Squalor sutra from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:01:45 GMT

What is "Stella"?

I cant recall what kind of fallacy it is to operate on "keywords," to make loose associations among things that would break the coherence of some form of communication. Tangents. Misdirected projectiles --

--like "Stella"

The dedication in Jack Kerouac's Selected Letters 1957 - 1969 is for Stella, the woman - out of all his lovers, beautiful - who turned out to be the love of his life, his wife.

Stella,
Star, sister of a great friend, hello

Stella is also: a love of a dear poet friend (who shared a Beat blood, gaining momentum frisking downhill, "traffic and sirens masked with jazz", charges against the existence of a god), and a DIY sticker found between the pages of Tokyo-Montana Express. Casimir, Richard Brautigan, then above Kerouac -- all linking to a Stella.

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:32:38 GMT

ketchup love letter from my edie because:

*i've given up on skater trash fast food
*i've given up on the great weight of ordeals that can make this life so unkind
*i've given up on being biblically correct!

**i fell in love with the world in you, you, you, you and you

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 10:01:24 GMT

IN SEARCH OF THE EFFORTLESS LIFE
a painting exhibition by Maya Munoz

A script of the Mindful among the mindless

To plot out this journey of and to satori is to pose a dilemma. Linear narratives are impossible. Overlaps might just work, only in paradoxical sequence.

I. The premise is a projectile with an unwavering view of “the effortless life.” Ironically all things are not qualified: departure points, direction, traits of the goal. Almost like Waiting for Godot, in a dog-bite-tail merry-go-round kind of way. It is a punch of desperation in a ring where one accepts loss forever but goes about being a shadowboxer.

II. The Samana (the Arhat, the Mindful among the mindless) is an ascetic, an outlaw-institution. The operative agenda to enlightenment is lost in rigid austerity programs. Outlaw turned institution. To paint is to be austere, to be disciplined. It is a self-institution where a painter binges and turns to a seclusion from everything that was covetous before. This is a chase-flight sequence.

III. The heart of Practice is conflict. A teetering between extremes, mostly, then consequentially the clamor to unify them (look past the binary scale). Like: evisceration and nonchalance, grit and idyll, sex and charity. But most of all, the paradox is already introduced to the seeker of Tathagata. Masao Abe speaks of the three stages of ego-self, no-self and true-self. Stages not as marks of progress but the incomprehensible composition of Buddha-self.

IV. In Search of the Effortless Life- Thom Pham, “If it is Effortless then why search for it?” Following Abe, to realize that the Object world is bull is the first negation but there is no moving forward. The no-self is still ego-self as much as it's the first genuine existential disarming of the tool of GRASPING. It is still a hankering after Reality, a swipe at Tathagata. To search is to be conscious is to be rabid is to hold tight. “Of” is to put distinctions, to separate Subject from Object (the goal that is the “effortless life”).

Now, the question of the cast. Also the qualification and worklist of a Samana.

I. The physical traits are irrelevant, all that is necessary is immediacy. The best shot is their silhouettes as they leap out of nebulous and angry backdrops. Suspended in an air formed in retribution, they are characters indifferent to the pedagogy of suffering. Buddha is not their answer. Despite of that, they become characters entangled in solipsistic lives of self-imposed conventions.

II. To return to the second part of the first section – since painting is an act of austerity, the sitters must be by all means lacking the capacity to engulf the painter. The sitters must be let go because as much as they are repulsive, they are are strangely a puzzle. The painter cannot succumb to, nor be driven mad. The subjects are not the Amorous Object. The hurt in this series has as its motor its own denial. Barthes, “It is an unhappiness which does not wear itself out in proportion to its acuity; a succession of jolts.”

III. The operative agenda of the portraits is to examine most of the sitters' insides. The outlined males are posed with a secret question: “What is your misery?” After promiscuity, obedience and brokenness lose their clarity, banality becomes satisfaction becomes divinity. Betrayal of the no-self which grasps the bottomlessness of reality and just become.

Redemption within the world, not beyond the world.

IV. In Search of the Effortless Life is not the sitters' predicament. Shifting between furious hues and deeply saturate cool palettes to dissect pale bodies as allegory of an internal battlefield. Desperation will never be this easy.

The resolution when there is nowhere to go is futility or fulfilment.

I. Resolution number 1: treating this search as a Sisyphian enterprise. In Search of the Effortless Life is an enchantment.

II. Resolution number 2: In Search of the Effortless Life. “In reality, it is unimportant that I have no likelihood of being really fulfilled. Only the will to fulfillment shines.”

III. Thus I have heard. At one time the Buddha was evaporating into wisps and was faceless together with a gathering of great humdrums.

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 04:18:25 GMT

fri 010209 10:13pm

Holden Crotchfield calls me SIDDISTRACTED. I prefered Siddelicious by Fresnoza or Siddementia, but I am neither one on most days.

This was meant to be a New Year post. I wanted to make lists of fragmented incidents, new lovers and constants, allegories of places, chase-flight sequences and ideas that could merit a reasonable amount of approval from my snooty friends. I wanted to make lists, because I've resolved to be a LIST person this year.

Oh well, lame one-liner it is: 2008 was unbelievable!

I spread myself too thin on the thick, hard toast of ... LIFE haha! I try very hard to center myself, take things one at a time and it is IMPOSSIBLE! No lists, just terse and corny answers!

