Tactility and Drawing

Today's continental philosophy class invited an assistant professor for drawing and painting to talk about how theory can be a catalyst for her work as well as an affirmation of her direction. Prof. Fremaux spoke on how drawing is about "excavation" whereas painting is "burial." Drawing is utility of lines that make, render visible and she cited Deleuze as a means of becoming, a generative process. Drawing is a series of action taking place; in which she discussed about portraiture on how she balances between Levinas and Deleuze when it comes to the "face."

Her practice is portraiture but she is not for representation and not for mimesis (likeness), but she investigates on "becoming." For Levinas, the emergence of the face is a moral principle because the act of face-to-face grounds all human existence. A portrait under the lens of Levinas would be imagining the other's interior life via exteriority.

Deleuze disagrees and goes for the face as forged politically. Prof. Fremaux discusses that the face "is not part of the body" and that it "emerges when the body is 'divided' according to culture.'" the division caters to a hierarchy which depending on the situation, places the face as a matter that can slip between identities. this play of identities expresses possibilities hence the political nature of the face.

The most interesting part of the class is that we were given a blank piece of paper and Prof. Fremaux told us to explore our own faces according to our own touch. We do not look at mirrors but to feel the fleshiness, the hardness of some parts of the face, the dips, the undulation and then draw these via lines. I enjoyed this activity so much because I never really drew anything via exploration of the touch. It is all about the preeminence of the sight, the gaze. Which Prof. Fremaux cited Deleuze's writing "[...] see through your skin [...]"

I like it that Prof. Fremaux mentioned that the face is a tiny part of our head and yet the most potent. She asked us to explore via touch our cranium, then our forehead, then our face....and this is what I came up with....it looks like I really feel my nose is bulbous. I look like a sleeping Asian Uncle Fester.

Major takeaway from this class is how critical theory, philosophy can help artists re/frame our practice. Lord knows how many times have I heard from visual artists that discard theory so easily thinking it is an obstacle. The gift of today is Prof. Fremaux has confirmed what I have been saying for some time now that theory is a partner to my practice. It is not the starting point of my practice. I don't think "Oh I am feeling dialectical today" and draws something. Theory helps me navigate my thoughts and feelings about subject matters and their renderings. Theory says that form and content are at the same level for me.

Asian Uncle Fester, is that you?

The Weight of Sadness

I was chatting with a friend and she was sad because her friend committed suicide. She told me that I should be strong because suicide affects everybody that you know.

I remember having a conversation with this guy who was utterly depressed and he asked me if I had suicidal thoughts. I said, "I would imagine my death to be fabulous...like being shot while I am wearing an Alexander McQueen suit that finally fits me. Is that suicidal?" I was joking to make him laugh.

He smiled. I told him "I understand why people commit suicide. It must be really hard for them to go on thinking that nobody is there for them. i imagine the hopelessness they might feel to think nothing will change. If I do kill myself now, I am getting rid for myself the opportunity to meet some cool people."

I had dark moments but I did not shake those off. They are still very much part of me. One of the best experiences I had in a class was an anthropology class under Chancellor Michael Tan. He was talking about a Buddhist ritual from the Himalayas about feeding your monsters.

I won't do justice here with an FB post but I recall that you are in a room with two chairs. You sit on one chair and you visualize the monster sitting on the other. Some rituals vary. Once you visualize your monster you feed it to befriend it. Then once you "sufficiently" fed it, you stand up and you sit on that chair, thereby embodying the monster itself. This ritual helps you understand your monsters, to befriend them, to feed them not to strengthen them but to connect with them and not let them overwhelm you.

Oh man, when Chancy Tan discussed those, I looked outside the window because I don't want him to see that I shed some tears. First time in my life to cry inside a classroom and I never cry in front of anybody. I had to do some heavy breathing so to control those tears.

I also read in another Buddhist ritual, this time, in Japan, wherein you draw your monsters. If you draw them, then you control them. I guess I am fortunate to be a cartoonist because I exorcise my monsters onto the strips, onto paper.

I am not an expert on mental health, but I imagine hopelessness has a weight to it. So does grief. so does resentment. That weight will stop you from moving. But the question is for how long?

Marx and Engels wrote about alienation and that has been a prevalent affliction in our times. Of course, Marx and Engles propose a solution for that but hear them out. Perhaps "direct action" is really what we need when we get the blues. I don't know. Maybe this is why many of us are addicted to social media, not just to "show off" but to retain a "semblance" (as opposed to actual) connection. It has become a crutch...and that is ok as long as it helps you get your bearings back.

But if you are sad and need somebody to chat with and if it so happens I am online and awake, just send me a message. Who knows? I can probably make you laugh? Lord knows I pester a select number of friends when I get the downward spirals.

Musings from a rodeo

watched my very first rodeo here in Texas. actually, this is my first sports spectacle on American soil...which is apt because ranching in part of the America’s manifest destiny and expansion. i found it interesting because ranching is in Australia, Canada, Argentina, Philippines. I am sure ranching has espoused a different sort of recreation in these countries. I remember in some ranches in Bukidnon, a province in Mindanao, they have stallion fighting, in which they have a mare in heat enter the arena and let two stallions slug it out.

it is quite American that it begins with the flanking of colors from”Old Glory” and a ritualized gratitude to the men and women of uniforms as well as rousing call to cultural arms from the host (ringmaster?) that we are in the best country on earth and cap that with a prayer.

There is a parade of the town banners with their police on horseback. this is an interesting bracketing of cultural identity with force entities and agricultural might and dexterity. the Americans deftly mixed spectacle and literal handling of resources of “domesticated” animals.

Is it rodeo season because it is spring? a loosening of atrophied joints brought by winter in order to be nimble and nifty for that time for planting and for harvest in the coming weeks? i recall great sporting spectacles in agrarian societies in the Philippines AFTER the harvest. I know some post-harvest ritual is to display the abundance of food on the streets during the fiesta.

I was actually riveted by the rodeo. I never thought I’d enjoy it this much, perhaps because this is a new thing for me. And such an American spectacle with riders carrying banners of their corporate sponsors in between events showing a great balance of capitalism and spectacle with sports. I imagine the football games are way more insane than this.

And of course there was the rodeo clown as an in-between act between the different participants. It was a slew of really dated jokes (ie. he had a joke about kids these days wearing their pants low and baggy. Wait that is my generation, kids these days wear skinny jeans that offer the prospect of slowed blood circulation.) and of course the tired wife jokes and then there is the usual regional jokes (ie. Rodeo clown knew there were Californians in the audience because he saw a Prius at the parking lot). I cast my glance at the crowd and these are the Lubbock people I have yet to meet because I am mostly within the confines of the campus then my home.

Though the stadium is not packed, there was still a huge crowd of fans which highlight the centrality of agricultural production in Lubbock. I am trying to remember if the Filipino farmer or ranchers would have this massive display of jollification.

The contrast is palpable because of the stark difference in terms of sociopolitical lenses. i was told many Lubbock farmers are wealthy and have government subsidies. Many Filipino farmers are still subject to a system developed centuries ago that meant subjugation to landowners.

That alone creates strata of differences in mobility. the rodeo is an intricate affair of wealth and might. the farmers’”sports” in the Philippines is not as extensive (ie. Carabao racing), because space is an issue. we do not have much flat lands in the Philippines like Texas.

