Like a nameless seaborne storm, this nameless tale took name and form: the moments, weeks, and months that groan under the weight of a life that isn’t their own.
Like the rush before Valentine’s I charged in, heedless of all the signs and found, beyond the smiles and laughter, nothing—no tears, just silence after.
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Gunita – Tagalog, “memory” or “recollection.” Yeah, the title’s in a different language than the poem. People can do that 😀
(Insert description longer than the actual poem here haha)
Sometimes you join or sign up for things, and find out that you might’ve made a mistake, and maybe you’re not meant to be there at all. That’s fine. Mistakes can be corrected 🙂 No, I didn’t decide to go up to the mountains and join the bandits. I know I do a lot of silly things, but that’s just too nonsensical for me. Counter-productive too.
Kundiman refers to traditional Filipino love songs, the kind that young men would serenade (harana) their ladyloves with. It’s said that on the level of subtext, kundimans are patriotic songs. So it is with “Jocelynang Baliwag,” one of the most well-known examples, which was quite popular with the revolutionaries in the late nineteenth century, which was given the appellation “the Music of the Legitimate Kundiman that Proceeds from the Insurgents’ Camp.”
Happy New Year, friends! I hope everyone had a nice holiday for Christmas and New Year, despite everything. May God bless us this year, so that we might be our best, true heroic selves.
Narrower, narrower grow the bars of red and blue, while the moment’s stars and their cohorts counting digits hour by hour to name and number and measure their powers just as they’ve done since yesterday now flicker, and fade, and drift away.
Then I’ll turn off to a dimmer screen in search of a smile and a friendly scene here, in my dear, familiar clime, in another place, in another time, silent, and dark, and untouched as yet by my faraway friend whom I’ve never met.
“Build bridges not walls”: Examining a common slogan, just for fun 🙂
Build bridges not walls— I kept hearing this phrase repeated so often last year, after it was repurposed as a rallying cry and hashtag for a political cause by President Trump’s opposition. I recall hearing it for other causes many times before, encouraging openness, communication, and cooperation instead of intolerance and narrow-mindedness. In this case, its users wanted it to allude both to those values as well as the literal wall he’d promised to build during his campaign, the high wall with the beautiful, big, fat door that he’d make Mexico pay for.
Often when we hear a word repeatedly, it starts to lose its meaning, becoming a mere collection of sounds, the words unmoored lines and curves on a page. But words carry meaning. Slogans are symbols which point— or ought to point— to a reality outside themselves. But as symbols they must be strong, instead of merely solid. Strength is reliable and firm, like a trusted person’s promise to be with us “until the end of time” (Matthew 28:20), but solidity can sometimes just be the quality of a deaf stone idol.
Obviously, the bridges and walls in this slogan are metaphorical, but the strength of a metaphor lies in its ability to reflect truths and realities in images. So now we repeat to ourselves: Build bridges, not walls. But this time, hopefully the words won’t lose their meaning. Instead, this time, hopefully their meaning becomes clearer.
My purpose right now isn’t to discuss policy, but people. My purpose is to find out what it means, on a personal level, to build bridges, not walls.
[Just for fun][Spoilers?] Hyouka as a mystery story, and what one might learn about mystery stories from it
source: hyouka-fan.blogspot.com
Since I’ve mentioned it before in otherposts already, it’s probably no big surprise that I’m a big fan of Hyouka (Kyoto Animation, 2012), the anime adaptation of some of Honobu Yonezawa’s Classic Literature Club light novels and short stories. Visually beautiful, with charming characters and a style that incorporated mystery, slice of life, and romantic elements, it re-introduced me to anime as an enjoyable medium. I found much to love in following around Houtarou Oreki and his friends through “the activities of the esteeemed Classic Literature Club,” as I’m sure many others did, too.
Around the time it first came out (c. 2012-2013) there was some discussion about how to interpret it. As a slice of life story? A coming of age story? A mystery story? An examination of the mystery story’s conventions? These, among others, were other people’s interpretations of it.
Leaving aside the question of whether the author is dead— they might be, though sometimes they’re decidedly not— and whether or not all interpretations (with textual support) are valid, in this post, I want to find out what makes Hyouka a mystery story— a mystery story with unusual, though not unconventional elements, perhaps, but a mystery story nonetheless; and then locate its possible place within the mystery genre. Finally, I wanted to find out what it might teach us about mystery stories.
