Tuesday, July 06, 2021

7:00 AM | Couples

Today is International Kissing Day! It is a secular celebration of kissing, and is all about showing your love and improving your health! To celebrate that, I’m sharing a music video of “Sayaw Ta,” by Hope Tinambacan, which features a bunch of Dumaguete couples — including Renz and me! — dancing and kissing, and what-not.



[Note: These are not all romantic couples. There are also mothers and sons here.]

Labels: dumaguete, life, love, music, video

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Sunday, October 29, 2017

8:21 PM | The Russian Candidate

A fantasy edit [using Daredevil footage] of a Trump downfall scenario, by YouTuber 1oneclone, to the tuneful sound of Matt Monro singing "From Russia with Love." This is so strangely satisfying, it almost feels like porn. [Not that I would know, you know?] Can we have a similar fantasy edit of...never mind.

Labels: politics, video

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Friday, January 15, 2016

12:04 PM | Classic Film Dancing to Uptown Funk

When I was sick, this mashup video of dance clips from a grand array of classic movies edited by Michael Binder, author of A Light Affliction: a History of Film Preservation and Restoration [Amazon], was welcome comfort. The choice of Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars' "Uptown Funk" as the musical thread of the clips is inspired and strangely appropriate. It's even better and apt than the more contemporary version of the mashup. Here you go...

Labels: art and culture, dance, film, humor, pop culture, video

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Tuesday, March 29, 2011

12:26 PM | How to Eat a Pizza

Slice by Marco Castro on Vimeo. Featuring "Every Time You Go Away" by Paul Young.

Labels: food, music, queer, video

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Tuesday, November 09, 2010

3:15 PM | Writing Iowa

Writing Iowa from Lewis Liu on Vimeo.

Singapore's O Thiam Chin had the brilliant idea of doing a short documentary of the 2010 writers-in-residence of the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa. He roped in the brilliantly talented young Chinese filmmaker Lewis Zhao to direct it — and then later roped me in to help supervise the editing/post-production since he was going to New York for the marathon over the weekend. Two sleepless nights later, here is the result.

Labels: film, iowa international writers program, travel, video, writers

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Wednesday, June 30, 2010

3:27 PM | One

This song, a cover of a U2 classic and interpreted to new rawness by Mary J. Blige, gets to your guts and rips out every strand of beautiful anger. And it's strange, because this is my anthem now. And you, of all people, gave this to me.

Labels: life, love, music, video

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Monday, June 01, 2009

9:09 AM | Sex and the Senate

By Lourd Ernest de Veyra

Manuel Quezon, Sergio Osmena, Manuel Roxas, Claro M. Recto, Eulogio Rodriguez, Lorenzo Tanada, Jose W. Diokno, Jovito Salonga, Benigno Aquino Jr. Throughout history the Philippine Senate has been the incandescent cradle of statesmen of towering intellects and oratorical intensity. Teofisto Guingona’s breathlessly elegant denunciation of Erap, “I Accuse,” was haunted by the spirit of Emile Zola. Decades earlier, Jose P. Laurel declared, “If I had to choose between my love of country and the church, my love of country comes first.”

On May 28, 2009, it’s just… “I even shouted ‘sizzling hot!’”

The Rizal Bill of 1956 drew great debates between intellectual heavyweights like Claro M. Recto and Francisco Rodrigo—both men of letters, in what was controversially viewed as conflict between the Catholic Church and the emerging nationalism. Ninoy Aquino exposed the 1968 Jabida Massacre, where the AFP exterminated at least 28 Moro recruits trained for covert military operations in Sabah.

In May 2009, Bong Revilla has the Hayden Kho-Katrina Halili sex video.

I also doubt “Ano’ng software ang ginamit mo?” would resound as one of Philippine history’s greatest speeches.

But since the Erap impeachment trial (some say as early as the 10th Congress), the Senate has stopped becoming the shining beacon of political nobility. Not since its members are voted into office not for their knowledge and virtue but through stupid jingles and celebrity endorsements. Once it was a fount of wisdom and patriotism. Now they’re just like those squirming little things you find under dead tree trunks after the rain.



This is not the first time the Senate has taken on a highly lurid controversy of absolutely zero political consequence. Remember the Brunei Beauties controversy back in the ’90s where Ruffa Gutierrez et al were summoned to an investigation? “In aid of the legislation” has become the most abused and misused phrase in modern Philippine politics. “Ano’ng software ang ginamit mo?” and “Saan mo nilagay ‘yung camera?”are not examples of questions with legislative intent either. What’s next, a bill proposing the ban of USB cables?

