Scanning Old 120 Negatives

I just bought a film and negative scanner (Canoscan 8800F). Now I can scan my old 120 and 35 mm negatives. I am so excited. Some of the images I'm seeing for the first time. Like the picture below, taken in Northeastern Thailand. Sea fossils can be found imbedded on the rocks proving that this site used to be under water.

Nando's Credo

In the years after the disaster, I often think of my friend Arturo Nogueira, and the conversations we had in the mountains about God. Many of my fellow survivors say they felt the personal presence of God in the mountains. He mercifully allowed us to survive, they believe, in answer to our prayers, and they were certain it was His hand that led us home. I deeply respect the faith of my friends, but, to be honest, as hard as I prayed for a miracle in the Andes, I never felt the personal presence of God. At least, I did not feel God as most people see Him. I did feel something larger than myself, something in the mountains and the glaciers and the glowing sky that, in rare moments, reassured me, and made me feel that the world was orderly and loving and good. If this was God, it was not God as a being or a spirit or some omnipotent, superhuman mind. It was not a God who would choose to save us or abandon us, or change in any way. It was simply a silence, a wholeness, an awe-inspiring simplicity. It seemed to reach me through my own feelings of love, and I have often thought that when we feel what we call love, we are really feeling our connection to this awesome presence. I feel this presence still when my mind quiets and I really pay attention. I don't pretend to understand what it is or what it wants from me. I don't want to understand these things. I have no interest in any God who can be understood, who speaks to us in one holy book or another, and who tinkers with our lives according to some divine plan, as if we were characters in a play. How can I make sense of a God who sets one religion above the rest, who answers one prayer and ignores another, who sends sixteen young men home and leaves twenty-nine others dead on a mountain?

There was a time when I wanted to know God, but I realize now that what I really wanted was the comfort of certainty, the knowledge that my God was the true God, and that in that end He would reward me for my faithfulness. Now I understand that to be certain - about God, about anything - is impossible. I have lost my need to know. In those unforgettable conversations with Arturo as he lay dying, he told me that the best way to find faith was by having the courage to doubt. I remember those words every day, and I doubt, and I hope, and in this crude way I try to grope my way toward the truth. I still pray the prayers I learned as a child - Hail Marys, Our Fathers - but I don't imagine a wise, heavenly father listening patiently on the other end of the line. Instead, I imagine love, an ocean of love, the very source of love, and I imagine myself merging with it. I open myself to it, I try to direct that tide of love toward the people who are close to me, hoping to protect them and bind them to me forever and connect us all to whatever there is in the world that is eternal. This is a very private thing for me, and I don't try to analyze what it means. I simply like the way it makes me feel. When I pray this way, I feel as if I am connected to something good and whole and powerful. In the mountains, it was love that kept me connected to the world of the living. Courage or cleverness wouldn't have saved me. I had no expertise to draw on, so I relied upon the trust I felt in my love for my father and my future, and that trust led me home. Since then, it has led me to a deeper understanding of who I am and what it means to be human. Now I am convinced that if there is something divine in the universe, the only way I fill find it is through love I feel for my family and my friends, and through the simple wonder of being alive. I don't need any other wisdom or philosophy other than this: My duty is to fill my time on earth with as much life as possible, to become a little more human every day, and to understand that we only become human when we love. I have tried to love my friends with a loyal and generous heart. I have loved my children with all my strength. And I have loved one woman with a love that has filled my life with meaning and joy. I have suffered great losses and have been blessed with great consolations, but whatever life may not give or take away, this is the simple wisdom that will always light my life: I have loved passionately, fearlessly, with all my heart and all my soul, and I have been loved in return. For me, this is enough. - Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes.

Lawrence Weschler on Why He Can't Write Fiction

I'm currently reading Weschler's Vermeer in Bosnia. This is what he wrote in lieu of a preface, why he can't write fiction:

That's because for me the world is already filled to bursting with interconnections, interrelationships, consequences of consequences. The world itself is overdetermined: the web of all those interrelationships is dense to the point of saturation. That's what my reporting becomes about: taking any single knot and worrying out the threads, tracing the interconnections, following the mesh through into the wider, outlying mesh, establishing the proper analogies, ferreting out the false strands. If I were somehow to be forced to write fiction about say, a make-believe Carribean island, I wouldn't know where to put it, because the Carribean as it is is already full - there's no room in it for fictional islands. Dropping one in there would provoke a tidal wave, and all other places would be swept away. I wouldn't be able to invent a fictional housewife, because the city as it is is already overcrowded - there are no apartments available, there is no more room in the phone book. (If by contrast, I were reporting on the life of an actual housewife, all the threads that make up her place in the city would be my subject, and I'd have no end of inspiration, no lack of room. Indeed, room - her specific space, the waythe world makes the room for her - would be my theme.)

