amphoterism

Today has been declared as Youth Act Now's National Day of Action. Several groups have scheduled a mass boycott of classes as critique of the corrupt Arroyo regime that has allowed TOFI, extrajudicial killings, massive corruption, etc. Noble idea, if you ask me. But for those who don't hold with such forms of protest, a question: what will YOU be doing today?

I've been rather smitten with this blog as of late: Kevin Kelly's The Technium. The title refers to the author's neologism for "the greater sphere of technology - one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types; anything that springs from the human mind." Here's a snippet from the most recent post, "Where The Linear Crosses the Exponential", also featured on Boingboing.

All extropic systems -- economy, nature and technology -- are governed by self-accelerating feedback cycles. Like compounding interest, or virtuous circles, they are powered by increasing returns. Success breeds success. There is a long tail of incremental build up and then as they keep doubling every cycle, they explode out of invisibility into significance. Extropic systems can also collapse in the same self-accelerating way, one subtraction triggering many other subtractions, so in a vicious cycle the whole system implodes. Our view of the future is warped and blinded by these exponential curves.

But while progress runs on exponential curves, our individual lives proceed in a linear fashion. We live day by day by day. While we might think time flies as we age, it really trickles out steadily. Today will always be more valuable than some day in the future, in large part because we have no guarantee we'll get that extra day. Ditto for civilizations. In linear time, the future is a loss. But because human minds and societies can improve things over time, and compound that improvement in virtuous circles, the future in this dimension is a gain. Therefore long-term thinking entails the confluence of the linear and the exponential. The linear march of our time intersects the cascading rise and fall of numerous self-amplifying exponential forces. Generations, too, proceed in a linear sequence. They advance steadily one after another while pushed by the compounding cycles of exponential change.

Balancing that point where the linear crosses the exponential is what long-term thinking should be about. For each generation and for each issue that equation of intersection will be different. Sometimes the immediate needs of the now will dominate, and the discount rate will favor the present. For example, the chronic use of childhood vaccines and antibiotics may prove to have long-term downsides, but their value to present generations is so great that we agree to send the cost to the future. Descending generations will have to pay the price -- or to solve the problem by inventing better medicines using exponentially better knowledge and resources. Other times future generations will be so enhanced by the later exponential growth begun in a small immediate gain that we raise the discount rate. For example the yield in educating girls in any society is so great, so amplified and compounded in so many ways, over so many generations, that it is worth an awful lot to pay its costs now -- even stiff costs in the face of cultural resistance and low immediate yields. Here the cost point is shifted to the present.

A timeline of where we expect these cost/benefit/risk-thresholds to fall in each sector of our civilization, or a field map of places we can see where our linear lives cross exponential change -- either would be very handy to have.

Ngaps, met Dr. Clarita Carlos of Polsci by accident today. Who wants to sit-in on a masteral course on geopolitics this coming Saturday?

Please attend the forum on RIZAL AND THE TRUTH on June 19, Thursday, with Jun Lozada, Fr. Bert Alejo and Nicanor Perlas. This follows the 5pm free screening of Ditsi Carolino's beautiful documentary Bunso.

Bahagi po ito ng PEPE GOES TO MARKET Arts Festival sa Market!Market! from July 19 to 21.

The schedule of the festival can be found here. For more information, do visit www.pagasa.net.ph. See you there!

Dear Friend,

This coming June 19, 2008 marks the 147th birthday of National Hero Jose Rizal. The significance of commemorating Rizal’s birthday is made more urgent in the light of the socio-political-economic challenges that our country is currently facing. Even in his own time, Rizal determinedly stood for the same issues. And using his creativity and artistic capabilities, he defended and committed to TRUTH as the main foundation of nation building.

A group of artists and cultural workers led by the Artists Welfare Project Inc. (AWPI), People’s Assembly For Genuine Alternatives Against Social Apathy (PAGASA), the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), National Commission for Culture & the Arts (NCCA) and the Station Square East Commercial Corporation, all converged to plan and implement a unique and meaningful celebration of our hero’s birth anniversary aptly billed as PEPE GOES TO MARKET: Sining Selebrasyon ng Birthday ni Rizal which will be held at the Market, Market! Mall from June 19-21, 2008. The celebration will be a three (3) day Arts Festival where artists from all disciplines converge for choral performances, band concerts, film screenings, art exhibitions, theater productions and an artists market which will all be opened FREE to the public. There will also be the First Philippine Vision Café for the youth, where students from everywhere can gather, share and exchange their visions of the future of our beloved Philippines. The festival will surely be an educational and highly interactive event for the whole family and the general public.