The 14th Congress of the Philippines has debased itself when it became the theater of a salaciously cheap psycho-sexual drama on May 28, 2009. It is bad enough that the past high-profile hearings simply went pfft. Citing the hitherto unresolved examples of ZTE, the Euro Generals, Jocjoc Bolante, the Legacy Group, by now we should have reached the conclusion that the Senate hall in the GSIS Building can serve the people better by being converted into a bowling alley.

Heading the investigation were three senators, two of whom are not known for their tact, two of whom are movie actors (one of them also not known for being a serial monogamist).

Towards Kho, Revilla was abrasive and judgmental, his thick eyebrows raised to intimidating angles. Jinggoy Estrada bullied Kho’s lawyer, Lorna Kapunan who was requesting that the hearing be made private. (In contrast, by characteristically keeping his mouth shut, Lito Lapid was a portrait of grace. But Lapid was not required in the panel. He is, after all, the so-called chairman of the Senate committee on silence.)

That the packed gallery—made up mostly of Senate employees—burst into applause when Estrada snarled “I demand the presence of Kho in this hearing!” ought to have been a clue already. All that was missing was the dancing seals, the jugglers, and the trapeze flyers, and they could start selling peanuts.

You can accuse it of anything but you can’t accuse it of not being gripping entertainment.

It has elements not even Robbie Tan and Mauro Gia Samonte would have imagined. Sex, drugs, illicit romance involving eye-pleasing celebrities, dirty accusations hurled, haughty interrogators squeezing their teary-eyed subjects for details, each one juicier than the next.

And each has no place for what is supposed to be an august body. That afternoon of May 28, 2009, Madrigal, Revilla, and Estrada—especially Estrada, for demanding a public inquiry—ceased to become honorable lawmakers. Instead they sank to the level of showbiz tabloid interviewers who merely stoked the flames of prurient interest. Where it used to be an intellectual battleground for issues that change the nation’s destiny, now it’s just a cesspool of gossip and smut. In the ’80s, Abner Afuang achieved a certain mythical status by going against a corrupt police department a la Serpico. He should not have simply poured water on Hayden’s head; he would’ve done the country a big favor by pouring gasoline and setting fire to the GSIS Building.

The bottom line is that the whole thing was an exercise in poor judgment and a total lack of propriety. In a sense, by rabidly denouncing the video in a privilege speech—Bong Revilla may have inadvertently sparked a bigger bushfire of interest in the videos, with no small help, of course, from a hyperventilating mass media. Our children’s morals and sense of values are in danger? Thanks to Revilla, your 5-year-old daughter now knows the meaning of the words “sex video” and “Ecstasy.” But that’s not before she asks you first over the breakfast table while you read the Inquirer’s front page. She is now aware that Ecstasy makes you do stupid things, like wear a bandanna and perform macho-dancer moves and mess up the lyrics to a Wham! classic.

But still, we can learn several important lessons from this whole sordid imbroglio:

• That one does not need video software to make films. Just a camera and a USB cable.
• That in a public discussion involving the subject of illicit sex, the phrase “hard drive” should be used with prudence. Lots of it. Especially by the perpetrator.
• Between an act of high-profile infidelity and a scandal video, people will forget that you’re a treacherous kabetching.
• That your humiliation simply does not end with the entire archipelago witnessing your coital habits. One day an ex-cop-turned-mayor-turned-tabloid columnist named Abner Afuang (portrated by Philip Salvador in an ’80s biopic) will walk up to your side and douse you with water. Although not quite Cherie Gil. More like those subliminally homoerotic Gatorade commercials. But a skeptical Bong Revilla will think the whole thing is scripted.
• Thirty tablets of Valium might not kill you. Unless you’re bullshitting us.
• That when the whole world seems to conspire against you, only Mother will rush to your rescue. But she will blame Lolit Solis first. And that Mother can be inexplicably creepy on national television.
• That sex video scandals have the power to thankfully eclipse news items like Dona Dionisia Pacquiao’s ballroom-dancing debut.
• If you screw up big time, blame it on drugs. If you can’t blame drugs, blame it on your bad childhood. If you can’t blame your bad childhood, well…there’s always Mom.

Artwork by Warren Espejo.

[Read Patricia Evangelista's powerful "The Morality of Sen. Bong Revilla" in today's Philippine Daily Inquirer]

Labels: politics, rants, scandal, sex, video

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Tuesday, April 14, 2009

10:40 PM | ... And Dance Like Everybody's Watching

Here's an idea. What would happen if you just start playing "Do Re Mi" from The Sound of Music in a busy Antwerp train station?



People dance.

I so want this to happen in Dumaguete. Ang saya!

Labels: dance, film, music, strange things, video

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Friday, March 27, 2009

1:33 AM | I Know Him So Well, With a Twist

The great John Barrowman and Daniel Boys give the classic duet from Chess a new twist. This song is about two people who love the same person, but at the end they know that they both cannot have him. It is such a lovely, sad song -- and one that I feel so deeply, now. Just because.

