even if it now appears no more cuddly than “anak ni Janice,” the tiyanak?

Last we looked, the underworld is still breezy with vile smoke all over the region. No doubt the VCS has still so much task at hand. And despite the fact that its fingers have grown hair and talons, a scissor and a clipper every now and them could have done the trick instead of a demolition crew gone gung-ho with a cleaver.

For a while there, it was as if the top honchos of law enforcement were no less as vulnerable as the benighted villagers in Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Go on with entrapment and squeeze out the scalawags at the VCS with smoldering pincers, good, but it would have been the better part of valor to save the unit. After all, it hasn’t outlived its functions yet. Or as Cebu City Councilor Sylvan Jakosalem averred: “All international police agencies have their vice squads, which are very specific in their duty in running after violators of either local ordinances or national laws pertaining to vices.”

Letting the VCS be and making the entrapment as incessant and steadfast as possible might yet be a feather in the cap of police hierarchy. Not unless the bigwigs were scared at the prospect of more controversies flying smack at their faces, the VCS—being such a lure to the lawless with uniforms—would have been like a focus point for spotting more shenanigans until all the undesirables would be discovered and come undone. Yes, like those stuck after preying on a flytrap.

Then again, that would prove that many in the police couldn’t soar no higher than flies feasting on rubbish, carcass, feces.

wonder under water

2007-08-29T08:43:00.001-07:00

From "Journey of Man," an aquatic acrobatic performed by the renowned Cirque du Soleil

my own private filmfest

2007-08-28T21:52:00.000-07:00

TO SEE IS TO CELEBRATE. Here's the top 10 from my recent binge of DVD viewing:

JULES AND JIM. About loving and living like death is a joke, one can’t experience a more effervescent film than this one-of-a-kind menage-a-trois that’s also valentine to friendship and reading. Directed by Francois Truffaut, this ode-worthy adaptation from Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel is way up there in my all-time top 40 list of personal favorites (aside from another Truffaut wonder, “The 400 Blows”).

The film explores the 30-year friendship—from the bohemian pre-World War I Paris to its doomed aftermath--between a French writer and an Austrian biologist as well as the ensuing love triangle with Catherine (in a sensually enigmatic performance by Jeanne Moreau). A feather in the cap of the French New Wave, this film is celebratory as it captures the devil-may-care days of youth—with a bacchanalia of details—matched with the panache of its zooms, flash cuts, freeze frames, etc.--that deftly reflect the changes in the relationship up to the postwar years.

INTOLERANCE. “Quite the most marvelous thing which has been put on the screen,” pipes in a celluloid scholar.

Living up to D.W. Griffith’s epithet as the silent era's "king of the world," this is the epitome, indeed, of an epic. Staggering is the scope of its vision and its narrative ambition as Griffith interweaves a quartet of parallel stories set in different historical periods: the modern 1916 when a workers' strike was brewing up, Jerusalem circa Christ's crucifixion, 1572 when Paris stewed with Catholic persecution against the Protestant Huguenots, and ancient Babylon. It’s nothing short of miraculous how the four stories accelerate into a common ground in its climactic race against time to save an innocent young man from the gallows. Literally heavenly, too, is the visual epilogue—a swarm of angels floating over a battlefield—a hallucination of a wished-for world without fear, ignorance, hatred, intolerance.

No wonder, the prize-winning and most controversial film critic Pauline Kael raved about it outright as the “greatest movie ever made.”

TOKYO STORY. How does a bomb buried in one’s heart feel? Find out with this restraint but emotionally explosive cache of insight by Yasujiro Ozu. Into the booby-trapped terrain of parent-children relationship—with its architectonics of tenderness and ache—Ozu dwells and delivers his stylistic signature: shots of nature undercutting and overlapping the story, the “tatami” mat angle, the stillness of his shots, and his characters speaking directly into the camera (compelling the viewer into intimacy).

Simplicity is beauty. True enough, this film hooks the heartstring tight into the plight of an aging couple on the road from their rural village to visit their two married kids in the city. What follows wrenches the guts without the fluffs and frills of sentimentality through the quintessentially Japanese yet universal theme of generation gap. So much so that a character’s comment (“One cannot serve his parents from beyond the grave") resonates with the crack of a rock under the weight of a teardrop. One of my top all-time favorites, definitely.

STORY OF WOMEN. Morality is a matter best left for God’s infinite grace, but its complexity is what director Claude Chabrol mirrors with utter complexity and unflinching humanity—warts and all—in this cinematic coup.

Based on the last woman to be executed in France, a housewife guillotined for performing abortions and housing prostitutes in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, the film dares to see a side of war rarely depicted: the lives in the margins of battle, no less caught in the crossfire between good and evil.

Exquisite as always is Isabelle Huppert, declared Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for the layered and quilt-worthy quality of her characterization: at once sly and naïve, vulture-like and vulnerable.

COMEDY OF POWER. Probably one of the most fecund of filmic collaboration in world cinema (aside from Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, Zhang Yimou and Gong Li, Mario O’Hara and Nora Aunor), Claude Chabrol and Isabelle Huppert score once more in this political thriller.

Inspired by a real-life scandal involving a French business empire and several top-level politicians, this film is tongue-in-cheek with its timely and provocative account of corporate and political rot. Huppert packs a knockout performance as a feisty magistrate, called "the piranha" in the judiciary system for her almost ravenous appetite for white-collar criminals in high places even as her domestic life languishes in the shallows.

Zooming into a world darkened by the monstrosity of power with its spawn of threat and intimidation, Chabrol is also light-handed at squeezing out humor as privilege paves the way for shadowy characters to lose face and fumble into disgrace.

THE CIRCLE. Smuggled out of Iran for the Venice Film Festival where it won the Golden Lion Award for Best Film, this daredevil work by Jafar Panahi roars with rage against a claustrophobic political culture.

Despite the pall of repression and injustice that hangs over the chador of a chain of women burdened by their gender, Panahi casts a spell of compassion as he showcases the rage and resilience of each character, scraping for goodness and dignity while scurrying through streets like rats to evade arrest.

From the opening scene at a delivery room and final moment in the dungeon, Panahi’s camera bears witness to the wonder of each woman’s spunk in spite of their common nightmare.

MAMMA ROMA. Stirring a critical stew against post-war Italian society and peppering it with dollops of neorealism, Pier Paolo Pasolini demonstrates how cinematic art can pack artillery for his anti-Fascist ideology.

Outrage becomes this film with the fiery Anna Magnani in the lead role as a former whore struggling to steer away from her past for the sake of her estranged teenage son.
But a better life with her child and her petit bourgeois idealism haplessly goes against the grain of Pasolini's worldview, whittling her dreams to the dimension of a tragic opera.

Like most of Pasolini's films, Mamma Roma was grist for controversy, but it was nothing compared to the outcry over La Ricotta, a 35-minute short featuring Orson Welles included in this DVD. Seized and condemned "for insulting the religion of the state," La Ricotta is a subtle but droll thumb-down at the Catholic Church with its story of a director (Welles) filming the crucifixion of Christ in which the actor playing Jesus stuffs himself with ricotta cheese and dies from indigestion on the cross!

THE MAGDALENE SISTERS. From acclaimed director Peter Mullan comes an incendiary testimony to one of the great tragedies of our time: an unflinching account of life inside the Magdalene Laundry, one of the asylums for "wayward women" run by the Catholic Church in Ireland under the mercy, or the lack thereof, of sadistic nuns. Stripped of their dignity and condemned to indefinite sentences of manual labor in order to cleanse themselves of the "sins," the women have become outcasts of society and spurned by their families.

In the face of hell, Mullan’s camera—basking in the perspective of three young inmates—also lays bare and celebrates their indomitable will and defiance that pave the way for the closure of a repressive establishment. Righting a wrong is never a cliché in Mullan’s hand as this gripping film went on to garner the top prize at the Venice Film Festival.

L’AVVENTURA. Hailed by many as Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece, L’Avventura is veritably a voyage of discovery, not only for its characters but also for its viewers bracing for a film’s function as a moral mirror and a visual poem.

A milestone in motion-picture grammar, film scholars call it. What appears to be a search for a missing person in a rocky island is actually an exploration of spiritual alienation and an understated diatribe against the decadence of idle upper class and their superficial notions on love and happiness.

Symbolic resonance is what Antonioni luxuriates in this tale of a girl who mysteriously disappears on a yachting trip. While her lover and her best friend search for her, they begin an affair. Eschewing smooth plotting, Antonioni revels instead in the power of symbols and uncanny character development. Something that grows like second skin with each repeat viewing.

CAMILLE CLAUDEL. Obsession with art and its intimacy with insanity. Thus this riveting film renders the life of Camille Claudel, the prodigy-muse-lover of sculptor Auguste Rodin who later became her competitor en route to her fall from grace.

Isabelle Adjani is incandescent in the title role opposite the great Gerard Depardieu in this historically accurate depiction of one of the most important union in the history of modern art.
The film begins with Camille braving the winter and digging clay with bare fingers from a frozen ditch. In the end, with her being hauled to an asylum, the viewer is left asking regarding the cause of Claudel's madness. Was it genes, or her reaction against society's mores, or the product of Rodin's persecution? Or, as one exasperated family member reckons, was it "the madness of mud"?

(Next in my viewing list: L'Atalante, Twilight Samurai, A Streetcard Named Desire, The Remains of the Day, Hannah and Her Sisters, Coup de Tourchon, Face, Army of Shadows, After Life, and Lilies of the Field.)

on their feet

2007-08-18T19:13:00.000-07:00

WHO SAYS INCARCERATION is a drudge? Not the dancing prisoners of Cebu who recently went out in the open with their terpsichorean skills and caught the world's eyes.

Beyond the crowd-pleasing choreography, my opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu (August 14, 2007 issue) zooms in:

Rhythm and reason

Postcard-perfect beaches, sweet mangoes, online dating and porn sites, guitars, and singers. These may have placed Cebu in the international map, but certainly nothing more sensational and unprecedented as the upbeat video of its dancing prisoners.

Such a welcome, if not well-choreographed, respite from recurrent headlines about the arrhythmic showdown between Cebu’s governor and the city mayor. It may not shake the viewers of YouTube and the media across the borders, but a Gwen-Tom tango might yet clinched for Cebu the international renown as an island of happy feet.

Or else, locked in their long-drawn-out hostility as if they were each other’s zombie, they’d become prisoners forever of their mutual disgrace.

Digression aside, one can shake off the straitjacket of downbeat expectations. Or so proved the eurhythmic inmates at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) now reportedly rehearsing to the tune of “Electric Dreams” for another crack at global spotlight.

A good turn, of course, deserves another. And so what more uplifting flight of fancy than the CPDRC jailbirds adding one more feather in their caps—pardon the pun—as a contingent for next year’s Sinulog mardi gras. Though this scenario looks like a security nightmare, wouldn’t that be a hoot for tourism to drum up international interest once again?

Beyond the hoopla, however, the recent popularity of the prisoners is a good time as any to look at their dance as a twinkle-toed prelude to deliverance. The very notion of rehabilitation, after all, presupposes the propitious idea of the incarcerated finally breaking out to a new and brighter day after facing the music of their transgressions or their outcast state. It’s about turning over a new leaf, yes.

No less spectacular than the stunts of Cirque du Soleil, certainly, would be the grace of a convict or the accused up on his feet for a whistle-worthy personal transformation.

Prison, despite its deprivations and utter desolation, can also pave the way for a wider inner world. Regarding the epiphany of empowerment, the book “Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela” abounds with passages in which the political prisoners formed a “university” inside the Robben Island prison, where Mandela and his friends shared and primed themselves up with books by Tolstoy, etc. Read how they dance around embitterment as they found decency even in their cold-hearted jailers.

Then again, outside the walls of prison also looms a dead end. Where finding a new path and bending the back of an old and dark past can be as painstaking as limbo rock. Or, the dance of death. That’s what the ill-starred spirit of one ex-convict found out after he was gunned down by two masked men Sunday night in Barangay Tisa. (Police, according to the report, are still determining if the incident was the handiwork of vigilantes.)

How ready are we as a community to give reformed sinners a second chance?

If only making a new life were as tidy as learning a new dance step. “Without an effective support group and rehabilitation program in the community,” explains non-government organization (NGO) official, “offenders still run the risk of getting involved in crimes again.”

Civilization could be judged by the way it treated its prisoners, stated Winston Churchill. But it’s a sorry judgment on us when our society, with the orchestration of its prejudice and discrimination—out of the lack of imagination and faith—can only compel those seeking a new footing into our fold to dance, awkwardly and hapless ever after, alone.

eros and psyche: for my wife-lover-best friend, arlaine

2007-08-09T13:43:00.001-07:00

To celebrate the birthday (August 10th)of Arlaine J. Obenieta, here's a montage of Cupid and Psyche culled from various era of art to the tune of one of my favorite songs: Sting's "My One and Only Love."

to erase the stain of badness from their badges

2007-08-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

IF THERE'S SOMEBODY in dire need to possess congeniality to inspire our confidence, it's none other than the police.

