At first, it came as a surprise, why a cafe brand would send me a promotional complimentary drink, considering I rarely patronize their beverages, and seldom even hang-out at their branches. I am partial to the green-and-white brand, whose logo is so ubiquitously gay – the mermaid.

But, as I am a cheapskate and a sucker for all sorts of swag and freebies, I decided to heed the invitation to peruse their website, where the promise of a free beverage had my mouth salivating in anticipation. Of course, all manners of promotional campaigns come with a fine print, and I was waiting for the catch all along.

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There is accretion in this place,
a delicate arrhythmia pervading
of cracked voices, soaked in malaise
and vomit spilled, coagulating.

Like paranoia and panic it crept
metastatic, hempen and contagious
be the youthful forcibly wept
so virulent, potent and hideous.

It felt wounded, a gash, open
fiddled heavily by a muddy digit
perusing flesh beneath the skin,
to rape the limping spirit.

I am here, amidst this anarchy
of bodies mindless, and hollow
moving shadows in captivity
by their own subversive sorrow.

Struggling for alimentary earth
where seed can grow to life,
where breathe escapes dearth,
where warmth eases the knife.

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To achieve the impossible, you must believe it's possible.


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Charles Kingsleigh
Alice in Wonderland
March 2010, Walt Disney Pictures

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I imagine your smell when I write to you. And you imagine I'm with you when you read them. Our letters are part of us now. Part of our history. A reminder that we made it through this time. Together.
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Dr. Paul Flanner
Nights at Rodanthe
2008 Warner Bros. Pictures

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In the spirit of fair-mindedness, I am sharing this video for your perusal. Let me state this as a disclaimer that although the video and its contents are portrayed as credited facts, I challenge you; an intelligent, educated, and sound-thinking audience, to validate and verify the information presented herein. I am neither discrediting nor reinforcing this content, merely sharing it for the sake of impartial indignation. The bottomline here is not that the video attempts to expose certain longstanding theories, or that it is obviously unilateral in its target, but that it affects us – to become indignant advocates of truth, to awaken the inquisitive and the questioning, to begin the process that peels away ignorance by incredulity.

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Is it just me or has the independent film industry fallen prey to an emergent malady of mediocrity? This, of course, is an overly generalized observation; there are a few noteworthy examples and some have even garnered accolades from foreign audiences, but let’s face it – the remarkable ones are few and far in between and is no way indicative of the homogeneity of our prevalent cinematic experience. I don’t fancy myself as a professional critic; and compared to Froyo, am no movie buff. I’ve had a few experiences during my undergraduate years as a student critic, and have graced several lectures and workshops on film and film theory enough to display a capacity to formulate an educated opinion.

I may not have the acute wit of a Pauline Kael, nor the practical sagacity of a Robert Ebert, and to speak of the profundity of cinematic semiotics would be hugely detached, but I’m certain that even the most layman and shallow would notice how the phrases “indie film” and “experimental cinema” have been used too loosely and without concern lately that it dilutes and damages the essence of these lexis, and consequently shedding the more legitimate instances of the genre in insipid light.

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His hands were quivering. Saltine droplets forming across the bridge of his forehead, trailing down his pudgy nose, as he contemplates the pristine page before him. A blank canvass waiting to be breathed into life, by his letters forming words, strung into sentences, weaved into paragraphs, and composed into a thought, a feeling, a longing.

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“We cannot live alone. As much as it pains us to be together, we can’t be alone.”
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I admit that I lack the necessary social and interpersonal skills to be considered endearing, nor the appropriate rapport requisite for amiableness, nor the levity to be deemed approachable. I concede that most of the competencies detrimental to being a sociable and socially-effective human being, I do not possess, and these are the specifics one cannot feign. To approximately place it, I have a societal retardation akin to a fish on dry land. The things that I do possess, or have an acceptable grasp of – logic, information, language, have little bearing on the dynamics of relating to other human beings.

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I gasped. The distinctly familiar scent of cum and sweat permeates the room like a bookmark wedged between pages of the space, highlighting the obvious remnants of what has just transpired. The singular lamp illuminating the sala seems to cast its light upon the soiled leather couch that buttresses the windows, as if gesturing to the exact spot where it had happened.

The sight of a half-naked male emerging from the shower came as no surprise. His hair was moist, while his torso glistened from his hurried bath. I paused to survey him. He is a stranger.

