last week in pictures
(dahil tamad na ako magkwento)

the week was going quite well...

unicef process documentation = raket moolah

presented my 3 case studies at the misereor regional workshop. finally!

tondo scan: with paco, covered 20% of it (by foot!) for the ipc manila heritage project in just one day. plus we still had time for...

window shopping for antiques

durian birthday fest (haberday paco!)

garage sale shopping: book (P10), Asin CD (30), italian leather bag (35) = P75. yehey!

cynthia alexander was supposed to be the beginning of my quiet and peaceful weekend. i slept like a log after the gig. but then majen woke me up for this:

i guess it wouldn't be a quiet and peaceful weekend afterall (more ondoy pics here).

--> who's afraid to get a little dirty? i know i'm not. then let's. <--

another one for my rustic imaginings

photo by http://www.saipua.blogspot.com/

it's official. the second biggest letdown of my year just came in via email. give me more of this and i'll start getting used to it. good things and bad things come in threes. i have a strong strong feeling that major letdown #3 is gonna make itself known in december. please, god, enough of 2009 already! if i could just sleep through this last quarter i would.

just a thought

it just occured to me that because of my interest in so many things (which i sometimes abhor as it somehow points towards my lack of focus on anything), i have gotten to know so many young ,talented, competent and passionate people in fields such as the social sciences, literature, film, visual arts, architecture, photography, the law, the hard sciences and journalism who work for far more larger causes than themselves. their enthusiasm take you. beneath the usual inconsequential banter and pretending to be pretentious are intense shining eyes full of promise. and they affect you until your own eyes gloss over. it's intense. it's inebriating.

these are the emerging creme de la creme of this country. these are the people who can make things happen. it is very interesting, therefore, to wonder how they will end up in the future, how they will inevitably cross paths, how they will collaborate or perhaps fight each other to the bitter end because of differing opinions. will all of these bright minds eventually do something significant to change how we collectively perceive and do things or will their resolve be clouded by personal greed and ambition? will some be paralyzed by their mind's demons? or will they learn to channel their restless energies and control these for productivity's sake.

maybe some will just get robbed and mercilessly shot to death.

eros and the everyday

John Koethe
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause

Elizabeth Bishop

A field of unreflecting things
Time is passing by: inert,
Anonymous beyond recall, the deflected
Objects of a self-regarding gaze
Untouched by the anxieties of proximity or love.
I tried to find those passions in the sky,
In moments when the heart surveys itself
As if from above, and wonders at the
Sight of something so particular and small.
A day brings language and a hint of what it means,
Of some presence waiting in the wings
Beyond the stage, beyond the words that
Gathered in the night and stayed
And through whose grace I find, if not quite
What I wanted, then everything else:
The contentment of each morning's
Exercise in freedom, freedom like a wall
Enclosing my heart; the disjunctive thoughts
Gesturing at some half-imagined whole;
A continuity that on the surface feels like love.

What is this thing that feels at once so nebulous
And so complete, living from day to day
Unmindful of itself, oblivious of the future
And the past, hovering like a judgment
Above the future, the present, and the past,
Floating in the distance like the eyes of love?
Call it "experience"-- that term of art
For time in an inhuman world
Indifferent to desire, the history
Of one who one day wandered off from home
Along a road that led from here to here:
These sidewalks and these houses, city streets
Through fields and quiet streams, uncharted
Trails descending to a farmhouse in a glen and
Nothing in my heart or in the sky above my heart.
And then from somewhere in that wilderness inside
I hear the murmur of a low, transforming tone
That fills the field of sight with feeling,
And that makes of blind experience a kind of love.

Let me stay there for a while, while evening
Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills.
There's something in the air, something I can't quite see,
Hiding behind this stock of images, this language
Culled from all the poems I've ever loved.
I don't believe a word they say, a word I say,
But it isn't really a matter of belief:
As ordinary things make up the world,
So life is purchased with the common coin of feeling,
Feelings deferred, that flower for a day
And then retreat into the language. And later,
When the hours they'd filled are summoned by name,
It's as if they'd never been, as if that tangible
Release could never come to me again.
I came here for the view, and what is there to see?
The place is still a place in progress
And the days have the feeling of friction, of pages
Blank with anticipation, biding their time,
And ever approaching the chapter in the story
Where it ends, and my heart is waiting.