I cannot imagine roping calves back home because that might “hurt” the animal hence a possible destruction of an important resource for the Filipino farmer. if anything, a rodeo is a show of economic force of a culture so wealthy it has changed beasts of burden to entertainment.

But of course, these are just thoughts running in my mind as i sat there mesmerized by the gladiator-like swagger of the cowboys and for a moment basking in the glow of this culture that has made subjugation of willful animals as a form of cultural identity.

Ride ‘em, Cowboy!

we have to really plumb down the depths of meaning of courage

(NB: This is my reaction from the Thinkpiece equating Sara Duterte with Courage)

(1) My problem with courage is it has to be displayed overtly so, for it to be validated in the political theater. But courage is mistaken for showmanship and lack of control in terms of Sara (without the "H" because she has no honesty, as they say) Duterte slapping the court sheriff. This is precisely people misunderstand courage for blunderbuss for political will (just like her father that is all just expletives and nothing much else)

(2) What is courage in terms of politics, anyway? Is it fighting for the people or really covering up for your criminal friends and family? Are you a "courageous woman" if you are willing to throw women under the bus and never really comment against your own father's diminution of women? this opinion piece writes about gender and though the writer professes she is no expert, courage is gendered in our culture. Just the fact that in the Tagalog language "nabakla" (to become bakla or queer or effeminate) means to lose your nerve (and that term is not just used in the streets, but even present in the Pasyon you will hear during Lent) Courage is culturally contextualized ergo what does it mean that "courage" is not just gendered but also geographic? (On Martial Law as an act of political will: "Kayong mga tiga-Maynila walang alam sa (insert problem) dito sa (insert place) kaya wag na kayong magsalita kasi kami ang nandito at kailangan namin ito) Courage has a location, apparently, and as you trawl through the social media comments and posts, courage is in Davao...(is there a "stifle your laughter" emoji?)

(3) Do you equate being a "strongman" to courage? Is it courageous to use your power and influence to muzzle your critics? If you are saying that courage means having the will to "do what it takes" to help the country "better"... (a) better for whom? (b) so, you're saying if you get mugged by men with ice picks and they steal your stuff because they are poor and need to feed their family and that is an act of courage for them because they do "whatever it takes" for a speedy result?

(4) If you go by Joseph Campbell, courage is a journey and transformation regarding to the power accorded to you which you initially refuse and flee from. What has Sara Duterte refused to do? Seek accountability from her family and cohorts' alleged criminal acts. What has she fled from? Decency? I don't know. All I know is I wouldn't use "Courage" to describe a brat with trigger problems.

of taxes and basketball

Texas Tech’s Mighty Fulbrighters 

(1) Gugu and I went to Sandra’s to help her out with her taxes. Fulbrighters helping out other Fulbrighters.

(2) Sandra prepared sumptuous fish with curry. sandra says, “and this is curry from Trinindad. ours is more potent.” this led to more discussions about food history and food anthropology. 

(3) Texas Tech won over Gonzaga and i knew because of twitter and because a church bell rang like crazy. sandra notes that “this is the longest i heard that bell ring.”

(4) we could hear all these hoots and hollering from outside. I see college students fill the streets and into whatever house party they will be in.

(5) Texas Tech winning over the powerhouse Gonzaga is a big deal considering Tech was written off by many experts early on. Now, Tech is at the Final Four of the country.

(6) Gugu gave me a birthday present! a Chinua Achebe book and I urge her to write the next best novel from Africa.

(7) As I walk home, there was this steady stream of huge pick up trucks with Texas Tech flags and people waving the Red Rangers guns’ up hand gesture.

(8) I saw my PhD cohort, the theater director Cole and told him texas texh won in this big deal game and he was nonplussed, “if only we have this same enthusiasm for the arts.” i just even surprised myself that i am talking about basketball.

(9) it is a good day. i exceeded my expectations in a paper, i organized my presentation, met up with Fulbright friends, had a proper meal, Texas Tech won, and i have a new book.

"I'm Walking Here!"

As I was reading about phenomenology of the voice, I remember an episode of my recent trip to NY. I took the train for Jersey City and got out of the port authority. It was early and the subways were teeming so I decided to walk. It was just a 3km-walk. I do that here in Lubbock with ease.

then, I forget NY is not Lubbock. There is something exhausting about walking in a very crowded city. The cacophony is an added weight as opposed to Lubbock's open spaces and general silence.

So, I was walking and encountered a "I'm walking here" New York moment. At a curb, there was a green light so a delivery van went through, but a guy was crossing the street. The van abruptly stopped and the driver got out. both men were screaming at each other. I always enjoy the spectacle of unbridled loosened macho energy as long as I am distant from it.

The driver was a a big guy, but the one crossing was a hulking dude. Like massive. I bet he got his anger issues from roid rage or something. And then I heard the hulk yell....oh my goodness, he belongs to the group of men under the loving and high-pitched embrace of David Beckham.

You cannot believe the strength I had to summon not to laugh out loud when this hulk was screeching, "YEAH I'M WALKIN' HERE, WACHUGUNNADOABOUTIT?" The driver just glowered and High-pitched Hulk was swaggering looking for a fight. Some guy had to go in between them.

A couple of guys behind me witnessed the hilarious cognitive dissonance of audio bravado. One guy just yelled, "YEAH, YOU TELL HIM, MIKE TYSON!"

and people in the scene just laughed and walked on leaving the high-pitched hulk and the glowering guy have a few more seconds of a stand-off.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

There is always a certain reliability for rock and roll to play up the sounds of irreverence.  It is like a cornerstone of grit, gutter, grime to add a layer of rock and roll in the narrative.  It has been deployed to make Jesus Christ accessible, relevant, young, hip in Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Jesus Christ Superstar.  Rock and Roll has been deployed to be transgressive, fluid, disruptive in the likes of Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Picture.  The transgression, relevance, disruption are called upon in Michael Friedman’s Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson recently staged by the TTU School of Theater and Dance.  The problems with a complicated person and even more complicated history reverberating from Andrew Jackson being pigeonholed in musical theater can be daunting.  Will this capture the breadth of his legacy?  Will this explore themes that still resonate today?  The problem with employing irreverence as an aesthetic direction is that there is a chance to caricaturize, ergo make diminutive the person and his crimes/glory.  And maybe that was the point – that this ultimately bloody figure be made into a rollicking buffoonish swagger onstage to both (1) undermine his person as an act of satirical cutting down to size, (2) to undermine the bloody consequences of his actions that are now packaged as head-bopping songs instead of painful, deep introspection of examining America.

