Wednesday, January 29, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 224.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
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Monday, January 27, 2025
7:48 PM |
Gloria Romero [1933-2025]
She was probably the one movie legend familiar to most Filipinos, given that her career spanned decades, and she never left the industry, and her face was always up there on our silver screens, beguiling us with her presence. She was probably the first movie star I knew to be a movie star, from my introduction to her through grainy black and white movies shown on the regular on RPN 9 in the 1980s, to her elderly patrician figure in contemporary movies in the years since then. I genuinely wish I was more familiar with her filmography, but most of her earlier films are gone. Labels: film, obituary, people
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Sunday, January 26, 2025
9:00 AM |
After Blue Monday
Last Monday, January 20, was a day thick with contradictions—a day where reality seemed to embody the peculiarities of a David Lynch film: baffling, surreal, outlandish. Coincidentally, it was the birthday of Lynch himself, who had passed away just days before turning 79. The surreal twist? It was also Martin Luther King Day, a moment ostensibly dedicated to hope and justice, while across the globe, the shadows of despair seemed to loom large. That same day marked the inauguration of a felon as President of what was once the most powerful country in the world—a nation, I believe, is now teetering on the edge of its ideals. Add to this the declaration of National Mental Health Week and the infamy of Blue Monday, the day New Year’s resolutions typically meet their doom. Together, it made for an ensemble of events that felt both absurd—and painfully resonant.
Truth to tell, I haven’t actively read the news since November. At first, it was a conscious decision to preserve my sanity, but over time, it morphed into something darker: a slow embrace of nihilism. It’s hard to keep believing in the sanctity of things—of hope, of progress, of love—when every headline feels like another nail in the coffin of optimism. And yet, here we are, navigating the chaos, still managing our lives and expectations, and still trying to find happiness amidst it all.
(Or, are we?)
I know that life often feels like a tightrope act. We tread carefully, hoping not to fall, but the weight of societal expectations, our personal struggles, and global despair can make even the sturdiest among us waver. From a young age, we are taught to envision happiness as a goal—a destination we’ll reach once we’ve checked off all the boxes: a good job, a stable relationship, financial security. But what happens when those boxes remain unchecked or, worse, when they are checked, but happiness still feels elusive?
Lately, I’ve come to realize that managing life and expectations requires a kind of recalibration. Instead of chasing an ideal, perhaps it’s more about learning to live with the imperfections.
There’s a quiet beauty, to be honest, in accepting that not every day will be good, but there can still be good in every day. This isn’t about toxic positivity—the kind that insists on finding a silver lining in every storm. It’s an ability to acknowledge the storm, to feel its weight—and still find a way to move forward.
Today, I was invited by the staff of the Silimanian Magazine to talk about my mental health struggles in an interview, hoping to feature this story in an upcoming issue of the magazine. I did so because mental health has become a kind of advocacy for me of late—and I know I have a considerable platform where people listen, where I can actually help them find articulation for what they’re going through, because I’m going through the same things myself. When that story comes out, I think in March, I hope Sillimanian Magazine will do justice to my mental health story—and I hope it will find resonance in people who need help, as well as with people who need to understand that mental health struggles do in fact exist.
Managing mental health, especially in times like these, is akin to tending a garden in the midst of a drought. The soil is parched, the air heavy, and yet we persist in planting seeds.
For me, this has meant setting boundaries with the deluge of bad news. It’s not about ignorance; it’s about self-preservation. There’s only so much heartbreak a person can take before they begin to crack, and it’s okay to step back, to choose silence over noise, stillness over chaos.
Therapy helps, of course. So does certain tricks to grapple with my ADHD like body doubling , or even journaling—pouring out my thoughts that swirl endlessly in my mind, and giving them form and then letting them go on the pages of either my diary, or on my blog. (Or this column.) Some days, I find solace in books or music or the simple act of brewing a cup of coffee. Other days, it’s harder. The shadows creep in, the mental paralysis takes its nasty form, and all I can do sometimes is hold on, trusting that this, too, shall pass. (Ritalin helps.)
I have come to understand that happiness isn’t always a grand and sweeping thing. It’s not the fireworks on New Year’s Eve or the applause of a crowd. Often, it’s small and quiet, easy to miss if you’re not paying attention. I know it sounds corny, but it can be the warmth of sunlight on your skin, the sound of laughter shared with a friend, the first bite of your favorite meal. (Or, like what I noted last week, an OBT around Dumaguete with your beloved.) These moments are fleeting, but they are also powerful reminders that even in the darkest times, there is still light.
It’s tempting, in the face of so much despair, to surrender to cynicism. To believe that nothing matters, that all efforts are futile. But perhaps there’s a kind of courage in choosing to care anyway. In planting those seeds, even when the odds are stacked against you. In believing, as David Lynch might have, that life’s absurdities hold their own kind of meaning.
Last Monday was a microcosm of the world we live in: a place of contradictions, where joy and sorrow, hope and despair, coexist. It’s easy to get lost in the noise, to feel overwhelmed by the weight of it all. But maybe the answer isn’t to drown it out entirely. Maybe it’s to find your own rhythm within it, to dance to a beat that feels true to you.
Labels: life, mental health
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1:17 AM |
From Hives to Death Row
Part 2 of the 2024 Oscar Shorts Considered
The allure of the documentary short is its journalistic fervor demonstrated in brevity. I’ve always preferred nonfiction as a genre to enjoy—these days, the books I read are mostly nonfiction titles [I am drawn towards subjects involving history and the arts, and sometimes biographies], and the films I gravitate to the most are documentaries. And so, when a nonfiction film does its job in a short running time, I consider that a huge win: I learn of true things with societal import, and I did it without whiling away precious time I do not really have given a busy life.
This is why I keep track of documentary short subject films considered annually by the Academy Awards—especially through the short list it puts out in December of every year, which culls into fifteen titles from a list of possible hundreds. This is helpful because one cannot really track and see all the documentary shorts that get produced every year. Who has the time? Fifteen is manageable. I am aware that there are many superior documentary shorts that may be overlooked every year—which is unfortunate, but that is how the system works, and again, fifteen titles are manageable.
For this year, the Oscars nominated the following documentary shorts: Incident [d. Bill Morrison], I Am Ready, Warden [d. Smriti Mundhra], The Only Girl in the Orchestra [d. Molly O’Brien], Death by Numbers [d. Kim A. Snyder], and Instruments of a Beating Heart [d. Ema Ryan Yamazaki].
I have seen all the shortlisted documentary shorts, except for two. Of all the nominated titles, I have yet to see Death by Numbers, which has earned a reputation of late as being a “white whale.” It is about the aftermath of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, and follows the advocacy of one survivor. The film has been rated highly, with one Letterbxd reviewer commenting: “I appreciate the focus on the micro rather than the macro. This isn't an overview or statement on school shootings, but a look at how one person is impacted immediately and going forward.” This sounds like an endorsement, so I will probably like this film.