I have a lot going on right now. Maya said, "Busy is an understatement!" But as I keep reassuring myself, "Busy, yeah. But VERY FLEXIBLE. Hit me up when you're going through liquor withdrawal."

Like most jobs, mine is 24/7. I have to be at everyone's beck and call, meaning sleeping over the gallery (which is on the other end of my commuting perimeter) or staying over that godforsaken sleepy industrial area till 2 fucking am is the most preferable option. Also, I deal work with divas (think miniscule wealthy percentage of Philippine socio-economic strata, think minuscule freelancing/freeloading percentage of Southeast Asian creative crust) and unhappy co-workers.

Regular work days are Tuesdays to Sundays. But between late November to December 2008 prior to the holidays, I only had one day off. Ta-daaaa!

I do not complain! I've always worked in high pressure conditions! Working in Manila Contemporary is my right kind of crazy. I just wish that I'm doing the job designated to me: the pretentious art nitpicking, the intoxicated proposal meetings, the pseudo-intellectual research ... that sort of thing. The glamorously-packaged (because after hours it's laborious and incrimintaing like every other occupation) tasks of the resident curator! BOW! All I feel at the end of the day is inadequacy (as much as everyone tells me to take a fucking break please!) because I can't do my job well when I'm thinking about more pressing technical, administrative things like contacting the printer, polishing the itinerary for delivery and pick up of works, applying for wifi. COME ON!

I am going to make this new gallery pretty! and I will continue working for ANARCHISM. "Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic "libertarianism" of the far right; but anarchism. as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid)." - Leguin

So yes, now that I've explained myself I'M SORRY! -- For projects gone on hold, for essays that stink, for books that pile up, for stale music and for expired interpersonal relations!

(For the sake of lists, I will give one.

List of browsers/ windows open after lunch to 5:30pm:
1. GMAIL job account COMPOSE MAIL
2. GMAIL job account MESSAGE
3. GMAIL personal account INBOX
4. Google results: Bayan ni Anding -- do you mean Bayan ni Nanding?
5. Wong Lip Chin online portfolio
6. Don Salubayba online portfolio
7. Facebook Manila Contemporary grand opening album with:
8. Facebook chat with Wawi
9. Facebook chat with Alwin
10. Facebook profile Alwin Reamillo
11. DestinAsia
12. YM Maya
13. YM Lea
14. YM Fatima
15. YM Cos
16. YM Zoe
17. Text editor: notes on AMORSOLO show
18. Word: Abysmal
19. Word: pr for AMORSOLO show
20: Word: photo comments and freestyle email stories for IN SEARCH...)

I should have taken a screenshot. I have never operated on so many of these... things at the same time. Maybe shifting through at 10sec intervals. But all of them, ALIVE! BUZZING!

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 05:37:27 GMT

1122 9:55pm

I tripped and fell on my way down from the Quezon Avenue-EDSA overpass earlier. Godforsaken inertia pulled me forward, I thought I was done for until I pushed my weight to the right and landed on my butt. I was so close to lighting a cig on the concrete steps (I was halfway down) if it wasn't for this lady who offered her hand and a command: "Come on. Time to get up, Miss."

Of course everyone below was staring, not laughing though - maybe because I was in attractive quasi-yuppie attire or maybe I was sitting on the steps for so long that they could've finished laughing at me by the time I got to my feet.

Damn I wanted to take my shoes off. Where were those street vendors who sold 50 pesos slippers? Instead I rushed into 711, bought Kleenex - then alcohol - when I saw that my right fucking foot was bleeding. Picture me in 711 alongside people eating their 30 pesos worth of good snack, my foot shaking so much because I was cleaning the fresh wounds with punyetang alcohol and the pile of bloodied tissues growing on the floor next to my foot.

I sent a message to a handful of friends: "My new fashion statement: a chic blouse and a bloody foot on four inch heels."

I sent another to a former lover who always counted my scars: "I have new scars to show off the next time we meet. Trendfuck the underground with the new accessories - bruises and open wounds."

I still ended up going to Marina's show, with the side of my shoe grazing the wound. Show must go on after all. That, and I enjoyed the falling. For serious! The incident is so urgent, so strangely significant to me that it's worth an LJ entry nga!

I think about minor accidents - like this one - and disasters - like the bizarre love triangle that climaxed into physical injury in a public place two months ago - that happened to me or I unconsciously whipped up. And how I enjoyed them like how some people enjoy surprise birthday parties or well-planned, unquestionably romantic marriage proposals. Unlike those latter events, accidents are never anticipated. Accidents provide no clues beforehand. Also, accidents are always uneasy things with embarrassing consequences. As much as both happy surprises and accidents are events that test my vulnerability, I think disasters are instances where I am more hurtled out of control. Accidents wake me up more, make me believe that clumsiness may not be the only reason that they happen. I think accidents are cosmic, beautiful events that shake me up the better way - reminding me that every single, short moment is consequential whether I make it or not. For me, they take longer to sink in but make longer echoes, more comic memories. I realize I curse more and alot quicker in happy surprises. I tend to want to sit down where I tripped right, reaching out for a cigarette, giggle and wonder what the fuck just happened? did I just do that?

Also, happy surprises are so goddamned out of fashion. Every fucking accident is fucking novelty. Believe me: in the future, a black eye and a bloody foot will be so in.