The production relied on irreverence for laughs like having the sound effects one would normally cull from Saturday morning cartoons to depict being shot by Native American arrows.  There was a smattering of laughter with Washington DC political elite being depicted as overwrought, preening sissies thereby portraying the country mouse versus the city mouse, or in this case, the fey Northeast elite versus the grubby Fortier land dwellers.  I thought that was tired and drawn out, and yet, it is very much played in the current political landscape of America – as well as that of in many “democracies” such as in the Philippines, Brazil wherein the central elite is overwrought and disconnected and they can only be swept away or have their swamp drained by an outsider – which is Andrew Jackson, or the many iterations of leaders that often cut corners that have problematic legacies.   The production was filled with facial mugging, jerkiness of the body, often breaking the fourth wall, blood splatter, crotch grabbing – basically implements that one would not want to associate with a hagiography or, at the very least, a depiction in one’s monument.  These tropes of irreverence are perfectly rendered in this production.  Though the setting is specific but the details that pulsate around it are conflated, discordant, messy, complicated – very much like the America today.  The whole cast’s look was bricolage in which you cannot tell which rock and roll era they belong to: is that an early naughts emo?  Was that punk?  Is her hair an homage to industrial rock?  What’s a 70s disco ball doing in a barn?  The collapse of the looks of the rock and roll eras very much add to the complication, conflation of discordance that is Andrew Jackson as a president.  He wanted the country safe, but in order to do that, he had to resort to mass murder.  He railed against the elitist of Washington DC and yet he is the architect of one of the world’s most oppressive internal dispersion of people which he saw as inferior and unable—nay, incapable to assimilate in the American way.  Lead actor Luke Weber had jagged performance from a frenetic swagger of Mick Jagger to the rubbery facial tics of comedic Topher Grace (and that is quite a range, I have to say) – again very much into the discordant portrayal of Jackson.  Pity the sound design of the production falls short as the band’s instruments were more than occasionally drowning the cast.  I do not know if it is the youth of the cast or the general earnestness of their giddiness but it feels like they are merely appropriate in going through the motions of a mosh pit – all movement but no direction, and I say this because they are supposed to be intrinsic to the narrative and yet they fall away like disposable ornaments.  It is like their irreverence is by the number, which is like listening to rock and roll as ambient music inside an elevator.  Or, maybe, I am just that old person scoffing at the young.

But kudos to the production design.  At the start of the musical there was a banter incorporated regarding TTU’s ongoing construction of the new theater and performance spaces. Was it by way of an apology that we have to watch this in a barn—and not just any barn, but a simulated one, which speaks of the simulation of presidency that is rustic, indecent inside a simulated space of the agricultural frontier.  I thought it is an act of genius to be inside a barn to watch a musical about a president that is problematic.  This time, irreverence as policy of personality politics.  Isn’t this the same guy who let off a glaring and telling retort within the musical as he, Pres. Andrew Jackson as reflective of “America’s character?”  The barn is not America’s character but a result of it. I thought it was sheer hilarity that we celebrate Jackson’s life in the National Ranch Heritage Center given the fact that ranches are the very result of imperious land-grabbing and the displacement and disenfranchisement of people by this person “Who put the ‘man’ in ‘manifest destiny!’” It goes without saying that this musical reflects America’s current unhinged populism.  The opening salvo is basically an homage to American governmental policy with the lyrics dripping with bravado, initiative, go-getter version of entitlement:  “From people like us who don't just think about things / People who make things happen / Sometimes with guns / Sometimes with speeches too / And also other things.” The call for “Make things happen” is tied to “Make America Great Again.”

My favorite part was the “Ten Little Indians” wherein the Indian was behind a screen and it was his shadow that enacted the horrors brought down upon them in song reminiscent of the nursery rhyme.  This particular set is truly the centerpiece of American history intertwined with Jackson, in my opinion.  It was as if the Native Americans really did not have a place, even onstage, but instead are relegated as shadows, or ghostly silhouettes, unformed and peripheral.  Furthermore, many people’s initial introduction to Native American is counting these little “Indians” – a people and several cultures reduced to juvenile rhythmic numbers of containment. It was a short part but that was a brilliant encapsulation I see as what made America “great:” the systematic obliteration/reduction of people – be it in America or abroad.

I thought it was absolutely brilliant to go into the details of production design.  At the base of the stage, there are three rugs: a cowhide, an “oriental rug” and a simulation woven hemp rug – I see these as visual short hands for American history and current events.  The cowhide as the western expansion, the simulation woven hemp rug as the indigenous people’s culture and way of life, and the “oriental” rug as present-day America’s problem with Islam – and all three received the frenetic stomps, body slams, of the cast, dragging of and jabs by the feet – this is where America treads on.  As the entire cast moves about tables, chairs to change the scenes onstage, these rugs stay still as the underlying, silent, foundational stage of America’s fast pace into history and into alacrity for unrelenting violence.

Tatsuya Nakatani and Satin Spar

At the end of the performance, the audience was all abuzz on how “different” this show was.  One sound engineer and musician even remarked, “In all my years here in Lubbock, I have never heard or seen anything like this.”  What was it about Tatsuya Nakatani’s “frenetic solo percussion” that set off such a proclamation of novelty?  It made me think on what sounds would be accustomed to make one hear and then proclaim, “Yup, that’s Lubbock!”  If sound and music have the power to transport us, where did we end up after the performance?

The performance was set up in one of the spaces at the Charles Addams Studio Project.  I have been in Lubbock in less than seven months and I have been to the area only thrice, but I can surmise that the spaces are near areas of industrial activity which perfectly segued to the opening act of Satin Spar.  One of the musicians, before starting the performance, muttered that they come from the “area” then adds the “ish” after; making it as if they are in the place but not of the place.  Which is highly indicative of their music, they are in the realm of sound, but not of the traditional notions of music as entertainment.  It is interesting to note that both performances delved into the feelings, into the motions, into the sounds of place.  Not quite space, for that would connote containment and parameters.  These two performances did not respect cartography and we were all relegated into an “area…ish” of sonic experiences.

Satin Spar basically had two men go up front and produced sounds that were manipulated by multiple synthesizers.  It could not be truly experimental because one of the musicians used a trumpet, but the sounds produced went beyond the recognizable, nay, expected and pleasant, easily digestible.  The sounds they produced are familiar – these are cacophonic overlapping of the sounds of cities punctured by video games and cartoons sound effects.  I was later told that the performance hinged on how the synthesizers “conversed” with one another.  This is quite interesting for the sounds of the frenzy of the urban centers not just converse with each other, but feed off each other clamoring for your attention and, yes, irritation.  I come from a city of 20 million people and from a capital where silence is literally golden or an attribute of privilege.  The shanties of Manila are brimming with sound, some say noise, where people live in shacks that are smashing to each other cheek by jowl.  In Manila, hushed conversations and whispers are uprooted when the currency is space, which many cannot afford it.  When I first set foot in Lubbock, the first thing I noticed was the sound of expanse.  Perhaps, this is what people in Lubbock were saying about not used to these sounds.  The music produced by Satin Spar are waves of industrial activities that are relentless ergo belying Lubbock’s almost fragile sleepiness compared to the bigger cities where these sounds are inherent as they are expected.  The sounds punctuate what it would be like to be inside a machine where there is no exit.  The way synthesizers had conversations with each other were enabled by the musicians twisting the knobs and flicking the switches – such acts belong to a factory which is perfect for this meditation and mediation of urban foment.  In contrast, I am reminded of the Icelandic singer Bjork’s Medulla album which has been marked as both great and experimental when it was released for its ambitious take on the dexterity of the human voice machine.  Satin Spar extended the conversation and used the voice machine to do a very human act which is to converse with each other.