Among the unnominated films in the short list, I have yet to see Once Upon a Time in Ukraine by Betsy West, a filmmaker whose past documentaries [often in tandem with Julia Cohen] I have enjoyed immensely, including RBG [a 2019 film about the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg which was nominated for Best Documentary in its year] and Julia [a 2021 about Julia Childs]. Would I have enjoyed Once Upon a Time in Ukraine if I had seen it? Most probably, given the director—although I am naturally wary [or perhaps weary?] of war documentaries.
There are three films which I found quite surprising for missing the nomination, simply because they are so powerfully made, with subjects I would have thought would resonate the most with regular Oscar voters. Then again, they also did not nominate Rashida Jones and Will McCormack’s A Swim Lesson, given that one of its directors is a popular actress and the daughter of Quincy Jones, and that its conceit is closely tailored after My Octopus Teacher, a 2020 documentary short which won its category in its Oscar year—but instead of an octopus, the helpful purveyor of life lessons is a Beverly Hills swimming teacher. [I rather prefer the aquatic animal.]
But Hannah Rafkin’s Keeper is a beautiful, essential, emphatic, and restrained work, about a United Nations staffer in New York who moonlights as an urban beekeeper, and who perseveres in his calling despite a bee allergy and a bout of cancer. [It is also a story of the beekeeper’s daughter, a brilliant young woman who deftly balances college life with beekeeping and taking care of her ailing father.] It always pains me to see that bad things [i.e., cancer] can happen to good people, but otherwise it is a hopeful story about a beautiful family, and what they do—beekeeping in a big city—is awesome. It is, however, not nominated for the Oscars this year. Watch it anyway.
Chasing Roo by Skye Fitzgerald [who has been nominated in this category before, with the powerful Hunger Ward], is also another must-watch. It is a deftly handled piece—about wildlife rescue experts in Australia devoting their lives to saving kangaroos, in tension with professional hunters seeking to harvest them for meat—and the film surprises for its balance between tenderness and visceral carnage, and also surprises for its observant humanity. Its score and sound design are also vital aesthetic choices. It doesn’t shy away from showing us the non-tender parts [those dogs attacking that hog and the various scenes of hunting and killing kangaroos will have animal rights activists up in arms], which could be graphic, but I think they are necessary to prove the film’s point. It is, however, not nominated for the Oscars this year. Watch it anyway.
Nadia Gill and Dominic Gill’s Planetwalker is a poignant portrait of John Francis, who is popularly known with the titular moniker. In 1971, he witnessed an oil tanker collision in the San Francisco Bay, and the sight of dead birds on the shoreline, harmed by the oil spill, caused him to give up motorized transport and began walking everywhere. He took another radical move, and vowed not to speak, convinced that listening rather than talking adding fuel to the fire of any issue. This did not stop him from earning graduate credentials, and even becoming a college professor. He didn’t talk and he didn’t use motorized vehicles, but he taught using the simplest hand signals and walked everywhere, even to various parts of the globe which would invite him to “talk” about his environmental advocacy. It is a stirring portrait of a committed man and a gentle soul. It is, however, not nominated for the Oscars this year. Watch it anyway.
The rest of the unnominated films are powerful in their own right, but are flawed in many ways—but that does not stop some films from achieving greatness. I’m not sure these are great, but they are fascinating portraits. Kimberly Reed’s Seat 31 follows Zooey Zephyr, who was expelled from the House of Representatives in Montana for rebuking its members on a prospective bill banning transgender medical care. She later made a nearby bench her “office.” The film follows her struggles, and her triumphs, but is most powerful when it showcases the hate she confronts from the most ordinary of people—like a tribe of housewives taking over her bench, just to piss her off. The film feels necessary, and while it did resonate, I found its subject matter a little too performative for comfort. But I guess you have to be that to be in politics and wanting change. I understand why it was nominated.
Jenifer McShane’s The Quilters—about a group of inmates who turn to quilt-making as a form of rehabilitation—makes for good double screening with Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing [2024], which is also about art-pursuing inmates, this time revolving around theatre, and has produced an Oscar hopeful in Colman Domingo, who is now nominated for Best Actor for the movie. I like how observant The Quilters was, and how appropriately paced. It feels plain, however, and ultimately does not rise to memorable. I understand why it was not nominated.
Julio Palacio’s Makayla’s Voice: A Letter to the World is about a teenage girl with non-verbal autism, whom the film depicts as someone who “unlocks a joyous world of self-expression as she shares her voice for the first time using a letter board.” That assertion, however—about the effectivity of letter boards as communication medium for those with autism—has proven controversial. And the film did not really move me. I understand why it was not nominated.
Jacqueline Baylon’s Until He’s Back is about a Moroccan father who has learned that his son has died in an attempt to get to Spain as a refugee. He embarks on the difficult task to bring his son’s remains back home—and faces a complicated process of repatriation. The film is important—but to be honest, as soon as I finished watching it, I forgot all about it, which meant it had no resonance. I understand why it was not nominated.
Ömer Sami’s Eternal Father is a strange one. It is about a father and his family—all migrants in Denmark—who have to contend with the fact that the patriarch is intent on defying death, through cryonics. It is interesting when it gets into the family dynamics, but the film lacks any real depth about cryonics itself—Is it a science or a pseudoscience? Is it an inherently capitalist scam that banks on our fear of death and illness? Why is this family giving this man a pass with this hairbrained scheme to live forever? We don’t really get any answers. I understand why it was not nominated.
Of the nominated films, the one that I enjoyed very much without liking its subject at all was Yamazaki’s Instruments of a Beating Heart. It is a simple film about a very young girl in an elementary school in Japan, who is single-minded in her quest to be part of an orchestra who has just been tasked to provide a musical number welcoming new students to the school. Reading through some of the comments about the film, I was astounded by quite a number who voiced such tender concern for the protagonist, Ayame. They cared when she cried. They cared when she bungled her audition to play an instrument. They cared when she was given a bit of a dressing down by her music teacher. And I was like—what is everybody talking about? That girl needed to be taken down a notch, because she is going to grow up like a Japanese versionof Tracy Flick. She is an annoying and assuming kid who does not do well at her tasks, and cries all throughout the film because she doesn’t get what she wants. Then when she gets another chance, and still does badly, she is always late and never practices, and then when gets reprimanded, she cries crocodile tears. As far as I’m concerned that music teacher said what needed to be said. [And the boy Haruka also totally deserved that spot, and I’m with Ide all the way.] I understand why the film is nominated.
I loved Bill Morrison’s Incident—although “loved” might be the wrong word that describes my respect for this short documentary. It is a feat of assemblage, piecing together all sorts of surveillance footage around the incident of a black man shot to death by police. What you see ultimately convinces you about how rigged the system is with regards racial profiling, and the easy escape of denial policemen resort to when they bow to their murderous instincts. I understand why the film is nominated.