Labels: life, love, music, theater, video

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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

1:29 PM | Sign Language Has Never Been This Hot

Britney Spear's "Womanizer" ...



... in American Sign Language.

Labels: music, queer, sign language, video, viral

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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

12:03 AM | Odie and Sayo Make a Cockroach Comedy

Dumaguete LitCritter-at-large Anthony Gerard Odtohan takes to directing a short comedy! (Who would have thought of that?) Starring his new girl! For his media studies class! In my old alma mater, the International Christian University in Tokyo! (Boy, his room reminds me of my old room...)

Labels: friends, LitCritters, video

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Tuesday, September 30, 2008

12:10 AM | Palin is Bush -- With Lipstick

I thought that Katie Couric's interview with Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin was hilarious and scary at the same time, so much like listening to Miss Teen South Carolina bluff her way through that pageant question about American teenagers and maps. Then I stumbled on this SNL skit. By golly, Tina Fey -- that comedy goddess -- effectively abbreviates the horror that is Palin in her latest parody of the Alaskan governor, who surged only a few weeks ago to the top of the GOP's right-wing delight with her quote about hockey moms, pit bulls, and lipstick...



... and guess what? Fey is merely cribbing from actual replies by Palin in Couric's interview. Scary.

Sarah Palin is George W. Bush. With lipstick.

Labels: comedians, politics, video

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Tuesday, July 08, 2008

2:49 PM | Dancing Around the World

The New York Times is right. This series of videos -- Matt Harding's YouTube hit "Dancing" -- is ridiculously, unfathomably charming and inspiring...





Charles McGrath writes:

The title is not misleading. "Dancing" shows a guy dancing: a big, doughy-looking fellow in shorts and hiking boots performing an arm-swinging, knee-pumping step that could charitably be called goofy. It’s the kind of semi-ironic dance that boys do by themselves at junior high mixers when they’re too embarrassed to partner with actual girls.

The dancer is Matt Harding, the 31-year-old creator of the video, and with some New Agey-sounding music playing in the background, he turns up, grinning and bouncing, in 69 different locations, including India, Kuwait, Bhutan, Tonga, Timbuktu and the Nellis Airspace in Nevada, where he performs the dance in zero gravity.

He started doing it at work, years ago, when he was living in Brisbane, Australia. “I’d dance at lunchtime or during an awkward pause or just to annoy people,” Mr. Harding said. “It was sort of a nervous tic.”

Now he’s on the streets in Mumbai one minute, balanced on the Giant’s Causeway rock formation in Northern Ireland the next, and then he’s in a tulip field in the Netherlands or in front of a geyser in Iceland. Sometimes Mr. Harding dances alone. On a Christmas Island beach he has an audience of crabs, and on Madagascar he performs for lemurs.

But more often — and this accounts for much of the video’s appeal — he’s in the company of others: South African street children in Soweto, bushmen in New Guinea, Bollywood-style dancers in India, some oddly costumed waitresses in Tokyo, crowds of free spirits in Paris, Madrid and rainy Montreal, all copying, or trying to, his flailing chicken-step. Mr. Harding even dances for a lone military policeman (unmoved to join him) in the Korean demilitarized zone.

In many ways “Dancing” is an almost perfect piece of Internet art: it’s short, pleasingly weird and so minimal in its content that it’s open to a multitude of interpretations. It could be a little commercial for one-world feel-goodism. It could be an allegory of American foreign policy: a bumptious foreigner turning up all over the world and answering just to his own inner music. Or it could be about nothing at all — just a guy dancing.

However you interpret it, you can’t watch “Dancing” for very long without feeling a little happier.

I don't think I have the nerve to do something like this, but hurrah to Matt and all white boys like him who can't dance -- but have a helluva time making us smile.

Labels: dance, humor, video

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Sunday, July 06, 2008

8:04 AM | The So-Called Church of Oprah

It's a Sunday morning. Perfect for this rant...

I've seen the notorious YouTube video which began circulating around since Oprah Winfrey backed Barack Obama for the U.S. presidency.* And this morning, I just got another online invitation to view the whole thing all over again -- and what can I say.... This time, it threw for a loop, because the sender is one of my most favoritest persons in the whole wide world. (He still is.) But I'm very skeptical about the whole "controversy." It's so easy to make videos like this, edited to make a particular slant. Hell, anybody can take several footages of Mother Teresa and edit them to make it look like she's the biggest ho in Calcutta. I mean, come on, haven't you ever seen that mock trailer of Stanley Kubrick's classic horror movie The Shining made to look like it was a touching father-and-son bonding story or as a romantic comedy? That one is available in YouTube, too.

