B and I spent the day at the beach. And I was inspired to write a poem! Well, an attempt anyway. Hehe. We thought we were being all slick by going early and on a week day. Boy were we totally off. So, now I have a tan that is probably only visible to me, and B is in pain from his burn. Note to self: next time, bring sun block!
Haaaaaay...i'm done with summer school! For the first time in four years I have the time to do what ever the hell I want. Well, at least for the next two months. And well, with a ridiculously minimal amount of money. Can't have everything.
What to do, what to do.
Well, I now have no excuse but to get my shit together with regards to maARTe and Arkipelago. The next month at least looks pretty busy with the next issue of maARTe to get together, Arkipelago sponsored events like Ray Halili's gallery tour and the Philippine Day Street Fair in Jersey City this weekend. There's also the Filipino film programs we're sponsoring for the AAIFF. With the (unwarranted?) fear of not having anything to do outside Arkipelago, I impulsively volunteered to help out with Peeling's new offering, Vampire Geishas of Brooklyn. You will either see me videotaping the show, selling tshirts or seating you, hehe...
Oh yeah, and there's my own stuff. I want to keep taking pictures! I want to write! Somehow I got myself assigned to do research on pinoy puns for Eileen Tabios for the next two months. The theory is that "For pinoys to pun is
to appropriate the forms and usage of English in such a way that "real" English-speakers can't understand them."
Haaaaaay, buhaaaaay....i'm so excited. and i just can't hide it. :)
I've spent another week with C's 2nd graders...and I'm exhausted! I can't imagine how the real thing will be. Anyways, this time I have pictures, including my favorite, Amber, who I've mentioned before. So check it out: Be Cool, Stay in School!
Though I should be sleeping this minute, since I'm observing at the my friend's school tomorrow morning, G and I are listening to Pinoy Radio. Galeng, so far they played Balikbayan Box by the Eheads, some Yano song, and now it's Rivermaya's Kisapmata...
"...Like in an epic, the most traditional form of poetry, the hero goes out to search for something, encounters many struggles, dies, then is enlightened to life again. This is true for many Filipinos who must leave the Philippines. As a writer, this is true for me too. I have to leave my country, in order to take root in my country." -Joi Barrios
Holy Crap!! I was on TV tonite!! They showed the Arki-gang at an event we sponsored back in September, and Cheryl plugged Arkipelago! woohoo!!! Tune in Thursday at 8pm EST for an encore presentation. This time, I'm taping it. Hehe.
I shoulda told you all sooner, thank goodness, E reminded me!! What I'm gonna be watching tomorrow evening: Married in America, which includes two of our maARTe-est: Neo and SurREAL Siren, heck you may even catch a glimpse of the Arki-gang! There's also an encore presentation on Thursday...
Dad bought himself an early Father's Day present: a Sony DV Cam. B and I were drooling over it. I just can't wait til Dad and Mom are back from their trip so we can play with it. *sigh*
Listening to Aikostar, Your Words. I think that's my fave song by them. B and I FINALLY went to watch them perform at Philippine Fiesta Village, a newish Pinoy restaurant/bar/videoke/club that's just 10 minutes from my house but seemed like the middle of NOWHERE. Dang, I was even afraid to park my car there. At one point there was an announcement that a car actually got hit in front of the freakin' restaurant. But more importantly, the food was pretty decent. A bunch of other bands played, but Aikostar blew them out of the water. Bigay na bigay talaga yung boses ni Ivy (who incidentally just discovered this site, hehe, hello there:), the lead singer. Unlike another certain female lead that performed that evening, when Ivy danced to the music you could really tell she was feeling the music. I love it when female singers don't sing in the stereotypically "girly" way. Maybe that's why that other singer annoyed me, plus the fact that when she was speaking into the mic it was totally clear but her singing voice was barely audible and she was doing some weird floating fairy dance that embarrassed even me. Ivy on the other hand, was totally raw, unleashed in her movements and her voice. They were the 4th band to play that night so you could really tell the difference with the band's full, tight sound compared to the other band's "unsureness." I mean the other bands weren't terrible, but they could definitely use more practice. Unfortunately, B and I couldn't stay long enough for Mike Hanpol's (yea he's here, hehe) set.