After Satin Spar, it was Tatsuya Nakatani’s turn and he was the sun in the center of the solar system of drums, snares, gongs, cymbals, and East Asian purification bowls.  That would be an apt description because Satin Spar offered a look into industry and urban ministrations, but Nakatani’s sounds overlap majesty, nature, and ritual for the next thirty minutes.  With the giant flat-faced gong used typically in announcing the arrival of royalty in East Asia, Nakatani managed to pull from this orb many sounds while he used a bow to do saw-like gestures in one hand, handling the rope that secures the gong in another.  With deft precision, he managed to wrangle sounds that are unearthly and, yet, familiar, particularly to somebody like me who grew up in East Asian culture.  We grew up with stories of the gong summoning dragons, spirits, or a way to placate the space with its reverberations that travel across the room.  Nakatani turned the gong into something that was more akin to summoning winds, for the cluster of his performance reminded me of the sounds of a typhoon ripping apart roofs and lifting debris with such ferocity and yet you could still make out the wind chimes tinkering playfully amidst such destruction. 

Mostly throughout his performance, Nakatani had his eyes closed and you could see his brow having a sheen of sweat coagulating with the music he produced.  This was both hard work and meditation, which has been hilariously classified as “emptying of the mind.”  That is not quite accurate, for in many Eastern cultures, the emptying of the mind is not an eradication of identity but a dissolution of desire, which in Nakatani’s music is about being responsive as opposed to be being utterly calculating.  The sounds he mounted each provided for a setting up for the next cluster of sounds which is like a building up on clouds as to prepare to let go the driving rain.  He would toss the many sized cymbals onto the top of the drum as he used the edge of said cymbals to skim off the skin.  The most interesting part for me was when Nakatani used the ceremonial purification bowls and upended them.  He would toss the smaller bowls into the bigger bowl and roll them creating this frenetic sound of panic.  I find it interesting because these purification bowls are held in high regard in many Eastern superstition.  We “activate” charms, crystals, amulets placed in the bowl as a rod is then struck at the side while it then touches the lip of the bowl elongating the sound.  This is the purification ritual, a calling onto the spirits to give the crystals, amulet their power.  And, yet, Nakatani collapsed the bowls into each other and was shaking them, dislodging the notion of purity.

My friend Eric later said that the clanging of the cymbals and gongs reminded him of a kitchen with the pots and pans collapsing on top of each other.I told him it reminded me of days in Manila when we are hit by typhoons; the power is out, no network coverage and it is just you in the room with the windows shuttered and you can feel the outside shake with such fury.And that is what Nakatani’s brilliant performance was, a fury that understood its own containment.In such fervent moves that is reminiscent of the whirling dervishes, Nakatani entered a place wherein we are witness to the occurrence but not quite inside such a place with him.I have heard from classmates in philosophy about “entering the zone.”This is Nakatani’s zone now and many of the audience are transported to such an unfamiliar place that some of us are left reeling after and thus one could hear proclamations of “I have never seen or heard anything like it.”True, I do not think Lubbock has had a typhoon.That was Nakatani’s piece exactly: a force of nature.

Place and Pace

At the opening night of Dance Tech 2019, we were greeted by a couple of dance students stationed by the door outside CASP 5&J Gallery.  These young ladies standing still, upright, with arms stretched out sideways look like a duo of Colossi of Rhodes with Led lights blinking on their person.  They are dressed in grey with billowing plastic bags as tutus and snaking around their arms are rubber hoses and one can deduce that they are attempting to look urban and rugged.  Their eye shadow are sharp flecks of black streaking from the front to the sides that are reminiscent of Natalie Portman’s eye make-up when she portrayed (and won an Oscar for) Odile in Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan.  These are visual short hands for me that the performances will not be the usual exploration of dance as lightness, elegance, and defiance of gravity.  Dance Tech 2019 did have those and yet there was a decided grit to it.

Dance Tech 2019 showed the choreography of Texas Tech teachers and guest artists that are site-specific.  The audience will have to contend to walk around selected areas for the different suites of performances (six in total).   It was a chance for the performance to go beyond the usual proscenium setting and to respond to available space that are oft-ignored.  The opening suite was inside the gallery wherein the lights shifted from purple to blue and cast an ethereal pallor on the dancers who wore grey.  The music alluded to some tinkering, almost flights of fancy type of staccato peppered with the dance movements of undulation and extension making the dancers look like cavorting and battling maenads or sea nymphs.  The hairstyles are not the usual severe buns of many a ballerina but different braids that remind me of Ukrainian peasant women which add to the playfulness of the performance.  In the other suites, the hair fashioned as such would serve as a crucial visual implement of counterbalance as well as a perfect juxtaposition of the urban decay in the surrounding areas.  The braids are folkloric, somewhat, to the jagged movements across the Lubbock dust and grime.  The second suite had all the audience members follow the plastic bag-festooned ballerinas as guides out in the back which is a start of four suites that caught my fancy.  The first and the last ones were the weakest as they pandered to clichés.

The second suite had a metallic structure that looked like a giant peacock tail feather with the dancers occasionally hanging on to it.  They are now dressed in white coveralls with face masks.  They were wearing heavy workmen boots.  At this point, the lighting was not as dynamic as the first one inside the climate-controlled room, but it does not mean it is less creative.  In fact, the lighting in the suites outside prove to be among the exciting details for me.  They used mobile spotlights as well as headlights of SUVs beaming through the bodies.  I take significance in this in the urban experience wherein these headlights are both bane and boost.  It can boost the vision of the driver, but bane to those focused on by the lights.  One of the apprehensions I feel in this usage of headlights is that it can be a weapon of aggression.  This is not a new thing.  As the dancers in industrial uniform were performing kicking up small dust storms and their bodies lit laterally, I am reminded of the Spanish painter Goya’s work The Third of May 1808 wherein the executioners used a strong light situated at the ground to focus on the prisoners who are pleading for their lives. 

Light has always been an act of illumination, of clarity, but in this work of Goya, and perhaps in Dance Tech, light added to the menace of the narrative.  The dancers in workmen’s clothes were at one point emulating the movements of factory workers, disjointed, repetitive.  At the end, there was one body being carried out as if in cruciform as a sacrifice for industrial might.  The one in cruciform stands in the end, takes down her mask and lets out an audible gasp, the only human sound to have been produced in that suite.

The performance after that was a solo act of a lady in tatters perched on a broken wooden chair grasping a tin cup.  She looked like a meditating Bodhisattva or urban decay as she crouched so still while at her back, across the street is the abandoned red brick building with broken glasses.  Among all the suites, this dance had the smallest area in which she crisscrossed on which relied more on the drama of the body rather than the reliance of space and sets.  Was she portraying a derelict in conversation with her meager resources as espoused by the broken chair and by the empty tin can?  Was this a dance portrait of homelessness and being dejected by society?  Her movements are splayed like grasping for air with her hands to prayers to an invisible god.  This was the sparsest, and dare I say, the most evocative of them all.