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:02:04 GMT

two full days in Malate i have been seeing nothing but heartbreaking sights of sky and sea. yesterday i saw the sunset over Manila Bay and just two hours ago i witnessed PURE GRAY huddling in all nimbustratus splendor.

it's relieving actually, to be in new spaces and getting lost in their squalor and complex road-breaks. after chipping off the mike clip from my first opportunity to be a rockstar, i think rain and unfamiliar streets make things less funny and more hopeful.

i miss people, i need people although most of the time all we are capable of is secretly wishing people arent so close to us. new places allow me breathing, and lots of walking. the world isnt too small after all?

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:24:57 GMT

I've waited hours for this! I've made myself so sick!

what a vacay! misery because my manic-depression is so damned EVEN you know im not used to non-extremes! not used to in-betweens! as i say this the sun has gone down oh man the sunset view in our temporary office in malate makes me want to poop in my pants because of its gorgeosity.

birthday i spent very sweetly close to crawling on gutters drunk, close to getting whisked away to baguio (very tempting i daresay you know i love being abducted during my smelliest low).

every day else i spent very bittersweetly. slow loves in between. pirate smiles now and then. backrides and open road quite regular than the rest. beermouth and roof hideouts one or two days of eternity - blessings, all of them altho i cant feel them as such in hopping excitement.

now it's bitch work mode back on. oh im loving this.

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 08:00:54 GMT

1030
12:09pm

it works like this always: to face week after week of feeling like you're hanging on with your teeth because you've lost your limbs so that you can have a brief time to be surrounded by a field of grace.

yesterday, i was with my beautiful friend - both of us more broken than we could ever know. i had a timeline, a packed day of personal projects in the making. to top the night, my schedule dictated, were interviews and a place too familiar it's alien ground.

contrary to what was proven, i hate interviews. despite the sea of faces and conversations i swam, i drown constantly before stepping on new water. maybe because all my interviews are like blind dates. i can never tell if my rehearsed conversations will go as planned, elicit expected responses. i have to talk to people, i must know them and in return they evicerate me. and they are artists - really, really, really they are an unpredictable race: elusive and stark in unison.

but last night, my beautiful friend was my strength. i know i glowed to myself more than before. last night was a night of sweet spirits, lovely singing, illuminated laughter, deep deep smiles. mavericks! pirates! we all were. there was something in the air last night.

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 09:48:54 GMT

sept 17
5:43pm

i have this suspicion that the best way to keep the novelty of some art is to mention it in passing. a reference. break it down into house names: Warhol, Koons, Fluxus, Baroque. otherwise, all this circular "academic" talk sucks the color out of these visual explosives.

blah blah blah. i have to bring this dilemma up all the fucking time. how to write. how to write. how to write. how to write beautiful. because, i read a friend's article in a magazine and i found it beautiful and i compared it with some of the stuff i did i found mine boring, pretentious, highfalutin.

Oct 16
9:38am

Body clock's messed up. My sleeping habits are a failure, like most things. I wanna think that it's just the circumstances i get myself into that makes me so goddamned unsound but then again i think, oh who you put you in those circumstances? come on, as if you've no choice in the matter no matter how big the matter is! there's always this fuckface moment - operating in milliseconds, or less, or extending to one second if you're asstick lucky - where you're given a say: yes or no?

So anyway, I think I'm in the doldrums again. (Sucker for the blues! as Maya would call me.) Because everything feels so shittingly LIGHT - especially my sleep- when the my breathing pipe to my diaphragm - including my dreams- is so HEAVY. One more indication (pretend im on my shrink's couch because this is going to sound cheesy): I CAN'T CONNECT WITH ANYONE and I cant find any distraction to give me a high out of this mess. That's two, sorry.

Start somewhere, bitch. Now I write - cozzzz like everyone else I'm wanker. Some more closeted than others. I dont need to be closeted. I write for myself, about myself. That's the closest thing to me right now, one writing gig after the other I feel motherfucking SPENT. Yeah, it's true I realize. Im a bittersweetfucking ART WHORE. I write for artists, gallerists, magazines about artists/ art/ religion/ feminism/ etc etc. I dont say no to please write for me? Instead I say go go go! I am spent - having more orgasms that I can muster/ handle- and Im still subjecting myself to more fucking. Not like I get very much out of this. More approriate to call me ART SLAVE.

Bleh. This is my life, my love! But I am out of words and innards for other things, other equally intense or inane people. Now I write what I feel, this therapy session's long overdue!

...

Some triggers:

Spider Jerusalem + Iara

...

Maybe I'll do a novel, like start now. Like what Iara did. I have enough filth and sentiment to keep me going for a while anyway. I thought we want to talk about beauty here. Right this moment: all it seriously takes to write truthfully is rage and humor. Beauty can do too, since beauty is deaddogscock tragic anyway.

...

What's your religion? Desire and desperation.

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 02:01:34 GMT

I own

I feel

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 02:51:13 GMT

two poems because i said so

"In dreams, emotions are overwhelming." - The Science of Sleep
I've been dreaming
of you
all day
Have you ever
felt sad
when you think
of me?