Actualizers are successful, sophisticated, active, "take-charge" people with high self-esteem and abundant resources. They are interested in growth and seek to develop, explore, and express themselves in a variety of ways—sometimes guided by principle, and sometimes by a desire to have an effect, to make a change.
Image is important to Actualizers, not as evidence of status or power but as an expression of their taste, independence, and character. Actualizers are among the established and emerging leaders in business and government, yet they continue to seek challenges. They have a wide range of interests, are concerned with social issues, and are open to change. Their lives are characterized by richness and diversity. Their possessions and recreation reflect a cultivated taste for the finer things in life.
Published in the 1998 program/zine for Arkipelago's Filipino Film & Video Festival, Sa Pinilakang Tabing:
"If You Want to Know What We Are" By Dionisio Velasco
"He who does not look back from whence he came will never ever reach his destination."
- an old Philippine saying, as quoted in Bontoc Eulogy
They were displayed like animals in cages for all the world to gawk at. They were the Igorot people from the Philippines, men and women who ate dogs, not hot dogs like at a baseball game or on the 4th of July, but bow-wow woof-woof dogs. The fascination with the "savages" at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair provided all the attraction of a carnival sideshow. "Bontoc Eulogy," by Marlon Fuentes, sets up this spectacle as the framework for his pseudo-documentary film about the personal exploration of a Filipino American who tries to unravel his ancestral heritage. The film, featured in Arkipelago's annual festival Sa Pinilakang Tabing (On the Silver Screen) in 1996, foregrounds the treatment of those Igorot Filipinos at the World Fair as a defining moment in Philippine-American relations.
The juxtaposition of Filipinos in cages with the advancements of American science and technology was of course a not so subtle declaration of racial and cultural superiority. That this attitude has not changed much since then is evidenced in recent sniping remarks by Hollywood celebrities in the mainstream media. Witness: Howard Stern joking on the air about "Filipinos who eat their own children," and then there was Liam Neeson telling a writer from GQ magazine about the Filipina women he¹s got tied up‹as in bondage in his bedroom. Recently, Emmy Awards host Joan Rivers, before cutting to a commercial, granted her national TV audience permission to either "feed your dog, walk your dog, or if you¹re Filipino, eat your dog." Are you ashamed of being Filipino yet? Let's assure Ms. Rivers that her pedigreed French poodle Kiki is in no danger of being skewered by our Filipino barbecue sticks. Biro lang. (Just kidding.) Yes, some of us do eat dog, Ms. Rivers, but for your own edification, the dish is called azucena, and it goes very well with San Miguel pale pilsner.
We Filipinos can be overly defensive and hypersensitive when it comes to being confronted with some of the above images and representations of our selves. We tend to take these things personally. We get pikon. But if we don¹t like the way we look, or the ways in which we are made to look in mainstream media we have to stop getting so defensive and literally take offense. If we are media makers, if we make images on film, on video or on our Macintosh computers, and combine them with sounds, music, words, then we represent our Filipino selves by presenting the many angles, facets, faces and phases that we are endowed with. What we produce is something akin to a new Philippine cinema.
The above preamble serves to point out only one thing: when it comes to building community, and increasing awareness of a blossoming FilAm film movement, Arkipelago's annual festival, Sa Pinilakang Tabing, featuring new films and videos produced here and in the Philippines, is a vital force at the forefront of Filipino American cultural/arts presentation. This year's [1998] festival, which marks the event¹s fifth year, begins on November 14th and continues until November 21st.
Since 1994 Arkipelago has provided an alternative space for independent film and video artists to screen their works. But Sa Pinilakang Tabing did not just come out of nowhere. To get properly grounded in the recent history of independent Philippine cinema in New York one has to go back ten years to 1988 when maverick filmmakers Nick Deocampo and Raymond Red each had retrospectives of their Super-8mm films at the now defunct Collective for Living Cinema. Both Deocampo and Red came out of the Mowelfund Film Institute in Manila. Throughout the 80s and into the 90s Mowelfund has been a fertile breeding ground for young Filipino filmmakers. For young Filipino American filmmakers at that time the presence of Deocampo and Red in New York was a shock of recognition at their own potential to produce Pinoy experimental films.