The next act had a duo emerging from upturned rubbish bins.  They remind me of battling hermit crabs.  This act looks like a performance after the apocalypse with the dancers dressed in rags, one looking like a discarded court jester and the other one is an androgynous mound of trash in humanoid form.  They were bickering back and forth, claiming, reclaiming the trash bins for themselves.  There were ropes with plastic bottles fastened onto them serving as the occasional parameter from each other.  One of the most powerful parts of this suite is when the one looking like a court fool sticks his head into a traffic cone and stand on an upturned trash bin in this sandy wasteland which eerily reminded me of that Iraqi prisoner made to wear a black pointed hood and robe by wayward American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison which is a catalyst of the dissolution of American presence in Iraq.  The next suite is a trio of dancers in frayed dresses in red skirts with rough and dirty hemlines as they danced in front of the shuttered door (via wooden planks) of an abandoned factory.  I thought they looked like beautiful Caryatids of failed industrialization.  The final suite was that of the entire dance troupe donning what looks like young, urban hipster clothing as they sashay and romp on a street with their mobile phones as among their sources of light.  It was a playful romp that could have been a powerful testament on the change of kinesthesia between human body and mobile device.  The last one turned into tableaus of millennial poses for selfies in varying articulated narcissisms.  It would have been more powerful an indictment to our current alienation had the choreography focus on the hunched movement and focused on the bright tiny screen like subdued humans being led on by a digital leash.  The costumes, too, in the final suite could have been more effective had they looked the same because in the current quest for digital cultural capital, the selfies, the influencers, the hashtags remarkably start to look the same. 

If there is any major takeaway for me in Dance Tech 2019 is how site-specificity and movement could have been more glaring in the privilege of mobility.  To get to this place would mean having a car or the finances for an uber.  That alone is restricting movement and impinging on access.

I took this not just from the dancers, most of which are Caucasians but the audience themselves are majority white people with cars and time to spare in such an artistic endeavor.  I frame this on the moment of access to such movements as well as access to witness such movements are seen as carefree by those who can afford it.  I thought it was amazing that the dance suites revolved mostly among abandoned buildings who has had its human movements cut off die to disrepair and neglect.  Was Dance Tech a way of reclaiming such movements in places where movement has stopped?  I glanced at the broken glasses of the window of an abandoned building hoping to hear an answer, but all I could hear were triumphant shrieks of the dancers for a job well done and now commencing the act of capturing place within a tiny frame in a frozen movement: the selfie with friends.  Then, they tumble into their cars as I walk, carless that I am, to see a Latino mother and child watching the final performance across the street, because they cannot enter the dance sites due to the barricades.  Hampered movement because of a border.  If there was anything more site-specific and indicators of movement in Texas, this scene would be it.

“Houston, we have a problem”

at the tail end of the flight from Nasville to Houston, there were three pings that alarmed in the cabin. the flight attendants rushed up front. i sat at the very back of the airplane. i could see others also were cocking their heads like me to see what’s happening.

After a few minutes, the pilot announced that there was mechanical failure. the front slats of the wings did not deploy. he alerted Houston International Airport and we will have an emergency landing. 

the captain was very calm and said we will have a landing that is a little forceful and that firetrucks are now deployed. the huge Houston airport has been declared a stoppage. no flights can land and get off until we land safely. 

i saw the flight attendants go from row to row to talk to the passengers and assuring them. one passenger is pregnant. the flight attendant said “we are all in this together. we will land safely.”

they asked us to turn off our gadgets. store them properly underneath in front of us. the flight attendants checked all the overhead bins and secured the items there. as we sat fastened to our seats, the flight attendant announced in the intercom, “if you are seated next to a stranger, this is a good time to talk to each other and, you know, see if that person is alright.” i sat next to Michael, an Australian, who is more worried about missing his connecting flight to Melbourne.

then, i fell silent. I just thought to myself, if ever this is my time to go, then, thank you, God, it was a great life. i just wish i could reach to my phone and hopefully send a message to my mother that I love her. But the cynic in me said “nah, you’re not going yet! you have some more suffering to endure in this life.” and i chuckled. 

We could see the lights of Houston become bigger. we are landing. all heads were cocked to the windows. we landed and it was a jolt and we were frightfully speeding down the runway. those slats that failed to open were supposed to slow down the plane. since it couldn’t slow down, the runways were closed just for our plane to run its course until the pilot can control the speed adequately.

applause broke in the cabin and the flight attendant announced, “let’s give our captain a hand. that landing was beautiful.”

it did not occur to me how truly serious it was until i spoke to the flight attendant. since i sat at the back, i am the last one to deplane.  the flight attendant hugged me “it’s not yet our time!” she then said in all her thirty years, this failure of the slats is the first thing to happen to her. and the captain did amazing. as i walked down the cabin to the exit, the pilot stood outside the cockpit greeting the passengers. the lady before me gave him a high five. i shook his hand.

i must have looked dazed when i got out the plane that a stranger came up to me and helped me where to go next. the people waiting at the gate knew what  happened.

I went to my terminal for my next flight to Lubbock. i have a three-hour layover. saw a guy eating burger and i told myself: “I NEEDED A BURGER, MAN.”

i saw the burger joint and just lined up. there was a hold up on the queue because of technical malfunction of the cash registers. the people in front of me grumbling and scoffing at the young African American lady who truly looked lost. she was calling the manager to help her, but nobody came. the couple in front of me were irritated and just blew off despite the cashier having keyed in their order.  i smiled and asked if they had a bacon cheeseburger. the young lady smiled sheepishly that there is cheeseburger but no bacon. i just said, “i’m good with that” and smiled.  she smiled back and started tapping at the register. it did not work. she went to another, still did not work. went to the other one, all registers fail. the only one that was functioning was the one with the keyed in orders of the couple before me that stormed off. 

i said, “i’m ok. i can wait.” 

she said, “i’ll ring in your order and you can eat it there but you have to pay later when these things are fixed. manager’s on his way.” i said sure.  i grabbed a bottle of coke zero and told her “i’m getting this, too.” the young lady waved me off and said “y’all can take that” and smiled.

the lady behind me said “i’ll have a burger, too, and fries.” i smiled at the lady behind me and we waited. she made small talk and i told her about the emergency landing.

the young lady at the cashier said, “you know..... that’s the order of the couple that left. y’all can just pay for it, if that’s ok.” i said sure. i was about to hand in my share and the lady behind me said “you know what, i’ll pay for your cheeseburger. you’ve been through a lot today.” i insisted that i pay for mine. the lady was adamant, “no! besides, it’s just four dollars? i got this.”

i thanked them profusely and found me a seat at the corner, ate with gusto. i was trying to figure out what the hell the past one hour means.  

I am still in a daze, so that’s why i had to type this down to gather my thoughts. in a few hours, i will be back in Lubbock, Texas and have more questions about my life but i still chuckle at how things unfolded.  

To think i told Gugu that my flight to Houston last August literally flew into a storm cloud and the plane violently shook. i was just then about to start my PhD in Texas Tech. you guys know me about my dark humor and I thought “what if this plane crashes BEFORE i can even start my PhD? I would be laughing at the massive joke as i plunge into death.”

so, yeah, my hands are still shaking and morbid thoughts are still here, but, God damn it, nothing tastes as good now as a free burger.

Mustard Seeds

February 1, 2019.

Today's Gospel comes from Mark 4:26-34

Hey, it's the parable of the Mustard Seed! A favorite....the kingdom of heaven is like the mustard seed.... among the smallest seeds on earth to become the biggest of shrubs where birds can perch.

On a personal note, I had a horrid time with physics in high school because I get panic attacks during quizzes that I would not answer it lucidly and get a zero. I was the laughing stock of the honor's class. It's not that I don't understand physics but there is an emotional and physical revulsion associated with my Physics teacher that even to this date, when I think about him, I feel like punching the wall.

