The Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) was established with the best of intentions – invigorate the local cinema industry by providing a venue for film makers, writers, and producers to showcase exemplary work that captures the spirit of Philippine culture, the interest and fancy of the local audience, and to push the envelope of Philippine cinema. But over the decades, it has lost sight of this mandate and objective and has become a parody of formulaic and uninspired output.

The trend towards independently-produced and curated films over the past few years have birthed some of the most exciting (and, once in a while, dismal) film festivals in the country. With a carte blanche of inspiration as its impetus; writers, producers, directors, and filmmakers have come-up with some of the most memorable films in the last two decades – the Cinemalaya and CinemaOne Originals being two of the most notable stalwarts of the movement.

In the end, the MMFF has lost both its meaning, relevance, and mandate to represent quality local films. Its yearly roster of re-hashed, regurgitated, and humdrum films indicates a lack of insight into the audience’s interest. Banking on its unquestioned monopoly over the cinema houses throughout the holiday season, this absence of healthy competition have left the big-name and big-ticket production houses to annually churn out one of the following blasé themes: a triptych horror series or some form of supernatural terror fest, a tongue-in-cheek rom-com with the most recent and popular love-team as its top-billers, some form of adventure-format or magical sojourn based on a superficial premise, the classic struggle of good versus evil, a farcical slapstick comedy, a semi-biographical action flick, or some gritty drama with the un-evolving theme of third-world struggles.

It’s no wonder and surprise then that discerning moviegoers respond more to indie-films and film fests than they do to the MMFF. Primarily because patronizing the sort of films they have released lately borders on insulting the capacity of their audience to accept, digest, and appreciate more complex, uncomfortable, or extreme themes.

It’s a challenge, then, to the MMFF organizers; and indirectly to the producers, to push the boundaries of film-making in the future, and produce content that is truly a zeitgeist of Philippine culture, a tranche de vie of the sentiments of a more and more discerning, vocal, and discriminating public.

The premise of every artform and medium is insight, perspective. Without this, it is nothing more than glorified nonsense.

Cinéma vérité (/ˈsɪnɨmə vɛrɨˈteɪ/; French: [sinema veʁite], truthful cinema) is a style of documentary filmmaking, invented by Jean Rouch, inspired by Dziga Vertov's theory about Kino-Pravda and influenced by Robert Flaherty’s films. It combines improvisation with the use of the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects hidden behind crude reality.

"Some things, once you've loved them, become yours forever. And if you try to let them go, they only circle back, and return to you. They become part of who you are. Or they destroy you." 

- Allen Ginsberg, Kill Your Darlings (2014)

When I was younger, influenced by the naivety of inexperience, I used to believe time was therapeutic. That everything is made easier and palatable with patience. And pain fades away with memory, like brush strokes on vellum.

But time is neutral, and it can easily fade a memory as much as magnify it. Resolution, like the depth of an experience or a memory, is independent of how long you dwell on it. No amount of wallowing will make the pill go down easier.

In that regard, we're slaves to history. It is both what feeds our hope for sunnier times, and the nimbus that clouds our present; propelling us in the struggle and abating our potential growth.

Experience is a good mentor, but insight is the better one. We often fail to recognize that what we go through in life is rendered worthless if it doesn't educate us.

Noone comes out of grief unscathed; the scars are meant not just to deform but also to inform us. Time does not pause from its glacial procession. It is only us who choose to be still, to stagnate, in these valuable and long-gone moments.

When a clock stops ticking, its gears do not cease to exist. They're still there, needing to be rewound.

This, here, is that.





This entry is for the Round Table Challenge, and was done entirely (including the photo-graphics) on the phone with Google Keep, PhotoGrid, and Blogger for Android.

Hello Aya,


"Happy is the man who finds a true friend, and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wife."
- Franz Schubert

Forgive my inaniloquence, as this wonderful news have come at such a surprise. Your nudiustertian decision is well appreciated, and has left me nothing but aghast at this elating development. The years have been unkind to those of the intelligensia, and discontent plagues our plight with the persistence of a keloidal scar, but that shouldn't deter us from seeking that elusive love. Serendipity is kind to those whom fate have been harsh to. I am glad you've found yours, from this immense sea of strangers, at a foreign land no less. 