On a personal level, I'd like to invite everybody to the Philippine Vision Cafe, something we've been feverishly working on for the past few. It's scheduled for two one-hour sessions on June 20 and 21, from 4:30 to 5:30 pm. We're in the process of inviting students from various high schools and universities across the metro, so you can think of it as a massive kapihan at chikahan-slash-speed dating exercise. :)




The Philippine Vision Cafe is a forum where the youth can come together and freely articulate among themselves a vision for the Philippines. Its process of emergent dialogue is based on the premise that people, if given a chance to radically participate, have the wisdom and creativity within themselves to face the most difficult challenges. Driven by questions that matter, participants engage in animated discussion in small groups. In this relaxed, non-hierarchical setting, every opinion is important.

As a challenge to the supposed apathy pervading Filipino youth culture, the Philippine Vision Cafe will allow the youth themselves to speak out on issues they truly care about. Rizal once famously said that the youth is the future of the nation. With this in mind, we frame the future not as a faraway abstraction but as a concrete reality where each citizen has a role to play.

This is to be the first of many Vision Cafes, a step towards a national process of visioning. By starting it with the youth, we hope to plant the seeds of deep-seated cultural change for the Philippines.


The schedule of the festival can be found here. For more information, do visit www.pagasa.net.ph.

I hope you guys can come. If you feel that this is something worthwhile, pass it on. See you there! :)

Who says the truth can't be fun? A PETA-produced music video for truth and transparency. Medyo nakaka-LSS. (May equivalent ba sa dance steps?)

Performed by May Bayot and Jay Yap, direction and choreography by Jose Jay Cruz.
Cuteness from Carlon Matobato, Meann Espinosa, Anj Heruela, Aaron Ching and Nex Agustin.


Please do pass it on if you like it. :)

Most days I wake up with a feeling of foreboding, as if something big's just about to happen. My skin tightens the way it does when dry electricity dances around presaging a storm, but stronger. It won't be negative, per se, whatever it is. Just big and bloody. Then the feeling fades as we breakfast on rice cut with sweet potato, as per Lola's orders. Apparently that was how they did it in oldskool wartime Iloilo. Try it sometime, it isn't as unpalatable as one would think.

Life been relatively quiet as of late but the blogspace silence has more to do with the fact that too many things are happening (in terms of absorption) for this aging mind to catch up with. Aging. Yes. 21 isn't ancient by any means but battalions of dead braincells have been making their non-presence felt. Words and concepts escape me with uncomfortable regularity. Still, there are advantages. Teenage hormonal hysteria has abated for the most part, leaving behind something calmer but infinitely more terrifying, in the long run.

Next semester will be my last as an undergraduate. There's no question that I'll be back in Diliman one way or another but to use that tired image, 'tis a crossroad. Erk. Apart from the fact that fresh-grad penury is just around the corner (although current events have ensured that each and every Filipino is well acquainted with the concept), there's the terror of actually having to choose. But so far I've been lucky enough that the universe plants seeds long before the need for harvest. (Ano daw?) Anyway, will be taking part in the PAGASA Facilitators' Workshop this weekend. Anj will also be along for the ride. I don't exactly know how things will turn out but we're hoping to bring that sort of energy to UP, in a form that will be accessible to students like us. Frankly, I've had enough of all these lines drawn between left and non-left on campus. Bottom line, we all need something to work for, and we all need to see that we aren't alone in hoping for something better.

Back to trying to finish my reading list before school starts. Recent recommendations (for reading or otherwise):

1. Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield's ongoing webcomic Freakangels. Ellis is definitely my main man right now. After reading Desolation Jones, Global Frequency and Transmetropolitan this summer, I would be hard pressed not to drop to my knees should I ever get to meet him. Take that in any sense possible.
2. Afterworld. The first ten episodes are up on YouTube but they say that it's just been launched on AXN. Possibly a new reason to watch TV again.
3. Pugad Baboy. Oo, ngayon lang ako nakabasa nito. Wa akong ma-say.
4. At higit sa lahat, Goya Dark Mint. Retail price, P27 sa grocery vs. P34 sa Mini Stop. Either way, third-world Andes na panalong-panalo. But is it true that Hershey's has acquired Goya?