*repost from abo-sa-dila
*photo, my own.

I'm rediscovering Filipino folk songs and OPM ballads. I am surprised to find out that I work faster while listening to kundiman instrumentals. Right now, I'd take anything. I even got my mom to look for my old Joey Albert minus one cassette back home. Hihihi. I'm sure she still has her Basil Valdez tapes. She's a rabid fanatic.

This one's simply beautiful. Anyone who knows where I can get Susan Fernandez-Magno's records send me a message. Can't find them anywhere!

Mental Exercises of the Sleepless Kind: Photography and Change

27 August 2009
FSC Forest Complex
Subic, Zambales
2:15 a.m.

Since the dawn of civilization, storytelling has been used by man as a means to entertain, educate, instill moral values and record history in aid of cultural preservation. Stories were shared through song and dance, rudimentary drawings scratched into cave walls and even temporary media like sand, leaves and the trunks of living trees. Through technology, man learned to develop more permanent and portable forms of communicating stories by drawing or writing in cloth, textiles, glass, metal and paper. Innovations like the printing press and film photograph paved the way for communicating en masse. Information reached more people in shorter time.

In the advent of the digital age, the speed and ease by which knowledge is transmitted has grown tremendously. Now, stories have the ability to trespass all familial, geographic and cultural boundaries. A plague in an obscure and remote town in Central America, for example once reported by international news agencies, can send a group of Japanese scientists in a flurry to seek a cure for the disease. An amateur video coverage of an endangered species in Antartica being slaughtered by poachers uploaded through the internet may cause a worldwide outrage among concerned groups who would call for stricter policies and sanctions regarding the issue. On a more personal level, a feature story of a young man without any limbs but who manages to be mobile and teach high school in an effective manner can inspire thousands of people with even less debilitating disabilities to lead more proactive lives and be of use to their communities. Stories, when presented truthfully and effectively, especially on a large scale, do facilitate inner and outer change.

I am foremost a social development worker and social researcher by profession. My work with various local non-government organizations (NGOs) brings me to the field where large contentious issues play themselves out in a concrete level. So far my work has been fulfilling. This is the drill: International funder promises aid to a developing country through various NGOs. These local groups create social programs and projects proposals for the funder’s approval. The money is released and the NGOs implement the programs. Throughout this stage, NGO workers, me included, are exposed to the socio-economic, cultural and political challenges that the people in the communities face in the micro level. We are able to pit their stories against the wider landscape of governance and socio-economic, cultural and political trends and see possible points of intervention--whether to troubleshoot existing projects or policies or to create needed ones. We write volumes of reports that the funders need to determine whether to fund another series of projects or not. The cycle continues.

Notice that the glut information has a very limited audience. At best, reports are furnished to government agencies in order to help them do their jobs well. However, these information usually replete with gut-wrenching stories and proposed solutions are only read by the usual people—the NGOs and the funders themselves. It’s like preaching to the converted.

There has been little move to disseminate newfound learning in the field to the common people. This is unfortunate. Time and again, social development has emphasized the need for change to begin from the grassroots. But how can this when people themselves do not have a grasp their issues as part of a wider context? How can this be when they do not know that their issues are similar issues that affect other groups of people even from different locales as well? It is common knowledge that people are debilitated when they feel alone but are empowered when they band together because of shared problems, operative word: shared.

That information is taken from the common people but do not go back to them prevents an active and dynamic participation which can only be borne out of awareness. When the stakes are conveyed to them in a comprehensive and coherent manner, people don’t just wait for solutions to community problems. They are forced to come up with these instead. Only from a well-informed community can participatory and therefore more sustainable development be spurred. To illustrate, a mother who realizes that the stagnant water in her backyard is the kind that caused hundreds of deaths in a town far from her residence due to dengue fever, will clean up her yard and not wait any government program to address the potential problem. Perhaps, especially if she holds some power in her neighborhood, she will also engage others to a collective action that will ensure that no household in their area will tolerate the existence of stagnant water there.