Here's a reprint of my recent opinion column in the op-ed page of Sun.Star Cebu (July 31, 2007):

Too true to be good

Perhaps we can love our law enforcers truly only if we’d have the hearts of their mothers.

Papa may preach, but “God sees us through our mothers' eyes,” as one philosopher once surmised. The milk of human kindness. Nothing else is more essential than this when cops are no less vulnerable than crybabies. Then again, those inclined to be cynical—as the police badge become something to weep for—would see nothing but crocodile tears.

Through rose-colored glasses, however, is the way Police Regional Office (PRO) 7 Director Silverio Alarcio Jr. looks at the men and women under his wings. True to a poet’s vision of hope as something with feathers, Alarcio is reportedly in cloud nine, “happy to see an improvement in the PNP’s image” and “elated that the business sector has a better outlook on the organization.” Yes, despite the negative approval rating.

When one’s scraping the bottom, even morsels are manna enough. And so a -36 evaluation on the PNP’s sincerity in stamping out corruption can only be an improvement from its 2005 rating of -54.

Look who’s endowed with maternal instincts, and the top gun in Central Visayas would rather behold the future as fibers of glass stained with sunlight and rainbow. “In the next survey,” he says, “we will hopefully get a positive rating.”

That’s the story, that’s the glory of love mothers can hum along: “You've got to give a little, take a little, and let your poor heart break a little.”
With such forecast worthy of a painter’s canvas, Alarcio and the rest of the rank and file had better reckon a reality check from Marc Chagall: “My mother's love for me was so great I have worked hard to justify it.”

By “being sincere on the job and in eradicating corrupt activities within the organization,” Alarcio is bullish about continuing their “transformation efforts.”

Which, if that would turn fantasy to fact, would be no less fabulous than Ovid’s tales of transformation wherein love is all it takes for a metamorphosis: a person or lesser deity becomes a stone, a flower, a tree, or a star.

An epic task of the imagination, what Alarcio is up to.

And, hopefully, Senior Insp. George Ylanan, the chief of Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Bureau (CIIB), and policewoman Jerybel Lerio can believe endings of legends and fairy tales do come true.

Meanwhile, not even their mothers’ lullabies are enough to shush both Ylanan and Lerio after lawyer Alex Tolentino deems police integrity no better than bugaboo to scare children into slumber.

Beware of the monster called “Mamlantiray.” That’s someone who plant evidence on suspects, thus begins Tolentino’s tale after he, in defense of two drug suspects, allegedly badmouthed Lerio. “The credibility of our office is at stake here,” cried Ylanan, who could have been more emphatic if he muttered: “Mother, mother, I am sick…”

it takes eight to tag

2007-08-06T02:00:00.000-07:00

MY PILLOW MAY be too hard for your head, but you can call me anything but a wet blanket. So it's as good as tickle when I got tagged by Isolde Amante.

Here are the rules for “8 facts”:

• In the 8 facts about [name], you share 8 things that your readers don’t know about you. At the end, you tag 8 other bloggers to keep the fun going. Each blogger must post these rules first.

• Each blogger starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

• At the end of the post, a blogger needs to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
So, take it or leave it:

Fact 1: My original birth certificate carried a mythic name--Hector--but my mother said I was sickly and blamed it all on that name. And so when I was baptized a month later, she took her cue from the daredevil portrait of an archangel in our altar. I have never been hospitalized ever since, thank God and my guardian namesake. Then again, the protracted state of non-existence about a certain Michael Obenieta in the files of the national census was like a sick joke. It was only last year, 38 years after birth, that I set the record at the NSO straight and became legit.

Fact 2: I sold newspapers during my elementary days because I envied my best friend and classmate--the late Gerry Almin--whose pockets were always full from his earnings as a newsboy. Of course, I read the papers first before I hawked them out in the streets, shouting again and again short of Eureka: "Bulletin, Journal, Express..."

Fact 3: As a reader, I'm obsessed about closures and continuities, and so I can't and won't read a book without first reading the last page. As a writer, I find the article "the" too imposing if not taking itself too seriously, thus I advertently avoid beginning my sentences with such as much as I can.

Fact 4: I have a life-long crush on Nora Aunor since I gawked at her way back in the 70s in the anthology "Makulay na Daigdig ni Nora" and the Sunday variety show "Superstar." My love affair with the movies started from my fondness for her films, the best of which have become hallmarks in Philippine cinema. From her humble beginnings, she amazes me with her larger-than-life gifts no less than her iconic persona, nothing short of phenomenal in Filipino culture, as well as her survivor's spunk. And I've been getting the hang of my friends' jokes since I cross my Noranian heart.

Fact 5: When going to funeral parlors, I always have the urge to take a peek at the faces under the coffin glass and often wonders if they're not yawning or rolling their eyeballs while we're not looking.

Fact 6: Among my fantasies, nothing's more recurrent than singing like Sting, James Brown, Andrea Bocelli, Michael Crawford, Jamie Cullum, and Yoyoy Villame. Poor me, reality check started early: I was eight when my mother, nudged by our neighbor next door, accompanied me to an audition for an amateur singing contest sponsored by Darigold (a brand of milk now extinct). Among the wannabes, my name was called first and I just stood there in the middle, petrified by the first guitar strain of "Bato sa Buhangin," my mouth gaping wide as I groped for the lyrics and wondered how my tongue turned into stone.

Fact 7: My dream jobs: film reviewer (I'd give an arm if I could write like Pauline Kael, Noel Vera, and Richard Corliss), carpenter (God knows I'd only end up hammering my head on the nail, but it's nothing short of miraculous that I actually earned my first 35 dollars here in America after five-hours toil as a carpenter's assistant, ha ha!), gardener (because I don't have a green thumb and the secret life of flowers and weeds fascinates me), librarian (because it's erotic to be privy to all that body of knowledge), lighthouse keeper (ah, solitude and the horizon), psychiatrist (because what's cooler than getting paid by those who are not sane enough to presume that I knew better?) and police detective (because nothing's more life-affirming than the hunt and the cloak-and-dagger thrill of it all.) Talking of the last dream job, I actually took year's worth of Criminology in college and dropped after realizing that my instructors were teaching me no more than how to scratch my head and have a big tummy.

Fact 8: Preemptive measures suits me perfect, as when a lady agreed to go out on a dinner date with me and before we could eat, I proposed marriage to her even before I formally made it known that I'm courting her. To prove that I was not joking, I later asked the lounge singer to dedicate the Beatles' "I Will" for her, and I had to go to the toilet when the singer started mentioning her name in the prelude. Lest she had the urge to slap me, I stayed in the toilet throughout the duration of the song. What's next? Well, she has been my wife and the mother of our two children. But up to now, she's still convinced there was potion in her plate.

Enough said. Gotta move on, and pass the tagged ball to these 8 bloggers: John Biton, Jeremiah Bondoc, Januar Yap, Niza Mariñas, Marlen Limpag, Lorenzo Niñal, Cathy Perez and Noel Villaflor.

faith, reason, and the power of imagination

2007-08-04T04:35:00.001-07:00

The gospel according to Sir Salman Rushdie

magnified madness

2007-07-30T01:39:00.001-07:00

A SECURITY GUARD is dependable as long as he stays alert where he is supposed to be, vigilant at any given time but at a safe distance . Something's iffy, however, when notions of security come masked in the face of paranoia. About the anti-terrorism law recently passed in the Philippines, here's a reprint of my column in the op-ed pages of Sun.Star Cebu (July 24, 2007):

Me, You, and Everyone We Know: A Peep Show

NOT unless you’re an exhibitionist or an attention-starved KSP, nothing is more self-annihilating than anonymity.

But for some of us who find a corner of sky by basking in the devil-may-care bliss of being unremarkable, it’s a monstrosity when the freedom of our privacy is going the way of the dinosaur. It’s cold comfort, indeed, when the sanctuary of confidentiality stops where the Human Security Act ((HSA), the anti-terrorism law, begins.

Who cares if minding your personal affairs is nothing more than a hill of beans?

In the eyes of the government, it may heave up like what Rufa Mae Quinto hides under her tank top.

If I sound suspicious in the face of President Arroyo’s assurance that the HSA or Republic Act 9372, it could be due to my allergy to legalese. Swallowing the law’s nuances, I confess, renders me fit for a Heimlich maneuver. Go wring my neck, but why do I feel choked about this well-meaning edict?

If there were many who’d rather grow genitals on their foreheads than bow down to HSA, it’s because there’s a lot to raise eyebrows for in the law’s provision “to secure the state and protect our people from terrorism.”

According to detractors of the law, all it takes is mere suspicion for law enforcers to subject the accused like a nude offering to the lions: preventive detention, warrantless arrest, house arrest, prohibition from the use of cell phones, computers and any other means of communication even when granted bail, surveillance and wiretapping, and examination, sequestration and freezing of bank deposits and other assets. Geez!

When the enforcement of the law jerks away the presumption of innocence like a used condom, suspicion renders it smooth to spawn more wariness. Or a sense of doom.

HSA is supposed to show how the government loves us enough to spare us from terrorists and the obscenity of their hate. But who was it again who thought, “Pure love and suspicion cannot dwell together: at the door where the latter enters?”

Isn’t suspicion a mental picture seen through an imaginary keyhole? It is, one writer remarked, “the courageous side of weakness.”

Look whose pants are down when the law started limbering up last Friday. The enforcers might as well be no more than fumblers at sixes and sevens with virginity. Or so reveals Police Regional Office (PRO) 7 Director Silverio Alarcio Jr. “Even some lawyers do not know some of the provisions so how much more our policemen on the ground?” Alarcio minced no words, stressing the need for education “everybody, every sector…as far as that Human Security Act is concerned.”

Far more preferable, indeed, is candor compared to the bravado of paranoia. Which engorges itself like a voyeur’s drool-greasy gratification out of cocking an eye at unsuspecting people.

Behavioral science explains “voyeurs generally have a history of insecurity and fear of rejection.” If that’s merely psychobabble worthy of the government’s roll of eyeballs, the incumbent administration is hardly exuding a post-coital glow after the majority spurned the advances of its senatorial slate last elections. The president’s popularity rating, in fact, has been no higher than the moan of a woman pretending orgasm.

Excuse me, but how comforting to heed the call of the toilet bowl. As I grunt and groan, I hope there’s no camera secretly seeking a terrorist splashing and swimming below my waist.

to see is to believe

2007-07-30T01:37:00.001-07:00

Grand design and other tell-tale signs for those dazed and lost in the midst of the Creator's signatures.

proofs raised to the power of five

2007-07-30T01:28:00.001-07:00

Because the lack of faith is a result of attention deficit, here are arguments for waking up. Amen, after all, is also a four-letter word.

for a while there: postscript to a phenomenon

2007-07-25T02:48:00.000-07:00

SO IT WAS TOLD: In the ancient times, Celtic druids who lived in what is now called Scotland were handy with wands.

Called a "man with the wisdom of the woods," a druid deemed the trees in the forest as magical and sacred: The cedar is the womb of energy, life-giving. An ash tree is useful for healing. The strong elm tree can enrich the power of a spell. A burning birch bark is a potent love potion.

Nowadays, the druid might as well be in the realms of the dead in the wake of trees massacred to make paper.

But when paper are transfigured with the existence of text, reincarnated in the shades of bookstores and libraries, I believe the druids are waving their wands again. So that the stardust of insight and enchantment, revelation and transformation will be upon us. And the world will be breezy again, brighter with the reverb of green, green, green.

* * *

"It's really the wand that chooses the wizard, of course." So explains Mr. Ollivander, the moon-eyed manufacturer and merchandiser of wands along Diagon Alley in J.K. Rowling's phenomenal series.

Of all Rowling's characters, Ollivander (played by John Hurt in the movies) is the one who intrigued me the most. To begin with, his first name has never been revealed, as far as I can remember. Never mind if he is renowned as the best wandmaker in the enchanted part of Britain.

No one, it seems, has bothered to ask his first name though his popularity has preceded him for never forgetting every wand he has ever sold, greeting people by rattling off the specifications of their magical sticks.

Come to think of it, there would be no Hogwarts school of wizardry and witchcraft, no epic battle between Harry Potter and Voldemort without Ollivander's wands.

I've been fascinated, too, of the fantastic effort it possibly took for him to secure the core materials to make those wands: the heartstring of a dragon, the feather of a phoenix, the tail hair of the unicorn. Wow!

He obviously had so much power in his hands, and yet he remained at the background--like God--throughout the seven-book series. Yes, he was called upon to perform the "weighing of the wands" at the Triwizard Tournament, but always he just faded out and away from the thick of things .

Truth to tell, I wished there was more of him in those books, the way Zeus often made his presence felt in mythology.