*****

Love as hostile ground
Here I think of my mother
[Fire] tucked behind her ears

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:55:10 GMT

One year and a half through our relationship, Luigi still tries to pick me up (and over sms at that!) -

L: So, you come here often?
S: NOT INTERESTED.
L: C'mon baby doll. I totally get you and I think you can totally get me. What's say we blow this popsicle stand and bake some sweet cookies over the hot passionate oven of love in my apartment in Anonas?

(overlapped messages -
S: Whaddaya say we hit some place quiet? It's getting quite hot and rowdy in here..
L: Let's get to it then, babe. I'll do things to you I wouldn't do to farm animals)

S: You are SO SO BAD at this! I feel like I'm in some beat pub in skid row from the 50's. You get a one night stand for it!

>On Luigi: he gets away with everything! My heart heals very well no matter how lame/ pervy/ overly geeky his cheer-sidd-up antics are. Oh, love!
>On the "apartment in Anonas": inside joke. Anybody who knows about this ridiculous pick up line still won't let me hear the end of it.
> On "I'll do things to you I wouldn't do to farm animals": a gem!

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 02:05:09 GMT

31 August 2008

I am reading Richard Brautigan. He is my new favorite writer. He writes curtly/ with brevity. Almost like this. But his uncomplexed language is paramount to his disconcerting koan-narratives. I do not have disconcerting koan-narratives. Here's an exchange between me and a good friend this morning:

Maya: Workd on my red motion piece til way late. Jst woke up and lukin at it. Wow. In daylite dis peice luks so gud it stops me frm pushing it past pretty. Great talkin 2 u as usual. enjoy d lazy sunday

Sid: I think u will like RICHARD BRAUTIGAN, that is, if you havent heard of him. He's my new favorite writer. I found just one book by him in the library and wished they sold all his books here but no bookstore i've been to recently believes in him

Maya: Not heard of him wats d title of buk?

Sid: They say his best work is TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA. But what im reading - my first of him - is THE TOKYO-MONTANA EXPRESS. Satorical short stories!

Maya: I like d titles. Wil ask my friend to get for me d trout buk n we can xchange.

---
I think Luigi, after spending a weekend at the beach without me, will be polite enough to ask me what have you been up to?. I will tell him oh alot of Brautigan and also some C. Chongson funny when you texted that she has a girl crush on me that same time I found her blog and a new luminous muse i have been quite smitten by her for a while now you know.

Also I will tell him again how cosmic life is for me: finding uncanny connections in my random, very fragmented relationships with people and things that inspire me. I will tell him that I wanted to read Brautigan because of Teal, an acquaintance who is now in Hampshire and is an award-winning spokenword poet. Then I found out the Christine also likes Brautigan which made me have a girl crush on her too. And you know what? Between the pages of THE TOKYO-MONTANA EXPRESS I borrowed from the library I found a hand-drawn, hand-colored sticker of the name STELLA. Stella was the girl Casimir, my mountain-hugging Beat poet friend from Portland, loved four years back. And if I'm sure he would love Brautigan as much as the others do. I will perhaps annoy him by saying oh maybe you should check them all out they're all in my facebook if Brautigan's still alive I'll probably befriend him in facebook too. Funny how memory works - carrying me towards the shore of the present full of completely unrelated incidents and paragraphs with poor transistions noh, babe?

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 04:47:47 GMT

26 August 2008
11:00 am

One day I will vomit to no end, lose my sight and have my mental "illumination" snuffed out. I will get a brain scan: they will see a damaged skull, malignant lumps and nasty holes in my cranial junkyard. (Or another way to go - lung scan: charred lungs, some top-stage cancer.)

After I find out this, I will still know rage and have enough self-conscious consciousness to sue all tricycles (as well as their drivers!) of Balara. I hate travellling from home to work and back: public transpo, traffic, pedestrians, roads, alternate routes, trucks, garbage.) In escalating furing I will end up trying to sue the government. Better yet, human mis-values. HUMANITY in general, for crying out loud. Or perhaps GOD!

Tin: "Namimiss ko na "i-foucault" ang buhay"

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 06:01:31 GMT

When the going gets tough, the tough gets into Theory and cerebral jack-offs:

I    W A S    M I C H E L    F O U C A U L T ' S    L O V E  S L A V E
by Carolyn Lloyd

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by theory,
well-fed complacent leather-coated, dragging themselves through the
Caucasian campuses at dawn looking for an angry signifier.

the voices dissolved into the warm pre-dawn darkness as I watched vomit drip between the ferns and fallen leaves. Muttering consolations, my friend held my elbow. Only moments before we had been making impassioned if sloshy love in my single bed, while my 21st birthday party raged outside. Now I was hurling what seemed like a infinite fount of bile into the bushes behind my little room.

As my friend led me to bed, I thought: You really are 21 now. You got horribly drunk, dragged a guy to bed, and then got sick. Just like a made-for-TV movie. These thoughts were accompanied by an odd, abstracted rapture I have come to take for granted. For want of a better term, I'll call it the rapture of irony.

Halfway to my bed, I must have laughed out loud, because my friend asked, "What are you thinking about?"

"The narrative," was all I could manage. I wanted him to know that even in this humiliated, impaired state, I was fully cognizant of the mind boggling paradox of the situation. I may have been a walking cliché but at least I was self-conscious.