Parang ganito din iyong sinasabi ni Peter Turchi sa Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. Except that Turchi is talking about imagining that place. It's not really contradictory. Turchi is talking about a similar purpose and process. Explain ko na lang next time.

A Philippine Disease

Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is flying to the United States. Below is a report on why she should not be leaving the country and why Obama should avoid her like a disease.





The Arroyo administration has failed to end decades of war between the pioneers and the settlers in Mindanao, between Muslim rebels and Christian militias in the Philippines. The peace talks have collapsed and this archipelago bleeds. Orlando de Guzman reports on the grave results of what happens when faith and guns replace dialogue and the peace process. And you staying in power, Madame President, is not going to help. You've done enough damage. Lumayas ka na! You're sick. Delusional. Look at you. Your face is bloated with your lying, manipulative, unjust, hypocritical and callous ways. You're this ugly growth in our body, a tumor that needs to be excised. You've done enough damage to the nation. Your corrupt and oppressive policies have done nothing but leave behind a wasteland of disempowered lives and disgruntled voices, a country of orphans and grieving mothers. You should stop receiving holy communion, go to trial, and spend the rest of your life in jail atoning for your sins. Tang ina mo Arroyo, you're such a disease!

Good job, Orlando!

sex and insects inside your body, evil dogs, and really, really dark animation

I saw this last night at the Embarcadero.

Charles Burn's segment on sex and insects inside your body was the creepiest.

Richard Mcguire's was the best: sharp, sophisticated, suspenseful. its elements: winter. night. traveler. empty house... Mcguire passed the supreme excellence test: you can't use this as a storyboard to make a film with real actors and sets. Wait, well of course you can; but it will fail in comparison. Mcguire's genius lies in the eloquent paring down of our claustrophobia and fear of the dark to simple lines and shadows, mentally teasing us with iconographic images of terror; and then pushing us back in the dark again with very, very minimal light, just enough to reveal our vulnerability, our doom.

Jack thinks Blutch' scene of a rabid dog attacking a dancer under her skirt was just sinister and unforgivable (I read Ian Mcewan's Black Dogs and those beasts were worse; evil-bred, pure, pure evil -- the book and the writing was sublime). But we both thought that Blutch's rough, charcoal pencil rendering was great.

Also, below is the best docu I've seen in years. And it's still showing at the Opera. It's about a heist. But it's also about art and memory. It's funny, elegiac, and profound. And what's great was it didn't even mention 9/11 and that just made it so powerful.



While I was watching it I also kept going back to this passage I read almost twenty years ago from E L Doctorow's World's Fair:

It interested me particularly that in the circus there was one wistful clown who climbed the high wire after the experts were done, and scared himself and us with his uproariously funny, and incredibly maladroit moves up there. Slipping and sliding about, losing his hat, his floppy shoes, and holding on to the wire for dear life, he was actually doing stunts far more difficult that any that had gone on before. This was confirmed, invariably, as he doffed his clown garments one by one and emerged from the woeful little potbellied misfit as the art who headlined the highwire act. In his tights and glistening bare torso he pulled off his bulbous nose and stood spotlighted on the platform with one arm raised to receive our wildest applause for having led us through our laughter, our fear, to simple awe. I took profound instruction from this hoary circus routine. It was not merely that I, the sniffler, with the red nose, would someday in my good time reveal myself to be a superman among men. There was art in the thing, the power of illusion, the mightier power of the reality behind it. What was first true was then false, a man was born from himself. All the problems of my own being were not the truth of me, I knew. In my own eyes I was a man no matter what daily evidence was thrown to my face to the contrary. But that there were ways to dramatize this to an unsuspecting world was the keenness of my understanding. You didn’t have to broadcast everything you knew all at once, but could reveal it suspensefully, and make them first cry out in fear, and make them laugh, and above all, make them applaud, when they finally saw what an achievement had been yours by taking on so well and accurately the comic being of a little kid.