I was trying to emotionally prepare myself that I might not graduate high school and be held back because of Physics. 
A friend of mine told me to go to this teacher for help. She did not work for the school I was in. She ran a tiny school with this parable of the mustard seed painted outside her school's walls. I would see that before and after the sessions as I walk back to the main road to wait for a jeepney to take me home. I religiously went to her every Saturday. In a few weeks she made me comfortable with physics and she calibrated her lessons to me in a very visual way.

Physics became fun and accessible to me. She drew and demonstrated with colors and forms. You have to remember that these were the days when "multiple intelligences" were not popular and that if you did not fit in the traditional pedagogy, you were an idiot. (and that physics teacher of mine was nasty and cruel that he would arrange the test papers according to descending level of the scores...imagine the emotional trauma you get when your classmates looking at you and smirking waiting for your name to be called among the last in the heap...and this happened numerous times for me and it is another level of humiliation....I mean I was already being attacked for being soft and effeminate and then I had to deal with this too. So, yeah, this is why I have such lingering hurt and hatred for that teacher).

After a few weeks with her, after a periodical exam, imagine my shock, my teacher's shock, my classmates' shock when my name got called out among the first when he returned our exam results. I was so happy that I rushed to her all giddy and she smiled then asked, "so, do you want to be ready for the UPCAT as well?"

Of course, I did. And several decades later, here I am.

So, yes, mustard seeds became a symbol of reclaiming power for me but also of possibilities as long as I, like in another parable, use my talent(s) well and for something bigger. And this is the gospel to kick-off February, the Philippine National Month for Culture and Arts, too.

PS I just chatted with that friend of mine who brought me to her and he said "she is a good teacher. in fairness pasok tayo sa lahat! (all the college applications that we applied)" And he informed me that this teacher passed away. This saddened me but I am not shocked. In many ways, she showed me how it is to be an effective teacher. God bless you po, ma'am. I love you and thank you.

The Great Expanse at This Time of My Life

According to a classmate from my school in Cebu, you can fit the Philippines 2.8 times in Texas. The entire state of Texas has the population of 20 million, which is close to the population of Metro Manila alone on weekdays.

Lubbock may not be cosmopolitan like the much bigger cities in America but it has given me what I have none of in the Philippines: space. Sure, I am hundreds of miles away from what many people usually think of what America is: the glitz of LA, Chicago, NY, Miami, Dallas, San Francisco.

But, the sky feels like a sky here in Lubbock.

The Manila sky is wafting in pollution, ugly skyscrapers, uglier billboards with the occasional sneers from people of various social mobilities. And whenever I look up to the sky in Manila, I am always brought back to the ground with sounds of the collapses of humanity such as videoke on the goddamn street or screams from entitled brats as they stumble out of a club thinking this is their best life ever or the snared traffic that slithers around Manila like a demented anaconda.

I remember months ago, Nemcy said "iba ang blue ng sky diyan no? Matingkad. Malakas." (The sky there has a different blue, right? Bright. Intense.) Those are words I do not use to describe my life.

The Lubbock sky is telling me something. time for a different shade of blue.

"Hunting and Gathering" in West Texas at the Start of 2019

I walked at least 4km for groceries in this winter with a -2 Celsius temperature that, according to the app, feels like -9 thanks to the winds. I experienced much colder temperature but I never walked with groceries hoisted in my backpack. It was a curious moment for me to decide wether I should give in to self-pity or just listen to "Philosophize This" podcasts (they are amazing by the way) as I trudge home with yakult bottles, pickled relish, and vegetables stuffed in my backpack.

Back in September, I was told by a cowboy I met here that Texans...nay, AMERICANS ....value their freedom and independence ergo they *NEED* to have a car as a symbol for this independence. So, in the land of freedom-loving larger-than-life with its own fuel fields: Texas does not have an efficient and reliable public transportation system.

When my classmates here find out that I do not have a car, they look at me with pity like I have syphilis AND leprosy at the same time. Even many of the Pinoys (not my neightbors, they're cool) here are baffled when I say I will be walking home "NAGLALAKAD KA?"

I don't know. Freedom is relative. I may not have a car here but I lost weight walking to class. I may not have a car here but I do not have to worry about parking fees of about 100 USD per semester....that is like three weeks of REALLY good groceries. I may not have a car but I do not have to pay exorbitant car insurance for foreigners. Maybe I will get a car here down the line, but I like walking.

I have always liked walking. I did not like walking in Manila because one's dignity is always negotiated when you are in Manila streets. I say streets, because the concept of sidewalks in Manila are mostly that: just concepts.

The landlord said that the temperature will become colder in January and February. So, walking to the grocery will be difficult. I could always wait for my Pinoy neighbors and just join them in their food run over at distant Walmart. But that would mean becoming dependent on them.

If there is one thing I learned VIOLENTLY here in Lubbock is that Independence is a gift and it is a commitment. Americans say they love their freedom, I get it. I love my newfound sense of independence, and even if it means walking through howling cold gales of Western Texas, then the cold is my companion to this independence.

This time last year I do not even boil water. And here I am with aching legs imagining that it was worse for the pioneers of American history that did not have climate-controlled environments as they went off to hunt for food. I am still luckier than billions that I have a fresh batch of baby spinach in my ref, which I brought with me from the grocery several blocks away.

Thank you, 2018!

you know what dawned upon me? The place where I am now lacks the spirit of anticipation. There are no harried crowds avoiding the rush just to be home with their loved ones in time of anticipated joy. There are no vibrant sights to anticipate the new year.

I do not mean to glorify poverty. However, I feel that anticipation is such a big thing for us because we have been witnesses to such horrors and hunger that anticipation is an act of survival. No wonder we have the longest Christmas in the planet. We are eager for hope.

and when hope does not materialize in a way that we did not anticipate, we are still grateful to be alive...so we can anticipate some more. Joy is in the waiting and in the receiving which makes it a ritual for hope for many of us. We have nothing but it is ok, we have laughter.

laughter will not feed us. Worrying won't feed us either. Although I would say pessimism is a survival tactic as well because it wises you up. And yet here we are eager to ring in the new year, to easily divest us of the hurt of 2018 as well as being thankful for its gifts.

ahhh.but the anticipation! Maybe 2019 will be better? Maybe I will be stronger. Maybe I will get better. Maybe I will be healthy. Maybe I will bear the personal losses better. This is why I like Cabaret's "Maybe this time" during New Year's Eve.

The new year is not a new you. it's a new set of maybe's in your life. We all have the lists of resolutions, but I do not do resolutions, I do maybe's...I do hope even though I am a nega star. For 2019, I wish for you, dear friend, a healthy perspective of your maybe's...

and I wish for you the biggest maybe of them all....maybe this time, I will have the strength to follow through and make those maybe's true. What is better than anticipation? It's determination informed by gratitude and hope.

My 2018 was a huge whirlwind and I wish for all of us is to take stock of our anticipations and learn to fly again like the way when we were kids....and enjoy the ride. Happy 2019, dear friends, hug your family, laugh with friends, and give yourself the love you deserve.

brave new world

the first semester here at Texas Tech is done and i feel emotionally drained. i did not think i did well in one subject and i truly hope that my average is up to standards.

So, I left the Philippines last August 21 and was honestly not emotionally prepared to be here. On the days leading up to my departure, I was frantic and frazzled over finishing and submitting my MFA manuscript as well as getting the nevessary documents for me to leave the country. Even though the Graduate Studies Coordinator of the UP Fine Arts said I could just email my manuscript and have somebody print, bind, submit for me, I chose to do everything before I left.