I also loved Molly O’Brien’s The Only Girl in the Orchestra, because it is a profile about a talented musician who is playfully wary about being profiled—but is game enough to let the cameras get a peek into her storied life anyway. The thing is, double bassist Orin O’Brien deserves this attention because her life as a member of New York Philarmonic has been truly trailblazing. She was hired by Leonard Bernstein in 1966 as the first female musician in the orchestra, and became the focus of much media interest and fascination because of that. She is now retired, and in her late 80s—but insists no fuss should be made about her, preferring instead to put a spotlight on her family, her students, her friends, and her colleagues. Which makes her doubly worthy of a documentary. I understand why the film is nominated.
Then there is Smriti Mundhra’s I Am Ready, Warden, which follows the last days in a Texas death row for inmate John Henry Ramirez, who robbed a convenience store when he was a young man, and killing its attendant in the process by riddling him with bullets. He soon fled to Mexico, stayed there for many years, but was eventually arrested and sent back to the U.S. to face prosecution, eventually landing him with capital punishment. But the real story is about his “rehabilitation,” and how he would soon seek out forgiveness from the son of the man he killed, and also demonstrably mending his life by becoming a “Christian.” That turn towards the evangelical in the middle was what left me in a lurch, because it left such a bad taste in the mouth—making the entire thing sound like Evangelical Christian propaganda. What a scam. This is probably the worst film in the whole Oscars shortlist for documentary shorts. I don’t understand why the film is nominated.
Here is my ranking of all the documentary short films, including the unnominated titles:
[1] Keeper
[2] Incident
[3] Chasing Roo
[4] The Only Girl in the Orchestra
[5] Planetwalker
[6] Instruments of a Beating Heart
[7] Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr
[8] Makayla’s Voice: A Letter to the World
[9] The Quilters
[10] Eternal Father
[11] Until He’s Back
[12] A Swim Lesson
[13] I Am Ready, Warden
Unseen by me:
[14] Death by Numbers
[15] Once Upon a Time in Ukraine
Labels: documentaries, film, life, short films
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Saturday, January 25, 2025
10:26 PM |
From Courage to Cicatrice
Part 1 of the 2024 Oscar Shorts Considered
Every time Oscar season comes—this usually starts around November and ends around the time the annual Oscar Awards telecast gets held, which is around early March—I would embark on a months-long movie marathon popularly called the Oscars Death Race.
It’s so-called because all participants—usually cinephiles like me who want some structure around our fervent movie-watching—have to catch all the films anticipated to get some Oscar nominations before that particular announcement rolls around mid-January. [A lot of what we watch don’t even receive any nominations, which leads to a round of griping online—“What do you mean Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers did not receive any nomination, but Jacques Audiard’s execrable Emilia Perez got thirteen?” “What? Nicole Kidman did not get nominated for her best role to date in Babygirl?” “I knew Angelina Jolie was a longshot for a nomination for Maria, but I’m still surprised.” “All We Imagine as Light was robbed!”]
When the nominations finally hit, we embark on catching all the remaining films nominated before the telecast itself, in a fervent race to watch them all, and it’s not always easy, especially if you don’t live in the United States. Every year, there are white whales—which are films that are almost impossible to watch, because their release dates are atrocious, or the filmmakers for some reason just choose to hold on to them without viable distribution. For the 2024-2025 season, that has got to be the full-length documentary Porcelain War, and the documentary short Death by Numbers, which, as far as ordinary cinephiles are concerned, do not really exist. [I have since bought a ticket for an online February screening of Porcelain War, which apparently does exist. And when it was still on the short list, Eno was also something I planned to watch online—because I was intrigued by the idea that it utilized a computer program which selects footage and edits the film so that a different version is shown each time it is screened. But its online distributors did not make it easy to buy a ticket. So when it failed to get a nomination last January 23, I just willingly let it go, even if I am a huge fan of the documentaries of Gary Hustwitt.] Then there are The Brutalist, September 5, Nickel Boys, and I’m Still Here, which are out-of-reach for non-U.S. death racers simply because their distributors are, for a lack of a better term, stupid. So sometimes we make do with so-called “cam” copies of these films, pirated via a camcorder in a movie theater, because once you are on a death race track, you have to do everything you can to get to the finish line. Even watch bad copies of them online.
The release of the Oscars shortlists in early December is our Thanksgiving—and helps narrow the list down, because it trims the number of international films, documentary films, and all the shorts [live action, animated, and documentary] to a manageable fifteen each. The Oscar nomination announcement is our Christmas Day, and the Oscar telecast is our New Year—because that day marks the beginning of another film year for most of us. There’s even a website that tracks all the films you have watched, complete with a leaderboard. [As of this writing, I am at #11 worldwide, with 96% of all nominated films already screened by me.]
Why do I do this? Because I’m a masochist. And because I truly love film. And because without this structure, I would not watch titles that are definitely out of my comfort zone.
Having said all that, I have a particular interest in following all the short films in contention. I like short films. The best ones manage to convey with gravity their themes in ten, or twenty, or thirty minutes—sometimes better than feature-length films which are four or five times longer in terms of running time. For film year 2024, out of the shortlists released last December, I managed to see almost all the titles in the live action and documentary shorts categories, and everything in the animated short category.
The five nominated live action short films are Anuja [d. Adam J. Graves], I’m Not a Robot [d. Victoria Warmerdam], The Last Ranger [d. Cindy Lee], A Lien [d. Sam Cutler-Kreutz and David Cutler-Kreutz], and The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent [d. Nebojša Slijepčević]—a great list for the simple reason that it did not include Dovecote, which was the worst film in the short list, a one-shot mess that starred Zoe Saldana as an inmate in a Venice prison for women that seemed to mistake its cinematographic dexterity with depth. It was awful. [Saldana, alas, stars in two of 2024’s most maligned, but strangely Oscar-considered, movies: this one, and Emilia Perez.]
The other unnominated films run the gamut of excellence deprived of recognition to truly awful exercises of the form. I was very surprised that Àlex Lora Cercos’s The Masterpiece did not get a nomination, given that it has a lot of Parasite vibes to it—including the house the story is set in, and the story revolving around a small clash between the privileged and the poor. I like its conceit that it is a clash over a painting, but whether or not which party gets the painting in the end, this does not matter at all, because the painting is a MacGuffin. The subtext of the film is the story: the contrast in material culture between a rich couple and a couple of scraps men; the posture each camp instinctively take towards the other in terms of “safety”; the lackadaisical way the rich have with their excess and “trash,” which the poor, all intentional, feast on as a source for living; and the power dynamics on display when fighting over what “seems” valuable. What intrigued me about the short film is the way the camera lingers on the younger scraps man as he looks with some befuddlement at the older one, who just made the choice that ended the short film. Was the look in anger? Or relief? I think that’s the invitation the film gifts us to consider its thesis. As for me, I think the right choice was made. [It would be difficult to sell that painting, anyway, without a certificate of its provenance.]