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I dream of books. Of stack upon stack of printed page, whose stories and anecdotes await my perusal. Their narratives enmeshed in the frailty of paper – vellum, parchment, fine print, glossy, matte, cold-laminated, trade paperback, and so forth; each percolating amongst pristine shelves that line an off-white room. Clean but not spotless, warm, cozy, intimating walls that seem to caress the binding of these books, each kissed by the powdery texture of this protective surface. Wooden shelves whose grain and weave hint of their own stories untold, unknown,  unread, unrejoiced, unfelt, unexulted carry these books like the cradling arms of a mother, delicate yet steadfast.

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His smile was quickly-given. It was beaming, dentally-proud, overflowing like glinting shards begging for flesh. The knives were sharpened and ever-ready, to present, to perform for his captive audience. It was, after all, a Pan-American one. It may seem duchenne, but it is half-meant and wholly fallacious. Like a pat without pressure, or an embrace without pull. He knew this, and kept this knowledge akin to a trade secret.

His composure was perfection, his words precise, an ensnaring spiel practiced to every nuance, flection and manner. This was the only way he knew, to parade and haggle by the sweetness of his promises, through the cunning of his misdirections. He was singular in may respects, poised and elegant, with a slight awkwardness approximated for good measure.

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[The Final Part of the Economics of Creativity Series]

Began with Fallacy of Form - Economics of Creativity I

Followed by Fallacy of Form - Economics of Creativity II

Continued from Fallacy of Form - Economics of Creativity III

This economics of creativity is an underlying force that could spell the solution to the puzzle of astute designing, by including the human condition as a factor in the process we can hope to inform and reform our design to suit more humane translations. Interpretation is always a subjective matter, but to totally ignore the epistemological would be looking right through the elephant in this room. Why can’t a space be both economical and efficient without it being boring and devoid of personality? Why can’t a form that’s emotional, distinct and exciting also be user-friendly and welcoming? Are the concepts of form and function too distant and antithetical that one has to forego the other to become complete? Or have we, as designers, simply become too egotistic and lazy to chip in the effort, dispensing one and never both?

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Began with Fallacy of Form - Economics of Creativity I

Continued from Fallacy of Form - Economics of Creativity II

These two trends; one being stale and has a predilection towards utilitarian lines and devoid of character or context, the other of an unquenchable thirst to assert deference against predecessors and continually challenging the capacity for alien forms and visions, are both equally valid and applicable in the milieu of our urban and non-urban realities. Where it fails and succeeds threads a fine line between respecting the previous or pre-existing vernacular, context, culture and prevalent esthetic, while providing for novelty, innovation and ingenuity, as well a suitable expression of creativity in solution and conception. Projects and developments of an institutional nature usually fall prey to this assumption of iconic corporately-driven ideological rendition of identity and enforced singularity. Whereas, commercial and retail spaces often become too occupied with finagling its users to purchase and spend that it becomes a claustrophobic orgy of mixed signals and self-promoting infatuation on all extant forms of commercialism. They are always striving to assert uniqueness against competition, becoming a laissez faire of line and form. But, when everything is unique, nothing is. When our senses are too overwhelmed, focus wanes and desensitization occurs. If either trend tips toward its more abstruse or extreme interpretation, what we’re left with is a space that is devoid of any relationship with the human scale.

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Continued from Fallacy of Form - Economics of Creativity I

The second trend is a direct manifestation of the hailed celebrities of the design community – the starchitects. Ostentatious and utterly solipsistic, the typical form that envelope their visions is an abject extension of a pregnant ego reflective of these self-imposed and self-professed visionaries. They have made a whole industry out of asserting a supposed avant garde-ness to their work, churning out a defined proclivity towards the iconic and shocking. Subscribing to the tenet of object rather than fabric architecture, their work is usually so stylized and esthetically-specific to warrant a whole demographic of clientele – those who have the money and a bloated ego, and those whose primary objective is to make a statement. Art for art’s sake; if indeed architecture is purely an artistic expression (which, consequently, it isn’t).

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With the global consciousness becoming more and more homogenized by the horror vacui of information peddling, the struggle to remain distinct and individual, unique if you may, becomes a matter of life and dread. Regressing from the craftsmanship of lost artisan forms and disciplines, we are faced with an experience of modernity consigned to the production line. Profit being a function of supply and demand, the conveyor belt/ fordist paradigm seemed like the most appropriate method of minimizing cost on the manufacturer while indirectly ensuring quality, or uniformity at least. Obfuscating the spirit of a designed product or space, we are left with standardized variations of the same tired translations, punctuated with slight interjections of difference every once in a while, but essentially and holistically retaining the standardized vision of a manufactured reality.