Getting those documents proved to be a bigger pain. The convoluted system plus the insensitive assigned staff member lacking any initiative and compassion to help just pushed me to take things into my own hands. One of my cohorts actually wept when his documents arrived out of sheer exhaustion. My documents arrived a few minutes before the end of the work week, a few days before I left.

Imagine my panic and anxiety. All of those impeded me from preparing for this PhD adventure properly. It has been truly a struggle for me. Everyday, I fight the black dogs away from my head. I couldn’t concentrate on a class and felt emotions I have not felt since High School: that of inadequacy.

But, first semester is done and I will be here for the next five years. I know now it feels long but when I start having more fun and being more productive, I imagine time will be swift.

I am in a brave new world with anxious feet, tepid sense of self. Mabe I can regain what I have lost in this new world.

To Be Black and To Be Blameworthy

Reading bell hooks’ Aint I A Woman reminded me of the slave Tituba in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Tituba is a minor character in the play  —  yet it was she who essentially started a wildfire in the quiet town of Salem. Tituba personifies what bell hooks noted as American society's concept of the black female body in general: spurious and dangerous. Therefore, there is a prevalent notion that the black female body must be expelled or contained and corrected.

The Crucible's opening scene features a group of young women from Salem frolicking in the woods with Tituba administering potions and rituals for the lovelorn posse. When a girl falls into a catatonic state, the residents of Salem are convinced that someone among them is into Devil worship. One of the girls supposedly affected by demonic harassment, Abigail Williams, points to Tituba: “Sometimes I wake and find myself standing in the open doorway and not a stitch on my body! I always hear her laughing in my sleep. I hear her singing her Barbados songs and tempting me with – (Miller, 44)." This line dramatizes what bell hooks referred to in Ain't I A Woman — that there is a deep-seated distrust and utter disregard for the black woman, not just between women, but in American society in general. The "possessions" in The Crucible are attributed to the Devil’s presence and the alleged "gateway" that was slave woman from Barbados. It was the black woman who instigated all of this; she is the source of corruption in a town that needed to reestablish itself close to God – never mind that the historical Salem Witch Trials are seen to be a way of land-grabbing within among the white inhabitants, yet it was a black woman who enabled this evil. This implicates what hooks wrote as the black female body’s proximity to barbarity, base sexuality, an instrument of moral and physical discord. Even in The Crucible itself, though an indictment against McCarthyism, the play has given what patriarchy thinks of women in general as wily, shrill, easily trammeled, with significantly weaker constitutions ergo easily manipulated by the devil (incidentally, many portrayals of the devil are of a goat’s head in a black male body). There is general fear as a rash of screams and convulsions wrought from the women of Salem as men look on bewildered and adamant that this situation can be fixed if only people can be controlled and return to the folds of goodness. This control and goodness (ie. decency) has been a power structure set in place as “In American patriarchy, all women are believed to embody sexual evil. Sexual Racism has caused black women to bear the burnt of society’s need to degrade and devalue women. (hooks, 110)” It is the precise devaluation of the black woman’s body that has been revealed as a protracted form of oppression in numerous manners: be it within slavery as a means of erasures of the femininity of the black women and their allocation as property and sexual assault objects, or via portrayal of the black female bodies in media to the 20th century women’s liberation movement where black women feel alienated because their struggles are different.

Even after slavery, black women have to work more in terms of recognition and respect and yet, fell short. “They reminded her that in the eyes of the white public she would never be seen as worthy of consideration or respect. (hooks, 55)” What hooks deftly demonstrated are the strands of power at work that are clumped together to form a noose to be hung into a black woman’s neck. This is a very difficult book to read, but a revelatory one, particularly from somebody outside the American nation such as myself. Yet, I find many connections to the problems hooks cited to the issues of patriarchy, misogyny, colorism, in the Philippines. Even in the Philippines, dark skin is akin to “filth,” wildness (as if an African savage), monstrosity, and something to be corrected with skin whiteners, that is a billion-dollar industry in Asia. In the Philippines, the media landscape reflects what hooks wrote on how female black bodies  — mostly in the roles of the maids — are typecast: harridans, sexually lascivious, angry, uneducated, bitchy and must be violently suppressed (ie. I grew up watching TV shows of Filipino men slapping black women in the Philippines as the literal punchline).

This book, though written in the late 20th century, still resonates with the present-day racial problems and misogyny. In light of the #MeToo movement, I recall what the black Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyongo wrote of her allegations of sexual harassment from the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. It is interesting to note that Weinstein has been accused by numerous women of bullying, sexual assault, and yet he only, through his publicist, addressed Nyongo's allegation as false. He cries foul when a black woman accuses him. Add to that fracas, is the founder of #MeToo movement, Tarana Burke, who was attacked by many social media comments as “too ugly” to be sexually assaulted. This underscores the many layers on how femininity, beauty are implicating blackness to ugliness among many other disturbing accusations (ie. black women’s bodies as carriers of diseases) that have constructed the American culture. Blackness, being a woman should not be easy categories that should be studied separately. After all, hooks has been reiterating the intersectionality and thus exposing the power structures overlapping mechanisms of oppression: “[…]we must first be willing to examine woman’s relationship to society, to race, and to American culture as it is and not as would ideally have it to be. (hooks, 124)” This why hooks has bemoaned the women’s movement as selecting issues regarding oppression.  It is within these lattices of issues where one can locate the moments of power, question them, and perhaps instigate a real change that is needed.  That is the crux of hooks’ brilliant and justifiably angry book: the notion of a “real” change. Is it a real change when all you seek is a place at the table, when the table itself is built on the mounds of victims of oppression? What resounded in me in hooks words are her aligning colonialism to patriarchy, connecting it to rapacious capitalist system. This system has truncated many people’s sense of self as equating worth with market value. This is why hooks derided the educated white feminists who just wanted to be CEOs and ignoring the plights of the women of color mired in cyclical poverty. This is the very image of the white slave owner’s white wife trying to accumulate power herself at the expense of the black female slaves thrown even lower in the social ladder. “Real” change is confronting the oppressive mechanisms of the status quo and not merely wanting to be elevated in the status quo.  “A feminist ideology that mouths radical rhetoric about resistance and revolution while actively seeking to establish itself within the capitalist system is essentially corrupt. (hooks, 191)” A different kind of alchemy is needed from us. If we vie for a world that is progressive, hinged on human rights then we better question our very privileges that have enacted us to be in whatever power positions that we are in this life. This is why I feel hooks is a difficult, but necessary read, because she is confrontational and elucidates the structure of violence and oppression as plainly, openly as it is. History and culture are a series of ruptures in the quest for improvements. Many among us seek to help find the disease, and not just treat the symptoms. In this book, hooks asks the readers to have a more multilayered approach in assessing and treating the festering situations that have been in operation for generations. This book shows us the pustules, the afflictions; asks how do we heal ourselves? How to heal the culture? Interesting metaphor that women, who were healers and who dabbled in chemistry to seek for cures or salves against ailments, are seen as witches.

hooks, bell. Ain't I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism. NY: Routledge, 2015.

Miller, Arthur. The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts. NY: Viking Press, 1952.