I also liked Dani Feixas’ Paris 70, a tender antidote to most grim Alzheimer’s drama out there—and the short film truly earns it with its pace, its characterization, its story—about a son who finds a way to humor his ailing mother by succumbing to her dreams of traveling to other places. I also liked Portia A. Buckley’s Clodagh, about a nun who discovers a talented young dancer in her congregation, and how it limns the borders of integrity, however small. Where do we draw the line at a lie, especially if it benefits us? Are there small lies and big lies?
The other unnominated films in the live action short list felt mid—if mildly involving in some places, but generally falling flat. The surprising thing about TJ O’Grady-Peyton’s Room Taken, about a homeless man who starts living in the house of a blind woman, is that it is not a horror film at all, but bends over backwards to make its disturbing tale a fable of humanism. Mohammed Almughanni’s An Orange from Jaffa, about an Israeli taxi driver who takes in as fare a Palestinian man who has difficulty crossing a checkpoint, does not really do much with its embedded tension. Jean de Meuron’s Edge of Space—which is a period film set at the height of the US-Soviet space race in the 1960s, and follows an ambitious USAF test pilot who is recruited by NASA for a suborbital mission in an X-15 hypersonic rocket-powered aircraft—is strangely cold and uninvolving for a space race story, and the only thing that carries it is the painstaking attention to detail, and to image. The worst of the lot, aside from Marco Perego Saldana’s Dovecote, is Pavel Sýkora and Viktor Horák’s The Compatriot, an ill-conceived drama about a widower at the height of the Nazi occupation of the former Czechoslovakia, who gets an unannounced visit by an SS officer—with the only thing the two having in common being their Sudeten origins. It felt very much like a typical Oscar bait story—except that this time around, the Academy did not bite. There’s also Jens Kevin Georg’s Crust, a very loose adaptation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” which follows a boy trying to prove his mettle by getting his first scar—something that everyone in his strange family seems to value above all else. Its telling is so offbeat though that I was more repulsed than entertained, and it was actually a relief when it was over. I have not seen Robert Moniot’s The Ice Cream Man, but the reviews online have not been kind—which might be why its filmmakers have chosen not to release the film in a suitable manner.
Of the nominated live action shorts, I did not expect Lee’s The Last Ranger to get the nod—although its depiction of a true story involving the fight against animal poachers in Africa might have swayed liberal-leaning Academy members with its important environmental message. [Sometimes, it’s really about the synopsis.] The story follows a young girl who is introduced to the responsibilities [and even wonder] of a game reserve by the last remaining ranger in their community—but soon the two are ambushed by poachers intent on harming the rhinos in the ranger’s keeping for their horns. During the fateful encounter, the young girl also discovers a terrible secret—a twist I knew was coming from the moment the film began. It’s not a bad film—it just feels like an important story told in a mediocre way.
I appreciated Graves’ Anuja because it felt like a part and parcel of 2024’s cinematic trend of following the travails of Indian women [a list that would include Santosh, All We Imagine as Light, and Laapataa Ladies—all of them unique and involving highlights of Indian cinema last year], but compared to these films, this short one felt like a breath of fresh air, simply because of its optimism. The story centers on two plucky sisters working in a garment factory and living on their own, but both soon face a decision they have to make at film’s end, which would alter their very lives. I make it sound ominous, but it isn’t. It is a film cloaked in hope—and springing from a story that has groundings in truth—and this quality makes it an endearing watch. It doesn’t have much of a punch, truth to tell, and it might even be forgettable, but its heart is in the right place.
Warmerdam’s I’m Not a Robot, on the other hand, is a serio-comic story about a woman who, while listening to music on her computer, discovers the program rebooting. This forces her to accomplish a series of CAPTCHA tests—which, to her chagrin, she fails again and again and again, leading her to entertain the disturbing notion that she might actually be a robot. The short film starts off as a commentary on our increasingly AI-infected lives, but it takes a sharp turn and becomes a rumination on relationships and the things we do to find compatibility in others—a turn that’s not exactly well-handled, but it’s entertaining enough, and the film is a hoot from beginning to end.
Cutler-Kreutz’s A Lien is the film from among the lot that feels like very much like it has been grabbed from the most contemporary headlines. It follows a bi-racial couple and their child as they arrive on the day of their green card interview, but they are soon confronted with a dangerous immigration process that’s actually quite common among agents working for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement [or ICE]—the taking into immediate custody, and then deportation, of “illegal aliens” who are, in fact, in the very process of legalizing their stay under the very blessings of immigration authorities. It is slice-of-life story whose tension comes from the unfairness of the situation we behold, and the film’s effectivity comes from the deft handling of that tension.
But the one live action short film that moved and disturbed me the most was Slijepčević’s The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, because its story is one that needed to be told, and because its narrative conceit indicts its viewers about the possibilities of courageous action when confronted with evil. We are told that the story is inspired by the actions of an actual hero from the Bosnian Wars in the early 1990s—that of Tomo Buzov, a passenger on a Belgrade-Bar train, which was stopped in the village of Štrpci in 1993 by the Serbian White Eagles paramilitary group. The paramilitary unit, under the command of Milan Lukić, subsequently pulled away 18 Bosniak Muslims and one Croat from among the passengers, who were then eventually massacred. Buzov was the sole non-Bosniak passenger on the train who tried to stand up against the attackers—and was also taken away to be massacred with the rest. I cannot explain the conceit of the film without taking away its power, but it is very much an experiment in point-of-view, which also asks us a question: you might think you will take a courageous stand in the face of evil—but will you really? As one Letterbxd member puts it, the film is about “the fragile balance of who we want to be and who we [really] are.”