Because I wanted so much to honor how he loomed large in my imagination, I chose to name my eldest child after him and an archangel.

Wish my son Gabriel Ollivan will discover, too, how the wand of words can spring a forest of possibilities.

***

Writers rock the world. And if my children would deem me nutty in the future--if books would become extinct, God forbid--for daring such a declaration, I will tell them this bit of history when reading hooked children and adults alike:

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final volume of J.K. Rowling's all-conquering fantasy series, sold a mountainous 8.3 million copies in its first 24 hours on sale in the United States, according to Scholastic Inc.

No other book, not even any of the six previous Potters, has been so desired, so quickly. Deathly Hallows averaged more than 300,000 copies in sales per hour — more than 5,000 a minute. The $34.99 book, even allowing for discounts, generated far more revenue than the opening weekend of the latest Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which came out July 10.

"The excitement, anticipation, and just plain hysteria that came over the entire country this weekend was a bit like the Beatles' first visit to the U.S.," Scholastic president Lisa Holton said.

That news, of course, would be enough a last laugh of, if not a lullabye for, a druid.

a woman writes about a boy and the wonder of it all, to begin with

2007-07-25T02:41:00.001-07:00

Once upon a time, a global phenomenon was born: an orphaned boy with a lightning scar on his forehead. Along came a revolution of reading. Just when the digital age seemed to usher in a universe of alliteracy, the magic of the written word suddenly held sway, casting its spell the world over. It's been ten years now. It's about time the woman who bewitched us all with the enchantment of her imagination takes a long last bow. Long live, J.K. Rowling!

when my eyes sing yes

2007-07-23T02:10:00.000-07:00

IF THERE'S ONE saving grace about American cities, it's the bounty of its public libraries.

Here in the Kansan city of Topeka, for instance, the amenities of the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Libary (featuring the convenience of malling with its luxuriant spaces and state-of-the-art architecture) abound not only with every bookworm's capacity to borrow as much reading fare as one can hoard but also the availability of DVDs to bring home. Oh, the wide-eyed buffet for the soul!

Here are the films I've long wished to see which recently got me--thanks to my insomnia--on a viewing binge:

ETERNITY AND A DAY. I rank this Theo Angelopoulos masterpiece among the films I’m most intimate with, which I can watch in tireless rapture again and again, like the rest of my personal favorites: Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire, Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, Milos Forman’s Amadeus, Jane Campion’s The Piano, Patrice Leconte’s Man On The Train, Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas, Zhang Yimou’s Hero.

Winner of the grand prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, Eternity and A Day revolves around the last moments of a dying Greek writer who embarks on a dreamy voyage to relive an idyll with his long-dead wife at their seaside retreat. His reveries, detouring into the times of an ancient Greek poet who buys forgotten words to construct an epic, segues seamlessly into the travails of an eight-year old boy, a refugee whose future weaves into Alexander's own search for meaning and fulfillment into the past.

THE COLOR OF PARADISE. Living up to its title is a miracle made palpable in the hands of Majid Majidi who made waves in world cinema with his enchanting Children of Heaven. In this lovely and lush tale—a testimony to the natural world’s majesty—Majidi explores a universe of the senses refracted from the perspective of a blind Iranian boy grappling with his father’s lost of innocence.

Aside from its heightened evocation of textures out of the boy's world, pure bliss are the painterly simplicity and spectacle of the countryside and its unerring natural rhythm: little hands intuiting through a garden, the burbling of the brook, the dialogue of woodpeckers, the orchestra of birdsongs and insects and the breeze. Best Film winner at the 21st Montreal Film Festival, among others.

NIGHTS OF CABIRIA. Chaplinesque with her panache for hilarity and heartbreak, Giulietta Masina won Best Actress at Cannes as the title character in one of Federico Fellini's most haunting films, a valentine for a prostitute’s child-like but stubborn search for faith, love, and a hopeful place under the red light.

Winner of the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film, this stirring cinematic piece comes in the heels of Fellini’s international breakthrough with La Strada (another collaboration with leading lady/wife Giulietta Masina). Rambling and leisurely paced, Nights of Cabiria is suffused with sunlight despite its dark undertones. Whatever they say of the human spirit, Masina’s Cabiria walks the talk in that tough but tender unraveling at the film’s fireworks-worthy end.

THE EEL. A psychodrama of regret, sexual repression as well as healing, Shohei Imamura’s film is engaging as he deftly tracks the journey of an anti-hero—a cuckold who murdered his wife he caught in an illicit act—en route to redemption.

From the violence of its opening act to the comic but poignant interlude of an impending relationship between two troubled people, Imamura’s vision gracefully weaves a spell of surreal vignettes—a neighbor who expects visitors from outer space, a mother who fancies herself a ballroom diva, etc—into a catharsis that charms and earns its insistence to keep the human spirit above the stormy depths of the heart. Winner of the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

THE SEVENTH SEAL. No film buff worth his larger-than-life craving for the classic can miss Ingmar Bergman's 1956 film that has survived its fair share of parodies for the heft and unabashed exploration of its subject matter: man’s search for God in the face of cynicism and destruction.

Wearing its lyrical and allegorical conceit on its sleeve, Bergman zooms in on the anguish of a knight returning from the Crusades and facing an apocalyptic scenario straight from the Book of Genesis. He plays chess with Death, to begin with. He encounters a troupe of actors and a flock of flagellants as he casts a shadow of his long face through the film’s somber tone and its philosophical perorations.

Through it all, brave-hearted is Bergman’s homage to the power of imagery that abounds here on top of the miracle of humor sprinkled through an otherwise stark visual meditation. Delicious is that scene where a philandering performer, outsmarting the cuckold who wanted to kill him and climbing a tree to avoid the beasts in the forest, looked down at Death literally sawing off the trunk of his perch!

THE SWEET HEREAFTER. The heart of another is a dark forest, Conrad once wrote. So concurs Atom Egoyan as he adapts for the screen Russell Bank’s celebrated novel about a tragedy in a small town and how the parents’ process of healing dovetails into a man’s search for truth and wholeness, both as a lawyer and as a father.

With its cocktail of themes (treachery, loss, and transcendence), Egoyan unerringly eschews cliché and cheap emotions as he constructs the tectonic shifts of the narrative like a puzzle, like layers of ice in the film’s arctic landscape. Or metaphoric reverb in the Pied Piper story which Egoyan used as a subtext in the story. Deeper secrets are revealed, no less devastating than the circumstances of the accident even as the lawyer dredges up odds and ends of his troubled past. How to pick up the pieces of broken lives? Egoyan is emphatic with the restraint of his clarifications no less complex than prisms, which also informs the luminous portrayal from an ensemble lead by Ian Holm and Sarah Polley.

THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS. What has otherworldly bliss got to do with the mundane lives and loves of two women—a drifter who opens her rucksack along with her heart to strangers and a searcher who wears her suspicions on her sleeve?

The debut film of Erick Zonca offers a quilt from shreds of desire to be alive, rendered stark with the peripheral reality of a comatose girl in whose home both Isa (Elodie Bouchez) and Marie (Natasha Régnier) stakes a sense of refuge after forging an unlikely friendship in a sewing factory.
While tragedy rips the seams of their shared intimacy in the end, the film celebrates the brief history of soul mates as well as the tenacity of possibilities for miracles, no matter if woven like a patchwork, out of the most fragile of human relationships. Such is the stuff of epiphanies, as delicate as the finely textured performances of Bouchez and Régnier who shared the prize for Best Actress at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.

BELLE DE JOUR. Regarding filmmaker Luis Bunuel, the critic Roger Ebert probes: “He was deeply cynical about human nature, but with amusement, not scorn. He was fascinated by the way in which deep emotional programming may be more important than free will in leading us to our decisions. Many of his films involve situations in which the characters seem free to act, but are not.”

One of the few films about eroticism that really gets it down pat--It’s more in the mind, not in the genitals, stupid!—Belle de Jour stars the incandescent Catherine Deneuve as Severine, a woman whose life is at once picture-perfect and empty. Leading a double life (a prostitute by day and a doctor’s housewife by night), Severine revels in repressed desire to be humiliated and used sexually. She escapes into waking dreams where she enjoys being whipped, soiled with mud, and bound to trees. Not recommended for feminists, definitely.

(Next in my viewing list: The Rose Tattoo, Sweetie, La Dolce Vita, Mamma Roma, The Circle, and The Magdalene Sisters)

en route to rhapsody

2007-07-23T02:09:00.001-07:00

How to become larger than one's self? Here's the gospel according to Rumi's poetry.

aren't we there yet?

2007-07-21T02:51:00.001-07:00

CAN'T TEACH old dogs new tricks, so it's said. Same thing, ho-hum, holds ever true for one of the Philippine's most doggone institution: the Commission on Elections (Comelec).

Hereunder is a reprint of my latest opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu (July 18, 2007):

Infernal affairs

One doesn't have to be bad to go to hell. Doing good, like coming to terms with your right to be a registered voter, would be enough for a soul-scorching ordeal.

Nope, the gospel of Matthews had it mixed up when he bid you and me to "enter through the narrow gate." Where heaven doesn't wait at the end of the queue, the portal of the local office of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) is neither wide nor broad, but it still "leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it."

Horror happens not only when the cold crawls up one's spine, but also when one's head shakes. Or pivots a la Linda Blair when one's eyeballs dilate at this jolly dreadful dispatch: “The first day of registration for the synchronized barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) elections in Oct. 29 saw an impatient and rowdy crowd jeering at Cebu City Commission on Elections (Comelec) personnel for the delay."

Mayhem ran loose, so the report goes. Registration process "took seven hours to finish for some…Priority numbers were distributed late in the morning, but not everyone lining up received one." Were they waiting for Godot?

Come along with an exorcist, quick. Brace yourself for the slow burn of boredom, if not the creepy probability of a demonic possession when elbowing your way through the Comelec throng. Restless, they might as well be smoking out of their ears and spewing sulfur at the Comelec personnel who must have been cowering at their wit's end as if confronted by a lynch mob.

“Dalawang bagay lang ang mahalaga sa mundo," the cuckolded clock-repair guy in Ishmael Bernal's classic Ikaw ay Akin waxes philosophic. “Paghahanap at paghihintay."

But searching for systematic process and waiting for deliverance proved for those who went to Comelec no less harrowing than waiting in line for the gas chamber. Literally so, if we reckon how many had to endure inhaling a whiff of lethal wind breaking from the bowels, let alone Comelec's miasma of mismanagement.

Digging up the dead does seem less dire than getting a grip on the poll body's rot—from its putrid process of registration to its worm's pace of counting the votes, no thanks to its failure to latch on to modernization and to computerize the election process.

Pray tell, what unspeakable wrongs have we, especially those voter-wannabes, done in our previous lives to deserve a purgatory via Comelec? Everything awful about it has been aired out ad nauseam, and yet it continues to roil up the throat like regurgitated vomit.

How, then, do you solve a problem like lining up at the Comelec?

Lest you'd resort to shouting fire or strapping yourself with a bogus bomb—God forbid, just because you want badly for the crowd to scamper out of your way—consider whiling away your time with these few options:

* Bring a copy of Proust's La Recherche Du Temps Perdu so that you'd hit two birds with one stone by savoring how to take things slow and remember things past as well as impressing people that you're an intellectual who knows cursing is more elegant in French.

* Lug along your videoke component and earn money by charging people for a chance to warble their ulcers out instead of jarring the air with jeers for Comelec's ears long deaf to the broken record called change.

* Lead the praying of the rosary, but concentrate on the sorrowful mysteries. These, heaven knows, are what unravel in Comelec any given day. It's in the direst circumstance, after all, that one can stretch one's capacity for being holy sort of foolhardy.

affirmative alternative

2007-07-16T02:20:00.001-07:00

In the end, faith is the only way to find the light.

beyond grief, in the light of the living

2007-07-11T20:56:00.000-07:00

IN THE END, death is going to be democratic while sweeping all of us off our feet.

Coming to grips with mortality has been no sweat with the recent news about a dear friend's tragic end. Devastated, utterly am. But death, ironically, also breeds and spurs an avenging appetite to live fully, aflame with beauty and meaning in the light of her loveliness, warmth, creative fire and courage to stake a place under her own sun.

Thus William Blakes waxes immortal: Ah, sunflower, weary of time,/ Who countest the steps of the sun;/ Seeking after that sweet golden clime/ Where the traveller's journey is done..." In that spirit, hereunder is a reprint of my recent opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu (July 10, 2007):

To live

Never say die, and the Beatles goes loud and lives on.

An assassin’s bullets and the ravages of cancer have long doomed John Lennon and George Harrison, true. But as long as you crank up the volume, there’s no stopping them from crooning and cuing us to nod with a head-bang against the world and its every blight: “…and I say it’s all right.”

Some songs, like Here Comes the Sun, are sure-fire weapons for fine-tuning one’s inner weather.