And I know very well the panic-inducing tendency behind this effort since I grew up with a very typically Christian fundamentalist environment. I was a devoted Sunday School kid and teenager with such loyalty to Calvary Chapel, back when it had great and compassionate pastors. When I was a kid, I used to write Jack T. Chick Publications for free copies of their comics and tracts (especially The Crusaders series -- I had the whole set), all of which tried to make all of the world -- Africa, the old U.S.S.R., India, evolution, Islam, Mormonism, the Catholic Church, Bible scholarship, rock music, the New Age movement, hitchhiking -- into grotesques masks of overpowering evil. And fundamentalists are often the most gullible people I know -- they swallow everything their pastors tell them. In one church meeting I attended, one guest pastor was shouting at the congregation with a conviction that all women should go back to the kitchen and the bedroom where they belong. I was so aghast at that message and wanted to walk out, but when I looked around, people were nodding and nodding. And in one recent luncheon with my own family, I found my blood boiling when I found most of them running their conversations (gossip was more like it) this way: "So-and-so is this. Is he Christian?" or "So-and-so just passed the Board. Is she Christian?" or "So you're friends with so-and-so. I hope they're Christian." That kitid-thinking drove me absolutely nuts. (In Church parlance, ni-backslide ko. I don't mind that ostracism, because I am still secure in my Christianity naman. You really don't need any gossip-swinging, judgment-bearing church to be Christian.)

But back to that Oprah video, which I won't even link here. It is so sad how earnestly "Christian" people try to bring other good people down, especially those who are trying to make something good out in the world. Look, I don't even like A New Earth, the Eckhart Tolle book she loves, but loving the book and being enthusiastic about it doesn't make Oprah a bad person with the intention of "making" an anti-God Church. The idea itself is so preposterous and absurd, I can't believe people actually believe in it. She is not the Anti-Christ. (Patrick Buchanan is, hahaha!)

*Do you smell a manufactured controversy to blindside fence-sitting conservatives for the election? I do.

Labels: family, friends, issues, rants, religion, video

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Friday, May 16, 2008

2:09 PM | Moon River

A magnificent clip from Blake Edwards' adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Audrey Hepburn singing "Moon River" in her Manhattan balcony. Gorgeous song, gorgeous story, gorgeous stars, gorgeous setting...



One perfect reason why I love old movies. This is lightning in a bottle, and it can never happen again, unfortunately. Can you imagine Megan Fox as Holly Golightly? No way.

Labels: books, celebrity, directors, film, video

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Thursday, May 15, 2008

10:53 AM | Some Things

1.

I've been really sick for the past week. Blogging helps, sometimes.

2.



I was watching this Chris Ware video from This American Life, and it perfectly encapsulates one moment from a play I've been trying to write for the past year: how our memory sometimes tricks us into remembering something we never even experienced in the first place.

[link via bookslut]

3.

Hell, what do I know. It's David vs. David, after all. Ehehehe. Vote for Cook! Gaspy has to go. Seriously.

4.

What is with Austria? My fantasies of it have always consisted of Mozart, Strauss, grand palaces, and The Sound of Music. But now, it's all Arthur Schnitzler (author of the novella Traumnovelle, the basis for Eyes Wide Shut), Elfriede Jelinek (Nobel Prize winner for such harrowing work as The Piano Teacher), Michael Haneke, underground captivity, and incest and more underground captivity. And now this. There seems to be an Austrian race to debase humanity in print, in film, and in real life. What's up with that?

What's strange: I'm actually planning to be in Austria to work and maybe study within the next eight years.

5.

Charles Tan on so-called "vegetable fiction" -- the best of the latest comments so far on the brewing issue on philistinism in reading "difficult" literature.

Labels: books, humor, issues, life, media, memories, music, philippine literature, television, video, writers

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

8:58 PM | He's Effing Ben Affleck!

Labels: celebrity, queer, television, video

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Thursday, February 14, 2008

10:26 PM | Amy Can't Top This and Other Things

1.

Rehab certainly can be sexy. (Not sure if this is office-safe. But you want to click, don't you.)

2.

The boys lost because Rovilson does not know his flags? Oh, bummer.

3.

I still can't believe that somebody as bland and forgettable as Jordin Sparks won last year's most popular singing derby. (Then again, that batch -- save for Melinda Doolittle -- was probably the worst in American Idol history, ever. Two words: Sanjaya Malakar.) And so, despite my best efforts not to be lured in too much, and despite the fact that its age (seven seasons!) is definitely showing, this new batch of American Idol kinda got to me. I like them. And I'm glad a Filipina got in (Simon pronounces her name as "Rey--mee--yel--Ma--loo--bey," to which Ramiele goes, in perfect Pinoy-speak, "Ma--luu--ba--i."). And despite that strange wheezing sound between notes because of an old vocal paralysis, David Archuleta is cute as a button: you want to pinch or devour him, just because.

Labels: dance, life, love, music, television, video

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