As I drifted off into a tangle of dehydrated nightmares, I comforted myself with the thought that Theory had suffused my life so thoroughly that I couldn't get laid, get drunk and get sick without paying homage to Roland Barthes' notion of the "artifice of realism" or Baudrillard's "simulacra." Though now I live a practical life, with more actions and fewer theories, I still struggle with the convoluted mind-set of my higher education. Even after years of trying to acclimate myself to a more concrete world, this odd theology lives in me — so much so that it is only recently that I have recognized it for what it is: a religious doctrine.

I am a child of Theory. I avoided this truth because I didn't want to confront the deep, strange river of pretentiousness that courses in my veins. But lately I've begun to think my predicament is less reflective of a private eccentricity than of a weird historical moment. The moment when the most arcane, elitist mental gymnastics — Theory in all its hybrid forms — was reborn as sexy, politically radical action. The moment when well-meaning liberal intellectuals — who a decade before had dedicated themselves to activism, volunteerism and building social programs — turned inward, tending to their private experiential gardens with obsessive diligence. Theory offered intellectuals the same escape from the public world that self-help and therapy offered the masses. But unlike self-help and therapy, which never claimed to be anything but psycho-spiritual Darwinism, Theory draped itself in revolutionary verbiage and pretended to be a political movement.

For those of us who got liberal educations in the wake of this shift, being radical meant little more than voting when it was convenient, reading the newspaper and thinking about doing charity work. The only thing that separated us from the ignorant masses was our intellectual opinions, which we shrouded in baroque revolutionary rhetoric. The "tyranny of grammar," the "subversion of sexual mores in extinct Native American tribes," and the "colonialism of the novel" — these were our mantles of honor.

Though I always believed that my upbringing was free of ideological trappings, I now see that the seed was planted long before I reached college. My eldest brother was a political activist in his teens, but with the onslaught of the '80s he threw away his ideals and pursued the good life: drinking from the corporate tit as an organizational consultant. After two years in Africa as Peace Corps volunteers, my parents shed their activist habits, moving to a resort town with the intention of getting rich building houses for retired millionaires. Aside from the little holes punched in their secret ballots and token checks made out to various nonprofit organizations, politically my family acted no differently than our blue-blood, conservative neighbors. They pursued the free market with a vengeance, bought as many nice things as possible and hobnobbed at the tennis club. But they still talked like the lefties they once had been. And how they talked.

At dinner we served up steaming topical cauldrons of death, child rearing, art and gender, then skewered them whole. We asked unanswerable questions and then imperiously proceeded to invent the answers. We had no interest in facts. Facts were just things you made up to win arguments. Once I brought home a boyfriend whose old-fashioned education and conservative family had taught him none of the liberal preference for ideas over facts. When the dinner conversation turned toward his hobby of California history and he began to speak in facts, my family paused to stare at him like he was sporting antennae. My mother hemmed; my father hawed; my brothers began to babble invented statistics. Through my family I learned to love ideas "for their own sake," which made me a kind of idiot savant (with emphasis on the idiot) and a prime victim for the God of Theory.

In 1978 my high school history teacher, a Harvard-educated, Jewish-turned-Catholic New Yorker, promised to give "extra credit" to anyone who read and did a book report on Paul de Man's "Blindness and Insight." (Though later exposed as a Nazi sympathizer, at that moment de Man still carried the mantle of "subversive" in the hippest sense.) Dutifully, I read every page — understanding it the way a little boy understands the gurgles of his toad. I had no idea what it meant but the densely knotted language of ideas made my head implode and my body sing. For the rest of my high school years I would only have to read a paragraph or two of deconstruction's steamy prose to have a literary orgasm.

In his recent disavowal of literary criticism in Lingua Franca, Frank Lentricchia confesses that his "silent encounters with literature are ravishingly pleasurable, like erotic transport." My experiences with Theory were equally exalted — delivering me into a paroxysm of overdetermined signs. In the blurry vertigo of those pages so full of incomprehensible printed matter I felt myself in the presence of a God: the God of complex questions, the God of language's mysteries, the God of meaning severed from the painful and demanding particularity of experience. In abstractions, I found absolution from a world in which I was utterly unprepared for any real responsibility or sacrifice. By surrendering myself to Theory, "reality" became a blank screen upon which I projected my political fantasies. My feelings of responsibility to a world that I had once recognized as both unjust and astoundingly concrete, slowly and painlessly seeped out of me until all that remained was the "consciousness" of the "complexity" of any "serious issue." I didn't need to fix anything, utterance was all, and all I needed were the words — long and tentacled enough to entrap meaning for a slippery, textual moment.

Like any religion, Theory provided perks to the pious. In my freshman year, I took an upper-division class on the 17th century English novel. The books were long and difficult but I secured my standing in the class when I responded to the teacher's mention of deconstructive theory. "Yes, each idea undermines itself," I parroted, channeling the memory of my sophomore extra credit report. "Paul de Man says..." With that bit of arcane spittle, I hit pay dirt. The teacher gave me such a hyperbolic recommendation, I was able to transfer to a better school. Once there, I evaded undergraduate classes with their demanding finals and multiple writing assignments and insinuated myself into graduate theory seminars of all departments: anthropology, literature, political science, theater, history. With a host of other would-be intellectuals, I honed the fine art of thinking about thinking about ... What we were thinking about was always pretty irrelevant. I developed minor expertise in the representation of the hermaphrodite in psychiatric literature, the uncanny relationship between classical ballet and the absolutist state of Louis XIV and the woman as landscape in Robbe-Grillet's "Jealousy." Now I was just warming up, I told myself. Someday I would find an important issue worthy of all my well-exercised mental muscles and then — watch out hegemony!