To play or sing it now here in America, however, entails a streak of dark humor. As the temperature goes over the top with a swathe of heat waves, wildfires have gone on a rampage across the West— California, Nevada, South Dakota, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon—scorching the woods along the way.

No holds barred, too, are those burning President Bush’s effigy after he sent American troops to the inferno in Iraq and made ashes out of more than 3,500 lives so far. With many Americans in the mood to haul him out of his hot seat and kick him all the way to Baghdad, yes, it would be a holiday for its horde of suicide bombers.

The heat is on, indeed, for the party of the pessimists with all its sound and fury:
The silent spread of global warming. The blood-curdling screams in Darfur, Rwanda and Bosnia. The chorus of last breath from hunger, AIDS and other sickness in Africa’s heart of darkness.

It’s an endless night, if not the end of the world, for many people on Earth where the sun always rises for rotten politics and puss-drenched policies. Along come the vile and violent always, like refrains in a song.

“And I say it’s all right,” insists the Beatles. Never mind if the primetime news and tabloids conspire for Pollyanna to turn a deaf ear to the sun-lit lilt of songs. Or the orchestra of God’s allusions at the end of Job’s lamentations.

Don’t fret, avers the Death Clock, “the Internet's friendly reminder that life is slipping away.” Might as well stick one’s tongue out at the Grim Reaper who will have the last laugh anyway. And so welcome to When-Will-You-Die.com, the online quiz “that tells you when your will die!” After answering the quiz and a consumer survey, one will receive “a death percentage score and a cleverly worded response.” Or, log in at TheHeavenOrHellQuiz.com, “a website dedicated to helping you answer Life's tough questions… whether or not you are going to Heaven or Hell.”

Tongue-in-cheek, indeed, does this dot-com generation makes mincemeat and thumbs down at Death. Or tweaks its nose. As if it suffices enough to pinch away the pain, or flick off the festering despair.

“People living deeply have no fear of death,” wrote Anais Nin whose words my friend Ana Escalante-Neri used to wade through.

Living deeply was how Ana, a scuba diver, lovingly stretched the limit of her own available light against the dark she alone can fathom, whether through her immersion in poetry and photography. Or through the rainbow of her roles as mother, lover, wife, daughter, sister, friend, teacher, and self-confessed “barefoot traveler.”

As a student, Ana once played the guitar in a band. If she opted not to pursue playing music, it could be one of the choices she knew was worth taking. Something along the line of what she wrote in one her columns in Sun.Star Weekend Magazine: “I’ve learned to discern which freedom I can take and which I have to let go. But I will take what I can take.”

In life, indeed, she had the courage of a firefly, fragile while defying the dark night. May she bask under the sun of God’s mercy and rest at last in peace. And for us who mourn our loss, may we have the grace and grit to hope, despite our grief and after all our questions, “it’s all right.”

in memoriam: ana escalante-neri (1978-2007), poet and dear friend whose life was an ellipsis of exclamation points

2007-07-08T04:14:00.001-07:00

Rest in peace, dear Ana. God, in his infinite mercy, will hear your poetry.

tomas the toughie

2007-07-08T02:11:00.000-07:00

FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE, Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña is a tough act to shrug off. By dint of any demeanor worthy of either a panegyric or caricature, he's been looming large in the Cebuano consciousness.

Not to be trifled, too, is his leadership skills which has been rewarded with a three-term vote of confidence despite the controversies hounding him: his barroom temper, his reported support of vigilante killing squads against alleged scums of society, his quarrel with the governor, etc.

That may help explain my seemingly endless fascination about the man for whom I devoted a couple of my recent opinion columns in Sun.Star Cebu (June 26 and July 3 issues). Reckon these reprints:

Call of the cool

When adults whom we look up to as leaders loom outsized with their public antics and their acrimonious statements, don’t you miss Kids Say The Darndest Thing with Bill Cosby and his cuddly guests?

If Mayor Tomas Osmeña saw that show, he might recall with a chuckle one particular episode wherein a little boy blurted out: “Love will find you, even if you are trying to hide from it. I’ve been trying to hide from it since I was five but the girls keep finding me.”

Playing hard to get, Mayor Tom might as well be a hermit in a cave. Or haul his heart out shut in a cage. Except that there’s now way he can keep himself from beating his chest to churn up the fire in his belly. Or hide from the cameras that go with the controversies.

See, the fact that he exudes the flair of a natural newsmaker isn’t hurting him so far as he can swagger about the votes of confidence from his constituency all through these years. Look, ma, isn’t he invincible?

They keep finding him, some girls. And sometimes they, as Mary Ann delos Santos and Gwen Garcia can tell, have found him darn perfect for their frowns and raised eyebrows. Don’t they wish he’d, for his sake and the city’s, grow up?

The meek may inherit the earth, but there’s just no way the mayor would shrug the ladies away—even if they happen to be mayor-wannabe or a governor—while they try—for better or for worse—to whittle down his sow’s ears of masculinity into a silk purse.

And who says only women got big mouths? Whether the matter is about constructing a school building or raising his stakes for a rotunda or a bus terminal, trust him to prove he’s the one who got balls and them women have no business bouncing it for him, thank you.

But what’s the manly thing to do when it seems the ladies would have you licking at their heels? When it’s sweet to sulk, can’t one take the cue of Incredible Hulk?

Oh, doesn’t the mayor—who makes no bones about booming out his intransigence and his tantrums— conduct himself like coolness a la Clark Gable and Humprey Bogart are passé.

In the face of his latest foes, it appears he can’t just grin and bear the slings and arrows of his mediagenic style of leadership and transmute stoicism into a science worthy of any grizzled gentleman by cooing, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Or, “Here’s watching at you, kid!”

Way he’s been behaving, it seems like he would gargle whisky and spew it in the face of anybody who’d dare tilt her chin up to his face. Probably not if they’d look like Ingrid Bergman and Vivien Leigh. Or Dame Margot.

Now that he has proven how utterly unbeatable he is—Man, he’s still lording over the city despite the cannonade of lemons hurled his way and not even his admission to the emergency room once upon a dizzy time can pull the rug from under his feet—perhaps the lady in his house can pat his forehead and gently remind him that, hey, can’t he take things easy? Just lie back and bask in the mighty fact that the scalps of his previous enemies have been brimming over his breast pocket, can’t he?

Or, with the blood from his political contender still shiny on his lips, isn’t it time to show he’s resilient enough to reinvent himself? That he, for a cool change, can show toughness laced with nobility and grace, and redefine for us what it really takes to be confident and secure as his buttons?

In fairness to the mayor, his equanimity with the missus could be proof-positive how fairly he can breeze through his feminine side. Which might be all it takes to disarm the Mary Anns and Gwens of this world, who knows?

See, even John Travolta—who’s been groovy playing a disco maniac, an alcoholic, an assassin, etc.—just proved he’s man enough to take on a roly-poly housewife’s role in the upcoming movie Hairspray. Darn it, mayor, isn’t it about time you let your hair down?

Or, as one of the kids in Cosby’s show enthuses: "Spend most of your time loving instead of going to work." Or going to war.

In the light of the last act

Anything but boring. Regarding the performance so far of Mayor Tomas Osmeña, even Aristotle—who hatched the basic idea of three acts in theatre—might as well uncork a Champagne bottle.

Indeed, there’s been more than enough of the mayor’s high-wire stunts and hysterics for Cebu—and for some Bisdaks like me now scattered all over the world--to stay riveted.

According to Aristotle’s sense of drama, the hero gets up a tree in the beginning until the second act would have him floundering up the branches while he goes higher. In the finale, he either climbs down or falls flat on his nose.

Now the last possibility would be delightful to the lady squinting from the Provincial Capitol.

Aside from the last installment in the Harry Potter series, what magical tricks the mayor may be up to in his third act would be worth the wait. Until the curtain goes down, he—despite his detractor’s observation that he’s full of himself—won’t definitely be wearing a cloak of invisibility.

His presence may be formidable, but the mayor says he’s not out to take a bow by his lonesome. Even with his awesome powers, Harry Potter is putty in the hands of his enemy without Ron and Hermione.

Thus his oath-taking oratory echoes an ode to teamwork. No, he avers, the limelight this time is not on him preening while declaiming about projects and plans. “In essence, we’re going to emphasize that this is one community that works well together,” he says.

“We are not for projects but for consolidating the entire community.” But, oops, with due exception to the empress in Capitol with whom he’s not in the mood to share center stage with while he goes about his monologue about “the future of Cebu.” Not even if community ought to be taken in the same breath as communication, no. He needs no leading lady as his tongue itches to intone abracadabra, to transform Cebu City “the most livable city in Asia.”

Where criminality doesn’t dance the can-can with a chorus line of derelicts and squatters at the sidewalk through garbage-littered and flood-prone streets. Where there’s enough parks and playground and pockets of greenery along the way. And, yes, more new books in the public library and more to behold at the zoo. Where heritage and culture, hopefully, will not be nudged aside to the backburner as the elbow room of investments prop up skyscraping proofs of a megalomaniac metropolis stripped of soul. Or the magic of connection, the wand of warmth.

Small in size, Cebu doesn’t have to be monumental like Mumbai or Calcutta where misery looms larger. Bigness can be a bane, so argues a 1969 article in Time Magazine on what it takes to be a great city. “After Tokyo, an undeniably great city despite its pedestrian architecture, Hong Kong is the most vibrant metropolis in Asia. It is, however, a city without a country—and therefore lacks greatness. Cairo is the capital of the Moslem world; but it lacks vitality.”

Truly, a habitable city can only be found with the compass of the so-called human dimension. “A city does not have to be comfortable to be great, but it nonetheless must have the amenities to make life tolerable,” explains the Time essay.

“It is hard to classify as great a city that limits human contact, either through political repression, like Moscow, or through distance, like Los Angeles… A city governed by birds might be more comfortable than a city governed by men. But it would not be human, nor would it be great; a city is great only in its human associations, confusing as they may be.” Quirky, certainly.

Yes, like Mayor Osmeña going out of character for a change by agreeing—apart from dreaming of a standing ovation—to sit down with Governor Garcia even for a cup of coffee.

hear what heaven sounds like

2007-07-06T11:05:00.001-07:00

Laughter in the light of innocence--something that ought to be amplified in the war zones and emergency rooms and everywhere thunder echoes with the sound of heartbreak.

gifts of light and grace

2007-07-05T13:24:00.000-07:00

IF YOU CAN'T win me over with a night-long Walpurgisnacht of who-the-hell-cares conversation over a crate of ice-cold San Miguel pale pilsen, the next best thing if you're in the mood for gift-giving are books, books, books. So damn easy to please, yours truly.

Come on, let me boast what I recently acquired for which I thank God the dictionary has a word called gratitude:

* A Book of Luminous Things. Edited by Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel laureate for Literature, this international anthology of poetry is a gift from my wife Arlaine. This book does live up to its title, truly a collection of brightness. Milosz states in his introduction that the purpose of this personal and eclectic collection is to present poetry that is "short, clear, readable, and...realistic, that is, loyal toward reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible."

Indeed, the poems in this collection have a clarity and immediacy that would appeal to even the most poetry-averse reader. Most of the selections are from classical Chinese and 20th-century American and European (primarily Eastern European, Scandinavian, and French) poets. The poems are grouped by intriguing headings ("The Moment," "The Secret of a Thing," "A Woman's Skin"), and Milosz has written brief prefaces to many of them, creating an unusual sense of dialogue between editor and reader.

"My intention," says Milosz, "is not so much to defend poetry...but rather, to remind readers that for some very good reasons it may be of importance today." This refreshing and wise anthology is recommended for all collections

Milosz's introduction is passionate and enlivening as he guides readers toward his vision of poems as forms of enchantment. A review succinctly sums up Milosz's magic in this volume of inflamed voices: "He deepens and extends the readers' understanding of his poetics and the poems he has so lovingly chosen. There are plenty of American poets here, quite a few Chinese poets, and a diverse scattering of Europeans, but place of origin isn't as significant, ultimately, as place of arrival: a poem that speaks to everyone in every land."

* Grace (Eventually). The latest collection of essays by Anne Lamott, this book is a present from my friend Cathy Viado Bradly. Lamott's topics may sound boringly profound--the world, community, the family, the human heart--but she perks it up with the pitch-perfect humor of her wisdom as she tackles "the missteps, detours, and roadblocks in her walk of faith."

Consider her tongue-in-cheek testimony: "I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark."

Consider, too, the chorus of praise for her writing:

"She's funny and she tells the truth, and truth and laughter are two things we need more of." (New York Times Book Review). "Lamott writes essays that are howlingly funny mini-sermons, reminding us of what's important in life... her quirky, funny perspective are nothing short of a salve for tired souls." (Los Angeles Times Book Review). "A cause for celebration...nothing short of miraculous." (The New Yorker).