The Stranger's Gift

Since Laocoon’as warning to his fellow Trojans went so tragically unheeded, the course of history has been strewn with the corpses of ungrateful nations which, despite the misery that stemmed from their inability to govern their own affairs, bitterly resented and actively resisted the firm and forceful help of others. The stranger’s gift of peace, order and prosperity is less welcome to us than the death, chaos, and poverty that are our own doing. For in the end they are our own, and that is what matters to us. Like adolescents, we do not want to be told how to do things or have them done for us; we want to make our own, even fatal mistakes. We will take what we can use from what is offered, but we want, at last, to do it ourselves; to manage our own lives, however badly. The main thing about the stranger, after all, is that he is strange. He is not like us; he will never understand us. Our greatest fear, perhaps the possibility is often seductive, is that we will become like him and we will lose ourselves. The stranger’s gift never comes without strings, and we do not want to be tied.

It is hard to find any fervent postcolonialist who will agree that, having thrown off the imperial yoke, the ex-colonial peoples should be free to choose dictatorship, theocracy, tribalism, nepotism, or the rule of warlords. Respect for indigenous cultures goes only so far. The left-liberals assume as fervently as the Bushites that people everywhere aspire to a state of liberal democratic polity where human rights and the rights of women will be assured and tolerance and religious freedom will be institutionalized. It is to their constant embarrassment that this does not happen, and fifty years later, the excuse that the failure lies in the pernicious aftereffects of colonialism is wearing thin; they do not really believe it themselves. (They have substituted neocolonialism, neoliberalism, globalization, transnational corporations.) But the alternative is hard to bear for the progressive mentality that assumes we can indeed write our own scripts and exclude all those factors of “human nature” that seem so stubbornly to resist our enlightened blandishments.

- Robin Fox

(photo taken during my recent trip to Vientiane)

My Facebook Life So Far

I finished editing 12 children's stories from Cambodia and Vietnam today.

I taught my six year old nephew how to use the online catalogue of the San Francisco Main Library, copy call numbers, and get the librarian to help him get his books.

I was on a global conference call telling stories about rural children in Nepal and what my organization is doing to provide them culturally relevant children's books in local languages.

I added the following on my reading list: Lynda Barry's What It is, the latest TLS Lapham's Quarterly, Poetry and Zoetrope, and Vol. 4 of Flight.

I saw Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky at Landmark Embarcadero and Man on Wire at the Opera and later had dinner at Max's sitting right next to the grand piano where an old man played and another crooned really cool standards.

I just read the most unexpected stories from Laos.

I explored dog patch with Jack and very much enjoyed the abandoned shipyards and factories, and later we had a discussion on the politics of acquired foreign accents.

I got drunk with Emily and danced at an Obamathon.

PS

I did not win in the photo contest/exhibit but was glad that photographers Jose Barracuda and Angrylittleboy won (they participated in my Lagalag project). Also, my best friend Ploi has this vision, a community-based preschool for the arts, designed for disadvantaged children. And it's going to be a reality soon!

----------

MOST MEMORABLE CONVERSATION OF THE WEEK

(Iona, my six year old nephew, and I had this exhange over lunch at the Westfield Food Court. He had pizza -- hated the tomatoes -- while I had korean barbecue and seaweed salad. I was telling him about the kids I met in Nepal. He was obviously getting jealous.)

IONA: But do they still remember you?

ME: I think so. Maybe.

IONA: But will they remember you tomorrow?

ME: Yea.

IONA: But will they remember you... next week?

ME: Maybe.

IONA: But will they remember you... NEXT YEAR????

ME: It's possible.

IONA: But will they remember you... FOREVEEEEER??????

ME: Maybe.

IONA: (thinks) But will they remember you...hmmmm....NEXT MONTH?!?!?!?!!?

ME: (laughs) Maybe not. But I know one boy I will always remember for the rest of my life. Do you know who he is?

IONA: (excitedly points at himself repeatedly)

Marcos Baby

Finally. Mondo Marcos, the martial law babies anthology is coming out in February 2009 in time for the anniversary of the overthrow of the dictatorship. Two of my essays will be in the anthology. Frank, one of the anthology editors, also posted this on Facebook: a photo of me taken in Baguio City, a few weeks before I left the Philippines in 199_ and moved abroad.

Below is a poem I wrote in April 1991. I never got to finish it. Parts of it appeared in a different form in Dyaryo Filipino.



Kung sa hatinggabi may manggigising at magsasabing
may naghahanap sa akin at alam kong imposible,
walang nakakaalam sa kinaroroonan ko (nagbabakasyon ako
sa isang malayong kamag-anak), sandali lang akong magtataka
kung sino ang naghahanap. Pagkatapos
sasabihin ko, siya na nga, siya
na nga.