Here is my ranking of all the live action short films, including the unnominated titles:
[1] The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent
[2] A Lien
[3] I’m Not a Robot
[4] The Masterpiece
[5] Paris 70
[6] Clodagh
[7] Anuja
[8] Room Taken
[9] The Last Ranger
[10] An Orange from Jaffa
[11] Edge of Space
[12] Crust
[13] The Compatriot
[14] Dovecote
[15] The Ice Cream Man
Labels: film, life, oscar, short films
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, January 23, 2025
12:45 PM |
Setting the Record Straight
Just to set the record straight, and why I became involved in this. In 2010, I was one of two Philippine delegates chosen as fellows to the International Writing Program in Iowa City, which just became a UNESCO City of Literature in 2008. When I was there, it dawned on me that this distinction was also fitting for Dumaguete. Since I came back from the U.S., I’ve been advocating for this every chance I got, including at several editions of the 6200 PopUp sponsored by DTI, and in all my lectures about Dumaguete literature in seminars and fora, including one on the creative economy at Silliman University for the NCCA. In 2014, I even curated an exhibit at Silliman Library titled “Cities of Literature,” which traced the link between Dumaguete and Iowa, with the blessings of the International Writing Program’s Christopher Merrill. In 2018, prodded by former Dumaguete City Tourism Officer Jacqueline Antonio, I prepared a white paper for Mayor Ipe Remollo to determine whether we should apply for City of Music or City of Literature. [You see, only the LGU can apply for UNESCO Creative City.] Naturally, as a writer, my bias was clear. The pandemic put these plans on hold. When I gave a talk about this at the first edition of Dumaguete LitFest in 2024, that propelled DTI Negros Oriental to take the first steps and got me involved in the official application, with the blessings of Mayor Remollo. And that’s the story.Labels: city of literature, cultural work, dumaguete, life
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Wednesday, January 22, 2025
8:35 AM |
Date Blindness
Today, a confessional I’d like to share for National Mental Health Week. You know what I hate the most about ADHD? It’s actually not the executive dysfunction [because I mostly solve that through doubling], it’s the weird mental anomaly we call “date blindness.” I have always had this, but I always thought it was just me being lazy about dates. Like, my ears hear “August,” but my brain makes my hand write down “December.” When I used to make posters for the CAC, I took painstaking care of the playdates I’d put in, recognizing this was always something I’d do, but often I’d still get it wrong and Leo Mamicpic would be the one to gently remind me: “Ian, the show is on February 11. You put in March 24.” Like, that totally happens, all the time. Like I know Silliman was founded in 1901, but I’d still put in “1902.” I really had no idea why and I used to berate myself a lot about it. Until I got diagnosed, and learned about date blindness. Fun, fun, fun! Today is Wednesday, right?Labels: adhd, date blindness, life, mental health
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7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 223.
Labels: poetry
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Tuesday, January 21, 2025
11:00 PM |
A Note for Gratefulness
I will always be grateful for friends who have my back and cheer me on, who are incredibly supportive and who show up, who push me gently when I falter, who believe in me even when I doubt myself, who double for me when my ADHD rears its penchance for executive dysfunction. Today was such a day. Thank you for being there.
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Monday, January 20, 2025
Today, January 20, is the birthday of filmmaker David Lynch who died only a few days ago. It is also Martin Luther King Day and the day a felon is inaugurated to be President of what used to be the most powerful country in the world. It is also the start of National Mental Health Week. And it is also Blue Monday, the day your New Year’s resolutions come to die, and apparently the most depressing day of the year. Take all that as you may.Labels: life
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11:44 AM |
How to Make Baye-Baye
If you hail from Bayawan, down at the southern bend of Negros Oriental, chances are you have grown up eating the city’s foremost delicacy—the baye-baye. Ian has maternal roots in Bayawan, and spent a significant part of his childhood there before the family moved for good to Dumaguete in 1980. He grew up eating the baye-baye, will trust only the ones made by the family of Manang Julia Occena of Barangay Villareal [formerly Balabag]—and until today, he has very specific tastes that determine for him which baye-baye is the real deal.
“Don’t eat the popular and commercial ones you find readily available in stores,” he says with a passion. “They’re rubbish.”
My mother Fennie with Manang Julia in Bayawan in 2017
Manang Julia's baye-baye
The baye-baye is made from roasted glutinous rice, coconut, and sugar that are pounded or ground together, and is often mistaken to be the local equivalent of the espasol. It is not. It is its own unique thing. It is also actually not native to Bayawan, but has roots in Pavia, Iloilo. There was a significant migration of Ilonggos to Bayawan at the turn of the 20th century, owing to agricultural opportunities, which is why many Bayawanons speak Kiniray-a, and baye-baye became a local delicacy. The Bayawan variety though is more starchy, while the Iloilo original is more sticky. [They’re also finished differently, with the Iloilo baye-baye shaped into a roll, while the Bayawan baye-baye is made into a sandwich-shaped cake.]
Ian insists on eating it fresh—because the delicacy quickly turns bad after a day of storage. “Fresh baye-baye is soft and pillowy,” Ian says. He also insists that its stickiness should be well-balanced with the pinipig powder that coats the entire thing.
A few years ago, in 2018, Ian’s family found themselves back in Bayawan for a visit—and somehow also found themselves making a trek to old Balabag, to search out Manang Julia where she still lived in her advanced years in her hut, already blind from old age—but still directing her family to make the delicacy that has been their tradition for generations. The baye-baye they bought that day in 2018 still retained the same sticky goodness from memory.
Last year, one member of Manang Julia’s family came over to Dumaguete to demonstrate the making of baye-baye at Adorno Galeria y Café at the Locsin Heritage House, masterminded by proprietor Jansen Tan, with the whole event made possible by the Bayawan City Tourism Office, and through the efforts of Pristine Martinez-Raymond, the first lady of the city.
For one day last August, Manang Mercy Barroca let us into her world of baye-baye making. We watched her hands mix glutinous rice and coconut into something more than food: a story, a memory, a taste of heritage. Manang Mercy’s reputation preceded her: she carried not just the skill but the heart of her in-laws’ legacy, a lineage intertwined with the rhythms of mortar and pestle, with the scent of toasted rice hanging in the air.
The stage for this demonstration was set with care. In the center stood the tools of her trade: the “lusokan,” a mortar and pestle made from casay wood. Casay, Manang Mercy explained, is not just a traditional implement; it was necessity. Other woods, though abundant, cannot promise the food-safe quality that casay does. And like any artist, Manang Mercy’s tools carried their own history—her mortar was twenty years old; the pestle was sixty. It was a lineage of objects meeting a lineage of hands.
To understand baye-baye is to begin with the grain. Glutinous rice, whole and unassuming, will find its place in the “kalaha,” the wok. Over steady flame, Manang Mercy stirred the ingredients, her movements deliberate, patient. Soon the grains turned golden, releasing a nutty fragrance that danced through the air and signaled their transformation. These toasted grains, tinged with fire, were milled into a fine powder, soft as talcum.
But baye-baye does not rest on rice alone. There is the coconut, grated and cooked down in its milk with brown sugar until it becomes caramelized perfection. The mixture, dark as molasses and glistening with unctuous richness, held the promise of flavor. “It shouldn’t be dry,” Manang Mercy said. “It should still shine.”
The marriage of these ingredients is where the craft truly begins. The glutinous rice flour and the caramelized coconut are mixed in the lusokan, where they are pounded and rotated in a ritualistic rhythm. No white streaks of flour should remain; no hint of separation should betray the harmony of the ingredients.