Back to work. I think.

Current mental exercise: trying to limit foreign multinational purchases to a maximum of one per day. Basic food products are hard enough (hello, ubiquity of cheap China veggies and Del Monte) but when you need stuff like techproducts medyo humihirap. Books don't count, of course.

I don't really have the need or the purchasing power at the moment but if I ever get one of those teensy 7-incher subnotebooks, it's good to know na merong Philippine-made UMPC that even seems to be better than most on the market. Slobber, slobber.


On a slightly tangential note:


Forum: Realizing NEW POLITICS
with Gov. Ed Panlilio (Pampanga), Gov. Grace Padaca (Isabela), & Nicanor Perlas
May 16, 2008. 6 to 10 PM
PETA Theater Center. No. 5 Eymard Drive, Brgy. Kristong Hari, New Manila, Quezon City 1121



Do stop by if you've the time. I'm actually interested in hearing how these guys manage to do what they do and still stay alive.

* Simplicity is linked with the correct, the logical, the self-evident.
* Simplicity should not be complicated; nor should the complicated be simplified. Albert Einstein once said, "One should make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler."
* Only simplicity has the chance of becoming timeless and generally valid.
* No one person has copyright on simplicity; it originates, suddenly exists -- and nobody knows from where; it is both target and result.
* Simplicity is less a question of technical detail, but rather a problem of the basic mental attitude to things technical.
* Simplicity, too, can be high-tech, indeed it has to be, if design is to be acceptable in terms of energy and material. And yet, simplicity is modest, manifest, easy to use, to adapt and to dispose of.
* Simplicity is not primitive, ordinary or rustic, on the contrary, simplicity is a product of collective reflection and development. Accordingly, simplicity is something that has matured, the ripe fruit of a frequently long process.
* Vulgarity is the enemy of simplicity -- in everyday life, in art and in language.
* Simplicity has to come into being; it can be found, but it cannot be forced.


- Andreas Borchert, from here.

Swiped from Soleil.

--


Ars Poetika
Allan Popa


Sa isang teorya sa pisika
walang anumang dalawang bagay
na maaaring ganap na magtagpo.
Mapipilit silang paglapitin
ngunit di kailanman mapagdidikit.

Laging may espasyong
papagitan sa kanila, gaano man
kakitid. Tulad ng mga paa
ng anghel na hindi sumasayad
sa lupa. Kaya tayo dumadama:
tinutulay ang pagkakahiwalay
upang humanap ng karamay
sa ating walang-hanggang pag-iisa.

sumasalat tayo ng kahulugan:
hibla-hibla ng kawalan na sinusulid.
hinahabi natin ang nadarama.
Ang mga katahimikan at patlang
sa pagitan ng bagay-bagay.

Brooding about sensuous objects
makes attachment to them grow;
from attachment desire arises;
from desire anger is born.

From anger comes confusion;
from confusion memory lapses;
from broken memory understanding is lost;
from loss of understanding, one is ruined.


- the Bhagavad-Gita (II:62-63)

from Jessica Zafra's blog: a Spanish advert for the Madrid Metro, set in Madrid, Surigao del Sur.



I'm not even disturbed about the colonialist overtones, the mild essentialism. The pagka-Pinoy is accurate, anyway. What I am disturbed by is that the chances of this scenario happening in real life--a proper transportation system being set up in the peripheries--are next to nil.

I'm not even religious, but here's praying for something to happen in our lifetimes, in our grandchildren's lifetimes. If the advert is to be believed--and I think it may well be--it has to come from our own hands.

"At one time, practice was considered an application of theory, a consequence; at other times, it had an opposite sense and it was thought to inspire theory, to be indispensable for the creation of future theoretical forms. In any event, their relationship was understood in terms of a process of totalisation. For us, however, the question is seen in a different light. The relationships between theory and practice are far more partial and fragmentary. on one side, a theory is always local and related to a limited field, and it is applied in another sphere, more or less distant from it. The relationship which holds in the application of a theory is never one of resemblance. Moreover, from the moment a theory moves into its proper domain, it begins to encounter obstacles, walls, and blockages which require its relay by another type of discourse (it is through this other discourse that it eventually passes to a different domain). Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall. [...] A theorising intellectual, for us, is no longer a subject, a representing or representative consciousness. Those who act and struggle are no longer represented, either by a group or a union that appropriates the right to stand as their conscience. Who speaks and acts? It is always a multiplicity, even within the person who speaks and acts."