"Anne Lamott is a walking proof that a person can be both reverent and irreverent in the same lifetime. Sometimes even in the same breath." (San Fransisco Chronicle). "A ferociously smart, droll, and original writer... transcendently lovely. (Entertainment Weekly)

Enough said.

wherever, whatever

2007-06-22T06:21:00.001-07:00

APART FROM the heart, home will always be where the gut is. And purgatory is everywhere, yes. Here's a reprint of my recent opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu (12 June 2007) :

Besides the chicken that crossed the road

Easy goes the green light for envy en route to any American city. It’s all it takes, hands down, to feel a sudden surge of empathy for stray dogs. Go ask any Third World drifter driving himself headlong into the dead-end of undue comparison.

Consider the commercial of a fast-food joint cranking up the condescending tone of a balikbayan matron. Sweating and fanning away the frustration off her face, she hissed at all the signals of the doggone state of our streets: “Walang ganyan sa States!”

Wringing that woman’s neck, however, may yet entail squeezing dry the threadbare fabric of one’s nationalistic streak.

For one preferring “a government run like hell by Filipinos,” our major thoroughfares are metaphors for a future that renders horoscopes way far better reading fare than op-ed columns.

What a relief, therefore, to run into Anne Lamott’s latest book of essays—
Grace (Eventually)—and to be reassured that the geography of what goes bad or wrong is our common ground. Regardless of race, yes.

“Nowhere is better than anywhere else,” writes Lammot.

Angels may fear to tread through the traffic anywhere in our country’s asphalt jungles, but even the world’s most affluent nation is neither a breeze through the boulevard.

Hardly a minute goes in New York at night, swear some expat friends, without emergency sirens blaring by. In Los Angeles, where road rage is rampant down the freeway, an unidentified man stalking the sidewalk has been caught on video cam lugging a baseball bat and swinging it down his victims’ head at random.

And here comes, where I’m helpless at waxing touristy at the camera-worthy pace of suburbia, this swerve of sobering news: A 16-year-old woman out from the mall was whisked off on the way to her car in the parking lot, her dead body found in a wooded area in the neighboring state three days after she was reported missing.

Reading all that, who wouldn’t rather scoot away into the tracks of Paris Hilton or veer off where Ruffa and Yilmaz exchange a flurry of toxic fumes?

Better yet, scratch one’s head at the sidelines while Cebu’s movers and shakers merrily rouse up sparks around and smack at each other as if they were inside bump cars in a children’s arcade.

Doesn’t the smash-up between the Capitol of Cebu and City Hall hit any Bisdak, displaced or not, as if—lucky us—we don’t have to bother anymore about global warming, the war in Iraq, and terrorism? Isn’t that entertaining enough to sideswipe us away from other pressing concerns like the lack of urban planning, the garbage-filled and flood-prone streets, the invasion of squatters in the sidewalks?

Oh, well, thank God for gawk-worthy dollops of distraction. Ignorance is bliss, right?

Where there’s mayhem in the streets to go with the caravan of political circus, sneaking online for nostalgic peeks at the homefront would be a chronic compulsion. As if it would be where I might stumble on the cure for cancer soon.

Of her city, Kerima Polotan notes the impossibility of getting intimate with it without the cocktail of “love and repulsion and sorrow.”

That, for all we know, is what the mayor imbibes in full measure while he looms large enough for both the affection of those who vote for him and the aversion of everyone else.

That, too, might explain why, even if it’s where her pet peeve holds sway, it’s no sweat for the island’s lady governor to swear, hand to her heart: “I love Cebu City!”

Come on, with all that drama worthy of a YouTube spot soon, my birthplace might as well be the center of the universe.

for my childten to sing and dance with

2007-06-15T02:12:00.001-07:00

God bless Luther Vandross for this lovely song. Happy Father's day to all the sons, brothers, and husbands who dream of siring a better world someday.

consciousness like continents

2007-06-14T22:55:00.000-07:00

TO RECLAIM SPACE is to reassert one's place, according to poet Mary Oliver, "in the family of things." After a month of taking a detour from my comfort zone into the uncertainty of an alien landscape, what a relief to return where mind and heart limbers up in the light of the familiar: a chance to continue touching base with my place of origin and pivot for return, at least through my regular op-ed corner in Sun.Star Cebu.

Published last June 12, here's a reprint of my first column after a month-long absence in the spell of readjustments en route to retracing the tracks of my byline:

Sheltering under the same sky

It does sound like a broken record, but “to find one’s place under the sun” is here to stay. Indeed, it’s enough of a record-breaking feat to steer clear and weather away the burning temptation of a cliché. Or the cold comfort of familiarity.

True, strangeness becomes me where the pastures are not only greener but also wider. But here in the city of Topeka, the capital of Kansas, there’s no trite notion I find easy to engage in and try to dispel than displacement.

But now that the age of dotcom renders distance just a click away from the computer keyboard, nothing else make me feel at home than harping on variations on a theme.

Connectedness, for instance.

Reckon how reverie veers away like ripples in a pebble-stirred lake, concentric from where consciousness sprawls out between the navel of the Philippine archipelago and the heartland of America.

Where I’m aiming to keep alienation at bay, waves of familiarity are also up my neck with a recent online report just enough to strike a sensitive chord to this true-blooded Cebuano who, despite shrinking in the shadow of toxic fumes from news at the homefront, can stand tall about its guitars and singers.

According to a Yahoo dispatch, more than 1,680 guitarists gather in Kansas to tune up and take part in setting a Guinness world record for the most people playing the same song—Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water—simultaneously.

Never mind the smoke of politics in Cebu hot in the heels of the elections on top of the water-logged news to flush one’s summer thoughts down the drain: overflowing creeks and sewers, flash floods in the streets and mudslides in the mountains.

Nothing new under the sun, right? Then again, just when summer in Kansas rouses a riot of colors and fragrance from its galaxy of gardens, something of a novelty nudges my nose not to smell what the flies revel in Taboan as I sniff stardust out of Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s seemingly spaced-out scheme.

Never mind if the mayor doesn’t have the heart to prop up a school building in Lahug as long as he has the lungs to whoop out a wizardry: To carve out a river right in the middle of the city’s clogged roads.

Come on, the Yellow Brick Road may be a universe away from Cebu, but it smacks of magic for the mayor to conjure “street rivers” where traffic and floating rats render it cool to hitch a ride on a witch’s broom above it all. Quick, go notify the authorities at Guinness!

In the face of formidable odds, any Cebuano worth his pride of Lapu-Lapu’s legend is no stranger to the struggle of holding his ground. As if conquest were a congenital blessing, if not a birthright.

Like water, there’s no stopping back the Bisdak’s knack for survival. Or his free-flowing instinct for finding a way out of dire straits.

And for the throng out to find a foothold to the future in alien shores, uncanny as well how they might feel no farther than the plight of Cebu City’s squatters to keep their heads above water as the tides of progress sweep the metro like a Kansan tornado.

A relocation site is up in the pipeline, assures Mayor Tomas Osmeña, who plans to pave a road from the SRP to Poblacion Pardo, where he will build a “new barangay” of squatters uprooted from various parts of the city. (No, slum dwellers won’t be cast away like garbage under the bridge because they are potential voters, remember?)

Strangeness is a state of mind, indeed. And like the brain-like formation of clouds, the sky stays—wherever we go and raise our stakes—always overhead. That, at least, can never be relocated.

leavetaking, and the love of friends

2007-06-13T05:28:00.000-07:00

"IN THE DEW of little things, the heart finds its morning." And I, born once upon a high noon in August under a lion's sign, roar amen.

We'll meet again--all of you in whom I have taken root--in yet another sunrise soon...

* * *

IT'S BEEN A MONTH since I left the country and settled (temporarily, I hope) with my family in the heartland of America. Ah, the sweet sorrow of departure and the thrill of a new adventure! And, yes, the geyser of goodwill and the grace of friendship that I've been blessed with all along! It had been a whirl of beer binges and videoke, reunions with friends long missed, and poetry dedicated to me like a talisman for tracing my way back home soon (Thank you, dear ole' Temistokles Adlawan). Plus a toast from two kindred spirits whose beautiful minds and hearts will always be cherished. Read on, here's a reprint of two opinion columns from Mayette Q. Tabada and Ana Escalante-Neri:

Xman Redux
by MAYETTE Q. TABADA, Sun.Star Cebu, 13 May 2007

CHEAPSKATE that I am, the first thing I bought when I had something left over from my salary was this mobile phone. Inexpensive and simple, the new phone fit me, down to the longish time it took to unlock and the limited memory of my ancient SIM card.

As far as coexistence anxieties went, this new phone and I settled down in no time, except for a few days ago, when this infernal gadget went crazy.

Fumbling with the keypad, I panicked every time the phone tone indicated an incoming message. Each time, I feared the worst: my younger son finally swallowed his older brother and was regurgitating him out, with the pieces in odd order.

Every time, it was this and that writer asking if Myke was gone, had gone, was really, really gone.

Texting is really ideal only for thumbs that fly over the keypad and eviscerate nimbly the rules of English writing. It is not for technophobes that feel they have to use the shift key every time to begin a sentence with a capital letter; or leave a space after punctuations (two if a period).

Also, texting is just too bloody for explaining to the young, the heartbroken, the dreamers that the mentor they wrote for, imitated, drank with—heck, loved—had, as of 3 PM last Friday, taken off for an 18-hour flight with his two young sons and a pocket full of finger puppets to go home to his beloved Arlaine.

Thanks to Myke, my editor-on-leave, I discovered a facet of the phone I thought I knew: push the buttons too quickly and this unremarkable piece of plastic will rear its spirit and refuse to execute a command.

Toxic, my editor would have said, nodding his bangs sagely while smiling roguishly.

Yeah, everything’s toxic alright, Xman. Some just use the poison to make poetry.

I first worked with Myke U. Obenieta in 2000. Our group of writers and photographers were prowling in the firecracker-making countryside of Babag, Lapu-Lapu to catch children and minors assembling in the illegal trade.

It was my first special report but my heart was not in it. Why punish the victims? For Myke, his interest was not to expose and investigate; he wanted to listen to the stories woven by those small, nimble fingers before an accidental spark sent them flying all over the countryside.

In the exacting world of journalism, Myke and I felt, more often than not, like mutants. In the backyards of Babag, we took to calling each other Xman, or “X-Man,” if according to Myke, as he was more straitlaced about grammar than I.

Over the years, in the newsroom or during coverage, we bumped into each other desultorily. I knew him better though as one of the most graceful editors to light up a classroom or a young writer’s dreams.

Some students stumble into writing because, caught between the devil and professors who believe in “publish or perish,” they have nowhere to go but into the roiling waters of the publishing world.

But the ones that grow into their craft have, hovering over their pens, not just Muses but angst-ministering angels and nurturing mutants. Until he finally made good on his travel plans last Friday, the Xman did not assign writers as go off with them on rambling, irreverent, offbeat, funny explorations of language, the movies, drinking, poetry, parenting, loving and other digressions that inexplicably fed the Craft.

For those unable to believe he has left, let me comfort you with Epictetus.

It’s not only because quoting some long-dead Greek confers the proper gravitas on leave-takings. The fellow is in one of the books left behind in the normal clutter of my editor’s desk.

This, as well as an oil-and-pastel painting of a ballet dancer, the communities of writers woven around his four scrupulously updated blogs, and the unfinished series of despedidas requiring at least half-a-year to complete, are portents that Myke has just stepped out and will, one afternoon, pop up to declare to us, day-shift stiffs: “Hi, beautiful people!”

* * *

Leavetaking

by ANA ESCALANTE-NERI, Sun.Star Weekend Magazine, 25 April 2007

IT IS HARD to write about someone who has left, but even harder to write for someone just about to leave when you imagine you could still venture the hope that they would stay. Offer a final argument against their departure. The ache is keener when you see what spaces remain occupied—his mess on his desk, blunt-tipped pencils in a mug, he on that chair where he’s sat in the lifetime of eight years—while knowing that a mere few, few days would empty all that.

There are only five days left, to be exact, before my Weekend editor Mr. Myke Obenieta leaves with his two boys for Kansas to join his wife Arlaine.

I am tempted to send him, in lieu of this column, something incoherent (uh, not that my columns aren’t) with twice the usual character requirement.

Or maybe I could be dramatic and turn in a blank page, tell him that would be enough to explain the great void we would all feel in his absence. Sniff, sniff. Choke, sob.

Or I could do the corny but heartfelt thing and write about his being more than an editor, but an occasional beer buddy, too, for whom I’ve offered to foot the bill only to find out when it was time to pay that I had not enough cash in my wallet—the only time we managed to laugh about not getting paid enough writing.

A mentor, he was, as well, paneling in the two regional writing workshops I attended where he was the easiest of the bunch to forgive despite all his insulting comments on my poems….naw. He did no such thing. If anything, he’s been best at giving encouragement and good advice, literary or otherwise.

Perhaps what I can do is give some of that back, casual good advice, from one traveler to another?