While I was being treated to the many joys of a great liberal education, I was also learning some rather insidious lessons. I discovered I didn't have to read the entire assigned book. After all, the "ideas" were what was important. Better to read the criticism about the book. Better yet, read the criticism of the criticism and my teachers would not only be impressed but a little intimidated. By extension, I learned not only a way of reading but a way of living. The more removed I was from a primary act, the more valuable it was. Why scoop soup at the homeless shelter when you could say something interesting about how naive it was to think that feeding people really helped them when really what was needed was structural change.

My friends now fall into two categories: ex-Theory nerds (like me) making a living off their late-learned pragmatism, and those who still live and breathe by Theory's fragrant vapors — political theorists, literary critics, historians, eternal graduate students. I love talking to them and often I covet the little thrones their ideas get to perch on. Yet when I come away from a conversation that has swooped from the racist implications of early French embalming techniques to the "revolutionary interventions" in the margins of "Tristram Shandy" and ended with the appalling hypocrisy of the right wing, I often feel a strange discomfort. Because these are some of the smartest, kindest and most energetic people I know, I cannot resist the question: Is this the best way for them to spend their lives? If they acknowledged that they were largely engaged in the amoral endeavor of pure intellectual play, that would be one thing, but each of these people considers their work deeply, emphatically political.

Is this theory-heavy, fact-free education teaching people to preach one way and live another? Are we learning that political opinion, however finely crafted, is a legitimate substitute for action? Sometimes it seems that the increased political emphasis on language — the controversies over "chairpersons," "people of color" and "youth-at-risk" — did more than create a friendly linguistic landscape, it gave liberals something to do, to argue about, to write about, while the right wing took over the country, precinct by precinct. After all, in a world where each lousy word can stir up a raging debate, why worry about the hard, dull work of food distribution or waste management?

I know how high and mighty this sounds, and the side of me that appreciates subtlety and disdains brow-beating is wincing. Political moralism has fallen from fashion, leaving us to cobble together myopic philosophies from warmed-over New Age thinkers like Deepak Chopra or archaic scriptures like the Bible. If it's any consolation, I include myself in the most offending group of educated progressives who squandered their political power over white wine and words like "instantiation." Moreover, I'm not saying we're all a bunch of awful, selfish people. We learned to read, we learned to think critically and at least pay lip service to certain values of justice, egalitarianism and questioning authority. But I do wonder if we're handicapped, publicly impaired somehow.

Like most of my siblings of Theory, from time to time I have tried to get off my duff and do something concrete: protest, precinct walk, do volunteer work — whatever — but I always get impatient. I wasn't meant to chant annoying rhymes. I am trained to relish complexity, to never simplify a thought. I am trained to appreciate "difference" (between skin tones and truths), but I don't know how to organize a political meeting, create a strategy or make a long-term commitment to a social organization. As Wallace Shawn wrote in "The Fever," "The incredible history of my feelings and my thoughts could fill up a dozen leather-bound books. But the story of my life — my behavior, my actions — that's a slim volume and I've never read it."

Lentricchia argues that by politicizing the experience of reading, we ended up degrading its beauty and pleasure. In the same fell swoop, we also robbed concrete political action of its meaning. The progressive pragmatists studied political theory; the progressive idealists studied literary theory; and the eccentric radicals became conceptual artists and sold their work to millionaires. In any case, everyone bought the idea that they were engaged in political work. Having a radical opinion was tantamount to revolution.

Back in college, I remember going to a party at the home of one of my professors, who was a famous Marxist. The split-level house was decorated with rare antiques from all over the world, exclusive labels filled the wine cellar, the banquet table overflowed with delicacies. Like an anointed inner circle of acolytes, we students sat around as our professors argued that Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was justified from the perspective of the underpaid Palestinian servants who worked in Kuwaiti homes. The following month, while I was house-sitting at the professor's house, his black gardener came to the door wanting to be paid. I discovered that my professor was paying the man minimum wage for less than a half day of self-employed work. That night as I plundered the refrigerator for the best cheeses that money could buy, I chided myself for not having doubled the man's wages. But that might have embarrassed him, no? It definitely would have embarrassed me. It would have been acting on a belief, and action makes me uncomfortable.

Recently I went to a conference on "Women's Art and Activism." I found precious little of either. Instead I found a lot of Theory garbed in its many costumes. There was a lesbian conceptual artist talking about her work, triangular boxes that "undermined the patriarchy of shapes"; a "revolutionary" poet lecturing on her experience of biculturalism; and an "anarchist" performance artist discussing "strategies for subversion." And what fabulous haircuts! The keynote speaker was Orlon, a French performance artist whose work consists of having her entire face rebuilt by plastic surgery. After a very French explanation as to why she needed a third face lift, she answered questions from the packed house. "I think you're just incredible," said one woman. "You say your aim is to reconquer your body as signifier. How do you feel about letting a doctor touch your signifier? And how do you see your revolutionary techniques emancipating women from the prisons of their bodies as sign?"