- From Intellectuals & Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze

I would be doing papers right now if not for the return of an old Romance:




Oh yeah, baby.

Went to Quiapo with Dani today to test out the Viv and have two moldy lenses cleaned. (Twice my age, inherited from Boldy Tapales. Buti na lang salvageable pa.) So right after paying, Manong Dong pulls out this squeaky-clean OM-1 body with a telephoto and a zoom: five thousand (!) lang daw for everything. Babalikan ko siya sa Wednesday along with my 100 and the macro. Not exactly solvent these days but I WANTS THEM PRECIOUSES. So if any horndogs are reading now, will fuck for Zuiko lenses. Kahit handjob, pwede na siguro. Meowr.

I haven't taken non-digital pictures for almost three years and it was shocking to see how much they charge for film these days. More or less, three hundred bucks for Tri-X or Elitechrome. Processing pa. But while digital is unquestionably far more practical, the unpredictability of manual photography brings back a certain humanity that's lost with the instant gratification of point-and-shoot. It's not Art, as most Photog profs or wannabe Lomographers claim. It's something else altogether (but hell if I know what it is.) So I'm testing out the Viv on cheapo Fuji and Elitechrome for the OM-1 (kahit Sunny-16 lang metro ko ngayon, couldn't resist). Pag naubos na 'to at dumating na yung inorder namin na murang 120, yung Holga naman. (Time to see what all the artsyfartsy folk have been raving about.)

So habang wala pang nadedevelop, here's a digi of Dani's pinkie against Berlin the Mini Dasch's tiny hairy nutsack:




Caveat: but a photograph is useless if the subject is not worth loving.
Time to wander the city again.

Possibly the most disturbing thing I have ever seen on YouTube: George Takei (also known as Sulu) at the Comedy Central William Shatner Roast. Now I want a gay grandfather. The darling absolutely cremated everybody on the dais, with charm and dignity unpareil despite the fellatio jokes every other sentence. ("If I could get my partner to suck that hard, I'd never leave my chateau!") Filipino "comediennes" in gay bars everywhere: THIS is how you do comedy.



Lisa Lampinelli's my new favorite roaster given her performances on this, Flava Flav's and Pam Anderson's respective bash-bashes. Ironically though, the best humor comes from the oldtimers: Golden Girl Betty White, and this, an oldskool Muhammad Ali roast.



Roasts are great. They take a person's measure, if you can take as much as you dish out. Would people like, say, Gretchen Barreto or Manny Pacquiao or Kuh Ledesma bear 45 minutes of pure insult with as much good humor and equanimity? I don't think so.

How to play the Theory.org.uk Trading Card Game:


1. Divide cards between players.

2. Decide who will go first.

3. The player whose turn it is, studies the card on top of their pile and selects either 'Strengths', 'Weaknesses / Risks' or 'Special Skills'.

4. All players then look at their own top card, and discuss who has got the best characteristic in this category.

For example:

--- The Giddens risk, "Misguided postmodernists may attack", is preferable to the Butler weakness, "Increasingly impenetrable writing style". (It doesn't matter if some postmodernists misunderstand your argument and slag you off. But if no-one can understand your argument in the first place, that's bad). So here, when comparing 'Weaknesses / Risks' , the player with the Giddens card wins (unless someone else's card beats theirs).

--- The Foucault strength, "Model of power innovative and realistic" is better than the Psychologists strength, "Resistance to postmodern self-doubt". (Self-belief isn't much of a contribution to the world, but good ideas are). So here, when comparing 'Strengths' , the player with the Foucault card wins (unless someone else's card beats theirs).

5. The winning player takes one card -- the card which just lost that battle -- from each other player.

6. If several players are involved, the discussions about who has the superior characteristic on their card will inevitably be more complex. In case of dispute, a majority vote decides the outcome. If this still does not decide it, then for God's sake, go and watch TV instead or something.