In all this discussion, where does photography, particularly documentary photography factor in?

Knowledge and inspiration are ingredients for change. I doubt that the mother in the above example would have read the World Health Organization’s annual report. She may have read the story from a newspaper or heard it on the radio. The challenge to sow knowledge and inspiration, I believe, is to convert an amalgam of useful information into a popular medium that has the capacity for clear, coherent and concise storytelling. Documentary photography, aside from newspaper articles and radio sound bytes, is one powerful tool.

In various experiments conducted by scientists, it had been discovered that people learn more quickly and retain knowledge by the use of images. A simply truthful yet aesthetically arresting photo can provide knowledge and inspiration to more number of people than inches-thick of academic reading or radio talk show. A photo can move you, figuratively and literally. It is for this reason that I have been dabbling in various sorts of photography for a couple of years now. For me like writing, photography is a means to communicate knowledge and inspiration. But unlike writing, a photo is universal in that even an unschooled person can instantly recognize truths within just four angles. With photos, there is no language barrier. And in a world where problems can be shared by various groups of people from different lands at digital pace, it is imperative to communicate through universally recognizable means—the photograph—at least initially, in order to facilitate the rapid and collective seeking out of solutions.

Photography is not just showing everybody how beautiful the world is, although it is also that. Photography, when used to tell stories, can make more known to the wider public the problems, victories, best practices, workable solutions and possible points of cooperation as viewed by different stakeholders in society. It is also a means to impart knowledge and inspire. It is an effective tool for change.

my secret happy place

PCP Photojournalism Workshop

Aug 30, 2009

most ennobling birthday ever

***

Plus! Doug Savage made me my 3rd birthday cartoon in a row. I love it!

i am actually considering checking in a clean cheap hotel room just to be able to write and meet my deadlines. seriously. i wish i were just holed up right now in a little log cabin some 2,000 meters above sea level somewhere.

dance craze



found this cute video today. hahaha. this looks like lani, lai and me spending a full hour in front of my laptop sweating it out with the wondergirl's "nobody" a few weeks ago. well... lani and lai gave up after 30 minutes but i was still at it while they were smoking 'em fags at our back yard. the blue robot would be me because i'm the shortest. and we were positioned exactly the same way. it's suuuuuper fun! you should try it. but i'm warning you, the steps are not easy as they look. so i am actually amazed that this girl and these young thai boys did a wonderful job at it. here's a tutorial. c'mon. i know you wanna. =P

happy thoughts. happy post.

WTF! what. the. fuck.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” - Lolo Nelson Mandela

Everytime the topic of 90's flicks comes up, I always ask if anyone had seen 'kicking and screaming.' I remember liking it when i watched it sometime between '95 - '97. But nobody knew of the movie. I couldn't even find it in the internet because all I could remember was the title, and this main character named Grover. Will Ferrell's comedy of the same title was far more popular and search attempts garnered only this result. After more that ten years of failing to convince people that the movie does exists, I resigned myself to the fact that I prolly really just conjured it in my mind.

That was before a few weeks ago. Finally, someone uploaded a clip on youtube. Yay! Watching the clips again made me realize how that movie had been an influence both in my wanting to go to Prague and my toting a notepad anywhere I went. Oh, and it also added to the many literature I read about underachieving--the trying not to try too hard. I like Eric Stoltz' character--the perennial student, the Peter Pan of this generation, someone who adamantly refuses to grow up. See this is why writers, artists and filmmakers should be more careful about their craft. They don't know how much their works can mess people up. Why, I'd been in post-college ennui a decade ago, way before I even entered college! How messed up is that? Hahaha.

Watch the trailer (which doesn't give justice to the movie) here, some uppity intellectual but nonetheless funny excrement here. And one of the simplest and most important scenes I posted below:

the most romantic line i've read in quite a while

"Putangina, naisip ko, karapat-dapat mahalin habambuhay ang babaeng nagsabi nito. Kakaiba siya sa lahat. Binigyang katwiran niya ang pagiging kakaiba ko rin." -- Norman Wilwayco