Allow me to express my heartfelt well wishes for the both of you. Nothing of value comes in this life without effort, and struggle. The struggle informs this value, makes the honey sweeter, the journey greater, and the and the sun a tad more warmer (and kinder). Maybe some day I will get to meet this man. May you bring joy and support, love and understanding, and above all trust and respect to each other. 

We must find happiness where we can. It is the only noble way to love.


Les deseo a ambos todo lo mejor en su compromiso y para el futuro!

Salud!
Red

Dear Blog,

I would like to apologize for my protracted absence. It has been a while since I’ve last posted anything noteworthy for you. For all its worth, this negligence has been primarily unintentional. I wish I could expound on the reasons more, but the cloud of doubt, uncertainty and anxiety looms over me like a shadow. A very large, menacing, and amorphous shadow.

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To write seems futile, incomplete, unintelligible
thoughts that refuse to find voice, form, a message
scarcely scribbled, quickly discarded, drafted
in the silence of an ordeal 

unspoken.

There is comfort in indecision.

 Realizing, I am human after all.

Just remember, once you're over the hill 

you begin to pick up speed.

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Charles Schulz

People generally dread turning 30, like an affliction that creeps in in the dead of night, turning youth into vain memory, a faint spark of glory days when life meant frolicking in wanton abandon, unbridled by mature conceptions such as responsibility and making a living. Considered a social fulcrum, men of this age and beyond are expected to forego juvenile dreams, and fickle behaviour, opting for the supposedly adult values of sound-mindedness, being goal-oriented, and a sense of obligation.

How easy it would be fall into this stereotype, conceding to the call of age, of time, and of the present. To pledge allegiance to social expectations, because the alternative, uncertainty, is a disposition that men fear with the same progression as they do with age. That the closer you are to your deathbed, the more you fear its eventuality, thus consequently turning the most free-spirited of us into jaded, indifferent, flawed pragmatists and cynics. That to become an adult, or mature, means to fall in line, to follow the flock, and to brand oneself with the searing humility of normalcy.

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This space, barren, quivers in the vast nothingness that has penetrated it. Unspoken words linger afloat in the cavity that trails untraced from there to nowhere. Miniscule crumbs left sprawled across the coffee table. Drapes hung low and depressed in the parched summer humidity, with seams tattered and undone. The floor creaks with patience for the foot that never sets foot upon it. Windows left ajar, wide and welcoming to the forgotten beyond. Paint cracked and peeling across walls stained with the mute passing of time, withered and pasty accumulating along the edges of the room, like termite-ridden dusting, sans the termites. For, even they have left abandoned this place. The leather sofa sits idly in a corner, askew from the line of the antique Persian rug beneath it, its upholstery frayed with a dullness whose cause is suspect. A broken floor lamp slumps with its wiring exposed, and its shades torn and discolored  A heel-less stiletto boot here, a discarded iPhone there; trinkets and follies without ownership and purpose.

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A subtle change is happening. I feel it most during those incoherent hours between sleep and wakefulness, vast and vacuous moments of apathy to the world that pepper and interject my days, and sometimes nights. They mingle and trickle beneath the seemingly bland normalcy (if, one could imprecisely classify it as such). It may be a harbinger of something more pervasive, invasive and assertive that has yet to find fruition. So far, this paradigm shift is neither malevolent nor malignant, at least to my knowledge.

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Forgive my marked lack of eloquence  in this circumstance. I find myself at a figurative standstill as I look back, being pleasantly overwhelmed, at the year that was, and that came to an unsurreptitious close. I may have been flagrant in the calumny of all things crass and kitschy, often too indignant and swift to contest, and for that reason, must have been the unintended cause for my inacuity on exploring something as ubiquitous and pedestrian as an annual conclusion. For to even attempt to condense, distill, nomenclate, classify, and order a whole year into an entry is just as, in my opinion, foolhardy and delusional as me foregoing caffeine. So I shan't.

To be more precise, there is a n enuresian thirst to illustrate the plethora of vertiginous emotional somersaulting I encountered in the  year that was, ungraspable by the grit and savoy of prose. Now, to find a place to begin is just as daunting as finding the appropriate flourish by which to conclude. Since my writing methodology lacks neither order, pattern, rhythm, regularity, discipline, nor sometimes sense, thus method being inaccurate as a descriptor at all, to examine with unceremonious procession across my entries would be a disservice and blunt oversight on momentous moments that have occurred, and were left undocumented, whether of my own volition or circumstantial dispositions.

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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 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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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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[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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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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