Manang Mercy demonstrating how to make baye-baye
Mixing baye-baye ingredients in a demonstration at Adorno Cafe
Manang Mercy worked with quiet confidence. Her hands guided the pestle, her movements precise yet unhurried. She knew when to stop, when to let the mixture rest, and when to press forward. In her hands, the lusokan seemed alive, an extension of her will. When the texture was just right—smooth and pliable—Manang Mercy reached for a rectangular plastic container, its surface dusted with flour. She pressed the mass into it, shaping it with a sandok until it took the form of a rectangle. With a practiced flip, she plopped it onto a plate, where it laid like a gift. The final act was a careful slicing the delicacy into squares, each piece a testament to the culinary craft that birthed it.
In a world rushing toward convenience, where food often loses its soul in the quest for speed, Manang Mercy, with her carrying on the traditional way of making baye-baye, stood as beacon of patience, of reverence for tradition. Her baye-baye was more than a snack; it was a connection to the past, a bridge to the future. The lusokan, the casay wood, the golden rice—each element held a fragment of memory, each strike of the pestle an affirmation that some things are worth preserving. Bayawan’s cultural stewards understood this, which is why they facilitated that demonstration. Baye-baye, humble as it may seem, is a symbol of resilience, of community, of the enduring power of tradition.
As we left Adorno Café, the scent of toasted rice and caramelized coconut still clung to the air, a reminder that sometimes the most profound stories are told not in words but in the simple, deliberate act of making something with love, and from tradition.
Labels: food, heritage, negros
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Sunday, January 19, 2025
9:00 AM |
The Infinite Poetry of One Big Tuyok
A few nights ago, tired from the anxiety plaguing us the past week, Renz and I decided to go make an impromptu O.B.T. around town. We even reached as far as Valencia, enjoying the straight-on-and-no-turning-left-or-right pleasures of the Jose Romero Highway that connects Dumaguete to the western town in the foothillds of Cuernos de Negros, then going around the municipal plaza, and then going back to Dumaguete via the Bacong-Valencia Highway, passing through Balayagmanok.
While Renz drove and I navigated, we listened to Adele, to Madonna, to Lady Gaga, to Robyn, and the various recommendations via Spotify. It made me think: living in the present is sometimes as simple as doing an O.B.T. at night with your significant other, while listening to our music on Spotify. There's no greater, simpler pleasure, and what one gets is understated, frills-free happiness. Just you, the road, good music, and someone you love beside you.
There’s something going around Dumaguete’s streets at night that invites reflection—perhaps the way the streetlights throw their measured glow on concrete roads, perhaps the hum of engines and the gentle crunch of tires on throughways, perhaps also the intimacy of conversations shared between people in transit. In Dumaguete, this practice has a name—O.B.T., or “One Big Tuyok.”
The term itself is part of the city’s vernacular, as intrinsic to Dumaguete’s identity as its beloved silvanas or the waves that lap against the seawall of the Rizal Boulevard. It began, as so many traditions do, with a simple need: something to do when the night stretched long and uneventful. “There was really nothing to do in Dumaguete before,” Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio once recounted to me. “So we would just be hanging out at our homes, on rotation each week, for tapok. Then when we ran out of things to do, our friend Raffy would say, ‘O.B.T. ‘ta!’”
And so, Raffy Teves and his friends in 1982 breathed life into this quintessential Dumaguete pastime, a “one big tuyok” around the city—just you, your ride, your music, and, most importantly, your companions.
From its humble beginnings as a whimsical escape for bored Dumaguete youth, the O.B.T. has transformed over the decades into a cherished ritual, its essence remaining gloriously unchanged even as Dumaguete’s roads became more congested and its charm grew into a magnet for tourists.
But to describe O.B.T. purely in terms of movement—of cars and motorcycles circling the city—would do it a disservice. It is not merely a drive; it is a celebration of simplicity, of understated joys that anchor us to the present moment. O.B.T. is the rhythmic cadence of life in Dumaguete distilled into a single experience, a reminder that the best pleasures are often those that demand nothing of us except to be present.
It is at night, under a canopy of stars and the glow of flickering streetlamps, that the city takes on its most poetic form. The air grows cooler, softer; the buzz of the day fades into hushed harmony. The once-busy streets, now quieter, seem to stretch more invitingly, as if encouraging you to explore their every curve and corner. On O.B.T., the city becomes both backdrop and participant—its landmarks, like Silliman Hall or the centuries-old campanario, slipping by like chapters in a well-loved book.
One can imagine those early days, when Raffy and his circle of friends, fueled by youthful restlessness, decided to embark on their nocturnal tours of Dumaguete. They would traverse the city’s narrow streets, their route an improvised map that included cemeteries, quiet barangays, and perhaps an obligatory stop by the Boulevard. It was not the destination that mattered but the journey—the act of being together, sharing laughter and stories as the world outside their rides blurred into motion.
The O.B.T. is rooted in connection. It thrives on companionship, whether it is with a circle of friends or a romantic partner. There’s something achingly tender about sharing a tuyok with someone you love, the way silences between songs on a Spotify playlist become as meaningful as the music itself. Words may flow freely or not at all; it doesn’t matter. What matters is the presence—two people moving through the night, their breaths syncing with the steady rhythm of the ride.
For those who’ve grown up in Dumaguete, the O.B.T. is a rite of passage. It is a memory shared by generations, a tradition passed down like a treasured recipe for life. Young lovers, for example, may find themselves on these drives, the road a silent witness to budding romances. For another, friends solidify their bonds over shared playlists and shared vistas over these rides. Families, too, partake in this tradition, their laughter filling the hallowed spaces of their vehicles as they pass familiar sights that suddenly seem new in the Dumaguete darkness.
In a way, the O.B.T. is Dumaguete’s love letter to its people, an invitation to slow down and rediscover the beauty in what is familiar. The act of going around in circles—in this case, quite literally—is paradoxically grounding. It reminds us that life need not always be about moving forward, that there is value in revisiting what we know, in finding novelty in the seemingly mundane.
This is not to say that O.B.T. has remained immune to the changes sweeping through Dumaguete. The city is no longer the quiet town of tartanillas and the empty streets that it once had. Traffic now is a common headache, and cars and motorcycles jostle for space on the roads, their headlights creating a chaotic mosaic against the night. And yet, amid the urban hum, the O.B.T. endures, adapting to the changng times without losing its essence. It is as though the spirit of the tradition—that longing for connection, for simplicity—refuses to be silenced by modernity.
Today, an O.B.T. can still include stops at the cemeteries and what-not, though it is just as likely to feature detours for midnight snacks at Dumaguete’s ubiquitous tempurahan or a quick coffee at one of its new cafes. The Spotify playlists may have replaced cassette tapes, but the heart of the experience remains: the road, the music, and the company.
And perhaps that is why he O.B.T. resonates so deeply for Dumagueteños. It is a microcosm of what it means to live well, to find joy in what is simple and true. In a world increasingly driven by haste and distraction, it offers an antidote: an invitation to slow down, to look out the window, to breathe. It is not about where you’re going, but about who you’re with and how you choose to get there.