Had I stumbled into a satanic ritual, I couldn't have felt a more chilling sensation of alienation. Once I would have smiled at these liturgies and savored their impenetrable truths. Now I only wanted to run away and — do what? Dig a ditch? Perform open heart surgery? Administrate a charity? Even after all these years, I was still expecting Theory to visit me like the Virgin Mary and give me more than a sign.

Yoinked from Jaymee Gamil who yoinked it from here.

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:35:30 GMT

I don't write as much as I used to.

I envy the lovely, nail-masticating girl who was grateful enough to keep __unculturedity and smashin_pumpkin even though she knew she wasn't keeping up with everyone else. (Shhh.. I am always desperate to have something to say, to prove that I am living a life worth knowing about).

I was thinking of welcoming a more aggressive, rigorous approach to things. Maybe because I feel like honing the snob in me - you know, sharpening critical-thinking skills, blurting out sexy-sounding jargon with ease and all that. (Or perhaps because I know nobody pays attention to people grumbling about the big picture: absolutes + abstracts.) Of course, I am torn between coming up with dry, near-witty diatribes about culture and politics and technology and education and and and and..., and spinning tales so fine people can inhale fragments of nebulous joy and despair from them. I will keep the latter, I suppose. And practice the cerebral former.

...
One of my resolutions is to write something beautiful soon. (And I'm afraid I have just the right material for that something beautiful.)

2008 Ateneo Art Awards: Zone of Influence Forum

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:42:55 GMT

2008 ATENEO ART AWARDS: ZONES OF INFLUENCE FORUM

To celebrate the fifth year of the Ateneo Art Awards, leading artists, curators, art educators, art writers, gallerists and collectors discuss the state of contemporary Philippine art, and new directions for its future.

30 July 2008, 8 am - 630 pm
Escaler Hall and Ateneo Art Gallery
The Loyola Schools, Ateneo de Manila University
Loyola Heights, Quezon City

Free admission

PROGRAM

8:00 – 9:00 AM
Registration

9:00 – 9:15 AM
Opening Remarks: Yael Buencamino, Managing Curator, Ateneo Art Gallery

9:15 – 10:45 AM
Zone 1: Academe
Escaler Hall, The Loyola Schools

Chair
Fr. Rene Javellana, Director, Fine Art Program, Ateneo de Manila University

Speakers
Tina Colayco, Dean, College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines, Diliman
"UP College of Fine Arts: The Next 100 Years"

Assoc. Prof. Jaime de los Santos, Dean, College of Fine Arts and Design, University of Sto. Tomas
"Tradition and Change : New Directions for the UST College of Fine Arts Program"

Architect Juan Gerardo Torres, Dean, School of Design and Arts, De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde
"Tradition and Change in the CSB School of Design and Arts"

Architect Lorelei del Castillo - de Viana, Dean, Institute of Architecture and Fine Arts, Far Eastern University
"Post Education : Careers in the Arts"

Discussion and open forum

10:45 – 11:00 AM
Break

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Zone 2: Curators + Art Writers
Escaler Hall, The Loyola Schools

Chair
Ringo Bunoan, Researcher-Philippines, Asia Art Archive

Speakers
Eileen Legaspi Ramirez, Editor, Pananaw: Journal of Philippine Visual Arts
"Pananaw : A view on the state of art writing in the Philippines"

Ma. Victoria Herrera, Curator, Vargas Museum, University of the Philippines, Diliman
"Site Specific Work : Questions of Space and Place"

Gina Fairley, Regional Editor, Asian Art News and Juror, 2008 Ateneo Art Awards
"Perspectives of Philippine Art Today"

Joselina Cruz, Curator, 2008 Singapore Biennale

Reactor
Alicia Herrera, Editor, Life Section, Businessworld

Discussion and open forum

12:30 – 1:30PM
Lunch

1:30 – 3:00PM
ZONE 3: Galleries and Collectors
EscalerHall, The Loyola Schools

Moderator
Gina Fairley, Regional Contributing Editor, Asian Art News

Round table discussion with:
Cesar Villalon Jr., Director, The Drawing Room
Vita Sarenas, Director, Finale Art Gallery
Isa Lorenzo, Director, silverlens Gallery

Discussion and open forum

3:15 – 3: 30 PM
Break/ transfer to Ateneo Art Gallery

3:30 – 6:00PM
Zone 4 : Artists
Ateneo Art Gallery

Chair
Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, Editor, Pananaw: Journal of Phil. Visual Arts

Speakers
Karen Flores
"Tutok"

Ronaldo Ruiz
"Tupada"

Charlie Co
"Contemporary art in the Visayas"

Manuel Ocampo
"The Difficulty in showing, promoting, and marketing art made in the Philippines"

Yason Banal
"Re-thinking: Conceptual Art"

Kawayan De Guia
"The Baguio contemporary art scene"

Discussion and open forum

For inquiries, contact Sidd Perez via phone +63 2 4266488 or email sperez@ateneo.edu

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:36:45 GMT

All stirs and shakes into a gray blur, when bouts of crazy are unwelcome the most - like that bad crash after a really good narc kick.