7. The player with all (or most) of the cards at the end, wins.

Wehehe. Parang masarap laruin 'to sa Sarah's. Anybody interested? :)

"It is a mistake to associate Photography, by reason of its technical origins, with the notion of a dark passage (camera obscura). It is camera lucida that we should say (such was the name of that apparatus, anterior to Photography, which permitted drawing an object through a prism, one eye on the model, the other on the paper); for, from the eye's viewpoint, "the essence of the image is to be altogether outside, without intimacy, and yet more inaccessible and mysterious than the thought of the innermost being; without signification, yet summoning up the depth of any possible meaning; unrevealed yet manifest, having that absence-as-presence which constitutes the lure and the fascination of the Sirens" (Blanchot.) [106]

...The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence--as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence. The image, says phenomenology, is an object-as-nothing. Now, in the Photograph, what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it is also, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it. Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except by intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. [115]

I then realized that there was a sort of link (or knot) between Photography, madness, and something whose name I did not know. I began by calling it: the pangs of love. [116]"


- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

--
The desire to pick up a camera and shoot again feels more immediate than present belly-rumblings or the malaise that still clings to these bones even after a week. It's not a desire to make art-pare-art. How to say this without sounding more pretentious than usual? Push a button, ensnare something Real with the intangible. Or is the intangible more real than everything around me, now? Not quite soul-stealing since I like dead subjects more, but there it is.

Inherited a beautiful Olympus twice my age but its light meter is more-or-less permanently dead. Eyeing this cheapo baby, though. Hmmm.


Countdown 'til the 18th. Need to get out of here.

I *so* miss leisurely reading. Dune!

I've been reading (well, stalking) the blogs of various thesising people and I feel a tiny twinge of guilt for deciding to slack and INC while the would-be graduates work their lovely little arses off for the final stretch. A little jealousy too, but it goes away when I get to read and scrape more theoretical coherence (the thought of synthesizing that much is still frightening, what hubris! A few more weeks and will start writing again, promise.) A case in point: last week Dr. Schriever lent both volumes of Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism & Schizophrenia, separately known as Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Milles Plateaux (1980) and is my mind seriously blown. I've previously read the pertinent bits on rhizome, thanks to a certain Prof. Queano, but 'tis the first time to read D&G in their entirety. (Dolce et Gabbana? Pwede. They *are* absolutely sexy, despite the fact that one of them--I forget whom--was supposed to have grown his nails awfully long because of hypersensitive fingertips, couldn't touch anything. Ew. But their words endure.)

Barthes and Foucault remain my favorites but with D&G there's a feeling of intellectual kismet, when you read something and everything you've loved and thought and held sacred for so long, but incoherently, turns out to have been codified almost 40 years ago? Pag-ibig 'to, mga tsong.

An excerpt from Foucault's preface to Anti-Oedipe, which has become famous in its own right:

"The art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:

• Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
  
• Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
  
• Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
  
• Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.
  
• Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
  
• Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generation of de-individualization.
  
• Do not be enamoured of power." (xiii-xiv)
  

Siyempre interpretation na 'to ni Papa Michel, given that D&G always saw desire, ever-creative, as All, as opposed to Foucault's machinations of power. Anyway, kaibig-ibig pa rin. Konti pang himay sa ngayon ng A Thousand Plateaus, bukod pa sa kayrami-rami pang kailangang basahin. I think it partly explains why I love playing Ludacris while doing academic work, the dirtier the better. Mmm. Libidinal economy indeed. :)

I've never been the flowers-and-romance kind of gal--the last poor sod who gave a bouquet vowed to never do so again after seeing my horror--but I must say that Diablo Dates are ze best, bar none. Now I understand why my cousin left her husband to shack up with a dude she met on Kahn Online. When you've got a Necromancer beside your Barbarian every step of the way, showering you with amulets and rare items and enough gold to resurrect your pokpok from Kashya, you can't help but fall, even when he makes your corpse explode into bits of Demon-killing shrapnel. May libreng neck-crick massage pa. Haaay. Five hours for LoD Act One, not bad at all. Post-game dinner, movie and cuddle makes Bleargh an even happier girl. On to Baal!

--

Tangent: Game Criticism: Why We Need It And Why Reviews Aren't It. (via Boingboing!)

Mom got this J.Lo shirt yesterday for her birthday. The dude looks a little constipated if you ask me.




Now somebody should do an Abalos/Ninoy mashup: THE BUR-JER IS WORTH DYING FOR. Sinong may silkscreen diyan?