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“Well, to me God is just a word for what I do when I talk to the best possible version of things: perfection. Or maybe God is the best possible version of myself. Maybe when I say this prayer, I’m appealing to a future, possible and perfect chair.” 

I throw the word chair in there to check her listening skills. But she hasn’t heard the last bit of my sentence. She clicks her tongue on the roof of her mouth. “It’s not God it’s just all about you.” 

“It’s not God if it isn’t me. It can’t be God without me thinking of God,” I say. 

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Beloved Lady Rust,

You perplex me. How your beauty is defined with your chocolate-colored pelt of crusty, flaky, aged quality, and how patches peel to unfold the tarnished element beneath. How the strongest fall prey and succumb to the creeping, contemplating, patient caress of your prowess, slowly by age and tenderly by weather. How you disregard my sheath of robust sheen, and crack it open in your own time.

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Dearest Froyo Hagens,

You are. 

The fire that ignited warmth into my frigid existence, whose saccharine kisses caressed and calmed the delirious tundra of my pain and angst. The flame that altered the effigy of haunting histories into a bonfire of comfort, homely and welcoming. A sanctum in the thickness of the black forest, that beaming beacon to my raft's berthing shore. 

Invigorating. 

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More important – and this speaks to the central problem with Double Dragon – are the issues of surface versus structure, and inclusion versus exclusion. Double Dragon is the first major step down the road to a high-gloss realism that makes a shift from what Marshall McLuhan would call a “cool”medium to a “hot”one: “Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one... the hot form excludes, and the cool one includes.”+ Strip away this realism and the game boils down to beating the hell out of people, a fair-enough fantasy pastime...

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Limits are possibilities. - Patton

How do you assess a year? How do you measure passed days, from disparate moments and detached memories strung precociously across the thread of one's consciousness; a life, an existence, into empirical and detrimental morsels measurable, thus lending more readily to valuation and assessment? Do you define parameters by which these moments could be billeted against, like some vague yardstick edgeless and non-graduated? Or do you attempt to distill sense from the intangible, a critical assay purely subjective and maudlin?

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Yesterday, 30 June 2011, my subscriber identity module (SIM) card was damaged. Partly from old age, as the SIM has been with me for over 8 years, and partly from carelessness on my part. I requested a replacement from Globe Telecoms (yes, that gleaming beacon of efficient customer service and after-sales support), and they obliged with speedy and swift action (two hours waiting time, and the actual replacement only took about 5 minutes tops).

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Is it just me, or has the celebration of Independence Day lost footing and relevance to the current generation? Considering that this year is also Jose Rizal’s 150th Birth Anniversary? Has the significance of independence or even the idea/ concept of it been lost in the masses, whose short attention span is currently being hoarded by the amoral volleys between a self-righteous proselytizing church and the smear campaign exploits against a legitimately elected president? Have we fallen prey to indifference and other various follies perpetrated by an encroaching global mindset, or do we simply do not care for it anymore? That the idea of democracy and independence, sovereignty and vox populi have been implored, invoked, used, and abused to the point of utter desensitizing?

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The following conversation occurred today between 11:47 AM and 12:38 PM. The book being discussed is Alex Garland's The Coma, released back in 2005. He is the same author of the critically-acclaimed novel-turned-Leonardo DiCaprio-starrer-slash-social commentary, The Beach, and The Tesseract, a gen-x dystopic reality set in Manila that was written when he was a mere 28-year old.

Spamwise Crunchy: the coma was great :)

although there's a feeling of inadequacy after i've read it. a thirst that spells a hollowness in the

ending.

it could've been because i read it too fast, and that it didn't had enough time to really transport

me into its reality.

voyeuristic and panoptic.

like a roller-coaster ride, done already when you've just started the adrenaline salivating.

sorry, did that sound too much like a critique?

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Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.
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David Cronenberg

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In answer to this post.

In the anarchy of ardor affairs, the choice of professing one’s intentions and emotions to another is always a decision replete with second-guessing and reservations. Self preservation prescribes a certain balance between tact and control that often laying out one’s cards objectively dismisses. Once you fail to keep your emotions at bay, and allow the other party a glimpse of a future you seek with him or her, the ball leaves your court. Vulnerability becomes the brand etched on one’s chest, where underneath a heart trembles in anticipation and anxiety.

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For her you were something different from who you were for me, you were part of yourself, not only of her body but also of her soul, of her identity as a woman. Of course you were my child too, I didn’t doubt that, but you were not that with the same absolute uncertainty as the fact that you were her child. That a child also has a father is a quite late discovery.