Rehab spaces:
1) my lola's sad house in Crame, where its above is hell and its below is Antarctica. i think the walls speak to me, i think they are the pores and veins of my grandmother and she is reviving us always. in its grand ruin (the bathroom roof caved a week ago) can i cry best and rest best and think of the saddest things to write about in pure voice.
2) i sleep and dream in the Sundays till my head throbs from having the eyes closed too much. yesterday i dreamt of my love handing me a kettle as a gesture of encouragement. instead of flowers, i get hot water. for a warm bath? can you make more bubbles out of hot or cold?
3) eeya's happy ideas. we're planning to get two people in hate married by october.
4) his promises. always his promises.

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:56:31 GMT

Right now, because it looks so goooood...

- I believe in terse sentences
- I believe in making run-ons
- I believe in
cutting
up
lines
pretend
it's
poetry
- I believe that everything and everyone I have always found luminous and merciful like the moon will always be luminous and merciful like the moon
- I believe in picture-stealing, picturing-saving, picture-collaging
- I believe that love can work between people who believe that people are beautiful
- I believe in this one last chance of desperate, this one last time for old time's sake throwing yourself in the path of a train Anna Karenina style
- I believe in the heavy of freedom

... because it looks so fucking goooood.

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:40:07 GMT

They make my heart happy.

When I think beautiful I think:

... once my voice isn't this small, I will say nothing but good, very beautiful things.

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:24:33 GMT

things better left unignored.
One thing that keeps me from misbehaving -

imagine waking up to this, waking meaning more real.

hard not to imagine possessiveness towards gizmos
gadgets
goodness
grand
guinea pigs
gold
grace
gardens
gigabytes
gravitational

Owed.

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:03:59 GMT

There is war between laughter that boils in your tummy and utter pity -

I feel like there should be a showbiz statement, the kind that makes it to the headlines regarding a superstar taking it to another level by doing bomba films. But of course I feel sheer pity and the only consolation I can give to Cos is by reminding him that he's finally making it. You never know with this guy who seems to be always at odds with offering levity with a witty. Now joke's over, cats. Be able to rip the magazine pages of Cos, Tatong Torres, Stephanie Lopez, Isa Lorenzo, Wawi Navarroza, Geraldine Javier, Ronald Caringal and Clint Catalan off from the Metro Society June-July 2008 Arts Culture and Charities issue. Shameless plug ends now. Bow.

Wed, 28 May 2008 03:15:27 GMT

Blew 2k on books yesterday -- which is an awesome deal considering I'd be spending twice as much if I bought the same 7 books somewhere else. What a headrush: my tolerance for purchased books is low. Of course a couple of them are gifts. But my mother used to tell me I shower my friends with stuff so I can absolve the guilt from being a BIG SPENDER.

Books, ukay and movies: the trinity of my eventual financial demise. Maya tried holding me back by texting: "It occured to me.. Isn't Sid busy for the next 20 years? Why she buying all them books?" But I should have known that she's the last person who could assist me in self-restraint in matters of literature and art. In the end, we figured: "But then again, you could always just look at them. I do that with books. I am satisfied just looking and knowing I own them." For all these Buddhist talk on detachment, we ~~are big hedonists~~ get pretty materialistic now, don't we?

But another good thing came out of that purchase. I get to see my parents march around the house chanting: "GASTADOR! GASTADOR!" Squee! I love loony parental units!

Mon, 26 May 2008 02:27:27 GMT

MRRRARGGGGH! Meet SORZ (for awesomesorz - is the l33t lingo correct? - and PandaSORZ): aren't these the zaniest pair of shoesies you've ever seen? L the loony manlet plucked them from ripe perfection as his candy, candy pasalubong from HK.

Like everything else, we also clash in clothing taste. He admitted how 'slightly embarrassed' he gets whenever I wear my very shiny gold sneakers to school. That kiddie ID band I made out of multi-colored paper clips he called 'kitsch.' The kick I get from the absurd but happy mismatches of '80's fashion (think Talking Heads, helmet hair, neon nails, airplane shoulder pads) he doesn't understand. That is why I thought it was mighty dear of him to spot this perfect pair! (He was looking for the shiniest, coloredest footie-pie.) As a thank you, I told him: "You can't say you're embarrassed to be seen with me wearing these shoes, babe. Remember you bought them for me!"

Heh. I quote Don S. --when he saw my silkish garter-edged flower-overloaded jacket-- now: "Happiness siya!"

Luigi the loony manlet is teh AWESOMESORZ. <333

Sat, 24 May 2008 02:51:34 GMT

When DEAD POP STARS began their set, me = headrush + rush of goosepimples. I lost my bearings and common sense, almost driven to hysterics preceding a magnificent blackout. While the other dazzling ladies picked up the bubbles of the scintillating bar, I was PARALYSED. It was one of the DIVINE nights of my life - Thursday night: Morrissey Night. The new people I met and lost their names -- who gave a fuck who we were, where we came from? -- we were the bestest of friends brought together by the upbeat tragedies of The Smiths. And Peachy! The strange ex-neighbour who I decided was my music soulmate long before we were introduced finally last night-- we danced a million ecstasies! And Hel! Just like sweet old times -- we haven't had this much fun together in more than a year! How purejoy Thursday night was- almost full of puke but happy drunken stupor. ((Oh dear, dear. Now I cannot imagine a PULP night. I will die!)) "I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour..."

ps I couldn't stop thinking of Reg, Jethro and Crist and how much of a BOMB they would have as well if they had made it on Thursday.