This was way, way back when 9Gag was everyone’s introduction to Internet culture, but since then I’d seen it in other forms, on places like Tumblr or my Facebook news feed. To me, it was like the image macro version of one of those sentimental Thought Catalog articles floating around on the Internet, so I never really gave it much thought.
Memes work because they are snappy, quick, and quickly-digested. One of my favorite examples is how the phrase “I sexually identify as an Apache attack helicopter” satirizes some of the discourse popping up on identity politics and gender issues. But in order to work, the audience needs to be in the loop to get it. Certainly the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign and its allies weren’t in the loop when they went after a green cartoon frog on the Internet and lost (psh, normies) but that’s just how memes work. And in hindsight, that might be why I didn’t get it.
So when it popped up again years later, when I was a bit older, more stressed, and with a “Robin” of my own, something clicked for me. And I wondered, “What had I missed before? What could this meme — this ‘Robin’ thing — tell me?”
[Just for fun] Some notes on Max Landis’s Carly Rae Jepsen theory
About a month ago, screenwriter and director Max Landis introduced “A Scar No One Else Can See,” his foray into musical criticism on Carly Rae Jepsen’s songs. Currently standing at 149 pages, he has referred to it as a “living document” and indicated that he plans to update it as he learns more.
In a nutshell, Mr. Landis argues (although he doesn’t use that word) that Carly Rae Jepsen’s songs all revolve around the same themes, and are all about one thing, succinctly summarized as: “Carly Rae Jepsen is in Hell.”
Seeing as he took the time to type up 149 pages (so far), brought people in to shoot a promo video, create motion graphics, and build a website, and then shot update videos, I think it’s fair to say that some effort certainly was spent on it.
Now, I’ve said elsewhere in passing that I thought “Emotion” was the best pop album of 2015, but I’m not intimately familiar with Carly Rae Jepsen’s work— not in the way that Max Landis seems to be. I enjoy her work, but don’t really fall into the “fan” camp just yet. I simply thought it was an interesting idea, although I have a number of questions.
My aim isn’t to counter the Jepsen theory; neither is it to convince people to found a Center for Carly Rae Jepsen Studies. Instead my aim is simply to ask questions and throw out ideas, in the hope of learning something new and just for fun.
This piece was mostly brought on by a sense of apprehension and trepidation on my part. What I say here might not be completely warranted, but I personally feel better writing it down.
As I write this, it is February, 2016. Come May, my country will hold its national elections.
[SPOILERS] Most of the material online have seen Jessica Jones as a feminist hero; but what makes her heroic isn’t her feminism, but her moral agency.
Warning: Spoilers
Full disclosure: before Marvel announced the Netflix series Jessica Jones, with season one slated for a November 2015 release (they were still referring to it as A.K.A. Jessica Jones at the time), I’d never heard of the character before. I was drawn to it because it sounded like an interesting concept: a former superhero turned private detective. The last place I’d expect to find a superhero would be in a car, camera in hand, staking out a seedy motel where a cheating spouse is meeting her lover.
Also, Krysten Ritter was in it, playing the eponymous heroine. I thought she did a really good job in the series and movie Veronica Mars (often compared to this series) and enjoyed much of her other work as well. Seeing her in this series has only made me admire her even more.
Much of the material written online about season one have looked at it through a feminist point of view: the mind-controlling Kilgrave (David Tennant) is the patriarchy, and Jessica its victim. This is almost inevitable in this day and age. I’m not seeking to discredit the feminist point of view or say that it’s invalid, but I will say that it’s not the only possible lens through which to view it. In fact, I’m sure most would agree that it’s not a very complete way of looking at things. However, neither will I pretend that what I say here will be more “complete” than what others have said: I simply want to present my own view, which can be summarized in one sentence:
This piece was inspired by one of Anita Sarkeesian’s older videos, entitled “Why we need you Veronica Mars.” In this pre-“Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” video, Ms. Sarkeesian comments on the three-season TV series featuring Kristen Bell as the eponymous “tiny blond detective.” Drawing primarily from her particular school of feminism, she sets forth and discusses reasons why we need more characters and shows like Veronica Mars.