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The Procedure by Harry Mulisch1998, 2001 Translated from Dutch by Paul Vincent, Penguin Putnam Inc.

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[Click the image to see the full size.]

The Kyoto Protocol was adopted 11 December 1997; in it was framework that redefined how we viewed fossil fuels. The protocol was the brainchild of collaboration; specialists, environmentalists and scientists, with the objective of providing a realistic and applicable means of reducing carbon gas emissions, hopefully abating global warming and climate change. Sadly we have forgotten this brilliant and historic moment, the idea of sustainability becoming a stylistic choice and a faddist curiosity.

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Time isn’t like the other senses, Eagleman says. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: it’s hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a smell, or the scent of a feeling. (Unless, of course, you have synesthesia—another of Eagleman’s obsessions.) But a sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. It’s there in the length of a song, the persistence of a scent, the flash of a light bulb. “There’s always an impulse toward phrenology in neuroscience—toward saying, ‘Here is the spot where it’s happening,’ ” Eagleman told me. “But the interesting thing about time is that there is no spot. It’s a distributed property. It’s metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.”
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Burkhard Bilger - The Possibilian What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain. (An interview with David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law) in Profiles: The New Yorker - 25 April 2011

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There is sublime solace in multi-dimensionality. I cannot begin to fathom how I have digressed from a fully-functioning social being of a few years back, into the anxious recluse that I am now. For a protracted period, I have used my soliloquy as a ploy to thwart those who would, out of self-preservation and exclusivity, deem me unfit for their palate. This, of course, was dictated by prevalent insecurities, borne from anxieties seeded by pain. However superfluous this methodology I utilize, it had its advantages. It kept those, whose superficial intentions are legible to the asinine, at bay; remaining perplexed in the confounding conundrum of my own design.

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The frigid zephyr shrouds my dermis, unencumbered by the hypertension of my varicosity. Analogous to cinder-heated lumbar puncture needles, the cold caresses my physiognomy with the fervor of a parasitic strain, held dormant from fresh hosts for millennia. It intoxicates, birthing interstitial recidivist flashes of prickly pestering pain. A causalgia ensues, metastasizing and malignant, a clandestine crenation activated by soliloquy. Resilient, resistant, and recalcitrant.

I twitch.

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The public would be half-expecting a bombardment of reminiscent and deeply nostalgic entries pertaining to vague memories and recollections of the series of events that transpired a quarter of a century ago that led to the revolt of a passive phenotype. From the bowels of the proletariat emerged a troubled and besmirched populace whose patience have been tested, and failed in strain, by the selfishness of the Marcos regime, a dictatorship that was in full-swing by then and whose objectives, though lofty at best, deprived the greater majority of justice in its attempt to market a simulacrum of genteel and benevolent nation-building.

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Click image for full view

I wish I was less arrogant
more receptive,
more considerate;
that there are other ways
besides
the methods I employ.

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Disclaimer: The author is in no way connected to Chef Rolando Laudico, the BFast All Day Breakfast Café, or the Chef Laudico Culinary Services. The following article is written as a narration of the personal experience of the author and is in no way fully indicative of the experience of BFast as a whole. The incident transpired during their soft opening last last month, December 1 2010.

I found myself wondering about Ayala Triangle in anticipation of the launching of the Symphony of Lights at the Ayala Triangle Gardens. To pass time waiting for the program to start, I decided to have a light and early dinner at one of the newly-opened concessionaires that flank the periphery of the gardens. Set up as a dining/ F & B strip along the side of the old Makati Stocks Exchange, I cozied up to one of the nearby establishments with a clear view of the park's grandiose piazza, providing ample vantage point when the program begins, as well as generous opportunities for more voyeuristic objectives.

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FROM MUSIC AND MADNESS II

Once in a while, we come across people whose designs are suspect. But because we are human, and for the most part gullible, we easily fall prey to their antagonisms masked by the saccharine and misrepresented. Wolves in sheeps' clothing they come, whether intentional or not, to cast damage on our sense self valuation. Sometimes even they themselves are unaware of this dynamic, but often it is by virtue of a selfishness innate and inherent in all of us. The challenge is to appropriately, precisely and effectively distinguish the genuine from the fallacious, the sincere from the merely solipsistic.


There will always be a tribulations to overcome, hurdles to triumph from, and labyrinths to unlock. For as long as we remain decent, honest, and faithful, eventually the corundum will make itself apparent from the crass of our midst. And all the pain, disappointment, hoodwinking and malevolence of our histories, would seem insignificant and minute.