Walk On, Woman

(This is a reaction paper for our Foundations in Women’s Studies Class on Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things To Me)

Rebecca Solnit knows the ways of interruption. Be it when men explain things to her, and on the other extreme, having read of news that a woman’s journey home interrupted by a gang rape.  If there is one unifying theme in her collection of sharp, eye-opening essays is that Solnit knows that a woman’s ways of navigation is pockmarked not with milestones but with potholes, distractions, detours, and chasms.  Milestones are a bonus, and not a given.

There is something dangerous about women and their mobility.  Girls are yelled at not to run for they might scratch themselves and render them undesirable for a mate in the future.  In many fairy tales, the damsel in distress is always waiting.  A sex worker is called a streetwalker, as if walking on the streets devalues a woman.  But who dictates these values anyway?  And all these values do is just impinge on movement much less actual progress.

Solnit mentions Virginia Woolf on the quest for imagination, and, yes, hope, with walking.  For imagination to thrive, it has to transcend.  Well, no wonder one way to break up a person’s will is solitary confinement.  Woolf and Solnit asks the reader, asks women to take a walk and let the strangeness and the stranger inform experience.  I recall Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in which this book hedges on a woman walking and having streams of consciousness overlap with her steps.  Though walking is a linear experience, Mrs Dalloway’s internal journeys take her across time and borders.  These reveries connect her life to the sociopolitical structure prevailing at that time.  I take note on the woman on the go, or even woman just even walking from the lens of art history.  When women are foisted as subjects on canvases in western art, these women are objects to be gazed upon, displayed, or in many cases, splayed, sprawled in various stages of undress, her nakedness disallows her to move outside beyond the confines of her space: which is for the male’s desirous gaze.

The woman sprawled is a trope not just in the visual arts but also in cartography as well as history.  Among the earliest sculptures of the anthropomorphization of “nation” is that of a Roman soldier atop a writhing woman labelled as Britannia.  Woman, as representation of land, sometimes wild land that needs to be pacified.  Woman as landscape that needs to be conquered, penetrated by a “civilization” depicted by men and their spears.  This has been the script for colonizers across the centuries, this is why in Solnit’s book, my favorite part is the one about Dominique Strauss Khan being bracketed as a metaphor for colonial power and his rapacious entitled sense of invading other people’s spaces, literally interrupting a woman of color’s work with his aghast performance of phallic revelation like a spear (I suspect a tiny flaccid one) brandishing it to a woman who (I also suspect he assumed will be quiet given his stature compared to hers).  How Solnit implicated Strauss Khan’s IMF role to the global south as his wanton disregard for decency and relied on the woman (representing the global south, and intersect racial colorification issues as well) as a silenced victim spoke to me in volumes.  I cam from a country who has been subject to the wiles of the IMF and that a huge chunk of our budget goes to debt servicing sacrificing education and health care is in a way silencing us, interrupting us, explaining to us that this is for the good of the country.  Debt saddles us immobile, unable to move to explore creativity and innovation, instead we have trained generations of Filipinos to seek economic refuge and financial stability in the service sectors abroad, supplying manpower to hospitals, nannies to the thousands of families – this implicates that the point of university education or higher education is to get a degree to become a desired export labor product.  Ironically, with the immobility brought by poverty and debts from the IMF, it has rendered generations of Filipinos mobile abroad but mostly in job sectors unwanted by the West.  If Virginia Woolf espoused that a woman must have “A Room of One’s Own” to realize her potential, then Filipinos and the global south must have financial health unburdened by debts for us to realize our own potential as well.

Furthermore, it is not just a “room of one’s own,” but a path of one’s own.  Solnit has written also mentioned that she has written Wanderlust: A History of Walking.  This reminds me of some readings I encountered before that one aspect of the emergence of “modern” art is through these artists that walked the city.  The flaneur has been cast as a idle wanderer, and yet, the flaneur, in art history, has recorded the lives of the other and translated these into images onto canvases that usually depict the lives of the rich and powerful and their possessions.  It was upon the act of walking that the others are revealed.  It was upon walking that “modern” notions on class, identity, cast itself upon society to have more lenses to look through them to understand and seek out the fissures that need to be rectified. 

Though Solnit opens her book on how a man of certain power “talked down” on her and made her into an “ingénue” ergo an infantlization, a gateway for a perceived powerful being (ie. Men) to explain things to you.  If you are rendered an infant, then you are assumed to be incapable of independent movement, ergo you are hampered.  As infant, one is seen as having somebody know what is good for you.  Furthermore, the hampering of movement is not just what is good for you, one part of her book posits that women all across the world have to contend at a daily basis on the issues of safety.  How can one have journeys across introspection which offer revelations, when you are trying to go home without getting gang raped?

At the doorway for a new chapter

I am almost done with my MFA.

I am about to embark on my quest for a PhD.

Here are the things that I should be doing:

1. Get Healthy.  If things look positive, I'd be getting a lot of walk and have access to healthy food while getting that PhD
2. Start those Comics, Chong!  Maybe now, I could focus on productivity.
3. Be a good academic.  I will improve, y'all.  I'll make sure I am going to be a vital and substantial contributor to society.
4. Write. And then write some more.
5. Enjoy what's left of my life.  The 20s and 30s were spent surly but the 40s will be proactive and awash in mirth and gratitude.  
6. Make no time for bullshit.

A Word from My MFA Adviser

Lately, it hasn't been great.

Well, not really downright abject, but things could be better.  So there I was managing my self-pity, when Ambie, a good friend, a great printmaker and my MFA Adviser just set me aside and told me something so basic that it is stupid of me to have forgotten about it:

"You're supposed to have fun."

All these deadlines and obligations can take its toll.  Not just with the stresses on the body, but you tend to forget "old feelings."  I try to remember the joy when I see a blank page and I had a pencil in my hand as I drew imaginary maps as a kid.  I try to remember how it is to just draw and enjoy it.

I remember one classmate of mine mentioned that he found it difficult to write fiction because "theory gets in the way."  He said theory ruined it for him.  I think my case is not that drastic.  I think theory helps me become a better, more rigorous artist.  If only I can balance a sense of play with a sense of context and purpose, then maybe I can fend off the blues or perceived blockage. 

It took a new perspective with something from that "old feeling."  Becoming giddy is easy, the point is to translate this sense of joy and purpose to a protracted sense of duty and get through the job.

2018, be kind, please.

Or maybe I should be praying for broader shoulders this year to carry the load?

It took 2.5 hours to go home from work.  Ideally that trip should clock in less than 45 minutes on a good day.  But in Manila, good days are not as prolific to many people of the lower rung.  It is a mark of privilege of not losing time off your life stuck in traffic, or queueing up for your crowded commute.  Maybe wealth is about having the time and not realizing that you have it.  

It is a mark of self defense, this cynicism of mine.  It's like when I expect the worse and when the worse does happen, I am comforted by this notion that I am correct.  It is like smiling with the knowledge of filth whilst in a pig sty.  But it gets tiresome.  Another privilege is you can afford to be disconnected.  not just ignorant, but disconnected.  Like all the traffic does not affect you.  the new taxation is just some brushes off your shoulders.  Pressure is upon you and everybody else and yet you have a gleaming smile on while you read your daily does of shadenfreude online.

Maybe 2018 should help me achieve an earnest smile once again eh?