I’ve mentioned my fondness for mystery and detective fiction elsewhere, and I’m very familiar with Veronica Mars; I spent a whole summer binge-watching the show, and I was very excited when the movie came out in 2014. Neo-noir in style, almost Dashiell Hammett-like at times, and written with a deft, light touch that brought the characters and setting to vivid, gritty, California sun-soaked life, I think Veronica Mars is one of the best examples of contemporary detective fiction.
Just not for all the same reasons as Ms. Sarkeesian.
Now, I have nothing against Anita Sarkeesian– everything written online about her seems to portray her as either a much-needed voice in today’s conversation on culture or a charlatan and a con artist; I don’t know her personally, so I’d rather reserve judgment. And I have nothing against feminism, either. I believe in women’s rights for much the same reason that I believe in men’s rights: I believe in human rights, and in the radical notion that men and women are equal, though not equivalent. This won’t be a critique of her discussion, but I found Ms. Sarkeesian’s discussion somewhat limited; no doubt mine will be, too, but either way, I hope to show why we still need you, Veronica Mars.
Veronica as victim
“I need your help, Veronica.” It’s one of the most common lines throughout the series, spoken by someone calling her or cornering her after class or in the ladies’ room; it’s even said in the 2014 movie. With those five words, she once again steps into a world she never really leaves. A world of characters and events every bit as dubious and dangerous as the ones Holmes and Watson meet in Victorian England, and she manages to solve the case and get her homework done, too.
Veronica is like a court of last resort for the students of Neptune High and, later on, Hearst College. She deals with all these victims, finding solutions for their problems. What we have to remember is that she herself is a victim. Before the events of the TV series take place, her best friend Lilly Kane was murdered and her father, former sheriff Keith Mars, was kicked out of the Sheriff’s Office in an emergency recall election. She was drugged and raped at a party, and the sheriff to whom she reported it refused to believe her.
She is a victim, but she does not stay a victim: she gets up, dusts herself off and presses on. In her words,
Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle, and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it’s still the mansion you remember. Or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild.
(S1E3, “Meet John Smith”)
Justice not for sale
Social inequality is a recurring theme, beginning in Season 1, where we’re introduced to the “09ers,” the rich inhabitants of Neptune, California (postal code 90909), characterized as a “town with no middle class,” ground zero when the class war comes.
In many of her cases, Veronica comes up against 09ers, and she outsmarts them, solving the case in the creative ways that Ms. Sarkeesian refers to in her video. The lesson is that justice isn’t a product that goes to the highest bidder; it isn’t something that the 09ers can buy. Something we have to remember every time we hear about the most shocking miscarriages of justice brought about by deep pockets. “Justice on the side of the highest bidder” is not justice at all.
Friends, family, partners in crime
In her video, Ms. Sarkeesian mentions two important characters: Veronica’s father and mentor, Keith Mars, and her friend, the tech-savvy Mac Mackenzie, who ends up working at Mars Investigations in the novels set after the events of the series and movie (and which, unfortunately, I haven’t read yet, but I’ll get around to reading The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line soon. No spoilers! 🙂 ).
She only appears as a minor character, but Veronica also has Lianne, her alcoholic mother, who left them after Keith was voted out of office. Veronica uses up her college funds to send her to rehab– an arrangement that doesn’t turn out well, and puts her future in jeopardy.
I found the omission of Wallace Fennel a glaring omission on Ms. Sarkeesian’s part. Wallace is roped into Veronica’s cases a few times, and he is portrayed as a loyal, foul-weather friend.
Keith, Mac, and Wallace show us the importance of our friends and family. On the other hand, Lianne shows us that sometimes, the people closest to us end up hurting us. That doesn’t make them evil; it just means they’re not perfect.
Veronica Mars is a hero
That’s right, she isn’t just a marshmallow. Veronica Mars is a hero.
We tend to form cults around our heroes. In places such as China or North Korea, cults around heroes tend to take a rather scary turn, with iconography and, sometimes, “hagiography” almost comparable to Catholic saints.
We sometimes forget that our heroes aren’t perfect, aren’t infallible or impeccable. Veronica is cynical– not without cause– at times indecisive, makes the wrong decisions, and sometimes it appears as though she doesn’t appreciate Wallace’s help. She isn’t perfect, but then again, who is?
She might not be perfect, but in spite of that, she always sets things right.
In the end, who is Veronica Mars?
She is a friend, a daughter, a detective, an avenging angel, a flawed and human character. She is a hero, and we could always use more heroes.
Aletheia Observer, signing out. Be careful out there! 🙂
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