As the night stretches on and the city slips into slumber, the final lap of an O.B.T. carries with it a certain wistfulness. The tuyok ends where it began, the cycle complete. But the beauty of O.B.T. lies in its infinite possibility. There will always be another night, another drive, another chance to see the city—and yourself—in a new light. Labels: dumaguete, life, obt, traditions
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Friday, January 17, 2025
Living in the present is sometimes as simple as doing OBT at night with the s.o., while listening to our playlists on Spotify. There's no greater, simpler pleasure, and what one gets is understated, frills-free happiness. Just you, the road, good music, and someone you love beside you.
Labels: dumaguete, life, love, music
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Wednesday, January 15, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 222.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
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Monday, January 13, 2025
8:01 PM |
In Café Maria, A Restoration of Exquisite Flavors
From last Sunday’s “Culinary Cuts” column I share with Renz Torres for the Dumaguete MetroPost.
There is a particular alchemy to restoration, and Casa Paquita in Fatima Village in Dumaguete embodies this magic to the hilt. Once a stately home built in the 1920s along Acias Pinili Street, then slowly abandoned in the ensuing decades, and finally relocated and restored to its old glory in this part of Bantayan, the heritage house’s hallowed walls now reverberate with fresh culinary ambitions as it also plays host to Cafe Maria.
This marriage of heritage and gastronomy is more than mere coincidence—it’s a conversation, a song, an invitation to sit and savor. But what does it mean to dine within restored elegance? Let us begin.
Stepping into Cafe Maria feels like entering a sepia photograph splashed with modern color. The dark wooden beams overhead and the artful interplay of antique tiles and contemporary decor are not merely aesthetic choices but an homage to time. The air carries faint whispers of the past, and yet, it’s also unmistakably alive with the murmurs of current diners and the rhythmic clatter of plates. This is a setting built for storytelling—and no better storyteller exists than food.
We started with a dish that dares to walk the tightrope of excess: the Bangus na Tambok. Its name, with a chuckle of self-awareness, declares its fatty splendor outright. Here is a whole milkfish fried to an audacious crisp, glistening under a drizzle of atsuete oil. And yet, the dish is anything but overwhelming. The crackling skin yields to flesh cooked with an assured tenderness, and the supporting cast elevates it to a star’s performance. The kalamansi aioli delivers a citrusy zing, while the atchara slaw provides crunch and acidity. It’s a platter that asks, “How far can we push indulgence before it topples?” The answer: just far enough. One of us wished for crisper skin, but we’ll let that pass—to each their textural preference.
From bold flavors, we segue to opulence with the Negros Wagyu Kaldereta, a dish that seems to whisper, “Trust me.” And trust, indeed, is warranted. This is not your grandmother’s kaldereta—it is richer, deeper, and more unapologetically decadent. Sourced from Montenegro Farms, the wagyu beef collapses under the gentlest nudge, as if surrendering itself willingly to your spoon. The sauce, bolstered by liver paté, vodka, and a lively interplay of olives and fresh tomatoes, brims with a complexity that defies its humble origins. There is a symphony of flavors here—a crescendo of salt, acid, and umami—but alas, the potatoes falter. They lack the golden crispness that might have crowned this dish triumphant. Yet even in imperfection, the kaldereta’s stars shine brightly.
The prelude to our feast arrived in the form of the Dukot Salad. Its title, a nod to scorched rice, suggests playfulness—and what a play it is. Whole lettuce leaves cradle a mélange of textures: crispy dukot, slender strips of singkamas, bursts of tomato, and the smoky umami of thin bulad. It’s a salad that leans into its contradictions: rustic yet elegant, familiar yet novel. If the rice had achieved a sharper crunch or the vinaigrette more assertive acidity, it might have sung louder. But even as is, this dish feels like an echo of home cooked with a touch of finesse.
And what’s a meal without a little indulgence of the liquid sort? Cafe Maria’s signature cocktail, Pangpa-Igat, flirts unapologetically with its name. The drink arrives like a spell in a glass—swirls of green apple and elderflower dancing in soda water, buoyed by gin’s subtle sting. It is, by all accounts, a pretty drink—gentle, sweet, and deceptively harmless. But therein lies the rub: where one might expect the bold flirtation of tartness or the audacious burn of spirits, it instead plays coy. It’s a pleasant sip, no doubt, but for a drink named after mischief, I’d hoped for a wilder night.
Perhaps the truest triumph of Cafe Maria lies not in any single dish but in its vision. To dine here is to partake in a dialogue between past and present. The restored Casa Paquita lends gravitas to the dining experience; the creak of its wooden floors, the glint of its antique windows, the shadows cast by its ornate beams—all these whisper tales of Dumaguete’s storied past. Yet the menu is firmly rooted in today, with a sly wink toward innovation and an embrace of locality. The use of Negros-sourced wagyu, for instance, is not just a statement of quality but a celebration of place.
There is an audacity in Cafe Maria’s promise to comfort and challenge in equal measure. Its menu teeters on the edge of the familiar and the experimental, sometimes stumbling but never losing its balance entirely. Here, you are invited to reconsider the bangus of your childhood, to reimagine the kaldereta of your lola’s kitchen, to find new possibilities in the humble scorched rice. It is an act of culinary storytelling, woven through the threads of an old house that has seen countless meals and conversations.
As we lingered over the last sips of our drinks, we found ourselves thinking of restoration not just as an act of revival but as an invitation to rethink what was and what could be. Cafe Maria, with its heritage setting and bold kitchen, has accepted this invitation with aplomb. It is not perfect—but then, perfection is not the point. The point is the journey, the effort, the joy of discovering something old made new, something familiar made surprising. And for that, Cafe Maria is well worth the visit.
Labels: dumaguete, food, heritage
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Sunday, January 12, 2025
10:00 PM |
Finally Recuperated!
My first time out of the apartment in days since I got sick last January 5. I'm with Renz, having dinner at Palmitas while watchig RuPaul's Drag Race.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
9:00 AM |
Life Lessons from a Ghost
I have been watching a lot of Japanese movies lately. It is, after all, “Japanuary,” a kind of cinephilic trend which calls for devoting the month of January to screening Japanese films. Of late, I have turned to the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa simply because this is also film awards season, and his latest film, Cloud, was the Japanese official entry to the International Feature category of the Oscar Awards. [Last year, he also gifted us with a truly horrifying short film, Chime.]
I do not ordinarily get my life lessons from the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The Japanese auteur, who burst to international fame in the late 1990s and early 2000s with his uncanny contributions to what we now call as “J-Horror,” is known for exploring in his films themes of existential dread, isolation and the fraught relationship between individuals and society, the dour impact of technology in our lives, and the fragility of memory—often giving his stories a supernatural bent involving ghosts, which are often malevolent and vengeful.