By 1990 Luis Francia and Noel Shaw had completed their too-long-to-be-a-short, but not-long-enough to be a feature Super-8mm film Flip's Adventures In Wonderland. Deocampo and Red had both assisted in the first third of the production of that film, which had screenings at alternative film venues like the Gas Station (a junkyard cum scrap metal art performance space) and the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village. That same year Artists Space in Soho presented a one-night-only screening of Kidlat Tahimik's seminal work Perfumed Nightmare. Most memorable that evening was when, during the notorious circumcision scene, a gentleman in the last row fell off his chair fainting, and halting the screening for several minutes.
In 1991, Youth for Philippine Action, an organization of young Filipino American activists hosted, in conjunction with Pilipino Pilmmakers Pare, a night of Filipino and Filipino American short films. The event, which was called Boses Pilipino (Filipino Voices), was in many ways a precursor to the Arkipelago presentations today. But that¹s another story.
The visions and perspectives of film- and videomakers who have been showcased in the first four years of Sa Pinilakang Tabing have certainly been various and wide-ranging. In personal documentaries like Nick Deocampo's "Private Wars", Veena Cabreros-Sud's "Stretchmark" and Michael Magnaye¹s "White Christmas" and we get a first person diary style-account, a poetic musing and travelogue, respectively. From the personal to the more politically motivated we¹ve seen documentaries produced in the Philippines‹like "Toxic Sunset," by Benjamin Pimentel and Wella Lasola, which attempted to expose the culpability of the U.S. Military over alleged dumping and waste left as a legacy of the naval and air force bases, and "FIND: A Ten Year Search For Justice" (produced by the Families of Victims of Involuntary Disappearance) in which the phenomenon of forced disappearances throughout the Marcos, Aquino and Ramos eras is examined.
The short narrative film format has also been well-represented in past SPT festivals. "Good Sense of Style" by Desireena Almoradie,"Waiting in the Wings" by Charles Uy and "Silencio" by Michael Arago have all exhibited strong dramatic story-telling characteristics. These three shorts, each directed by a young Filipino American filmmaker, display the kind of clean and crisp production value evident in most film school projects.
A more mythic kind of story-telling is attempted in Ellen Ramos¹s "The Other Side of the Volcano" (Doon Sa Kabila Ng Bulkan). A meticulously crafted, hand-painted animation, the film unfolds like a dream as it recounts the sublime worldview of the Aetas people. A different kind of dream state is realized in Fruto Corre¹s cinema verite "Tupada." Bizarre and surreal are apt descriptions of the scene during the Philippine presidential campaign that Corre¹s ubiquitous camera and microphone capture in 1992. "Tupada" offers a harshly critical look at the wacky follies of an election season that is uniquely Filipino. But more than espousing a wickedly political sense of humor the real saving grace of the film is Corre¹s compassion toward the mass of humanity that make up the Philippine voting public.
The humor quotient goes way up, however, in Ernesto Foronda¹s "Back to Bataan Beach" and in Rico Reyes' "Karaoke" videos. Playing off the style of "extended" trailers that Hollywood studios employed in the 50s and 60s, Foronda embraces American pop culture while at the same time poking fun at it. And by using an all-Filipino cast in his raucous beach romp, Foronda casts a sharply critical eye at young Filipinos' wholesale consumption of all things Amerikano. Meanwhile the "Karaoke" videos by Rico Reyes hold a mirror up to the Filipino¹s passion for "minus-one" singing. Give us a microphone, a cassette tape with pre-recorded backing music and maybe a few drinks and we¹ll give you belt-it-out singing a la Whitney Houston.
From the straightforward and conventional to the subversive and irreverent, the myriad films and videos exhibited in Sa Pinilakang Tabing (SPT) over the first four years of the festival's young existence have exposed the welling up of talent and verve in this new Philippine / Philippine American cinema. How do you distill images that are purely Filipino? You don¹t, and you can¹t. Filipinos are a people of too many tribes with too many outside influences, colonial or otherwise, for any clearcut definition of a pure Filipino. Because a millennia before the so-called multicultural movement in America was cheapened by the political motives of status quo educators, policy makers and the czars of culture and media, Filipinos were already inherently a multicultural peoples. Picture a film, unrolling before your eyes, spanning islands and oceans.
Our last festival was in 1999. Cross your fingers that SPT comes alive again this year...