Myke. Stuff your suitcase with the usual chicharon, otap, rosquillos, dried mangoes, pastillas, danggit. Our kababayans in the States are heartsick for those. They won’t mind your charging them quadruple their original price. Use profit from sales to tide you over until you find rich relatives to mooch money from during the first few months of your stay.

On the plane, when your two little men start to become a handful, think tranquilizer. Not for them, silly. For you. There should be at least three hundred other passengers on board anyway to keep an eye on them.

When you get there, don’t stop yourself from constantly calculating exchange rates. That way, you won’t have the heart to spend on anything, especially the little luxuries you never needed anyway when you were here. So when you come back home to Cebu, to us, to me, your favorite columnist, you could feel free to bore us with your stateside tales in an unnatural American accent if only because you’ve saved so much dolyares and could afford to buy us beer. If you spring for more than a couple, we might even pretend to be interested.

The important thing is coming home, at some point. Hopefully before the new Weekend editor recommends to fire me due to an attitude problem. A catty treatment from me. Uh, wait. Sorry to have to break it to you here, but I believe that position has been offered to me. Great news, right? You’re guaranteed a job when you return, and I get the chance to pay you back for all your kindness by offering you a tiny 300-worder space-filler under my editorship.

Meantime, ayo-ayo, Bai. Do enjoy your new adventure and give our regards to our fellow-poet Arlaine.

Wait, wait, a final thing. Don’t bring large bottles of toiletry in your hand-carry.

And your desk. Maybe don’t clear it.

Or clear it.

Or don’t.

who deserves the evil eye?

2007-04-21T08:34:00.000-07:00

HARD TO FACE a problem, indeed, when the problem is a politician's face in a prohibited campaign poster. In Cebu, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) might as well be seeing ghosts while rolling its eyeballs at the election litter all over.

Hair-raising, thus groans my recent column in the opinion page of Sun.Star Cebu (17 April 2007 issue) :

Zooming in on zombies

Horror wears a happy face. Worse, it’s sticking its tongue out at the Commission on Elections, leaving it dazed in the dark and in dire need of a sixth sense.

“There’s evidence all over, but no suspects in sight.” Thus declares the headline in one of this paper’s reports last Sunday.

About the abomination of campaign posters placed illegally, the report would have been more terrific (if not terrifying) to the tune of spine-crunching sound effects worthy of a whodunit.

Who’s giving Comelec a black eye? Who’s winking at the voters now besieged with photogenic attempts at peek-a-boo?

How to determine who really placed the posters is Comelec’s nightmare. “It’s difficult because a rival camp can paste the other’s posters illegally,” explains a Comelec officer.

Would there be a ghost of a chance for Comelec to exorcise the omnipresence of prohibited posters stuck on trees, along the streets and main thoroughfares, on bridges, public structures or buildings, electric posts or wires, schools, and shrines?

Are graveyards not included? There might be campaign posters stuck somewhere there, too. Not on someone else’s tombstone, hopefully.

Meanwhile, some candidates smile.

It’s a wonderful world, indeed, where the Comelec is facing a blank wall while searching for witnesses who’d dare look the devil in the eye.

Unless somebody complains and comes out in open “against those who place posters outside designated areas,” Comelec might as well be blind, deaf, and mute. No way it can prosecute, unless it gets lucky and catches someone flouting its regulations red-handed.

Mean and whiling away the leeway of the law, some candidates can only flaunt a prelude to their proclivity for sidestepping the line between right and wrong soon after they’re voted into power.

Dead malice, anyone?

In the face of these delinquent candidates with their helter-skelter hunger to be the apple of the electorate’s eyes, any voter worth his jaundice is pretty justified to see skulls and crossed bones instead.

Or, better yet, be imaginative enough to behold the errant posters as if Oscar Wilde were back from the graves with updated variations on The Picture of Dorian Gray. (In that novel, darkness was made visible in the image of the protagonist whose corruption left its hideous marks in his portrait.)

As much as we yearn to see politicians in a new light, sorry, there’s just no blinking away the enduring ubiquity of blight.

Bless, therefore, some vandals that voters ought to shake hands with. There’s beauty and grace in graffiti, yes, when these designers of disfigure would render an animated mural of clowns and circus freaks out of the faces from those posters. The more offensive, the better. Enough, yes, for Dracula’s laughter.

making no sense, making me smile

2007-04-20T10:14:00.001-07:00

ONE WOULD SUPPOSE, considering the constant grimace about successive grim topics such as politics and the forthcoming elections in this blog, that it's a fashion style to wear my wrinkles on my forehead.

So when it seems like the remains of my hair and my cowlick are scraping on cobwebs and puncturing my thought balloons, it's such a relief to just shake the stress away with odds and ends of humor scoured along the way.

If the bottles are shaking after pounding your fist on the table to make a point in the face of your beer buddies, hereunder are handy quotables to quell the dissonance of reason and rigmarole in this election season when it looks like there's a conspiracy to make fools out of all of us. These hand-me-down quips, come to think of it, would be fine for grinning and bearing it all:

I was born intelligent; education ruined me.

***

Practice makes perfect, but nobody's perfect. So why practice?

***
Since light travels faster than sound, people appear bright until you hear them speak.

***

The more you learn, the more you know, The more you know, the more you forget.The more you forget, the less you know. So why learn?

(And, hey, wouldn't it be cool if after seeing shirts emblazoned with a candidate's callus-fortified face, all of us thirsting and hungry for honest-to-goodness elections would witness our piss-worthy politicians wearing that shirt up there instead of the kagalanggalang (kuno) Barong Tagalong and Amerikana suits if ever--God forbid--they'd be voted again and souse themselves once more in the froth of power?)

banishing the boars

2007-04-04T04:53:00.000-07:00

NO LESS THAN divine guidance. That's devoutly to be wished for us voters while many politicians go hell-bent to sweep us off our feet with their devil-may-care compulsion for the nation's cruxifixion. Here's my Lenten-themed column in the opinion page of Sun.Star Cebu (3 April 2007):

In the face of the faithless

When God granted free will to us Filipinos, did it seem like casting pearls before swine? Not if the outcome of the forthcoming elections, hopefully, wouldn’t again leave us heaving a sigh of whine until we’re fit to be tied, skewered, and roasted.

Now that not a few politicians impel us into pigging out on the slop of their self-aggrandizement, Lent does come in the nick of time to nudge us off the beaten track of the politically cynical and clueless.

In this year of the Fire Pig, will the elections—God forbid!—again leave us blood-curdled and curled over the coals?

Then again, no scenario is ever outlandish where the craven and the clowns take turn hogging our attention, unsettling enough to scare even our guardian angels to take absence without leave.

Sacred, our right of suffrage. But suffering fools gladly has been like a religion to us as we take the extra mile of masochism. Preferably on bended knees, yes. As if we’re out to prove—as if we don’t have a surplus of comic relief—that we are a nation of martyrs.

Consider and weep over how we continue to bear the cross brusquely hewn in the hands of self-styled redeemers.

Lest we lapse into the twilight zone of inertia once more, which is all some candidates need for us to fry in our own fat till we crackle under our skin, it’s about time we seize the day of our own deliverance. And that may be the closest thing we have to redemption by way of repentance.

Or else, there’s more hell to pay. So exhorts those who hold the candle in the face, crusted with callus, of our candidates.

Indeed, some priests have pushed their sphere of influence far into the fray of politics. A Catholic priest in Zamboanga City has resigned from the priesthood to run for mayor, and another man of the cloth is also seeking to be governor of Pampanga.

If we must burn, it better come from the fire in our belly along with the belief or leap of faith that we could still make an effing difference.

Thus the Cebu-based Dilaab Foundation (“a volunteer-driven movement for a transformed Filipino nation through heroic Christian citizenship”) sparks up its plug for us to take charge with its decision-making guide. Yes, so that we’d vote with the visionary light of LASER (Lifestyle, Action, Support, Election conduct, Reputation) and zap to zero the chances of undesirable or “anti-life” candidates with ill-gotten wealth and campaign money sourced from illegal drugs.

Also recently, Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales urged voters to choose for “green candidates” as the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) released the “Ten Commandments for Responsible Voting.”

Hopefully, this will influence the electorate on “what to ask and look for from candidates in terms of environmental record and platform.”

It’s about time we save ourselves. And spare the next balloting time from the usual suspects who want us to swallow the staleness of politics microwaved with this advertising adage: “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.”

way through the wilderness

2007-04-04T04:28:00.000-07:00

IT'S A WILD, wild world. That's true, at least, in this kingdom where politicians reign.

Here's something to ponder--uttered by Lucy, the youngest of the four children in the magical but evil-plagued world in C.S. Lewis’ Prince Caspian (the 2nd book of The Chronicles of Narnia)--especially now that the most craven of candidates come to us like the proverbial sheeps in wolves' clothing:

“Wouldn't it be dreadful if someday in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you’d never know which were which?”

gospel truth beyond the garbage

2007-04-04T03:53:00.000-07:00

ALL IT TAKES for a hellish experience in the heat of the Lenten season is to shiver through the spine while listening to the litter in the air stirred up by the elocution contest among election-starved candidates. Hear how they hope for us to believe their words were holy writ. That's the crux of my column in the opinion page of Sun.Star Cebu (27 March 2007):

Of politics and penitence

Even the devil knows how to quote the Bible, and so it’s not really farfetched for some politicians to wax penitential in the heat of Lent. You bet, religious frenzy would be a fashionable excuse for self-anointed saviors to wear holiness like oil in their hair.

Donning sackcloth and ash, as hypocrites in biblical times used to do, would be a tad unphotogenic for those born to be vainglorious. Aber, can you cite any candidate who doesn’t take the extra mile, with hell’s bells ringing up the road to popularity, just to stay high profile?

In the name of fame and fortune, yes, doing a Faust wouldn’t be futile.

Because they’ve got the flair for fizzing up their spit in the face of an audience, it’s likely they’d even give an arm in exchange for the chance to flail their hands to high heavens for the traditional staging of the Siete Palabras.

Or, if the less voluble of them would opt out of that public display of piety, there’s no fuss as long as it’s never overlooked and ought to be put on record that all that oratory comes courtesy of his generosity, thank you.

Then again, I wouldn’t mind, if their knack for sheer showmanship—preferably with full media coverage— would compel them to whip their backs with a stingray’s tail while walking on their knees under a spitfire sky. Cool, if the self-flagellant would also invite the voters to vent off their loathing and join in the lynching.

Hateful, I confess. Utterly un-Christian if we reckon our Catechism teacher in kindergarten who taught us “to love our enemies” even if she couldn’t stop herself from pinching us in the nape for not listening.

How to look at our politicians in a new light? That, whoa, is no less uphill than retracing the skull-littered path to Golgotha.

Instead of seeing any vote-starved pervert with a pyromaniac’s glower, the Dilaab Foundation ("a volunteer-driven, Church-based movement for a transformed Filipino nation through heroic Christian citizenship”) has offered a suggestion to “challenge the notion that elections are useless because many candidates have dubious motives in running for office.”

Instigated by Fr. Carmelo Diola, the foundation has urged the public not to vote for undesirable candidates by using a decision-making guide called LASER (Lifestyle. Action. Support. Election conduct. Reputation.) Beware of “anti-life” candidates with unexplained wealth or with campaign machinery oiled with money from illegal drugs by beaming up your LASER vision.

Or if you’re still rolling your eyeballs, thank God for this scrap of humor:

“An old couple had a son who was still living with them. They were a little worried owing to their son’s lack of career plans. Thus they decided to do a small test.

They took a wad of money, a Bible and a bottle of whiskey, and put these on the dining table. Then they hid, pretending they were not at home.

If the son took the money, he would be a businessman, if he took the Bible, he would be a priest; but if he took the bottle of whiskey, he would be a drunk.

In the nearby closet and peeping through the keyhole, they saw their son arrive at last. He read the note they had left him. He took the money, looked at it against the light, and slid it in his pocket. But after that, he took the Bible, flicked through it, and took it. Finally he grabbed the bottle, opened it, and took an appreciative whiff to check the quality. Then he left for his room, carrying all three items.

The father slapped his forehead and said, “Darn, it’s even worse than I could ever have imagined. Our son is going to be a politician!”

what it takes to be a man

2007-04-03T07:23:00.000-07:00

CULLED FROM Soul On Ice, Eldrige Cleaver's autobiography:

"For being a man is the continuing battle of one's life, and one loses a bit of manhood with every stale compromise to the authority of any power in which one does not believe."-- Norman Mailer

"Song and dance are, perhaps, only a little less old than man himself. It is with his music and dance, the recreation through art of the rhythms suggested by and implicit in the tempo of his life and cultural environment, that man purges his soul of the tensions of daily strife and maintains his harmony in the universe.