Kahit huwag mong ibigay ang numero ng bahay
ang pangalan ng kalye, ng baryo, ng bayan,
kahit probinsiya lang, hindi ito lokohan,
matatagpuan ka niya. Magtatanong siya sa munisipyo
kung saan po ba nakatira ang mga apelyido o pamilyang ganito.
Magbabahay-bahay siya at maliligaw hanggang makarating
sa tumana o aplaya o saan mang dulo at mag-uumpisa
na naman sa umpisa. Kahit bigyan mo siya ng maling impormasyon
o ibang direksyon, sa kadilima'y kakatok siya
susungaw sa bintana mo, sapagkat alam niyang bilog ang mundo
lahat natutunton. Wala kang puwedeng takasan.

Wala sa higpit ng kapit o tatag ng binti ang kaligtasan
niya. Isang gagambang nabaog ang kasaputan; lahat ng pata
kumakapit sa lahat ng direksyon. Sana may mga puwang o bitak
ang bato para, Ina ng Awa, may matuntungan, San Antonio,
patron ng nawawala, may makapitan. Subalit buhay ang kagubatan.
Ito ang magdedesisyon, ang diyos na mamimili
kung sino ang ililigtas at sino ang ipapahamak.
Bibitak ang kinatatayuan mo, bibigay ang mga bato
at padudulasin lahat. Dalawampu't dalawang taon
pa lang siya noon. Ngunit sanay na siyang magpaalam sa mundo.

Minsan may nangyari sa kanya sa daan. Naligaw na
nadukutan pa. Nakisakay sa ten wheeler na may kargang troso.
Nang abutin ng gabi, nakitulog na rin sa highway
kasama ng driver. Naghanap ng tuyong kahoy at nagsiga
sa gilid ng kalsada. Kinuha ang trapal sa trak, inilatag,
at ang dulo'y ibinalabal sa katawan. Ito
ang mga pinakamasasayang araw niya (para daw siyang pinaghehele
ng kanyang ama).

Hindi na mahalaga kung narating man niya ang tribu
o kung nakita niya ang barkada namin sa Atimonan
o sa iba pang mga kuwento -- kung nakita ba niya ang tiyahin niya
sa Albay noong dose anyos siya at naglayas at kinupkop
ng isang binatang pulis o sa mga susunod pang kuwento
kung narating ba niya ang isang walang pangalang isla
sa paghahanap sa kaibigan ng kapatid ng kaklase na isang
manikuristang nagnenegosyo ng itim na marmol sa Romblon --
hindi na mahalaga iyon, kahit walang paltos,
nakikita niya ang hinahanap niya. Ang mahalaga sa kanya
ay ang mga walang pangalang lugar, ang mga hindi kilalang mukha
na nakalutang sa ilaw ng bitbit na lampara, ang malungkot
na ngiti, na magtatanong sa kanya sa paos na boses,
"Magpahinga ka muna, amang. Mukhang pagod na pagod ka.
Dito ka na matulog."

(Pagkatapos ng maraming taon, nang ang lagusan sa dibdib niya'y nagbara na sa galit, at nagpunta siya para ialay ang sarili sa dambana ng bathalang itim na bato sa bundok, susubukan niyang sariwain ang bukal ng kamusmusan sa paraiso, noong hindi pa ginugulo ang lahat ng paglalakbay, salubsob, at armadong tanke...

Kayhiwagang ipinosas ako sa kasaysayan ng bayan, ang palad ko'y sumanib at natanikala. - Salman Rushdie, Mga Anak ng Hatinggabi)

Bago pa man ipagamot sa Hawaii ang kanyang ama
bago pa man magkaroon ng pagtatalo
kung dapat ba itong pauwiin sa Pilipinas
alam na niya na ang mga pangyayari sa buhay nilang mag-ama
ay itinakda upang sundan ang buhay ng dating Pangulo
at ng mga anak na isinilang sa rehimen ng diktadura.
Bago pa man dumating iyon, alam na niya kung kailan
at paano mamamatay ang kanyang ama.