In his seminal Cure [1997], we follow a police procedural involving a series of grisly murders which seem to be connected—because all the victims have the mark “X” carved into their necks. But as the story unfolds, we learn that the murders are being committed by disparate individuals who have no memory of what they have done, nor have any motives for doing them. The clues soon lead to a mysterious figure named Mamiya whose presence evoke a profound sense of alienation that he causes otherwise ordinary people to succumb to their violent impulses, challenging the idea that identity and morality are stable constructs. In Pulse [2001], we gradually learn that the dead have begun infiltrating the living world through the Internet, causing people to succumb to despair and vanish, leaving behind only dark, shadowy marks.
Not exactly films to take away endearing life lessons from.
In 2015, Kurosawa released Journey to the Shore, which from the get-go already presents itself as a ghost story. We meet Mizuki, a piano teacher for children, whose melancholy is evident from the way she goes about her daily routines. She has reasons to be sad: her husband Yusuke has been missing for three years, and presumed dead. She misses him, and still grieves. One day, after her piano lessons, she comes home to find the ghost of her husband in her living room. But the ghost of Yusuke also inhabits a corporeal reality the movie never questions—he is truly a ghost, but he can also be touched, and he can be seen by other people. He even eats and sleeps. Sometimes, however, he disappears into thin air.
Yusuke informs Mizuki that he drowned at sea—and his body has already been eaten by crabs. But somehow he found himself entering the living world, interacting with people, some of them living and some dead—ghosts who are exactly like him. He has been traveling and meeting people since passing away, and now, to finally say goodbye, he wants to take Mizuki with him to meet all the individuals who have been part of his life these past three years, so that she, too, can see, touch, and feel what Yusuki did while he was gone. She packs her bag without question, and goes on this journey with her ghost husband, sometimes taking the train, sometimes the bus. The movie proceeds on an episodic structure, with each visit becoming Kurosawa’s way of instructing us about the relationships between people and their ghosts, about remembering and forgetting, about forgiving and longing.
In the penultimate “episode,” Yusuke, with Mizuki in tow, returns to a farm he worked in, where the community of farmers has learned to gravitate towards him as a kind of philosopher and storyteller. He was known to give the farm folk the occasional capsule lectures about varied things, like Physics, in their small community hall, and sometimes strings these educational talks with poignant observations about life. One such talk begins soon after Yusuke’s return to town. He begins to discuss the matter of light as both a particle and as a wave:
“Light is both a wave and a particle,” Yusuke begins. “A light particle has zero mass. Light, as its name implies, travels at the speed of light. If you apply Einstein’s equation, anything traveling at the speed of light should have infinite mass. But a tiny particle of light couldn’t possibly have infinite mass. The only solution is for it to have zero mass. A particle of light must have zero mass. But can you say that something of zero mass even exists? What is this particle which is like a lot of nothing? And remember, light is also a wave. It has a wavelength, which is like the wave’s width. But if you keep reducing this wavelength, is there a point where it becomes zero? If it’s a zero, that’s not a wave. However tiny it is, a wave has a wavelength. So the smallest wavelength of a wave of light also has a quantity of zero.”
He continues: “The thing is, in the world of the very small, zero does have a width. In other words, zero isn’t zero. The whole universe is filled with an infinite number of zeroes. Zero is the basis of everything. So nothingness isn’t the same as meaninglessness. Nothingness is the foundation of everything. Mountains and rivers, the earth and human beings. Everything is composed of combinations of this nothingness. This would seem to be a true representation of the world.”
Truly, this whole monologue does not seem to come from a typical Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie.
And I’m glad.
Yusuke made me think. What does it mean to live a life that matters? Perhaps the answer lies not in grand proclamations but in the tension between light and shadow, between the tangible and the ineffable. Yusuke makes a point that the universe itself—both vast and microscopic—offers us a metaphor for this paradox, to consider light—a force that is both particle and wave, both zero and infinite. It is something and nothing all at once, the very essence of the contradictory truths that define existence.
This duality of light captures the enigmatic foundation of reality.
We wake each morning with an unspoken hope: to find clarity, joy, or purpose in the hours ahead. Yet life often undercuts these expectations. The coffee spills; the news disappoints. But even in the mundane—in the routine of commuting, working, returning—there lies an unspoken wonder. The banality of the everyday is not meaningless; it is an intricate dance of forces seen and unseen, much like light itself. Fleeting and fragile, life compels us to create, to love, to leave a mark. It is as if we are each a beam of light, our trajectory immeasurable yet undeniable.
Take, for example, the quiet courage of a mother waking early to prepare her child for school. Or the rhythmic precision of a farmer tending his crops under the rising sun. Or the solitary writer chasing words that might outlast time. These acts, so ordinary they often escape notice, are like photons scattering through space. They are small, yet they illuminate. They are fleeting, yet they shape the world.
Perhaps meaning is not found in answers but in the act of seeking. Meaning is a mosaic of personal truths: the way sunlight pools on a wooden floor, the laughter shared among friends, the feeling of holding a book that feels like an old companion. It is in the particulars that we discover the infinite—the zero that is not zero.
But life is not only light. It is shadow. Loss, grief, and suffering carve through our days with an unrelenting hand. Yet these shadows sharpen our perception of what truly matters. Consider those who have endured unimaginable loss and emerged with a greater capacity for love, for connection. In their lives, we see a profound truth: that even in the void, there is creation; even in absence, there is presence.
And so, we circle back to the question: what is the meaning of life? It is perhaps a flawed question, for it assumes meaning to be a fixed point, a destination. But what if meaning is found in the journey? What if it is the striving, the questioning, the living that gives life its shape?
This reminds me of a story about a fisherman who spent his days casting nets into the ocean, watching the tides. One day, a scholar asked him, “What do you see out there?” The fisherman, gazing at the horizon, replied, “Possibility.” The scholar pressed on. “But what does it mean to you?” The fisherman laughed. “It doesn’t have to mean anything,” he said. “It just is.”
There is wisdom in the fisherman’s humility, an acceptance of the universe’s enigmatic nature. To search for meaning is not to find a definitive answer but to grow through the seeking. It is to recognize that we are participants in an infinite dance, a constellation of lives intertwined by joys and sorrows, by light and shadow.
Perhaps the meaning of life is not a puzzle to solve but a question to live. It is as vast and unknowable as the ocean the fisherman watched, as fundamental and paradoxical as the light that travels through it. And when the end comes—as it must—the measure of a meaningful life will not be the monuments we’ve built or the accolades we’ve received. It will be the ripples we leave in the hearts of others, the moments of light we shared in their shadows, the quiet assurance that, for a while, we were here. We loved, we wondered, we lived. And in that fragile, infinite dance, perhaps we were enough.
Labels: film, life, physics
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, January 08, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 221.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, January 05, 2025
8:33 PM |
I'm Taking to Bed. I'm Sick.
Labels: health, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, January 01, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 220. Happy New Year!
Labels: new year, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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