In the increasingly mechanized, automated world--a cold, bodiless world of wheels, smooth plastic surfaces, tubes, pushbuttons, transistors, computers, jet propulsion, rockets to the moon, atomic energy--man's need for the affirmation of his biology has become that much more intense. He feels need for a clear definition of where his body ends and the machine begins..."

power center

2007-03-23T04:31:00.000-07:00

SOME GIRLS grow up ballsy, and become feminists. Which is fair enough in a world unduly and long ruled by chauvinists with ants in the pants about growing up.

Then again, when world domination sounds too macho out of the mouth of bra-burners--at the risk of transmogrifying themselves into bare-knuckle parodies or cracked mirror images of the "enemy"--it's such a relief when power struggle spawned by age-old inequality along gender lines gets straightened out loud and clear. Like this spunky and innocent certainty about that hole which has caused many a mighty man's downfall throughout history: "With this I'm going to control your LIFE!"

Other than victimization, vagina also alliterates well with victory.

That's downright the naked truth, or so agree lovers of Eve's daughters. And even without getting an earful of Ensler's many-splendoured monologues about that hallowed magnet of man's fascination, obsession and sometimes abuse, the message is simply easier to ascertain than finding the fabled G-spot: Whether you like it or not, we all--whether tyrant or wimp--came out of it!

Thumbs up, therefore, to the celebration of Women's Month.

blazing big

2007-02-25T07:01:00.000-08:00

IN A LITTLE WHILE the pageantry of this year's Oscars Awards will be history. But before the drum roll starts for the winners, I'm sticking my neck out for my preference (up yours, Roger Ebert!) among the Best Picture contenders.

True, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel is literally a towering achievement. All the accolades heaped on it so far are as unassailable as the sun rising at the East; the audacity of its scope is matched only by the subtlety and immediacy of its insight on the continental drift of despair rippling out of the most intimate instances of miscommunication and alienation.

Up on my feet, no problem, if Iñarritu's epic would win the Best Film. But I'll be howling out of my ears while trotting hot off my shoes if the spotlight would loom large and zoom in on Little Miss Sunshine.

Like summer on the side of nightmare, this film directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris zigzags seamlessly around heartbreak and hilarity, reeling on its dark theme--the bumpy ride to happiness and the horror of dreams hitting deadends--with its steadfast engine of intelligence and empathy.

It tracks the cross-country journey on a dilapidated minibus of "a family on the verge of a breakdown." But, aiee, how it veers off the viewers into borders of madness, failure, pain, love, and laughter with such detours of delight.

*** The ceremony just ended. The Departed won. Ok lang, at least Martin Scorcese won at last. If it's any consolation, Little Miss Sunshine took the trophy for Best Original Screenplay (by Michael Arndt) on top of the Best Supporting Actor award to Alan Arkin.

a toast to a televisionary

2007-02-11T05:00:00.000-08:00

BEEN GOING over the top with my insomnia lately, and living up to the heights of flight such witching hours can offer: an invitation to be vigilant, to empty one’s attention out for a journey into the depths of discovery.

Never thought I could stay riveted in front of the television with a monk’s devotion, an autistic’s focus and clarity, or a marathoner’s energy. Not until I got the DVD of the transcendent HBO production, “Six Feet Under,” containing the entire five seasons created by Alan Ball (writer of the critically-acclaimed “American Beauty”).

As long as I soaked up transfixed to its visionary concoction about a family who runs a funeral home—where the messed-up lives of the main and minor characters feel like second skin even as they hover like music and dance around despair and the inevitability of death--why bother about workaday schedules gone awry?

All that jazz about the human condition, with its bottomless cocktail of horror and humor, are here attuned to higher frequencies of omniscience. In my book, this series is the closest to ransacking a library for a crash course on the meaning of our mortality.

How downright affirmative to have been addicted!

so what else is new?

2007-01-30T03:50:00.000-08:00

THERE'S NOTHING like elections, more so in the Philippines, to brew a mixed-up slop of hope and cynicism. Nothing like the campaigns, too, to make eyeballs roll as we become witness to a circus of political antics that unravel like a rerun of a primetime slapstick. With your indulgence, here's a reprint of my column in the opinion page of today's issue of Sun.Star Cebu:

Here We Go Again

AS far as fad goes, foot massage is up for a peak season. Beware of varicose veins like forks of lightning burning down the soles on the heels of fancy footwork en route to the razzle-dazzle for the May polls.

Bite your toenails, yes. Or, hide. Legs will be pulled, and there’ll be a riot among those out to take all the voters for a ride. Been there, done that. So goes the chorus of the candidates and the electorate: Let us try again. Until we succeed, sigh.

Really, how far have we gone with the wind of politicians since elections were invented? Talk about democratic exercise, and those flexing up lip service about public interest have often succeeded in buffing up the sphincters and putting up more layers of callus in their faces.

Then again, aren’t most of our politicians merely mirroring who we are as we end up with our feet in our mouths after stomping and swearing of the sanctity of our right to vote?

How long do we allow ourselves to wallow before finding the so-called way to Damascus? How ready are we to take the high road beyond the same old tricks?

Of those running for any of the 17,000 positions in the national and local levels, who are out to keep us running in circles? Or, who among them can inspire us to go beyond the boredom of cynicism? So far, ho-hum.

Last Sinulog, for instance, we saw a few prospective senatorial candidates gracelessly getting in sync with the piety of the festival. There’s a time for everything, we’re told. But the timing simply sucks, period.

Here at the homefront, we hear of local bets flaunting their generosity, doling out PhilHealth cards to the needy as if such act of charity would be a dog-bites-man phenomenon outside the election season.

It’s refreshingly startling, therefore, when a candidate makes no bones about it. “It is not misconstrued,” replied Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña when told that his plan to give out 35,000 PhilHealth cards might be seen as a form of politicking. “It is what it is.”

At the risk of running on empty, any candidate is expected to put the best foot forward. Where have we been all along if we thought otherwise?

And if we voters have what it takes to search for a brain, a heart, and courage—not only from the candidates but also from ourselves—might as well brace for the bumps down the Yellow Brick Road. Wising up, as Dorothy and her friend realized in the end, meant finding out the wizard was just, well, pulling their legs. But, after all their ordeal, what a kick of a reality check!

a film to fly for

2006-12-29T03:50:00.000-08:00

“REALITY is brutal and it will kill you, make no mistake about it, but our tales, our creatures and our heroes have a chance to live longer than any of us.”

So says Guillermo del Toro, director-writer of Pan’s Labyrinth (''El Labirinto del Fauno''). I've just seen this, and del Toro's ode to the mythic and magical has left me reeling to the brink of breathlessness. Ought to kick myself, I know, but my toes are tapping in sync with the critics’ chorus of alleluias.

Shuttling his narrative structure between a young girl's vicarious world of fairy tales and the historical backdrop of fascism during the Spanish Civil War, del Toro takes the viewers through a romp that soars with the extravagance of his vision and the exuberance of his imagination.

With its fair share of enchantment and engagement, Pan's Labyrinth is an invitation to that almost extinct zone of innocence where military malevolence and ideological dead-ends coexist with fairy-eating ogres and a giant toad. Thus del Toro, in one of his interviews, affirms: "There is something vaguely embryonic about all the magic environments because I believe that fairy tales are ultimately about two things: facing the dragon or climbing back to our world inside.”

This film recently got nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Golden Globe awards (it is also Mexico's entry in the forthcoming Oscar awards), and my vote is irrevocable. Sight unseen, del Toro's competitors look like chewing gum to this minotaur of a motion picture.

when christmas carols make us cry

2006-12-14T09:15:00.000-08:00

DECEMBER and diaspora don't jell well, if you ask families riven by the exigency of seeking greener pastures far, far away from home.

Against the chill of temporary separation, even a photograph sun-drenched with a missed smile becomes reason enough for a celebration. Yes, if only to assure us that all's well with the world despite everything that compels and entails distance to bargain for every dreamer's prayer for a picture-perfect future.

To my Wawa, all the way to the cold heart of America, from me and our children: Malipayong Pasko ug Bulahang Bag-ong Tuig! Till we kiss again.

payt, bay!

2006-12-04T03:29:00.000-08:00

NO LESS THAN survival of the species, if not its spirit. That's what the language issue ought to be for those waging war against the marginalization of the mother tongue and its imminent extinction. For all true-blue Bisdak, here's my latest column in the opinion page of Sun.Star Cebu (5 December 2006 issue) :

Our Own Enemy

Like a cat giving birth to a puppy, something is out of whack when all that caterwauling about caring for the mother tongue gets the speakers wagging their tails in English instead.

Pastilan, the Bisdak spirit is willing but the tongue is weak. Or so those who stood up to speak at the symposium (a component of “Dalit Bisaya: A Celebration of Cebuano Culture” at the University of San Carlos) waxed awkward and apologetic for their fluency in “speaking dollars,” the currency of our educational system.

Victim of circumstance, thus one reactor explained her plight as she recalled and reminded her listeners what every school kid has learned all along: The vernacular is verboten in the classroom, and it means having to say you’re sorry after getting fined for speaking it.

And who can blame us, dear reader, if you opt to be an English patient as you recuperate in the act of reading me?

Talking on “The Future of Visayan,” Dr. Francisco Nemenzo (former president of the University of the Philippines) has an uphill way to go as he called on Cebuanos “to help promote, dignify and intellectualize the Cebuano language and to revive interest in the Cebuano culture.”

Licking ash, however, is not an option despite the givens of globalization and the politics in the policy of our national language. Swallow it all, we can. But that doesn’t have to entail vomiting out and casting aside what’s intrinsically ours.

True, aside from the obligation to reconcile ourselves with our historical and geopolitical circumstances, it behooves upon every Cebuano worth his birthright to be rabid with the responsibility to rage. Yes, against the dying of our umbilical words without which we Cebuanos might risk an orphan’s identity or consign to oblivion a vital aspect of ourselves “in the family of things,” as one poet puts it.

Tongue in cheek with our colonized consciousness, we have so much humble pie to digest. “The prevalence of colonial mentality in the age of globalization is the biggest threat to the survival of Visayan,” Nemenzo sighed. “If the Visayans themselves prefer to speak English to each other and use Visayan only for trivial chatter, our language is bound to die.”

Where does that leave the rest of us licking our lips while gloating over the ascendancy of the English language? “The world is changing so fast that English, perhaps the most worldly of languages, is struggling to keep up,” warns David Graddol, a British linguist and author of 'The Future of English?'

Indeed, it’s foolhardy to be complacent if we reckon how the erstwhile dominance of Greek and Latin did not spare the “lingua franca” from passing away.

No matter how convenient, English cannot replace other languages in the world. More than a communicative tool, language carries the signature of a particular race or culture. We may learn to branch out linguistically as citizens of the world, but no way can we uproot ourselves by displacing our language or facilitating its erasure. Of betrayal, Eugene Gloria’s poem In Language articulates it exactly: “It’s in the act/ of cleansing that we kill the spirit— ourselves; every culture’s worst enemy/ is its own people.”

buffet a la bisdak

2006-11-30T16:21:00.000-08:00

NATIVE SPECIALTY. That's what the University of San Carlos dishes out starting today as the Dalit Bisaya 2006: Cebuano Cultural Festival kicks off with an exhibit featuring slide shows, among others, at the Trade Hall of SM City.

Vicente Sotto's play Elena will also be staged as well as a free concert-- featuring Pilita Corrales, Dulce, Jimmy Marquez, local bands and USC's choir and dance troupe-- that will wind up the three-day affair.

But the most delicious part of the whole feast will be the Symposium on Cebuano Heritage on December 2 at 1:00 to 4:30 pm at the Theodore Buttenbruch Hall, USC Main. Slurp up to your ears, here are the papers to be presented:

1) "Ethnography, Blacksmiths : A Glimpse of Cebu’s Past” by Jocelyn B. Gerra, Executive Director of Cultural Heritage Ramon Aboitiz Foundation, Inc.

2) “Cebuano Tangible Heritage: Issues and Concerns” by Arch. Melva Rodriguez-Java, Director of the Conservation and Heritage Research Institute and Workshop (CHERISH) of the University of San Carlos

3) “The Future of Visayan,” by Dr. Francisco Nemenzo, former President, University of the Philippines

4) “Bisaya in the Global Filipino Nation” by Dr. Jose V. Abueva, President of the Kalayaan College in Marikina City

Kitakita ta, Bay!