Tuwing Linggo ng hapon, sa isang bayan sa Nueva Ecija
nanonood ng sine ang mga anak ni Meyor. Ipinatitigil nila
sa kalagitnaan ang pelikula at uutusang buksan lahat ng ilaw
para makahanap sila ng uupuan. Kapag okupado ang puwesto nila
sa gitna, pinaaalis ang mga nakaupo. Kadalasan,
dumarating pa lang sila, naglilipatan na ng upuan
ang mga manonood. Alam nilang kung sakaling katatawanan
o katatakutan ang palabas at hindi natawa o hindi napasigaw
ang mga anak ni Meyor, ingat na at baka masigawan ka pa ng,
Walang sisigaw! o kaya, Walang tatawa!
Kalauna'y naging paboritong laro na ito ng mga anak ni Meyor.
Tatalasan nila ang mga pandinig sa dilim, roronda,
at kapag may nahuling natawa o napahiyaw, tututukan
nila ng baril at palalabasin.
Wala namang nabalitaang sinaktan ng mga panahong iyon.
Kakaiba ang kamatayang nagaganap sa loob ng sinehan.
Parang 3-D silang rarapiduhin ng suntok ni FPJ,
babarilin ni Lito Lapid, at tatadyakan ni Robin Padilla.
Habang ang telon ay inaagusan ng dugo, hindi kikibo
ang taong bayan. Bubusalan nila ang kanilang mga bibig
iingatan kahit impit at sasabihin na lang sa sarili,
walang nakakatawa sa ginagawa ni Dolphy.
Hindi ito totoo. Pelikula lang ito.
Kaya mas box office pag drama ang palabas. Walang ingay
ang pagluha kapag inaapi si Nora Aunor,
ang imahen ng mga piniping pagdurusa, ang superstar
na pinaglihi sa Mater Dolorosa. Paglabas sa sinehan
at nakauwi na sa bahay ang mga tao, doon pa lang sila
bubunghalit ng tawa habang naghahanda ng hapunan
o mapapahagulgol habang nagkakape at matatakot
sa mga maligno kapag matutulog na.
Kung sakaling walang pambili ng hapunan
o pangkape man lang at kailangang mamaluktot sila
sa iksi ng kumot, tatandaan na lang nila:
Hindi ito totoo. Walang kakatwang nangyayari.
Pelikula lang ito. At aasa na lang sila na sana
Ate Guy, bukas
next picture na.

Nevada, Philippines

The photo above, which I took in a ghost town in Nevada is currently on exhibit in Manila. Dubbed Ikatlong Banat, the exhibit/photo competition is on display from October 15 to 18 at the Trinoma Cinema Hall, Level 4. My photo is entitled "Dahil Isang Biyahe Lang Sa Kanya Ang Walang Katapusang Pagpanaw Ng Mga Mahal Mo Sa Buhay"

And Now For Something Completely Different

3rd Annual Now Film Festival -Wk 19 Finalist - City Paradise


No matter how carefully a comic strip is constructed, the reader's experience of it cannot be predicted. There are as many versions of each comic strip as there are readers. Reading a comic strip more than once seems to change it as well, but of course it's not the comic strip that is doing the changing. When we notice new things in the story, something is being forgotton that we don't notice. Sometimes not getting the story the way it was intended can be the very thing that makes it usable. For best results, it is good to read something twice so you can misunderstand it at least once. Yet more words from Miss Know it All. Thus spake Sea-Ma.

- Lynda Barry, from the introduction to the 2008 Best American Comics

Plus, you will LIKE this: Bohemian Rhapsody and the 25 Most Annoying Voices

Last Flight

Manny and I attended the same high school and became close after graduation when we both became active members of a parish-based organization in San Jose City, Philippines. He was one of the gentlest persons I've ever met.

You will be missed, Manny. Thank you for serving the country. Job well done!

Major Manuel Zambrano, Jr., Philippine Air Force, 1970-2008




Full military honor was bestowed at high noon to Major Manuel Zambrano, the pilot of the PAF C-130 Number 4593 that crashed in Davao City.

Witnessed by the top leaders and officers of the Philippine Air Force, Zambrano was interred after a mass at Villamor Air Base chapel amidst volleys of rifle shots – a 21-gun salute meant for heroes and exemplary military service – and a flower drop from fellow military pilots.

One the PAF's most weathered pilots, Manny has been handling the C-130 for the past 11 years now, including maneuvering it through the stormiest weather. At age 39, he has logged in 4,153 flying hours, including flying missions to other countries carrying relief aid. He was also awarded for his outstanding field service by no less than President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo last month.

The true cause of the crash remains to be a mystery. General Cadungog shared that one of the toughest decision he made as an officer is to put a closure on the incident, saying earlier that it is impossible for anybody to survive the crash. “We have to put a closure on this case so that the entire Command can move on to other tasks at hand,” he said.