I have about a dozen half-used journals in my drawer. I think the first journal I had was in 7th grade. I'd be inspired by one type of journal and then lose interest and move on to the next. I went through a flowery girlish journal stage, then a bright orange plaid book-style bound one. But my favorite one by far has got to be a plain black spiral bound sketch book because it had no lines. I gave it two titles (feeling writer talaga) on the front cover, it says "Empress Journal" and on the inside cover, I wrote "Sweet and Sour Indulgences". Gad, maarte, noon pa. Well, not too long ago. The first entry is from February 1997 (and ended in May 1998) where my concerns were graduating by the next semester, getting a decent dorm room, and as much as I hate to admit it, boys. Anyways, since I rediscovered this favorite journal of mine, I decided to use it again. I realized I've forgotten to write! Well, write, without worrying what you think, anyway, even though, I know, I know, I shouldn't care. I haven't written in a private journal since I started blogging. Which was nearly, what 3 years ago! Yikes. Very bad! I've neglected my inner soul, err, or something like that. Long story short, expect changes in my entries (content wise, frequency) here...just a heads up...
I'm in a Grrrrrr mood. Teeth grinding, eyebrows concentrated, fist-clenching - you get the picture. Just because. Everything. You know what annoys me? When people claim diversity or multiculturalism or minorities, when they're really just talking about African Americans. Like Asians don't exist. Or when people STILL say Chinese when they mean Asian. Or when they say Asian when they're talking about just Chinese. Or when they say Asian (after listing African American, Latino...) and not Asian American because they assume that coz we look the way we do, we just got off the boat. Or when people's intelligence are judged by how well they speak English. Or a person cries "crab mentality!" when others are pointing out bullshit that person has actually done or said. Or people who win arguments not because they're right but because everyone is too tired to argue with them. Or people who claim "first" without bothering to acknowledge that life existed before they came along. Grrrrrr...
I really should stop reading yahoo group postings. They give me a migraine.
Check out the great pics at Heidi's blog of an event at Dixon Place. Makes me want to go out and start taking pics again...I want a digital camera! Wah, wah, wah...
By the way, the maARTe store is up. Stickers will soon be available for sale. To those of you who requested free ones that are prolly wondering where the hell they are - and believe me, i've gotten complaints of not following through :P, tomorrow will be set aside for mailing them out. :) All is well.
I'm pulling the old "too lazy to tell you what I've been up to so I'll copy and paste a homework assignment" trick:
Community Walk Assignment
What have been your experiences in the community around your school? What about the community has made an impression on you? What groups are identifiable in this community? Who lives in the community and what sights characterize the area? What have you learned about the community? (disclosure: the community I wrote about is also the neighborhood in which I live)
The community is quite diverse in terms of age, family groups and ethnicities. It is an ethnic-rich neighborhood. This is indicative in the types of businesses in the area and the population of the schools. The diversity of the community is evident by just observing the residents themselves.
Within just a 2 – 3 block radius of the preschool for special needs where I observed children that were developmentally delayed, one could be overwhelmed by the scents and sights of the surrounding eateries. Smells of zeppoli, pizzas, and curries mix. There are 2 Chinese take out restaurants, 4 Filipino owned businesses (including a bakery, small grocery and restaurants), 2 Latino owned businesses (including a pizzeria, a diner that offers Greek, Spanish and typically American cuisine, and a bakery), 2 Korean owned businesses (one deli and one nail salon), at least 3 African American owned businesses (including 3 salons and a boutique) numerous Greek owned businesses (including 2 hair salons and a Mediterranean deli, numerous Indian and Pakistani owned businesses (including small grocery stores and restaurants).
There are also a number of faith based groups, including a Greek Orthodox church, a chain of stores owned by the Sri Chinoy worshippers, a Korean Christian church, and a Roman Catholic church.
There are many types of greenery – many tree lined streets, rose bushes and wide varieties of other flowers and bushes. The area has mostly houses and only a few small apartments. There are many cars as well as bikes around the area. On any given day, one could walk down a street and smell barbeque and see children playing ball on the less busy streets.
There are many families that live in the area with children ranging from pre-k to high school age. There are at least 5 schools in the area ranging from public to private as well as pre k to high school. There are also a lot of cats that roam around as well as dogs barking from their house gates.