You have to be whole yourself first, before you can share yourself.

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FROM MUSIC AND MADNESS II


One can never be perfect for another, but two can be perfect for each other.

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FROM MUSIC AND MADNESS II


I long for him, who can unfold me into the frail fragments of truth beneath. Who can see beyond the verbosity of my language, a tacit taxonomy meant to protect the curious and crucial from the false and vociferous, not by faux identification nor by empirical action, but by accession of the clandestine message. I am laid bare now, here, by choice and circumstance. For the solitary method one can find another is by being found himself.

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FROM MUSIC AND MADNESS II


Hold on to this moment, singular and definite, that it may never come to pass again. Like the river ever prescient and foreign, we welcome strangers into the play of our lives as transient actors to the script unwritten and unrehearsed. Make most of the now and the present, for it too, like everything, shall come to pass. So it is for pain and suffering, so shall it be for happiness and pleasure. Because all we will ever have is now.

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FROM MUSIC AND MADNESS II


Because to cry is to release the pain, in all its revolting, unsightly, horrid and definitive translation; the tears becoming the tangible and palpable phenotype of the anguish made physical, apparent and undeniable. We make ourselves believe we are well, denying the pain by the employment of a smile, a smirk, and a tug of shoulder. Thinking that by disallowing the translation of this pain, we deny it its grip of our being, but failing to realize that to let the saltine rivers flow is not succumbing but accepting, for only in the acceptance of the sorrow can we attain serenity.

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FROM MUSIC AND MADNESS II



Maybe it is not the lost and the missing that we long for to come home. But ourselves, that we may find who we are again in the wake of the pain, the tranquil emptiness after the grief has ebbed into its sullen tomb, hibernating for its next opportunity to strike, to remind, to reopen hastily sutured wounds. That for every passing pain of a love lost, we lose a part of ourselves never to be regained. We are pieces of a whole parceled and partial to those who warrant our affection, in the hope that they too would give a bit of themselves to fill what we lack.


A piece of home.


But we cannot come home, for home to us is a concept alien, intangible, and abstract. Until we discover that our home is within, not from without, that it is the absence of the pieces that allows us to be of value, of meaning, and of opportunity. That we can only be a home, if we are one for another.

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FROM MUSIC AND MADNESS II

Sometimes certain episodes in one’s life are too exquisite, singular, and crucial that to remember it pedant and pure allows us to relive it. But to dwell on a moment, a fleeting memory, is to deny the senescent nature of our predicament. That life is ever-changing, and to live is to evolve, triumphant or otherwise. Goodbye’s are for those who do not wish to look back, for those who feel that this here, now, will never happen again. But if you choose not to, the moment can live on, not as a recollection but as a promise, that the striving won’t end.

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FROM MUSIC AND MADNESS II

Because we all must reach that point, a helplessness, that proves how much and deep the investment of emotion has been, proof of us succumbing, conceding, to it. The painful verity is that when this occurs, when you are laid bare by the roadside, your throbbing heart an excruciating evidence of the absoluteness of the affection, you realize that you no longer own that which you long for. That the silence of the night: the long pauses between conversations seem like eternities extending, wrenching, unforgiving. The fragile touch he laid left on your skin is more brand than a memory, and flagrant proof of your own fragility. Like glitter thrown to the wind, its brilliance in midair is but a momentary magnificence, fleeting and pervious to the passing of time, and the changing of hearts.

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FROM MUSIC AND MADNESS II


I used to believe that speaking the same language is requisite to finding true connection, that communication resides in the blanket of words, of thoughts, and of ideas and beliefs. But often, speaking the same language is not enough, because even if there is congruency, there is also an inadequacy, of the language to explore what is really meant, and expound what is actually done.

                          

Somewhere, beyond the distanciation of time, of belief and action, there is a place I can go to. There I am whole once more, and perfection is not an illusion. But I cannot let you in to that place; merely narrate and describe as far as my vocabulary will afford. My reality may be dark and desolate, but there, here, in the words of a language esoteric and lost, I can attempt to take you.

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FROM MUSIC AND MADNESS II

Because we only have one life to live, and to experience it with fear and remorse is not living but existing. One cannot fully connect with another without letting the other in, into who one is, imperfections and all. Vulnerability is a fact of our humanity, and to those who willingly refute this, much will be granted by fate. We can only hope that the divine is forgiving upon us mortals, and that morsels of manna occur once in a while. But how we are to our fellowmen is purely our discretion, and acknowledging their humanity is accepting our own.

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