Puzzle-Dazzle in a Poem

2006-11-30T05:48:00.000-08:00

HEFTY AND FEATHERY at the same time, here's an airtight evidence of poetry's power to encapsulate anything of epic scope. One of my favorite poems from the anthology 180 More: Extraordinary Poems For Every Day (edited by Billy Collins), the following piece written by R.S Gwynn is simply nifty in summing up some of Shakespeare's masterpieces, whittling down the formidable canon to the level of a playful puzzle: a deconstructionist's romp through the ramparts of the Elizabethan verse structure that often looms like an enchanted jungle to many an English Lit major. Who says one can't graze through the wilderness of a poem, chew the cud of its subtleties, and lick one's lips with a flourish of a grin after reading? Consider this:

Shakespearean Sonnet

A father is haunted by his father’s ghost.
A boy and girl love while their families fight.
A Scottish king is murdered by his host.
Two couples get lost on a summer night.
A hunchback murders all who blocks his way.
A ruler’s rival plot against his life.
A fat man and a prince make rebels pay.
A noble Moor has doubts about his wife.
An English king decides to conquer France.
A duke learns that his best friend is a she.
A forest sets the scene for this romance.
An old man and his daughters disagree.
A Roman leader makes a big mistake.
A sexy queen is bitten by a snake.

In Search Of The City's Soul

2006-11-20T04:56:00.000-08:00

TO MAKE Cebu worth the tourists' winks, those calling the shot for the metro have been at sixes and sevens about hosting the forthcoming Asean Summit. But there's more than meets the eye, or so fancies my recent column in the Opinion Page of Sun.Star Cebu (21 November 2006):

Where’s the Way to Sugbo Cultural Park?

What dreams may come for this so-called Queen City of the South remains to be seen, but City Hall is all eyes for no less than the spectacular. Never mind if the city’s overseer has been losing sleep in preparation for the Asean Summit; what matters is he wouldn’t wind up a somnambulist after going deep in trance for his visions of development.

All perked up for the forthcoming arrival of foreign guests and tourists this December, the city has been looking slick all the way. See, the center isle of the city’ major roads where the summit itinerary goes has been spruced up with the sleight of the landscape artist’s hands. Yellow paint has streaked out the sidewalk’s eyesores, too. And direct from France, a “state-of-the-art lighting technology” made of aluminum and glass will soon take the breath away of passersby and motorists along Fuente Osmeña to the Provincial Capitol.

Prospects are bright, too, for the relocation Department of Tourism (DOT) in a Banaue Rice Terraces-inspired edifice slated to rise at Kawit Point in the South Road Properties (SRP). With Cebu getting the President’s thumb-up as part of the Central Philippines super region, tourism is expected to take the city and the whole island by storm.

Upbeat about blazing cool sights in the city, the Mayor also mulls over the blueprint for improving Linot-od Falls in the mountain barangays of Taptap and Tabunan. Streamlining the scenery around it by putting up cable cars and other amenities would make it ideal as a picnic spot.

It’s a welcome possibility, indeed, in a city so short of parks and public spaces for recreation. So far, what comfort the city can offer to its denizens and tourists smack in its hustle and bustle (Plaza Independencia, Fuente Osmeña, Cebu Business Park in Ayala, and the Family Park in Talamban) is niggardly compared to the breezy vista of Luneta in Manila, for instance.

Now that City Hall is in the mood to set up landmarks that would raise the stakes for the city’s pride, why not aim higher and pave the way for a long-overdue oasis for Cebuano culture?

On this site will rise the Sugbo Cultural Park, or so this column wishes to see a billboard announcing soon its realization right in the heart of the city (perhaps somewhere in the SRP). Where green is the breeze whistling over the verdure and grass as the harvest of finest Bisdak sensibility gets celebrated. Where tourists and locals alike would gather not only to laze the hours away, but also to visit the park’s museums, art gallery, mini-theatre for a showcase of art films as well as poetry readings, play productions, concerts, etc. Where the trees would be renamed in loving memory of Cebu’s creators of literature, music, visual arts, dance, etc. (For example: Narra Vicente Ranudo, Acacia Martino Abellana, Molave Minggoy Lopez, or Mahogany Sandiego)

Beyond the cosmetic change of the city, indeed, there are more meaningful and enduring metamorphosis that would also spell its soul long after it has realized its dream for progress.

His Highness

2006-11-20T04:24:00.000-08:00

HEAVENLY, this pose after packing a knockout punch: an oblation of hands inverting the "V" of victory, of eyes rapt with gratitude. Such gesture, such grace of humility before a higher power, would have been out of sorts for one who rules in a sport steeped in machismo and vainglory. But there he is, showing us the stuff true champs are made of. Alleluiah, indeed!

Dossier For The Dopey

2006-11-19T02:28:00.000-08:00

SOME blogger got me tagged for a ride en route to that netherworld of self-indulgence. So, take it or leave it, here goes the buzz from my upfront dialogue with the rear-view mirror:

Which actor would best play you in the film of your life? Takeshi Kitano.

What would the title of your autobiography be? Still Grinning and Scratching My Head After All These Years

If you were a country, which one would you be? Italy by day, Japan by night

If your philosophy in life could be summarized on a car sticker, what would it say? Walking is better, but having a chaffeur is best.

If you could choose your own nickname, what would it be? Geez, this question’s Einstenian enough to rumple the remains of my hair!

If people used your name as a verb, what would it be for? For telling everyone not to take themselves too seriously

If you had your 15 minutes of fame, what would it be for? For Scarlett Johannson to tell the paparazzi that it was me who devirginized her through mental telepathy

If you could be a fictional character, who would you be? Peter Pan. Or if I’d grow up, Zorba the Greek and Odysseus.

What three qualities in a woman would be essential for her to qualify as the love of your life? Hey, wanna meet my wife?

Which TV character do you most identify with? The voice-over in the commercials

How would you describe yourself in a lonely hearts ad? Thrives well in solitude. Envious of lighthouse keepers, librarians, carpenters, chefs, gardeners and landscape artists, and directors of blue movies. Addicted to beer. A frustrated guitarist and symphony conductor. Lured but scared of the sea. And, yes, I have a lifelong crush on Nora Aunor.

If you could be an animal, what creature would you be? Pegasus

In what era do you belong? Way back where the air of innocence was struck with the soundtrack of such televised fares as Hawaii Five-O, Six-Million-Dollar Man and Superstar.

When someone asks you, What do you do? What would you like to be able to say? I aspire to be St. Augustine, thank you!

Which fashion designer epitomizes your sense of style? Would you haul me off to the nearest nudist colony, instead, please?

What car would you be? I’d rather be a tartanilla hauled by Pegasus.

What season is most like you? Rainy, the sort that drives me and my kids outside in the downpour while my wife prepares arroz caldo or pancakes and hot chocolate in the kictchen.

Where are you in life’s swimming pool? In the deep or shallow end, floating, sinking, on the diving board or in the changing room? Swimming pool? Get real, life is either an ocean or a sewer.

What song sums you up best? Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana because it sounds barbaric and heavenly at the same time

What flower would you be? Dama de noche, if not a nocturnal sunflower

What are your three best qualities? I remember. I celebrate. I believe. (Otherwise, I’d be damned!)

What three words would your detractors use about you? What three words would your friends use about you? Who do you agree with? Guess what? Reading the minds of my friends and foes alike is too presumptuous for my own comfort.

Which of the seven deadly sins are you most likely to commit? Lust and pride. (If not, I would be a saint.)

What famous person, past or present, would most enjoy your company? Bert “Tawa” Marcelo, because he laughed a lot whether he meant it or not. Plus the cool fact that he used to be an endorser of San Miguel beer. Swell!

Happy Birthday, Aegan!

2006-11-15T00:57:00.000-08:00

TOMORROW, 16th of November, my youngest son Raphael Gandalf will turn one. It's been a year, and the hours still soar to where bliss and magic loom eternal in the light of his presence in our lives. God bless my children (and their parents, too, who are nurtured by them and are grateful beyond measure!)

Adrenaline Overdrive, Anyone?

2006-11-06T03:18:00.000-08:00

WHAT WAS that again about all that fuss that flushes up waste? Well, the go-getters for Cebu do appear like they know no better, headlong into their goal with horse's blinders on, about the Asean Summit this December. Here goes my rub again in my latest column in the opinion page of Sun.Star Cebu:

In the heat of the haste

If it would make them look better, they could try jumping down the river.

Surge and swell up. Or so the pressure goes for the metro’s movers and shakers, flexing themselves for the forthcoming Asean Summit and hoping their heads would be above the flow.

Even the Niagara would fall short of the ferocity with which our leaders have poured out their resources just so that our foreign guests would be swept off their feet. A multi-million structure suddenly looms into view, and roads suddenly get spruced up with yellows enough to cause jaundice while shanties along the visitors’ way get coated over with cool green until the tourists’ eyes turn mint.

Hey, aren’t we so up to the challenge of making ourselves look cozy with urban development? But couldn’t we have done this entire proclivity for preening a long time ago and save ourselves of the nail-biting groan and grind of making things happen, spic and span, in the nick of deadline?

Ah, this adrenaline rush to level up to expectation. This would have served us in good stead if this were harnessed for honest-to-goodness urban planning for the Cebuanos’ benefit to begin with, and not merely because we have foreign guests to please.

Then again, with our “fiesta” mentality, hardly do we mind if we drown ourselves with debts as long we’re riding the waves of goodwill from our visitors until they puke their guts out of the glut of our preparations for their satisfaction.

Foresight, however, is a factor marked with X here this island now stooping its stressed-out head down its soles so it can prove what our foreign guests are coming into is no backwater. Yes, even if garbage clogs up the corpses of our rivers that abruptly rise with the downpour until they gorge up and gobble away youngsters along the rapids.

What happens when the Summit is over and done with? Would we still be as obsessed about making our metropolis look first-rate? Could we sustain this overdrive to appear decent even if only our homegrown eyes would be left staring? Would law enforcement still keep up with its level of hunger to pounce on and make mincemeat of felons who are ever so galling with their cold-blooded appetite whether or not guests are coming to dinner?

Hopefully, this burst of momentum to make sense of our urban muddle won’t be momentary. Flirting with progress is fine, true. It’s another story, however, to rouse ourselves with a band and tidy up for transients, to wink at them so we can make the most of our time together in the heat of a one-night stand.

If that’s sorely the case, wouldn’t we be better off jumping down the rampaging river? (7 November 2006, Sun.Star Cebu)

Unbearable Lightness of Being With Golli and Aegan

2006-11-05T03:41:00.000-08:00

THIS IS just to say, against uncertainty and life's black humor, these are reasons enough for wingedness and wizardry: Gabriel Ollivan and Raphael Gandalf.

A toast to Arlaine, mother extraordinaire as well as my lifetime conspirator of all things worth conjuring. Tip my hat: all the ice-cold San Miguel Pilsen has never been warmer down my throat to my heart.

"Who travels for love finds a thousand miles not longer than one." - Japanese proverb

Our Days Of Disquiet

2006-10-31T03:28:00.000-08:00

FOR THE LIVING who are no better than those who rest in peace, here's my All Souls' Day column in the opinion page of Sun.Star Cebu:

Restless

If he were a ghost, his grimace seemed not enough to spook City Hall into action.

“I would like, at least, to have my complaints noted and my questions answered,” rues a certain Alvin John Osmeña who hopes for city officials’ attention so they can “address the recurring problem on noise.” All that sound—loud music played inside vehicles and highly sensitive car alarms—reportedly bothers him wherever he is.

Must he consign himself to wait until he’d be six feet under before he’d experience what it takes to be tranquil?

That his grievances have fallen on deaf ears is indication enough that City Hall ought to be reminded what Desiderata intoned so solemnly: “Remember what peace there may be in
silence.”

But as its ears register nothing less than high frequency of the forthcoming Asean Summit, is City Hall up to the challenge for calm?

Isn’t its desperate need to live up to expectation or to prove that the city is no cemetery of progress a symptom of modern world’s neurosis?

It’s supposed to be a luxury, but taking things slow has become a liability. The go-getting mania has rendered it quaint to quell the cliché and, yes, smell the flowers. The quick and the dead, alas, have one thing in common: Too unconscious to find loveliness in their ornate funeral wreath.

Who has time to catch a whiff of grace as we reek of rage throughout our constant brush with rush hours, deadlines, quotas? Blessed are the departed, indeed, for having gone past the zone of discomfort Thoreau scoffed at: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Indeed, pity the taxpayer in dire need for an accessible refuge in the midst of the city’s hustle and bustle. Where are our public spaces with trees to sit under? Breezy does it, if you ask the dead in memorial parks from which real estate developers are literally making a killing.

Indeed, anguish is when we have to puncture our eardrums to the feet-stomping tune of “Let’s Get Loud” so that we get a kick out of the doldrums. Ah, doesn’t that explain our private emergencies to lull ourselves with our iPod so can we insulate our head and shut the hysterical world out of our ears?

Hear, too, the prognosis from the World Health Organization: Depression will soon be the second leading cause of disability in the world where suicide ranks as the third leading cause of death among dismally spirited adolescents.

“Quiet is going extinct,” says Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who’s espousing a campaign on behalf of American parks called “One Square Inch of Silence” meant to protect a tiny spot of serenity from man-made sound. “I wanted to find a quiet place and hang on to it and protect it.”

Man, he’d better be dead than find himself fuming from both ears here this side of purgatory. (31 October 2006, Sun.Star Cebu)