Archive for March, 2009

Brother, did you forget your name
Did you lose it on the war, playing tic-tac-toe?
Yo, check the diagonal, three million gone, come on
‘Coz you know they counted backwards to zero. 

- Rage Against the Machine, “Freedom”
Rage Against the Machine, Epic (1992) 

We all know how it worked back then: our once-free people had some slavery going on in the village.  You had maharlika, then there are the “middle-class” timmawa, and then there were the alipin.  Two weeks and 488 years ago, a guy named Magellan took it upon himself to land his ships on these islands and claim it in the name of the Crown of Spain.  Your ancestors, including mine, ceased to be free.  We weren’t set free by the Americans, even; for the price of 20 million dollars, we were sold down the river by our masters.  The rest, as they say, is history.

For the next 300 years, we started to live the lives of slaves – alipin - in our own country, without regard for maharlika or timmawa, caring less for the alipin who happened to come with the “packaged deal” that was this country.  We were just servants of a bunch of people who happened to land their ships on some rock or beach somewhere on our shores, and claimed 7,107 islands found this side of the Pacific – and the people found in it – as theirs.  We started making ships, mining gold, planting tobacco, picking cotton.  We didn’t get to ride those ships, we didn’t get to use that gold, none of us smoked that tobacco and wore the clothes picked out of the cotton we picked.  For the next half-millennium of our existence, we were relegated to slavery.

When that wasn’t enough, we became slaves in other countries as well.  The slavery of poverty and debt was enough to make many of us contemplate – and even succumb to – the modern-day democratic capitalist free-market equivalents of colonial slavery: overseas slavery, wage slavery, white slavery, corporate slavery.  So yeah, our history is defined a tad too much by us being servants and slaves.

Isn’t the obvious just wonderful… if not for the obvious being something we choose to set aside.  No, we prefer to listen to feel-good stories about singers and boxers and champions, and set aside this whole “servant/slave” bollocks for those who thrive on negative energy.  Hmmm…

OK, lemme just puke again into my online paper cup and fume away.

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts.  It breathes, it eats, it eats.  It shits and fucks.  What a mistake to have ever said the id.  Everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.

- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 

A painting or a print may have so many meanings, but we all know that even the most realist of art forms are flights of fancy and products of an active imagination.  The depressing thing with the surreal is that it is often far more real than we can imagine; they evoke in us feelings that, all too often, we do not want to feel at all.

Awhile ago, I was looking at Richard Lindner’s “Boy With Machine,” and somehow the weight of a lot of things I worry about fell on me.  They call it “hand-wringing,” and that idea led me to think of washing machines; like the wires and levers and pulleys that surround Lindner’s boy conceal – or highlight – the fact that the boy himself is a machine, connected to many others.  I let out a depressed huff just looking at it.

“Under many circumstances the hunger inside you will take over… and you’ll do anything to satisfy it.”

- David Bowie (as John Blaylock)
The Hunger, 1997

There’s something about those packets of instant noodles that please – and at the same time, assault – the senses, especially when cooked.  Instant ramen is nowhere near its Japanese equivalent; it’s just that hulking, dehydrated mass of carbohydrates and sodium, with those tiny morsels of dried herbs that cut the jaundiced mass with refreshing – and depressing – bits of green.  There’s the consolation, too, that the noodles are nutritious.

The mother, after attending to her brood, will now proceed to make the meal of the day.  There’s enough fuel in the very small LPG tank for this one meal, while the rice has to be bought on credit from the nearby carinderia. In goes the noodles, in goes the flavoring packs.  Flavors like “chicken” or “beef” don’t really matter; if they were really honest about it, “monosodium glutamate” makes for bad marketing.  It’s just that: water, flour, and sodium.

Besides, when you water down the noodles enough, whatever flavor is in there disappears.  You don’t follow the ratio that there is in the pack, knowing that it takes two packs of instant noodles to completely satisfy the hunger of one grown person.  Instead, you improvise; the point behind instant noodles is no longer to be a meal in itself, but as a condiment.  It takes practice, but you can water down noodles enough – and cook them in such a way – that everyone gets to flavor their rice with broth.

So I guess it’s time for another one of those really long-winded, complicated posts where I end up telling you a lot of things you already know…